There was a photo, unfortunately, lost in the mists of time, of me, my head in my hands, as I sat doing the accounts for my family’s corner shop business. My father had captioned the photo Despair! 20 grand owed to the bank.
So terrible was that moment that I no longer even remember it, its place usurped by a hundred other most terrible moments before and since. My mother toppling down the stairs after a thump from my father, my father’s girlfriend dying in my arms, my mother going up in flames in front of me after piercing a gas cylinder before an open fire, a neighbour calling to our house requesting I fetch my dear inebriated mother who had urinated on their sofa. The shame of it. I thought there could be no worse ignominy to be suffered until said mother appeared blotto at my classroom door.
If you get the idea that most of my worst moments somehow involved my parents, you’d be right, and the most terrible was the moment I realised the true extent of my father’s perfidy.
I was in my early 20s, running a legal services business, when one of my more friendly solicitor clients called me to say that cheques he’d used to settle his account with me had been cashed in a pub, as opposed to being lodged in the normal way in my company bank account. I knew immediately that the culprit was my father. Who else would care so little about being caught that he’d steal cheques from me and cash them in his favourite watering hole? I’m not a person given to crying but when I went to his flat to tackle him and was met, not with remorse, but with ridicule and an enquiry as to whether I had any more money he could steal, I fled, weeping.
It wasn’t the stealing that shocked me, I knew he was a rogue and a chancer. I once asked him according to what sort of moral code he operated, to which he replied ‘expediency.’ The shocker was that he was taking the cheques before they got to the accounts section so I was repeatedly billing clients for invoices they’d already paid, resulting in numerous queries and angry clients. That he cared so little about me that he’d endanger my business just for cash I would have given to him had he asked, that destroyed me.
Were there repercussions for my father? Well, I’m not one to hold a grudge, which is just as well since I cannot recall him ever apologising for anything, though he had plenty to be sorry for. Besides, another most terrible moment quickly followed when the Garda (police) Special Branch called to the office to interview me. But that’s another story.
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Posted in response to 
Photos are my own