Leon’s legacy
Marc Quinlan remembers his son who drowned — and tells Barry Egan how he found love and peace
IT’S 3am in Marbella. Marc Quinlan’s restaurant Becketts is packed on a balmy Saturday night in southern Spain. While all around him is hustle and bustle in his restaurant kingdom in the sun, inside Marc Quinlan’s head, inside Marc Quinlan’s battered soul, is one thought that goes around and around, and never goes away. Ever.
“There’s not a day that I don’t think about it,” the 45-year-old Dubliner says in reference to the terrible night of Sunday, June 27, 2004, when his two-and-a-half-year-old son Leon somehow got out of the house in Spain and made his way to the swimming pool, before falling in and drowning. “It’s not something I’ll ever forget,” says Marc. “No father is ever going to forget it. No family is ever going to forget it.”
Marc was at the grave recently, because Leon’s anniversary was only a few weeks ago, with his beautiful fiancee Penny Caradas. He cried at the grave. Being there brought everything back suddenly, he says.
“I still can’t believe he isn’t here with me. His birthday was Christmas Day...” Marc says, his voice trailing off some place in his psyche.
Marc says it is like a wound that never closes. Time is some sort of a healer of that wound, he says, but it is not possible that it will ever fully heal. But he says the fact that he has other children — Jordan (20), Chloe (17), Kai (13) and Abby (11) — has helped him deal with the emotional enormity of the pain.
“I suppose if I didn’t have any other kids it would be a worse situation. It is not a nice thing to say but it eases the pain when you have other kids there. I have four healthy kids and every time I look at them I thank God for them. Touch wood. I know a friend who lost one kid, his one kid, through a cot death and the man is suicidal.”
Was Marc ever suicidal? “No. I am pretty strong like that. I would go deep, deep, in my head...like I said, a week and a half after Leon died, I bought the Bull McCabe [pub]. And when I stopped working at nighttime, I would lock the door and start breaking down crying when all the workers were gone. I never turned to drink. I never hit the drink over it. That’s how I dealt with it.
“I kind of gave up on Becketts for a little while and I stopped coming in because everybody was always asking me how I was. I went through a little bit of depression. I didn’t shave. I didn’t want to get out of bed.”
Marc says he saw a little blond kid on the beach today kicking a ball and he suddenly thought of Leon. “Any time I see kids with curly blond hair, automatically it brings back the memory.” (Marc adds that his son Jordan has just gone to Ibiza on holiday and he finds himself getting anxious. “If anything happened to him, it would absolutely break me. I couldn’t hack it.”)
Asked how he kept going after it happened, Marc says he had no other choice. He had four other children that depended on him. “We were heading towards a recession in Spain. Business was dropping. So I had to look out for my other kids.”
“Leon would have now...” Marc breaks off, going into that place in his head, his soul, once more. “Leon would have been 15 this Christmas.
“His death is something you are never going to get over,” he continues. “It’s 13 years ago. But it feels like yesterday sometimes. Jordan is never going to forget it. It was very hard for him because it was his little brother. It is very painful for Jordan, as it is for all of us, chief among them, their mother, Lynn,” Marc says in reference to his ex-wife.
“Lynn takes it a little worse than I do, but we all suffer with it, with the memory. I buried myself in projects.”
I ask Marc if he has buried himself in work, how has he dealt with Leon’s death?
“I have dealt with it in my own time. I didn’t grieve the way people expected me to grieve. I grieve in my own way, in my own time, when I was alone. I grieved for years after. I was breaking down crying, to be honest with you.”
Lynn and Marc, who were married in March 1999, at the Good Shepherd in Churchtown, separated five years ago, and are now divorced. “Leon’s death didn’t help Lynn’s and my marriage. It didn’t help the situation. Lynn was very emotional. I was away from the house a lot, with work. I’m sure that didn’t help the situation either, you know? Lynn is a fantastic woman.
“Any woman, any mother, to get through losing a kid is a fantastic woman. She is a strong, good woman and sadly it just wasn’t to be between us in the end. I bought her a hair salon. So she is out of this business. She is not in the restaurant business any more. I am still close to Lynn. We are still friends.”
When I interviewed them three years after Leon died, they were ghost-like beings. “Leon had a small gash on his head,” Marc said to me, all those years ago. “I taught all my kids to swim, and I know myself that Leon would have been able to swim to the edge of that pool if he hadn’t had that nappy on him. He must have banged his head but it was the nappy that pulled him down.”
He added that Leon was rushed to hospital and then on the Tuesday he was moved from the Costa Del Sol Hospital to the Children’s Hospital in Malaga, where he was put on life support. The hospital did a brain scan. Marc and Lynn knew from the results of the brain scan that nothing was going to bring Leon back. On July 1, they made the decision to turn the life-support machine off and to donate Leon’s organs — his heart, lungs and kidneys.
“He was a very bright kid. He could have a full conversation with you. I still say we have five kids, all of them different in their own little ways, but this particular guy got to people without even trying. Leon was naturally drawn to people,” Lynn remembered fondly when I spoke to Marc and herself in 2007. She said that Leon had such striking long blond hair, unusual in Spain, that people would often say to her to be careful because “that guy’s going to be taken on you because he’s so chatty and friendly. I was starting to get paranoid, so many people said it to me. The night of his accident, I actually thought somebody had taken Leon.”
What happened to Leon was, that day Marc was at work in Becketts, the Quinlan family had been at the beach and Leon was ready for bed. He was lying on the couch when Lynn went upstairs to put the youngest child Kai — then aged one — to bed. When Lynn, who at the time was pregnant with daughter Abby, came back downstairs, Leon was gone, having somehow squeezed under the shutter on the back window, and towards the pool. There were still kids playing in the complex. And Lynn could hear their voices. At first, Lynn thought Leon was playing with them. She ran around, calling his name. Lynn got no reply.
“I know myself he didn’t get into that pool. Something happened. He fell in. And the nappy held him down,” Lynn told me in July 2007.
Last week over lunch in his other restaurant in Marbella, The Playwright, Marc Quinlan remembered how his father Daniel wanted him to become a docker like him and his grandfather before him. “Da handed me his docker’s button when I was 18. I said to him: ‘You’re mad.’
“My grandfather’s nickname was Losther because when he would tie the boats up, the boats would move away and he would shout out: ‘Oh f***, I’ve lost her!’”
Born June 4, 1971, Marc Quinlan is something of a character — equal parts mischievous fun-merchant with a wicked glint in his eye and chin-stroking existentialist-cum-mad-eyed philosopher; a Finglas Rimbaud never far from laughter, or, on occasion, the shadows.
He has lived in Spain for 13 years, yet has no hesitation in saying: “I love everything about Spain except the Spanish. I am joking! That’s a joke!
“They will screw you to your last penny and stab you in the back.”
His mother Marie got Marc a job in The Maples Hotel in Glasnevin at the weekends doing breakfast for free when he was 14. “Then they offered me a job,” he recalls, “and she kept pushing me.”
Did he inherit the flair for cooking from his mother?
“No,” he laughs, “she will burn water. My dad has a flair for cooking.”
Why did his mother want him to become a chef ? What did she see in him that she thought he would like to work with food?
“I loved cooking from a very young age. I used to cook for my mother and father all the time. Also, a chef was a great trade to have and very hard to get into before you were 18. I was qualified at 19. I lied about my age in college.”
Years later, he was cooking for Bono at the Clarence Hotel. “Bono always used to come in to thank us all in the kitchen. He was a great guy.”
Thirteen years ago, after realising that the Italian restaurant in Clonee he and Lynn had opened was “never going to make any money in Ireland despite working all the hours in the day”, they decided to move to Spain with their young family and seek out their fortune in Marbs.
The burning ambition to make as much of himself as he could came, he says, from seeing his mother and father “struggling in the 1980s — when the docks were on strike and there was no money coming into the house”.
“My dad is a great man. I have learned a lot from him,” Marc says, referring to respect and manners. “My dad always said to shake a man’s hand firmly and to walk with your back straight. I say the same to my kids.
“Yes, we went through some hard times but it also a great childhood growing up. I was always in trouble on the road, just messing, you know?” says Marc, who grew up on Deanstown Park in Finglas with two sisters (an older one, Linda, and a younger one, Lorraine).
This “messing” almost morphed into something of an economic necessity at one point when Marc was a pseudo-Dickensian roué of just
‘I grieved for years after Leon’s death. I was breaking down crying when the restaurant doors closed at night’
12 years of age. He doesn’t seem to mind that the story doesn’t exactly paint him in the most flattering of lights. (I have a theory about Marc that ever since Leon died he doesn’t care what the world or its inhabitants think of him.)
“When things were really tough in the house, my mam would say to me: ‘Go out and get a job’. ‘Doing what?’ She would say cut grass or clean windows or something like that. I told her every kid in Finglas was doing that and there was not a good ratio of windows to kids. She said ‘Use your imagination’. So I called to my mate Willie’s house and I said: ‘Willie, we need to set up a business’. I had an idea.”
With sister Linda’s Confirmation money to help (“She has always invested in me — she still does”), Marc and Willie pooled enough money to buy a second-hand ladder from the market. Marc told Willie they were going to clean gutters because none of the other kids’ ladders would reach to the roofs in Finglas.
“Then we went to the old reliable neighbours who would feel sorry for us and never say no, knocked at their door and asked ‘Would you like your gutters cleaned?’ They would not say no because they knew my dad was on strike.
“Then Willie and I would collect a bag of dirt off the street, stick it in our jackets and sit on the roof, smoking cigarettes. Then after a hour we come down and show the bag of dirt to the neighbour and tell her she should have it cleaned more often.
“So she told us to come back every month and so did all the other people. We had a sweet little business. We had 27 customers every month at £2. Who is going to check? Also the gutters in Ireland are not dirty with so much rain. I never cleaned one gutter!”
Marc lives in a four-bedroomed penthouse in Marbella with his beautiful wife-to-be Penny Caradas. If he does not clean gutters, is he a whizz with the hoover at home?
“I have a cleaning woman who does all that for me,” he smiles. “I don’t have time to clean up! I never have a moment that isn’t devoured by work.”
This is because he is running two successful restaurants in Marbella (Becketts and The Playwright), plus he has just opened two multi-million dollar restaurants in Batumi, Georgia (The Brandy Club and Lizzaran). He is jumping on a plane to fly out to Georgia straight after our lunch. On top of also opening a beach restaurant in Marbella in September, Marc is also heavily involved in another project somewhat closer to his heart: that of his wedding to Penny on May 13 at Estrella Del Mar Beach Club.
“I love Penny so much it is hard to put into words. I really can’t wait to call her my wife. I miss her when I go away for work, or when she is at work herself.” (Marc doesn’t have to go far to remind himself of what Penny looks like as there is a giant, framed portrait of Penny downstairs in Becketts.) “There is no one like her. She is so special.”
As if on cue, Penny arrives, and joins us for lunch. “I love him to bits,” she says when she sits down. She does admit, however, that when she first met him she had her doubts. In fact, she thought he was a bit of “an arsehole”.
Marc, ever mischievous, says with a laugh: “Still am!”
Penny’s sister Kara knew Marc. She informed Penny that he came with a bit of a reputation for the nightlife. Or, to be precise, the enjoyment of it.
“At first he used to come into our restaurant [Sala] every day for breakfast or for his meetings. He has great banter so I was often amused by him,” Penny remembers.
“One Sunday, he came in while I was working with a few friends and said let’s go for drinks so I gave him my number. A few days later he was stuck at the airport with a seven-hour delay, he messaged me and I kept him amused. We arranged to meet when he got back.”
Their first date started at the Trocadero beach club where they sunbathed, drank cocktails and talked for hours, laughing the whole time. “We had planned to go to dinner at The Playwright. So I was going to go home and change but Marc said just come to mine and change on the way. I told him I had nothing to wear. So he bought me a dress off a man selling dresses on the beach and said: ‘Wear this’. “So I did and we went to the Playwright that evening and had a great night. We truly just clicked. Jordan, Marc’s eldest son, says he has found his match. I am a female version of Marc.”
The story of how Marc proposed to Penny is just as dramatic. It was Christmas Day 2015. “I woke up a bit pissed off that I had to go to work. Marc says now he had the ring under his pillow but because I was in bad humour he thought he wouldn’t do it then. Anyway, Marc went round to see his kids and I went off to work.
“About 11am, Marc and his youngest son Kai came in to see me with some gifts. Marc then went to work himself and sent me a gift every hour on the hour until 5pm when I went up to Becketts.
“All my family were there, as were Marc’s kids. We were all enjoying the celebrations but Marc seemed a bit quiet and weird. And Marc is never quiet! Anyway, as we were all sitting together Marc turns to me and says: ‘I have one more present for you’... he takes out the ring and said: ‘I love you to bits and I want you to marry me’.”
After all Marc went through with Leon’s tragic death, finding peace with Penny must be a source of comfort.