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

In the last couple of years, Slat's sex life had become a hunt for right-wing women of a certain age. He started going to DUP and Official Unionist meetings, and even Conservative ones, in the hope of scoring with the treasurer in the toilets. (Sometimes it worked.) On a week's holiday in Houston, he stayed in a hotel where a Republican convention was being held and got criminally boffed by the wife of a rabidly xenophobic Ohio she ruined the experience by disagreeing with some of her husband's more excessive notions.

Slat told me that he slept with these women for several reasons. It was naughty because they were so entirely right wing, because they were so entirely middle-aged. But mostly he slept with them because they hated hinm. That was a sensation difficult to replicate with non-political girls.

The upshot of this was that Slat was forced to inform me that he had got engaged a week before to someone ominously called Wincey. That sounded right-wing, Protestant and middle-aged all at once. She would be in the Wigwam tonight. I could hardly wait.

I had often worried that my friends and I seldom talked about politics. There we were, living in Northern Ireland, the country of calorific nationalisms, Christolatry and a splittable and splitting populace. We never really mentioned it. It was good to see that local conditions weren't entirely passing us by. I was glad that my friends' sex lives were incorporating the sectarian and post-colonial experience. It meant I didn't have to think about them myself.

Eight fifteen p.m. Usual table in the Wigwam. Everyone was there. Slat was there, Donal was there, Luke was there. Even Chuckle was there. He was completely silent, true, and Max seemed to be holding him down in his seat, but he was there. It had been a month since any of us had seen him. Septic had started a rumour that he was hiding out because he'd had a hundred grand's worth of plastic surgery in California. He and Max had arrived late and even the sceptical amongst us had been half expecting to see a new slim, epicene Lurgan. When the same old fat, balding Chuckle walked by Max — we were much relieved.

When we'd said hello, he had grunted reluctantly. With her usual skill, Max had smoothed it over and made us comfortable. Pregnancy suited her. She was more beautiful and serene than before. As she talked and joked to fill Chuckle's silence, she made the rest of us feel that we lacked something.

Donal was there with his new boyfriend. Pablo seemed a nice enough young nian, if pointlessly good-looking and wellmuscled. I caught Septic staring distastefully at the inordinate bulge in Pablo's trousers. It was easy to see precisely what Donal was getting these days.

Slat had brought Wincey, who looked like she was the mother of everybody else at the table. She must have been fifty. Brown-haired, well made-up, plump but trim, she was the kind of woman that Chuckle's mother might now go for. Slender, intelligent, sensitive, Slat looked like her youngest son. But Slat was obviously besotted. They persisted in whispering close together like amorous teenagers. I heard her ask how many of us were Catholics. I heard the distinct erotic and colonialist quality of her gasp when Slat told her that we were almost all Catholics.

Septic, too, was accompanied. His escort was, to my infinite surprise, young Aoirghe. I was trying not to think about the irritation this was causing me. They weren't exactly swapping sweet nothings and Septic's hands only seldom fluttered near her airspace but they were together and that pissed me off.

It wasn't the usual Wigwam scene. Bar Luke and me, the boys had all paired off. It was Couple City. It was like the last scene of a Shakespearian comedy: everybody was getting married off apart from us minor comic characters. I'd always hated Shakespearian comedies.

At first, the chat was general. Current weather conditions. Sharon Stone. Garden furniture. Jimi Hendrix. There was more unease, more discomfort than we'd ever experienced on one of these evenings. Some of that was to be expected. We no longer had a quorum. Our numbers had doubled. We'd been forced to spread out and grow up. But there was much strangeness: even Chuckle's silence was not particularly remarkable amongst all the newness. None of us boys seemed to have spoken so far.

`Was he that black boy who killed himself years ago?' asked Wincey.

`That's right,' replied Pablo. `A beautiful man.'

`Didn't he take lots of drugs?'

`Whenever possible.'

'That's terrible'

'Probably.'

I saw both Donal and Slat shiver with pleasure and affection. The exchange was obviously characteristic of each of their paramours and this they found infinitely sweet, it seemed.

`Jimi Hendrix was a victim,' declared Aoirghe. Septic flinched. We all flinched as she went on,'He was a black man in a white man's world. It had to end the way it did'

I laughed.'He was a stoned man in a white man's world.That had more to do with his death than the accident of his skin,' I suggested.

'He made beautiful music,' sighed Pablo.

'It was the music of the oppressed; Aoirghe hissed at me.

I laughed and Slat rapidly began talking about Chelsea football club. He supported Arsenal so it was an eccentric choice.

`If they don't buy a central defender early in the season, they'll be relegated' He fizzled away into silence and everyone but Wincey and I glared at him.

`Oh, I am sorry,'Aoirghe said with a theatrical air. `I wouldn't want to annoy Jake by being too committed.'

How could she open the door for me like that?

`I'd have no problem with you being committed, sweetheart!

Slat and Donal gave me their cheap-shot looks and Septic practically clapped his hand over Aoirghe's mouth to prevent her reply. The moment passed without violence.

'Did you hear the OTG guy has been arrested?' piped up Donal, over-brightly.

'What?' I asked, suddenly interested.

`I heard on the radio.'

'Nah,' said Slat. 'The cops waded in after a student party. A whole lot of the kids had taken a bucketload of speed and fucked off round the Holy Land with spray cans. Not the real McCoy.'

`Mass action. That's so sixties; squeaked Wincey.

We all stared at her in silence. I tried to smile at her.

'Absolutely.' l grinned. I liked Wincey. I nearly began to wonder what she'd look like in some high-thigh Lycra…

`So the real guy hasn't been found?' asked Max.

`How do you know it's only one guy or even a guy at all? It could be several people.!

Roche saw him,' I told them.

'When?'

'A couple of times. It was definitely the right guy.'

`Nobody knows what it means yet?' asked Max.

`No,' said Septic.

`Feeble pacifist bullshit,' murmured Aoirghe.

I laughed into my beer.

`I have an idea what it means,' said Donal quietly.

`What do you think it means?' asked Slat.

`Nothing,' replied Donal.

Everyone pulled their disappointed faces.

'I'm serious,' said Donal. `I think it's entirely random. It could be any three letters of the alphabet. It doesn't really matter what they are. This is the city of the three-letter initial written on walls. I think someone's satirizing us.!

`Well, it's worked,' said Pablo.

'It has to be someone very persistent,' grumbled Septic.

`He must just have wanted to see what happened. To see if other people copied they did. It must have been touch and go whether it was going to start a terrorist gang, a religious cult or a political party.!

`So, it's ultimately pointless?' I suggested.

'Not at all, satire is never pointless. It makes us look stupid and besides it's just a pretty good wheeze.'

I felt suddenly depressed. The same conviction had been growing in me. I didn't like to have it verified in this manner. I wouldn't say I'd been placing any hopes, spiritual or political, on this OTG thing but I'd been glad to have it around. I liked the way it had pissed everybody off.