I had not spoken to Maeve in nearly two years when she arrived at St James’s Hospital carrying my old navy scarf and a paper cup of tea I hadn’t asked for, milk first, no sugar. That was the part that undid me. Not the broken wrist, not the blood dried along my eyebrow, not the embarrassment of coming off my bicycle on the Grand Canal like a man who had forgotten how gravity worked. It was the tea.
We had been divorced for three years by then. Civilly, as people like to say when they mean coldly. No children, no dramatic betrayals, just a slow wearing away of kindness. We had lived in Rathmines above a bakery, and for the first few years the smell of warm bread came through the floorboards every morning and made us feel richer than we were. By the end, I remember lying awake beside her, listening to buses sigh at the stop outside, feeling lonelier than I had ever felt alone.
After we split, I told everyone I was relieved. I said it in pubs, in work, over pints in Grogan’s and outside places on Camden Street when someone asked too gently how I was getting on. I became very good at the story of being grand. I dated a little. I bought nicer runners. I learned to cook one decent pasta dish and called it growth. If anyone mentioned Maeve, I gave a small shrug, the kind men mistake for maturity.
The accident happened on a wet Thursday in November. I had stayed late in the office and cycled home along the canal, annoyed at nothing in particular. Near Portobello, a taxi pulled in, I swerved, the wheel caught the slick edge of the path, and I went down hard. I remember the orange reflection of a streetlamp trembling in the water. I remember a woman saying, “Don’t move yet, love.” My phone screen was cracked, but my emergency contact still worked.
Of course, I had forgotten to change it.
When the nurse told me my wife was on the way, I almost laughed. “Ex-wife,” I said, because even dazed I was apparently committed to accuracy. Then panic set in. I imagined Maeve irritated, interrupted, dragged across Dublin for a man she had already done the hard work of leaving. I imagined her new life, which I knew nothing about, being punctured by my name on a stranger’s phone.
She came in wearing a green raincoat I recognised immediately. Her hair was shorter. There were fine lines near her eyes that had not been there when we were thirty, or maybe I had stopped looking closely long before then. She stood at the end of the bed and said, “You look ridiculous.”
I said, “You came.”
“You’re still incapable of updating forms.”
For a moment, it was us again. Not married us, not even happy us, but some older, stranger version that still knew the shape of the room when the other person entered it. She handed me the tea. My good hand shook when I took it.
We talked while waiting for the X-ray results. At first, we kept to safe ground. Work. Her mother’s hip. The rent in Rathmines getting worse, which somehow felt personal, as if the neighbourhood had betrayed our old selves. Then the silences grew less frightening. She told me she had moved to Clontarf and had started swimming at Dollymount, even in winter. I told her I sometimes walked through St Stephen’s Green on Sundays because the quiet there made me feel less accused by my own flat.
She smiled at that, but sadly. “You always thought quiet meant something
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
