Page 3 of Beautiful Losers

‘Where are you from – besides Ireland?’ I asked, filling the kettle and placing it on the gas stove.

‘Wichita, Kansas, originally, but I’m a bit of a gypsy. Lived all over. Been in Cordes coming on seven years now. What brings you and Ari here?’

‘Ah, you know,’ I said. ‘Sunshine,crème brûlée, the quintessential good life.’

I wasn’t about to unburden myself to Leonard, though there was something oddly soothing about his company, a kindness to his face. At that moment, Ari ran into the kitchen holding Margaret.

‘Hey, this must the man himself! Nice to meet you, little guy!’

Ari scrutinised Leonard before sitting down opposite him.

‘This is Margaret,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s nice to meet you too, Margaret,’ replied Leonard. ‘Now, what exactly is Margaret? A goldfish?’

‘A California golden trout,’ Ari corrected him.

‘Of course she is,’ said Leonard, accepting a mug of tea from me with a smile. ‘And tell me, Ari, do you and Margaret like your new home?’

Ari pursed his lips, considering the question.

‘There’s a garden here, which is really fun. We didn’t have a garden in our flat. We had a playground around the corner, but one time, Mummy got cross when we saw a needle like the one the nurse used to give me the Coronavirus medicine, so we stopped going after that.’

Leonard glanced at me knowingly.

‘I have a best friend at home,’ Ari continued. ‘Her name is Agata. She’s from Poland. I don’t have any friends here.’

‘Not yet, but just you wait til you start school,’ said Leonard. He turned to me. ‘You enrolled him in Ecole Saint-Georges?’

I nodded. ‘He starts next week.’

‘It’s a great little place. The principal has some interesting views … Ari will be fine, though, won’t you, buddy? And you know what? You don’t need to wait for school to make friends.’

Leonard untied a blue and orange woven wrist band from his right arm, and handed it to Ari.

‘Now I’ll keep this one right here,’ he said, tugging at the remaining purple and green band. ‘And that means we’re buddies, okay? Anyone gives you a hard time, you come to me.’

Leonard prodded at his chest with his thumb and winked at Ari. Ari beamed, passing me the bracelet to fasten around his tiny wrist.

Before Leonard left, he told me that if I needed a hand around the house or getting the garden in shape before tourist season kicked off, I was to give him a shout. I thanked him, but assured him his services wouldn’t be necessary. One of the few useful pieces of fatherly advice my dad passed on to me was self-reliance.‘Cowboys, Fiadh,’ he used to say of his fellow tradesmen.‘They’ll shaft ye in a heartbeat if you’re not careful.’ He showed me how to replace a radiator and reseal the bath, and I’ve never had to ask for help. I’m not about to start relying on other people now.

3

I was a sub editor onThe Irish Chronicle, for sixteen years. That’s the lifespan of a wolf. OrGrey’s Anatomy. Meredith and the Seattle Grace gang survived a hospital shooting, a plane crash, removed abombfrom a patient’s chest – all while I sat in the same seat day after day, drinking Barry’s tea and circling errant commas in red biro.

Needless to say, this was not The Plan. The Plan had been to become a serious journalist, like Veronica Guerin. I wanted to face danger head on, expose the evils of the world, speak truth to power, whatever that looked like. After graduating, I got an internship on the crime desk, shadowing Paul McGinty, a hardened hack, who regularly took on Dublin’s lords and had already been fined twice for flouting the newly implemented smoking ban. This was where I belonged. Sticking it to the Man, holding the gobshites to account.

It was 2005 and Ireland was having the time ofits life. Golfing hotels were springing up across the country, and those thirty euro-a-pop horse and carriage rides around Stephen’s Green, the ones only wealthy American tourists used to take, became as ubiquitous on a night out as a round of jaegerbombs. Then came the global financial crash, and the press started going after the developers and the bankers and the corrupt politicians, and suddenly, my dad is front-page news. And it’s harder to take down the gobshites when you’re related to one.

Paul moved me over to the production team. ‘It’s just temporary, Fiadh,’ he said, sitting on the edge of my desk and lighting up a cigarette. ‘Until this whole thing with your dad blows over. You’ve got something. A real instinct. We’ll have you back reporting in no time.’

It didn’t blow over. Dad was never going to go down gracefully. I think he quite liked being the story, dictating the news agenda. He never tired of pushing the same old narrative – that he was a scapegoat, a regular guy trying to do his best for his family and his country. After a while, I got used to the anonymity of back-office life. Of being just Fiadh, not Desi Murphy’s daughter. Though it was more than that. There was a comfort, a reassuring predictability to the process of sub editing. Cutting back on extraneous information. Fact-checking every assertion. Cleaning up grammar. Pursuing a steadfast policy of containment against windbaggery. (This didn’t go down well with Dermot Cleary, the newspaper’s lead columnist, who, it must be said, was fond of the old windbaggery.)

Anyway, I was made redundant in February.The Chronicle, like all newspapers, had been struggling for years and subs are usually the first out the door. I was relieved, in a way, to be leaving. I told myself it was the push I needed to get outthere, get my reporting career back on track, contribute to society in a more meaningful way. The thing is, I hadn’t counted on how much my job, those daily tasks of correcting and confining and cutting and cleaning, had been keeping my world together, imposing order on a chaos that’s never far from the surface, keeping realities that demand to be confronted at bay.

~

‘You need to leave this dump. Dublin is a joke. You eating that?’ Without waiting for a response, Yiv reached across the table and stuck her fork into my dinner. ‘I mean, what’s this about? Twenty-five euros for a shitty aubergine? We learnt fuck all from ’08. I’m telling you, the bubble’s about to burst on this place. Again. Get out while you still can.’

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