Ross O'Carroll-Kelly
"Resolutions?" I go. "No. I'm not that actually that religious?"
"I have. Do you want to know what my resolution is?" "What?" "You." Now, it's not often that I'm lost for words. I make a grab for the apricot and sausage meat stuffing but she knows it's, like, a diversionary tactic.
"I'm sorry," she goes, "you and Sorcha are fooling no one." "What do you mean?" "You're like kissing cousins, Ross. There's, like, zero sexual chemistry between you. And now you're supposedly back together? Well, I'm going to show it up for the sham that it is." "And how are you proposing to do that?" "I'm going to seduce you," she goes. "That's my plan for 2013." And with that, she just, like, flounces out of the kitchen and back into the dining room.
I grab a spoonful of the Seville orange and cranberry sauce and try to regain my composure. But before I can, Sorcha's old man has arrived into the kitchen with a face on him that would honestly horden concrete. No pleasantries. Nothing. He actually goes, "How does a six-year-old girl end up speaking to her mother like that?"
"I know," I go. "She's a bitch." He's like, "You think it's funny?" I'm there, "No, I'm actually agreeing with you. It's probably one of the few things we do agree on. She's a nightmare. But what can we do? I suppose we just have to suck it up."
He looks at me like I'm the problem? He goes, "When Sorcha was six years old, do you know what she told me she wanted to be when she grew up?" I'm there, "Go on, tell me." "Ireland's first female Attorney General. And do you know what went wrong?" "I suppose she did Orts in UCD - which is not much good to anyone." "It was nothing to do with her choice of subject!" he pretty much roars at me. "It was meeting you!" "Excuse me?" "That's what happened. And now look at her - 33 years old, unemployed, living with a failure for a husband and taking lip from your brat of a daughter."
I'm about to tell him what his own precious daughter said to me five seconds before he walked into the kitchen. Except I don't. I end up just bottling it. Instead, I go, "Do you want more sprouts?" And he goes, "Do you know what my New Year's resolution is going to be?" "Let me guess." "To break up this sham of a marriage."
That's exactly what I was going to guess.
