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

This sudden fame upset Chuckie. It shattered the love for celebrity that had never left him. If someone as unevolved as Chuckie himself could be celebrated, however briefly, then notoriety was not worth the having. It was oddly appropriate to his experience of America. That country ran on the fuel of celebrity. It was the true spiritual currency of the nation. In America, actors and actresses were gods, the populace hung on their every word. Chat-shows were the discourses in which these beings diagnosed for the people.

When first in New York, Chuckie had felt that movie-unease was a feeling restricted to him. Every step he took on those famous pavements was self-conscious. That, he felt, was a visitor's sensation. By the time he got to NewYork second time around, he had established that this sensation was the common experience of the inhabitants as well. Everyone behaved like the movies they'd seen, like the movies in which they'd want to star.The streets were full of men and women acting out images of what they wanted to be. The cops acted like movie cops.The young bloods acted like movie young bloods. The men in suits were motion-picture men in suits. Chuckie even saw a streetsweeper who wielded his brush with a discernibly cinematic air.

In New York, there was a glitch in reality, a hair in the gate, a speck on the lens.There were gross parodies of machismo and arcane street competence everywhere he looked.

The fact that Chuckie now knew that everyone on the planet was an infant who watched too many movies meant that he would never be able to stop making money.

But as the aircraft flew away from America and Max rested her head on the plump shelf of his belly, Chuckle knew that making money had, perhaps temporarily, lost its mystique. He needed to look for something else to give substance to his life. As he looked at her slumbering face, he knew he didn't need to search.

When they reached Aldergrove airport, Chuckie felt his spirits lift. Through the Atlantic air his mood had been subdued, but as soon as that Ulster drizzle smacked his fat chops, he knew he felt better. Max bought some flowers and laid them on the spot where her father had been shot. Her face was red and Chuckie said nothing.

Even the taxi-driver's predictable churlishness moved him. As they drove at speed down the motorway, he found himself becoming grotesquely sentimental. Moving south on the motorway towards Belfast, the mountains hit him like a friend. It was near dusk. The city was laid out beneath him, flat, shyly illuminated. The sky looked like litmus paper and Chuckie knew that there was no excitement in the world like the excitement of this dour provincial cityscape.

They drove to Max's flat first. Aoirghe helped them unload Max's baggage. She embraced Max, but merely scowled her habitual scowl at Protestant Chuckie. He wondered if she had found out about his run-in with Eve. It didn't seem likely. He parted from Max after ten minutes of nuzzling embraces on the pavement while the grouchy driver looked on.

Max went inside and Chuckie told the driver to take him to Eureka Street.

`Are you sure you don't want to do any more fucking snogging there, mate?'

Chuckie, New York veteran, fascist-slayer, MFG, spent the rest of the journey telling the driver what the trouble with him was.

A few hours later, he sat in the jumbled living room of little No. 42, oppressed by a burgeoning sense of unease. His welcome had been all that he could have hoped. His mother was much better, Caroline Causton had attempted courtesy and the house had been cleared of the majority of his recent madcap catalogue purchases. But there was something about the two women that began to perplex him. As the evening went on, he kept waiting for Caroline Causton to stand up and announce that she was going across the street to her own house. This persisted in not happening.

Chuckie tried to ignore the unspoken restraint under which both women mysteriously laboured. He gently questioned his mother about how she was feeling. He told them about his trip to America. Caroline stayed still. He told them some more about his trip to America.

all these big Yank tycoons, they were all scared shitless of China. They thought it was the coming place and they didn't want those slit-eyed bastards taking all their money so, of course, the dumb fucks went and sent all their money to China and invested

His voice trailed away. He felt like he'd been talking for hours (he had). He noticed that both women had now stood up. Peggy Lurgan bent over him and kissed his face. `Welcome home, son.' She straightened up. `We're going to bed now,' she said casually.

Chuckle stared his question marks all around the little room as the two women headed for the stairs.

His mother paused in the doorway. Both women looked at him. `Yeah,' Peggy said lightly, `Caroline's moved in with us. 'Night, Chuckle.'

She started to climb the stairs and Caroline favoured him with the merest ghost of a wink before following her.

Chuckie sat in his favourite armchair, mouth open, breathing slow. His flesh grew cold and he began to think he was in shock. After a while, however, he calmed down. He even began to smile. What he had been thinking was, of course, absurd. His mother and Caroline were simply too middle-aged and unsophisticated to have mastered the meaning that might have been imputed to their words. They probably didn't even know what lesbians were. His mother had forgotten to tell him that he would have to sleep on the sofa because Caroline would be sleeping in his bed. He nipped upstairs to check.

His heart raced faster when he saw his room empty. But the fact that his bedroom was unoccupied proved nothing. They had been friends since they were little girls. They probably felt it natural to share a bed, especially since Caroline had been looking after Peggy so recently. He would maybe drop a gentle hint to his mother the next day, demonstrating that such an arrangement might be unseemly.

Chuckie was confident that he was right and could not explain the sweat on his palms and the sensation of bloodlessness in his face. He stepped across Eureka Street and knocked on the Causton house front door. There was no answer. He knocked again.

The door of an adjacent house opened. Old Barney came out in his slippers. Chuckie had known this man all his life. He had always seemed old. Chiefly notable for his extraordinary smoker's cough and the velocity of his spitting, he had a habit of opening his front door to spit onto the street. He never looked first and most of the Eureka Street residents had been inadvertently spat on at some time or other. He didn't do that so much any more — no one liked to think of where he now many would still cross the street instead of passing his house.

`Ach, what about you, Chuckie? Back from the United States of America, then?' He coughed, rumbled and hawked.

Chuckie ducked. He heard the phlegm splash on the street behind him and straightened up. `Are the Caustons not in?'

Barney looked vaguely shifty. `Aye, well, they've gone away for a few days. I think there's been a bit of a dispute in the family.'

Chuckie experienced a surge of relief. His mother had merely taken her friend in because her husband was maltreating her. `Yeah,' he said, `Caroline's staying with us.!

Barney coughed again. Chuckie ducked and waited for the splash. It did not come. He looked up at the old man. He realized that, for the first time in his life, Barney had just executed a nervous cough.

'I know,' the old man said quietly. He looked up at one of the upstairs windows of Chuckie followed his gaze just in time to see a light extinguished. The old man's face quivered in panic. `Gotta go, Chuckie,' he muttered. He started to call his old dog.

Chuckie was bemused by his urgency. `What's going on, Barney?'