I first noticed him outside the Mater on a wet Friday in November, when the rain was coming down sideways over Eccles Street and everyone looked like they were carrying bad news under their coats. I was there to see my father, who had been admitted with a heart infection that sounded manageable when the consultant said it, and terrifying when I Googled it later on the bus back to Dublin city centre.
The musician stood near the hospital entrance with a guitar case open at his feet, not in the way of anyone, just close enough that you had to pass through the song before you went inside. He was older, maybe late sixties, with a navy cap and a face that looked kind even when he wasn’t smiling. That first day he was playing Raglan Road. I remember being annoyed by it. I thought, who plays music outside a hospital, of all places? People were going in to receive results, to say goodbye, to wait for operations. I wanted silence. I wanted the world to show a bit of respect for how frightened I was.
My father heard him too. His bed was on a ward where the windows only opened a crack, but sound still found its way in. “Is that a fella singing?” he asked. I said it was. “Good voice?” he said. I told him it was grand, because in our family grand meant anything from terrible to beautiful. My father closed his eyes. “I used to sing that to your mother after two pints in McGowans,” he said, and for the first time that week, he looked less like a patient and more like himself.
After that, Fridays became measured by the musician. My dad’s illness didn’t move in a straight line. Some mornings he was joking with nurses, asking if the tea had been strained through a sock. Other mornings he was grey with tiredness, too weak to lift the plastic cup to his mouth. But on Fridays, if the musician was outside, my father listened. Sometimes it was The Parting Glass, sometimes Dirty Old Town, sometimes songs I didn’t know but felt I had known somewhere before, maybe from kitchens after funerals or buses passing through <a href
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