Surviving Michael Read Free Page B

to them a few times a week. With my brother living abroad, and never bothering his arse to come home for a visit, and with my sister’s continual doctor and school appointments for her litany of kids (perhaps she should have got herself a hobby), there’s no one else except me to annoy them on a consistent basis. I also like to go by in order to show them that just because Aoife isn’t around anymore, everything is normal, in that I’m still as dismally despondent as everyone else in the world.
    I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be cheering them up or vice versa, but we do our best. They provide me with tea and offer me safe, perfunctory questions, to which I obligingly reciprocate between sips of scalding tea and an occasional custard cream, with customary and soothing answers.
    It’s an innate flaw in all of us. We wish so much for our parents to be omnipotent, and for many years they are. And they, in turn, wish us so much to be irreproachable, and for many more years, so too are we. Then we both realise that we’ve been lied to, that one’s offspring is merely a normally dysfunctional human being like everyone else, and that one’s parents are our exact equivalent, only older and duller. Inevitably we get angry at each other, and spend years in obscure habitual impatience at best, and hysteria at worst. And then finally, acceptance, hopefully sooner rather than later, and a realisation that their infallibility is as fatuous as our own. Only then can we sit, and drink tea, and dunk custard creams, and nod, and lie to each other that we’re okay, and that everything is going to be okay, and that there will, after all, be a satisfactory conclusion to each of our own individual stories.
     
    There’s an eclectic bunch of fellow travellers on the Luas this evening. Must be the heat that has them all out. That’s why it’s always those hot countries like in the Middle East that seem to be constantly at war. The heat just pushes them over the edge. Charlie spent a little bit of time on a kibbutz in Israel about ten years ago. Somewhere in the desert. I don’t think I could stand this heat all the time. Anyway, when he came back he read the first three chapters of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ‘
The Siege
’ and ever since thinks himself an analytical expert on the Middle East. We just try to avoid the subject entirely in conversations now.
    He has an amazing apartment in the docklands that must have cost a fortune. I’ve been to a few of his plays so I know for definite he’s lying about his acting paying for that place. I met Richard, his agent, or whoever he says he is, a couple of times. He looks a lot like Stephen Fry or some sort of Oscar Wilde character; only better dressed and even more English looking, but without the wit or charm. Liam told me he saw Charlie in a porno once, but Liam’s seen so many pornos that if he told me he’d seen me in one, I’d believe him.
    Charlie texted me earlier to say that he was coming in. It’s been a while since we were all out together for a pint. ‘Will b der later Nicolas,’ he wrote. I hate when he calls me Nicolas, but I try not to say it as it only provokes him to use it more often. I don’t think I’ve been called Nicolas by anyone else since Father Jim poured holy water over my head and made me a fully-fledged member of the Catholic Church. I can’t think of any other international organisation with fewer entry requirements and vetting policies than the Vatican; any sort of a pulse and you’re in. Even Facebook demands a certain level of computer skills and an email address before signing you up. However, adding someone as a member before they acquire any say in the matter has to be handed to them as a stroke of genius.
    Naturally, I was baptised Nicolas because like all Nicolases I was born on Christmas Day. One day later, it would have been Stephen. One day earlier, I don’t know, maybe Rudolf. Such banal insipidity by my parents set the stage for my