Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  I remember once she told me about driving down the country and going into a house where an artist had glued shoes up against the wall. She wrote about that in one of her books. How she came across this exhibit that an artist had made with shoes. I wish I had seen it myself. All along the wall, right up to the ceiling. And maybe that’s what I’m thinking, that maybe her shoes ended up in some kind of montage, that they might have been kept by someone, those red canvas shoes.

  They were frayed a bit and slightly faded, with the shape of her feet indented, the toes, the heel gone shiny and worn down from contact with the street. And yes, one broken white lace. That’s how I remember them.

  16

  She was helping me to look back and deal with my memory. There was this thing I told her about which was going on in my family. I’m still not sure exactly what it was, because nobody talked about it very much. That’s what happens to people who don’t talk, she said, they behave the same as their own fathers and mothers and father’s brothers, in my case. I tried my best not to be like my father and I ended up being more like my father’s brother. The Jesuit. He never said very much. He spoke only when absolutely necessary.

  Everybody loved the Jesuit in the family. I had an aunt on my father’s side who left all she had to the Jesuits and the donkey sanctuary. Not that anyone should ever be expecting prize money from relatives when they die, or pegging their memory of a person to the sum received. Which is far from the truth in this case, because my aunt was very kind to us. We loved her. Me and my brother will never forget the time she took us down to Cork to see the donkey sanctuary for ourselves. I know it meant a lot to her. Also the Jesuits meant a lot to her.

  It was not long after my aunt lost her husband, so she was still in mourning and didn’t want to travel all that distance alone. She took us with her for the company. We will never forget that journey to Cork because my aunt was in tears sometimes while she was driving, telling us about everything, the Rock of Cashel coming into view around the bend. We never imagined that anything as old as the Rock of Cashel could still exist in our time. I think it made my aunt feel better to be travelling. And then the car stalled on the steepest hill in Ireland, in Cork City. I can still remember the sound of the engine straining and her laughing, a frightened laugh that frightened us, thinking she had forgotten the handbrake and we were going to roll all the way back to where we came from. Until she stopped at an angle in the middle of the street and we got out. She said she knew somebody in Cork who could point the car forward again, back down the hill. She brought us for fish and chips which was something we never had the taste of before because my father was against food that was not cooked at home. Fish and chips was something foreign to our family and we never even spoke about it or wanted it. Fish and chips was for other people, not us. So having fish and chips in Cork was something I could never forget. It was the greatest kindness. Like something left to me in a will, something I can keep, something I can’t spend.

  My aunt had the best smile that I ever saw, mostly with her eyes. She was very generous. She put us up in a hotel in Cork. I think it was the first time we ever stayed in a hotel. She had her room and we had our room, though I had to sleep with my brother in the same bed and we tried our best to stay separate, as far away from each other as possible. We said good night to my aunt, but then we got up again. We got dressed and went downstairs, I don’t really know why. I think we just wanted to be awake. We thought it was a waste to sleep in Cork. We didn’t talk, but I knew what my brother was thinking and he knew what I was thinking. We agreed without agreeing, saying only the least words necessary. We left the room and went down the stairs to explore, I suppose, that’s what we called it without saying the word.

  We walked through the reception, out the door. I think we wanted to see the street in darkness, the front porch of the hotel with the lights on, one missing. We wanted to see people, anybody out there smoking, the smell of cigarettes in the open. The air in the street at night. Our own breath like smoke. And cars going by. Guessing by the headlights and the sound of the engine what model it could be, particularly motorbikes, what CC they were and what the maximum speed was on the speed dial.

  And as we were standing there, we saw a man and a woman coming out of the hotel together holding hands. It took a few seconds to realise that we knew them. There was my aunt, walking towards us. I thought she must be coming to tell us to go to bed, we had no permission to be out there on the street. The man she was with was wearing a light-grey suit, so we didn’t recognize him at first. It was my father’s brother, the Jesuit. Even though he was not dressed as a Jesuit, we knew it was my father’s brother because we recognized his face and his voice. He had only recently been at the funeral of my uncle, my aunt’s husband, a few weeks before that, saying Mass for him.

  I was sure they must have seen us standing next to the railings. We were so obvious. I could think of no excuse for being out in the street after we had already said good night. But then they passed us by. I suppose they were not expecting us to be there. Even though my father’s brother looked straight at me, in the eyes, he didn’t recognize me, he thought we were just boys at the railings.

  My aunt was smiling. Her smile was full of sadness and happiness, if you can imagine that. When I saw my aunt at the funeral of her husband, my uncle, she could hardly walk, she had to be carried, people holding her arms on both sides. One of her shoes came off on the steps and they had to put it back on again for her, because she had no feeling in her feet, they were not even touching the ground any more. I could see what grief was and I was confused by it. I didn’t understand how it could be so close to happiness as well.

  Maybe grief and happiness were the same thing, I thought.

  My father’s brother, the Jesuit, put his elbow up in the air and she slipped her arm inside, hooking. That’s what we saw, my brother and me. We saw them walking away, arm in arm. We saw them stopping at the end of the street. My aunt leaned her head against his shoulder and they disappeared. I had no thoughts in my head only does he have sweets in his pocket. That’s what my brother was thinking about as well, both of us thought everything together, identical. Did my father’s brother have sweets in his left pocket when he was walking away with my aunt on his arm, wine gums usually? We didn’t say anything to each other. We couldn’t tell anyone, not my mother, not my father, not the Jesuit, not my aunt, not even ourselves. We were afraid to be found out. We didn’t know what to do with the information, so we pretended that we saw nothing, only cars and people passing by. We went back upstairs and put our pyjamas on and tried to sleep, side by side, he was always taking the blankets.

  17

  She’s worried about Buddy. We’re at the Berlin Wall and she turns to ask me if Buddy is all right. She wants me to tell her what Buddy is feeling right now. She wants to hear me say that he’s doing fine, he’s lying down with his snout laid out on the floor and his ears up for the tiniest noise, staring at the door, waiting for her to walk in so that he can jump up and run around in circles to welcome her back, celebrating the way that only dogs do. He’s perfectly happy, I tell her. For all he knows, you might as well be gone down the road to get a bottle of wine as off in Berlin. Besides, he was well used to her being away. Every time she went to New York, he stayed with Mary, her neighbour, so he was always at home. And whenever she came back, she would bring him straight down to Clare so they could walk across the Burren together, Buddy running ahead and coming back every now and again to make sure she was still there.

  Is he OK, Liam, do you think?

  He’s very well looked after, Úna.

  Do you think he knows?

  I can’t answer that. She is aware that dogs can tell what’s going on, they can smell illness, but I don’t want to remind her. She can be sure that Mary treats him like part of the family and he’ll be even more delighted to see her when she gets back.

  We’re at the Berlin Wall now, what’s left of it, passing along the outside with all the
graffiti. Outside or inside, it’s hard to know at this stage. We’re looking at the height of it and saying it’s not as tall as we thought, in comparison to other walls nowadays. She loves all the colour, the drawings. She gets Manfred to tell her the stories, the wall going up and families escaping, mothers handing babies across barbed wire, tunnels, spies, plus all the ironic things that happened later on when the wall came down again, like the man bringing back a library book he borrowed thirty years ago.

  What were they thinking?

  She asks Manfred that question like a girl. Because she likes to go back in time to the very beginning to try and work it out logically, step by step. She lets on that she’s like a blank envelope and she knows nothing about the Cold War or anything to do with the twentieth century. She wants Manfred to go over the whole story again, as if that part of history was happening in front of us.

  How can they put up a wall, she says, in the middle of a city? Manfred. Could you explain that to me?

  So Manfred gives her a summary of the time before he was born, which is more complicated than you might think. He blows air out through his lips and gives her a list of facts while the traffic is talking over him, arguing with him. And she’s ticking off things inside her head, waiting for him to come up with something new. She likes the story of the woman escaping by clinging on underneath a car, but she wants Manfred to tell her something about himself, what side of the wall he grew up on. So he tells her that he was only a child in the west and he would never have met his Polish wife, Olga, if the wall was still there.

  The past is so childish, she says.

  She asks Manfred would he mind getting her a bottle of water, she’s thirsty. He goes away but she calls him back to give him the money. It takes a moment for her to search around in her bag, even though she can clearly see her purse from the outside. When Manfred is gone she sits forward in the wheelchair with her arms folded, trying to imagine his life.

  Imagine Manfred on one side of the wall, she says, and Olga on the other, unable to get to each other. Imagine the wall coming down and Olga rushing across into Manfred’s arms and they have three children in quick succession. Imagine being born at the right time, she says. Imagine being born too early or too late. Imagine not knowing that things can change. Imagine all the news not reported yet. Things we don’t know yet. All the people coming after me, she says.

  Imagine not knowing what happened in the past, she says. Imagine things happening and you thought they were just happening.

  Imagine not knowing about 9/11.

  Maybe she’s lost the thread of what she was about to say. She begins worrying about Buddy again, because she once lost him on one of her walks and thought he would never come back again. It was the worst moment of her life, she says.

  Don’t worry about Buddy, I tell her. He’s fine.

  He misses me, she says.

  So I try to put her mind at rest again and tell her that Buddy is the best-cared-for dog in Ireland. He’s living like a prince, like a celebrity.

  Manfred comes back with the water. He takes the cap off the bottle for her and she has a drink. Then she hands the bottle to me along with the cap to screw back on again and she gets out a bar of chocolate, she’s hungry. I ask her would she like to go and eat something, a sandwich maybe, but she says she’ll be fine with the chocolate.

  I feel like a feather, she says.

  She has trouble opening the chocolate. Her hands are gone weak, so I offer to help her but she snatches it away saying she can still manage.

  She’s dying, don’t forget.

  She rips the cover off the chocolate like a letter she’s been waiting for. I can hear the sound of the silver paper over the traffic. She horses into it, as she would say herself, biting straight into the chocolate as if it’s the last chocolate bar on earth. I can hear the black squares snapping off inside her mouth, grinding between her teeth, like she’s eating bits of black tiling. She holds the bar out where she can keep an eye on it, not letting it out of her sight, waiting to break off the next bit as if she’s trying to finish the whole thing before something happens, before somebody comes and takes it off her, somebody who needs it more. And she’s stamping her right foot up and down. That’s my memory of it, her right foot stamping on the footrest to help with the chewing. She’s rocking a bit also, in a rhythm, and there is a melody, some sort of high droning note full of unspoken things coming from the back of her throat. A black paste on her lips and the noise of the traffic over the chewing. Manfred and me watching her without looking.

  Sorry, she says.

  Then she offers the chocolate around, speaking with a black mouth, something that doesn’t sound like the full spelling.

  Here, she says. I have more in my bag.

  I notice that she has a big smear of chocolate across the side of her face, so I get out a tissue to clean it off. I put the tissue up to the top of the bottle of water and turn it upside down so I can wipe her face clean. She doesn’t notice me doing this. Instead, she holds on to my hand and asks me again about Buddy.

  Will you call Mary for me, Liam?

  Now?

  I need to know that he’s OK, she says, has he enough water?

  You want me to call her from here?

  Please, Liam. He’s an outdoors dog. He gets down if he doesn’t get a good run.

  So I make the call to Dublin, because she’s getting restless, one of those anxiety spikes. She might start crying. She’s putting even larger pieces of chocolate into her mouth, two squares at a time if not more, silver paper and all, and I’m on the phone to Mary, telling her that we’re making good progress, we’ve got as far as the Berlin Wall. We’re not doing this chronologically, I explain to Mary, not the way it happened in history, more like a random tour, pick and mix. I’m on the phone saying sorry to bother you with this Mary, but there is one small problem, if that’s all right, it’s Buddy. I think she misses him.

  I just want to say hello to him, Úna says.

  So I relay that request to Mary, could she put the phone up to Buddy’s ear, would that be possible? Could she put it on speaker phone maybe? And, of course, there is no question, Mary will do anything in the world. I pass the phone on to Úna so she can have a word with Buddy. She gives me what’s left of the chocolate to put back into her bag while she speaks to Buddy with black teeth smiling.

  Come here, Buddy, she says. Come on, good boy. You’re such a good boy. There’s a good boy, Buddy. Come here.

  You’re in Berlin.

  It doesn’t make sense. But you know what she’s getting at, she wants him to feel that she’s near. She continues slapping her hand on her thigh, saying, good boy, come here, Buddy.

  He can hear me, Liam.

  Manfred is standing by in case we need him.

  He’s barking, Liam. He knows it’s me.

  She hands me the phone as if I don’t believe her.

  Here, Liam, you speak to him.

  So there I am at the Berlin Wall saying come here Buddy. Shoe, Buddy. Get the shoe. It’s his favourite game. Shoe.

  Stop winding him up, Úna says.

  He’s barking like mad now. I go through the motions, pretending to throw a shoe and hide it behind my back.

  He’s a Border Collie, Liam. Don’t get him so worked up, he’s only going to be searching all over the house, tearing the place apart, and poor Mary will have to give him a shoe of her own to calm him down again.

  Shoe, Buddy. Shoe.

  Will you stop tormenting him, Liam. Give me the phone.

  18

  He was there at the funeral, Buddy. Right up at the front, with Mary. I remember him barking once or twice in the church, everybody heard it. He must have been confused over his whereabouts. Probably thought the interior of the church was outdoors, would he? While she was dying he was very unsettled because the house was full of people coming to visit her. The house was over-subscribed, overwhelmed, one of those words. People trying to get in the door to see her, people she wan
ted to see and people she didn’t want to see. They were all the same to Buddy, I think. What am I saying? He knows people individually, by their clothes, their smell, he knows the difference between a man and a woman. He’s very intelligent, so he probably never forgets a face. And it’s only a small house, a terraced cottage. Artisan, they call it. The front door opens straight onto the living room, in off the street.

  He was lying on the bed with her when she died.

  He must have been wondering where she was gone. Did he know it was her in the coffin, with her feet pointing away from the altar? It was a very big funeral, the church was packed. Maybe he was looking for her, among all the people there, that’s what I’m thinking, that’s why he barked. There was lots of singing, all the songs she had picked out herself. Buddy was well used to hearing people singing. Down in Clare. He was used to lying on the floor of a pub and hearing somebody breaking into a song and holding on to the bar counter. He probably even knew her favourite song, if that’s possible, what do you think? A song in Irish. A song that she used to sing herself or say the words of, repeating the last lines again and again to herself about something that never comes again.

  She didn’t believe in the afterlife. There is no such thing as the next life, she said. This is the next life we’re having right now, here, this minute. She said her life was no more than Buddy’s life, only that she could read and write and remember the words of a song, that was all.

  She didn’t know why she was having a church funeral, but where else would you have it if not in a church? You end up going back to what you did your best to get away from. She always wanted to die in Dublin, by choice, like an ordinary person with a modest, heartfelt, traditional Dublin funeral, so she said. She saved up the money years ago to pay for it, because even if you believe in nothing, she said, the way Irish people did funerals gave you something to look forward to, if only you could be there yourself, in person. And she was right, I never saw so many people who were friends again in one place, under the one roof. She insisted on a full lunch for everyone in a hotel afterwards. Anyone and everybody, regardless of who said things about her and who didn’t, because some people didn’t like me, that’s fine, some people did.