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

During the summer of 1929, John Lurgan and his family holidayed in a small cottage near Bundoran.The family of their local doctor in Belfast, the Flynns, had found a cottage close by. Dr Flynn was famous in Belfast for his work in the poor areas like Sailortown and the Short Strand. He was accompanied by his wife, two sons and one daughter. One of the Flynn sons fell horribly in love with Jenny,John Lurgan's pretty eighteen-yearold daughter. But jenny soon found herself bored with the youth. Early in the holiday, the entire county had buzzed with that the great actor Charlie Chaplin had rented a large house on the coast for part of the summer. Jenny had been beguiled by the possibility of meeting him and plotted many entrances to the famous actor's home, including: faked injury or heart attack, nude bathing in the lake and impersonation of minor Swedish royalty.

Young Flynn, though a good-looking boy, could scarcely hope to dent jenny's lust for the movie star. Her family were keen on the lad. He was amiable and soundly bourgeois but Jenny wouldn't, couldn't listen to their plans of dull advancement. Her hopes were bent on that touch of celebrity, so close she could almost reach out and bathe in its glow. While jenny wasted her summer, trying to scrape an acquaintance with Chaplin, young Flynn made desperate, disappointed plans. None came to fruition and he spent the summer failing to fill his arms with jenny's fragrant young form. That autumn he left Ireland, a rejected and unhappy youth. He went to America, changed his name to Errol and, within a brace of years, he became a movie star. Subsequently and lastingly, Jenny was sour.

In 1958, jenny's ceased washing her left hand for eighteen months to preserve the ghostly trace left on her flesh when she had touched Eddie Cochrane's jacket sleeve as he left at the stage door of the Ulster Hall following his concert. Though the hand became first black then brown and finally blue with dirt, and a small piece of chewing gum stuck to the inside of her left index finger actually crystallized with age, Peggy would not wash the imagined mark that Cochrane had left. Her hand was finally washed (two hours of scrubbing in which the skin came off like paper) on the day she heard that Eddie had died.

Chuckie's father, though only belatedly his mother's husband, had been immune to this fame-lust. He was not a Lurgan. Chuckie had taken his mother's name when he was born. His father had been a businessman who had spent his best years down Sandy Row selling love pills to middle-aged matrons. He refused to marry Chuckie's mother for two long years, in which time he planted the seed of Chuckie. He had married her on Chuckle's first birthday. Then, tired of the Lurgan opprobrium, and finally exasperated by the mother's collection of sixties pop-star portraits, he had debunked, leaving behind a lingering impression that, if suicide failed, he was bound for Idaho.

Chuckie knew this to be lies or storytelling. He had seen his father a couple of years previously, lie-down drunk in a docker's bar that never closed. He had briefly considered approaching him and having some mannish hug thing there with him on that line of cheap bar-stools. He didn't, though. His father's face was flushed with the sunless tan of the full-time dipso.The man lived in the country in which all Irish alcoholics lived. Chuckie didn't want to see what that would look like.

Chuckie himself demonstrated his family's weakness on a number of occasions. When Ronald Reagan visited Ireland, playing the big Mick card in a tiny two-house town in Kerry, Chuckie had slept fruitlessly in a nearby field for the chance of pressing the palm of the American President, a man he despised.

But more importantly, more massively, Chuckie had flipped when the Pope came to Ireland.

Now, Chuckie was a Methodist. And in God's own country, the substantial, upstanding Protestant was meant to reserve a particular hatred, a particular fear for the evil Kommandant of all the Romish hordes. All his life Chuckie had been capable of shouting, `Fuck the Pope,' with the hardest and most Protestant of his friends. But when he heard that the man in question, the new Polish Pope, was coming to Ireland, he was in a quandary. Sure, the guy was a Taig, a Fenian, the logical extension of all that was Catholic in the world. But no one could deny that he was famous.

Helpless in the glare of the Pontiff's undoubted acclaim, Chuckie secretly arranged to go on one of the special buses down to the big outdoor mass at Knock. He signed his name as Seamus McGuffin, hoping that would lend a Romish air to his broad Ulster features and his wide-apart, deeply Protestant eyes.

Thousands of people were there.The sun beat down and the Catholics broiled in that heat. Chuckie felt like he was the last Methodist left.

The Mass itself was a dull and mystifying affair. Chuckie sweated at his ignorance of the responses that the rest of the crowd made as though it were second nature. He had been under the impression that the Catholic Mass was still celebrated in Latin and had planned to mumble meaninglessly when required to make those Taig noises. He was horrified to find that they now said Mass in English and that his lunatic mumblings were no effective disguise. He panicked for a while before it dawned upon him that the people around him thought that he was merely some physical or mental unfortunate who'd been brought to this event instead of on a more reliably miraculous pilgrimage to Lourdes.

The Pope was a windswept dot on a raised altar in the distance. Chuckie was disappointed. But a rumour had circulated that the Holy Pole intended to have one of his favoured walkabouts on the periphery of the enormous throng. Just before the end of the service, Chuckie pushed himself right through to the front, just on the off-chance.

Chuckie's gamble paid off gloriously. The Pope did, indeed, amble briefly along the crush barriers nearest the altar. He touched hands and gave blessings. The people around Chuckie went wild with delight and, as the Pontiff passed by where he was standing, Chuckie threw out his hands amongst the forest of stretching limbs and brushed the Pope's own fingers.

When the Holy Man had gone, the people around Chuckie crowed and bubbled with excitement. He had never seen faces so edified, so glazed with glee. Their lives had been touched with some piety, some great sacredness they craved. But Chuckie's pleasure was more substantial. His hand buzzed with surplus blood, it felt suffused, electrified by the touch of fame, the touch of serious global celebrity.

A shabby photographer, who'd been snapping crazily, touted his wares to the crowd, telling them that he'd got shots which featured themselves and the Pope simultaneously. Chuckie despised the gullibility of the others but ordered a couple his own behalf anyway.

Two weeks later, a package arrived with his photographs. One was meaningless, a blur of arms and a white cassock out of focus; the other, however, was perfect. The blur of arms was fainter, less chaotic, and out of the melee of people, two figures were clear.The Polish Pope faced the lee of the crowd, one arni outstretched. In the midst of that crowd, Chuckie stood five feet distant from the Pontiff, his right arm stretched towards the Pope, his fingers six inches from the Pope's own.

It was a big moment for Chuckie in a number of complicated ways. He felt he had entered the annals of his ancestors' fameseeking activities with some style. But also, swollen with the joy and pride of this famous encounter, Chuckie was forced to take the clement, ecumenical step of having the photograph framed and mounted on the sitting-room wall of his most Protestant domicile.

And from this a moderation was born in Chuckie. He was still only seventeen, and when some of his coarser faithmates heard of what he had placed on his wall, they judged him still young enough to take the meat of their schoolboy beatings. And amidst the billings and bleatings and bleedings, Chuckie, who only defended the Man because he was famous, began to see an absurdity in this hatred, in this fear. Could it matter that the Pope was a Taig if the Pope was in the papers?