Every Single Minute

Every Single Minute Hugo Hamilton ‘Not only haunted by death, but also by beauty and the strangeness of being alive. A deeply memorable novel’ Colm T?ib?n‘… I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except I am dying.’?na has little over a week left to live and wants to see Berlin for the first and last time. Her friend Liam accompanies her. As the city streets open up to them, so too do their pasts. ?na recalls her life – her lovers, her famous father, her alcoholic mother and the death of her younger brother. For Liam the weekend becomes a lesson in true living from a friend he is about to lose. HUGO HAMILTON Every Single Minute Copyright (#ulink_d35a8791-ce54-54c3-81c6-5c29d002a18c) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014 Copyright © Hugo Hamilton 2014 Hugo Hamilton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007324859 Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007468867 Version: 2015-01-09 For Mary Rose Where can I find another brother, ever? Sophocles/Seamus Heaney Contents Cover (#ude41a4bb-14a3-50f6-af29-65f9eecac4a1) Title Page (#ueee45761-c8e3-507c-8f00-7f872cebe8b9) Copyright (#uae10bb56-a171-539e-9db9-4a2bfac6a059) Dedication (#u0844f7d1-7ef3-57f9-963e-48f1dc464353) Epigraph (#u8b82ec91-068e-5063-8bb1-8dec0ff99101) Chapter 1 (#uf6ffc1a0-1194-56e0-84be-91f1f4444f84) Chapter 2 (#u1afb34cc-ba6c-5d0a-b766-a13b6ba10c23) Chapter 3 (#uccbc4d4f-eb9b-5702-a58b-5da4694a5466) Chapter 4 (#ua92749a3-e0a4-5500-babd-bf4b02ce1c74) Chapter 5 (#uc09b3efb-bcbd-5de4-a3eb-39d5b85b5eb2) Chapter 6 (#u0e4bc497-943b-5902-9500-b35137986b41) Chapter 7 (#u93f3547e-1f3a-5f2c-a44c-5eee2670fea9) Chapter 8 (#u92852ac4-dd96-501a-a494-f6c0165234cb) Chapter 9 (#u890a41c9-8aa6-55da-a8f1-e33af3a13aa6) Chapter 10 (#u66033a94-6848-5b17-9e69-034506c14fd2) Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Hugo Hamilton (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 (#ulink_3f83f4e0-0058-55d3-9e29-b39c6746d6ad) She’s wearing those red canvas shoes. They’re in all the photographs. They’re there at the airport, while she’s being helped down the steps. They’re there in the Botanic Garden. At the Pergamon Museum. Also outside the opera house. They made her feel light on her feet. You know them, those flat canvas shoes with the white rubber soles and white rubber toe-caps and rough white stitching. Sneakers, people sometimes call them. Converse, if you prefer, with two rows of steel eyelets punched into the canvas for the laces, white laces. And two extra eyelets on each side for no other reason than to make them look more sporty, I suppose, more industrial maybe. They’re there at the hotel, beside her bed. She’s sitting in her chair, ready to go out. She’s got white socks on, from some long-haul flight, I think, and I’m helping her on with the shoes, the red canvas shoes. I get the laces done up and help her onto her feet. I’ve double-parked the wheelchair next to her chair so I can swing her around, holding her by the elbows and letting her down slowly. I can hear her breathing. Will she be warm enough? By right she should have some kind of scarf to put on because her neck is quite exposed. She says she’ll be fine, she can always hold the collar of her coat up. She wanted to be brought to Berlin. I was bringing her. She loved travelling and it was her last wish to go somewhere away. Anywhere, she said. Anywhere away. So why not Berlin, I suggested, and she said yes, why not? Berlin was one of those places she had always been putting off and now she was afraid she might never see the city in her own lifetime. I love the way they do potatoes in Germany, she said. I want to see the Pergamon Museum. I want to see the Botanic Garden. I want to see the church that’s been left in ruins since the war. This is different, she said to me a couple of times on the flight coming over from Dublin. She was actually crying in that photograph, taken by the flight attendant. She was crying and smiling at the same time, saying this is different, Liam. This is different. I think she might have been afraid of what the photograph was doing to her. It was keeping her. It was keeping her and it was leaving her behind. She kept saying it was different because there was a bit of travelling left in her and going to Berlin was giving her something to live for. It was like extra time, if you can call it that. There’s nothing wrong with me only I’m dying, she said. I suppose she was trying to laugh it off sometimes, doing her best to ignore the reality, you can understand that. She had all this energy, she wanted to see everything. All the galleries. All the museums, all the gardens, all the places unvisited before, the history, the whole place changing after the Berlin Wall, the way the city looks here and now, alive and breathing and remembering, everything we can humanly fit in, she said. She had a list made out, written on hotel paper, the itinerary, if you like. I won’t forget this, she said to me. She said she loved every single minute. She said she would remember this journey as long as she lived. I know that doesn’t make sense under the circumstances, but you know what she was getting at. What people say is not always word for word. She said a lot of hopeful things about the world and the future, because it’s hard to get out of the habit of looking forward and being optimistic. It’s hard to stop saying as long as you live, even though you can never tell how long that’s going to be for. She only had a bit over a week after that. She asked me to book tickets for the opera. She wanted to go to the Berlin State Opera, it’s not far from the Adlon where we were staying. Don Carlo was running at the time. Verdi, she said. We have to go. The last time I saw Don Carlo was at theMet, in New York. Unfortunately the performance was sold out. I called the reception at the hotel to see if there was any chance of them getting tickets for us. They were extremely helpful. They did say it was a bit late in the day, but they assured me they would do their very best and if there was a spare ticket to be found anywhere in Berlin it was hers. I told her it was looking good. Thanks, Liam, she said. And then she pulls off the wig that she’s wearing. A full head of hair, with light brown curls, not unlike her own. She pulls it off with both hands like a child and throws it across the room as if she never found anything she hated as much. In fact, the first time she put the wig on she had to laugh. As if she was only pretending to be grown up, wearing something belonging to the adults, don’t I look very funny in this? You wouldn’t recognize her in those photographs if you didn’t know her. She looks so unlike herself without the curly hair, so uncovered. Her face is a bit puffed up with medication, swollen around the eyes. I think the real reason for the wig was so as not to frighten people, because she could see the shock in their eyes when they saw her head bare, how quickly this can happen to anyone. I’m not wearing that thing, she says. I don’t blame you. I want to be myself, she says. The wig is left lying on the floor like an animal that’s been run over on the motorway. I pick it up and carry it away, back to her suitcase. Then I take off my cap and give it to her, because she can’t be going out with nothing covering her head. This is Berlin in May we’re talking about. We can’t be sure if it’s going to be warm or cold. Here, why don’t you wear my cap? What I have is a grey baseball-type cap, pretty ordinary, no brand name on it. She examines the cap in her hands for a moment. She makes no comment, she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t trust mirrors. The cap fits her and I’m hoping she will keep it on, she looks great. I tell her it goes with the shoes, the red canvas shoes. Now you look like Steven Spielberg. She laughs. Sure what does it matter? she says. I’m here in Berlin, nobody can see me. And the way she said things like that you’d never forget. You’d recognize her anywhere by the way she spoke in a high voice, quite innocent, as if everything was new to her. Her voice was a girl. Her mind was a girl. She loved everything she didn’t know yet. She loved the whole idea of letting on that she knew nothing so that people would explain things to her very clearly, in simple words, and she would not be expected to say anything. She would tilt her head and listen carefully and wait for them to tell her things they might never say to a grown-up woman, or a man. Nobody sees a child watching, she said. Some of the things she said, I have to admit, didn’t make sense to me until after she died. While she was still alive I may have been prevented from understanding a lot of what she was saying until now, looking back. I know this sounds like a contradiction, but it’s hard sometimes to see exactly what’s in front of you until you get around to remembering. I hope this is accurate. I hope I’m getting it all in the right order. I’m only going by the photographs and the places we went to see. And what she said at the time might not be the same as what I remember she said. 2 (#ulink_42eeee42-1310-5ef0-a914-4715384274cc) The bag she had. She had this see-through plastic bag with a white zip across the top. I think it might have come with a pillow, or a duvet cover, something like that. It was a heavy-duty bag with proper white rope handles, completely clear with no product name, so you could see all the contents inside. Everything she had with her, all her belongings, if you like. From the outside you could see her purse, her medication, her tissues, her reading glasses, her passport, the key card for the hotel room, bits of newspapers she was keeping for later. A book she was never going to read. Her mobile phone, switched off. Things taken from the hotel room like free pens. And chocolate. Lots of chocolate. What are we only children? That’s what she said to me. Not that she was stuck for a bag. She could have got herself any bag she wanted, only handbags were never a great priority in her life. That see-through bag was perfectly good, she said, too good to be thrown out. She held on to it for environmental reasons, obviously, but also to let people know that she was not the kind of woman who would spend a lot of money on a designer bag, that’s not who she was. She wasn’t here to make a big impression, it was only a bag to put her things into. I think she was making the point that her life was very open, nothing to hide. It could only have been her bag and nobody else’s, unmistakable. And it was handy being able to see into the bag from the outside while searching with her hand inside at the same time. Her hand became one of the items in the bag and the plastic made a squeaking sound while she was looking for something, her glasses, checking to make sure she had her glasses, with the wine-coloured frames. She had only recently bought them in New York and she told me that the optometrist had nice breath. She tried to get him into conversation, but all he ever said was look up, look down at the floor, look at my left ear. And the same thing again for the other eye, look up, look down, look at my right ear. He was so close in front of her that she got the smell of blackberries on his breath, like blackberry jam. We’re only children. That’s it. We’re only just children, she said. She liked to imagine that every day was the first day of her life. She loved being at the Adlon, a bit of luxury, she said. The foyer was wide, with a section cordoned off at the centre for tables and chairs where people sat having coffee and cake, a glass of champagne, like they had done for years, I suppose. There was a high dome lit up in the middle of the ceiling and a balcony overlooking the foyer where people could look down from above at the people below. The reception was to the left as you came in, that’s how I remember it, and a cocktail bar to the right. And there was a long marble corridor leading away to the back past the elevators. It was a calm place, all in all, even when it was busy, with a piano playing most of the time and voices chatting and the sound of the elevator doors. She loved meeting new people, for example the hotel staff. She got into conversation and made friends with them right away, asking them questions, personal questions like do you believe in ghosts? Do you have a boyfriend? What do you think of Lady Gaga? And they always responded truthfully, out of courtesy. She talked to them like she was one of the hotel staff herself, which she was once, long ago, in London, a chambermaid, if that’s what you still call room service now. She was like one of them, having a chat to fill in the time, keeping them from their work. Her room was bigger, more deluxe than mine, overlooking the street with all the action. My room looked out over the inner courtyard with the flower garden. There was possibly a bit too much d?cor, if you ask me, needless use of natural resources. Wood panelling around the rooms, all very heavy and executive. Corporate, would that be the right word? And the bathrooms were something else, very spacious, marble tiling, beautiful towels that looked to me like they had never been used before, that was the feeling you got at least. Everything was very new and old-looking at the same time, new old. The place had been completely reconstructed since the wall came down, with no trace of the old place left, only the name and the reputation. Sometimes I wonder what people get up to in hotel bedrooms, what mad things went on before me. It doesn’t bear thinking about, she said. Leave it alone, you don’t want to imagine. Because she worked as a chambermaid in London years ago and she’d seen everything that was worth imagining. It was her job to erase the evidence. A hotel bedroom is meant to have no trace of the previous occupants. Maybe all they ever get up to is look into each other’s eyes and say each other’s names, out loud. So we’re all ready to go and she takes out the list from her bag. I’m pushing the wheelchair along the corridor towards the elevator. I call the elevator and she hands me the list to give to the driver when we see him. We’re not going to call him the driver, she says. Are we? We can call him Manfred. Does he mind being called Manfred? That’s his name, I tell her. Please call me Manfred, that’s what he said to me. She wants to know, does he have much English? Yes. Don’t tell him, she says, will you? She would prefer Manfred not to know about her condition. It’s not like her to withhold information from people, but keeping Manfred free from knowing that she is dying is not such a big lie, everybody does that. She would rather not have to explain. She probably doesn’t want to go over those medical details again. What the doctors said, how they waved the X-ray around and then left her alone in the corridor. How they came back and told her that in spite of the bad news, she was as healthy as a trout. Her heart was in excellent condition, and her blood pressure was perfect. They were talking about her like spare body parts, she told me, as though they could reassemble the best available parts from a number of women into one decent woman they could stand over. The nurse even remarked about her elbows, how did she keep them so young, she had the elbows of a ten-year-old. I’ve let him know you’re a writer, I tell her. He doesn’t need to know any more than that, she says. He thinks you’re my mother. She laughs at that. Me, your mother? Everybody loves mothers, I say, and she laughs again, with all her lungs. I wouldn’t know how to be a mother, she says. Ah that’s not true. She’s not my mother, only Manfred has picked up that impression somehow because she’s a good bit older than me, in a wheelchair. Just to be clear about this, she was definitely not my mother and there was no romance between us either, nothing like that in the past, no previous history. We were not attached to each other or living together like lovers, or married, or related in any compulsory way, like her family. We were good friends, that’s all. We met when things were a bit upside-down, for both of us. She was older in years, in books, in everything. She didn’t mind me knowing less than she did. She didn’t mind not knowing the first thing about cooking, I wouldn’t let her near a kitchen. We clicked, I suppose, just telling each other things, having a laugh. We took each other seriously, but not all the time. I used to call around to play with her dog, Buddy, throwing her shoe across the room to make him go after it, while she was reading. She had the ability to read as if there was nobody else in the world outside the book. Even with me running around her chair and Buddy after me, she would continue reading, even when I was hiding the shoe behind her back so that Buddy would have to jump right across her and the book would go flying out of her hands, only then she would look up and say, Liam, I’m going to kill you. Manfred is waiting at the reception by the time we get down. As we come out of the elevator he is walking towards us and I get the impression that he has been walking towards us for some time, maybe hours, maybe days, maybe always was walking towards us. How did he know when to start walking, I’m asking myself. He’s got a shaved head and you wouldn’t say he’s overweight, just very big all round, in a physical sense, he does weights, it’s obvious. He’s wearing a suit and tie and his chest is expanding to an enormous size as he puts out his hand, smiling. The piano is playing somewhere, up at the balcony level, I think it was. I give Manfred the itinerary and tell him that we can always change the order as we go along, and we’re open to anything else of interest that’s not already included on the list, if there’s enough time left. He looks at the list for a moment as though we might have the wrong city. She has everything listed all over the place, the way it happened in history. He points with his finger, blowing out air through his lips, lining the places up in some kind of order that would make sense to him geographically, as a driver. And while I’m talking to Manfred, she’s looking back at the elevator we have just come from, staring at the old-fashioned dial above the doors, maybe wondering if that’s how Manfred guessed we were on our way down. It’s one of the features of the old Adlon which they have reinstated in the new Adlon. Like in the Hitchcock films. A dial pointing to the different levels like a clock, letting you know where the elevator is, in case you want to know. Here, let me take your mother, Manfred says. He grabs the handles of the wheelchair out of my hands and away she goes, wearing her cap and her red canvas shoes, holding the clear, see-through bag with all her belongings, nothing hidden. Down the marble wheelchair ramp at the side, through the automatic doors, out under the red canopy towards the tour buses waiting in the street. Manfred pushes her over to the car and opens the sliding door. And after she’s got into the car I discover that the sliding door closes electronically. Please leave it alone, Manfred says to me when I try to close it myself, manually. In the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate there is some kind of demonstration going on. A small gathering of people with placards, more policemen than demonstrators. It’s all very calm, a lot of chanting, I think it’s for Tibet. And Manfred is right, absolutely, she was like a mother. She gave advice like a mother, she asked questions like a mother, she bossed people around like a mother. You can’t have cake for your main meal, with beer. Eat something decent, Liam, look at you, the vultures would pass over you. That kind of thing she would say. As if she was responsible for me. But she would let you have anything you want after all, you could always get around her, and she insisted on paying for everything. She had a mother’s way of stepping into your life and giving a running commentary on everything that was going on, telling you what you were doing right or wrong while you were doing it. She cross-examined you like a mother, holding your arm and looking inside your head and saying out loud all the things you were keeping to yourself. She could guess what you were thinking. No wonder everyone thought she was my mother. She was like a mother to everyone. Indiscriminately. Even Manfred, the driver, she held his arm while he was helping her into the car, asking him questions until he told her that he was half-Turkish on his mother’s side and married with three children under ten. She said she was a hundred percent Irish and she would love to be half something else. Maybe that’s what happens when you have no children of your own, you turn everyone else into children. She even spoke like a mother about Tibet. God love them, she said, they only want to be themselves. 3 (#ulink_c5e7593f-4177-5dec-b57d-72d4e8947801) So we’re sitting side by side in the back of a large grey-coloured car and she’s telling me about the opera, Don Carlo. She’s saying it’s basically a big family story, not unlike her own. The conversation we have is quite random initially. She’s wondering about her dog. Will Buddy be all right, Liam, do you think? Yes, he’s perfectly happy, I assure her. She tells me to remind her about the sheets. The sheets, Liam, don’t let me forget the sheets. Because she has everything planned out in advance and it’s her intention to buy a new pair of sheets in Berlin to bring home with her to Dublin. Manfred is taking us through the big park, past the golden angel, it’s been seen in lots of movies, and music videos. The day is sunny and there are people out walking with take-away coffees. Running with bottles of water. And dogs. Running with dogs. Cycling with dogs. Look at that, she says, pointing to a man cycling with a child inside a trailer cart attached to the back of his bicycle. Or is it two children? That’s not something you see very much of in Dublin, she says. She talks about the amount of women on bicycles without helmets. Right out in the middle of the traffic. She says you wouldn’t find her cycling without a helmet in any city now. We come out of the park and pass by a large yellow brick building in a modern design that looks like a pirate’s hat, she says. It’s the Berlin Philharmonic. Another place she would love to include on the list. Then she tells me why she loves Don Carlo. The plot is a bit complicated, from what I remember. It’s about a father killing his own son. The King is forced to hand over his son in order to keep his reign, that’s the outline in a simple sentence. It’s set in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. The King is trying to bring order to the world by force and his son Don Carlos is against all that brutality, he wants to stop the killing and everyone to go home and live in peace with the person they love. Power is all that matters to the King. He’s addicted to power and he’s got to do everything to keep it, including killing his own son. It’s a terrible decision he has to make and he’s full of guilt and remorse, going against all his instincts as a father. There is an added problem. The son, Don Carlos, is in love with a French woman, but his father has already married her by force and made her the Queen. She still loves Don Carlos and Don Carlos is heartbroken. That gives his father a further reason for mistrusting his son and getting him out of the way. I know it sounds a bit simplistic, but that’s it, more or less, a big family drama. He must kill the love within himself, she says. The King has to kill the love inside in order to kill his own son. The opera keeps reminding her of her own family, that’s why she’s so keen on seeing it again. It’s the story of every family, she tells me. That’s why Don Carlo has remained so popular over the years, because we can all read our own lives into the story, it’s universal. Every time she goes to see it she cannot help thinking of her own father and what happened to her brother, her little brother. It’s the power of the drama that makes you think it’s your own story which is being portrayed on stage, she says, you become part of what’s happening right in front of your eyes. She says her imagination is too big. She’s like a girl again, watching the story of her family unfolding around her. She’s so taken by the opera each time that she can see her brother coming back to life on stage. Her father killing the love inside himself. Her brother being taken away in the end. And she’s completely helpless, trapped in her seat, listening to the music. There’s nothing she can do to intervene. We used to go to the theatre together, the odd time in Dublin. She would be given complimentary tickets and ask me to go with her, as a companion. We would have an early meal somewhere and get to the theatre with time to spare so she could meet people. You could see them nudging each other, the lips moving. She would disappear into the crowd, pulled along by one handshake after another, passed on from one group to the next, until she needed to escape. Just when they were beginning to tell her something about herself that she already knew, she would point to me standing at the bar and tell them that she had somebody waiting for her. All these theatregoers she knew, I wouldn’t have a clue who they were, other writers, journalists, TV personalities, faces that everybody knows. What I remember most is people coming up to her at the interval saying they had read her book. And she would hunch up with all that praise, like a light was hurting her eyes. A woman once turned around and stood right up in her seat and reached back across two rows to shake her hand and say thank you. That’s all the woman said to her, thanks, for being so honest, for being herself, for writing the story of her life and her family without hiding anything. It was mostly families we talked about in Berlin. We talked about Don Carlo and fathers and mothers and brothers. We talked about men and women and aunts and uncles and children and Jesuits and love and weddings and life and friends and lovers, the whole lot, I suppose. The things that happen in families. Which includes almost everything, doesn’t it? We were going around the city looking at the sights and telling each other these stories. Family stories and love stories come right and wrong, she said. Is love still a good word for love, she asked me at one point. I mean, how can you answer that? Of course it’s still a good word. It’s the best word there is for love. What other word is there that would work any better? Chemistry? She said they were always making young words out of the old words, changing the meaning so you don’t recognize them any more. And love is one of those words like home and hope and passion, all those words that people never put back in the right place, she said. I think being away in Berlin allowed us both to be quite open with each other. It helped us to forget what was happening to her, it was all on hold. There was a comfort in not having to think about what was imminent, I suppose. As long as we kept moving and telling each other stories, as long as the streets were going by and we had all these family things to talk about. I think it was not having to explain anything that made it easier to explain everything, if you get me. 4 (#ulink_b81001bf-9ba6-5095-8fd0-f3996efe02bd) She’s on a lot of steroids to help with her breath-ing. She’s searching in her see-through bag and takes out some medication. She reads the label and drops it back into the bag. She holds up the bag and looks inside. Because it’s easier to find things like that from the outside. She reaches in with her hand once more and takes out other medication, then looks at the label and drops that back into the bag also. It’s hard to know if she’s picking out the same one each time or if they’re always different. She said your life is a pair of lungs. Time is a pair of lungs. Could that be right? You’re only as good as your lungs and her lungs had run out of time, something like that she said. She described to me what it’s like going into hospital for a breathing test. The nurse gets you to sit down in front of a machine called the pulmonary function test. You put your lips around a nozzle that looks like a gum shield attached to the machine, then the nurse tells you to take in a deep breath until your lungs are completely full up and you hold it for as long as possible. Then you blow all the way out until your lungs are completely empty. And when you’re ready, she said the nurse says it all like a breathing song. Take in a deep breath, all the way in, right up to the top of your lungs and hold it, hold it, hold it, she says, hold it, hold it, very good, now blast all the way out, all the way, all the way, keep going, she says, all the way, all the way, all the way, keep going, every last bit, very good, excellent, well done, she says, until your face has gone all red from the effort and the nurse tells you to relax and breathe in normally and let’s try that again, one more time. As well as the steroids, she’s also taking painkillers. And they’ve given her Xanax, too, so she can relax and sleep at night. At the hotel she told me that she was afraid sometimes. I’m afraid of drowning, she said. I’m afraid my lungs will fill up and then I’ll drown. That’s what happens, you know, when you get pneumonia, it’s like drowning. I’m afraid of drowning alone, she said. The Xanax was meant to stop all that anxiety. She said it makes you more like yourself, back to the way you were before, the real yourself. Because she was worried, naturally, and she found it difficult to concentrate. Apart from a few articles in the newspapers, I think she had trouble absorbing too much news. She was more interested in seeing things first-hand now, listening to people. She couldn’t write. She didn’t see the point in putting things down any more. She had no time for things that were made up, she couldn’t read a novel or watch a movie, for example, there was no time for anything invented. Only Don Carlo, because it was so personal to her. She offers me a Xanax in the car, as if I need it. She starts laughing and shaking her see-through plastic bag around. Like she’s offering around mints or chocolate. Here, would anybody like a Xanax? Manfred ignores her. He’s in his own world and remains focused on the driving. Anyway it’s not something that should be given to a person operating machinery. I don’t need one either, but she says it will do me no harm, why not? So I take one for a laugh, see if it does anything for me. I tell her that my daughter, Maeve, is getting married. That’s great news, Liam. She thinks I’m obsessed with my daughter. She doesn’t like me going on too much about Maeve all the time, I can understand that, because she has no children herself and this whole father and daughter thing gets to her a bit. I think it makes her feel excluded. She usually tells me to shut up. So I give her the details in brief, the wedding is planned for August. That’s very soon, she says. You’ll be getting an invitation, I tell her. Thanks, she says. And then I realize what I’ve just said. There’s not a hope in hell of her being able to attend the wedding. Maybe it’s the Xanax. It must be making me feel more like myself. I’m coming, she says. But it’s three months away. I’ll be there, Liam. Whether I’m dead or alive. Where are they having it? It seems like the future has abandoned her, all these things carrying on in her absence. The wedding, Liam? Where are they having it? On the farm, I tell her, his farm, Shane. It’s his mother and father, they’re very keen to have a wedding on the farm. They have these great barns and the ruins of an old church on their land. They want to have the wedding in the old ruins and then I suppose they’re intending to get a marquee, just in case of the weather. It’s a fully working farm, with live cattle and so forth. But knowing Shane, he will get that all fixed up, taking into account the wedding guests and their clothes and shoes, I would imagine. At least, that is what they’re talking about. A farm wedding, she says. I would love to be there. She once showed me a photograph of herself when she was the same age as Maeve. No more than twenty-four years old, twenty-five at the most. With lots of curls. It was taken before she went to London, before she worked as a chambermaid, when she was getting out, leaving her family and her country behind. With no fear and no idea what was coming. I wish I had met her then, the life in her. She must have been great fun in that photograph, full of danger and up for anything, all kinds of things not even thought up yet. The look in her eyes. Staring right at you. I think it was the eyebrows you noticed most. Striking, you would have to say, drawn by a child. Her eyes look like they had great questions to ask. She has the same eyes in Berlin. They are the eyes of a twenty-four-year-old girl, with the eyebrows left intact, even though all her hair is gone from radiation and her lungs are working very hard and she can’t get enough air to say all the things she still wants to tell me. She talks about a place she once went to which was great for the lungs. The salt mine she went to visit in Romania, in Transylvania. It was an active salt mine, fully operational, but all the people with bad lungs came there because the salt dried the air for them. That’s when she was travelling with Noleen. Herself and Noleen, they travelled all the way down from the Ukrainian border, right down to Tirana and back around the coast to Italy. Lots of people told them to go to the salt mine. Patients with pulmonary trouble came from all over the country, all over the world in fact. People even asked them where they were from, as if they had come especially for their lungs, all the way from Ireland. She told them she had lungs like a damp cottage and they said she had come to the right place. It’s a famous mine, she says, like a place of pilgrimage without prayers, with the same air temperature day and night. She describes the trucks carrying out boulders of stone-white salt, and the people coming to inhale and straighten out their shoulders. Lots of people in wheelchairs. Grandmothers and all. Even people who were off the cigarettes having a cigarette, why not? Because the air was so clear it was crackling in your nostrils, she says. Whole families going for a picnic down there with fold-up chairs and a portable cassette player making hardly any noise because the place was so big. All the children breathing up and down and playing football in a huge underground stadium, she says. With floodlights. And goal posts marked out on the salt walls. And after the salt mine, she’s telling me, they went swimming nearby in a salt lake that never freezes. It was the strangest feeling, she says. Floating on top of the water. Their legs were rising up out of the lake in front of them like buoyancy bags, you couldn’t keep them down. That’s what happens, your legs feel weightless, she says. And Noleen had a way of turning everything that went wrong into something to laugh at. When they were coming out of the lake they must have chosen a spot that was very muddy, because they were covered in mud like female wrestlers, the two of them laughing and holding on to each other, hardly able to stand up. Travelling unlimited, she says. She says her lungs are left in Romania. My lungs are in Romania, she says, and my head is in New York and my feet are in Berlin and the rest of me is in Dublin. 5 (#ulink_0612773c-8362-5b5a-be69-ac946ba43b85) I heard her speaking a number of times in public. I saw her on stage once at the literary festival in Ennis, County Clare, in the Old Ground Hotel. I also saw her in Colorado, in Aspen. It was my first time in the Rocky Mountains, but they were very familiar to me already. I had a good memory of those mountains from watching television as a boy. I had also heard a lot of songs that were written about that part of America. Some of the things she said in Ennis she also said in Aspen. She was there to speak about herself and her family. What life was like for a Dublin woman in her own time. How things have changed and how much better things are now and how much has gone missing. She was well known for speaking straight from the heart, no matter where she was, Ennis or Aspen. She was the world expert on her own childhood and what happened inside her family, nobody could argue with her about those facts. People everywhere in Ennis and Aspen loved hearing what things were like in Ireland and why she could never forgive her mother and father. The problem was that every time she spoke in public, she would get herself worked up, she got angry, she cried openly. People wanted to hear everything in person nowadays and that left her vulnerable, stepping back into her own childhood and remembering it all over again as if it happened only recently and it was never going to be over. Every time she spoke about these things in public she had to back them up emotionally, in tears, as if nobody would believe her unless she cried. Sometimes I was afraid the story was getting magnified each time she told it. You know the way you remember things larger than they actually were, whenever you speak about them, just because somebody is good enough to listen. People in the audience were so enthusiastic, she may have been forced to make things look worse. Or maybe it was just a matter of finding the best words to describe the worst things. She had a good memory for bad memory, so she said herself. Or does everything get smaller when you talk about it? My concern at the time was her not being able to let go. I hated seeing her crying in public. It was hard to watch her taking out a handkerchief from her sleeve, or not even doing that, allowing herself to cry openly without any attempt to hide her tears. So I made a suggestion to her, as a friend, in good faith. I think it was being away in Aspen that made me say things I would never have thought of in Ennis. The mountains allowed me to put forward the idea that she might try to understand her mother and father a bit more. Not that she would have to forgive them or anything like that, I was not questioning her story or saying it didn’t happen, only that sometimes when she spoke, it took too much out of her. Why not try and put it behind you? For your own peace of mind. I was saying this because I had the same problem with my own father following me all the time, even though he’s dead now. The fact is, he never goes away and I’m still afraid of his anger. Sometimes I think it might be better to pretend you never had a father, even for a while now and again, like a short vacation from your memory, instead of sitting up all night like a child waiting for him. She listened to me. She tilted her head as usual and allowed me to speak my mind. I thought I was doing quite well, making some good points that were worth considering at least. I was only saying that remembering your childhood is not all that it’s made out to be. And you need to give your father the right to reply, especially if he’s not around to speak up for himself. Otherwise it’s like a military tribunal. That’s all I’m saying, you need to step into their shoes and see their point of view. That’s rubbish, Liam. She said the altitude was beginning to affect me. I was not thinking properly. The clouds were below the hotel and the air was so thin, oxygen-depleted, my understanding of things had become a bit simplistic. It’s my life, she said. I’m only trying to help you get over it, I said. You want me to abandon my brother? She was having a yoghurt, I remember. In her room, overlooking the mountains. She was telling me that her memory was all she had to go by. Your memory keeps changing and you have to keep up with it, she said. The yoghurt was finished but she was still finding tiny bits. She picked up the tin-foil lid and licked the remaining yoghurt off until it was shining and then she went back to the carton again. She said that’s what writers do, they search around for things to write about in their memory, like a human laboratory. It’s not really possible to make things up out of nothing, she said. Nothing is invented, only things that have already happened in some way or another happening all over again in your imagination in more and more fantastic ways. She continued going around the yoghurt carton with the spoon, so I got the impression she was looking for something in it to write about. You’re not going to find anything more in there, I said. She stared at me. You never knew how she was going to take something like that, she might laugh with you or she might go the other way. You’re living in a fantasy, Liam. That’s what she said to me. You think it’s possible to walk around with no memory. You think it’s humanly possible to put everything behind you and walk away like you’re leaving behind an empty field, or an empty barn? Ah Jaysus, ?na. I’m only saying, give your parents a break, you can’t blame them for everything. Well you should have heard her. She accused me of trying to take her childhood away from her, stealing everything she had to write about. I could hear the emotion rising in her voice, as if she couldn’t speak the words fast enough. I can’t even remember half of what she said, all about children being kept quiet by letting them put their hand in a jar of satin sweets so they wouldn’t listen to what the adults were saying. She said I was trying to claim that she was a child invisible, with no interest in the world. You’re just like the rest of them, she said. You want me to keep my mouth shut, don’t you? You want me to pretend I never heard what happened to women inside their own homes. You think I just went to school peacefully with the nuns and slept with my hands crossed over my chest. For God’s sake, ?na. You think I’m just putting on an Irish accent and letting on that I’m from Dublin, is that it? The conversation started to escalate, out of my hands. She made it look like I had never been a child myself. Like I had said something unforgivable against all children, all women. I’m not stealing anything from you, I said. You think I never saw the bloody sawdust on the floor of the butchers? I’m not disputing your childhood, I said. You’re being cruel to me, Liam. Look, ?na. I’m on your side, one hundred percent. I just don’t want you to be a victim. A victim, she said. That was it. She gave me a filthy look. A victim? She repeated the word a number of times, speaking towards the door as if she was addressing somebody else, like there was an audience in the room and she was asking them to agree with her, getting them to say that I had no compassion. What I was implying was so wrong, so hurtful, so insensitive, not even allowing her to be a victim. She turned on me with her eyes and said that was exactly what happened to victims of all crimes, they were made to feel responsible for the injustice that was done to them. I’m not saying that, ?na. That’s what being a victim is, Liam, you feel it’s your own fault. Let go the injustice, that’s all I’m saying. We don’t have the right to let go, she said. How are we going to change anything if we don’t remember? I don’t want to be a victim, I said. You think you have a choice, Liam? Is that it? You think people can just decide whether they want to be a victim or not? It’s just a lifestyle thing, is that what you’re saying? Look at you. You haven’t come out all that well either, have you? Just take a look at yourself, Liam. You’re a mess. That’s what you are. A mess. She knew that was out of order. I was waiting for her to put it right, to say that everybody was a mess, not just me, all of us, herself included, but she said nothing and neither did I. She put her finger into the yoghurt carton and began twirling it around. Then she licked her finger and looked straight out the window at the mountains. I walked out. I didn’t even care if we remained friends after that. I was having nothing more to do with her. I couldn’t be arsed to go and listen to her speaking in public, but then she phoned me to apologize. Liam, I’m really sorry, she said. She said I was not a mess. She said I was anything but a mess and I was absolutely right about everything. I’m full of self-pity sometimes, she said. I don’t know why I’m like this. I keep losing all my friends. That’s why nobody likes me, she said, I’m so obsessed with myself. I can only remember what was done to me. Please, Liam, I’m sorry. You’re the only friend I have left. Which was not strictly true, she had friends everywhere. But we made up, sort of. You know the way it is, you take a person good and bad. Like she was taking me good and bad. We were good and bad together, you could say. I went to see her on stage after all, in front of a massive audience. This is Aspen, not Ennis, we’re talking about, so they came from all over America to listen to her. And you know what, nothing changed, she said the same things all over again, word for word. She spoke even more forcefully, like she had only been rehearsing it with me in her room. She spoke like a woman who had never been given a chance to speak before and she was going to leave nothing unsaid this time. It felt as though she was looking straight at me and I was left with no right to reply. You could hear her inhaling. You could hear her mouth clicking. She said the loneliest person in the world was the person who could not tell their own story. And that’s how it was for her before she began to write her memoir. She said you become locked into your own silence and it’s like not being alive at all any more. Until you write the story down and claim your own life back and stop being at the mercy of what happened to you. I was at the mercy, she said. She spoke about Don Carlo. She said she had seen it lately at the Met in New York. It was fabulous, she said. It was like the story of her own family. She said her father was just like the King, obsessed with his own power and his own fame around Dublin. Her father had no love for his son. Her mother had no love for herself because she became an alcoholic. As children they went to school with no love. Her little brother was the biggest casualty of all that. He was our Don Carlos, she said. My little brother, Jimmy. She said love had to be passed on to you as a child. You see your reflection in a child’s eyes. There is nothing in the world better than hearing a child laugh, nothing makes you happier than seeing food going into a child’s mouth, she said. How could they send a boy out into the world with no love in him? My brother, my reflection, she said. You could hear the audience listening. You could feel them getting angry on her behalf, crying with her. You could sense them leaning forward and agreeing with her, that a person has to have love inside them to receive it, otherwise love would have no reason to come looking for you. You could feel every mother in the place wondering if they had something to answer for, some moment where they had withheld love from a child. Everything they had done or not done, without knowing what they had done. Fathers too, like myself. That fear of looking back and wondering what could have been done differently, even when it’s already too late. She thanked the audience for listening to her life and bowed her head. And then, the big surprise came at the end, she sang a song. As she said herself afterwards, she murdered the song. It was all breathy and full of laughing, full of inhaling and coughing and lifting her voice up, as if she had to stand on a chair to get the notes down. It was a song about emigration. Everybody loved it. She forgot the words halfway through. All you could hear was her breathing up and down, like she was keeping the beat going. Then she remembered the words again and carried on all the way to the end, until her lungs were completely empty. 6 (#ulink_3c72dd74-901e-573c-b947-cb628aaaab02) We’re heading to the Botanic Garden and I get this mad phone call from Dublin. She has to listen to me saying hold it, Gerry, hold it. I’m with somebody. I’m in Berlin. She can hear me telling him that I’m not in the least bit interested in going to a school reunion, it’s probably the last thing in the world I want to do. You can forget it. But they’re all depending on me to be there, so he’s saying, as if they can’t have a school reunion without me. I tell him he can count me absent, but then he continues trying to persuade me by reminding me of some of the funny things that happened at school. Do I remember the two Kenny brothers and one of them had a big birthmark on his forehead, they used to call him Star Trek. Yeah. Hilarious. This is exactly the kind of stuff I don’t want to hear about. I don’t want to hear about the Lynch brothers either and how one of them is bald now working in the Pidgeon House power plant, or was he always bald, he asks, which is a ridiculous question, how could he be bald at school? I don’t want to hear another word, so I end the call as quickly as possible and she wants to know what’s going on. You need friends, she says, why not meet your old pals from school? Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Don’t be like me, she says. She knows I don’t like looking back. She knows I’m always trying to put things behind me. She knows I’m trying to forget as much as possible, particularly things you can do nothing about. She says I’m still allowing my father to make my decisions for me. She says all my relationships with other men are copies of my relationship with my father. My father will be around for all eternity if I go on like this, she says, the world is full of men who are my father in disguise. Be yourself, Liam, she says. I’m not sure what Manfred thinks of all this talk going on inside his car and if he’s the kind of person who keeps driving and not listening to what his passengers are saying to each other, or whether he hears it all and is only pretending to be the driver. I tell her that I have no intention of going to a school reunion. Myself and my brother both wore the same coloured jumpers, given to us by my father, identical. They couldn’t tell us apart. They thought I was my brother. They beat him up thinking it was me. I used to hate my brother not standing up for himself. I hated him because I loved him. I loved him and I hated him and now I love him even more because I had to pretend he was not my brother. There is absolutely no way that I’m going to spend thirty euros on a dinner in the Camden Hotel, sitting down with those savages, pretending it’s all in the past. Even if it is in the past. The reunion of savages. Everybody laughing like savages and talking about how far they’ve come up in the world and how we’re not savages any more. Calm down, Liam.You’re in Berlin. I am calm. She wants to know what my brother is doing now and so I fill her in on my family. Peadar, my older brother, is married and living at home and he’s got a problem with water hammer. She has no idea what water hammer is, so I explain it to her. It’s something my brother has inherited along with the house, it has to do with the old pipes, the old plumbing. Water starts hammering like a hammer due to air locking, if you run water or flush the toilet in two different places in the middle of the night, for example. It can wake up the whole house. It used to drive my father mad. It’s virtually unheard of nowadays, a thing of the past which happens mostly in old houses. I tell her that my brother has hardly done a thing to the house in the meantime, he’s kept everything the way it was, unchanged. He wants to preserve it all according to his memory. He still has the same problem with mice that my father used to have. My brother’s father is the same as my father, no difference, only that everybody has their own father to deal with. I still believe my father is after me. Even in the hotel sometimes, when I hear a door opening at night, I think he’s coming to get me even though he’s been dead for years and it can’t be him, I checked. It was somebody who got the wrong door. Swedish tourists, I think, who thought I was in their room by mistake. And every time this happens to me, I discover nothing new, only that my father has better things to be doing than following me around for the rest of my life. I’ve been imagining him, that’s all. It’s only now that I know what I’m dealing with. Liam, stop it, she says. Also. The yellow door. The door I’ve been afraid of since childhood is not the door of the place where my father brought me when my mother was in hospital and I thought she was never coming back, the yellow door that still gives me the taste of custard at the back of my throat every time I pass by, and it’s not the blue door of the school either, because the colour is irrelevant, so I’m told, it’s not any of those doors but the door of my own home when I was a child that I should be coming to terms with and walking into without fear, whatever colour it was, dark green. A kind of deep green gloss that people had on doors in the past but which is not in use very much any more now. 7 (#ulink_a14dd61e-89bf-5fcb-8c1d-d6f9218f30c9) There was a moment of sadness in the car from time to time that kept us from saying anything. We stopped talking quite suddenly and were silent, back to our own thoughts, looking out the window, arriving outside the gates of the Botanic Garden. As if there were no words left in the world, only the sound of the electronic door sliding back and the sound of traffic and the sound of Manfred getting out the wheelchair. All I could think about was how short the time was and how she would be dead so soon after that. You do your best not to think like this, but you can’t help it. It’s at the forefront of your mind, even when you think you’ve forgotten it and it seems like nothing is going to change, we’re all going to live forever. There were occasions during the trip when she was close to crying and I wanted to cry with her, but I couldn’t let myself. I wish I could. And I’m not sure sadness is the right word for what I felt as Manfred was helping her out of the car, getting her into the wheelchair and she was saying, thanks Manfred, you’re a pet. It was bigger than sadness, I think. Something else, maybe the feeling that things were not quite as sad as they were meant to be, as though I was yet to discover what sadness was about and we had only briefly stepped outside normal time, waiting for real time to catch up again. To be honest, Ihad no idea howto be sad. I couldn’t find the words to describe what I was thinking in that kind of situation. What do you say when somebody is dying? What are you meant to talk about? You talk about nothing to do with dying, isn’t that so? You say anything that comes into your head and pretend it’s the furthest thing from your thoughts. She was not afraid of talking about death and what it does to you. She said it took all the goodness out of life, hearing that it was over. Everything went black, she said. What was the point of it all? What was the point in all that knowledge inside her head coming to nothing? All the people. All the stories she collected. All the books she read. And what about all the good times? Did they all come to nothing as well? Or did they remain good times? She said it was like a door closing. She said it was like losing all the lovers she ever had, like losing her friends, losing her brother, like all the doors closing at once, like everybody leaving without a word, only this time it was herself that was leaving, she said. That’s what you do, Liam, you start saying goodbye. You go back over your life and you say goodbye to everyone, each one individually. You say goodbye to all the people you remember. All the things you had once in your possession, the jar of hand cream, your lipstick, your own thumbprint left in a tube of toothpaste. All the things you had that were never yours for keeps, only borrowed. The yellow curtains, Liam. The books. The shoes. The trace of yourself left behind. All the places you ever set foot in. All the houses you ever lived in, all those quiet rooms, all the fires at night, all the warm beds and the towels on the radiator. And maybe there in Berlin with her was the first time I became aware of anyone close to me dying. I didn’t say this to her, but when my own father died, I was too much in shock, I had spent so much time trying to get away from him that I was not mentally prepared for it when he disappeared. It felt as if he was only gone out to the garden to light a bonfire and he would be back any minute with the smell of smoke on his clothes asking me what I’d been up to. I felt suddenly very old when my father died. As if my life was gone past. His death was my death, so I thought, even though I obviously had to go on living, I had no option. I was still alive after him, but he might as well have taken me with him, I refused to believe it was him in the coffin. At his funeral I felt he was still fully present. My mother and all our relatives and everyone else in the church were in a different world and my father’s brother, the Jesuit, was up on the altar saying his own brother was gone, the Lord had taken him to rest. I didn’t believe any of those words. I wanted to run away from the church and all the people because they were suffocating me. I think you need lessons in sadness. I had no idea what grief was at the time. I could see it in other people, but I didn’t realise that I carried it with me all along. It was accumulating without me knowing it, like some dormant virus that can eventually erupt when you’re least expecting it. When I saw my mother crying I could see everything, her whole life, her childhood, her memories, how much she must have been in love and how much she must have been loved, no matter how hard my father was on the family. Whenever people were sad, they showed all their happiness as well. I didn’t think sadness should be revealed in a person, it was a weakness. I was only doing what everybody else was doing at the time, I thought, trying to avoid sadness. I was under the impression that everyone in Ireland was doing their best to pretend there was no such thing as sadness, singing, drinking, talking, telling stories, anything at all to keep themselves from looking sad, only when they were singing sad songs. I kept laughing at myself, laughing at the world, laughing at death, laughing at pain, laughing at things I liked, laughing at love and all those things that could hurt you if they were taken away, laughing at everything that makes you fall victim to sadness. I wanted to let everyone know that I was not afraid of my father dying, I was not bothered by any of that, so I told myself. When my mother died I was still afraid to be sad. She was alone after my father died because her best friend, my father’s brother, refused to visit her. All I knew how to do was to be her son. But he was her real companion, my father’s brother, the Jesuit in the family. And then he stopped coming to see her. I didn’t know the reason for this at the time. I knew there was a reason, but it’s not something I worked out until much later. She would sit looking out at the back garden and wait for my father’s brother, saying why does he not come and visit me? He was there at her funeral, the Jesuit. My father’s brother. He came to say Mass for her. Although I was hardly present myself. I was there with the family, but I was more or less absent from then on, avoiding everything, shaking hands with my father’s brother outside the church and not saying anything, wishing I was invisible, as if you cannot see your own life clearly when you’re actually in it. This time I was present. Travelling around Berlin in the car for two days, pushing the wheelchair in through the gates of the Botanic Garden, for example, allowed me time to say goodbye to my own mother and father, in retrospect, from a distance. This time I was fully aware of what it means to lose somebody. And you know what, this may sound like the wrong thing to say, but there was something about ?na dying that triggered off something alive in me. It made me feel as though I was actually taking part in my own life for the first time. In fact, I think I was a bit elated being there near the end, with her. Even joyful. Exhilarated, you could say. Am I getting this right? It made me feel more myself. Or more like an exemption from myself, somebody released on parole or something like that, as if I never had to pay the fare again, as if all my debts were paid, that sort of feeling I had. I think. It felt as if none of the ordinary things mattered any more. That’s what I thought. Or maybe it was the other way around, it was only the ordinary things that mattered, like buying the entrance tickets to the Botanic Garden and letting Manfred know that he had plenty of time to go for coffee, I would call him in a while when we were ready to leave again. 8 (#ulink_ec07b4e6-c6c5-51a8-8ddf-fcd58225e371) She told me about her love life. She said she first had sex with a man when she was fifteen. He was twice her age. She said she loved all the attention her body got in her school uniform. How was she supposed to know that he was a married man? She said she was lucky that her father found out and called her a slut and took her out of school and sold his car and borrowed another car to take her to a boarding school in the north of the country where she would be out of danger and it was too cold and damp to think about men. She said you could see your breath when you went to sleep. And there was nothing to think about only the Virgin Mary and other girls. This is not word for word. This is more like a reconstruction, the back pages, she called it, made up of some of the things she said about love and sex and happiness, not all of it in Berlin. She loved sex. Especially on Dublin afternoons, she said, with the sound of buses going by and squeaking brakes. She loved the sound of people’s feet walking past the basement window while the word fuck was flying out of her mouth. Fuck was not a word she used that often. She said love and sex were a bit like writing a novel, it had everything to do with fabrication. That’s what I think she said. She said the best lover was the best storyteller, something like that. The problem with a lot of books, she said, was the writer trying to tell you what to feel. Writers getting the better of their readers, forcing themselves on their characters. Like one man she was with who told her that she was mistaken and that what happened between them was consensual, only that she was too young at the time to know the difference. She didn’t like being told what to feel. She had a boyfriend in London once who said she could not make love but she had to sit up in bed with a book afterwards. He hated me reading, she said, the way other people sat up in bed and smoked a cigarette. Which she did also, but with a book. He thought it was the biggest insult to a man. The book. He said she made sex look like doing the dishes and she couldn’t wait to get back to her book, so he took out all the light bulbs. Every one of them, she said, just to make sure she stayed in the room and didn’t escape with the book. But even in the dark I withdrew into my imagination, she said, like my mother did with my father. Even with no light in the room and no book to read I still crept away into a childhood corner of myself alone, rocking myself to sleep. She said it was a great adventure, her love life. Sometimes she came across moments that were unforgettable, like seeing something from a moving train that you wanted to bring with you only it was already gone by and all you could do was try and write it down. She said it was delicious. Sex was delicious. I know it’s an old word now, but it’s an honest word, she told me, and I have no reason to doubt her. The meaning of delicious may not have changed all that much and sex may not have changed all that much either, it was all discovered in her time. Delicious, she said. She lived with a man for a long while who was a great reader and they went to lots of places together in Europe. He used to read aloud to her after breakfast, books that she had never heard of before. Things in books that she would never have noticed without talking about them and pointing them out to each other, like they were still learning to read. She said it was the only secure relationship she ever had and they could have got married but that would have put an end to all the travelling, wouldn’t it? She said she didn’t know what made her so afraid of getting married, only the fear of becoming her own mother. The wedding was called off and people were left holding their wedding gifts. Because she always had the need to be alone again. She had to be herself. It was her greatest fear, not being herself, being restrained by the people she loved. Afraid of being in love because you might not be free. She could remember standing in the street listening to him telling her not to walk away, please, and all she could think of was keeping one foot on the pavement and the other foot off the pavement, everything swirling in her head, waiting for him to stop talking so she could walk away. Swirling was another word she used a lot and maybe that doesn’t change much, it’s still in the same place as before, like the word please, and the word finished and the word over. She used to sit alone in her room drinking wine like her mother. She would let the phone ring and not answer it, as if there was nobody in her life only the characters in the books she was reading. She thought there was something noble about being alone. She thought your family was where you trained how to be alone. She thought every person you loved would leave and you had to leave every person you loved. She had to be herself and being alone was the purest form of being yourself. She said New York was a great place to be alone. She got to know a lot of people there and a lot of people knew her. In fact, people more often knew her when she didn’t know them, people nodding to her as if she should remember them from somewhere. And then she would realise how much she needed people more than ever. Being alone was like denying the weather, something you could not avoid being in and out of, like having a mother and father, like having brothers and sisters, like religion, like being brought up in a Catholic school and needing to get away, being a writer. She said she spent her life searching for men who were like her father. And one time late in her life she met an Irish truck driver who was like a real father. The trucker knew how to make up a story. The trucker with the false teeth, she said. Love with false teeth. Love without teeth, she said, so he could suck on my breasts. I told her it was wrong to put all that into her book about the trucker. I wouldn’t like those kind of details made public, if I had false teeth. Jesus, I hope his wife didn’t read it, she said. His wife probably recognized the false teeth, I said. Don’t laugh about it, she said. That trucker was full of love and travelling. One night he came to me and he was unable to have sex, she said, he wasn’t up to it. Too much on the road. So we just left it and went to sleep. And during the night I woke up to find him stroking my back. We didn’t speak. He was sitting up in bed, gently stroking my back and I imagined him travelling across Europe, she said, off to England, across to France and Germany and down through Austria, all that mileage and all those road signs in different languages, all the faces of people he must have seen and spoken to, picking up his consignment of Italian tiles and bringing them all the way back along the big European roads, back on the ferry to Dublin. He travelled in his sleep, in silence, stroking my back, she said. Then he had to go home to his wife. He left me asleep and awake. He made himself a cup of tea. He didn’t give himself time to drink it. He left the cup on the table. He walked out the door and continued on travelling. I couldn’t keep him, she said. I kept his letters. Beautiful letters, I kept them all. I brought them with me wherever I went travelling, a bundle of them in my suitcase all over the world. I kept them and read them from time to time, but I couldn’t keep him. I couldn’t keep anyone. The only way I had of keeping anything in my life was in my book. 9 (#ulink_47c250df-0d44-5500-b71b-078cb4a8d11d) I told her a bit about my love life. I didn’t tell her when I first had sex, she didn’t ask me. We talked about who I fell in love with when I was around nineteen. Her name is Emily and she is the mother of my daughter, Maeve. We talked about love and travelling and she wanted to know all about my back pages. How I took Emily down to Milltown Malbay in County Clare, when we were escaping from her boyfriend. Emily was living in a basement apartment with him and she invited me down for breakfast, a boiled egg. Her boyfriend was out, and before he came back, Emily asked me to take her away somewhere. Anywhere away. So that’s what I did, I took her away to Milltown Malbay. It’s a funny thing, you go somewhere abroad and right away you start talking about home, making connections. It’s mad, isn’t it. You go to Berlin and you end up talking about Clare and Milltown Malbay. She’s sitting in her wheelchair and we talk about how much we both love the west of Ireland, Clare in particular. She has a house there, a small two-roomed cottage where she used to go to work on her books and walk across the Burren with Buddy. When she came back after living in London, she went down to Clare for the first time and she said it was like finding a place on the far side of the world that she had never heard of before, undiscovered. We talk about the music festival in Milltown Malbay every summer. She remembers the musicians and the listeners on the street because there was never enough room and the pubs were turned inside-out. I remember a piper sitting on a chair, she told me, brought out on the pavement. Men with their shirt sleeves rolled up to work the fiddle and women with accordions strapped across their chests and the knees going up and down like engines in the machine room of a ship. People bringing out drink and ham sandwiches to keep them going. She said there was always a man or a woman in the audience who got so excited by the speed of the music they would yelp and shout fair play to you, right in the middle of the tune, just to make sure they could be heard listening. And the pub where everybody was suddenly trying to get back in, like it was the only place in the world to be at that moment and there was no way a pub that small could accommodate the amount of people already inside. Where the crowd squeezing in at the door was like the people in London, she said, trying to get on the Underground. Only they were straining to hear a singer who had started up a song unaccompanied, with his eyes closed, holding on to the bar counter to steady himself. I asked her about that pub, what was the name of it? But she could not remember the name. Was it a pub where women had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom at the back of the house, I wanted to know. And there was a big bath in there with all these cracks. A huge bath with a million tiny hairline cracks in the enamel. She said she remembered a lot of bathrooms in the living quarters at the back of pubs and they all had cracked sinks and cracked tiles and mirrors that were gone freckled with black spots and plaster flaking off the ceiling and the geyser above the bath where the water came out boiling. You must have seen the bath, I said to her. The bath with a million hairline cracks in the enamel. Not that I remember, she said. It was in that same pub, I said. I’m certain of it. I was asking her all that because I was there myself at that festival, the year I escaped with Emily, possibly at the same time, listening to a man of that description standing at the bar, steadying himself on the counter. He was belting out this song with his eyes closed. And then who walks into the crowded bar, only Emily’s boyfriend. I don’t know how he could have known we were there, but Emily said she saw him squeezing his way through the crowd. I didn’t actually see him myself, only that Emily looked up suddenly and said, shit. Then she took my hand and dragged me through the crowded bar, out the back, through the kitchen with the smell of rashers and eggs and tealeaves. As we passed through I saw a range and an armchair in the corner with a holy picture on the wall above. Through the house Emily pulled me, into the bathroom where they had the cracked bath. She locked the door and that’s where we stayed and waited. We could hear the man singing in the bar still, it must have been a hundred verses. You could hear a pin drop, as they say, as if there was nobody out there but the singer by himself alone, just the occasional cough or the sound of empty glasses, you know the way a barman puts a finger in each glass and sweeps them up with a clink, three or four glasses in one go, as many fingers as he has available. Emily was sitting on the side of the bath with the million hairline cracks, wearing a green dress and black boots and a light-brown cardigan with the top buttons open. Her hair was long and she had lots of freckles. She was playing with the chain, swinging the grey stopper around while I was standing with my back to the door. We didn’t say a word. I was not smiling or laughing or anything like that, and nor was Emily, only that she lifted her shoulders as if to say, what else can you do? I don’t remember how we got out of there in the end. All I remember is Emily sitting on the edge of the bath with all the hairline cracks and whispering to me that maybe there was time to have a quick bath together while we were waiting, only that there was no soap except ivy soap and that was for washing the floor, not for washing your body. What a pity we didn’t bring a candle. And what a pity we didn’t bring our drinks with us at least, Emily added. There was a picture of Pope John the Twenty-third and John F. Kennedy in the bathroom with us. Maybe the only one left in Ireland. The picture was quite faded with the steam from so many baths. John F. Kennedy had his head tilted to one side and there was a water cloud covering half his face. Pope John held his hand up in a blessing and his white robe was gone brown, buckled up with age. I know that because Emily asked me to look at the picture carefully while she was having a piss. Listen to the song outside, she said. And then I ended up bringing Emily for a bath after all, the next day. The seaweed baths. Out along the coast, a place with blue painted doors and blue window frames, where people came from all over the world, men and women from Germany and Scandinavia, in their dressing gowns. The centre for hot seaweed baths. They gave Emily a cubicle to herself with a bath she could not even put her toes into first it was so hot, full of brown seaweed, like brown leather straps. There was steam everywhere and echoes of people splashing water around their bodies in other cubicles, talking to each other in Swedish over the wooden partitions. When Emily eventually lay back in the bath, she said it felt quite slimy at first, a bit like floating in cod liver oil, but she liked it because it’s meant to be good for your health, you’ll never get rheumatism, all those promises going back hundreds of years. Her face was flushed from the heat and she played with the seaweed straps all around her body, making a long brown, underwater dress for herself with seaweed straps around her thighs and seaweed straps covering her breasts and going around her shoulders. You’d never forget the smell of seaweed either, it stays in your memory, you recognize it instantly as soon as you get to the coast. Emily’s skin was very smooth afterwards, I remember, I don’t really have the word for it exactly, so smooth it was almost not there, more like holding your hand under running water. And afterwards, to rinse the oily feeling from her body we went out to the Pollock Holes near Kilkee, Pollies they’re called, these natural pools in the rocks where people in dressing gowns go swimming when the tide is out, because the water left behind in those pools is so clear and warm and deep and calm and full of minerals. And all the time I was looking around me, searching up and down the shore to see if we were being followed. 10 (#ulink_23061971-ea98-5334-81b4-3ffcd075d8b7) We had the Botanic Garden to ourselves, give or take. We were like any other tourists, really, looking around, taking pictures. Apart from her being in a wheelchair, the people there would have thought nothing unusual, only that she was not up to walking, that’s all. She kept the cap on, so nobody knew what was going on underneath. We were unseen mostly, apart from a few onlookers here and there, more interested in all that stuff coming to life around us. It was warm, you could feel the sun pulling things out of the earth. The air was full of cross-fertilization. We brought our own summer with us, she said. It was spring, in fact, but she did that sometimes, quoting words from a song or a book. I didn’t always know what she meant, because she was not speaking to me directly but remembering a random line that made sense on its own, without being part of a conversation. Unless she was saying that you bring your own weather with you. Could that be right? I got the tickets in the small cottage, a gate lodge. She said it reminded her of going to the zoo in Dublin, with the entrance through black turnstiles beside a thatched cottage in the Phoenix Park, only there was no smell of elephants in the air here. We were both given a brochure through the window, what we could expect to find coming back to life again. There was a trail mapped out with the most beautiful places not to be missed. They were lovely gardens, I have to say. But the thing is, I might not have seen everything in Berlin with my own eyes, but through her eyes, for the last time. Our conversation was full of last things. I was here with her for the last time. And I would say that ninety percent of what you see is ultimately for other people. She called the trees and the shrubs by name, as if she knew them personally. I remember them like you never forget a face, but I can’t tell you what they are unless I read the names on the plaque or someone tells me. The copper beech, she said. As if it was the only copper beech tree ever, the same one she had seen many times elsewhere in Ireland or Europe or North America, and it had come to say goodbye to her at the Botanic Garden. There was a wide path that led between a mansion on one side and a lake with water lilies and ducks on the other. It was how you would imagine botanic gardens, maybe that’s why I didn’t notice much, only the conservatories in the distance and a water tower behind it. It made me think of those enormous jigsaw puzzles we used to get of beautiful gardens. People don’t have much time for them any more because they take over too much space and one or two of the thousand pieces always went missing before you got finished, if ever. And my father always thought it was a terrible waste of time. You had to make the most of your life, puzzles and board games were nothing but time-wasting. The conservatories were tropical. It was a different country in there. They keep the place at thirty-five degrees all year round. And the humidity, we were walking into a heat wave. They had radiators lined up underneath the glass, and there was steam blowing down from the pipes to give you an impression of where all these plants came from. She said it was like a huge glass cathedral. You could hear running water, like prayers. Not that I’ve been there, she said, but the rainforest reminds me of the interiors of a church. In fact, all those silent plants together under one glass roof made me think of what it must have been like before we were here, on earth, ages back. Some of the flowers you might have seen before in a florist or a petrol station, though I never saw a coffee plant before. It was good to see them where they belonged, in a more natural habitat. More authentic, undisturbed. And still there was something missing, I thought, the sounds of birds maybe, a few shrieks here and there, like monkeys up above, in the canopy. I was half expecting to see an iguana or a snake, a pair of eyes at least, staring out through the foliage occasionally. There were a few flightless birds brought in especially from the tropics to keep the insects down. Beneficial species, they call them. Apart from them there were only a few sparrows that managed to get in through the windows, doing no harm. I think people were primarily there for the horticulture and the peace of mind. It’s the absence of noise they were looking for. It occurred to me that this would be a great place to work, testing the soil and checking the temperature, picking off dead leaves, avoiding overcrowding, making sure the plants have everything they need and thinking of them as your own family. You could belong to a place like this, I thought. We saw one or two gardeners walking around in their inner world. There was a couple sitting on a bench meditating, either that or sleeping, it was hard to tell. And a man with a camera on a tripod taking close-up photographs of an orchid. He obviously had permission to do that. All in all it was perfect for a visit, only the environment was not right. It was not long before her breathing started giving trouble. I can’t breathe in here, she said. I’ll suffocate. She preferred being out in the open with the trees, everything afresh. She asked me to push the wheelchair off the path, right into a meadow of cowslips. That’s what I remember. She said cowslips as if they had disappeared last year in the west of Ireland and now they were coming up out of the ground in Berlin. They were part of her childhood and she must have been confused by her whereabouts. The ground was soft and the tyres sank into the earth and she sat there a while, sinking and thinking. What she said could easily have been said to the cowslips without me being there at all. I have a photo of her there to back it up, reaching down to touch the cowslips. Also a short video clip of her taken on my phone, more or less stationary, huddled in her black coat and the see-through bag hanging on the handle of the wheelchair. She was going to say something. About her childhood. She said you can’t possibly stop yourself from looking back. I agreed with her. You can’t avoid coming across things in your life that are pointing backwards, objects that surface in front of you, while you’re not looking, while you’re trying to delete things that cannot be deleted. Photographs, for example. Little bits of evidence that turn up where they don’t belong in your life any more. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/hugo-hamilton/every-single-minute/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.