3
I was a sub editor on The Irish Chronicle , for sixteen years. That’s the lifespan of a wolf. Or Grey’s Anatomy . Meredith and the Seattle Grace gang survived a hospital shooting, a plane crash, removed a bomb from 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 of its 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 out there, 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.’
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 watching The 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 so French . 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 was to sell the guesthouse, but quelle 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’h ? tes ,’ 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.’
‘I know. Long day. Look, Fiadh.’ Yiv reached across the table and grabbed my hand. ‘I think a change of scenery would do you good. And Ari. It’s been a tough couple of years for you guys with everything that went down with your dad, then Captain Bellend going off to LA to discover his own arsehole. You need a reboot.’
‘Yiv, I’m not a computer.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been coding since 8 a.m. You know what I get like. All I’m saying is, you could do with an adventure. I remember at school, you weren’t afraid of anything. You couldn’t wait to get out there and change the world. To be honest, I found your faith in our species to sort its shit out a bit naive, but it was kind of inspiring at the same time. What I’m trying to get across (and patently doing a piss-poor job of it) is, it’s not all bad. I mean, yes, the far right and the religious nuts are taking over and we’re all going to die in a fiery apocalypse of our own making, but there are good things in the world, Fiadh. Like this opportunity to move to France. And the sex I’m going to have with that waitress when she finishes her shift. Just promise me you’ll think about it and I’ll buy you dinner.’
‘You’re buying it anyway. You’ve eaten half of mine. But fine, I’ll think about it.’
‘Good. Because I’ve already given Sophie your email.’
~
There was no formal interview process for the role of manager of La Maison Bleue, simply a series of blank emails with questions in the subject line.
Can you make your own preserves? (We are known for our mirabelle jam.)
Eh, sure?
Do you know how to fix a ballcock?
Is it a plunger or diaphragm-type? Might be a good idea to replace it with a more modern float-cup-style fill valve.
How do you feel about poltergeists?
Fine. As long as they keep the noise down between 2 and 4 a.m. – that’s when I get my non-REM sleep.
Haha. We make little joke. There are no ghosts at La Maison Bleue. It is important to have a sense of humour in hospitality.
The salary was non-existent, I’d have to foot the utilities bills and the odd minor repair might crop up. On the plus side, there was no rent to pay as Sophie and Nicolas owned the property outright, I could keep any takings and there was a place for Ari in the local school.
I had agreed to contact the owners to get Yiv off my back, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What it would be like to take on a seventeenth-century property in rural France. Do a Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun and start over in style. Sophie warned me that business had been slow these past few months. In normal times, they’re fully booked in high season. She assured me things would pick up before long as France had started to ease its lockdown restrictions.
I did the maths and reckoned we had enough savings to cover us for a year without the additional income from guests. Aside from my monthly dinners with Yiv, who, despite her protestations to the contrary won’t dine anywhere that doesn’t have an exorbitantly priced vegetable on the menu, I’m fairly sensible with cash. I buy clothes for Ari and myself in charity shops. We go camping for our holidays. I reuse teabags. My salary at The Chronicle was modest, but I’d managed to cobble together a small nest egg for us. More goldcrest-sized than albatross. Still, it was a nest egg all the same. I didn’t worry about spending it, because I didn’t think we would. Not much of it anyway. I was confident we’d soon have an avalanche of bookings.
Before I knew it, it was the week before our departure and I allowed myself to be talked into a farewell drink with my old boss, Cara. It turned out to be a surprise party. If I enjoyed the company of others or were a better actor, I might have made the appropriate noises on discovering seven colleagues scattered around a reserved section of O’Donoghue’s to wish me bon voyage. Afterwards, Cara told me she’s literally watched paint dry with greater enthusiasm than I’d shown for my leaving do.
At the bar, Dermot, the Chronicle ’s star writer, offered to buy me a drink. Without waiting for a reply, he instructed the barman to make a gin martini.
Dermot and I started at the Chronicle at the same time. Within a couple of years, he’d kissed enough arse to land the paper’s top writing job. I’ve always found the reverence with which his name was uttered in the Irish media to be a case of the emperor not wearing any clothes. The insights he shares in his weekly column are about as original as those mugs emblazoned with the slogan, ‘But first, coffee’. Dermot has one on his desk.
He came on to me once. I was going with Cillian at the time, but I would have said no anyway because I don’t do workplace romance and, also, Dermot is a bit of a shite. He didn’t take the rejection too well. The next time I edited his column, he sent me an email, cc-ing the entire office, after I dared to remove the indefinite article from his copy. Couldn’t I see that he had been making a joke , with that particular indefinite article absolutely crucial to the punchline? (I was tempted to point out that italicising multiple words in a sentence negates the emphasis you’re going for, and that ‘absolutely crucial’ is a tautology.)
‘Well, Fiadh,’ Dermot said, leaning against the bar and taking a sip of his Guinness. He licked the creamy residue off his lips in a disturbingly exaggerated fashion. ‘It’s a shame you’re jumping ship.’
‘I didn’t jump anything, Dermot. I was made redundant,’ I replied, taking a larger gulp of gin than intended.
‘You know, these things rarely work out. I had an aunt who bought a little albergo in Positano.’
He said ‘albergo’ and ‘Positano’ with an Italian accent.
‘It’s a thankless business. She worked all hours and barely broke even. Came back home after four months. Hospitality requires real graft. The reality is, most of these ventures fail.’
‘Well, I’m confident I’ll be the one to buck the trend,’ I said, sticking my chin out.
‘I give it til the end of the summer,’ he said, with an assuredness that made me want to tip the remainder of his pint over his head. ‘Listen, when you do come back, I’m looking for someone to handle my affairs. Nothing too taxing. Travel arrangements, a bit of light cleaning and ironing, some meal prep. I’d be more than happy to help you get back on your feet.’
‘So good of you, Dermot, but actually, we’re fully booked for the next six months. If an opening pops up in your busy schedule, you must come and stay with us. I’ll do my best to squeeze you in.’
He gave me a pitying look and sauntered off.
‘Knob,’ I muttered under my breath as he rejoined the others.
In the weeks leading up to the move, I questioned the sanity of what I was doing on an almost daily basis, drafting an email to the owners of La Maison Bleue several times to pull out of our arrangement. I had lied to Dermot – we weren’t fully booked. Not even close. I had one family coming to stay a few months after we arrived and that was it. I should have backed out. There was still time. But Dermot’s certainty I would fail (not to mention the fact that in one week, Ari and I would be homeless) had settled the matter. We were moving to France.
The night before we left, Yiv helped us box up our two-bedroom flat in Kilmainham. (We lived in the part of the neighbourhood The Dubliner evidently didn’t visit when the magazine raved about the area’s ‘hip restaurants’ and ‘creative vibe’.) I put Ari to sleep on a blow-up mattress and Yiv and I sat on the floor of the living room eating her mum’s Dong ’ an chicken out of foil cartons like old times. The following morning, we set off. Drove to the docks and boarded a ferry for Cherbourg. I bought a cup of coffee and Ari a carton of orange juice from the café on board and we made our way to the wind-beaten deck, my coat wrapped around us, and watched Dublin get smaller and smaller as we drifted out to sea .