He opens the door. He’s surprised to see me standing there — although shocked is possibly more the word?
He’s like, “Are we not meeting in Starbucks?”, which is our usual arrangement — although I think what he’s really asking is, “How the fock did you find out where I live?”
“Change of plan,” I go. “The Irish Times have asked me to do something a little bit different this week?”
He’s like, “Different?”
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Paul Howard is not from a rugby background, but after 25 years of working together, I can understand most things he says.
“They want me to interview you,” I go.
He’s like, “What?”, clearly horrified by the idea. “Why?”
“I think they ripped the idea off The Gordian. They had Alan Partridge interviewing Steve Coogan and they wanted me to do something similar.”
“But Alan Partridge is a fictional character. And you’re–”
“What?”
“Well, real.”
“I’m 100 per cent real — and I’m still standing on the focking doorstep, by the way.”
Grudgingly, he opens a gap in the door to let me in – although that’s not strictly true? I actually put my shoulder to the thing and his frail body is no match for the core strength I built up through years of playing rugby and a training regimen centred around 200 sit-ups and press-ups per day.
“How did you find out where I live?”, he goes, wincing in pain.
I’m there, “Let’s just say I chormed it out of one of the girls in the office,” at the same time flexing my pecs, just like I did in the accounts deportment.
It’s not long before I discover why he prefers to keep his own personal life such a mystery. Like him, his gaff — in Wicklow of all places — is nothing much to look at. There is no evidence at all of the money he has made trading off my name and my success for, like, a quarter of a century.
Physically, I may have already mentioned, he is a very unimpressive man. With his glasses and puny body, he looks like the kind of substitute teacher we used to try to push into having a nervous breakdown at Castlerock College, and he dresses like a priest on his day off, shopping for gorden furniture in Woodies.
There’s one question that I’ve always wanted to ask him — except that our conversations are usually 100 per cent about me. I don’t read my own books, but I’ve often suspected that he — I want to say — misrepresents me when he writes about my adventures? In other words, he doesn’t always write what I want him to write? Friends of mine have told me that they’ve detected a definite sense of tutting disapproval in the way he tells my story. I’m trying to think of a way to ask him about this. In the end, I just go, “So what’s your problem with me, Dude?”
He’s like, “My problem?”
“Yeah, no, for instance,” I go, remembering one of the interviews we did in the course of writing Once Upon a Time in Donnybrook, my latest and (apparently) best book yet, “I told you a hilarious story about taking my orse out in the Thomond Bor in Cork on the day that Munster lost a Heineken Cup semi-final to Toulon. You didn’t laugh once. And then when you put it in the book — according to my old man, who’s actually read the thing — you blew it out of all proportion.”
He’s there, “How did I blow it out of all proportion? You were arrested for indecent exposure.”
“Yeah, it was a rugby-related mooning incident,” I go. “In other words, funny. As my old man said, if the gords were to arrest every rugby fan who’s ever taken his orse out in public, then our legal and banking systems would cease to function.”
“But when you were arrested, you gave the gardaí your friend Fionn’s name. And without wanting to spoil the plot of the book, it came back to bite you years later, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, no, the point I’m trying to make is that when you write about me, it’s always with a hint of, I want to say, disapproval?”
“Well,” he goes, “I’ve always said that the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books are a salutary lesson rather than a guide to living.”
He literally says that. Word for word. The smugness of this man, who made his name leveraging off my — very nearly — rugby career, is staggering.
“So, what’s your real issue?” I go.
He’s like, “What do you mean?”
“Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it. I don’t see any medals or trophies on display in this — I’m not being a d**k here — but bang average house.”
“That’s very observant of you.”
“So, it’s jealousy?” I go.
He’s like, “It’s not jealousy,” his face definitely reddening and his ridiculous glasses becoming steamed up.
I’m there, “Tell me about your background,” because, as a natural out-half, I instinctively know how to attack where the defensive line is weakest.
“What does my background have to do with it?” he tries to go.
Clearly, he doesn’t want to talk about his childhood, but I’ve told him everything about mine, so I insist.
“You grew up poor,” I go.
He’s like, “We were far from poor,” but I can see that he has tears in his eyes. “We didn’t go on skiing holidays, or have household staff like the O’Carroll-Kellys, but we were given everything we needed to ensure we had a happy childhood.”
“Sounds horrendous,” I go, tilting my head to try to appear sympathetic, a trick I learned from my wife.
He grew up in Ballybrack, a few miles — but in reality an entire world away — from where I lived in Foxrock. I’m imagining some miserable, Angela’s Ashes-type upbringing, involving chip shop dinners, crossbows for Christmas and streets named after IRA men, that has left him bitter and twisted against those of us who have been more successful than him, financially, socially and sexually. I say it to him as well.
“I’ve never denied having a chip on my shoulder,” he tries to go, a little smirk playing on his lips.
And something occurs to me then — for the first time in the almost 25 years since I first met him and tried to be an improving influence. I don’t like the dude.
He’s there, “I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. I’m actually proud of where I came from.”
“What,” I go, “even though all trace of it has disappeared from your accent?”
Whoa! It's a burn! A big-time burn! He knows it and I know it. It takes him a while to recover his composure. Actually, I'm not sure he even does.
“So, the chip on your shoulder,” I go, “comes from what then? Being too short-sighted and physically unimpressive to be the rugby player that I was? Being — let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room here — too ugly to enjoy the kind of success I’ve enjoyed with women over the years?”
He’s like, “Yeah, it must be that,” in a passive-aggressive way that is very much the measure of the man.
I’m there, “Did you have an embarrassing nickname at school?”
“Like what?” he wants to know.
I’m like, “Luke Skydorker? William Nerdsworth? Get Him to the Geek?”, surprising myself with how easily the insults trip off my tongue. I think It’s from spending so much time around Fionn, to whom he bears more than a passing resemblance.
He goes, “Are we done here? Or are you going to give me a wedgy or something?”
I’m tempted. I’m very, very tempted. But I don’t. Instead, I’m there, “You’re not a bit grateful to me, are you?”
“Grateful?”, he goes. “What have I got to be grateful to you for?”
I’m like, “Do you never think about how your life might have turned out if I hadn’t asked you to write my diary of a school rugby player all those years ago?”
He laughs — with the arrogance of a man who thinks he’s actually achieved something in his own right.
He’s there, “I’m sure it would have been much the same.”
“Yeah,” I go, “you keep telling yourself that. If it wasn’t for me, no one would have heard of you.”
“Is that right?”
“Dude, I made you who you are today — even though from the outside that isn’t much.”
It’s a zinger. And, I decide, the perfect one-liner on which to end our so-called interview. He’s trying to think of something funny, something clever, something profound to say, but for once, words fail him. So that’s how I leave him, his mouth working away dumbly like a goldfish.
As I head back to my palatial home on the Killiney coast, with the top down on my cor and the sun in my face, I get a call from the Magazine desk at The Irish Times.
“How did it go?”, I’m asked. “Did anything come out of the interview?”
“Not much,” I go. “But, hey, I think it does him good to be reminded every now and then who the real talent is.”
Once Upon a Time… in Donnybrook, the latest book in the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, is in bookshops from September 1st
