‘She must be one of the most beautiful women in Ireland and, not surprisingly, my stamps are all over her passport’
MEADHBH MENTONE IS a bird you may or may not have heard me talk about before. She’s one of the most stunning-looking women I’ve ever seen. There’s a definite look of, like, Alessandra Ambrosio off her. But she’s also very, very, very thick – and I don’t mean, like me, in an adorable kind of way?
Meadhbh was the girl who failed her driving test for – get this – sitting at a stop sign for 10 minutes waiting for it to change to go. No, that wasn’t an urban myth. That was Meadhbh Mentone. She told me the story herself.
“The focker failed me for that,” she went. “Oh my God, he totally had it in for me? I can’t help it if the focking sign is faulty. It’s, like, hello?”
That’d be fairly typical of Meadhbh. As the saying goes, there’s salt in the shaker, but no holes in the lid. She’s still out there, by the way, driving around on a provisional licence, in her old dear’s Citroën Saxo – silver, just in case you see her out.
But, like I said, she must be one of the most beautiful women in Ireland and, not surprisingly, my stamps are all over her passport. In fact, we have this kind of, like, unwritten rule that if we bump into each other on a night out and we both happen to be between relationships – a permanent condition, in my case – we always end up together. And this is what happened last Saturday night.
I was in the usual Kielys of Donnybrook, watching England make a total mess of us, while various people slapped me on the back and told me what I could have brought to the Ireland team if I hadn’t pissed my talent up against the wall. It’s lovely that people still remember.
Anyway, it was in the depressing aftermath of Ireland’s defeat that JP nudged me and went, “Here comes your comforter,” and it turned out to be, like, Meadhbh, looking as spectacular as ever. Half an hour later we were in the back of a taxi on the way back to my aportment, with a bottle of Neuf de Plonk from O’Brien’s and a night of dastardly deeds ahead.
“I don’t know why they just don’t throw the ball forwards,” she went at some point of the journey to Ticknock. “Think about it, Ross. If they threw the ball forwards instead of – oh my God – backwards all the time, they’d actually get down the pitch quicker.”
The trick with Meadhbh is to just play along. “Oh, yeah,” I went. “I must say that to Declan Kidney the next time I run into him.”
“I’m actually surprised no-one has ever thought of it,” she carried on going, the stunning-looking idiot.
I put my finger on her lips. “Hey,” I went, “let’s save our strength for the bedroom,” and she sort of, like, smiled at me stupidly and I caught the taxi driver looking at me in the rear-view mirror, obviously thinking, “Whoa, this dude is a definite player.”
So we arrived at Rosa Parks – “Where Gracious Living is a Civil Right” – and I paid the driver, tipping him like it was still 2006.
In my mind, I was already throwing off my clothes and leaving them in a trail to the bedroom.
And I suspected Meadhbh felt the exact same way, given the speed with which she crossed the cobbled courtyord in her six-inch Kurt Geiger heels.
Nothing could prepared me for the shock that awaited me when we reached my building, though. I knew something was, like, amiss from the moment I saw a crowd of 30 or 40 people standing around outside in their pyjamas – not just the crowd that the Deportment of Social Welfare have plonked in on top of us, but the ones who, like me, paid seven hundred thousand snots to actually live here.
As I got closer, I noticed that the door had, like, yellow-and-black scene-of-accident tape across it and a dude was standing in front of it in, like, a hord hat, telling everyone that they had to step back – please! – at least 100 yords from the building. You know the way sometimes when you can feel an evening taking a turn for the worse?
“Do you mind me asking what the fock?” I went.
The dude looked at me and he went, “The building’s been evacuated.”
I was there, “Evacuated?”
“It’s been declared unsafe for human habitation. That’s all I’m allowed to tell you.”
It was actually a bird from two floors below me – nothing much to look at – who filled me in. “Something to do with foundations,” she went. “They’re saying they were compromised when they carried out those controlled explosions on the unfinished blocks last year. It was all over the news earlier on. They might end up having to demolish the entire building.”
I was like, “You have got to be shitting me.”
That was when Meadhbh suddenly piped up. “Okay, am I being incredibly stupid here or is this thing just not being explained very well?”
No-one said anything, although the dude in the hord hat did look at me as if to say, “Jesus, she’s an iron or two short of the full golf bag, isn’t she?”
I was like, “Where are we supposed to go?”
The dude just shrugged. “All I know is that I can’t let you back into this building. It could collapse at any time.”
It was at that exact moment that my phone suddenly rang and Sorcha was on the other end, her voice all full of concern. “Ross,” she went, “I just heard the news. Oh my God!”
I was like, “You can say that again. It’s a focking disgrace. I’m just glad that actual Rosa Parks didn’t live long enough to see this day. They’re saying they’re probably going to have to demolish the entire building.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“Haven’t thought about it yet.”
“Why don’t you come and stay with us?”
“Really?”
That was when Meadhbh stuck her oar in. “Ross,” she went, “I’m going to try and get some answers here.”
I actually laughed. “Yeah,” I went, “you go and do that,” and I watched her clip-clop over to a group of dudes in fluorescent yellow bibs.
“Who’s that?” Sorcha went. I couldn’t tell whether she meant it in, like, a jealous way or not?
“It’s, er, Meadhbh,” I went.
She was like, “Driving-test Meadhbh?”
I thought about lying, but in the end I didn’t bother. “Driving-test Meadhbh, yeah. Did you mean that, babes – I can definitely move in?”
“It’s only temporary, Ross. Until you get yourself sorted out.”
“Sorcha, I can’t tell you how much I seriously appreciate this. So when can I actually move in?”
“Well, come now, if you want.” And Sorcha, who knows me better than anyone else in the entire world, pretty much read my mind in the five seconds of silence that followed. She was like, “No, Ross, you can’t bring Meadhbh with you.”