Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  I checked him out afterwards on the net, that’s how I remember the green socks and the green shorts.

  Manfred tells me that he brought the hip-hop artist to the venue and that he was invited to stay for the performance, so that he could bring him back to his hotel afterwards, very late. The venue was packed, so Manfred is saying. The hip-hop artist had a huge fan base and the place was full of people dancing and crashing into each other. It was very loud, you would have to wear earplugs. Manfred says he’s not accustomed to that volume any more. My ears were whistling for two days, he says. Crazy. I couldn’t hear my own television. There are two drummers in the band, he says, the rest is mostly technology, and there is a large green skull over the stage which keeps lighting on and off to the music. When the lights go off, Manfred says, the green skull is flying high over the crowd. The green skull flickering on and off very rapidly to the beat. The green skull man. Or was it the skull of a green woman? Who knows? He has no body but he has a life, Manfred says, with the music.

  Manfred tells me that he’s a family man now. And when you have children, he says, you forget how important all that clubbing scene is. It’s good to know that it’s all still there, he says, within reach, without you, all those things he might or might not have done before, without going into the details. While Manfred is talking I get the feeling that I’ve been in the wrong place up to now. I should have been here in this city from the start. I’ve been missing something. Like music I was not aware of and should have been listening to if I wasn’t already listening to something else. I should be here, where everything is available. Everything is in your grasp, so I thought to myself.

  This city doesn’t mind what age you are, Manfred says.

  And as we’re stopped briefly at traffic lights again, I’m looking out at some people sitting on a bench. It seems to me that it’s a grandfather and a father and a son. Three generations. You can tell, they look very alike, only different ages, that’s all. Three different stages of the same man, you could say. The father is talking to the grandfather, telling a story, using his hands. The grandfather has some beads in his hand and he’s listening to his son telling the story, while his grandson is playing with a piece of blue twine. The boy begins tying the blue twine around his grandfather’s head. The grandfather hardly notices the twine going around his own head because he’s listening. The father keeps talking, occasionally elbowing the boy, telling him to stop doing that to his grandfather. But the boy ignores him, because his father and his grandfather are so deeply involved in the conversation that they are not really bothered by the thin blue twine going around the grandfather’s chin, around the ears, up over his bald head and back down under the chin again. The father continues telling the story and the grandfather continues listening and the boy continues tying the blue twine around the grandfather’s head. That’s all I saw. We moved on, so I didn’t find out what happened after that.

  24

  She wakes up. She makes a barking sound at the back of her throat and looks out the window to see where she is.

  Was I asleep with my mouth open?

  No, I say.

  Liam, you’re such a liar, she says. I hate that, sleeping with my mouth open.

  It’s as though she has the ability to remember everything that’s been said while she was asleep. Because she tells me to grow up, my clubbing days are over. Be yourself, she says, there are plenty of other things in the city apart from the night-life. And then I’m thinking that maybe she was not asleep at all, only sitting with her head back like a listening device, picking up everything myself and Manfred were talking about, including the green skull.

  And then we have an emergency in the car, her feet were causing trouble, so I remember.

  Liam, I can’t feel my feet. My feet don’t belong to me any more. They’re not my feet, Liam. Could that be right? My feet don’t feel like my feet any more, she said.

  Is it the medication? Is it her circulation? Would she like to go back to the hotel now? No, she says, keep going, because there’s nothing much to do back in the hotel room and she doesn’t want to sit in the foyer of the Adlon listening to piano music all day, whether it’s a real piano player or just a piano playing of its own accord, doesn’t matter. It’s only her feet, they feel so tight, squeezed into her shoes. The best thing for me to do in that case is to raise her legs up onto the seat, so she’s travelling sideways.

  Free the feet, she says.

  I loosen the laces and pull her shoes off by the heel. I put the socks into her bag and then she wants her toenails cut.

  Look at them, she says. They’re too long. They’re jamming up against the tips of my shoes.

  Fair enough.

  They’re cutting into my toes, Liam.

  We’re going to be late for a lunch meeting, but what does that matter?

  This has nothing to do with time-keeping, it has to do with now, here and now. So I ask Manfred if he could do us a favour and stop so we can get a pair of nail clippers. What would be the best place around here, without going too much out of the way? So Manfred tells us not to worry, it’s probably best for him to park somewhere and go out himself to get the nail clippers. She says thanks Manfred, this is very kind of you. Make sure it’s a good pair of nail clippers, she says, proper industrial ones, not those cheap ones that go sideways and slip out of your fingers and don’t even cut the nail only score it with a little mark before it breaks. Manfred knows exactly what she’s talking about.

  I understand, he says, big nail clippers for the feet.

  25

  Manfred disappears. We’re watching the street corner where he went out of sight, waiting for him to come back with the nail clippers. Another man appears and it takes a moment for us to realize that it’s not Manfred, until he walks right past ignoring us. We go back to waiting for Manfred.

  I want to ask her something about Milltown Malbay. The singer she told me about, holding on to the bar counter. During the music festival, with the pub so crawling with people that nobody could move in or out the door. Was he wearing a blue suit jacket? Did he have a black T-shirt underneath?

  Yes, she says. I think so.

  Did he have the other hand on his hip?

  Yes, I think so.

  Had he got his eyes closed? Had he got his chest out and his shoulders back? Because that’s the way I remember it, the man singing in the crowded bar in Milltown Malbay, he had his eyes open just once, very briefly, to look at something over the door. Even though there was nothing up there to look at and he was only doing so to remember the words, then he closed his eyes again.

  He had a voice like a new car, I remember. She agrees with that. He sang a song called A stór mo chroí, my heart’s love. We agree on that as well. We also agree that he was not a famous singer, not professional. He never made a recording. He only became a singer at that very moment, as he began to sing. It was the song that turned him into a singer, as soon as people called for silence. So that was his only recording, the people listening. We were his recording. He was our recording, because we were there at the same time, myself and Emily, listening to the man with his eyes closed and a voice like a new car singing.

  I tell her about a time I was trying to go back to Milltown Malbay. Around the time that my daughter was born. I couldn’t believe what was in my grasp, holding the baby’s head, looking at her eyes opening, the tiny fingers, the cry, quivering. You could say I was astonished at the idea of being a father, excited, exhilarated, all those words that don’t really explain anything. I was delirious, no other word for it. I had the feeling that I was escaping from myself, that for once, nobody was following me.

  When she was only two weeks old, it was discovered that the baby had a cyst on one of her breasts. Something she was born with, I would never have noticed it myself. A tiny growth that seemed completely harmless but could have turned malignant. The paediatricians were telling us it would be a matter of concern, if it was not removed right away, surgically. She was on
ly two weeks old and she was having to go for an operation, under general anaesthetic. They said it would leave no more than a small scar, but all the same. It was more serious than we thought. I kept reassuring Emily that it was nothing. The baby would not even remember it. No. That’s not true. Of course I knew it had to be a total nightmare and the baby would feel abandoned. Only there was nothing we could do, that’s what I was saying, the operation had to proceed and we could not be present in theatre.

  Emily was asked to provide some breast milk. So she got a breast pump and filled a lot of sterilized jars full of her milk and brought them in to be labelled and kept in storage. The baby’s name was written on all the jars, my surname.

  We were only just getting used to calling her Maeve.

  So there we stood on the street outside the hospital not knowing what to do, we felt so alone without the baby. Emily kept looking up at the windows. I have no idea what she was hoping to see. Medical staff dressed in green gowns and green masks over their faces. I had to pull her away down the street by the arm and we sat in a café with nothing to say, not even looking into each other’s eyes, not drinking the coffee or eating the scones we ordered either, only me talking and her not listening, as if she couldn’t hear me.

  Emily kept repeating the baby’s name, trying to feel close to her. Maeve. Maeveen. She kept wanting to find out if there was any news yet, but there was nothing we could possibly do only wait.

  And the thing was this, I was mad about her. I loved Emily in a way that you can only love a mother after having a baby. I was ready to do anything in the world to distract her and make her happy. So I got her into the car and started driving, just to stop her worrying about what the baby was going through. I don’t know what came over me only that I felt I had to take action, go somewhere, get away from what was making her so sad, she had all this milk love in her breasts. I know this sounds crazy and it is, but all I could think of doing at the time was to keep driving through the streets, any direction. I had the music on and the windows open, it was absurd. I kept talking, saying anything at all that might cheer her up and make her smile again.

  Remember the bar with the bathroom at the back, I kept saying to Emily. Where you had to go through the kitchen, through the smell of soup and washing-up liquid and tea leaves. Emily, remember us when we were escaping, you were sitting on the edge of the bath with the enamel all cracked, a million hairline cracks. Because that’s what happens when you pour boiling water into old baths like that, the enamel begins to crack into tiny surface fractures, no real harm done, only that it makes the bath look even older than it is. A bath with wrinkles, that’s what Emily called it back then. I reminded her how we laughed about it, wondering how many people must have had a bath in it over the years. How many generations of mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers would fit together in a bath like that with the water up to their ears? And how many children lay back and put their heads down, only their noses and their eyes up over the surface, looking at the steamed-up tiles, listening to the world with all the sound gone under, the pipework clicking and the overflow plughole slurping and the underwater sounds coming from the bar, the empty glasses being collected and the voice of a singer like an engine humming and a lot of swallowing.

  I’m just driving. Driving with this thing stuck in my head, something I want to re-create which has nothing to do with what’s happening right now in our lives. Emily is sitting beside me, asking me where we’re going and I’m not listening to her. I keep on driving and wondering what it would be like to go back, if the cracked bath is still there at all any more, or has it been replaced. I imagine it like a re-enactment. Emily and me going into that bar in Milltown Malbay, sitting down for a drink together. And after a while she gets up to go to the bathroom, because the men’s toilets are out in the yard, so it’s up to her to check. I wait for her in the bar, looking around to see how much I remember. For a place that was so full of people the last time we were there, it seems very empty now, only the barman stacking bottles. Then she comes back out to the bar and sits down beside me, smiling. Yes, Liam, she says. The bath is still there, with all the cracks left in it. And the hot water boiler above. And the two green lines. And the chain with the stopper gone grey.

  That’s how I imagined it. Everything the same as it was. The road to the coast. The seaweed baths, the Pollock Holes, the sky, the rocks, the empty landscape, all intact. The entire shoreline unchanged.

  There is no way of explaining this, even talking about it feels like waking up on the edge of the cliffs, opening my eyes and staring down at the way I was then. I was obsessed with making up a story for myself. My imagination was more real than my life.

  I mean, this is the mother of a two-week-old baby in hospital. Emily was still very pale after the birth. It showed up her freckles. The milk love in her breasts was leaking all over the car so I brought her straight back to the hospital. She was crying and she left the car door open. She ran, or half-ran, that’s how I remember it, in through the revolving doors. I saw her turning right, then left, then right again before she disappeared. I parked the car and went in after her and it was as if she couldn’t recognize me, as if I was not even the father and she could not speak to me until she was told that the operation was over, the baby was fine, sleeping now. She asked if she could sit beside the cot.

  26

  Manfred gets back. I see him appearing around the corner but I don’t actually believe it’s him until he comes right up to the car and smiles in through the window. He opens the door and hands me a small white plastic bag with the nail clippers. He apologizes for taking so long, but Úna tells him it’s fine, we were having a chat and we didn’t even notice him gone.

  The nail clippers come in a plastic wrapper and it takes me ages, you know those sealed packages that are almost impossible to open up without mutilating yourself. I have to tear away at the cardboard backing. She’s waiting patiently and then I finally manage to wrench the nail clippers out. We’re ready to begin. The big pedicure, I say to her. I put my jacket on my knees and lift her feet up. We can’t rush this, I’m telling myself. It’s a delicate thing. I ask Manfred to wait, because we can’t be driving and cutting toenails at the same time.

  I can be good at this. I start with the big toe and work my way down to the little toe. I just concentrate on what I’m doing and she watches me. She starts telling me something about Bob Dylan, did I know that you can look at the entire double album being played on the internet now.

  No, I say, not looking up.

  I come from a time of vinyl, she says. And vinyl is making a comeback. At least you can see the double album being played again, she says. A pair of hands brings out each disk and lays it down on the turntable. The disk begins to spin and the needle touches down with a scrape and a hiss, the way it used to. Imagine, she says. You can listen to the whole thing and watch the printed information on the centre label rotating. Columbia, she says. All the crackles underneath the songs, completely authentic.

  I offer to play it for her on my phone, but she doesn’t want that, she doesn’t have the attention span now.

  When I’m finished doing her toenails I gather up the bits and put them into the paper bag that came with the toenail clippers. I put the clippers into her see-through bag and I put the bag with the cut-off toenails into my jacket pocket. She says her feet are quite itchy and hot, so I rub some hand cream on them. The sensation has come back into her feet and she starts laughing, it tickles. She’s laughing and coughing, so I have to stop. I tell Manfred to go ahead, he can drive on. I open the windows to cool her feet and she stretches out her toes, wriggling them in the breeze. Then I put her shoes and socks back on.

  Thanks, Liam.

  There you are now. How does that feel?

  My feet are my own again, she says.

  I tie the shoelaces and one of them breaks, so I put the broken piece of white shoestring into my jacket pocket as well. Where else do you put these things?

/>   27

  I had no idea how to be a father. I was completely unprepared when the baby came out of hospital. I thought things would just fall into place. I was like a boy on a bike. There’s no other way of describing it. A boy freewheeling through the puddles with my legs out.

  I think she rescued me. Maeve. Maeveen.

  There was a fire at the house where we had been living. It was not fit for a baby any more, never was. Emily and myself had a flat in a terraced house where people had a lot of parties. Spontaneous parties that erupted late and sometimes went on till lunchtime the next day, all kinds of stuff being taken. Bottles left on the stairs. It was that type of place, there was a great turnover of faces, you hardly got to know anybody properly. We had a great time, it has to be said, and it would be misleading to give the impression it wasn’t me and Emily throwing most of the parties ourselves, but now we had moved on to the family stage.

  I thought the baby would be fine there for a while, we made it nice. I should have planned something better, but to be honest, I had no money and I was not very good at making plans, only planning to get out of things, planning to get away from my father, for example, away from home. I got used to living unprepared, with people coming and going through my life. I was doing what I thought everyone else in Ireland was doing at the time, planning to have no plans, hoping everything would look after itself, and if not, you could always leave it behind and go away, abroad. And then there was a fire downstairs one day, somebody careless with a cigarette or a candle, it was bound to happen. We came back to find the front door open and water all over the hallway. There was some half-burned furniture and curtains thrown into the front garden. The banisters were charred, you could see where the flames had begun to bite into the paint, dark teeth-marks in the wood. The walls were blackened with smoke along the stairs. Our rooms had been broken into by the fire officers in order to secure the building, they had opened all the windows. I can still remember the smell of dampness and burned wood. It was in our clothes, in the books, in everything we owned, even the electrical equipment. A sharp smell of things half-eaten, coughed up by fire.