I met Niamh in the queue outside a tiny café near Dublin Castle, both of us pretending the rain was only a passing thing when it had clearly settled in for the day. I was twenty-six, newly arrived from Mayo, working in a job I didn’t like and renting a room in Rathmines where the radiator sounded like it was trying to speak. She was behind me, holding a broken umbrella and laughing at herself. When the barista asked for her name, she said, “Niamh, like every third girl in Ireland,” and I smiled before I knew I was doing it.
We became friends slowly, the way people do in Dublin when neither wants to seem too eager. Lunches near George’s Street. Pints in The Long Hall when we both claimed we were only staying for one. Walks along the Grand Canal where she would point out her favourite houses and invent lives for the people inside them. She never flirted in any obvious way. She never said anything that could be held up in court as proof. But she noticed everything. If I had a bad day, a packet of Tayto appeared on my desk. If my mother was in hospital, Niamh remembered the date of every appointment. When I said I missed the sea, she dragged me onto the DART to Sandymount and made me stand there in the wind until I admitted I felt better.
I was too frightened to call it love. I had grown up in a house where love was mostly practical: lifts to matches, money left on the kitchen table, silence after arguments. Niamh’s kind of care unsettled me because it was gentle and constant, and I didn’t trust anything gentle to last. So I kept her at a safe distance. I dated other people badly. I told her about them, which I now know was a small cruelty dressed up as honesty. She listened, asked questions, and never once made me feel ashamed. Sometimes her face changed for half a second, like a curtain moving in an empty room, but then she would smile and ask if I wanted another coffee.
The incident I remember most happened the winter I lost my job. It was just before Christmas, and Dublin was lit up in that beautiful, punishing way it has, all gold shop windows and people carrying bags they could barely afford. I walked out of the office on Harcourt Street with a cardboard box and the kind of fear that makes the city look unfamiliar. I didn’t ring anyone. I went to St Stephen’s Green and sat on a wet bench like an eejit, watching the ducks move across the dark water.
Niamh found me there because, apparently, I always disappeared to parks when I was upset. She had left a work dinner to come looking. She sat beside me without asking what happened. For a while we said nothing. Then she took off her scarf and wrapped it around my neck, though she was shivering herself. “You’ll get pneumonia and then you’ll be unemployed and dramatic,” she said.
I laughed because she gave me permission to. Then I cried, which I had not done even when my manager was giving me the speech about restructuring. Niamh didn’t hug me straight away. She waited until I leaned toward her. That was her way. She never took what wasn’t offered.
Afterwards, she brought me to a chipper near Camden Street and paid before I could pretend I had money. On the walk home, she told me she had accepted a job in Copenhagen. She said it lightly, as if she were mentioning a new haircut. Three weeks, she said. She’d be gone in three weeks.
I felt the news land somewhere deep in me, but I acted pleased. I congratulated her. I said it was
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