Some people really did like me, she said.
Buddy was there at the hotel as well, where else would he go? I could see him getting his bowl of food and his water like everyone else. It was a fine day, very sunny, and we were all sitting outside. I was at a table full of women, the only non-woman. They were remembering their favourite lines of poetry. So when it was my turn, I could only think of repeating the last lines from the song that she liked so much, Trathnóna beag aréir. That’s the Irish for a small evening, last evening. What a great night we had together last night gone by and what a pity it’s already turned into yesterday and never coming back. Roughly translated.
That’s what I’ll miss most, she says to me at the Berlin Wall. I’ll miss walking with Buddy. His blurry legs running along the path. I’ll miss being on the road, meeting somebody by chance. I’ll miss being out in the wind, with the words taken out of your mouth, you can hardly talk.
Manfred is gone ahead to get the car and she tells me some of the things that make her happy.
People with time to spare, she says. I love people asking me questions, was I away and am I back home again. I love meeting the farmer living near Doolin, she says, the man who knows everything there is to know about Elvis, even things that Elvis never knew, the dates of all his hits, the entire discography, all the irrelevant stuff on the labels. He knows the same if not more about Chuck Berry, she says, even though you can’t imagine what he needs that information for when he’s out walking across the rocks. And he would never tell me this himself, she says, but I heard that he was once in the finals of Mastermind. He blew all his opponents away and he only fell down on some question to do with Naked Gun.
And Josie, the woman whose brother, Packo, died only recently, did I ever tell you that, Liam? They were such a lovely couple together, she says. I thought for years they were husband and wife, until I asked them where they found each other, was it at a dance? They laughed and said, no, we’re twins. And Josie, she says, she’s the only person I know who still wears one of those see-through, plastic head-scarves going to Mass. Packo never had anything to cover his head only a newspaper, you’d see him making a dash into the pub. Their friends all had names like Rosie and Peig and Jerome and Bapty, for John the Baptist.
I love meeting young people, she says. Young eyes. Young stories not made up yet. I love the young men in the Indian restaurant, talking to them about where they come from, Karachi, Nepal.
She wants to know what makes me happy.
I’m not talking about the normal things, she says, like love and drink and drugs and the day your daughter was born.
What else is there?
Things that lift your heart, Liam.
Like a lighthouse.
What lighthouse?
Any lighthouse. I tell her I feel glad whenever I see a lighthouse. I have no idea why. Maybe it reminds me of being close to home. Something about the summer. Even the word lighthouse makes me happy. I don’t go looking for them. It’s just lighthouses I happen to see or hear about.
You’re right, she says. Lighthouses.
I tell her I’m like everyone else, I love travelling. I love hearing languages I don’t understand. Far away languages, like Japanese. I wouldn’t have a clue what they were saying. I like that. And Irish. I tell her I love it when Radio na Gaeltachta comes on by accident in the car. When you hear somebody talking his head off with great Irish and you don’t understand half the words.
Go mbeirimíd beo ar an ám seo arís.
She says it’s the Irish for being alive around the same time next year. Literally. May we meet again alive this time.
19
We make a stop at a café called Einstein. I help her off with her coat, but she’s still very hot and she says it feels like she has a coat on inside her. She needs to use the facilities, she calls it. I bring her as far as the ladies and help her out of the wheelchair. She can manage after that, thanks, Liam. She is able to walk without assistance, holding on to things. She closes the door behind her but doesn’t lock it in case. I wait down the corridor, sort of standing guard to make sure nobody walks in on her.
I think it was mostly fathers we talked about in Café Einstein.
When she gets back to the table she is still too hot or too cold, she doesn’t know the difference any more. She stands still for a moment, holding on to the table, maybe it’s the pain. She sits down. She takes off the cap and everybody knows. She smiles back at them. Let them look.
She told me about her father and I told her about my father.
She orders coffee, tea for me. She wants nothing else. She’s fine with the coffee because she’s already had plenty of chocolate earlier on. And when the coffee arrives along with a tiny glass of water, she drinks the water and admires the glass. She opens a sachet of sugar and ends up spilling it across the table. She gathers it all up, placing her palm on the table and pulling the grains of sugar together towards the edge. She sweeps them into the catching hand, then pours them into the coffee and slaps her hands free. She stirs the coffee and takes a sip, then sits back to look at faces. She examines all the faces available, the waitress, the people sitting opposite, two women facing each other, looking at their mobile phones.
She remembers her father’s eyes. She wanted to be like her father, not like her mother. His eyes didn’t care what was left behind. Her father was happier than her mother was, he loved himself more than her mother could ever love herself.
I’ve ordered Apfelstrudel for myself and when it arrives she leans forward to examine it. She notices that they’ve given me custard, even though I’ve asked for it without custard. It makes me think of the yellow door, that’s all. It says custard on the menu, she says. Vanilla sauce, they call it, paler in colour than custard.
She picks up my fork and digs a corner off the Apfelstrudel. Then she dips the piece into the custard or vanilla sauce and puts it into her mouth, a leaf of pastry that looks a bit like soft leather with icing sugar. She nods to me and says it’s lovely, how can you not like custard? And then she continues eating as if she’s ordered it for herself. Until it’s nearly half gone, then she puts down the fork and leaves the rest.
Úna. You’ve eaten half of it.
She laughs. Sorry.
You might as well finish it now, I tell her.
Don’t give me any more, she says. She pushes the plate away and looks at the two women sitting across from us, travelling together. One of the women is now leafing through a guide book trying to decide where they want to go next. The other woman holds a camera in her hands, probably going back over the photographs of where they have already been.
My father’s eyes had the city and the country in them, Úna says.
She tells me that her father made all the connections between people and towns. He knew where they were from and what brought them to the city. His eyes understood what they owned and what they wanted and what they had lost. He collected all the talking and the noise and the smell of smoke and beer in their clothes. What people said when they were squashed together at the bar counter. She remembers the bar in Dublin where he often went. It had a phone box in it so you could close the door and keep out the noise while you called home to say you were held up.
She’s opening another sachet of sugar. Or not. She is flapping it back and forth in preparation without actually doing so.
Her father’s eyes kept everything they saw. Her mother’s eyes denied everything they saw. My father’s eyes kept all the occasions, she says, the celebrity weddings and the public functions in the Mansion House. All the black-and-white photographs of Dublin in the sixties, people drinking wine they were not used to yet in Ireland. People smiling a lot. People self-conscious and not aware of what they owned yet. When having no money was not such a bad thing as it is now, because people really had no money then, only an account in the grocery shops. When things were getting better than before. It was a time, she says, when you had dance halls and function rooms full of smoke and swe
at and perfume in the air. Men in bow ties and women with off-the-shoulder dresses and holy medals well hidden. People being continental, looking rich, behaving modern, even though it was still Dublin and everybody knew everyone else, she says, everyone knew what you had or didn’t have. So it was not possible to be anonymous.
Anything that was not worth seeing through her father’s eyes was not worth happening. Because it was his job as a journalist to know what receptions were worth attending and who was worth talking about and what was worth remembering. What politicians liked to be seen in the company of women who were still women. When times were glamorous like they never were before in Ireland, she says, when it was glamorous to be an air hostess, when it was glamorous to be a journalist, glamorous even to be a priest. A time before avocadoes. A time before yoghurt. A time before toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches, even.
Her father wrote about it all, she says. All the people busy catching up with the future. People not letting on where they came from. When the taste of freedom was new and the history of Ireland was only just gone by. When the country was smaller than it seems now, she says, more compact, more innocent. When the only colour in the streets was the golden glow of the pubs, she says. When it was customary to sing in maternity wards and you’d see empty bottles of Guinness rolling under the new mother’s bed. When divorce was not a word and going to London was the saying for expecting a baby and a baby not born yet was more alive than the mother. When being a woman was the word for not being a man. When going abroad was the word for Europe. When Ireland was still far away, full of scenery and flag days and motorcades and hurling finals and signs painted on granite walls by the sea, reminding swimmers that togs must be worn. Conversations full of men only and pink male bodies coming out of the cold sea.
And togs well worn, she says.
Her father brought her with him to the horse fair in Smithfield, she says. She can remember sitting in the back of the car, looking at his eyes in the mirror. I wanted to keep his eyes, she says, and be a man. I wanted to be the driver of a car, smoking out the window and looking back in the mirror. I wanted to be a woman like a man. A woman with the viewpoint of a man. A man only a woman, in a women-only way. I admired him as a small girl of six would, she says, the confidence in him, like a packet of cigarettes gave you confidence and the person who owned a packet of cigarettes owned the world. I remember everything, she says, the people coming up to shake his hand, offering him a cigarette, a drink, inducements of friendship. I remember people handing over their life stories like they were giving away everything precious they had inherited. People eager and shy, wiping their hands on their trousers before they shook his, because they may have touched a horse or a cow or a shovel before him. Women with flour on their hands clapping.
He wore the city in his suit, she says. He carried the power of words before it was called the media.
She can remember the men at the horse fair showing the horses how to smile. Her father was laughing with a woman who was not her mother. And the woman who was not her mother smiling like the horses. And then a boy on a runaway horse came racing through the crowd. He could not be stopped, so the woman who was not her mother grabbed her hand and everyone had to scatter with their backs against the wall of the pub. And she spilled the red lemonade on her dress.
She says the woman who was not her mother started coming to the house. I remember them arguing over dinner together, she says, around the table, my father and my mother and the woman who was not my mother. The woman who was not my mother got up over something that was said by my mother and walked straight out the door, with my father after her and my mother after him. That’s how I remember it, she says. We didn’t have the words to describe what was happening in our own family. We were children watching. None of us could understand any of it. It was like seeing your own legs in the water when you go swimming and you wonder if they still are your own legs, she says. Because it was only years later that she understood what was going on around the table, how the woman who was not her mother had come to ask her father to go to Australia with her. She wanted to buy my father from my mother, she says. She had the money to do that. She wanted my father to leave us all behind and go off to Australia, she says, with no children.
So then, she says, her mother must have said something. She put up a fuss and said nobody was going anywhere. Nobody was leaving until they were finished eating. The least they could do was appreciate the food that she had cooked for them. She had put all the love she had left into that dinner and she started drinking wine very fast, in big gulps, she says, because my father was thinking of leaving us all and going to Australia. Her father got up and said he had enough, he was not hungry. The woman who was not her mother got up and ran after him, out the door. We stood at the window watching them all, she says, marching away after each other, down the street. My mother fell and we saw her left in a heap on the ground.
20
The two women sitting at the table opposite in Café Einstein look over at us. They look as if they feel they’ve been looked at. We look back at them. Then we all look away in different directions, as if we’re taking no notice of each other. The waitress comes to our table and picks up the empty plate. She asks if there is anything else we might need, more water maybe.
It’s lovely water, Úna says to the waitress. Is it tap water, just?
Yes, the waitress says. It’s ordinary tap water.
Úna says she started out trying to make sure she was not like her mother. She says she ended up being like her father. Or was it the other way round? Back and forth. I went to London, she says, to try and be myself. But the more I was myself the more I was like them.
It felt like they were coming after me, everywhere I went, I couldn’t get away. I remember them sending my brother over to London. My father sent him because he didn’t want to be responsible for his own son any more. He didn’t want his own son loitering around Dublin, getting into trouble, bringing his good name into disrepute. Because he was the king, she says, the king of journalism, the king of the city and all the people gathered at receptions. He didn’t want his son to be his weakness. He didn’t want to be reminded of his role as a father and having to love his own son. He wanted his son out of sight, out of harm, so he sent him to London for me to look after. Jimmy, she says, he was not even eighteen. He was only a boy and I should have done more for him.
She says she loved her brother so much she was afraid of him. He was our Don Carlos, she says, killed by his own father, sending him off to London with no love in him.
He was the baby in the family, she says. Curly hair and big open eyes, like his father. I was already in secondary school when he was born, she says, so I remember him sitting on my knee and I knew what it was like to be his mother. I put his shoes on and taught him how to tie his laces. I put stories into his head and heard them coming back through his imagination, everything repeated. I remember him sleepy after waking up, trying to make him laugh. You could never be angry with him. He followed me around the house, watching everything I was doing, asking me why was I drawing over my eyebrows with a pencil and where was I going and what was in the book I was reading. Not letting me out of his sight. He was there every morning, waiting for me to get up because his mother was still passed out from drinking the night before.
He was a child unable to grow up. He was like his father, good at being out in pubs with people around him. Like his mother, good at holding the drink and not opening his eyes. I could see him already ending up like his mother and father and maybe that’s what made me so afraid of him, his weakness.
My brother, my weakness, she says.
He stayed a few nights with me in London, she says, he slept on the floor. She went to work and he was there when she came home, waiting for her. He had that look in his eyes that says will you tell me what to do, will you show me where to go. He hardly had the confidence to fill in a form or make a phone call. He missed appointments and left things behind, lost money out o
f his pocket, she says. He thought everybody in London was like a big family. He expected the world to be his friend, just as he wanted his mother to be his mother, just as he wanted his father to be his father and not send him away over to London where he was on his own.
She says she was only finding her feet at the time. Do you understand me, Liam? I didn’t even know how to be my own friend. I gave my brother money but he had no idea how to hold on to it and came back looking for more. I told him he couldn’t be expecting me to be his mother and father for him, she says, he just had to get used to being on his own like everyone else.
Liam, she says, he looked into my eyes but I couldn’t let him in.
She says she remembered his birthday. Even if I got it wrong by a few days, she says, or a week. If there was ever a time I missed his birthday it was because he went missing and I couldn’t find him. I swear to God, Liam, I always remembered his birthday, like a big sister.
She picks up the napkin and holds it in her hand. She folds it up and then unfolds it again, not lifting it up to her eyes.
21
Her hands are swollen. She begins to search around in her bag and finds some hand cream that I didn’t know she had, maybe it was hidden by other things. She takes the lid off the tub and puts some of the cream on her hands. The smell of hand cream is like custard, vanilla sauce.
She wants to know more about my childhood but I have nothing much to tell her. All I remember is being out fishing and my father pulling on the oars and the water dripping from the oars. I remember honey dripping from the spoon at the breakfast table and my father twisting the spoon around quickly to stop the honey running. I remember the water hammering in the pipes at night and the mice running along the floor.
Every Single Minute Page 8
