IT'S A DADS LIFE: Join the queue in our house if you're unemployed and in need of loving care
OUR MOST recent “victim of recession” (VoR) friend came to visit. “I might stay a while longer,” says he. “Sure what else would I be doing with myself? Don’t have to sign on til Thursday.”
The dole office is a topic of conversation again. He’s talking about Apollo House on Tara Street, right across the road from the current offices of this fair paper, and I’m having nostalgic memories. Haggling for 50g pouches of Drum on the street after signing on, your weekly bump burning a hole in the pocket, driving you up to the Wed Wose Café on Exchequer Street for the Tuesday treat.
A mega-breakfast for £3. Maybe rack a couple of frames in the Hideout for afters. Before settling back in the flat with a mug of Nescafé, whatever red top was on special and vague thoughts of some day getting a job.
Sweet memories that, until recently, had seemed as far removed from modern Ireland as yellow and black buses and a bawdy visit up to Monto. Now they’re back, but without the serene backdrop of rent-allowance subsidised accommodation and long, lazy days with only your twentysomething self to entertain. There’s no romance in the dole office when you have kids on your case accustomed to the finest of fine living.
VoR friends, and they are increasing in numbers, seem to have unified behind a brave face. To a man I have heard them speak, those in my sphere anyway, of the positive opportunity their altered circumstances have afforded them.
They can’t halt some seepage of bitterness towards their former employers but they talk of this downturn affecting everybody and that can only reinvigorate a sense of community and personality in a society that had lost sight of those particular characteristics.
Their words sound upbeat but VoR friends wear the strain on their faces and you know they would snatch a hand off at the wrist if their previous circumstances were offered back to them. Still, VoR friends are right: change is afoot for all of us, and not all of it miserable.
If our most recent VoR friend’s visit had one good effect it was that it gave the kids their first taste of competing for a boy’s attention, success and loss. They were both smitten within minutes of his arrival but the elder scored first, seducing him with Nintendo Wii and talk of sea animals and various other interests.
However, by day two the younger had interceded and marked him as her own through sheer force of will. We all convened one afternoon in a cafe and our lattes turned out to have the sub-plot of a Polanski film. The younger physically toying with her new boy as her elder sister sobbed in the corner. “She won’t let me play with him,” she splutters, “She’s keeping him all to herself. I hate her!”
The younger is engaged with the VoR but is shooting the elder looks in a way that suggests she knows she has won, and that she’s getting as much joy from the victory as she is from time with her beau. These looks are being delivered in that way four year olds do when they think they’re being discreet, in other words everyone in the place knows what is afoot.
Except the VoR who, in his innocence, believes he has made two friends for life and is not the point at the head of a love triangle.
Which is probably why he is so shocked when the younger jilts him the next day. She’s had her fun and is moving on to new territories. The VoR, in an attempt to steady the ship, naively suggests that “they could still be friends?”
Pah! What does he know of women? She dismisses him, but rather than ignore his renewed advances she decides to torment him, physically and mentally.
The elder sees her chance and consoles him, using her seven-year-old maturity to highlight the point that if he had just stayed loyal to her he need never have endured the torments of the under-five psyche.
She threatens her hurt may be too strong for forgiveness to ever occur, but seeing her own pain mirrored in his she relents and fires up MarioKart.
The terms of their relationship now laid out, the three of them come to an easy alliance. VoR understands that the younger, while beautiful, is not ready for commitment and has much of the world yet to see. He comes to recognise the greater depths of the elder, but having hurt her with his dalliances, he may have forever scarred her innocence.
The elder sits on the VoR’s knee in a position of strength. The younger uses a Barbie to bash lego into a teddy bear’s head and ignores them.
abrophy@irishtimes.com