Free The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll by Brian Beacom

was just so special.’
    Brendan clearly liked black. But he knew a relationship would be highly problematic.
    Doreen, who worked for a clothing manufacturers, came from the other side of the tracks. Not in a Montague-Capulet sense – there was little economic divide in Finglas; everyone was skint. But Doreen lived in an area into which Brendan’s gang, the boys from the Hardy Street area, dared not walk.
    Yet, the little skinhead pushed his concerns aside.
    ‘I let her – and her mates – in for free,’ he says, offering irrefutable evidence of his interest in the young lady.
    ‘Then I asked her to dance and she said, “I wouldn’t have anything to do with ya, ya sap.” So I pursued her for six months, but she was always with her mates.
    ‘She told me years later that she took terrible advantage of me. She would ring me up and say, “I saw a pair of Wranglers in a shop window in town.”
    ‘“What size are you?”
    ‘“Ten.”
    ‘“Right, I’ll sort it.”
    ‘And I would get her the jeans. And the following day she’d call and say, “I’d love another pair of those Wranglers.” And I’d say, “A ten?” And she’d say, “No, get me an eight.”
    ‘The next week it would be a twelve. She was getting jeans for all her pals. And I knew this, of course. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was she was interested in me. And I was captivated. Eventually, she agreed I could go to the pictures with her – but she’d bring her friends along as well.
    ‘Meanwhile, my own mates were slagging me, telling me I was wasting my time. But it was a challenge for me. And I told my pals that once she had agreed to go out with me, I’d tell her to forget it.
    ‘Anyway, I think what happened was I stopped ringing her. I didn’t see her for maybe a week. And she rang me, saying, “I miss you.” I said, “Tough, that’s the way it goes.” But we agreed to meet that night and she said she would go out with me.’
    A first love always finds a way. But the way ahead was rocky.
    ‘I told all my mates. And they said, “Right, when are you dumping her?” And I hummed a bit and said, “I never said I would definitely do that . . .”’
    He didn’t. And Brendan and Doreen became a couple. They conquered the gangland divide, and the relationship developed. The disco didn’t, however. Brendan spent the profits on Wranglers and taxis, and the punters gradually fell away.
    But now there were two women in Brendan’s life. Since his father had died, his mother had been reliant upon the Special One more than ever, for company, conversation and laughter. The pair sparked off each other. But they argued with an intensity that only people who care for each other can do. And they loved to push each other to the limits.
    Yet, although Brendan was precocious, determined to grow up as quickly as possible, he was in no rush to leave his mammy behind.
    ‘When I was fifteen, Dublin Corporation decided that people should be able to buy their Corporation houses. And I remember the letter coming through the door at the time and I thought, “Jesus, I’ll buy this!” But they wouldn’t sell the house to me. They would only sell it to my mother and me, just in case I was the type to throw my mother out and they’d have to find another house for her.
    ‘So we bought it in joint names, and I just gave her the money every week for it. It was seventeen hundred quid, thanks to the allowance we got for all the rent that had been paid previously. And that’s what we did.’
    The plan would later come back to haunt him. And there were other signs he was rushing in the direction of adulthood way too fast.
    ‘I was mad into the dogs,’ he recalls of visits to the racetrack. ‘The thirty-second climax they used to call it, because that’s all it takes for the fastest dog to run a race. What happened was that the first three times I went to the dogs, I won big. On the third occasion, I was only fourteen years of age, I had five