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

Outside, it was briefly wet and the rain fell like fingers on his face. Chuckie looked for a bus stop.

Eureka Street, The darkness was soft and coloured. In Mr and Mrs Playfair mumbled in their tidy bed, a brand new Easi-sleep reduced to C99 in a bomb-damage clearance sale in a broken store at Sprucefield. Across the street in Johnny Murray, by the half-light of a shaded lamp, offered the beauty of his erect penis to a wardrobe mirror. In Edward Carson watched television and drank deep from a can of beer; he was pleased that his children (Billy, Barry and Rosie) were finally asleep and that his irritable wife was, at last, having her protracted bath; in his general pleasure, Edward laughed at something on the television that he didn't find funny. In No. 27, the rococo legend BELLEVUE painted on a wooden plaque by the door, Mr and Mrs Stevens were absent, holidaying in Bundoran; Julia, their daughter (gladly left behind), was showing both her breasts to Robert Cole, who previously had glimpsed only the upper portion of the left one during a memorable party in Chemical Street. In a silent man smoked his sixty-fifth cigarette of the day and thought of his policeman son, dead ten years.

In Chuckie Lurgan sat in a second-hand armchair of cheap construction. It was getting near eleven and his time felt wrong. Like himself, his time felt sluggish and inert. He was waiting for nothing yet felt himself goaded by a sensation of attendance. He rose from his armchair and went to the window. He looked out onto the street. His gaze swept over Nos. 7, 12, 22, 27 and 34 without comment. He was aware of some vague inflation, some massiveness in Eureka Street. It did not worry him. He imputed it to the inevident God and regained his seat.

He heard the muffled impacts of an argument between the Murtaghs next door. He winced at the sludgy sound of their proletarian controversy. Chuckie was ashamed of the way his fellow citizens spoke. The accents of his city appalled him. His own accent was as thick as any, but to Chuckie, other Belfast people sounded as though they had lighted matches or burning cigarettes in their mouths. He longed for elocutionary elegance.

But this irritation was momentary, for Chuckie was big with love. Shocks of lissom bliss puckered his flesh and he shuddered down the length of his cerebrospinal axis. He had seen her, all of ten hours previously, in the quartered sunlight from the four-paned window of the upstairs room in the Botanic Inn, the perfect girl in the perfect bar. He had fallen, he deemed, in love.

She was having lunch with friends as Chuckie was beginning the serious part of his day's drinking. Glancing over at her while trying to persuade Pete the Priest to buy him a drink, Chuckie had felt profoundly heterosexual. A quick look at the mirrored wall beyond the optics told him (mistakenly) that he was looking well. It wasn't that she was beautiful. She was pretty, certainly. It was more that she somehow reminded Chuckie of himself. He ambled over to her table.

He had given her some old chat. To his amazement she had been polite, even friendly. Chuckie was accustomed to the brutal end of brush-offs and her amiability encouraged him more than it should have. She was an American so her friendliness might just have been constitutional with her. But, try as he might, he couldn't prevent himself from flopping into the chair that her hard-faced girlfriend had vacated to head for the pisshouse.

He hadn't told her too many lies and hadn't looked exclusively at her breasts.That was good going. Relative honesty and looking at her face while she spoke was good behaviour by Chuckle's standards. Briefly, he had felt like a plump David Niven.

She was called Max and had been living in Belfast for a year. She told him that she worked in a nursery or kindergarten. Her friend, who had a funny name, told him later that Max owned the nursery in which she worked. Chuckle's bowels had melted sharply at the thought that she might be rich as well.

Too soon, Pete the Priest was busting his balls to move on to Lavery's, preparatory to the mid-afternoon crawl and then the usual Monday night saucehunt. But he had done big work with this girl. He had made some decisions. He had made some moves. She had magically given him her phone number.

He had left under protest with a new feeling creeping under his flesh. A big feeling for the friendly American girl that felt consonant with his imminent tycoon status. He and Pete drank the rest of the day, as usual, losing each other in a tight clinch in the Rotterdam between the beer and the spirits. He had somehow got back across town to the Bot in the vain hope she might still. be there, and in the more serious hope that her drinking habits would be much too moderate for that to be possible. She had not been there and Chuckie had just looked at her phone number on its paper scrap and scrounged a few beers off people who couldn't say no. As the night had wound down, he couldn't help feeling that it was all starting for him.

And, now that he was home, that excitement had not left him. Even the dissipation of his half-cut booze-buzz did not daunt him. The thought of her lent some curious reality, some warm flesh to his dreams of wealth. Somehow, she made it possible. Maybe it was because he knew she was high-grade, top-notch. Maybe it was because she made his dreams necessary.

He wasn't sure but all he could do was think of her. When she had smiled, her lips had stretched like they would split. Maybe it was the shape of her skull or the tone of her skin. All he knew was that he liked it, and later that evening, in all the other bars, it was with him when she wasn't.

Chuckle rose from his chair and decided to go to bed. He was ashamed to retire at such an unmanly had not gone to bed before midnight since he was twelve years old. He knew that he would be insomniac with passion but he did not care. The open-eyed idleness of his armchair was insupportable to him. He would see better and calmer in the dark.

He switched off the lights and climbed the narrow staircase. In the bathroom, he urinated copiously once more but did not bother to brush his teeth. He calculated that he drank a pint and a half of good Ulster tapwater every day and concluded that this represented enough fluoride for any man. His teeth were clean enough. Chuckle gilded no lilies.

He switched off the bathroom light and crossed the tiny hall to his bedroom door. Before entering his own room, he glanced through the open door of his mother's. His eyes adjusted quickly to its small gloom and he could see the massive form of his chubby mother, wrapped and warped like a slug in her bedding. She slept fast. Her mouth hung open and he detected a tiny glint of drool on her cheek. He wondered what she dreamt.

(Mrs Lurgan dreamt of the cold night of Tuesday z November 1964 when, at the age of twenty, in a polka-dot dress shorter than it should have been, she had ridden one hundred and seventy yards, scrabbling and weeping on the roof of the heavy black car in which the Beatles were being driven away from the ABC cinema and on up Fisher-wick Avenue until, solicitous for her, the car had stopped and she fell off onto the tarmac, which had been considerably harder than it looked.)

Chuckle undressed and crept into bed. He waited and shivered as the mattress warmed. He thought of his perfect, perfect girl and his penis unfurled itself slowly. He was surprised by his desire and wrapped his arms firmly around his chest. He decided not to touch himself for her. He felt strongly that he should at least call the girl before he took the liberty of masturbating about her. He started to paint diem pictures of her calling him at the office or sitting in the passenger seat of his phantom car, complete with steering wheel and sun-roof, as they idled lovingly through the car-wash.

Soon, disappointingly soon, he fell asleep.