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

But for now they are still abed. Like Jake they lie, their stories only temporarily suspended. They are marvellous in their beds. They are epic, these citizens, they are tender, murderable.

In Belfast, in all cities, it is always present tense and all the streets are Poetry Streets.

Rosemary Daye popped her third tobacco gum of the day. It had been three weeks and she'd smoked only two cigarettes. Both when she'd had a drink with Sean. She had felt that there was an excuse with a new boyfriend. On that second date, she'd been so nervous that accepting a cigarette had helped to establish the cloud of sophistication with which she was trying to blind him. She knew now that it was an effort she did not need to make. Now she knew how gloriously blinded he'd been already. She'd worn her print dress and he had actually whimpered even before she had slowly peeled it off.

The light sunshine almost warmed her skin at the thought. She crossed Royal Avenue and went into her favourite shop. Fashionable girls lounged. She browsed absent-mindedly. It was too expensive and she wasn't sure she liked it but she tried on a green-linen knee-length skirt. The things he had said about her sincerity underlined by the visual made her skin flush. As she modelled the skirt in a half-length mirror, she noticed that it was already creasing beneath her pelvis. A week ago she might have thought it made her pearshaped. Now she gladly wrote the hefty cheque before she had even changed back into her own clothes. This skirt, those creases, she knew, would make him weep.

The shop assistant smiled at her as she paid and Rosemary wondered if the girl knew her thoughts. Her happiness seemed intuitive, conspiratorial. She wondered if the girl, who was pretty, had someone who worshipped her like Sean worshipped Rosemary. Pointlessly but generously, she hoped so.

Outside, the sunshine had cooled but was sunshine still. Her mood lifted further and she even, faintly but perceptibly, swung her hips when she walked.

She wondered why she hadn't found him handsome until that night. Now, she wanted to chew his smile right off his face. His broad teeth with the tiny front gap, his strong chin and the skin dark with imminent stubble, they all made her feel clumsy and hot inside.

She smiled at herself in a dark window. Mechan's beauty parlour. Rosemary checked that window often. Rosemary checked many windows often.There were few pedestrian routes through the city that Rosemary could not plot for regular intervals of reflecting surfaces. She had a map of the city whose milestones were places where she might look at herself. Dark windows, matt displays, even parked cars. Rosemary was uncomfortable if she was forced to walk more than two or three hundred yards without the possibility of checking how she looked.

It wasn't vanity. It was concern. Rosemary's hair had ruled her life since she'd been thirteen. Idiosyncratic, untameable, her hair had a unique capacity to make her unhappy. For years she had spent hundreds of pounds on cutting it, treating it and shaping it in a variety of She had watched other women and their hair, she had calculated their difficulties, their budgets. If she drove her car behind a car full of women, she could calculate to a nicety the combined annual trichological expenditure represented there.

In the past couple of years, she had established some control over her hair. With the help of an electronic straightening device and a mysterious post-shampoo unguent that seemed to thicken it, she had won the battle. Too often, her hair still looked like an unfashionable air hostess's coiffure, and bad-hair days were more than bad for her, but it was progress.

Nonetheless she had not lost her self-checking window habit. She was not alone, she noticed. Other women routinely checked their ghostly selves in those demi-mirrors, and many more men seemed to do it than women. Even the ugly fat men inspected their images with monotonous regularity. The more attractive men seemed to do it with uneasy fascination but the ugly fat men looked at themselves with entirely candid, undisguised approval. It was only lately that her looking had become an act of approval. She was beginning to like herself. She was beginning to think that if she'd been a man she might have liked to climb all over a woman like herself. She was twentysix. It was about time.

As she looked out at the broad expanse of Royal Avenue, it seemed that the street was full of men who would desire her and that their desire would be different from the unwelcome, reducing thing it had always been before. It was as though Sean had released or revealed a world that was full of good desire, generous desire. People wanted their flesh to touch flesh, warm skin on warm skin. What could be the harm in that?

Rosemary crossed the street, smiling at a man who hadn't noticed her. He looked at her then, gratified and puzzled by the width and warmth of her smile.

It was a quarter past one. She had only fifteen minutes before she had to be back at work, back to the slender joys of insurance. For the first time in three years, she felt herself yearn for the office and its milky half-light and its somniferous warmth. An afternoon of desultory phone calls could not be too onerous. She would kick off her shoes and knead the warm carpet under her desk with her bare was the first day of the year on which she had not worn tights and she was pleased to see that few other women had dared on so unsunny a day. There would be plenty of time to think about Sean and his hard/soft skin and the possible futures they might have.

She cut down Queen's Arcade and walked through its murk.

This place, normally so tawdry to her, a poorly covered row a man wide, was transfigured and glamorous. Her spirits, not peaking, lifted further. She hoped she would always feel this.

She felt as though he had kissed her every inch. He was her fifth. Oh, let me be your fifth, he had pleaded, when she had told him she had slept with four men. No one before had shown his gentleness or his appreciation. The memory of his stunned silences and his sheer gleeful gratitude made her stumble halfway down the arcade, again making her stomach feel heated and wet inside.

She had refused to spend the night and she hadn't smiled when he said he would call her. It had hurt her to have the mood so dispelled by those words, I'll call you. They were the only words he had said that she had heard before. As she drove home, she had gained some perspective, made it no big deal. Men were like that. She should feel anger, not shame. But she could not control her joy when she got home and her grumpy flatmate Orla had tersely announced that someone called Sean had just telephoned for her, unconcerned that it was half past three in the morning. Orla said that he sounded drunk, though Rosemary knew that he had drunk from her. Orla went back to bed in some dudgeon and Rosemary called him back. His voice was wide awake but soft and he did sound intoxicated. He told her, cornily, that his bed felt too big without her and that her hips had made him feel that he could now die happy. Maybe it wasn't much but it felt like enough.

She emerged from the dark of Queen's Arcade. A hazy strip of cloud had passed, the sun blushed warmer and she felt its tiny warmth in her already hot face. She smiled and then smiled again at the thought of her reasonless grinning. She loosened her collar. Though lightly clad, she felt wrapped and snug in her skin. The heat of her flesh was marvellous. She thought she would never be cold again. She felt as though every living, breathing inch of her was goaded into some kind of heat, some slow, productive burn.

The light of Fountain Place brought her to some approximation of her senses. She had wandered and bought skirts for so long that she had neglected to get her lunch. She didn't have much time left. She turned into the small sandwich shop to which she always went. She stopped at the door to let a handsome, raffish young man in a green suit pass by. He, struck by the flush of her face and neck, smiled flirtatiously and held the door open with a vaguely gallant air. She smirked happily and stepped under his arm. She turned to murmur some thanks and stopped existing.