Free Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other by Robert Mclaim Wilson Page B

high to shut him up but he could miaow while he ate these days. I switched on the radio to drown the noise.
    `A part-time UDR soldier was killed last night in an explosion in the Beechmount area of West Belfast.Two other soldiers were injured. The incident happened just after ten o'clock. A bomb was thrown at the soldiers' Land-Rover. A security force spokesman said that ..
    I switched off the radio. In Belfast the news was an accompaniment like music but I didn't want to hear this stuff. Coffee- jar bomb. Yeah, that was another big craze. I got the idea that people were impressed by this new thing, this wheeze, this caper. Me, I wasn't impressed. It was easy to do that ugly stuff.

    Suddenly I longed to leave Belfast. Because of an inadvertently heard news story, the city felt like a necropolis. When the bad things happened, I always wanted to leave and let Belfast rot. That was what living in this place was all about. I got this feeling twice a week every week of the year. Like everyone here, I lived in Belfast from day to day. It was never firm. I always stayed but I never really wanted to.
    Depressed, I grabbed my coat and left my flat. In Mullin's I bought several cigarettes and a pint of pasteurized. I lit a fag and drank the milk while I drove down the Lisburn Road and on to Bradbury Place, still grubby and paper-strewn after its usual festive night. It was early and the people were soft and pretty, most still rumpled and creased from their recent sleep. Men in suits walked with habitual confidence, unaware that their hair stuck up endearingly; trim women didn't notice that the labels on their dresses were showing and their lipstick was slightly crooked. Belfast was only half awake and its citizens were mild and lovable as children.
    As I drove there under the pale sky, I weltered in sentiment. And it was briefly good to be doing what I was doing. Driving to my hard day's toil. In my big boots, my artisan's shirt and my rough trousers I felt dignified, I felt worthy, I felt like the nineteen thirties.
    Then I remembered what I did for a living.
    I was a repo man. I was a hard guy. I was a tough. I'd been doing it for nearly six months. I'd been doing it since Sarah had left. I'd just gone back to the way I'd mostly been. Before Sarah, I'd sometimes earned my living by fighting people, hitting people or just by looking like I might do any of those things. Bouncer, bodyguard, general frightener, all-purpose yob, I had had the full range. It wasn't that I was big. It wasn't that I was bad. It was just that I was so good at fighting.
    In the years after I went to college, I used these skills and butched my way round London, punching heads for cash-in fist. I went to America for a short stint, quickly discovering that they were all much too good at fighting, and then back to my imperfectly macho hometown. I seldom had to do any real harm. When sporadically called to punch a head or two, I punched a head or two. It seemed easy then. I was like an actress doing a nude scene. I told myself I didn't really mind.

    Then one night, doing the door at a dockers' bar, I'd had to mash some old guy who'd been goosing the barmaids. He'd turned bolshie when I'd chucked him out and had kept coming at me. No matter how many times I hit him, no matter how hard, he was so roofed that none of it hurt. In the end I'd laid him out cold. As he lay there on the filthy pavement, his face red and ragged, his gut exposed, I'd felt like chucking my stomach.
    And soon afterwards, Sarah had come and ironed me smooth, pressed the tough stuff right out of me. It was only then that I worked out why it was always so easy to hit people. It was because I had no imagination.
    The human route to sympathy or empathy is a clumsy one but it's all we've got. To understand the consequences of our actions we must exercise our imaginations. We decide that it's a bad idea to hit someone over the head with a bottle because we put ourselves in their position and