And there’s more. As well as all of the above, it turns out your man Bobby the Murdering Builder knows Seanie well. Seanie is from that crazy village. She fucking knew that when she bought that house, but she never told me. It’s mad, the things Réaltín keeps secret. Like, she’d tell me all about the colour of her poo, but she won’t tell me something like that. And I’m serious about the poo. She went around the office one day in an unbelievable flap, convinced she had colon cancer or bowel cancer or something because her poo had turned green. It was the tannins from the bucket of red wine she’d glugged in my house the night before. But there was no telling her. Drama. Anything for drama.
She’s a weirdo at times. Imagine how her poor daddy feels now, having left her on her own in that house with a murderer! I wonder why he went and killed his father, anyway. A lot of those culchies are mad, though. They’re so repressed, like. They all spend their whole lives going to Mass and playing GAA and eating farm animals and cabbage and not saying how they’re feeling until it’s too late and then BANG! They kill someone. Or themselves. They’re just as mad as the city lunatics, except the city lunatics are honest about their scumbaggery. But anyway, Seanie the prickface is calling up now, roaring and shouting that she was riding his friend and crying like a baby and wanting to come in and staring down her top and licking his lips and sometimes, groping himself absent-mindedly. I only met him a few times, but I spotted that habit he had — it was disgusting — of talking to your tits and actually licking his lips at the same time. He’s okay-looking, I suppose, in a rough sort of way, and he has a great body (that’s how she met him, he was standing in a hole across the street from the office with no top on, just a skimpy luminous jacket thing over his jeans and a white helmet and Réaltín started acting like we were in a fucking Diet Coke ad or something), but he’s an animal, really. Like, he’s not civilized. He’s not even evolved.
It’s just like Réaltín to make everything about her, though. Someone gets murdered, and it’s all about Réaltín. How she feels, how she is being victimized, how she can’t go to the shop without people gawking at her with their big country mouths hanging open. That’s Réaltín. She always asks how I am by rote; she never actually wants to know. If I started saying something like God, I’m exhausted actually, Mam is still really sick and I had to go home and make Dad’s dinner, or God, I’m really pissed off actually, Darren never rang me since our row … her eyes would literally glaze over and she’d just say oh, aaaww, and tut-tut noncommittally a few times in mock sympathy, and get more and more impatient for the moment when she could start talking about herself. I mean, we’re best friends since our first day in the School of Commerce, but it really feels sometimes as though I’m just a receptacle for Réaltín’s thoughts and worries and complaints. I do love her, I really do, she has such a great heart, and she’d do anything for you, but she does think the whole universe revolves around her. Poor little Dylan, he’s an absolute dote, but I wonder if she even knows he’s there. Has she room enough in her head for a whole other human being, who’s dependent on her? Sometimes I doubt it.
I don’t know why I spend so much time talking about and thinking about Réaltín. She never bothers her arse to think about me, that’s for sure. Like, I had to invite myself out to see her house. Then she tried to pick a day when her father wouldn’t be there, in case I jumped on him or something, and then she rang to cancel because Mad Bobby the Murdering Builder was calling to suck sludge from her pipes or something, and I had the day booked off and everything, but she didn’t give a shit. She suits herself, always. Mam was really sick last year, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it, because her mother is dead, so that meant I couldn’t be upset about my mother just being sick. When Darren broke it off with me, I couldn’t get out of bed for about four days, but it was lousy of me to text her to tell George I wouldn’t be in. I mean I was barely capable of speech, and absolutely incapable of coherency. Then she called up after about three days and all she could say was, ah Hillary, come on, he was a fucking prick, he didn’t even have an arse, just a hole in his back! It was funny, and I did start to feel a bit better, but actual empathy is just impossible for Réaltín.
It was the exact same when we used to spend every single Saturday in town. Like, it was brilliant craic, and I loved being with her, but I used to have to spend literally hours sitting on chairs in dressing-room corridors, watching her parade up and down in outfit after outfit, reassuring her again and again that she didn’t have a big fat arse. But if I ever tried anything on she’d be sighing and exasperated-looking and checking her watch (that I saved up to buy her as a present when Dylan was born) and saying ya Hillary, lovely, come on, I’m dying for a coffee and a bloody fag.
And when all that shit blew up a few years ago, when the recession had barely even started to kick in, with George telling her and me that since we were the last in and we were young and single, we’d have to take a massive pay cut because of the falloff in conveyancing, I had to do all the arguing on our behalf. I was like, you know, Mister McSweeney, there’s something in the equality legislation about discrimination on the grounds of age and marital status, and, ah, ammm … And George, the sleazy fucking asshole, just sat there with his eyebrows arched in mock wonder and his hands shaped in a V, just under his narrow lips, and a little shitty smile, as much as to say go on, tell me the law, ha ha ha, and she just stood behind me, like she wasn’t really party to any of this rebelliousness, but was just grudgingly supporting her errant friend out of loyalty, and she ended up shagging the old bollocks and getting a special career break, supposedly without pay, but I don’t know. I still love her, though.
AREN’T YOU LUCKY to have a job? That’s the stick that’s being used to beat us all now. Like, you can’t say one word about anything now, or you have that shit thrown at you. George sacked the cleaner. Then he started looking at me! The bastard. I was like, NO WAY, there’s no way I’m hoovering here as well as at home in my parents’ house because Mam is still sick with her mystery illness that not one doctor can diagnose in the whole country. And what about the goddamn toilets? Those horrible old biddies all shit like fat cows. There’s no way in a million years I’m scrubbing their skidmarks. For anyone or anything. No job is worth it. So I had to kick and scream and cry until it was agreed that a rota would be drawn up among the secretaries for the cleaning, and everyone would have to do a day every three weeks. Then I had to scream that it was unfair; the apprentices and junior solicitors should have to as well. So George made the solicitors go on the cleaning rota to shut me up — he knows I know things about him, he’s just not sure how much I know — but the sneaks always have an excuse: stuck in court all day, had to meet a client for early dinner, blah blah blah. So I’m stuck doing it most of the time anyway. For forty euros a week less than I used to get. But aren’t I lucky to have a job? Ya, like, I’m really lucky.