I met Aisling on a wet Thursday evening outside St Stephen’s Green, though “met” is too grand a word for what happened at first. I was standing under the trees by the Fusiliers’ Arch with my coat soaked through, watching buses hiss past like they had somewhere better to be. I had been in Dublin eight months by then, working in a kitchen near Camden Street, sleeping in a box room in Ranelagh, and pretending to my mother in Donegal that I was grand. I was not grand. My father had died the previous winter, my girlfriend had left in April, and that morning my manager had told me there would be no more shifts after Sunday. I remember thinking that Dublin could be very full of people and still leave you feeling like the last person alive.
I had walked for hours with no aim. Down Grafton Street, past the buskers, across Trinity, along the Liffey, then back again as the rain turned the evening silver. I had not eaten since breakfast. My phone was dead. In my pocket was a ticket for the last bus out of the city, though I had no idea where I meant to go. I only knew I wanted to vanish from the life I had made such a mess of. That is when she came running out of the rain with one shoe in her hand, laughing as if the weather had told her a private joke.
She stopped beside me because the heel of her shoe had snapped clean off. She was wearing a navy dress under a huge green raincoat, and her hair was stuck to her face. “You wouldn’t happen to be an engineer, would you?” she asked. I said no. She said, “That’s a pity. I’d have settled for a magician.” I should have walked away. Instead, because her smile made it rude not to, I looked at the shoe and told her the heel was finished. “So am I,” she said, and then she started laughing again.
She was due at her sister’s engagement party in The Long Hall and refused to arrive barefoot because, in her words, her family would “turn it into folklore.” There was a small newsagent nearby, and I suggested tape. We went in, dripping all over the floor, and bought a roll of black electrical tape from a man who did not seem surprised by anything Dublin produced. I sat on the low wall outside the Green, wrapped the heel as tightly as I could, and handed it back to her. It was ugly work, but it held.
She asked my name. I told her. She said, “I’m Aisling. You’ve saved my dignity, Conor.” I nearly laughed at that, because the truth was the other way around. For ten minutes I had not been thinking about leaving, or failing, or the heavy dark place in my chest. I had been thinking about a broken shoe and a stranger’s party and whether black tape could pass in a dim pub.
She insisted on buying me a drink as payment. I said no twice, then followed her anyway because I had nowhere else to go and because she spoke to me as if I was expected. The party was upstairs, warm and loud, smelling of perfume, stout, and wet coats. She introduced me as “the cobbler of Stephen’s Green,” and nobody questioned it. Someone put a pint of Guinness in my hand. Her sister hugged me. Her uncle told me a long story about losing a shoe at Croke Park in 1982. I stood there among strangers and felt, for the first time in months, not happy exactly, but held.
Near midnight, Aisling found me on the stairs, where I had gone to escape the noise. She
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