Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  Getting born is something that’s done to you, she says.

  We’re retracing our steps at this point, back past the field of cowslips. We can see the tiered gardens and the symmetrical hedges and the lawns between the paths. We come back past the statues of the naked boy and the naked girl on each side. And the conservatories, the green water-tower on top of the red-bricked base in the background, it’s in one of the photographs.

  That was one of the reasons why she decided to have no children herself, so I gather. She didn’t want to be her own mother. No more than I wanted to be my own father, so to speak, even though you can’t help it.

  She didn’t want to feel responsible for the future.

  The population, she calls it.

  I think she wanted to stop the future at herself. She wanted to be her own child, her own offspring. She wanted women to have the freedom to be themselves and not have to bear children if they didn’t want to, to become artists and writers and musicians instead of surrendering their entire lives and rearing children like her mother did. She didn’t believe all that stuff they told Emily about not having anything during the birth, no epidurals, embracing the pain, as they call it, because it makes you bond better with your child. Úna wanted to bond with the world, I suppose. She wanted the right to do things to herself. She didn’t want to do the same to a child that was done to her, in other words. She didn’t want her own reflection following her around for the rest of her life. She wanted only to be responsible for herself, in her own lifetime, her own person, her own body.

  I’m gathering all this now, in retrospect.

  She had enough trouble breaking out of her family plot without starting a new one. Your family, your country, where you were brought in. The entry point, she calls it. It stays with you, it’s after you no matter where you go.

  It’s in your shoes.

  She wanted the freedom to write and tell the story. She says your life is your story. And she’s often said this before, in public, in Ennis and Aspen. Sure what are we only stories. That’s all we are, Liam, only walking stories. We are at the mercy of our stories and our children and our families. Because that’s all there is, the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories that are told about us, the stories we tell about each other. And the stories withheld. The stories we have to make up because they have been kept from us.

  13

  There was a great freedom in being so open with her. I told her things that I would never have said to anyone else alive, all kinds of things that she was not going to remember. In those last few days, I could tell her everything because she was going to take it all away with her, off my shoulders.

  Is there something you’re not telling me?

  She stops the wheelchair with one foot skidding on the ground. She tells me to stand in front of her. Liam, where I can see you. Look into my eyes. Is there something you want to tell me?

  Because she has the ability to reach all the way inside my head and find out what she wants. With or without my consent. It’s one of those things she picked up from her father. In through the eyes, take what you like. He was a famous journalist and she became a famous writer after him. Her father had those eyes that everybody wanted to be seen by. He made people forget about themselves and hand over things they never even knew they had. She inherited that gift of being able to walk through an open door and help herself. Go through people’s belongings without them even knowing. Anything that remained concealed, closed to the public, even those things you were keeping from yourself, she had a good guess at. Her eyes won’t let go. That’s what made her a writer, you came out of a conversation with her feeling a bit ransacked. She was interested in everything that was undiscovered. Undisclosed. And there was no stopping her from working out what she didn’t know, by intuition, by multiple choice. By remaining silent and letting you walk your way into the empty space.

  You can tell me, Liam.

  She knows my eyes have no locks on them and people can wander in and out like they’re at an auction. She knows I want to talk about my life but it feels a bit like stealing from myself.

  That’s impossible, she says.

  I feel my life is stolen goods when I talk about it.

  You can’t steal your own property, Liam.

  I don’t know what is my own property, I tell her. I always thought my life was my own property and my daughter was in it, but now I’m not so sure any more that you can be the owner of your own life.

  It’s bad for you to keep things to yourself, she says. It will burn a cigarette hole in your head.

  All I have to talk about is my daughter.

  Go on, she says.

  My daughter is having doubts, I tell her. Maeve. She’s twenty-five and very successful at her work, she loves what she’s doing, but there’s something wrong. She’s with one of those online companies and they keep telling her that she’s part of the family, the company is her family now. I know it’s only what they say to make employees feel at home in the workplace, your new family. But she’s got all this doubt. I think she’s picked it up from me. Something missing.

  Like what?

  Her real family.

  The main gate is in sight now, with the traffic beyond. We’re stopped right in the middle of the wide path, with the lake on one side and the mansion on the other side, switched around this time, from left to right. And I’m telling her all this stuff about my daughter, asking if there are human reasons for everything.

  You’re blowing this out of proportion, Úna says.

  I tell her my daughter has been asking questions.

  What questions?

  Maeve wants to know who she is. She’s asking all about me and Emily, her mother. The back story, she doesn’t believe us.

  She’s nervous about the wedding, Liam, that’s all.

  She’s thinking of calling it off, I tell her.

  You can’t let her do that, Úna says.

  She’s having second thoughts.

  You can’t let her have second thoughts, Liam. You can’t let her cancel the wedding, that’s what happened to me. It was a perfectly good wedding and a perfectly good marriage only that I called it off. I thought it was too good to be true. Liam. Listen to me. You tell Maeve from me, not to call off that wedding. Please. She’ll spend the rest of her life having second thoughts.

  Maybe she’s not ready for it.

  You’re far too protective, Liam. Your precious little daughter. You’re all over her.

  I don’t want to let her down.

  You’re at the mercy of your own child, Liam. Come on, get a grip of yourself. That whole fatherhood instinct. Fathers loving their daughters to bits. It’s so repulsive, I’m going to get sick. Think of how other people feel, she says, that cosy little relationship you have going together, excluding everyone else. You’re refusing to let her grow up. That’s what you’re doing, Liam. You want her to remain a child. The child you want her to be. I bet you can’t even let her cross the street without holding her hand.

  I love her.

  What? You love her like an overheated room, she says. You love her like that glass cathedral over there, thirty-five degrees. You’re suffocating her.

  You hate me talking about Maeve, don’t you?

  She’s getting married, Liam. She’s out of your hands, let her go.

  You can’t stand my daughter getting all the attention, is that it?

  Liam. I’m only helping you to own your life.

  Manfred is waiting for us. I can see him standing on the far side of the gate, staring into the park, keeping an eye out for a wheelchair. I begin to push the wheelchair towards the gate but she stops me once more.

  Hold it, she says. Come here. Let me give you a hug.

  So then I have to lean down and try to work out how to embrace her in the wheelchair. She lets go of the see-through bag with all her belongings and throws her arms out. And as I’m going into her arms, it’s hard for me to know where to put my own arms because they won’t
go around her, the wheelchair begins to back away from me and I have to hold on to her bag, sliding down between us. I have to catch the bag with my knees. It seems too premeditated to put on the brakes or to put the bag down for a moment and do this properly. So I just improvise. I try my best to hold on to everything without making it look like I care too much about things that don’t matter right now. She reaches forward to pull my face down onto her shoulder for everybody in the Botanic Garden to see. I lean in towards her as much as I can but it’s only the side of her face that I’m in contact with and her arms are pulling me down further by the neck than it’s possible for me to go without the wheelchair rolling away. Her breathing is loud, I can hear the rhythm of it.

  I’m still here, Liam, she says.

  All I can say is nothing. I mean that, not a word. I’m leaning right across her in silence, trying not to hurt her, in spite of the fact that she’s in such pain and not saying a thing about it, only withholding it. As well as not having a son of her own to embrace, or even her brother.

  Manfred is standing at the gate with his hands behind his back. His feet are placed apart. His chest is out. It looks like he’s been standing in that position for some time now, watching us. He doesn’t move. I wave to let him know that we’re on the way, we’re coming, but he remains still, as if he has not seen us yet. He continues looking straight at us, as though he’s going to carry on waiting for us to appear.

  14

  The will she made. She made a will that was like a short story with all the characters of her life. It was her way of gathering around the people she was close to and speaking to them personally after she was gone, leaving them a couple of words along with whatever she was intending to give them. From the way she wrote the will, it sounded like she was still very much present, keeping up the conversation. As if she was still telling people what to do with their lives. As if she still wanted to know what was going on and how everybody was doing. What was the news. Who was going to be the next president of America, that kind of thing.

  She wanted to die with no money on her hands. She left most of her money to charity with children in mind.

  Her last will and testament. You could say it allowed her to carry on living in some way, for a few more pages at least. People don’t disappear and stop talking suddenly when they die, do they? You carry on having the same conversation you were having before, in fact, the relationship you have with someone keeps growing, she said, only that you understand them much better after they’re gone. They become even more of a story that you want to keep telling.

  She has forgotten nobody. Everyone is remembered, personally. The words she chose for each individual were non-transferable.

  What she said to me in her will was already said alive. Very simple. I’ll never forget you bringing me to Berlin as long as I live. So thank you, Liam. Thank you. Thank you.

  What can you say to that? No, it’s me alive who has all the reasons to remember and say thank you. Of course, it’s not possible to answer back. Not verbally anyway. She’s having the last word, and none of us have the right to reply, not until we write our own will.

  A list of things, that’s what she said all writing was. Making a list. Your own list. Her final list.

  I give and bequeath, it said at the top of the page, with the beneficiaries listed underneath along with the sums of money or property. She wrote the will after she returned to Dublin from Berlin and it was clear from the document that she had given it a lot of thought. She spent time carefully thinking up what she would say to us.

  In loving memory of many pints.

  For a new teapot after the one I broke.

  For all the messages left on my phone which were like a fire to come home to and I’m sorry if I didn’t reply at the time.

  For a new pair of gloves. Although. That seemed to be more like a private joke and the person receiving the money for gloves must have had some story which only they would remember.

  For looking after Buddy with such great fondness and being so good to him when I was away.

  For wit and imagination.

  For putting up with my sourness. For not getting angry whenever I just turned my back and picked up the newspaper and ignored everyone else at the dinner table as if I was better off alone.

  For the time we got soaked, remember. When we were watching the waves. The anger in them.

  For the time I got lost in Wicklow and I couldn’t find the cottage and then I did find it after all.

  For knowing everything about Dublin that I could not remember. All the things I would never think of without the company of somebody else to talk to. For reminding me where exactly the door to the ladies used to be in Kehoe’s, before it was all changed. For remembering the crankiest barman in the world. For remembering what was there once in Dublin, all the streets and the corners and the women selling flowers and Bewley’s, when it was still Bewley’s and you could spend all day reading and drinking the same cup of coffee and eating the same cherry bun gone pink, only looking up every now and again to see who was who. What order the shops were in, with the bookshop still on Grafton Street and the only restaurant we could afford on South Anne Street. And the time we went for a big slap-up dinner in a fancy place intending to do a runner without paying, but the meal was far too heavy in my stomach even to walk, so we got up from the table in a great hurry and ran to the door, only for me to change my mind at the last minute, so I ran to the bathroom instead, like I needed to go very badly, and came back and paid the bill after all. For those things I would have forgotten by now. For remembering Dublin when the city was nothing but a few pubs. For remembering the people and the order they stood in at the bar and the type of things they were saying and God knows where they are now?

  For keeping the time. For keeping the time we were in.

  She looked after all the people who were import-ant to her. She distributed some of her furniture and itemized certain things, remembering particular people who used to visit her and where they normally sat at the table, what cups they drank from. To one person she left her second-best chair, for example, which was obviously another private joke they were having a laugh over during her lifetime and long after.

  To various people she left money for pure friendship, for their songs, for inspiration, for being so encouraging and supportive. For allowing me to be myself, she writes, for giving me the lift when I needed it. Her will was full of optimism. She left a lot of praise for people, reminding them that how good they were was far more important than how bad they were. She said they were to remember the good times, the future would take care of itself.

  I’ve no idea if people followed her instructions. There was no way of compelling them to keep her furniture or to spend the money in any particular way, legally. And converting the money into cash usually gets rid of any personal significance. Or maybe they converted the money into memory, blowing it on something unspecified like going on the tear and getting rat-arsed and drugged-up on her behalf, if that’s the case. Who knows what the money was spent on in the end? They could even pay the car tax or allow the money to flow into the general household budget and spend it on frozen pizzas in memory of her. Which was all fine, for all I know, as long as they actually felt the money in their pockets for a moment at least.

  To a fellow writer she gave the yellow curtains she bought in New York, drifting in the open window.

  To another writer friend she left a sum of money for all the walks not yet walked without a map.

  For Noleen she left money to keep on travelling.

  15

  I was thinking about her shoes, the shoes she had on in Berlin. The red canvas shoes. I’ll remember them as long as I live. I wonder where they went to. Because the shoes keep you. They keep you always. After you’ve stepped out of them. Is this making any sense? Your presence remains in the shoes after you take them off and you park them under the bed at night. You might as well still be in them, even when you’re not. They look like they’ll sta
rt walking by themselves.

  Maybe the shoes were given away along with her clothes, everything dispersed, distributed, whatever word you can use for personal things that cannot be put in a will or passed on to anyone else. I wonder did her shoes end up in a charity shop somewhere, in with all the other people’s stuff, in with the second-hand smell left behind in their clothes and their shoes? In with all those things that people wore and had regard for once. One of those places where people root around in other people’s belongings, to see if there is anything of value. Where you find things like a doll’s house, or a game of Monopoly still intact, things like wall lamps that are perfectly good only missing the second one to make up a matching pair. Things that creep up on you like St Patrick’s Day medals that you would not have seen since you were in school, or a hurling stick with grass stains which somebody has signed, or those luminous statues of St Christopher that people used to stick onto the dashboard of their car. My own father had one because he was obsessed with safety. Teapots with animal faces, and Toby jugs, and a mug with Lady Di and Prince Charles when they were young and getting married with the handle missing. A milk bottle for the World Cup. People not paying much attention to anyone else, only occasionally looking about to see what other people had found. As if you don’t know what you want until somebody else wants it. People going through a trolley full of old DVDs while somebody else is plugging in a perfectly good hairdryer to see if it’s still working and not just blowing out cool air instead of hot.

  And all the shoes, racks of shoes that people wore all over the country, who knows where they’ve all been. Shoes that carried people across the world, on trains, around airports and shopping centres and cinemas, shoes that tell the story of their journeys. Shoes that people gave away for no good reason and that had nothing wrong with them, completely new-looking, maybe only briefly lived in, maybe the wrong size, ill-fitting. Runners, loafers, deck shoes, boots with fur around the rim, shoes with heels you cannot imagine anyone wearing, lots of ordinary shoes and lives you cannot imagine anyone living.