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

I waited on for Roche. I watched as the just Us guy was discharged with a small plaster on his forehead. Two cops led him gently out as he struggled and screamed cinematically for the news crews. I watched the Amnesty guy give another brief statement about police brutality and the rule of law. I thought about making him wait with me to see Roche but I decided, accurately, that he didn't want to know.

I felt so bad about what I'd said to Aoirghe that I didn't even have the heart to fall in love with any of the nurses and doctors. I just drank Casualty coffee and nipped outside every fifteen minutes for a smoke.

I was finally allowed to talk to Roche at about four o'clock that morning. When I went in to see him, I was more upset than I needed to be. Amongst the bruises, bandages and cuts, I could easily discern the wide-boy presence of Roche's conscious self.

'How are you feeling?' I asked lumpily.

'Fabulous,' said the kid.

'You don't look so bad now,' I said.

He glared at the quiver of my lips and the bulge of my firmly uncrying eyes. 'Don't VOL) start bawling,' he warned. 'All them good-looking nurses will think you're my boyfriend or something.!

I smiled. `There's a social worker coming to see you tomorrow. Did they tell you that?'

'Aye: He laughed indulgently.

`What's funny?' I asked.

`They take photographs of you to show foster parents. I was just thinking of the groovy foster mum I'd get if they take the photographs tomorrow' He gestured at the wreckage of his tiny body. `The way I look I'd arouse the maternal instincts of any late-twenties piece of ass you'd care to mention.'

`You're disgusting.'

`Hey, Jake.'

`What?'

`You coming to see me tomorrow?'

I got all emotional again. `Yeah, sure thing.'

'Well, get the doctors to give me more of these flying, boy.'

I laughed again.'I think I hate you,' I said fondly.

A nurse came in and asked me to leave. I said goodbye to Roche. I patted the only undamaged portion of him that I could find and he yelped in pain anyway.

`That was some routine with the girl there,' he said, as I was walking away.

'What?'

'Your big screaming match with your woman with the funny name.

'Aoirghe?'

`Aye.'

'I thought you were asleep,' I said guiltily.

`Nah, I was keeping an eye on you.You really gave it to her.'

'I was very uptight.'

`She seemed sorry, said Roche.

I looked closely at him. Roche could not have made his eyes twinkle if he'd tried.

`I don't think so; I replied. `She's not the sorry type.'

Roche settled down into his bed. `Yeah, maybe not. Nice tits, though.'

I left.

I had to walk back to the south of the city. I had left the Wreck parked near the Wigwam. I was tired and lugubrious after my big night. I walked slowly. My right hand hurt from when I had hit someone during the riot. I had run out of cigarettes a couple of hours before and I had no cash. I started humming blues riffs to myself. It sounded bad but appropriate.

I cut across the motorway and the industrial estate, heading in a straight line for the railway track near Poetry Street. I bummed a fag off a drunk lying near the Park Centre. I saved it and walked on.

There was a dampness in the air and a dampness in my spirits. The riot had depressed me and Roche had an infinite capacity for making me feel bad, but that did not explain the droop in my mood.

I'd overstepped the mark with Aoirghe Jenkins back there. She deserved a little and I'd given her more than a lot. Her politics were poisonous but she hadn't beaten up any twelveyear-olds. My heart sank as I remembered what I had said to her.

It was after five by the time I crossed the railway tracks at Adelaide Halt. I stopped on the footbridge. I was only a few hundred yards from Poetry Street but I sat down on the steps of the bridge facing the mountain. I fished in the pockets of my ruined suit for my borrowed cigarette. I found the fag and I found Sarah's letter as well. I smiled and decided to read it. It was getting pretty light and it seemed like the right time. I lit the cigarette and opened the letter.

I read Sarah's one-word letter and sat thinking and smoking for quite a long time. I looked up at the hill. It looked down at me. The fields from the mountains rolled out towards the city like a proffered tailor's cloth, checked and regular. Clouds of liquid grey issued and gathered over the city like witchbrew.

The one word in Sarah's letter was Forgive.

It was minutes before dawn. The birds were anxious. They suffered last-minute, curtain-up nerves. A yellow spider of crane metal picked itself out in the gloom, its noselight winking bright against the faded mountain. The slopes were a gradual beginning on which buildings dotted themselves with increasing density. Houses, farms, quarries, stations and schools. They tumbled into ensemble and merged urban and flat at the foot of the hill.

I thought about forgiving.

Yet the sky didn't lighten. The atmosphere thickened like gravy and all seemed stained. A man crossed the footbridge, a white plastic bag drooping from his motiveless hand. He shuffled onto the footpath parallel to the rails. His bobbing back faded into flatness until he seemed like a tiny shimmer on a painting: cuckold, worker, citizen.

I thought about Chuckie and Max. I thought about Peggy and Caroline. I thought about Donal and Pablo. I thought about Slat and Wincey. I thought about Luke Findlater and the Maoist waitress. I even thought about the boy and the girl from the supermarket.

Now the mountains were beginning to clear, show themselves, gaining form and colour. On each side of their broad sweep they were fringed with tassels, trees on one side and the regular cadence of a sloping quarryworks on the other. They looked like a cheap sofa. They looked like something Chuckie would buy. They were beautiful.

I thought about Aoirghe.

I went looking for my car. I had stuff to do.

When she had been a young woman, Chuckle's mother had been obsessed by the beauty of her breasts. She had loved their firmness, their fullness, their marvellous unlikelihood. Her breasts had been magical to her. For much of the time between sixteen and twenty, she had longed to show them to the world. To walk the streets of Belfast with her dress around her waist. She had longed to astonish and gratify one of the dull boys who dated her by opening her blouse without a word and letting him fill his mouth with their taut abundance.

Needless to say, Peggy Lurgan had astonished and gratified no one. Her breasts had languished in glorious privacy seen only by herself and occasionally by her friend, Caroline. By the time Chuckie's father had finally penetrated to the mysteries beneath her clothes, the magic had somehow gone.

But Peggy had always remembered the bliss of her boson. Indeed, as she grew older, her remembrance of the early to mid-sixties was indissolubly linked to the memory of her chestly beauty. The Kennedy Assassination. The vague beginnings of American and Northern Irish civil unrest. Such recollections were hazy adjuncts to the historical fact of her private prize.

Recently, the obsession had returned. It had been so long since she had taken her sleeping pills and tranquillizers that many such unbidden memories flooded her unfogged brain now but her breast-vanity was the chief revenant. She was glad that she had felt that way and was glad that she was beginning to feel that way again. They were still pretty good. For a fiftyyear-old woman, they were spectacular.

Then there had been that thing with Jake Jackson, Chuckie's friend. She had noticed that he had noticed. The fact of making an attractive young man obviously uncomfortable in that manner intoxicated Peggy. She felt that she was beginning anew.