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

I flicked something between a smile and a nod at him.

'I'm glad to see it go,' he said, lazily confidential. 'The bitch fucked off so her stuff can fuck off after her.'

Me, I never knew what to say to unhappy people. I never knew what to add or subtract.

'Lost your job?' I asked clumsily.

`Aye, fuck'The man was briefly energized. `I was at Short's ten years. Laid me off four months ago. They're letting fucking Taigs in now.'

Yeah, yeah, I thought. There was a new Commission now to make sure that Catholics had fair representation in the workforces of the province. Equable commentators like this guy blamed this Commission for all the economic, social and moral ills of the planet generally. They had liked it the old way, when Catholics were glad of an indoor bathroom and a couple of raw spuds. But what could he have expected? That kind of stuff couldn't have gone on for ever. Not because it was wrong or anything like that, because it was embarrassing. Would he have been comfortable if he'd known I was a Catholic? I wondered. Probably.

`When did she go?' I asked, to change the subject.

His Catholic-hating smile hardened into his wife-hating smile, a much uglier thing. `Last month. Told me she was fucking her cousin and pissed off the day before Christmas. Didn't miss her. Drunkest I'd ever been. Drunkest anybody's ever been. Didn't miss her. Won't miss her.' He nudged me. `Gives me a chance to have a go at all the wee tarts running round the estate. That's the life for me.'

A tear tracked down the tired lines in his face while he talked all his tough talk. Here we go again, I thought. He talked more hardman bullshit like he didn't know I knew how soft and small and sad he was. I didn't listen with either ear.

Crab and Hally finally lumbered out of the house carrying both parts of the sunbed.The van door was open so they loaded up without my assistance. The guy ignored them all the while and continued cajoling me with his man-of-the-world stuff. Crab got into the driver's seat, grumbling about not getting a look at the tart with the sunbed.The man's face did not flicker. Hally pushed him out of the way and climbed in.

And it was when Crab started the van and we moved off that it happened. I looked back and the guy waved at me. A tired, amiable, clapped-out gesture. I don't know. I'd taken stuff from old folks, from women, from kids even. It's supposed to be easier to feel sorry for them but I'd never felt sorrier for any one than I felt for this tired guy, this silent weeper who'd waved at me as I'd driven away with the last remnant of the woman who had left him.

And that was enough to do it.The low-rent street, the crappy houses, the sky pale and drooping, the waving man with the wet face. It all looked like I felt and I decided that I wanted to go home. I was going to take the rest of the day off. A morning's worth of repo work was enough sadness for anybody.

The van was getting full and we decided to drive back and unload. Crab and Hally bickered on as we drove back to the garage from where we worked. Soon they guessed my mood and left me out of their banter. I couldn't get the picture of the guy with no wife and no sunbed out of my head and I couldn't swallow the taste of shame.

Back at the garage, I left my two colleagues and walked into Allen's office. He owned the garage and ran his debt-collection gimmick from there. He was talking money into the telephone. He motioned me to wait. I waited without patience.

`What do you want?' he asked, when he had finished. Allen was an ex-dipso, car salesman, repossessor, loan shark, all-round wide-boy. He was the only sixty-year-old bald guy I had ever seen in a pair of leather trousers. He was not a man with much grace.

'I'm going home. I'm sick.'

`The fuck you are.'

'Stop me.'

He frowned and decided to stop trying to look menacing. He wasn't any good at it.That's what he'd hired Crab, Hally and me for.

'What's wrong with you?'

'I'm sick.'

He looked out of the small window to where he could see Crab and Hally unloading the van. 'Have you gotta problem with this work, Jackson?'

'Nah, I find it massively rewarding. I thank God every day for the fulfilment of it, the sense of achievement. What do you think?'

He didn't couldn't, he didn't understand all those syllables.

`Why don't you go be a fucking brain-surgeon, then?'

`I'm thinking about it.!

`You get up my nose, you know.' Happily reminded, he started to pick the organ in question. `Crab and Hally don't have a problem. Admittedly, they're stupid cunts but they don't have a problem because they know that what you don't pay for you can't have. We take stuff from scumbags who shouldn't have bought it in the first place. Don't buy things you can't afford' He dislodged a wieldy piece of snot and paused thoughtfully. `If you don't like it go get another job. I'll live with the disappointment of losing you. Fuck me, who cares if we're not nice — we're necessary. That's more important.' He smiled and flicked the snot from his fingers. Just in case I thought he was justifying himself or anything like that, he added, `Anyway, do you think I could give two fucks?

'Can I go home now?'

He dismissed me with a wave. `Yeah, fuck off. And don't do this again.'

At the door he called me back. I turned reluctantly and looked at him without interest.

`You're a real soppy prick, you know.'

'Yeah,' l said, `I've been told.'

Back home in Poetry Street, I smacked a cup of coffee into me. Fancy coffee; black as Mick beer and strong as radiator paint. The only way to drink it. Cost me three quid a pound but a man had to have good coffee. Since Sarah had ironed out my tastes it had become a first principle. I lived at the posh end of town now so I ground my coffee and drank it from overpriced, underglazed kitchenware. This was Poetry Street. This was bourgeois Belfast, leafier and more prosperous than you might imagine. Sarah had found this place and moved us in to lead our leafy kind of life in our leafy kind of area. When her English friends or family had visited us there they had always been disappointed by the lack of burnt-out cars or foot patrols on our wide, tree-lined avenue. From my downstairs window, Belfast looked like Oxford or Cheltenham. The houses, the streets and the people were plump with disposable income.

From my upstairs window, however, I could see the West; the famous, hushed West. That's where I'd been born: West Belfast, the bold, the true, the extremely rough. I used to send Sarah's visitors up there. There were plenty of those local details up West.

A radio waffled softly from the flat downstairs. It was barely ten o'clock and the student kids downstairs were probably just getting up. I pulled my curtains wide and Saturday sunlight slapped itself around my room like a coat of paint. I squinted out at all the Belfast birds in all the Belfast sky. Across the Lisburn Road, a diminutive cleaning woman chucked some flaccid garbage from the doorway of the fancy Indian chickenhouse. A group of cats appeared from nowhere and started filling their faces. I recognized my own prominent amongst them. He was the fat one with no testicles. I thought about calling him in for his breakfast but I decided not to bother. I didn't particularly like my cat. My cat was a bit of a wanker.

I looked to my own dry toast and cigarettes. I ate in good heart, a neat trick on two hours' sleep and a baby hangover. I went to the door and looked again for the mail that never arrived. I picked up the local paper and took a read at that instead. Another taxi-driver shot the night before. Taxi-drivers were fashionable victims just then. It was all the rage. It was all the hatred. At the bottom of the front page there was an ad for a Christmas pantomime. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs WITH REAL DWARFS!!!