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

Chuckie began to scan the streets in serious search of a taxicab. It was only San Diego but Chuckie was terrified now. He lamented the foolishness of his small-hours adventure. The streets upon which he walked felt splattered with somebody's blood or somebody's semen. He had a sudden and unwelcome sense of how fragile and inappropriate all his chubby, formless Irish flesh was in the midst of all this. He longed for the comfort of familiar Belfast and the understandably butch and brutal Sandy Row. He longed for the safety of some terrorism, some civil war.

It took him an hour to get a cab and he felt that he had walked half-way back to the airport by then. Back at his hotel, he cancelled his wake-up call and almost made a trembling, homesick pass at the bright new girl at reception. Fifteen minutes later, he slept like a dead man.

He woke so late and breakfasted so long that it was nearly five o'clock before his cab rolled up outside Max's mother's house. It was a big house, roughly the same size as the entire compass of Eureka Street. It daunted him badly.

A servant or some kind of housekeeper answered the door and there were a bad couple of minutes while Chuckie explained that he wanted to talk to Mrs Paxmeir about her daughter. There were some more bad minutes when he was introduced to Matron Paxmeir herself and had to explain his mission once more. He was rendered almost speechless by Mrs Paxmeir's appearance, which did nothing to plead his case.

Mrs Paxmeir was a gross facsimile of her daughter. Emaciated, paper-thin, she wore a smile tightened by sunburn and ill-will. Despite her dragonish exterior, Chuckie found himself oppressed by her TV-anchorwoman glamour. She looked like a woman who had never been to the toilet.

She told Chuckie that she had seen Max two days before. She didn't seem to know why her daughter had visited but she seemed conscious that she had disappointed her in some way. That consciousness did not trouble the woman. As she grew older, she said, she found herself growing less interested in her daughter's various dramas.

`I always knew she'd end up with someone like you,' she informed Chuckie.

`Someone like me?'

`Yeah:

`What does that mean?'

`Well, you know, somebody small-town.'

`Thank you.'

They both heard the housekeeper at the door. It appeared that Paxmeir's husband had come home. She seemed to intend being rid of Chuckle before she had to make any introductions.

`I don't want to keep you,' said Chuckle. 'If you could tell me if you have any idea where she went, I'll take my leave. Her grandmother's old house maybe?'

`Yeah, maybe,' the woman replied indifferently.

Chuckie tried to glare at her but failed. He felt a new affection for Max, a new pride in her. With this harpy as a mother, Max was a genetic miracle. It was astonishing that she could walk and talk when she came from such a source. What she was, she had made herself.

Mrs Paxmeir noticed his appraising look. `You think I'm a pretty bad mother, eh?'

Chuckie blushed and stammered. Despite his dislike, he did not want to insult the woman. He intended to marry her daughter, after all. `Hey, listen,' he stumbled, `a friend of mine once told me that the maternal instinct was a fiction.'

`A real bright guy.'

'So so.,

She stood up on her spindly legs, preparatory to his departure. `You got big feelings for Max?'

'I think so.'

She smiled thinly. `That's not always enough for my little girl. I should know. She's strange that way.You watch your step, Irish boy.' She manoeuvred him through the hallway and opened the front door herself.

`I always do, Mrs Paxmeir. I always have.'

`Call first next time.'

`Absolutely.'

She closed the door behind him. He didn't turn round. Across the street, his cabby waited. Chuckie was glad that somebody cared.

He spent another night at the airport hotel. There was a flight to Kansas City in the morning but he was stuck in San Diego for that night. He clung to the hotel like a piece of driftwood. He ate room-service sandwiches, drank room-service coffee and watched insane hotel television, failing to interest himself even in the miraculous variety of naked young women on one of the cable channels.

Much later he went down to the lobby just to talk to someone. He asked the girl at reception several spurious questions. Joining in the conceit with professional briskness, she answered his questions efficiently but amiably. Then switching into her general-chat mode, she asked Chuckie, with that same efficient amiability, where he came from. He told her.

`Gee, you're Irish. That must be great for you,' she squeaked, with restrained enthusiasm.

`Where I come from, it's not a very distinguishing feature.!

The girl looked question marks at him.

'Well, we're all Irish there.' He realized what he had said.'Or, at least, so some say. Some people say that we're British and some Northern Irish, but on the other He looked at her blank, enquiring face, which registered no distress at his meandering. `Forget it, he said.

`Sure, no problem.' The girl beamed at him. Chuckie was forced to admit that her smile was neither vacuous nor false. Her grace was simultaneously professional and genuine. He had only been three days in America. It was a combination to which he had not yet grown accustomed. Americans were simply frequently in a very good mood.

`Nice talking to you,' she said, with a concluding smile.

Chuckie smiled back at her. `Definitely,' he replied.

Back upstairs, his head on his pillow, his elbow on his gut and his genitals in his fist, Chuckie decided that he liked Americans.

When he woke, he felt differently. Jet-lagged, lonely, Chuckie struggled around his hotel room, washing, shaving, dressing. His mood was inexplicably black. In the bathroom he raged impotently at all the mirrors in which he could see his extra, his unnecessary flesh. His body didn't look like it could do much romantic pursuing. He could hear the usual faint accompaniment of American hotel bathrooms. Through each thin wall, through ceiling and floor, he could hear people brushing their teeth. It had been the same in the hotel in NewYork.This was America. People brushed their teeth all the time and the sound of other people brushing their teeth had always driven him crazy.

Mutinous, ugly, Chuckie checked out and found his flight for Kansas City. As he waited in the departure lounge, he knew why he was unhappy. As he came close to finding her, he discovered that he dreaded it. He was supposed to persuade her to return with him. He could think of nothing to persuade her.

On the plane he tried to sleep but the man sitting next to him stirred and twitched in that way that Chuckie was beginning to recognize as the beginning of an American conversation. Chuckie was most unkeen. He grabbed a magazine and scanned its pages silently.

`Hi, there!

Chuckie looked round. They were already at twenty thousand feet. The man had had several minutes in which to think of an opening gambit more complex than this.

'Hello'

'You English?' the man asked.

`Not quite'

`Not quite. What does that mean?'

Chuckie stared. The man seemed almost annoyed by his prevarication. He was a massively tanned fellow of sixty or so with one of those abundant, entirely white heads of hair that Chuckie longed to pull. His head didn't look real. Though white, his hair was as thick and strong as any young man's. Why didn't Americans go bald, Chuckie wondered.

'I'm from Belfast!

'Northern Irish.!

'Yeah:

`Not quite British.' The man smiled.

`You got it,' said Chuckie, in American.

There was a lull in their chat and Chuckie returned gladly to his magazine.

`What you doing over here?' the man asked him, obviously rejuvenated by the little pause.