Your man Bobby is fair sound all the same. He tried to give me a job one time all right, but I’m not holding that against him. I think he thought he was doing me a favour. My auld fella brung me out to your man Bobby’s house and all, the night before I was meant to start work on some mad lunatic building site or something. I’d look fuckin pretty on a building site, wouldn’t I? State of me. But them FÁS cunts were making me seeing as I done a construction skills course and a Safe Pass yoke and the whole lot. I only done them to keep them happy at the hatch, I thought that was understood. I told your man Bobby, Jaysus sorry mate, I suffers awful from my back, and my head is all over the place, and he only laughed and said fair enough and thanked me and all for letting him know. Then he looked over at my auld fella’s shiteheap of a Corolla and said Christ lads, that front wheel is buckled to bits and I said I know bud, it’s like getting a spin in the Flintstones’ car, ha ha ha, and fuck me if he didn’t tell me hang on there a minute and went over to his big shed and rooted around and pulled out a fourteen-inch, four-stud wheel with a fair decent tyre on it and all and jacked my auld lad’s car up and put it on and my auld lad was a fucking embarrassment saying ah, you’re a decent skin, you’re a decent skin, I’ll pay you for it and all when I’m flush, and your man Bobby knew for a fact that was bullshit but he didn’t give a shit. Yerra, it was only lying around here, he said, I don’t even know where it came out of.
That’s the way he was. The auld fella’s car went sweet as a nut with that new wheel. Your man Bobby done that turn for fellas that was as good as strangers to him and looked for nothing back and nearly made it sound like it was us doing him a favour. I felt like some cunt after it. I wasn’t even sure why.
Hillary
YOU KNOW, I don’t think Réaltín realizes the trouble she causes half the time. Every single person in work knows about her going off with George at the anniversary party, but still it’s me that has to get the evil eye off all the old bitches all day every day. It’s grand for Réaltín, off on her so-called special career break. That was a new one for Georgie Pervy, the chickenshit bastard. Jesus, how are all men the exact same? George leches all over everyone, well, all the young ones anyway, and no one gives it a second thought, but Réaltín has to take it to the next level and actually shag him. But Réaltín doesn’t care; she just does anything she wants. I’m not saying I don’t love her, I really do, she’s gorgeous, and she’s brilliant craic and everything, but — I’d never say this to anyone — she’s going to have to cop herself on. She’s going to have to decide what she’s doing with her life and stop being such a disaster.
I think sometimes it’s an affectation, all the angst and introspection and random lovesickness, but then I see her sometimes, when she thinks no one’s looking, and she just looks so sad. But she does draw sadness on herself, in fairness. I mean she’s all of a sudden madly in love with this new builder fella. I think Réaltín actually thinks he’s going to leave his wife and marry her or something. As far as I can make out he’s not even made a ghost of a move on her, but she seems convinced he’s besotted with her or something and it’s only a matter of time before he drops his hammer and asks if she wants to see his other tool. She went off and bought about forty new outfits to wear for when he calls to her. And she’s meant to be broke. She makes up reasons to get him to call. He charges her as well — nothing near what the cowboys in the city charge — but she couldn’t have money to be throwing around on trying to seduce married builders. She got a hammer of her own (she probably stole it from his toolbox, in fairness) and banged a load of plaster off her bedroom wall and got him to fix it; she broke a cupboard door in her kitchen and let on Dylan did it; she broke tiles on the en-suite bathroom floor and got him to take them all up and do the whole thing again. And then while he’s there she acts like she’s a fucking little tramp, which she is, at times. She flits around him in skin-tight jeans or little minis, trying to make him make a move. And he hasn’t, nowhere near, and probably never will now, because, you won’t believe this: he’s only after killing his own father.
First of all, she rang me about two weeks ago, crying her head off because old hatchet-faced Bridget, that married Réaltín’s daddy (her and Réaltín are a lot more alike than Réaltín would want to hear; they’d both do anything to get their man), heard at some mad forty-five drive or bridge festival or somewhere that they were all talking about Réaltín in that crazy village where she insisted on buying that house, saying that her and this Bobby the Builder fella were having a proper affair, and he was moving in with her, and his wife was distraught and yadda, yadda, yadda. Réaltín’s poor daddy got really upset; like, he must have known about the flirting, because he’s always out there, making sure she doesn’t get raped and pillaged by the mad villagers, cutting grass and trying to avoid Bridget the Midget probably, but he would have only rolled his eyes up to heaven and taken Dylan for a walk and left her at it, but those kinds of rumours going around would really make him feel terrible. He’s lovely. He’s really good-looking, too. He’s one of those men who get even more handsome as they get older, like Colin Firth or George Clooney. I had a little bit of a flirt with him, and I mean a demure, innocent flirt, at Réaltín’s twenty-first and she went mental. She called me a bitch and cried and everything. What a fucking hypocrite! She nearly raped my father at my granny’s funeral. His mother, like.
Anyway, as if that wasn’t bad enough, that the whole crazy village thinks she’s a brazen, home-wrecking hussy, now your man is after killing his own father. And you know there’s a kind of inevitability about Réaltín being stuck smack bang in the middle of any drama in her vicinity. His own father, though, can you imagine it? He’s been in Réaltín’s house, at the top end of that spooky, empty, three-quarters built estate, and she’s been bending over in front of him, wagging her little arse in his face, and all that time there was a murderer hiding inside in him. He just stove in the poor man’s head, I heard. Sure, if he was capable of that he would have been capable of driving off with Réaltín and little gorgeous Dylan in his boot, tied up and suffocated to death. Oh Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Some mad-looking cop, like your man out of Killinaskully, came up with a detective from town, asking her a load of questions. The Bobby fella had been up in her house only that morning, imagine. They wanted to know what her relationship was with him, what they talked about when he was in her house, what his behaviour was like. They frightened the life out of poor little Dylan, who thought his mummy was being taken to jail, and they even suggested she leave him with her father and go to the garda station to talk about it. Fuckers. Luckily Réaltín was well aware of her rights, on account of George being the scumbags’ solicitor of choice. Or he was, until the legal aid rates went down and George stopped being so available.
Oh lads, it’s great craic now. Réaltín is acting like she’s some kind of a victim of a miscarriage of justice. She’s crying over your man non-stop, like. I had to remind her that she isn’t his wife, she isn’t his mistress, she isn’t his friend — your relationship to him, I told her, is as follows: You are a fucking crazy single mother living in a freaky ghost estate who breaks things in her house and makes him fix them. That is not a relationship on the basis of which you have a right to be weeping at the foot of the gallows. He’s not Braveheart, I told her, and you’re not Braveheart’s girlfriend. Sometimes you have to be firm with Réaltín. You have to tell her the truth. She gets lost in the mists of imaginary romance.