‘Hello, everyone,’ I said. ‘My name – for those of you who aren’t au fait with Irish-Sino relations,’ and here I gave a little chuckle, ‘is Fiach O’Bric. I’m from, well, here, meaning obviously Dublin, although I’ve lived abroad for most of my adult life, working in the diplomatic service…
…Five faces stared vacantly back at me. I figured they probably knew all of this from Googling my name or looking at my LinkedIn page.
…
‘I’m sorry,’ said Nina at last, ‘I’m confused. Vanessa said you were the new Secretary General.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
Colman and Esme exchanged a look of surprise.
‘So what’s happened to Malachi?’ said Vanessa. ‘Has he finally had that massive brain haemorrhage that’s been coming for years?’
And that was when, as if on cue, I heard a man’s voice, loud and dripping with rage, echo up the stairwell: ‘Bullying? Bullying, my fucking hole. I’ve been nothing nice to that woman. Nothing but nice to her – sanctimonious fucking bitch. Fine, I might not always have used language that would be considered, you know, appropriate by a so-called woman of the cloth–’
And then I laid eyes on him for the very first time. He was a big, unhealthily obese man, approximately my age, with an ink-black pompadour of hair and enormous eyebrows that were dyed the same ridiculous, age-inappropriate colour. He was eating a bag of Tayto Mighty Munch, which appeared to constitute breakfast. His face was pink with anger, like a boiled ham, and a long, bulbous vein in his left temple seemed to throb to the bassline of the angry diatribe that poured from his mouth.
‘Darts?’ he said. ‘Would you ever ask me hole with your fucking darts, hai.’
He was clearly from Dundalk.
‘I wouldn’t have a photograph of that hoor on me wall, so I wouldn’t, even if it was to throw darts at,’ he said. ‘Well, whoever told you that is a fucking–’
A cloistral silence had fallen over the room by the time his eyes locked onto mine. He removed the phone from his ear, killed the call and then, grinning at me panto villain-style, said: ‘Then Daddy Bear growled, ‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’’
