The playground burned on a Tuesday night, just after the rain had stopped and the streets around Portland Row were shining under the lamps. I remember the smell most of all, that sour plastic smoke drifting over the flats and into our kitchen while I was making toast for my daughter’s supper. By the time we got downstairs, the swings were black ropes, the little slide had folded in on itself, and the climbing frame looked like the bones of something small that had died.
It was not a grand playground. No tourist would have photographed it on their way to Dublin city centre. It had two benches, a patch of rubber matting, and a mural painted by children who had long since grown into teenagers. But for us it was the place where parents caught their breath between jobs, where children learned to share, where lonely older people sat with shopping bags and pretended they were only resting. My daughter, Nia, was six then, and she cried as if someone had burned down her bedroom.
For weeks afterwards, the council tape flapped in the wind. People were angry at first, then tired. There were rumours about who did it, the usual talk that rises up when a community is hurt and nobody knows where to put the pain. I heard people say the area was gone to the dogs. I said it myself once, and an older man standing near the railings looked at me in a way that made me feel small.
His name was Martin Kavanagh. I knew him only as the man from the end block who walked with a limp and carried his groceries in an old SuperValu bag. He had a face that seemed permanently weathered, like he had spent too many years waiting at bus stops. He never joined in much. If you said hello, he nodded. If children ran past him, he stepped aside. That was all.
One Saturday morning, about a month after the fire, I came down early to bring Nia to swimming near Parnell Square. Martin was inside the taped-off playground with a broom. He had rolled up his sleeves and was sweeping ash into neat little piles. I called over that he shouldn’t be in there, that it might not be safe. He didn’t look up. “It’s not safe because it’s been left,” he said.
After that, I began noticing him everywhere. He was there after work with gloves on, pulling melted plastic from the ground. He was there on Sunday with a borrowed drill. He was there in the evenings, long after the children had gone in, measuring timber with a pencil tucked behind his ear. I assumed he had been sent by someone, but when I asked around, nobody knew anything. The council said repairs were pending. The housing office said assessments were ongoing. Martin said nothing at all.
One evening I brought him a flask of tea. He accepted it like I had handed him a legal document. He sat on the low wall, both hands around the cup, and for the first time he spoke more than a sentence to me. He told me he had been a carpenter before his back went. He had worked on sites from Ringsend to Cabra, then spent years doing odd jobs until pain and pride pushed him indoors. He had a son once, he said, who loved that playground. The boy had died at nineteen, not dramatically, not in a way people write songs about, but from an infection that turned too quickly and was missed until it was too late.
“He used to sit on that swing even when he was too big for it,” Martin said. “Feet dragging along the ground like a fool.” He smiled, but only for a second. “When I saw it burned, I thought, there’s another thing gone that remembers him.”
I did not know what to say, so I said the useless thing. I said I was sorry. He nodded as if sorry was a weather condition he had learned to live under.
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
