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

No, amazingly, she didn't laugh. She continued not laughing for another twenty minutes or so before I finally left. Just before the end of that comedy-free conversation she told me mutinously that Amnesty International were having a Belfast press conference in a fortnight's time and they wanted me to attend and tell the world how I was abused by the police. She had promised them that she would try to persuade me.

At least I got a laugh out of that. I pointed out some of the reasons why that might be a little difficult. I painted her a broad picture. `Go fuck yourself,' I said. (I was getting pretty slick.)

She threw me out. I liked that about Aoirghe. She was consistent.

I drove around for a while.The streets were less deserted than latterly and my mood lifted again. It was one of those nights when every song on the radio makes your trousers tight. It was a bad night to be without a girlfriend. It was warm. It was almost like any summer Friday night when the girls were out barelegged in short skirts and the boys were wearing linen trousers stained by their sixth pint and innocent Belfast lay bemused and strewn with their drunken litter and everyone laboured under the misconception that I drove a taxi.

I dropped in at the Wigwam. I was an hour late but I wasn't hungry. I found the boys at our usual table. As always they were talking about what really mattered.

`There absolutely has to be life on other planets,' said Deasely. `To suppose that amongst the multibillions of stars and thus more multibillions of planets, to suppose that ours is the only planet to produce the right conditions for sentience is monumental arrogance. Mathematically, there has to be something in that vast black darkness'

`What, Ballymena?' quipped Septic.

I sat down and they nodded their greetings at me. Deasely continued. `The universe has everything we need to think about. Too much twentieth-century science has been microscience, the science of molecules, atoms, genetics. The real science is the new way of thinking that lying on your back looking at the stars can never fail to produce.!

The nationalist waitress sidled up to me. `Sian,' she said.

'Yeah, right,' I replied.

Ever since she'd read about me in the papers, this girl had been giving me the Gaelic thing there. She asked me what I wanted in what she supposed to be a seductive tone. I asked for some coffee. She said something else in Irish that I didn't understand and loped off with a big smile. At least someone wanted to sleep with me, but I still felt like weeping.

`The most beautiful concept in the cognitive universe is the glitch in stellar calculations produced by the imponderable of the speed with which they are moving away from us and the speed with which we are moving away from them. All measurements of distant stellar bodies are unreliable because of distance, speed and time. The mathematics depend on where we stand. From somewhere else, the results would be different. There can be no absolutes. That is so tremendous. It's so political. The act of observation is ultimately vain,' mentioned Donal.

`Maybe that's why Jake can never work out why he can't get a girlfriend,' suggested Septic. Nobody laughed. I lifted my hand. I cocked my invisible gun and blew out his invisible brains.

The freedom-fighting waitress brought me my coffee. I stared at the floor.

`Not eating?' asked Slat.

`Not hungry.'

`What's she saying? Septic asked, as the waitress moved off muttering her thick dark stuff. `Does anybody know what she said?'

Without Chuckle there we were all Catholics but, still, none of us had a clue. Septic's finest comic episode had come a few years before when a French girl he wanted to pork had asked him what the Irish word for silence was. Septic had replied, with entire sincerity, that soilence was the Irish word for silence. He had been easier to like in those days.

`What have you got against chuckie pussy?' Septic asked me. I ignored him.

`The very difference between the evident manufacture of the basic chemical elements in interstellar space and the nonmanufacture in intergalactic space tells us that-'

`Fuck up, Deasely,' snapped Septic.

I hoped that Septic's ill wasn't even looking at any of the many women dining in the that his plans to investigate Aoirghe's pants had come to naught thus far. I was sure that this was the case. Septic liked to boast. I asked him what he'd been doing over there and his lips were uncharacteristically zipped.

We talked idly for a while. The waitress brought us some drinks, but we failed to be festive. We missed Chuckie. We'd met a couple of times here since Chuckie had gone and it simply hadn't been the same without him. His was an unlikely loss and I think we were all shamefaced that our fat Protestant friend's absence cost us so dear. But we sat it out for an hour or so, looking at each other unhappily, mumbling incoherently about this, mumbling incoherently about that. Near eleven I announced my intention of going home. Nobody wept. No one protested.

As I was preparing to leave, Tick, in a new suit and shoes, came in looking for Chuckie. When we told the suddenly elegant indigent that his friend was in America, the old man sat on the floor and sobbed like a baby. 'I brought these,' he blubbed.'He asked me and I brought him these'

He held some pieces of paper in his quivering hand. I took them. I read. They were receipts. Chuckie had actually asked old Tick to invoice him. I totted up the total. Eight hundred pounds. I took Tick aside. `How much money did Chuckie give you?'

'Oh, absolute hundreds,' replied Tick.

`How many absolute hundreds? Eight hundred?'

Tick nodded and started bawling again.

'Jesus,Tick.Why are you crying? I'll make sure he gets them. He won't mind if they're late. He went away.!

'It's not that,' he sobbed.

'What, then?'

Tick wiped a remarkable-looking droop of snot from his nose and mouth with the sharp sleeve of his new suit.'Chuckie asked me to double every amount. He said it would do no harm. My conscience wouldn't let me.That's fraud. I'm a wino but I'm an honest wino.'

He dissolved in tears. I patted his head gently. I looked at my hand. I wiped it on my trousers. The others were looking over inquisitively at us by now. I helped the broken Tick out of the cafe. `I'll talk to Chuckie,' I said. `I'm sure he'll understand.'

Tick pressed my hand and limped off. I watched him. His sharp suit still looked grotesque on his grubby body. That was the thing about was always so surprising, so unwelcome.

I said farewell to the others and left the Wigwam. At the door, the Gaelic-speaking waitress gave me some old Mick chat but I ignored her. I made like Tick and limped off home on my own account.

It was a beautiful night. I left the Wreck parked outside the Wigwam and loped slowly towards Poetry Street. Belfast was tense and scared; there were, doubtless, people being done to death at that very instant but, all in all, it was beautiful.The city sounded like an old record that crackled and hissed. But you could still hear the trouble, distant or close. In the broad night, the sirens whooped and chattered like metallic married couples.

I removed my jacket and opened my shirt. I slowed my pace. I dodged the drunken men and tried not to look at the miraculous girls. I read the walls with a feeling of unaccountable joy. After a few yards, I noticed that there was a smattering of dyslexic OTGs: TGO, ODG, OTD. I stopped and touched the wall in question. I had guessed right.The poor draughtsmanship was characteristic and the paint was still wet.

`Roche!' I bellowed. `Roche, where are you?'

A few passers-by stopped to stare. I ignored them.

`Roche!'

Several of the passers-by shook their heads and walked off, thinking I was a madman. A small dirty head peered round the entrance of an alley nearby. There were smudges and flecks of paint in the boy's hair. `Oh, it's you.'