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

Then Chuckie had returned home and spent a fortnight in the front bedroom, speaking to neither woman. At first, Peggy had been upset by her son's reaction. He had passed out on the street on his first night home. Caroline had intolerantly suggested jet-lag. Chuckie's subsequent gloom and silence made his message clear. It wasn't so much that he didn't like what she was doing. He hated every micro-second of what she was doing. She didn't want to change anything for Chuckie. She would give up this new joy for no one, although she tried to modify it a little. But the walls were so very thin and her delight was ungovernable.

After a comatose fortnight from Chuckie, Peggy and Caroline grew restive. They enlisted Max's American girl had been sympathetic from the she persuaded Chuckie to go to the Wigwam and meet his friends again.

That night Peggy and Caroline breathed free. It was blissful to be rid of Chuckle's morose, disapproving presence. The two women played Eddie Cochrane records and told each other that this was love. But after a couple of hours, Peggy was unnerved. She missed Chuckie. It was her big secret. It was what had filled her last thirty years. It was what had brought the little light to her tranquillized decade. Chuckle had been a miracle child, a presence she could never have expected. Peggy loved her son like she would never be able to love anything else. For thirty years Chuckie had ruled her thoughts like a government of love. She decided that it was time she told him.

She put on her coat and asked Caroline to come with her. Caroline had been slightly rebellious but they went to the Wigwam looking for Chuckie.

Peggy failed to see why he ran away when they got there.

The morning after the riot on the Falls Road, Chuckie woke late. His curtains were open and his head ached from having slept several hours in direct sunlight and from the nitrazepam he'd nicked from his mother's neglected bottle. He shook his groggy head, lurched out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom.

He fumbled with his pyjama trousers, dozily trying to find his member.

'Ah, Chuckie.'

He leapt softly into the air and spun round to confront the two hitherto unnoticed naked women sloshing around in the bath. Caroline and Peggy both smiled mutely at him.

`Fuck it,' said Chuckie.

He went downstairs and urinated in the kitchen sink.

Afterwards, he switched the kettle on. Uncertainly, he walked to the foot of the little staircase. His voice quivered slightly as he said, `Hey, I'm making some tea. Do you two want some?'

There was a hesitation. Then he heard some splashing and what he could only describe as whoops of delight rendered tinny and echoey by the tiny Eureka Street bathroom. A door opened and Peggy stood at the top of the staircase, wrapped in a flimsy towel. Caroline, obviously still naked, slipped her head around the banister and stared at him. His mother looked happy. The silence was over. It was how Chuckie had intended his mother to look. Son and mother stared at each other, silent and almost loving.

`Some time this week, Chuckie,' said Caroline. `Milk and two sugars.

Later that day Chuckie decided that this base-level, lowincome-group resolution over a cup of tea was typical and commendable in equal measure. No rapprochements, no negotiations or accords could be made in deep Eureka Street in any other way. He decided that this was one of the nice things about being working class.

Chuckie sat in the swanky office of the enormously expensive architect whom he had just hired to build him a new house and decided that he didn't care what his mother did with her private parts. He didn't approve but it was not in his remit. His mind was full and he didn't have space to think about Peggy and Caroline munching at each other every night.

`What about that?' asked the expensive, well-dressed, suntanned architect. He held a sketch in front of Lurgan's unseeing eyes. `What about that?' he repeated.

`That's fine,' murmured Chuckie absently. `That's just grand.'

Somehow, he had understood how much his mother loved him. He had never comprehended this before. It had come as something of a shock.

`And the price?' asked the architect.

Chuckie was silent.

The architect touched his Corbusier spectacles nervously and scribbled a figure at the bottom of the sketch. `That's the absolute minimum,' he suggested.

Chuckie dragged his weary gaze to the paper in front of him.

'Sure thing,' he said.'No problem.'

The architect gulped in surprise. He was disappointed that he had not scribbled a rather higher figure if this fat yob had found his original estimate so unexceptionable. He started scribbling again.

Chuckie had first known the tempestuous extent of his own mother love when Peggy had been exposed to all the ordnance down at Fountain Street. That was when he learnt that the frail and the harmable had to be loved. But it had only been when he'd parked his fat gut in the midst of last night's riot that he had guessed she might feel the same uncontrollable thing for him.

'Of course,' the architect elaborated, 'there might by contingency and add-on costs of all kinds. It might come to something He pushed the paper with his revised total at Chuckie.

'Uh-huh,' mumbled the fat man.

He had realized that he and his mother were both so small, so breakable, that each merited more love than they knew. He didn't want to spend too much time thinking about it, but he knew that Peggy and Caroline could do whatever they liked to each other and there was simply no room for him to mind.

'And if there are any planning problems then it will be likely to come to something close to..'

The architect thrust another scribbled number in front of Chuckle's face. Chuckle woke up. He grabbed the pad from the man. He scored out all the numbers, wrote a figure almost half of the man's first estimate and spoke clearly for the first time. 'If you can't do it for this, I'll get some other yuppie fucker to do it instead.'

Then Chuckie Lurgan walked out of the building, thoughtfully.

That night in Max's flat, he watched television absently, one hand gripping a can of beer, the other rhythmically stroking Max's astonishingly occupied belly. Aoirghe had gone home to Fermanagh after some big fight with Jake Jackson and they had the flat to themselves. They had been watching news programmes for hours. The ceasefires were still playing to big houses on Northern Irish television. The situation had developed in eccentric fashion. The IRA had said they had given up violence but were going to keep their guns (just in case?), the UVF had said they were sorry for killing all those people, the US State Department had said that the ceasefire was all its own work (a claim disputed by several messianic Irish politicians), the Irish and British governments were having Exploratory Talks about the possibility of having some other Exploratory Talks, and around two hundred teenagers had been beaten with baseball bats and car tools by a selection of extremely unofficial policemen in balaclavas and leather jackets.

Some prisoners had been released early. Chuckie had been worried about this. These were men who had killed people, sometimes quite a lot of people. It was how they expressed their aspirations. Two or three hundred assassins were being released back into the melting pot of his Belfast. These were men who did not easily deal with the frustrations of normal life. And with the confessed inadequacies of his driving skills, Chuckie didn't want to go cutting up any of these guys in traffic.

Shague Ghinthoss, the poet, had been awarded a knighthood and the just Us party's very first Hero of the Revolution Award. This unfortunate conjunction had caused him some unease until a fresh-faced young hack had asked him whether he was going to accept both awards as some kind of pan-ecumenical gesture, an attempt to build bridges between the divided traditions. Ghinthoss's eyes had gleamed suddenly. `Yes,' he had said. `Funny you should mention it.'