It happened on a wet Thursday in November, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and wait for you to walk through it. I had met Aoife after work near Camden Street, where we’d been saying for months that we should “properly catch up” and then never doing it. We ended up in Whelan’s, not for a gig, just for shelter, pints, and the comfort of being somewhere noisy enough to excuse the things we weren’t brave enough to say.
We had known each other since college. Back then, she had a green coat, a laugh that arrived before the joke was finished, and a habit of making everyone feel as if they had been chosen. I was in love with her in the quietest possible way. Not dramatically. Not the sort of love that makes you write songs or start fights. More like a small lamp left on in a room I rarely entered. I dated other people. She dated other people. We became close in that Dublin way where you can share secrets on the Luas and then pretend you’re grand in the Centra queue the next morning.
That night we talked about everything except us. Her job in a charity office near Dublin city centre, my mother’s health, the ridiculous rent, the friends who had moved to London and sent back photographs of brighter kitchens. She told me she had broken up with Mark, finally, after two years of almost leaving. I tried to look sympathetic and not relieved. I told her I was sorry. She said, “Don’t be. I think I was lonely with him in a way I’m not lonely on my own.”
There was a moment after she said it when the pub seemed to lean away from us. I could have said something then. I could have told her that I knew exactly what she meant, that I had been lonely beside nearly everyone except her. Instead, I lifted my glass and made some stupid comment about how at least she wouldn’t have to pretend to like his friends anymore. She laughed, but softly. I still remember that laugh because it had a door in it, and I stood outside.
We left after midnight. The rain had thickened, and Camden Street shone black under the streetlights. Neither of us wanted the night to end, but neither of us would admit that either. We walked towards St Stephen’s Green under my broken umbrella, shoulder to shoulder, pretending it was practical to stand that close. Her hair smelled faintly of smoke and shampoo. At one point her hand brushed mine, and we both apologised, as if our bodies had made a social error.
Her flat was in Rathmines, and mine was in Phibsborough. I missed the last bus because I had walked her home. She said, “Don’t be daft, stay here. The couch is a crime against the spine, but you’re welcome to it.” The couch really was terrible. It sagged in the middle like it had given up during the recession. She brought me a duvet and made tea neither of us wanted. Then the heating clicked off, and the flat turned cold in that old Dublin way, the cold that feels personal.
“You’ll freeze out there,” she said from the bedroom door. “Just sleep in here. We’re adults.”
I laughed because adults were exactly what we were failing to be. Her bed was small, pushed against the wall, with one pillow too many and a pile of books on the floor. I changed into a T-shirt she gave me from some charity run she’d never done. She wore flannel pyjamas and took off her earrings in the mirror. It was painfully ordinary, which made it worse.
We lay on our backs in the dark, separated by a strip of sheet as narrow and serious as a border. The rain tapped the window. Somewhere outside, a taxi slowed, then moved on. I could hear her breathing. I could hear myself trying not to breathe too loudly. She asked if I was awake, and I said yes. She said, “Do you ever think we missed something?”
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