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

She fell in love with her philosophy professor. He was a handsome, untidy young man who smoked secret cigarettes in his office. Half the girls and a quarter of the boys on the humanities campus wanted to fuck him. Some had tried and so far all had failed. His smile was as crumpled as his suit and there was something generously ill-fitting about him in general.

One day she saw him in the coffee bar with a couple of young children. Max's heart sank a little to see him married. She joined their table. The young professor was gracious and friendly as always. He introduced her to his children. Married or not, he was made more beautiful by the children crawling over him. She understood why his suits were always crumpled.

Max made cutesy with the kids. She found out their ages. She asked them about their favourite toys and television shows. In a calculated moment, she praised the beauty of the little girl and asked her if her mother had made the ribbons in her hair.

The young professor's smile tightened.The little boy stopped his play and the little girl frowned.

`We don't have a mom.'

The young professor swallowed and spoke to her in a low, level voice, the kind of voice to which children did not listen. `I'm a widower. Their mother died in a car crash a year ago.'

They talked there for an hour. At one point he excused himself to go to the bathroom. The little girl took the opportunity to tell Max that her mother was gone and her daddy looked after them and how sometimes their daddy's face was sad when he looked at them and how sometimes he cried when he was putting them to bed at night.

The young professor returned and took the child on his knee once more. He whispered something lumpy to her and kissed her soft cheek. He looked at Max, at the mist of her eyes and his smile was gracious. `Ah, has Alice been telling you sentimental stories about me?' he asked, gently amused. `She thinks it will make people fall in love with me.'

The little girl was right. There was a month of moves at him. He was unfailingly polite, unfailingly busy with something else. Some other girls told her she was wasting her time. The young professor didn't sleep with his students. If they had failed, Max had no chance.

But there was a night after a late lecture when it rained. She had walked from the theatre with him and they had shared her small umbrella, which kept neither of them dry. They talked under there, the umbrella keeping them close. She had wished it was smaller yet.

The young professor had given her a ride home that night. When he pulled up, she knew by the rigidness of his neck as they parted that he had considered the possibility of feeling something for her. It was easy from there.

Within a month they were spending most nights with each other. She was astonished by the heat of his desire and the wildness of his remorse. She had never met a man who didn't want to. It made her want to very much. And, afterwards, as the young professor lay, naked and grieving for his dead wife, her eyes were full of his flesh.

When he lectured, she marvelled at how her fellow students listened. She flushed with pride to hear him talk. The low red of the evening sun through the windows would make his hair shine like memory and she would want to take him publicly where he stood.

And when he touched her, his touch was courteous, his kiss gentle. He seemed to have a remnant of the manhood her father had possessed, a tender, fightless thing.

Everything in her changed. For both of them she began to believe in a time soon to come. A time when they could forget the damaged process of their lives and be married.

The young professor's children loved her and she was warm with them. But she noticed a stiffness in his face when she touched them. She could tell when he was thinking of his dead wife and she would ask him about her. She asked him about her clothes, about her habits, her tastes so that she could avoid doing anything that reminded him of her. Sometimes, she would find photographs of the dead woman and would feel unpardonable jealousy.

And when they argued, she cried bitterly and hated his wife and said cruel things. It was easy to love the dead, the silent, forgivable dead. He was angry when she talked of his wife.

Her grandmother died. She blew her brains out with bon's old rat-rifle.The young professor was gentle with her while she arranged to fly back to Kansas. There, her mother cried in her arms and was sorry for all the things she could not remember. They buried her grandmother beside her husband. Bea had left Max most of the money she'd had. It was over a million dollars. Max's mother cried again. She was already rich but Max's legacy wounded her.

She spent two weeks in Kansas, clearing up the crazy old house. When she returned to the West Coast she went to the young professor. It was a weekend. He was with his children. They greeted her like a stranger. They had retrieved the world they'd had before her arrival, the world centred on the unspoken, unseen presence of the dead wife and mother. Later, when he put the children to bed, he lingered with them for an hour and more.

That night she fucked him like a whore, like he was a whore. She mauled and moulded his flesh in her hands. Then, when he started to cry, she got up and packed a bag. Before she left she took a picture of his dead wife from the drawer in which she knew it lay. She stood at the foot of his bed, while he sobbed, and threw the photograph onto the empty space she'd left on the pillow

As she had always done, Max ran away. She flew to San Diego and fought with her mother within an hour. She flew straight back to LA. She packed some bags and boarded a plane for New York. It used to be she would run away by bus. Now, with her grandfather's money, her flights were properly airborne.

In La Guardia, she telephoned her mother, she telephoned the young professor. Neither gave her a reason to come back. She wept briefly.

And then she left America.

She flew club class New York to London. JFK to Heathrow. It had been two airborne and airport days. LA to San Diego. San Diego to LA. LA to New York. New York to London. The plastic airports had seemed more substantial than the cities themselves on the flightsome night.

She was going to Paris. Her father had spent a year there before his marriage. He had always talked about how beautiful it was, how happy he had been.

At Heathrow, she grabbed her bags and wheeled her trolley to a stand-up coffee bar. Numbly, she drank her feeble drink. London looked like New least, the airport did. The men were shorter and their teeth were bad but everything else was much of a muchness. She hoped Paris would be better.

She wheeled her trolley to the Air France desk. A viciously pretty British woman dressed in multiple nylons asked if she could help.

'Yeah, gimme a ticket to Paris'

The woman's smile twitched briefly. 'What kind of ticket, madam

'A plane ticket, honey. Like I'd ask you for a bus ticket.'

Her smile flattened completely and disappeared.' My name is Helen, I don't answer to Honey.'

'Fuck it,' said Max. She walked away.

She spent six motiveless hours sitting on her bags, numbly avoiding an alternative destination. Paris was a city she had sought without much reason. It hadn't worked out. She would have to go somewhere else. It didn't really matter where. She looked up at a departure screen and saw the word that trade up her mind:

BELFAST

She stepped off the plane at Aldergrove. Sticky drizzle immediately coated her hot face.This had been the first time that she had been in the exterior of any place for the previous two transitional days.

She stepped through the airport nervously. She knew it would be OK if she managed to walk past the spot where her father had been murdered. She remembered the place well from the television reports. It had looked to her like all the places she would never know. Her heart was hot and rapid but she walked on bravely. She passed it without trauma. She was almost disappointed.