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

They were to meet in the Europa. When Chuckie arrived building work was going on in the foyer and he thought he saw Jake. He ignored him and hurried on to the restaurant. He was directed to a table at which Findlater already sat. Chuckie walked up and nervously shook his hand.

`Charles Lurgan,' said Chuckie Lurgan.

`Luke Findlater. Glad to meet you.'

They sat. Chuckie was appalled. Findlater was tall and elegant. His suit might have belonged to his grandfather but it looked much better than Chuckie's five-hundred-pound barrow-boy effort. He imagined a satiric bent to the welcoming smile with which Findlater favoured him. Mutinously, hotfaced, he prepared himself to be patronized.

That did not happen. There was something soft in Findlater's patrician armour. Chuckie found the chip on his shoulder easing away and began to tell this man his troubles.

At last he found someone who understood. Findlater seemed unamazed by how Chuckie had amassed his Lz7z,645. He seemed undaunted by the prospect of the rest of the IRB grant coming in. He understood that Chuckie was manufacturing, selling, producing nothing. Chuckie even told him about the prosperity-bringing vibrator. Findlater laughed delightedly.

Chuckie tried to dampen his humour by talking of his concern at being given nearly a million pounds for doing nothing.

`You see a problem in that?' smiled Findlater.

`Yes, don't you?'

Findlater laughed. `Mr Lurgan, I think that this is a precious skill of which you should be proud'

'Yeah, but I'm going to get found out. I'm going to get arrested. It's all going to fall apart.'

Findlater asked him how he managed to persuade these people to give him so much money. Chuckie replied that he was fucked if he knew.

`No.That's not what I meant.What did you tell these people you were going to do with the money?'

This was what Chuckle had wanted to avoid. With shame, he recounted the details.

Chuckie had known that his big chance was to play on the ecumenical angle with the grant agencies. In divided Northern Ireland, the Government thought that solution and resolution lay in schemes that would bring the warring tribes together. No idea was too lunatic to be rejected in this expensive cross-community effort. Chuckie had told the UDB that he was starting a business that would bring the Catholic nationalist sports of Gaelic football and hurling to Protestants, and the English Protestant pursuits of rugby and cricket to Catholics. These sports were sharply divided and a significant emblem of the apartheid in Northern Ireland, or so he had persuaded Slat to write on his application form. Since the men who worked in the UDB were all witless ex-executives from a multinational toothpaste company, this struck them as an excellent business proposal and they had given him fifty thousand pounds on the spot.

He told the IRB that he was going to set up a chain of ecumenical Irish restaurants in Paris. When they asked him what his restaurants would cook that would be distinctly Irish, he nearly said that he couldn't give a fuck but he wasn't sure that employees of a Northern Ireland Office department would understand that sloppy concept. He had hastily changed the subject and had told them that an employee of his was working on the biodegradable gas television receiver. He told them a number of lies and when he ran out of cogent mistruths he just ran through the menu of his own absurd and megalomaniac fantasies.

When poor, Chuckie's daydreams had been modest: a car, an easy job, oral sex with a constantly updated series of film stars, weather girls and game-show hostesses. Any of these things would have been a massive extension of any waking or likely aspirations he might have had. But now Chuckie dreamed of buying the Department of Social Services and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But, in particular, Chuckie dreamt of buying Ireland. He could already visualize the estate agent's description for the Ireland auction: FINE OLD COUNTRY, RECENTLY PARTITIONED. IN NEED OF MINOR POLITICAL REPAIR. PRICED FOR QUICK SALE.

Chuckle's detailing of his methods faded away. He saw Findlater staring at him fixedly. He blushed.

`That kind of thing,' he said. `More of the same. Can't remember most of what I said now.'

Findlater continued to stare at him in fixed silence. Chuckie felt his blush spread.

`You mean you managed to persuade government agencies to give you hundreds of thousands of pounds with that witless amateur bullshit?'

Chuckie gulped hotly, too ashamed to be angry. `Yes,' he squeaked, like a schoolboy.

To his horror, the Englishman fell to his knees in the middle of the restaurant. There were tears in his eyes. He raised his hand in supplication. Dishes clattered to the floor. Other diners looked round sharply.

`Mr Lurgan,' gasped the stricken man, `you are a genius, a master. Let me follow you.'

Chuckie helped him to his feet.

Luke Findlater would accept nothing other than full employment from Chuckie. He wanted to give up all his other interests and devote himself entirely to Chuckie's projects.The honour of having his ludicrous pipe-dreams called projects thrilled Chuckie but he was anxious. Historically unadmired, Chuckie was deeply unaccustomed to making such a favourable impression on anyone. He felt the unease of the plain man approached by a beautiful woman. Which of his friends had put her up to it? Was she a working girl? Was it a bet?

Within a week, they had offices. Chuckie moved his fax machine out of his mother's scullery They had a secretary, a girl from Enniskillen chosen by Luke for her competence and her lack of beauty. They were writing proposals, making contacts and generating documents in a manner that satisfied and mystified Chuckie to an equal degree.

That weekend, he and Luke had what the Englishman persisted in describing as brainstorming sessions.This seemed both strenuous and most unproletarian to Chuckie. They spent the entirety of Saturday and most of Sunday morning sitting in their offices staring guiltily at each other across an unstrewn desk. Chuckie was growing mutinous by Sunday lunchtime when Luke was struck with an idea.

He took Chuckie to the Ashley bar and got him hammered. The Ashley was a dreadful, dank, unreconstructed Loyalist bar. Many of the men who drank there had done time for chasing, beating, baiting, or just killing the Catholics of the city. There was a poster for the ANC over the bar. With its freedomfighting connotations and left-wing associations, this had puzzled Luke until one of the more cosmopolitan drinkers informed him that the poster was there because of an unshakeable belief amongst the regulars that ANC stood for Absolutely No Catholics. This seemed just the place to Luke. He proceeded to inebriate Chuckie as quickly as he could.

He was right.The combination of witlessness and the milieu of primordial Protestant ignorance induced Chuckie to fantasize wildly and to ramble around the grimy bar telling his hairy-knuckled confederates all his plans for making a million. Luke followed him round, notebook in hand, keeping him out of the worst of the brawls and carefully annotating every use less boozy aphorism.

Within the next week, this eccentric planning session had borne fruit. Chuckie, only truly recovered from his hangover by Thursday afternoon, found to his bewilderment that his company was already heavily engaged in several ventures. Capital had been committed, people hired, money moved.

They had broken into the Irishness business. They were engaged to import half-wool Aran sweaters, made by slaveworkers in Romania. By sticking a Made in Ireland label on them and shipping them to New York and Boston, they would make a fortune. They had already bought out a small mineralwater supplier in Kansas; they had contracted to ship the water to East Coast restaurants and wine bars. The shipments stopped off in Philadelphia where they were decorated with the legend IRISH WATER and a picture of an Irish brook. They couldn't afford the water company but, by the time they had to pay for their purchase, the profits for the half-wool Arans would have it covered.