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

When we'd finished I sat heavily on the sofa intended for Aoirghe and puffed. To my surprise, Peggy suggested that she make us some tea. I had always particularly loathed Peggy's tea — green-grey, only partially I thought her offer was a good sign so I courageously accepted. She pottered off into the kitchen.

While she was gone I started to examine some of the boxes I'd piled near the sofa on which I sat. They contained women's underwear, reams of it. It was fairly glossy stuff, too. I knew Chuckle's catalogue had been a medium to low-rent affair but those silky things looked the business to me. As I dug further into the boxes I found Lycra high-thigh bikinis, G-strings, lurid thongs. I ran them through my fingers in amazement, horror.

`Sugar?'

I made it a few inches off the sofa without the use of arms or legs. In my shock, I had rendered myself airborne solely by buttock. I glared wildly at Chuckie's mother, who stood by the kitchen door.

She smiled.`I know! Look at those things.What was Chuckie thinking of?'Then (I swear) she giggled like a milkmaid, looked me full in the eyes, tossed her hair and said, `What use would those things be to an old woman like me?'

She tripped back into the kitchen.

I felt my skin crawl with shame. I felt sure that she had spotted it. I didn't know how long she'd been standing there, watching me, before she asked if I wanted sugar. I knew she had read the not entirely comic thought in my face.

For, unwillingly but unavoidably, I had just at that moment been wondering what Peggy might have looked like in some of those athletic skimpies.

When she returned with the tea-tray the air in was all electrons; it was thick with threat and charge. As she set the tray on the little coffee table, I could have sworn that Peggy had assumed a seductive twitch to her hips. Her ass positively waggled. It was six inches from my sweating face. I couldn't help but look.

As we drank our tea, I realized that this was the first time Peggy and I had been alone. Caroline Causton was in her own house. The sudden thought did not assist my ease of manner.

`Once we get rid of the bigger things, the house will be back to normal,' said Peggy. Her tone wasn't exactly coquettish but there was a bright nervousness in it that appalled me. `Caroline called Oxfam today and they said they'd be glad to take some.'

I nodded vaguely. I hated to admit it but Chuckie's mother did look different. It was as though she was undergoing some transmutation, emerging from some matronly chrysalis. She had shed a few pounds since the thing at Fountain Street — she'd never been anywhere near as fat as Chuckle, and I'd always been fond of the generous figure, but the loss suited her. I really hated to admit it but Chuckle's mother had become vaguely shapely.

`Margaret Balfour at said she might be interested in the last sofa. I've never really liked her much but I don't see the harm.'

It was weird. I began to have a dreadful suspicion that I was considering the possibility of fancying Chuckle's mother. I wasn't sure what age Peggy was. Fifty, fifty-one. It had never struck me before but she was a pretty handsome woman. She had a good figure for her age. And there was, I hated to confess, that business with the underwear. As she wittered on about catalogue consumer goods, the image of her new intimate apparel rented space in my mind and invited unwelcome images over for long parties. Grotesquely, I thought Peggy was beginning to notice my discomfort and guess its source. I mean, Jesus, I wasn't getting laid. I was very horny, but this — this was too much.

'Do you sleep with enormous numbers of girls, Jake?'

I spat a half-mouthful of bad tea all over the sofa destined for Aoirghe. I coughed. I choked. I sputtered.

Peggy tittered mildly.'Well?'

I was still having trouble breathing but I blurted out a response before she could say anything else I might regret. 'Jesus, Peggy. No!

She smiled beatifically. 'Why not?'

Some more coughing. Some more choking. A bit of sputtering too. `Fuck. Sorry. Ah, Jesus, I don't know.'

'I'm surprised you don't get around more.You're not a badlooking fella.'

If I'd had any tea left to spit I would have spat.

After a few minutes I managed to steer the chat into neutral space, but the rest of the evening was a nightmare. There was an obscene mutual consciousness between Peggy and me. I was no saint. I'd had that heart-shaking, dry-mouthed, deeply sexual silence with women once or twice but never with a friend's mum.

When Caroline Causton finally returned, after a dreadful two hours, I almost wept with gratitude.

So, I chose not to call in on Eureka Street just then. I was still in my work clothes, I reasoned feebly. I had to pick up the sofa for Aoirghe. That was time enough. I knew it was because I was too frightened, but I walked up the Lisburn Road anyway, concluding that I needed to have some sex. I needed to have some sex really soon.

I got home. I washed my untouched dishes and then my untouched self. I had a few hours to kill and, normally, I would have put on a suit, strolled into my supermarket and looked around to see if my teenage admirer was working. But I had stopped that. I didn't go to that supermarket any more.

How was I, then, to make six o'clock become seven o'clock if I couldn't aimlessly shop? There were other shops on my road but there are only so many cigarettes you can buy. There were plenty of cafes but I didn't have the nerve for solo snacking and, besides, I didn't want to go falling in love with any more waitresses.

I took the cat for a walk.

Poetry Street was radiant. The old lady across the road smiled at me and her Asian neighbour cast an amiable wave my way. My cat hid under the nearest car. He had no social skills. (Before he'd left for America, Chuckie in a fever of fiscal enquiry had calculated that if my cat lived to its proper natural term, then in food, vet bills and moderate fortnightly catty treats he would cost me more than eight thousand pounds before he died. Chuckie said my cat represented an unaccept ably low unit profit and advised me to hit him over the head with a brick. I was tempted.) A few paces on, the cat and I saw an attractive young woman coming towards us on our side of the street. This time the cat checked her out and I hid under a car.

Yeah, it was getting bad. I was getting close to thirty and I didn't have a girlfriend. Even Chuckle had a steady squeeze but I felt like that was all over for me now. It didn't help that it was summer and I fell in love every hundred and fifty yards. It didn't help that I felt like the kind of man that I wouldn't have gone out with.

Leaving the cat where he was (there was always a slim hope he might get lost), I headed back home. I jumped into my car and Wrecked it over to Eureka Street. I made Caroline help me stuff the sofa into it while Peggy was still into a Dayglo thong? I told Caroline I'd be round later or the next day or something, and drove off.

Having passed through that ordeal, I turned my thoughts to the one I was about to face. What had happened to Ronnie Clay that day was merely the real-time manifestation of what Aoirghe had been doing to me ever since I'd met her. No one had ever squeezed my stones like she did.

I was stopped at two roadblocks on the way to Aoirghe's. One of the soldiers wanted to rip up the sofa sticking out the back of my car. He thought it was a good place to hide a big wad of Semtex. His colleagues dissuaded him.They pointed out the absurdity of the notion of a sofa-bomb and also mentioned what a feeble fucker I looked. I drove on unmolested.

Just as I pulled up outside Aoirghe's, the radio told me that two more soldiers had been shot.The timing was inappropriate. I would have carried the sofa alone if it had been possible. It wasn't. I pushed her doorbell.