‘On the morning of my wedding day – do you remember that? – you said that when things inevitably went wrong with Ross, that my old bedroom would always be there for me’
SORCHA’S OLD MAN hates me like I hate Thomond Pork. The happiest day of his life – he’s on the record as saying – was the day his daughter storted divorce proceedings against me. So you can probably picture his face last weekend when I breezed into the old gaff on Newtownpork Avenue while he was trying to chair, like, a family conference?
They were all sat around the Escana dining table that I remember shelling out two Ks for back in the day – and that’s not me being bitter about my marriage. There was, like, Sorcha, her old man, her old dear and her sister – Hafnium or Arnica or whatever the fock she goes by.
“What the hell is he doing here?” the dude went. See, he’s never appreciated my whole routine.
I was like, “Saturday is one of my court-appointed unsupervised access days. I’m here to bring my daughter to Dundrum Town Centre – if that’s okay with you.”
That’s when I noticed that Sorcha and the sister had both been crying. Sorcha was actually still in tears? Her make-up was all over the shop, like she slapped it on pissed.
I was like, “What’s going on?”
Straight away, Sorcha went, “Mom and dad are selling the house.”
I presumed she was talking about the family gaff in Killiney – and I presumed right.
The old man was there, “I’d prefer not to talk about this in front of outside parties,” meaning me. That explained why he was so hostile when I let myself in, singing a Rihanna song at the top of my voice.
The sister was like, “I still don’t understand why you’re selling it.” I couldn’t be a 100 per cent sure her name isn’t Polonious or something like that.
“I told you,” he went, “I will not discuss it in front of him.”
But Sorcha’s old dear ended up saying it anyway. “We have some financial troubles – like a lot of others.”
Sorcha piped up then. “They borrowed money to buy bank shares.”
The sister was never the brightest crayon in the box, yet even she seemed to instantly know what this actually meant, because her jaw just dropped.
“They borrowed money,” Sorcha went, like she was still trying to get her own head around it. “Basically remortgaged the house. To buy bank shares. And guess which bank they bought shares in, everyone?”
No one answered and the question just hung there in the air for about 20 seconds. The old man reached across the table to touch Sorcha’s orm. She just pulled away. “Don’t touch me!” she just went. She loved that gaff, you see. “How could you have been so stupid?”
“Look,” he tried to go, “I was planning to retire early. Wanted to make it as comfortable as I could for your mother and I. Those shares went through the roof, you know.”
“I can’t believe you’ve known about this – how long, two-and-a-half years? And you’ve kept it to yourself. That’s the house I grew up in!”
“We thought we could trade our way out of it. We were sure the villa in Quinta do Lago would hold its value.”
“And you were wrong.”
“Yes, we were wrong. If you want to hear me say it, I’ll say it. But we can’t just bury our heads in the sand, Sorcha. We have to deal with it and that’s what we’re attempting to do.”
Sorcha just shook her head. “All of my childhood memories,” she went, “the happiest moments of my actual life, are wrapped up in that house . . . ”
“But you’ll always have those memories.”
“You told me I’d always have the house! You said it’d always be a refuge for me. On the morning of my wedding day – do you remember that? – you said that when things inevitably went wrong with Ross, that my old bedroom would always be there for me.”
Like I said – hates me.
The sister – who is still living at home – was only storting to get her head around what the whole thing was going to mean for her. “Oh my God,” she went, “have you even thought about where I’m going to live?”
“We’re looking at apartments,” the old dear went. “Another few years and that garden was going to be too much work for us anyway. A lot of people out there are downsizing.”
“So, what, I’m going to be living in, like, an apartment with you?”
The old man then ended up having a – literally – freak attack with her. “You’re 25 years of age!” he went. “Do you not think it’s time you stood on your own two feet?”
The sister was like, “Excuse me?” the same way Sorcha does when she’s riled.
“How many courses have we paid for you to do?”
“Edmund,” the old dear went, trying to calm him.
“And you haven’t worked a bloody day since you left school.”
“Er, I’ve done Smirnoff promotions?”
“And meanwhile,” he went, “it was your mother and I who paid for you to go gallivanting around Australia,” and he nodded at her top tens. She had them – as they say in these ports – augmented while she was in Adelaide.
He turned on Sorcha then. This is a father and daughter, bear in mind, who’ve never exchanged an angry word in their lives. She’s the apple of his actual eye? “And how much money did I put into that shop of yours?” he went.
She was like, “It was actually a boutique,” feeling the sudden need to defend herself.
“How many years was I writing cheques to cover your losses? I must have given you half a million euro to keep that place open – even during the good times. You ungrateful little . . . ”
The next thing I heard was the sound of, like, chair legs scraping off the floor. Sorcha stood up, stared at her old man and went, “I want you to leave – now!”
I honestly hadn’t seen her that upset since the Iraq war kicked off. Or certainly since the time she stepped into a puddle of oily water outside Wilde Green and destroyed a brand new pair of chestnut Uggs.
It was a definite first though. I’ve always been the least popular person in the room at Lalor family get-togethers. Now he knew how it suddenly felt.
There’s a word you often hear used to describe these times in which we’re living – and that word is, like, unpresidented.
rossocarrollkelly.ie, twitter.com/rossock