Robert Wilson - Eureka Street - A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

Max didn't trust the idea of sex. It was not something that she could square with her idea of manhood. Of who her father was. His gentleness, his charity were her ideal of how a life should be lived and that ideal was sexless.The only role that sex had played in the life of her father was to induce his wife to run away with his brother. Sex was an acid that corroded. It was something that stopped people being good.

For two or three years, it worked well. She saw her father every two or three months. She always saw him in New York. He was busier than ever and was becoming quite famous for his placid skills. He was a common sight on television news.

On her sixteenth birthday, her father took her out to dinner in a Manhattan restaurant where everybody smiled and some blushed to see him. She was proud of him. She was proud of the way he dealt with the people who stopped at their table to talk to him, the men confidential and trusting, the women openly admiring.

Her father told her that she was beautiful.

The band played `Your Kiss Is on My List of the Best Things in Life'.

Six months later, there was a talk of the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize. He had just negotiated a settlement in a tribal dispute in a Central African Socialist Republic that had cost ten thousand lives a year. He was invested with almost saintly status, and television pictures were beamed all round the world of her tall and handsome father surrounded by happy villagers. Then he was sent to Northern Ireland.

He was shot dead twenty minutes after he stepped off the plane. He didn't even make it out of the airport. The police and the Army were amazed. The airport was one of the most heavily guarded spots in Northern Ireland. They reported that the Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries had joined forces to execute such a daring attack.

The IRA and the UVF both claimed responsibility. An American newscaster told the camera that her father had been executed because he was too good at his job. The Irish didn't want him persuading them away from their war.The Irish liked their war.

Max cried through the ten lost days until they flew her father's body back and burned it at an unprivate private funeral. Her mother sobbed without tears for the cameras and her uncle/stepfather made husky eulogies of his dead brother for reporters. Some of those ghouls shouted her name and took her picture when she looked at them.

That night Max ran away.

She ran to Jacksonville, she ran to Pensacola, she ran to Fayetteville and Tulsa, she ran to Amarillo and Lubbock, she ran South again to El Paso, she ran to San Antonio.

She stopped running in Phoenix. In a bus-station coffeeshop, she looked at her watch and saw that two years had passed. She took a pile of dimes and called her mother.

Max had changed. She talked now. She talked in the tough rhythms of cheap crime novels. She talked funny talk about giving head, spit or swallow. Men liked the way she talked. They were impressed by the shell of her independence.

She was a virgin no longer. She'd lost that in a rented room in Sarasota when she fucked a boy she didn't love. It had been a relief but she'd left him that night, unable to sleep beside his animal heat and noise. In the rest of those two lost years, it seemed to her that she had disinterestedly fucked half of the men in America. They'd mostly been grateful but it had touched nothing in her. It had been less than exercise. It had been nothing. Anyway, she only really liked alcoholic men. And they liked her. In sympathy with their own poisonings, she started to find comfort in amphetamines and barbiturates. Stoked on benzedrine in the sweaty arms of some bum in a hotel room, she could sometimes feel free of pain. In two years she thought of her father no tines.

Then a very bad thing happened. She didn't tell Chuckie what it was. All he needed to know was that a bad thing happened.

Her mother flew to Phoenix and took her home. She spent a month in Miami. She tried to be calm and she tried to be good. But her mother's smile made her face itch. So, without pleasure, she fucked her uncle/stepfather in her old bedroom and then she ran away again.

She rode Greyhounds for near a month. She had everywhere to go and nowhere to stop. There was nothing for her in New York now that her father was dead. She could not go back to Miami. And all the places she'd stopped in the two years after she left home were only motels and dirty rooms to her. So she just rode buses along and across, up and down America.

On a two-day stop in Reno, she asked an old man where she stood on the map she'd bought. He'd looked at it long and then smiled at her sadly. `Oh, you're not even on this map, honey.'

In a truckers' bar in North Carolina, she tried to pick up the girl who worked behind the bar. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, the girl had served her beers for two hours, her hips twitching without artifice as she walked. Max cornered her in the restroom and pushed her against a wall.The girl had peeled her off like a dirty shirt.

She came to a stop the night she slept in an alley near the bus station in LA.The air was full of big-city noise and she trembled as she slept.There were cries and gunshots. It seemed to her that the whole of this big city was angry. Suddenly tired, she slept till dawn and then boarded a bus to Kansas.

She hadn't seen her grandparents since her father had died. Her father's father had sold all his land but they still lived in their old house sixty miles from Wichita. Her grandfather's straight back had bent from his years in the dirt he owned and he did not mourn its loss.

Her grandparents, Don and Bea, had fought for twenty years. Two decades ago there had been an argument so divisive that they had split their sitting room into two. One side was feminine, brushed and clean. It had furniture, curtains, there was well-swept order and peace. Her uncle's side was greasy and hardly furnished at all, apart from a buggy old armchair beside the fire. The border between the two regions was only visible because of the unwavering margin between the shine of her floorboards and the dull glisten of the accumulated dirt on his. The strange thing was that they never went anywhere without being together. Always separate inside their home, they walked, sat or stood firmly side by side when they confronted the outside world. Speculation was rife about whether their bedroom was divided in a similar way to their living room. It seemed impossible that a couple who could bear each other so little would sleep together.

She stayed there a year. In that year, she talked of her father with her grandparents. In that year her mother visited once to tell her she was getting divorced and remarried to a doctor from San Diego. Max decided to go to college.

Just before she was to leave, Don died. Bea was deranged with grief. When the family came to see Don's body lying in its coffin, she stopped the procession half-way through. She clambered onto the coffin and hunkered over the body like a child, sobbing. The rest of the family were astonished to see these protestations from the woman who'd split the room to get away from her husband. They buried him next day. Bea allowed only one

Afterwards, she did not change the layout of that divided room. She cleaned her own half and maintained his own portion in its usual disarray. She conceived a particular fondness for Max and it was thus that Max finally saw the bedroom and knew the truth about whether it, too, had been divided so starkly. She sneaked in one day while Bea was sleeping in her armchair.

She was surprised by what she saw. She told no one about the ordinary room with the deep curtains and the one plump double bed.

She went to UCLA a month later.

It felt like two years of summertime. She sat reading on lawns. She smelt the fragrance her friends brought with them. She talked politics. She talked school.