Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  You must remember more than that, she says.

  I tell her I’ve forgotten everything and my brother’s memory is far better than mine. I always wanted to put things behind me as fast as possible and I left it up to him to remember. He keeps everything in his head so I can forget. Dates, times, places, all the details of what happened. His memory is the same as mine, no difference, only that he knows where to find it.

  That’s absurd, she says.

  She doesn’t believe it’s possible for me to have so few personal memories. I must be suppressing things. I tell her my memory is unreliable. That’s not the word that I wanted to use, unreliable, not to be trusted. Resistant, recalcitrant, some word like that.

  I’m only suppressing things I can’t remember.

  She closes up the tub of hand cream and puts it back into her bag. Then she leans forward to let me know something. She says she once read about a writer who said you were always crawling towards the truth. Which is true, she says. She came from a time that was only crawling towards the truth and she couldn’t wait that long, she had to speak out. It’s all in my books, she says. I didn’t make it look beautiful. I didn’t make it look worse, or better. It was the honesty I was after, nothing else.

  The rhythm of honesty, she calls it.

  She’s afraid I have no rhythm.

  She says I need to bring everything out into the open. I can’t be like an empty field any more with nothing built on it, it’s impossible to be alive without remembering.

  Tell me about your father, she says.

  So then I try to get into the rhythm, in Café Einstein. She’s a good listener and she gives me time to explain.

  We were far too honest, I tell her. That was our problem, too much honesty. My father was a schoolteacher, I explain to her, so he had a good method for finding out what was going on inside your head. He cross-examined me and my brother separately, so we could never agree on a story together. The details were always a bit off. I was the reflection of my older brother, but we sometimes remembered things differently. We were easily confused, always caught out.

  My father was trying to find out the truth, I tell her.

  About what?

  The Jesuit. My uncle, the Jesuit.

  It was the silence, I explain to her. My father’s brother made our family very silent. We thought it was good to be silent. We were all trying to be as silent as a Jesuit and get away with saying nothing, so nobody could guess what was inside our heads. We used to go out to the field and play hurling, just the two of us, my brother and me, whacking the ball to each other, back and forth. I still remember the sound of the wood against the leather ball. I remember him catching the ball, taking it out of the air with his hand like you would pick an apple. A stinging apple. Then he would swing his body around and send the ball back. That’s all we did for hours, like a conversation with only one word. We were so honest, myself and my brother, we only said the most necessary things to each other. I think we were being exactly like my father and his brother, as silent as possible. They had nothing to say to each other apart from talking about world events, history, the economy. Me and my brother had nothing to say to each other either, nothing that ever connected up into a conversation. Only the essential practicalities, that’s all. And facts. A few bits of general information that we were trying to get right for my father, facts like highest mountains, largest lakes, longest roads, things you learn in school basically.

  We went up a mountain together once without saying much for a whole day. We were afraid to talk about seeing my father’s brother coming out of the hotel in Cork with my aunt. We didn’t even want to admit that we were in Cork at the same time. We didn’t want to tell each other that my aunt and my father’s brother were cousins. The less we knew the less could be extracted under pressure. Anything you say to yourself you end up saying out loud in the end, I knew that, so we pretended we didn’t carry any of that information with us.

  The sound at Café Einstein keeps renewing itself. Cups and plates and pots of coffee clicking as they are being set out on the tables. She’s listening to everything I’m saying. Then she finds some lip balm that I didn’t know she had in her bag either. Where did all these things come from? Her lips are very dry. She’s dehydrated, even though she’s been drinking lots of water.

  We were on a fishing holiday, I explain to her. Staying in a hotel right next to a lake. The lake was called Lough Conn. And out through the windows of the hotel we could see a mountain called Nephin.

  The mountain was asking to be climbed. Every morning it was there at breakfast like a challenge. So one day my father allowed us to climb the mountain, me and my brother, we were only about thirteen and fourteen at the time. We had sandwiches and soft drinks in a rucksack each, identical. We set off from the hotel with the lake behind us and the mountain rising up ahead. The cattle were chewing. There were rushes in the fields, like eyebrows. Fuchsia hedges along the side of the road with a line of bright red dust underneath. I can clearly remember a tractor passing by, followed by a dog, followed by the smell of diesel. The man on the tractor raised his hand without looking back. And the mountain came back into view every now and then, a big surprise around the next bend, closer and larger than before.

  All these things I remember, but we never spoke about them, we didn’t trust each other.

  It was like a silent country we were walking through. We cut in off the road where the fields came to an end and the bog took over. The bog was covered in heather, like a complicated softness under my feet. I felt the breeze in my armpits. The fields were shrinking behind us and there was nobody around, no other witnesses. About halfway up the mountain, we sat down and had our sandwiches. The lake looked more stretched out, more like a piece of blue tiling, reflected. We lay back for a while staring at the clouds moving across the sky above us. Every time the sun went in it was like the end of the day and every time the sun came out again was like a new day beginning. Sometimes it looked like the clouds had come to a standstill and we were forced to believe that the mountain was carrying us away.

  And then my brother spoke to me. He talked about the Jesuit and said it was better for us to agree on a plan. So we made an official agreement to remain silent. We agreed to be as silent as my father and my father’s brother and not speak a word about having chips or staying in the hotel in Cork and seeing my father’s brother with my aunt, two cousins holding hands.

  I remember getting up and telling my brother we better carry on before it started raining. He told me to go ahead, he would catch up. So I kept going and left my brother behind me. Every once in a while I looked back down and he was still there, lying on his back looking at the clouds taking him further and further away. I remember the strong wind and the rocks where the heather stopped growing and the small cairn at the summit. The view was gone, the rain came down, I was inside a cloud.

  My brother disappeared. When I got back down again I looked for him. I called him. Maybe I came down in a different place, so I thought at the time, where he was not to be found. So I had to carry on back to the hotel on my own, without my brother. I was worried what my father might ask him to say, so I hurried along the same road back to the lake to try and catch up with him, past the cattle bunched together in the corner of a field, past the same rushes dripping and the sound of water left running. I kept thinking of my brother walking only yards ahead of me, but I was mistaken.

  I was the first to get to the hotel and it was my brother who was still missing. My father questioned me, but I only gave him the most necessary information, that myself and my brother split up, that’s all. I told him that I went up to the top of the mountain and then it started raining, we lost each other. My father said it was very irresponsible to split up like that and my mother told him to wait until my brother came back before he said any more.

  We were all staring around the room waiting. There were photographs of the lake and the mountain everywhere, to remind you of the real lake and the real m
ountain outside. And fishing. No matter where you went, in the corridors, the bedrooms, you couldn’t get away from men holding up a salmon or a lake trout, hanging their catch on the weighing scales. Men in boats, men in oilskins, men smiling and raising a glass of whiskey afterwards. Famous men who had come to the hotel, lucky enough to catch a fish while they were there. And flies for sale at the reception. Thousands of beautiful flies in colours that you could never believe, nothing you could ever imagine seeing in real life. They had workshops for people learning how to tie mayflies with bits of chicken feathers and deer hair and I knew I would be very good at that kind of thing if I let myself. The biggest pike ever caught on the lake was in a glass case over the bar, with his mouth open, serrated teeth. And beside him, the coloured fly on a hook that he had been caught by.

  It was getting late and my mother was even more worried standing up than she was sitting down. She wanted to call the rescue services because it was nearly dark. And then my brother walked in the door.

  He has decided to come back, my father said.

  My mother ran to embrace my brother and the front of her dress got soaked. My father was even more angry at seeing him back safe again, so after my mother changed my brother’s clothes and dried his hair with a towel and sang a song to calm him down, my father asked him for a full explanation. My brother told him that he followed me up to the top of the mountain and I was gone. My mother tried to intervene, but my father told her to keep out of it, she had not been on the mountain, so she had nothing to say. My brother said it started raining and I said it started raining and my father said he couldn’t believe either of us.

  And what happened then?

  My brother gave in. I think he was trying to save me from getting punished. He told my father about my aunt giving us fish and chips in Cork. How the car was left on a hill and somebody who knew how to drive had to come and point it in the right direction again. My brother explained how we stayed in a hotel for the night and we were not tired, so we got dressed and went downstairs to explore without permission. We didn’t do anything, my brother said. We were only there by accident when my aunt came out of the hotel with my father’s brother. We were standing at the railings minding our own business, he said. He told my father everything, the smile my aunt had in her eyes, full of sadness and happiness. How she went arm in arm with my father’s brother, and he was wearing a light-grey suit, like an ordinary man, not a Jesuit.

  My mother began to cry.

  My father said he was glad the truth had been told, finally.

  My mother cried and said now she knew why my father’s brother, the Jesuit, was no longer coming to our house to visit.

  Instead of punishing us, my father came over to embrace me. He held my head sideways against his chest, so I could feel the sharp point of a pencil in his top pocket against my face. He embraced me for a long time and I wanted to escape. The pencil was sticking deeper into my face the more he loved me. I was more afraid of his love than I was of his anger. His love and his anger were nearly the same, no difference, full of things that could not be put right in his family, lots of cruel reasons and lonely times he spent as a boy in West Cork without a father. It made him press my face harder and harder against his chest. He would not let go, possibly for two minutes, maybe three or four. When he finally let go, he turned to my brother and embraced him in the same way, for the same duration, to make sure he loved us both equally, no difference.

  We kept our memories separate after that. My brother and me. Just like my father and my father’s brother. We were like counterspies in the same house, sitting at the same breakfast table and passing each other by on the stairs.

  Maybe I should be talking to your brother, she says.

  I don’t have his memory, Úna.

  You did too many drugs, Liam.

  No. It’s not that.

  I tell her it has nothing to do with drugs or not being able to remember. It’s got to do with who owns that memory, me or my brother. He wanted to keep that story of the mountain. Like he kept the story of my aunt and the Jesuit arm in arm. Please, he was always saying, let me remember the mountain story. So I gave it to him. I decided to let him keep it. I told him it belonged to him and he didn’t have to worry, I was not going to take it back off him or tell anyone it was mine.

  22

  As we were coming out of Café Einstein the waitress came running after us. Manfred was helping Úna into the car and she was already sitting down putting her seat belt on when we looked around and saw the waitress standing by on the pavement with the money in her hand.

  This is not right, the waitress was saying.

  It was embarrassing with all the people passing along street and the waitress calling – Hallo, excuse me, this is not right. There must be some mistake. Even though it was not the mistake you would expect, not what the people watching would have thought when they saw the waitress with the money in one hand and the restaurant bill in the other. It was the opposite. The truth of the matter was that the tip Úna left behind on the table was so enormous, there had to be some kind of mistake.

  She smiled at the waitress and told her to keep it. It was no mistake, because she knew what it was like to be a waitress, she knew what the money was like to receive, more than what it was to give.

  Put that away now, she said. You keep that for yourself.

  She said it like an aunt. Like a mother. Even though the waitress continued saying it was a mistake, she could not accept it, please, take it back, it’s far too much. I remember the waitress closing her fist on the money and holding it up against her chest, in tears, because I think she knew the money was being transferred from a dying person to a living person. She stood on the pavement waving goodbye.

  23

  Then she’s asleep.

  Your mother is asleep, Manfred says. Will I stop the car?

  I ask her would she like to lie down. Would you like to go back to the hotel and lie down for a while? But she doesn’t answer. Her eyes are closed and she doesn’t hear me.

  I tell Manfred to keep going.

  Where?

  Anywhere, just keep driving.

  The back of her head is rolling from side to side, lolling, if you prefer. Until the side of her forehead comes to rest against the frame of the car. The bag has slipped from her grasp. I just about catch it before the contents spill out and put it on the seat beside her. I place her hands in her lap, one across the other, palms up. Her mouth is open, she could be dead.

  She’s asleep with all the architecture going by. All the streets that she’s missing. Look at all the people passing us by, I want to say to her. All the things I’m seeing for her, with my own eyes, while she’s asleep. Like what? Houses. Shops. Traffic. Overhead trains. A whole city slipping by, street by street. All the graffiti on the walls and the doors and shops and train stations. Graffiti up high where people don’t go. Graffiti on trees. Graffiti on people. Graffiti on the plinth of a horse rider, an oversized nobleman still on his horse with the weeds growing around him. Riding through the city weeds. Riding past the people. And the people riding past him on their bikes, in every direction. Layers of memory over memory over shops over banks over schools over courthouses and galleries and everything that moves.

  What else?

  If she wasn’t asleep I would tell her to look at the two men embracing outside a train station, kissing each other cheek by cheek five times before they part and one goes down the steps and the other walks away along the street. I want to tell her about the man I see waiting for another man to finish the bottle he’s drinking so he can have it to add to all the other bottles he’s collecting in a blue Ikea bag on his shoulder. I want to tell her I saw a man checking the contents of the street bin with a small flashlight. I saw a woman with two children on her bike, front and back, talking to them both as she’s passing by. Also. An old man with a ponytail sitting outside a café with a red rug over his knees. Also. A man wearing a white apron and a white cap on his head, smok
ing a cigarette outside a restaurant, with white flour on his hands and face. Also. A father and daughter crossing the street. He’s wearing a leather jacket with psychobilly written on it. You’d hardly know they were father and daughter, more like brother and sister maybe. Only that they’re holding hands and she looks like him. I have no idea what they could be talking about, maybe something to do with a dog. That’s what I’m guessing. I think she’s asking him if they can get a dog.

  Maybe the people are like the city they live in, I’m thinking, or is it the other way around, the city is like the people that live there. Úna would have something to say about that, I’m sure, but she’s asleep and we’re driving around in circles with her mouth open.

  I get talking to Manfred. I ask him general questions. Who else does he normally drive around the city? He speaks over his shoulder and tells me he drives around men in suits mostly. He never likes asking them what they’re up to, unless they tell him. It’s not his business. It’s not his car. He’s only the driver and the fleet belongs to his cousin.

  Manfred tells me about an American hip-hop artist he collected from the airport recently. He gives me the name but I’ve never heard of him before. The hip-hop artist apologized for not speaking German, Manfred says, then he kept talking all the way from the airport to the hotel, in English. He had a strong American accent which Manfred could not understand very well, it had such a fast rhythm and it was hard for him to stop the flow. Manfred says he had a red beard and he wore the clothes of his sister. If he had a sister, Manfred says. A light-blue jumper with a diagonal pattern of rabbits and lightning strikes. Blue lightning strikes, he says, across the chest. He was also wearing green shorts and luminous green socks, up to his knees.