I met her at mile nine, just after the long green hush of Phoenix Park, when my left calf had begun to tighten and my confidence had slipped somewhere behind me on the road. She was wearing a purple running top, her hair plaited badly, like she had done it in a rush, and she was laughing at a man dressed as a banana who had overtaken us with alarming dignity.
“If a banana beats me,” she said, “I’m emigrating.”
I laughed too loudly because I was grateful for anything that pulled me out of my own head. I was thirty-eight, married twelve years, father of two, running the Dublin Marathon for a charity I had chosen because my mother died of cancer and I didn’t know what else to do with the grief. My wife, Aoife, had kissed me that morning near Merrion Square and told me she was proud of me. I remember feeling almost annoyed by her kindness, which is a terrible thing to admit. We had become polite with each other, and politeness can be colder than anger.
The woman’s name was Sinead. She was running for her brother, who had come through a dark year and was waiting somewhere near Terenure with a sign. We fell into pace together as if we had practised it. We talked about music, bad knees, the cruelty of oranges at water stations, and the strange intimacy of running beside strangers while the city opened its front doors and cheered.
At mile eighteen, on the climb, I nearly stopped. Sinead slowed down with me and said, “Walk thirty seconds. Then we start again. Don’t make a religion out of suffering.”
That sentence stayed with me longer than the medal.
We crossed the finish line within minutes of each other, both ruined, both crying in that foolish, helpless way people cry after they’ve asked too much of their bodies. She hugged me at the barrier near Merrion Square. It was meant to be nothing. Sweat, foil blankets, relief. But I felt something in that hug I hadn’t felt in years: not passion exactly, but being seen before I had arranged my face.
We exchanged numbers “for the photos.” That was the lie we told ourselves first.
The messages started harmlessly. Stairs are evil. My toenails may resign. Did the banana finish before you? Then longer messages. Then voice notes. Then we met for coffee near Grand Canal Dock, both saying we had only half an hour. We stayed two and a half. She was married too, no children, a teacher in Rathmines. She said her husband was a good man but they had become housemates with a mortgage. I said the same about Aoife, except I dressed it up with nicer words.
The affair began in November, in a small hotel off Harcourt Street, after we had walked around St Stephen’s Green three times pretending we were deciding not to. I wish I could say it was only physical, because that would make it easier to condemn and file away. But it was worse than that. It was tender. We told each other the truth with the carelessness of people who did not have to live inside each other’s ordinary days.
For four months, Dublin became a map of excuses. A drink in Kehoe’s. A sandwich in Portobello. A run along the canal when neither of us was training for anything except escape. I became a better liar and a
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