I met Niamh on a wet Thursday outside the Luas stop at Smithfield, both of us standing under the same broken umbrella like two eejits pretending it was doing any good. She laughed first. That was how most things began with her. A laugh, then a question, then suddenly you were telling her the truth about yourself before you had decided if you trusted her.
We were together for four years. We lived in a small flat in Stoneybatter, above a barber who played the radio too loudly on Saturdays. She worked in a pharmacy near Phibsborough, and I did accounts for a builders’ supplier out near Ballymount. We were ordinary in the way I used to think meant safe. Friday pints in The Cobblestone, Sunday walks along the Grand Canal, arguing gently over whether to spend money on a holiday or save for a mortgage deposit we both called “the imaginary house.”
The trouble started when I lost my job. I was thirty-two and too proud to say the words out loud. I left the flat every morning in my shirt and coat, kissed her on the forehead, and went to the Central Library or sat in cafés on Capel Street applying for jobs I didn’t want and getting silence back. I told myself I was protecting her from worry. That was the first lie, and it was the one that made the rest feel possible.
For nearly three months I pretended everything was normal. I used our savings to cover rent and bills. Then I used more of it. Then, in a panic I still feel ashamed to remember, I took money from the account we had opened for the house deposit. It wasn’t a fortune to some people, but to us it was years of packed lunches, skipped taxis, and saying no to nights out. I kept thinking I would replace it before she noticed. I got interviews. I got close. I got nothing.
She found out on a Tuesday evening. I came home to our flat quiet in a way I had never heard it before. No kettle, no radio, no Niamh singing badly while chopping onions. She was sitting at the little kitchen table with the laptop open and the bank statement on the screen. Her face wasn’t angry at first. That was worse. She looked like someone who had been shown a photograph of a place she loved after it had burned down.
I told her everything then, but the truth arrived too late to be brave. I told her about the job, the applications, the mornings I had walked around Dublin in the rain because I couldn’t bear to come home early. I told her I had meant to fix it. She listened without interrupting. When I finished, she asked one question: “Did you let me talk about our future while you knew you were spending it?”
I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t another kind of cruelty.
For two weeks we tried to continue. I got a temporary job through a friend, stacking invoices in an office near Pearse Street. I came home with flowers from the Spar on Manor Street. I cooked. I apologised until the words became small and useless. Niamh didn’t punish me. She still asked if I had eaten. She still put a blanket over me when I fell asleep on the sofa. Once, after I broke down in the bathroom, she sat outside the door and said, “I do love you. That’s the awful part.”
But love was not the same as trust. I learned that slowly, then all at once.
The end came in Phoenix Park, near the Wellington Monument. We had gone for a walk because the flat had become too full of unsaid things. It was late autumn, and the leaves were stuck to the paths like old letters. Niamh held my hand for most of the walk, which gave me hope I didn’t deserve. Then she stopped beside a bench and told me she had arranged to stay with her sister in Rathmines for a while.
I said I would pay it all back.
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
