Page 18 of Beautiful Losers

‘Right, absolutely. Poke the dead bee.’

Mme Dupont seems satisfied. ‘Life is richer when we accept that nothing lasts.’

‘Got it. Anything else? How’s Ari doing morebroadly? Is he getting to grips with the language? How’s his counting going?’

‘He doesn’t colour inside the lines.’

‘Oh. Well, Ari is very creative. I don’t think he likes being restricted when it comes to expressing himself. I’ve seen him colour inside the lines before, so if you’re worried about his fine motor skills there’s no problem there. I think he’d just prefer not to colour inside the lines.’

‘Non.’

‘Non?’

‘Non. He must follow the rules.’

Rules. I feel a flicker of resistance at the word, a reflexive urge to challenge Mme Dupont. Before I can speak, I’m cut off by the ringtone on her phone, Ed Sheeran’sShape of You, at full volume. She checks her screen and stands up, escorting me out of the room. ‘Death is life, Madame Murphy,’ she says, giving me a gentle shove out the door into the blinding sun.

11

I’m worried about Ari after my conversation with Mme Dupont, so I decide to give Cillian a call. The sun is barely up in California, far too early for Cillian. He used to stay in bed until midday in protest against ‘militant morning culture’.

‘There’s this bogus idea that larks are more wholesome and morally upright than night owls, but it’s a myth, Fifi – created by corporations to increase productivity and therefore their bottom line. I refuse to be a cog in the wheel.’

I received this philosophy, or some variation of it, daily as I left for work. At the time, Cillian was gainfully unemployed, his attentions focused on a business plan, the details of which he preferred not to get into as it was in the ‘marinading phase’ of development. ‘You don’t want to rush these things,’ he’d warn. ‘Too many startups fail due to insufficient rumination in the embryonic stages. You want to take your time, let the idea percolate.’

I’m surprised when he answers the phone on the second ring. I’d expected him to be sleeping.

‘There she is. How you doing, Fifi?’

He’s sitting on the balcony of his house, a beachfront villa in Malibu, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. His hair, the colour of an EasyJet flight, is tied in a top knot, a set of Buddhist prayer beads twisted around his wrist. His skin is glowing, like he’s just worked out or had sex. Los Angeles Cillian is more mindful about ‘creating a space for play’ than Dublin Cillian, so it’s probably the latter. On the sand below, I can make out a couple of surfers hitting the waves and further out to sea, a giant oil tanker.

‘You’ve grown your hair,’ I remark.

‘Yeah, just trying something different. Gotta keep the mind open to new ideas.’

He takes a sip of herbal tea and eases back into a brown leather Egg chair.

‘So how’s it all going over there? How’s our boy doing?’

Cillian chose the name Aristotle. He was taking an online philosophy course when I was pregnant to complement his burgeoning career as a life coach and had liked Aristotle’s vibe. He wasn’t like the other philosophers, Fifi. He didn’t ask, “How do I live a good life?” He said the question we should put to ourselves is, “What kind of person do I want tobe?”’

I’m well aware that naming my child after one of the most celebrated philosophers to ever live is a punchy move, but after a forty-hour labour, you could have put the pi symbol on Ari’s birth certificate and I wouldn’t have objected.

‘He’s not settling in at school,’ I say, feeling a familiar knot of anxiety in my stomach. ‘He hasn’t made any friends. Honestly, I think Margaret is his best friend.’

Cillian smiles. ‘Ah, Margaret. You know I bought her at the gift shop at Monterey Bay Aquarium? You should have seen the place. I remember this huge spiny lobster in one of the tanks and I was blown away by her. She was so … majestic. We locked eyes and I swear, Fifi, I could feel herinsideme. It was like we were one. Did you know lobsters keep growing forever? We don’t know exactly how long they live because there aren’t any traps big enough to catch the largest ones.’

I wonder whether he was at one with the one-kilo lobster he devoured the time I took him to Roly’s bistro to celebrate his first appearance onIreland AM.

‘They probably don’t live very long,’ I say. ‘Lobsters eat one another.’

Cillian ignores the comment and continues with his paean to marine life.

‘Man, living out here, the Pacific on your doorstep, it’s humbling. Seriously, I amhumbledevery day by nature’s beauty. And I can’t stop thinking about what we’re doing to our oceans, what kind of world Ari’s generation will inherit. I read the other day that the equivalent of a garbage truckload of plastic is dumped into the sea every single minute. Can you believe it?’

He pauses to let the gravitas of the statement sink in, but I’m distracted by his use of the word ‘garbage’. We say nothing for a couple of seconds to allow Cillian a moment to recover from his brand new discovery that sea life is fucked. When the appropriate amount of time has passed, I tell himthat Ari’s teacher is concerned that Ari has yet to grasp the concept of death.

‘She said we need to find a dead bee and poke it, so Ari can understand it isn’t coming back to life. She said we shouldn’t run from reality, that life is better when we accept that nothing lasts.’

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