Written by Gary Finnegan
“Bewley’s café has never seen so much action on a Saturday morning,” he said, eyes backlit.
“Not from students in rented tuxedos and cocktail dresses.”
“Sad that it’s our last Ball,” she replied, heating her palms against the curved body of a
chipped cup. “Imagine, this time next year we could be anywhere. Working,
studying…maybe falling in love with Vienna or Paris on an Interrail trip and forgetting to come
home.”
“Yeah, why not,” he said, fixing his dickie bow, rubbing her arm from elbow to wrist.
“Find a bedsit or a house share‒as long as we’re in the same bed it will be a palace.”
“Oh give over, you’ll ruin my mascara.”
They did this weekly now. Dressed up and re-lived their favourite scenes from the
comfort of their hardwood kitchen table, aged and stained by the rings of countless coffees.
They remembered, they reimagined. They gifted themselves full immersion in the moments
that had made them. The milestones punctuating the path to their pearl wedding anniversary.
These reenactments were never quite the same as the originals. Like a tribute act that
hit all the notes and wore the right costumes, but whose faces should not be inspected too
closely.
Details were hazy. They would fill in the blanks with ideal versions of their history,
remembering themselves as a little more sure of their pairing, less afraid of the uncertainty
that comes with being twenty-two. They now had the answers to the questions that lived in
the back of their wide open minds in Dublin cafés and on European trains. Would this all
work out? How? Where? What jobs would occupy them in the daylight hours between their
breakfasts together and the evening reunions that would, they presumed, be forever electric.
They exercised full editorial power over their origin story, deleting scenes that jarred
with the preferred narrative, sprinkling embellishments as required. Their younger selves
were, on reflection, better looking, quicker witted, morally stronger than they felt in the
1980s. It was a partial history, incomplete and biased. No need to excavate the bodies of
competing suitors. Skip over his Erasmus year in Rotterdam. Bury the shock of that
summer’s pregnancy and its sudden loss.
They just played their Greatest Hits‒mouthing every word by heart‒and went to
bed happy. He loved his memories; she hated that there would be no new ones.
“Honeymoon tonight, love,” she said. “Dromoland Castle, 1992.
Remember?”
“You know I do,” he said, snappier than intended. “I remember being exhausted,
happy. I remember we had the house bought and the kids born before we got around to
planning a bloody wedding. Right, you start.”
“Okay. God, I hope the twins go down easy for Mam.” A wistful glassiness threatened
as she thought of her mother‒still a frenetic force back then, now a memory.
“Ah here, don’t start thinking of your Mammy, you’ll break character. Come back to
me,” he pleaded. It was usually he who misplaced the rules of this game.
“Sorry, sorry‒where were we?”
“Honeymoon,” he said. “Dinner, the first night. Girls in your Mam’s, delighted with
themselves. You’re looking like Audrey Hepburn with her hair up.”
“Yeah, yes‒I’m there. I miss them though, those baby girls. Sticky little fingers.”
“A wonderful stage,” he agreed. “I miss it all too.”
Dress-up Night could be a minefield. Too much warming nostalgia could invite
paralysing grief. Inhabiting those years again stirred more than love for twin two-year-olds
and the giddy escape of their brief honeymoon in County Clare. There was guilt. An inner
critic complaining that they were not enjoying their babies enough. The bittersweet sound of
life’s best days drowned out by infants’ sleepless cries; the joys of sorely-wanted early
parenthood suffocated by postnatal depression.
In all this remembering, there was much to forget. The struggle to conceive the twins.
His habit of staying late in work, lengthening her endless days alone and outnumbered. The
gulf between their parenting styles, one laissez-faire, the other a busy interventionist. The
times when the death of empathy could have killed off their relationship, each thinking their
own station was the harder.
But these evenings were not designed to dwell on their sacrifices. No place to mourn
the withering of friendships or the loss of self. They remembered the worst days of their lives
as they wanted to. Warmly. Some chapters were best rewritten.
They named the undeniably beautiful things they had to celebrate: dressing soft-
skinned children, signing for their house, holidays in the heat, the four of them curled up on a
three-seater for movie night. All their progress. The true, unspoken cause for celebration‒
their survival.
They had, now, a control that eluded them in the first edition of their lives. And they
were here to enjoy it.
“What did you say was for mains? Chicken?”
“Fish. It’s in the oven. Stay there, I’ll get it.”
“I’m not helpless, I can work the bloody oven.”
“I know, love,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “But it’s my treat, remember? Let
me.”
His frustration settled. And that night they re-lived another of their golden periods.
The one where the girls were young women, up and out and on their way. The one where
they bask in the sense of achievement, the vicarious joy of graduation ceremonies and job
offers‒without the final exams and interview stress.
For them, that had been an era of rekindling, where they rediscovered themselves and
each other. The years of new hobbies, of joining, of new people. Of having enough money to
think of it only rarely, of city breaks together. The headspace. The joys of doing their own
things, and of evening reunions to share the day’s stories. The return of electric anticipation.
Naturally, the quiet stillness of an empty nest went unnamed. The hollowing sense of
loss. Those years when their parents’ fading health dragged them up and down the motorway.
That helpless horror at the romantic missteps of their adult children.
The accident.
All omitted.
They didn’t always play the greatest hits. Sometimes she treated him to new material.
Depending on how his mind was doing, these nights were often his favourites.
“That was some week in Cannes. The glamour of it! The thrill of a new world‒at our
age.”
“Go on,” he leaned forward on folded arms, inhaling her words.
“When your screenplay was nominated for best short film.”
“Hah! I love it. Tell me more.”
“The after-party with the Clooneys. And us turning down their holiday invitation
because we had planned a weekend in Westport,” she said, with a wave of her thin fingers,
dismissing A-listers left and right.
“And all of this happened in the last year, I suppose,” he said, giddily suspending
disbelief.
“Oh absolutely. An overnight success after sixty-two years, as you kept saying. You had
Graham Norton in stitches.”
There were nights when he might almost believe her. And other evenings, like this
one, when he was a co-conspirator.
“I do recall promising Penelope Cruz I’ll mention her if we win the Oscar,” he
ventured. “Felt awful forgetting her name in Cannes.”
“When are the Oscars? I haven’t even thought about what to wear.”
“This day next week, I’d say. If you can find that dress from the 1983 Trinity Ball,
you’ll dominate the red carpet.”
These invented memories were the sweetest. There were no downsides to suppress.
No lost youth to mourn. They were stories set in the near present, fantastical current affairs,
featuring something to look forward to just over the horizon. It was after these Dress-up
Nights that she would catch herself weeping pints as he slept. The more she gave him, the
more it cost her.
At times, she even envied his blissful detachment from reality, though she knew too
of the price he paid in confusion. For every glorious daydream, ten waking nightmares.
Names, faces, and places churned like a kaleidoscope. Timelines could shift from their cold
linear order to become a warped sticky tar, melting in the sun.
At his most lucid, scenes from childhood to that momentary motorway lapse fifteen
months ago could be retrieved with clarity. He could achieve enough mastery to play with his
memories, to enjoy them all over again, but he retained precious little new information since
merging onto the M1, laden with their daughter, her infant and their luggage. A bubbling
conversation interrupted.
There were people dead who he believed to be living. Of this too, she was envious.
The next morning, she surveilled him standing in the garden surrounded by hand
trowels, spades and forks, waiting for a cue that might remind him why he had emptied the
shed onto the lawn. Maybe she’d make paella for dinner, she thought. Get some Spanish wine
in and wear summer clothes. Do the Bilbao holiday. He always loved that one.
First published in The Ogham Stone printed anthology (University of Limerick), 2024.
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Gary Finnegan is an Irish writer whose fiction has appeared in Litro, The London Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Howl, and elsewhere. He won the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025 and has received an Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award. Gary has an MA in creative writing from Maynooth University and is working on a novel.