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

`What do you fancy, Chuckie?' he asked, with a proprietorial air.

Small, dark-haired women with big hips, thought Chuckie. But a waitress glided up and prevented the comment. Septic Ted bristled up and ran his fingers through his hair, which was too short to be significantly altered by the process. Jake gave the waitress his order, Deasely told her what he wanted and Septic confessed his desires. She turned to Chuckie.

`What would you like?'

`What's nice?'

`The chicken's good.'

Chuckie smiled dismissively. `I'm sorry,' he said. `I don't eat anything beginning with the letter C.'

The waitress blanked this completely but the boys were delighted.

`Nothing at all?' queried Donal.

`Nah,' replied Chuckie. `Courgettes, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, celery, cucumber, celeriac, Cos, cheese, coffee, cereals, chicken, candy, crackerbreads of any type. I wouldn't touch any of those bastards.!

'What Septic Ted pronounced a coarse synonym for female pudenda.

The waitress didn't bother to blush.

`You're a charmer, Septic,' said Jake.

`What's the fish?' asked Chuckie.

`You wouldn't like it,' said the waitress.

`Cod?'

`Yup'

'OK, gimme a salad but can I have extra chemicals in that? If it doesn't come wrapped in plastic, I don't eat it'

The waitress sidled off, uncharmed.

Jake gave Septic some lip about sleazing the waitress.

`Relax,' retorted Septic. `From what Chuckie tells me, you've a bit of a weakness for the serving classes yourself.'

`Blow it out your ass.'

`Witty.'

Chuckle smiled fraternally upon his friends, bickering and unbickering. He felt better with them. Somehow, the panic and strangeness of his new success was rendered harmless by their presence.

He was closest to Jake but fond of the other three to varying degrees. Slat Sloane was the only socialist that Chuckie knew. He was a lawyer who worked for city community groups and charities. He was better educated than anyone Chuckie had ever met and probably earned less money than the waitress here. He was big on dignity and contribution. Chuckie suspected that Slat just wanted to be Swedish. He'd been in Sweden a couple of times and it seemed to have made a lasting impression. Jake had told him that Slat had not bought his own toilet roll in the ten years since he'd left home. Slat did his own ironing, cooking and cleaning but he was just too fastidious to buy toilet roll. Apparently he didn't want the check-out girls in supermarkets to suspect that he defecated. His mother bought it for him. Slat never had any girlfriends.

Donal Deasely worked for the Government. He dished out all the money that flooded in from the European Community, the International Fund for Ireland and all the other pass-thehat agencies the Irish loved so. Deasely earned quite a lot of money and spent most of it on fashionable clothes, haircuts and obscure books about science and medicine. He was always reading about something genetics, thermodynamics, prime numbers or swanky astronomy. That's why he'd bought all the clothes and haircuts. He said he really wanted to be a himbo. Donal never had any girlfriends either.

Septic Ted had plenty of girlfriends. Septic Ted had too many girlfriends. Septic Ted sold insurance so his erotic success was that bit easier to bear.

`Guess who I saw today,' Donal challenged.

`Marilyn Monroe,' suggested Chuckie.

`Fyodor Dostoevsky' said Slat.

`Spiderman?' hinted Septic.

`Nah, Ripley Bogle.!

`Who?' asked Chuckle.

'A guy we were all at school with,' explained Slat. `He was some kind of tramp or something but he went away to England. Cambridge, I think. Haven't heard of him for years. Smart guy.'

`A tosspot,' said Septic.

Then Chuckie remembered their stories of this boy who slept rough in the grounds of Belfast Castle through the last of his unElysian schooldays. Apparently Jake had met him once in London where he had been homeless also. Bogle had told him that he had spent a night sleeping in the Blue Peter garden. Jake had considered this a class act.

`Where'd you see him?' asked Jake.

Donal became unsure. `I think it was him. I saw some bum down near the City Hall. He was reciting Mallarme in French for fifty p a go.'

`That's him,' said Slat.

`He's a bum again?' asked Chuckie.

`He was made to be a bum,' said Septic. `A bum from a bum family. Somebody told me his ma used to work the docks for brown money.'

`Brown money?'

change.'

`Fuck, Septic,' bellowed Chuckle. 'Brown make this stuff up.'

'Nah, traditional Irish rhyming rhyme.'

There was some faint guffawing; the five men made their stab at bonhomie. Chuckie was fond of his friends. He was the only Protestant there and still, after ten years and more, that felt like a proud claim, a distinguished thing. When he was seventeen Chuckle had been beaten up for these people.

They'd been friends on and off for twelve or thirteen years. They had mostly gone away and come back. Slat had gone to England to read law at Manchester. He had come back and started fighting fights for the deracinated proles of his hometown. Deasely, bizarrely Francophile, bizarrely polyglot, had lived in Bayeux for a couple of years, then Bremen, then Barcelona. He too had come home. Septic had worked a couple of North Sea rigs and lived in Scotland for a few years. He had come back. Jake had truly disappeared. He had gone to America and no one thought they would ever see him again but he had left America for university in London and had come back eventually. Chuckie? Eureka Street to Eureka Street, Chuckie had never left. They'd gone away, they'd come back. It used to be that Northern Ireland's diaspora was permanent, poor denuded Ireland. But everyone had started coming back. Everyone was returning.

Girls, too, had come and gone in their lives but there they still were, still together, still doing the old stuff. They had history. Mostly a history of wasting their time in each other's houses when their parents were away, bogus sophisticates, drinking instant coffee and discussing platonic love.

The waitress brought their drinks. No one commented on Chuckle's ostentatiously alcohol-free mineral water.

'Salut.'

' Prost'

'Slainte'

'Beat it down ya.'

They sucked their drinks with ceremony.

`Heads down!' hissed Deasely. `There's Tick:

All five started examining their fingernails, coughing into their chests, tying their laces.

`Where is he?' asked Slat.

`Up at the front by the till.'

They looked round furtively. An old tramp had come into the cafe. In the distance, he could be seen hassling the waitress for money.They were all, except Chuckie, vaguely fond ofTick. They had named him so when he had told them proudly that he was the only Northern Irish indigent ever to have been fitted with a pacemaker. Several medical research bodies had (in print) declared that Tick could not actually exist, that the success of such a procedure was not compatible with Tick's highoctane lifestyle. But Chuckie dreaded him. Tick reminded Chuckie of his father. Tick had always reminded him of his father. In the seven or eight years since Chuckie had first encountered Tick, he must have dished out about six or seven hundred pounds to the old clochard. On Chuckie s then limited resources, this had been a strain. But whenever he saw the guy, he couldn't help but think of his father. He couldn't help but dip his hand.

Septic tittered. `Haven't seen him in a while. He looks pretty shit.'

`He's never dazzled exactly,' said Jake.

'Uh-oh, here he comes: Deasely blatantly ducked under the table.

`What's the bets it's the Kennedy one?' hazarded Septic.

`A fiver says it's not,' rumbled Deasely, from under the table.

`You're on, said Septic.

They were referring to Tick's spiel. Chuckie used to think it was charming that Tick had a spiel. None of the other pissed old farts around town bothered much with such finesse. But Tick had dozens of spiels. Propping up the downstairs bar in Lavery's, he used to tell the gullible that he was an out-of-luck songwriter who had written most of Elvis's hits. He charged iop for a joke. He did'GuessYour Star Sign'. He sang a crackly chested version of the'Fields ofAthenry' until people gave hint pounds to go away. He had even earned good money for a couple of years down the markets by eating fleas for bets.