I first heard her voice through the wall on a wet Saturday in Phibsborough. I had moved into a small flat near the canal after my marriage ended, and I was living the way people live when they are embarrassed by their own sadness: quietly, with the curtains half closed, making tea I forgot to drink. Every weekend, at eleven in the morning, a woman in the flat beside mine began reading aloud. Not talking on the phone, not watching the radio too loud, but reading. Her voice was low and warm, with that Dublin softness that makes even bad news sound like it might be survived.
At first, I was annoyed. I was tired and wanted silence. Then I noticed she wasn’t reading for herself. There were pauses, laughter, questions from other voices. One voice belonged to an older man who always asked her to go back a line. Another was a woman who said, “Ah, that’s lovely,” whenever a sentence pleased her. After three Saturdays of listening through plasterboard, I met my neighbour on the stairs. She was carrying a canvas bag full of books, and she apologised before I said anything. “I hope we’re not driving you mad,” she said. “I read to a few neighbours who can’t see well anymore. We do it here because my kettle is the least temperamental.”
Her name was Maura. She was in her late sixties, widowed, with silver hair pinned up like she had somewhere grand to go, though she was usually only going to the shop on North Circular Road. She told me she had started reading to one blind neighbour during the pandemic, then another heard about it, then another. By the time I met her, five people came every Saturday and Sunday. They listened to novels, poems, death notices, letters from grandchildren, menus for places they would never visit, and sometimes old articles about Dublin just to argue over what had changed.
One morning she knocked on my door in a panic. Her throat was gone. She could barely whisper, and the group were already on their way. I had no good excuse prepared, so I said yes when she asked if I would read for twenty minutes until someone else arrived. I remember standing in her sitting room, holding a copy of The Country Girls, with four blind people sitting around a small table and one man, Seán, folding and unfolding his walking stick. The room smelled of toast, furniture polish, and raincoats drying near the radiator.
I read badly at first. Too fast. Too careful. I was aware of my own voice in a way that made me dislike it. Maura sat beside me with a scarf around her neck and tapped my knee whenever I rushed. After a few pages, the room settled. Seán smiled at a line before I understood it myself. A woman called Bridie corrected my pronunciation of a place in Mayo with such authority that everyone laughed. Another man, Patrick, who had been silent, asked if I could describe the cover of the book. I said it was orange and cream, with a young woman looking away. He nodded and said, “Looking away is half of Irish literature.” That was the first time I laughed properly in months.
Twenty minutes became two hours. Nobody came to replace me because Maura had forgotten to ring anyone else. When the chapter ended, nobody moved. Outside, the rain had stopped, and a thin light was lying across the windowsill. Maura made tea by whispering instructions at me like a general with laryngitis. I poured milk into the sugar bowl, dropped a spoon, and somehow the world did not collapse.
After that, I went every Saturday. We read books from ILAC Library, second-hand paperbacks from Chapters, and occasionally
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