An election porty? I’ve seen livelier autopsies, but Fionn’s speech gets my attention
PORTY IN FIONN’S gaff – that was the word. Didn’t matter to me that it was, like, a Tuesday night – when you’re living off your old man’s ill-gotten gains, every day is the weekend. So I swung out there around ten o’clock with twenty cans of H in the boot.
Fionn wasn’t exactly a contented temporary tent dweller to see me and straight away I copped why. The porty was for his other mates – the ones from, like, the Institute, college and the time he won Blackboard focking Jungle.
None of whom, by the way, would know a rugby ball if they sat naked on a buttered one.
They’re all sitting around the TV, roysh, drinking – get this – wine, and one or two of them have the actual cheek to throw their eyes up to heaven when I walk in.
“Up,” I tell this specky geek who’s sitting in what was my chair when I lived here and he has brains enough to do what I tell him. Then I’m like, “So what’s the Jack with this porty? I’ve been at autopsies with a better atmosphere.” Fionn’s spitting nails, of course. “It’s an election party,” he goes. “We’re waiting for the first results to come in.”
I just, like, stare him out of it. “This is an actual joke, I take it. I’m presuming that door over there is going to open any minute and six or seven strippers are going to walk in . . .” “It’s an historic night,” this bird, who I recognise as one of Fionn’s exes, goes. “America is about to elect its first black President,” which I already know, roysh, because Sorcha’s planning to sit up all night watching it, as is half of South Dublin.
I just don’t see what it’s got to do with the price of sun-blushed tomatoes.
Fionn’s ex — I’m seventy per cent certain I scored her once, just to piss him off — tells me that if I sit and listen I might discover the ways in which it could affect my life.
So, like a fool, that’s what I ended up doing – sat there listening to the Nerd Herd banging on about who was going to win Florida, who was going to win Pennsylvania, then who was going to win Ohio, which I knew straight away they made up, just to see would I cop it.
Believe it or not, roysh, over the next couple of hours, I actually got quite into it, so much so that I was even offering my own, I suppose, analysis on shit, even though I’d never been into, like, world affairs? That’s when Fionn tells me he wants a word and flicks his head in the direction of the kitchen. I follow him out. “Jesus,” I tell him, “it’s a good job you played rugby – you’d have died a virgin hanging around with that crew.” He’s like, “I think you’ve given us all a new appreciation of the American political system tonight, Ross. What was that word you used to described Sarah Palin?” I’m there, “Filthy.” “Filthy,” he goes. “Thank you, David Frost. Ross, I wanted to have a word with you about Ronan . . .” Yeah, Fionn’s actually teaching him this year, God help the poor kid.
I’m there, “Sorry he wasn’t in school today – he was up all night getting through the new Paul Williams.”
“Ross,” he goes. “I – and one or two other teachers in the school – we think he’s gifted.” I’m like, “Gifted? Well, no surprise there – chip off the old block.” “Ross,” he goes, “you have difficulty operating a bedside lamp. I’m talking about really gifted. He may even have a genius IQ.” I ask the question that I suppose any father would ask in those circumstances.
“How’s this going to affect his rugby?” which he just ignores.
“He came to me at lunchtime yesterday,” he goes, “said he was interested in joining the Maths Club I’ve set up this year for the sixth years. I told him – rather patronisingly, as it turns out – that it might be a bit too advanced for a boy of eleven.
“So he tells me that he’s been giving quite a bit of thought to the Collatz Conjecture, in other words the 3n + 1 problem? I said to him, ‘What do you know about the Collatz Conjecture, Ronan?’ and he said, ‘Only that it’s one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics.’
“Then he went on to explain it to me in perfect detail. ‘Well, you let f (n) be a function defined on the positive integers, such that f (n) = n/2 if n = 0 and f (n) = (3n+1) if n = 1 . . .’ Are you following me, Ross?”
I’m like, “Fionn, you’re going to have to say ‘Over’ at the end of every sentence, just so I know when you’ve finished focking talking.” He laughs at that, in fairness to him. “Ross, he understood that when you form a sequence by performing this operation repeatedly, starting with any positive integer and taking the result at each step as the input at the next, the process will eventually reach the number 1, irrespective of what positive integer is chosen at the outset.”
“And you’re saying that makes him a genius?” I go. He’s like, “I don’t know. I’d certainly like to have him tested.” I’m there, “Are you talking, I don’t know, opening his actual head up?” “No,” he goes, trying to keep his patience with me, “I’m talking about sending him somewhere to be asked a series of questions.” A roar goes up from the living room. Obama’s obviously won, I don’t know, some state or other. “Ross, my suspicion is that, mathematically at least, Ronan is inside the top 0.00000001% of the population.”
A thought suddenly occurs to me and a big shit-eating grin breaks out across my face.
Fionn just shakes his head. “You’re thinking about bringing him to Vegas, aren’t you?” I’m like, “How dare you? What do you take me for?” He knows me only too well.
Keep up with Ross’s adventures online at irishtimes.com/blogs/lifewithross
