Ross O'Carroll-Kelly: The Teenage Dirtbag Years: 2 (Ross O'Carroll Kelly)

by Paul Howard

  I’m just there, ‘Who’s Esme?’ knowing full well who she is, roysh, and he goes, ‘Esme. Hello? Second year business in Portobello? Looks like Elize Dushku, or so you said.’ I tried to be with her two weeks ago in Annabel’s, totally crashed and burned, and we’re talking TOTALLY. I go, ‘I never said she looked like Elize Dushku,’ and Fionn’s like, ‘I know you tried to get in there, Ross. No hord feelings. Turns out she goes for goys with glasses. Thinks they’re a sign of intelligence.’ I’m there, ‘What an airhead … I never said she looks like Elize Dushku,’ and Fionn laughs and goes, ‘Anyone with any information on the whereabouts of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s dignity, please contact Gardaí in Dún Laoghaire.’

  He goes, ‘Christian ended up with this bird from Iceland.’ I’m like, ‘As in the country?’ and he goes, ‘No, as in the supermorket. Of course the focking country. What’s wrong with you today?’ I’m there, ‘Sorry, man. Distracted.’ He’s like, ‘Does this have anything to do with Sorcha? I saw her at Mass this morning. Wasn’t a happy camper. Asked her whether she’d been talking to you and she practically storted crying.’ I’m like, ‘Starring role in a period costume drama?’ and he goes, ‘Maybe. I wondered if she found out about you and Erika.’ I’m like, ‘Erika. Now you’re getting to it. Can’t stop thinking about her, Fionn. Fock, don’t know why I’m spilling my guts like this, sounds a bit gay, I know.’

  Fionn goes, ‘Take my advice, Ross. Do not go there.’ I’m like, ‘JP reckons she’s saving herself for Ben Affleck,’ and he goes, ‘It’s not that, Ross. She’s into horses.’ I’m there, ‘And your point is?’ and he’s like, ‘Take it from someone who’s pissing his way through first year psychology. I know what I’m talking about. No girl who’s into horses can ever truly love a goy.’ I’m like, ‘Is that because of the size of their–’ and he goes, ‘Ross, try to forget about your schlong for one minute, will you? Now think about all the girls we know who have horses. Alyson Berry. Amy Holden. Caoimhe Kelly.’ I’m there, ‘I thought you told me to stop thinking about my schlong,’ but he ignores me and goes, ‘Medb Long. Becky Cooper. Maggie Merriman. What have they all got in common?’ I’m like, ‘I’ve been with them all,’ and he goes, ‘Apart from that?’ I’m like, ‘Em, they’ve all got horses.’ He goes, ‘And they’re focking wenches. Stuck-up. Moody. Selfish. Cold. Stubborn. Whatever. The very qualities you associate with horses. I’ll make this simple for you. Horses aren’t nice animals. They’re not loyal. They’re not friendly. And they don’t need human love. They want apples and carrots and if you don’t bring them, they go into a sulk.’

  I’m like, ‘I’m missing Octopussy here, Fionn.’ He goes, ‘Girls like Erika, they’ve been trying their whole lives to relate to these animals, to get love from them, but they can’t. Erika knows that however much she feeds that animal, brushes him, cleans him, he’s never going to feel the same way about her as she does about him. The first love of her life was unrequited. And that’s focked her up. Goes for all girls whose daddys buy them horses when they’re kids.’

  I’m there, ‘I’ve got to go. Bell you later.’

  The next thing I hear when I get off the phone, roysh, is the old dear coming into the room, with a bottle of Sheridans in one hand and a big heart-shaped box of, like, Butler’s chocolates in the other. I’m like, ‘What do you want?’ and she goes, ‘Three o’clock, Ross. The Queen’s speech,’ and I’m there, ‘If you think you’re coming in here to watch that bullshit, you can think again.’ She goes, ‘It’s only ten minutes long,’ and I’m there, ‘Hello? There are six other televisions in this house. Watch one of them, you stupid wagon,’ and she focks off.

  I sit around for another, like, ten or fifteen minutes, just thinking about Erika, roysh, and about what Fionn said and whether I only really want her because she’s the only girl in the world I can’t have roysh now. I decide to give her a call. The best way to play it, I decide, is Kool and the Gang, so I phone her up, roysh, and I’m like, ‘Hey babe, how the hell are ya?’ She goes, ‘Who is this?’ sounding like she’s pretty pissed off about something, which is pretty much the way she sounds all of the time. I’m like, ‘It’s Ross. Just wondering how your Christmas is going.’

  She goes, ‘Look, I’m going to save you a lot of heartache and save myself a major headache by telling you, again, that I have no interest in you.’ I’m there, ‘Hey babe, why so hostile?’ and she goes, ‘I’m only stretching this conversation beyond one sentence because I want you to get this into your head once and for all.’ I’m there, ‘Well, you seemed pretty interested a few weeks ago. The stables, remember?’ She goes, ‘Get a life, will you. If you must know, I did that because I was pissed off with Sorcha.’

  I’m like, ‘Sorcha?’ and she’s there, ‘Sorcha. You know, as in your girlfriend? “All this subtext is making me tired”.’ I have to say, she does the voice really well. I’m like, ‘Look, why don’t I call over to your gaff?’ and she, like, breaks her shite laughing, roysh, and goes, ‘You really think that under this hord outer shell there’s a vulnerable, sensitive little girl who’s going to melt into your orms when she hears all your bullshit lines, don’t you?’

  Not trying to be big-headed or anything, but I go, ‘You did in the past,’ and she’s like, ‘We were at school then. I was sixteen. That was back in the days when you were someone,’ and I’m like, ‘Meaning?’ She goes, ‘You were on the senior rugby team, Ross. Being with you was, like, a status thing. Who are you now? You’re doing Sports Management, for fock’s sake. You’re not even playing for UCD.’

  Below the belt. I go, ‘Yeah, I’ve been mostly chilling this year. I mean, I SO have to get my finger out, I know that. The goy who has my place on the team, Matthew Path, he’s shite. He’s a focking Blackrock boy, for fock’s sake. I could easily take his place. If I do, would you be interested then?’

  She tells me I’m basically making a fool of myself, roysh, then says she has neither the energy nor the interest to continue the conversation further and she hangs up.

  I think about calling her back, roysh, but she’s left me a bit shell-shocked, to be honest. She’s roysh. My name used to mean something. Every girl wanted to say she’d been with Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Time has moved on, I guess.

  In the kitchen, the old dear has put on her new Charlotte focking Church album and the old man gives one of his big false laughs to some obviously unfunny thing that, like, Dermot has said. I go into the study and grab the tape of the senior cup final, fast-forward it to my winning try and spend the next, like, twenty minutes watching it and then rewinding it and watching it over and over again. Rewind and play. Rewind and play. Then my interview with Ryle Nugent. ‘That’s a good question, Ryle. I can’t take all the credit for this victory, though. Some of it has to go to the goys.’

  And in the background, roysh, you can see all these blue jumpers. Mounties. We’re talking hundreds of them. And I think I can even make out Erika – her hair was shorter then, still a dead-ringer for Denise Richards though – and she’s hanging on my every word. I think I might have even been with her that night …

  I put the lid back on the Quality Street, knock back the last of the cans and make my New Year’s resolutions. Get fit. Get on the UCD team. Get Erika.

  Then I go into the kitchen and tell the old man to keep the fake focking laughter down.

  I call out to Sorcha’s gaff on Stephen’s Day, roysh, and it’s the usual crack from her old dear, who SO wants me to get back with her daughter it’s not funny. She’s all over me, we’re talking TOTALLY here. It’s all hugs and kisses and I’m just there going, Guess who got a bottle of Chanel No 5 for Christmas? The gaff is full, of course. The Lalors always have, like, half the focking world around to eat the Christmas leftovers, and when the old dear’s finished air-kissing and squeezing the shit out of me, she leads me around the house, introducing me to aunts and uncles and neighbours and clients of the old man and a few ladies-who-lunch types who, I presume, spend a lot of money in that boutique she h
as in the Merrion Shopping Centre. Sometimes she goes, ‘This is Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Sorcha’s friend. He was on the Castlerock team that won the cup,’ and other times it’s, ‘This is Ross, Charles O’Carroll-Kelly’s son, very good friends with Sorcha.’ Then she offers me, in the following order: a slice of banoffi, a glass of mulled wine, a turkey-and-stuffing toasted sandwich, a piece of plum-pudding, a can of lager, some Baileys and a home-made mince pie, and I say no to all of them and then there’s pretty much nothing else to say, roysh, and we’re both standing there like a couple of spare pricks, so she just tells me that Sorcha’s in her room and to go on up to her.

  She’s lying on her bed, roysh, wearing her black Armani jeans and a white airtex with the collar up, and she’s, like, flicking through the channels on the telly. She doesn’t even acknowledge me and I just sort of, like, hang around in the doorway and I ask her whether she’s pissed off with me about something and she goes, ‘Why would I give a shit what you do with your life?’

  Her room has actually been decorated, pretty recently I’d say, and I basically tell her that it’s changed a good bit and she looks at me for the first time and goes, ‘It has changed, Ross. The last time you were in here, you were with my little sister,’ and I turn around and stort, like, heading downstairs, but she calls me back and says she’s sorry and then she, like, gives me a hug and wishes me a Merry Christmas. She goes, ‘I don’t know why I insist on reliving, in excruciating detail, one of the most painful experiences of our lives. Maybe it’s my perversely self-deprecating way of moving on. Or maybe I’m still trying to punish you.’

  I sit down on the bed and she lies down with her head on my lap and asks me to, like, pet her face, which is something I used to always do when we were, like, going out together, and I can’t work out whether she actually wants to be with me, or whetherit’s just, like, a prick-tease, but I do it anyway.

  I ask her why she’s not downstairs at the porty and she goes, ‘Because I’m tired of my mother’s projection fantasies,’ and I don’t have a focking clue what she’s talking about, so I just go, ‘Bummer.’

  She says that the millennium turned out to be one complete bummer and that Cillian was the only decent thing that happened to her in the year 2000, and I’m like, ‘Is this the twenty-eight-year-old?’ and she nods and goes, ‘I should say that Cillian and you were the only decent things that happened this year,’ and all of a sudden, roysh, I’m pretty certain that I’m going to end up, like, getting my bit here and I stop petting her face and go, ‘What do you mean, I was one of the decent things that happened?’ She goes, ‘Well, not so much you, Ross, as us. After years of gratuitous self-examination, we’ve finally got past that whole relationship checkmate thing.’

  Your guess is as good as mine, but I get the impression, roysh, she’s trying to get across the point that she’s not actually interested in me anymore, which is total bullshit because I notice she has The Very Best of Ennio Morricone, the CD I bought her for her birthday last year, on her bedside locker – I say bought, I actually robbed it off the old man – and I’m pretty sure that before I arrived she was listening to ‘Gabriel’s Homo’, or whatever it’s called, wondering whether I was going to call up.

  But she’s obviously playing hord-to-get, roysh, so I sort of, like, change tack and go, ‘I was talking to Erika earlier,’ but instead of getting jealous she goes, ‘She’s making a fool out of you, Ross,’ and I’m like, ‘Spare me.’ She goes, ‘Nothing that girl does bothers me anymore. You know what she said in the bor the other night? She said that wheelie bins are working class. I’d hate to see you get hurt, Ross. She’s an orsehole. I should know, she’s one of my best friends.’

  We lie there on her bed for a couple of hours. We watch ‘The Royle Family’. Eventually I tell her that I’ve got to go and she tells me she’s SO happy I called up, that Christmas wouldn’t be the same without seeing me and that she’s glad we’re over ‘that whole relationship trauma’. I tell her I’m going back playing rugby and she tells me it’s not going to change the way she feels about us. She goes, ‘Me and Cillian are too strong.’

  She takes off her scrunchy, slips it onto her wrist, shakes her hair free and then smoothes it back into a low ponytail again, puts it back in the scrunchy and then pulls five or six, like, strands of hair loose.

  As I’m leaving, roysh, she asks me how Christian is. I go, ‘Not good. You heard he was done for drunk-and-disorderly last weekend?’ Sorcha’s like, ‘I can’t believe his parents are splitting up. Trevor and Andrea? OH! MY! GOD! It’s, like, SUCH a shock.’

  I go, ‘I know,’ but I can’t look at her when I say it. She gives me a hug and says that Christian’s SO lucky to have a best friend like me and she knows that I’ll be there for him. I go, ‘I don’t know what to say to the goy,’ and she goes, ‘Just be yourself and be there for him.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Ross, like, SO loves himself it’s not funny.’

  Discuss.

  Hazel is this bird I met in the M1, roysh, a Montessori teacher and a total lasher, we’re talking SO like Rachael Leigh Cook it’s just not funny. There I was, roysh, sitting up at the bor with Christian and Fionn, just talking about, like, rugby and shit, when her and a couple of her friends – recognised one of them from The Palace, Orna I think her name is, second year Law in Portobello – they come up and they’re, like, ordering drinks, roysh, and this Orna one picks up Fionn’s mobile phone and, the usual, storts, like, scrolling down through his phonebook, going, ‘Keavo? OH! MY! GOD! is that Alan Keaveney?’

  I turn around to Hazel, who’s paying for, like, two vodka and Red Bulls and a Smirnoff Ice, roysh, and stort chatting away to her, working the old charm on her. I ask her what Montessori actually is, roysh, but of course I’m too busy thinking of my next killer line to listen properly to what she’s saying, though from what I can make out it’s pretty much the same as, like, a normal nursery school, except that instead of giving the kids, like, paint and jigsaws and shit, they teach them focking Japanese and how to play the violin.

  Of course, I’m there cracking on to be really interested. End of the night, roysh, Christian’s focked off home, because his old man moved out of the house today and he wants to make sure his old dear is alroysh, I mean, I offered to go with him, but he said he wanted to be on his own, and it’s just me, Fionn, Orna and Hazel left. Orna is completely off her tits, roysh, and she keeps telling us she has to have an essay in for Tort tomorrow and she hasn’t done a tap on it and that the Law course in LSB is SO much horder than it is in UCD, but when you tell people that – OH! MY! GOD! – no one believes you.

  Eventually, roysh, Fionn leans over to me and goes, ‘I’m going to drop the old Chief Justice here home,’ and I high-five the dude and he helps her off the stool and out the door. Hazel, roysh, she shows no sign of following, so obviously I’m there thinking, I’m well in here. I go, ‘So, where are you living?’ still playing it Kool and the Gang, and she goes, ‘Sandycove,’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve been known to find myself in that particular vicinity. Can I drive you home? We’re talking Golf GTI. Black. With alloys,’ and she goes, ‘Oh my God! Cool.’

  So there we are in the cor, roysh, heading out towards her gaff, and I decide it’s time to put on the old Pretty Woman tape, but I can’t remember whether I’ve, like, rewound the tape to the stort of ‘Fallen’. If I haven’t, roysh, she’s going to get an earful of Roy Orbison giving it, ‘Whooooah-hoh, Pretty Woman,’ which is actually a pretty good song, but a bit of a passion-killer.

  So I’m basically taking a bit of a chance hitting the play button, roysh, but it’s cool because the next thing I hear is, like, Lauren Wood’s voice and Hazel goes, ‘OH! MY! GOD! I don’t believe it,’ and I’m like, ‘What?’ cracking on to be all surprised. She goes, ‘Oh my God, this has to be fate. This is, like, my favourite song of all time,’ and I’m like, ‘Really? Who is it, Samantha Mumba?’ She goes, ‘It’s from Pretty Woman. Is this a tape?’ and I’m there giving it, �
��No, it’s just the radio,’ and she goes, ‘OH! MY! GOD! then this has to be fate. Every time I hear this song I’m going to think of you now.’

  If only she knew how many locks I’ve picked with this tape.

  So we pull up outside her gaff, roysh, massive pad, her old man must be minted, and she goes, ‘Oh my God, I said I wouldn’t let this happen,’ and I’m like, ‘Let what happen?’ and she goes, ‘I promised myself that I wouldn’t fall so easily again. Especially after Cian.’ I’m like, ‘Who’s Cian,’ as if I give a fock. I’m just getting ready to bail in here. She goes, ‘You don’t want to know,’ and she’s bang-on there.

  She looks away and she goes, ‘I got really hurt,’ and of course I’m like, ‘Hey, just go with the flow,’ and I move in for the kill, roysh, but as I go to throw the lips on her she goes, ‘What are you doing?’ and I’m like, ‘Hey, a little bit of what you fancy is good for you.’ I hate myself for using Oisinn’s chat-up lines, but it’s fock-all use anyway because she pushes me away, just as Roy Orbison comes on as it happens. I’m wondering has she fallen to the communists, but she says it’s just that she wants to, like, take things a bit more slowly. It looks very much to me as though this could be a two-day job, which, under normal circumstances, roysh, would be enough to put me off completely, but she asks me what I’m doing tomorrow night and, of course, now I’ve got to face the old dilemma: do I cut my losses now and just tell her I’m emigrating to Outer Mongolia, or do I go for a second crack at it?