As It Began

We met in late 2005 at a Christmas party for a Network Club that both of us had joined early that year. The great thing about The Network Club was that we didn't have to get into any small talk. You sat on a high stool in the Beazen Head. When I said this you turned around: 

"What do you mean by small talk," you said.

I was intrigued. I like her, I thought.

We spent most of 2006 in the pub and in the bed. We were everything to each other or so I thought. If we were young and anyone ever said.

“Where's Margaret? She’s down in Barry’s,” would have been the answer. 

Or, if you ever wondered where Barry was you’d be told: 

“Oh, he’s down with Margaret.” 

But we weren’t young. We were in our late thirties and had lived a lot. It was all great but it wouldn't last.

We had many love affairs behind us. We never spoke of them. We were starting afresh. In 2007 we bought a house in Dublin 15. We painted. We decorated. We put everything into place. We bought a couch, a fridge, a cooker, a washing machine and a bed. It was a wooden sleight bed and I lay in on Saturday’s reading World History. In 2008 I had a heart attack. A smoker's heart attack, they said.

 “If he smokes again,” he dead, you were told or so you said. Whether that was to encourage me to quit the fags it didn't matter. I quit anyway, eventually.

We got married in 2009 in a small church in Waterfoot, Northern Ireland. Your father lived there. It was the only way we could get him to come. He was one of six in total. That included my Mam - my father had passed away ten years before. Your Mam and Dad. Then, You and I, of course, And the aunty Kate. Kate was the banger. She was your bad tempered aunt. The rest were respectively, the prospective bride and groom and our parents. She was unpleasant and critical. Maybe that's where you got it from.

“Men, sure they’d rape the seat you were sitting on,” she’d say.

 In 2010, Sophie came along. Despite our trepidation about pregnancy with your age. You never stopped gling on about in on our long walks in the park. Sophie was great. She was the light of our lives. In 2011, the tumour came along and everything changed when the tumour came to stay. And you hold on it like a sinking ship and brought us all down with you. But I'm coming back to the surface and now in 2025 I'll stay afloat while you sink down.