Page 4 of Beautiful Losers

Yiv is my only friend from school. Scratch that. Yiv is my only friend. Her real name is Yufan. After Yiv introduced herself on our first day at St Mary’s, our Irish teacher went ‘Yvonne?’, pronouncing it ‘Yiv-onne’. Yiv repeated herself, ‘No, Yufan’ and the teacher goes, ‘Yivonne is easier.’ Yiv said, ‘Alright, whatever’, and it stuck.

We bonded over our pariah status. I was a misfit, uninterested in playing by the rules required to get ahead socially. Yiv was equally unacceptable. Her family emigrated from Hunan province when she was three and she came out in first year. Yiv’s parents owned a successful chain of Chinese takeaways across south County Dublin. Every Saturday night, her dad would answer the phone at Jade Palace to a group of giggling teenage girls wanting to place an order for chicken friend ‘lice’. We tried not to let the abuse we received from our peers bother us, laughing off the pedestrian nature of the insults.Chink, lizzie, freak, weirdo. I mean, if you’re going to be an arsehole, at least be original about it. Besides, Yiv and I were happy in our own little world, our weekends spent eating her mum’s Dong’an chicken and watchingThe X Files.

Yiv always said that Asian lesbians would have their day. And she was right. After Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage by popular vote, sure didn’t everybody want to be queer? Yiv further ascended the ladder of cool when she joined Facebook in its infancy as one of the EU headquarters’ only female engineers. More or less overnight, she was bombarded with requests to chair panels and give keynote speeches at major industry events. ‘I’m telling you,’ she said at the time, ‘the tech world is a Chinese dyke’s oyster sauce.’

I pointed out that she was working for a dark overlord responsible for destroying human relationships, political discourse and democracy itself. She agreed, but said the pay was excellent and she’d struggle to forgo her monthly work trips to Silicon Valley as California girls are infinitely hotter than Irish ones. Sadly, Yiv says her social capital has diminished somewhat since Covid and everyone thinking the Chinese started it by eating bats.

‘You should move to France,’ she said, helping herself to another bite of my shitty aubergine.

‘Why would I move to France?’

‘Remember that guesthouse I stayed at a few years ago? I was with that girl I was seeing at the time. What was her name? She was the one who brought a bottle of Fanta to your gaff for dinner, drank everyone else’s wine, then took the Fanta home with her when she left.’

‘Linda?’

‘No. Linda was the one who carried a jar of mini gherkins around with her.’

‘The one who’d start eating them at inappropriate times?’

‘Like during a tour of Auschwitz? Yep. Not her. It was the other one. Yer one with the fringe. Had freakishly long toes …’

‘Caroline,’ I said.

‘Ah yes, Caroline. I wonder what she’s up to these days … Anyway, I raved about the place when I got home. Said I was going to give up tech and run a B&B.’

‘Until you realised you’d have to wash other people’s bedsheets and be nice to strangers to avoid a bad review on Tripadvisor.’

‘I’d struggle with someone slagging off my livelihood alright.’

‘You said if anyone said anything negative about the service you’d send them a shit in the post.’

‘Okay, so I’m not cut out for the hospitality business, but Fiadh, you should have seen this place. It was just soFrench. The views were unreal, everything smelt of lavender, and there was this cute little pergola with wisteria growing all over it where I’d have breakfast with what’s-her-face.’

‘Caroline. It sounds like the dream,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t have to be a dream,’ said Yiv, making sex eyes at the waitress who’d come to check on us. ‘I’ve kept in touch with the owners.Sophie, the wife, emailed me last week. She and Nicolas are getting divorced. He’s moving back to Normandy and Sophie wants to go travelling. The idea wasto sell the guesthouse, butquelle surprise– shifting a property in the middle of a global pandemic isn’t the easiest gig, so they’ve decided to get someone to run it for them instead. Maybe try again in a couple of years when the market has settled down.’

‘Why don’t they ask someone with experience?’

‘No time. Some sort of family emergency. So, do you fancy it? I told them I had a friend who’d be perfect for the role.’

‘Who?’

Yiv grins at me. I stop shovelling food into my mouth, my fork suspended in mid-air as I catch up with the conversation.

‘Me? What do I know about running a B&B?’

‘Chambres d’hôtes,’Yiv said.‘You have a degree in French for a start.’

‘I haven’t spoken French in years.’

‘Then there was that summer you worked in Butlin’s.’

‘I was a magician’s assistant in the kids’ club.’

‘Great. So you can work your magic on La Maison Bleue.’

‘That was weak.’

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