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

All stories are love stories.

It was a late Friday night, six months ago, six months since Sarah had left. I was in a bar making talk with a waitress called Mary. She had short hair, a very round ass and the big eyes of a hapless child. I had known her three hours and I was getting the two-year blues already.

Chuckle Lurgan had sloped out of there half an hour previously after gracefully running out of cash and twenty minutes' worth of heavy hints from me.

In a bar full of waitresses, Mary had been one among many but I'd more than noticed her. She had started by not liking me. Maybe a lot of men might have suspected some reluctant I just thought she wanted to kill me and didn't bother to wonder why. She was hard. She bristled and showed me her sharp little spines. I'm sure she understood that this would make me fall in love with her. I'm sure she knew that.

Then she had begun the amiable waitress routine, teasing me as she served us our drinks. In the end she just sat across from me in Chuckle's vacant seat whenever she had a quiet moment. This constituted a relationship. There was something in the way she looked at me, sloe-eyed, speculative, without warmth. Then there was something in the tilt of her head as she refused my cigarettes and lit her own. I think I thought she liked me. I think I thought I should take her home.

And the special way she looked at me could have been nothing compared with the special way I felt myself look at her. I could feel it written all over my face.

It was me all over. The erotic high-style in the back bar of an Oirish pub. But for all my big talk, I was a blusher, a gulper. I couldn't say anything as straight as a stick. So while I hummed and while I hawed, Mary asked me to take her home.

Sitting late in the bar while they closed up was more disconcerting than you might readily suppose. I looked down the neck of my bottle, ignoring the giggles of Mary's colleagues. The big Protestant bouncer took off his tux, rolled up his sleeves and flashed his UVF tattoos. He tried giving me some old chat while he swept the floor but I was afraid of saying something too Catholic. I ignored him as best I could and tried to think of Sarah. I couldn't manage it.

I suppose it was the first full night of spring and the blunt warm wind lifted my mood as Mary and I left the bar. I ignored my wreck of a car and suggested that we walk.

In her smart dress and sheer tights, Mary looked like something in a crime novel. I wasn't accustomed to girls like that. Somehow it made me feel cheap but, as she smiled at me, I couldn't help but concede that she was pretty. She talked energetically about her job. With all my heart I tried to listen but drifted off, letting the wind make shapes with my hair. But I was glad she talked. I was glad of the noise.

`What do you do?' she asked as we passed Hope Street.

I smiled. `I do a lot of things. I'm a debt counsellor right now,' I lied, after a fashion.

`That's nice.'

That's the thing about when you he. If they don't believe you, you despise yourself, if they do believe you, you despise them.

There was a police checkpoint stopping cars at the mouth of the Lisburn Road. As we passed, a cop greeted Mary by name. I didn't like that. There was still enough of the working-class Catholic in me not to like that.

'He comes into the bar sometimes,' Mary said afterwards. The excuse in her voice meant she had guessed what I was thinking. I didn't like that either.

She was impressed by my street. It was leafy. It was green. She even liked the name. I lived on a street called Poetry Street. It wasn't always a good sign when people liked the name of my street. She was impressed by my flat. My flat makes me look like I have a lot of money. She looked at all Sarah's swish furniture and pictures, at all Sarah's faultless taste, and liked me more. She ran her fingers along the bookshelves and smiled at me like I was some intellectual.

I made a pot of coffee all by myself and that, too, impressed her.

`Nice place,' she said.

I didn't know if I liked or admired her but I wanted her. I was lonely that night, womanless. It wasn't the sex I craved. It was the joint cornflakes, the hand on my hip in the dark, somebody else's hair on my pillow. I needed the small presences of someone. I needed Sarah's little bits.

'Do you own or rent?' she asked.

I don't know what I did with that face of mine but hers fell at my reaction. There was a sudden extra width in the big eyes and a tremble of the lips. I hated it when people did that kind of stuff to out with some duff line and then looking like they were six years old when I frowned.

`I'm sorry,' she said. `That was a stupid thing to say.'

I didn't disagree but that was when I knew I couldn't sleep with her. I don't my small experience of women, I've found it hard to sleep with them at such tirnes.Times when you get the impression that there's more to them than an opportunity. Sleeping with girls was great, sleeping with people was a bit more complicated. Maybe it was a bad thing, maybe a sign of my immaturity, but I knew that there was some kind of tenderness in it as well.

I stood up as tactfully as I could manage. She stood too.There was nothing to say and little to do. I couldn't think of how to tell her of the big mistake that this had been. I moved towards her and she opened her shoulders and lifted her face uncertainly. It looked like she expected me to kiss her. And then I wanted to, very badly indeed.

`I must go,' she said, surprisingly.

Her cab took twenty minutes. We talked a little. I was oddly flattered that she didn't like me; that she had made her mistake and had corrected it so staunchly. I told her about Sarah and she told me about her policeman boyfriend whom she was going to call when she got home. I thought she was talking about the guy she had greeted when we left the bar but he was just a friend. Mary thought he would tell her boyfriend about seeing her with some guy and she wanted to pre-empt that strike.

`I'm sorry,' she said. `This was a bad idea.'

'Well' I mumbled.

`I don't do this.'

`Me neither.!

'First night of spring.' She smiled.

`Yeah.'

Then she left me to the rest of the coffee and myself. Much as Sarah had done.

There are those nights when you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one will ever kiss your lips again.

I wandered the rooms of my empty flat. I liked my flat. But sometimes, when home alone, I felt like I was the last man living and my two bedrooms were a humiliation of riches. Since Sarah left, I hadn't prospered. Life had been slow, life had been long. She'd been gone six months. She didn't want to live in Belfast any more. She was English. She didn't need it any more. There had been a lot of killings back then and she decided that she'd had enough. She wanted to go back to somewhere where politics meant fiscal arguments, health debates, local taxation, not bombs not maiming not murders and not fear.

So, she had gone back to London. Chuckle had comforted me with the observation that English girls were a waste of time. She didn't write. She didn't call. She didn't even fax. She'd been right to go but I was still waiting for her to come back. I'd waited for other things in my life. Waiting was nothing new to me. But waiting had never seemed like this. It looked as though I was going to have to wait for longer than I'd got. The clock was running in sprints and I wasn't even off the blocks. People had got it all wrong about time. Time wasn't money. Time was speed.

That night, I lay in my bed with my windows open, the helicopters chuckling comfortingly as they hovered over all those Catholics out west. Sarah had always hated that noise. I had always liked it. It had helped me sleep when I was a child. I hoped it would fail now. It was near four and I was working at half past six. I wasn't worried, though. I knew I had enough unhappy thoughts to keep me well awake so I dozed, feebly wishing that either Mary or Sarah could have somehow found it fit to lay her head next to mine.