I met Martin outside St. James’s Hospital on a wet Tuesday morning when Dublin looked like it had been rinsed and left on the line too long. I had just finished my second round of chemotherapy, and I was standing under the little shelter near the entrance with a paper bag of medicines in one hand and my phone in the other, trying to convince myself I was strong enough to get the Luas home.
I wasn’t. My legs had that hollow, trembling feeling, like they belonged to someone older and more frightened than me. I pressed the taxi app twice and cancelled it twice because the fare to Raheny felt like a luxury I had no right to spend money on. Then a black taxi pulled up, not one I had ordered, and the driver leaned across the passenger seat and rolled down the window.
“You look like you’re negotiating with the rain,” he said. “Where are you headed?”
I told him I was grand, because that is what we say in Dublin when we are anything but grand. He smiled, not pitying me, not fussing, just waiting. He was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, with silver hair and a face that looked as if it had been softened by years of listening.
“Raheny,” I admitted.
“Hop in so. I’m going that way.”
He wasn’t, of course. I learned that later.
Inside the taxi, there was a small wooden rosary hanging from the mirror, a packet of mints in the cup holder, and a faint smell of coffee. He had the heat turned up before I even asked. We passed the Guinness Storehouse, the quays shining black beside the Liffey, and for a while neither of us spoke. It was the kindest silence I had experienced in months.
Cancer makes people talk strangely around you. They either become too cheerful, as if positivity is a medicine you have forgotten to take, or they lower their voices like you are already halfway gone. Martin did neither. He asked if I wanted the radio on. I said no. He said no problem. That was all.
When we reached my flat, the meter said €34.60. I had my card out before he pulled up.
“Put that away,” he said.
I thought he meant the card machine was broken. “I have cash inside if you wait.”
“No. I mean put it away. I don’t take money from anyone coming from cancer treatment.”
I stared at him, embarrassed suddenly, as if I had been caught being unwell in public. “You can’t do that,” I said. “You don’t even know me.”
“I don’t need to know you.”
There was no performance in it. No grand speech. Just a rule he had made for himself and lived by quietly.
I tried to argue, because pride is sometimes the last coat we keep on. He shook his head and pointed toward my door. “Go in. Put the kettle on. Rest. That’s your job today.”
Before I closed the door, he handed me a card with his number written on it. “If you’re stuck after treatment, ring me. If I can’t come, I’ll find someone who can.”
I cried in my kitchen before I made the tea.
Over the next six months, Martin drove me to and from St. James’s more times than I can count. Sometimes he collected another patient first, an old man from Crumlin who always wore a flat cap and called everyone “boss.” Sometimes there was a woman from Ballyfermot who brought boiled sweets and insisted I take the lemon ones because she hated them. Martin never made us feel like charity cases. In his taxi, we were just people with appointments, bad stomachs, scanxiety, and places to be.
One morning, when traffic was crawling near Heuston Station, I finally asked him why he did it. He kept his eyes on the road for a long moment.
“My wife, Eileen,” he said. “Breast cancer. Years ago now.”
He told me they used to live near Fairview Park, and when she was sick, he was working nights. Some days she had
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