A Dublin man keeps his distance from the woman he loves out of loyalty, until years later an honest conversation changes both their lives.
I first saw Niamh Byrne in the doorway of Grogan’s on a wet Thursday evening, shaking rain from her hair like a dog and laughing as if the whole city had been built for her amusement. She was wearing a green coat with one missing button and carrying a paper bag from George’s Street Arcade that had gone soft at the corners. Beside her stood my best friend, Liam, his hand resting lightly on the small of her back.
‘Cian,’ he said, grinning, ‘this is Niamh. Be nice. I like this one.’
That was the first warning, and I heard it clearly. In our twenties, Liam liked plenty of people for the length of a song, a summer, a cheap lease. But he said this one as if he had found something rare in the clutter of Dublin, something he intended to keep.
Niamh put out her hand. Her palm was cold from the rain. ‘He has told me absolutely nothing about you, which means you are either very boring or very important.’
‘Both,’ I said.
She smiled, and there it was: the small catastrophe of my life, arriving without music, without permission.
Back then I was working in a bookshop off Dawson Street and renting a damp room in Rathmines where the windows cried every morning. Liam and I had known each other since school in Drumcondra. He was the boy who could talk his way into parties and out of trouble. I was the one who held his jacket, minded his keys, remembered the last Luas home. Our friendship was old enough to feel like family, and family, I believed, was something you did not betray.
So I put Niamh in the locked room of my heart and pretended not to hear her moving around in there.
For two years we became a trio. We drank in Kehoe’s when the wages allowed and in smaller, stickier places when they did not. We queued outside Whelan’s in the cold, ate chips on Camden Street, wandered through St Stephen’s Green on lunch breaks when Niamh had interviews near Harcourt Street. She wanted to be a set designer and had a talent for making ordinary rooms look as if secrets had happened in them. Liam loved this about her, though he often forgot to ask what she was working on.
I remembered. I remembered everything.
