‘The point I’m trying to make is that, yeah, your old pair focked up in a major way – a lot of people did’
SORCHA TOLD ME she needed 400 snots for a new clutch. So I shelled out. We said we were going to handle this divorce in, like, an amicable way and she needs that cor of hers to ferry Honor around. Anyway, now she’s standing in the living room in Newtownpork Avenue showing me the clutch she bought and she’s asking me if I think it goes with her black Yves Saint Laurent sequined dress or whether she should have got something possibly more muted? Men and women – we will never, ever understand each other. That’s just a fact of life.
I bite my tongue, though, because she’s down at the moment. She has been all week. “Have you spoken to your old man,” I go, “you know – since?”
She’s like, “No,” and she says it in, like, a super-defensive way. “Oh my god, you think I’m being hord on him.”
I’m like, “Possibly.”
“Ross, you heard the way he spoke to me. He’s never raised his voice to me in my actual life.”
“Which shows you how much pressure he must be under. Look, I know he’s never been my number-one fan. He blames me for ruining your life. Which is fair enough. But he also chooses to ignore some of my more amazing, amazing qualities. So I’m the last one in the world who should be defending him.”
“And yet you are?”
“All I’m saying is you’re the apple of his actual eye, Sorcha. I just think, all the shit he’s already going through – him and your old dear. Losing their life savings. Having to sell their gaff. And now you’re giving them the big silent treatment – how long is it now, a week?”
“He told me it wasn’t 2002 any more. He said we were all going to have to learn to stand on our own two feet.”
“No one’s saying that’s right.”
“He actually shouted at me.”
“No one’s saying that’s right either. But what are you most upset about – that or the fact that he’s having to sell the home you grew up in?”
She stares into the distance for a good 60 seconds. In fact, I wonder is she going to even answer. Then she goes, “I guess I’m just coming to the realisation later than a lot of girls, that my dad isn’t Superman.”
I laugh. “Superman had his enemies. He didn’t have every focker in the street telling him to stick his money in bank shares. Or telling him to buy investment properties in – where was it again?”
“Quinta do Lago.”
“Quinta do Lago! It’s hord to even say it now without smiling. The point I’m trying to make is that, yeah, your old pair focked up. They focked up in a major way. A lot of people did.”
She reacts to that as if she’s been stung. “Oh, no you don’t, Ross. Don’t you dare give me that, ‘We all portied’ line. Yeah, no, we’re all paying the price – but some of us actually didn’t lose the run of ourselves?” I’m remembering the time she paid some Tibetan dude in Crumlin 900 snots to have her spirit recentred while his wife burned eucalyptus candles and played Bridge Over Troubled Water on the pan pipes.
Again, I say nothing.
“Look, Sorcha,” I go, “you know as well as anyone that there’s very little going on between my ears. My head is like a focking snow globe. Who am I to be dishing out advice? But Fr Fehily used to say this thing – perfection is something we’re forever seeking in everyone else, yet never in ourselves.”
She looks away. “That is an amazing quote.”
“See, I wrote a lot of them down. The only writing I ever did do in school. Can I tell you something else, Sorcha?”
“What?”
“I was always jealous of your relationship with your parents. I mean, I honestly would have liked a bit of what you always had. And I’m telling you this for nothing – you do not want to end up the way I am with my old pair.”
“You’re getting on well with Chorles these days.”
“It’s better than it was – there’s no denying that. It’s still not great, though.”
“And Fionnuala really loves you, too, Ross.”
“That woman’s not capable of love. All she’s interested in is collagen, Bombay gin and doing evil. But seriously, Sorcha, give your old man a break.”
I obviously manage to get through to her, roysh, because she suddenly gets up and says she’s going to ring him – maybe ask him over the house so she can, like, apologise properly. She goes out to the kitchen.
I stare at the TV for a little while, then she comes back and says he’s coming over. She’s as giddy as a kid on Skittles.
“Oh my god, I’ve literally nothing in. Ross, where are you going to go when he comes?” See, he hates even being in the same room as me.
I’m like, “Sorcha, calm down. I’ll hit the bricks the second the dude gets here.” She throws her orms around me and tells me I’m the most incredible person she’s ever met in her life and that it – oh my god – hurts her that some people can’t see the actual good in me? An hour later, there’s, like, a ring on the doorbell. I go out and answer it. Sorcha’s old man looks at me like I’m a tampon he’s just found floating in his hot tub.
“Come in,” is all I go.
He’s there, “I don’t need an invitation from you to enter my daughter’s home,” and then – because he never can resist it – he goes, “You know, when I look at you, I think of all the things that Sorcha could have been in life had she not suffered the misfortune of meeting you. Her mother and I rue the day it happened.” There’s a great smell coming from the kitchen. Sorcha’s obviously baking.
“She’s in there,” I go, nodding in the general postcode of the kitchen.
He looks me up and down and goes, “Huh.”
I get in my cor and drive home.
rossocarrollkelly.ie, twitter.com/rossock