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

And in the next few years, this new moderation led to a change in the people Chuckie knew. He met Slat Sloane, Jake Jackson and a series of other Roman Catholics. He spent time with them, ate in their houses, met their parents and, crucially, saw the pictures on their walls. It him to find, as he developed this extensive Catholic acquaintance, that everybody's parents had been in Knock when the Pope came to Ireland and that everybody had the same kind of photograph on the walls from that Pope on the periphery and some family member close to him amongst the scrum of devout others.

For the first couple of years Chuckie had failed to bring any of his Catholic friends back to his home, partly because he was unsure of the reaction of his Methodist had never discussed ecumenicalism, so he couldn't be sure where she partly because he was wary of bringing friendly Catholics to a street so firmly set in the red, white and blue epicentre of the Protestant Loyalist belt of the city.

However, he also had to admit, it was because he didn't want them to see his Pope photograph. With their experience of Pope photographs, he knew they would fail to be impressed. Chuckie decided that something would have to be done. He had an idea. He took the frame from the wall, the photograph from the frame and brought the picture to Dex, an alcoholic one-time commercial artist who lived on Cairo Street. Dex had been dubbed Dex on account of his remarkable facility for painting two-handed. The guy was a spray-paint genius who never boasted that he had once painted for a national CocaCola advertisement. Chuckie promised him two bottles of Bell's for good work and absolute discretion. Then he told him what he wanted.

Two days later Chuckie retrieved his photograph, refrained it and put it back on the wall. His Cairo Street friend had carefully painted over all the human figures apart from Chuckie and the Pope. What was left was the Pope and Chuckie, arms stretched towards each other, in some murky brown dreamscape.

After only an hour, Chuckie had taken down the photograph and returned to Cairo Street. He slapped the second of his bottles out of the painter's hand and set him back to work.The picture was now patently unrealistic. It needed a landscape.

Another two days passed. Chuckie had already promised Slat and Jake that they could soon come and visit down at chez Lurgan. He was so anxious, he nearly lost some weight.

The second time he picked up his photograph, he was happier. Dex had painted some highly realistic trees and hedges, some good green grass, an unlikely sky and even a garden looked like Chuckie and the Pope were hanging out in some pleasant garden or hotel grounds. Chuckie put it on his wall, called Jake and told him to come round later that afternoon.

But the hour he waited was fatal and when Jake found his Catholic way to Chuckle's Protestant door, Chuckie lay on the floor for twenty minutes ignoring his friend's increasingly irritated knocking. The exterior scene of him and the Pope wasn't special enough. It looked too much like a chance meeting, a casual and unwelcome acquaintance. He went back to Cairo Street.

Dex's liver was suffering as Chuckie gave him his fifth and sixth bottle of whisky in a week. Give me an interior, he said. Give me walls and a roof and stuff. Dex looked at him in trepidation. Then I'll be happy, said Chuckie, without conviction.

And he nearly was. Having apologized to the furious Jake, Chuckie was delighted to see the latest of Dex's handiwork. The old saucehound still had it in him. Now the Pope and Chuckie stood in some modest but spacious room, possibly domestic, possibly of some seminary. There were walls, ceiling, chairs, bookshelves, even a bay window, which shed an excessively transfiguring shaft of light close to the Pontiff. Chuckie stuck it on his wall and promised himself that this would be it.

Chuckie invited every Catholic he had ever met to come round to his house on the following Saturday. His mother would be glory complete.

Chuckie woke early that Saturday. He drank sweet tea as he stared at his photograph and flinched as the shame began to rise. Despite the delicacy of Dex's spray technique, the picture had visibly thickened. Chuckle's heart sank as he could only concede that something was still wrong.The posture of the two figures was now too dramatic. In the exterior version the fact that they were standing, arms outstretched towards each other, had not seemed too incongruous. But now, in that calm interior setting, the attitudes were quite absurd. The outstretched arms above the bookcases would get a belly laugh.

It was still a few minutes short of nine o'clock. Chuckie dressed and headed round for Cairo Street.

He found Dex lying on his own front doorstep, his clothes a stained geography of the night before. It was past ten o'clock before he regained the power of speech. Chuckie explained the remaining problem with the photograph and told Dex to sort it out somehow and make it less ridiculous. Chuckie told him he had one hour. He went home without hope.

When Slat, Jake and the others arrived, Chuckie stalled as best he could. He directed them into the narrow kitchen where they smoked, drank tea and lied about drugs and girls for an hour. Septic Ted, who was hung over, kept asking that they should go into the sitting room so that he could he down and fart some. Chuckie, who had often boasted of the superiority of his Pope snap, was finally giving up hope when there was a knock at the front door.

Dex stood on the step, his face hideously pale and sweaty. He held the framed photograph in his hands like a desperate peace offering.

`Put it on the fucking wall and get out of here,' hissed Chuckie.

Humbly, the cowed Dex sidled into the living room. Chuckie returned to the kitchen, marked conversational time for ninety-five seconds and then heard the retreating Dex close the front door. Young Lurgan suggested that everyone adjourned to the sitting room.

His friends filed out and filed into the front room. Chuckie entered that room at the tail of the procession and already he could hear murmured exclamations of surprise and edification:

God, who'd have thought it?

They're all at it.

All dipsos.

Fucking typical.

From across the room, Chuckie tried to press a modest smile on his features. He could make out the photograph between the heads of his friends and could see no difference. He could see the two figures in the pictured room, arms out to each other. He shuffled towards the picture promising cruel revenge, though conceding that he hadn't given llex enough time. Until, two feet from the famous photograph, he saw that llex had really fixed it, that he had rendered the absurd postures unremarkable, and Chuckie finally understood the genius of the man.

For there they stood, Pope and Chuckie, arms still outstretched towards one another, a whisky bottle in the Pope's hand, a glass in Chuckle's.

Six weeks later, Dex was dead.The kids shouted that he was now an ex-Dex and much amused themselves. The local matrons stood in armfolding pairs on doorsteps. That's where the drink always took you in the end, they would say, loud enough for any passing husbands to hear.

Chuckie, however, hid his photograph and silently disagreed.

In the lizard lounge of the Botanic Inn, Chuckie Lurgan told a joke. No one laughed too hard and Chuckie was conscious of failure. He began to think about going home. He was tired from his unaccustomed early waking and a day's fiscal planning in six different bars. He had drunk too much cheap beer, bought by too many people he didn't really know. As he looked around the thickly peopled gloom of the bar, he was groggily conscious of dissipating his entrepreneurial energies.

Resolute, he drained the last third of his last pint in massive rolling gulps and set the defeated glass on the bar. He bid an unnoticed farewell to a man from Pacific Avenue and struck a path through the crops of people. He urinated odorously in the toilets and then left the bar, felt return.