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

She took a squat bus to Belfast. There she disembarked and waited. Trolleyless, laden with bags, she couldn't think of what to do. Her travelling had lost its energy. She felt heavy and motionless. She simply sat on the pile of her bags once more.

She lit a cigarette and pulled her collar tighter round her neck. She was breathless with the strangeness of this new town, with all its sticky cold and its planetary tame. It was like walking into a cowboy film. There was an open rank of blue and white buses with mysterious names all rolled above their windshields: Enniskillen, Dungannon, Omagh, L'derry. There was an unreality in this, an unlikelihood that pleased her.

That night she sat on a broken chair and stared out of the uncurtained window of the room she had rented. The window looked out to a road on which people congregated on the warm evening. A shop was still open and groups of women chatted outside its bright window. Across the road she saw two small queues for a cinema.The queues made her unaccountably happy. She watched as they grew and then shrank to nothing and it was quite, quite dark. She did not feel alone.

It pleased her that her life could be so random. The passage from Los Angeles to this obscure Belfast street had been entirely without volition. Unfortunate glances, involuntary decisions, chance conversations. It seemed a suitable way to move herself around the planet.

That night she slept deep and true…

When she had finished all her talking, all her story, Max looked down at Chuckie. He lay beached on the bed, the meagre sheet drawn around him. There was a look on his face she had not seen before; a warmth for him flickered in her belly. She hadn't talked so hard in years. She wondered what it was about this dumb, fat guy that had produced all this narrative in her. She smiled. He had done an admirable amount of listening. There were depths to chubby Chuck. Looking down at his lap, she saw the rim of his erection against the sheet. She was surprised but not upset. She laughed. `Hey, Chuck. Have I been turning you on?'

He looked up at her and paused. His face was pale with the strain of new emotions, unplumbed depths. His eyes were moist with love.

`How much is a million dollars in sterling?' he asked.

Later that week, Chuckie Lurgan walked a street for the first time in his life, new in the thought that he loved her. This was absolutely it. When he wasn't with her, he thought of her; when he wasn't with her he wanted to see her, hear her; all for reasons he could never satisfactorily explain. He needed her like you might need a drink or a cigarette. When he saw her, they didn't have to do anything special for it to be special.They didn't have to make love, they didn't have to go out. An hour of sitting side by side with her in silence was somehow magically different from the same experience without her. At one point, she told him that she had met Clint Eastwood. Chuckie, starfucker, fameseeker, forgot to get excited. He just looked at her mouth while it moved. Chuckie was worried.

Aoirghe had come back from Dublin and Chuckie had not cared. The last six days had been a series of evenings spent in their flat with Max climbing all over his bibulous form. The night before, even the neighbours had complained, so noisy had been their glee. In all the smutty roll of Chuckle's copulatory history, amongst the countless couplings and ruts, this had counted high.

But adipose Chuckle knew that it was all wrong. Fat Lurgan knew that he didn't deserve her. Ugly Chuck was conscious of an imbalance. He wondered what arcane satisfaction the beautiful and intelligent Max drew from his company. Chuckie had the sense and grace to know that he was a chump. It worried him that he was getting this unchumply girl.

And all this chump-free money.

For Chuckie now found himself rich. He looked at the statements of his four bank accounts and found a total of (272,645 there. It seemed like an awful lot of pounds.

It lent him ballast as he walked from Eureka Street to Bedford Street. He had returned home that morning as though from a holiday. His mother wasn't there and he had picked up his stuff and headed out. It was an unshiny, pleasant day. He looked at the sky with a proprietorial air. The sky was albino. The sky looked like eggs to him.Two hundred and seventy-two thousand, six hundred and forty-five pounds. He walked down Great Victoria Street, mumbling the lyrics of a cheap love song. He felt what he could only call tremendous, enlarged, a bigger man.

Basking under the double shine of topmost admiration, Chuckie Lurgan walked through the glass doors of Patterson's, the Mercedes People. His dream was coming true. He was about to buy his big, expensive car. He was about to buy a car too big to park.

`Can I help you, sir?'

The pristine young woman's tone was just uncertain enough and the `sir' faltering enough to be insulting. Chuckie's suit was good but he knew that his face still did not convince. He looked at her tight skirt and her trim heels. He looked at her pretty, prissy face and grinned. `Yeah, I wanna buy a car.' He stared at her. He fingered his cuffs. He smiled in her face. `Fuck it, maybe I'll buy two.'

Forty minutes later, Chuckie sat thoughtfully in the corner of the glossy showroom. He looked around him vacantly. Even the sunshine in there looked like it earned good money. The leather in his chair squeaked prosperously as he shifted but, under Chuckle's big ass, it sounded furtive.

The salesmen were doing some paperwork on his behalf. As he glanced around the big shiny strange, so beautiful could scarcely remember which one he had selected. The tanned toothy men had taken some time to treat his intentions seriously. Like the girl at reception, they had figured him for a dreamer, a fantasist coming in to look at stuff he couldn't afford. When he had made his choice and announced his desire to write a cheque on the spot, one of them had openly snorted in disbelief. When he had given them his yob address, they had frowned and bristled, almost ready to eject this overdressed proletarian timewaster.

But when he had given them one of his account numbers and they had called his bank, everything had changed. The men's smiles became extraordinarily elastic. One of them told the receptionist to get Chuckie some coffee, that was, if Mr Lurgan wouldn't prefer a glass of wine. When the insolent girl had returned with his coffee, she gave Chuckie a look of such melting sexual intention that he suspected he might have wangled a blowjob without too much trouble.

When his newly acquired mobile phone had rung and he had blushingly fished it out of his wallet pocket, they had been even more impressed. It had only been Max calling him to tell him some of the things she would do to his genitals that night. At his end, Chuckie had persisted in trying to make it sound like a business call. Max, delighted by this subterfuge, had become more obscene. `Yeah,' said Chuckie hilariously, `give me a report on that. Send me some figures.' It was an entirely wasted effort since both salesmen and receptionist had clearly heard a woman's voice bellow, 'I'm gonna fuck you till you scream,' before Chuckie got off the line.

He should have been delighted as he waited there while they clucked, their faces filled with his reflected cash-heavy grandeur, but he was merely depressed. Their initial reactions had caused him too much shame. They had dented him. The subsequent obsequiousness held no charm. Without the actual proof of all those pounds, he didn't look, feel or smell like a wealthy man. He was all wrong. These people knew money. They knew he was all wrong.

For no easily detectable reason, his life had become spectacular, thrilling. He was rich. He was successful. He was in love with a beautiful girl. He was Chuckie Lurgan.