Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

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.

What are you talking about?

Just when you’re trying to move forward, that is.

Rubbish. I’m talking about the truth, she said. Not hiding anything. It takes too much energy to conceal things, Liam. She could no more stop telling her story than she could stop breathing. That’s all I was ever doing, she said, breathing and telling. Unless you want me to be silent like a gardener and keep my mouth shut. As if gardeners don’t breathe. And the idea of her becoming a gardener instead of a writer was never very realistic. She said she once heard about a writer in America who was told by a friend that looking back makes you go crazy. But the writer ignored all that advice and went straight home to look back and write a book about school, just to stop himself going crazy.

I can no more stay silent than a horse can run backwards, that’s what she said.

She remembered a man trying to reverse a horse out of an alleyway when she was a girl. The sight of a horse and cart was gone from the streets now and she wondered what was the point in remembering things that were always going to disappear. It was one of the things she collected as a child. Because she was a writer even before she could read, long before she ran down and told the woman in the shop, I can read, I can read. And the woman in the shop said good girl, aren’t you great now? They had to be careful what they said in future because she had turned herself into a collector. Collecting all kinds of useless things, hiding them like favourite stones under her pillow.

The man collecting the scrap metal had the horse and cart in the alleyway. I was nothing but a girl, she said, standing in the street with one foot on top of the other. I had nothing better to do than watching the man trying to back the horse and the heavy load of metal out. I copied everything down in my head, she said, the wheels, the leather belt tied around the axle for no reason, the hind legs with white ankle socks and the eyelashes like a beauty queen. The man was standing in front of the horse negotiating, she said, but the horse had no wish to go backwards. The horse was afraid time was going to start going backwards from there on and his legs were only designed to go forward, I knew that, she said. The horse kept rearing its head up, trying to look back over its shoulder at something it didn’t want to do. She remembered the fear in the horse’s eyes. The slippery sound of hooves on the cobbles. That was the first thing I ever collected, she said, the day of the horse refusing to go backwards. It took the man ten minutes, maybe an hour, maybe all day in her memory. Again and again he tried to coax the horse. A white string of spit was suspended from its mouth, she said. In the end the metal collector had to put a sack over the horse’s head and move forward and backwards until the horse was confused enough about the direction of time that he finally agreed to come out, a bit like a man coming down a ladder. And that’s how I started asking questions, she said, because everything had to be turned backwards, until it was out in the open. Until the horse was a horse again, trotting off along the street and the cart was tilted to one side under the weight of metal.

We’re in the field of cowslips and she asks me to take off her shoes. She wants to tell me something that she’s never figured out before. Something that happened between her mother and father.

Liam, she says. I want to stand up.

Here?

Can you take off my shoes?

You can’t do that, Úna. It’s too cold.

I need to feel the grass, she says.

What about pneumonia? What if she gets ill and people ask me why I took her shoes off in the park, in May?

Your childhood is in the grass, she says.

I know this is not good, but I’m already undoing the white laces, taking off the shoes and socks and helping her to stand up in her bare feet, because I can’t stop her going through her collection.

She remembers waking up one night with the sound of knocking, she says. She got up and went downstairs because her mother and father were not in bed. She was only four or five at the most, and she understood nothing of what she was about to see in front of her.

There was a light on down there, coming in from the kitchen door left open. My mother and father were in the living room, she says. My mother was sitting on my father’s knee, facing him, not sideways but straight ahead, with her legs out. I could see one of her bare knees. She was knocking his head against the wall and I thought she was killing him. I stood at the bottom of the stairs not knowing what to do, she says, because your mother can’t be doing something like that without explanation. She had her hands in his hair and I saw her banging his head against the wall again and again. She was shouting at him at the same time, not words that I knew from before, nothing people would have said in the shop but some terrible language that you could only hate somebody with.

My mother saw me standing in the doorway, she says, watching her. And the look in her eyes was furious. I was afraid of her. I thought she was going to stop killing my father and kill me instead, she says, for being there, for seeing what was going on, for being a child watching.

I’m listening to her, holding the red canvas shoes in my hand.

My mother sighed, she says, and said my father had done a terrible thing. Your father has been very bold, my mother said, he has to be punished. She turned back to face him. Never let me see you do that again, my mother said to him, then she banged his head against the wall again. Very, very bold. Never do that again, ever, ever, ever.

Her father didn’t look at her, she says. His mouth was open, like he needed water. I clearly remember the moonlight coming in from the kitchen and the crucifix on the wall and my father letting a word out of his mouth that was not a word at all but the sound of great pain.

I’m only telling you what I saw, Liam.

She was told to go back up to bed. None of the other children were awake, she says, she was the only one who saw this happening. I was afraid to tell them, she says. I lay in bed trying to work out what my father had done that my mother would hit his head against the wall, and him not arguing back.

Úna. Please let me put your shoes back on.

Why didn’t they tell me they were in love?

Your feet must be freezing.

What was so wrong with saying the word love? It took me years to realise that they loved each other, once. It was something I worked out backwards, like coming down the ladder. And it wasn’t moonlight either, only the fluorescent light left on in the kitchen.

Why didn’t they just say?

She’s looking down at the cowslips.

Why did they make up that stupid story of punishment? Why didn’t my mother say they were only pretending? Why didn’t she stroke the side of my father’s face and say they were only playing and that she was going to make him some cocoa and we would all go back to sleep? It would not have been such a lie. And maybe it might have prevented what was coming. Because when you’re a child, she says, you believe everything, you take people at their word. You feel responsible for your father and mother, she says. Everything that happens to them is happening to you. When they’re afraid you’re afraid. When they’re happy you’re happy. And when they can’t talk about things, you will not be able to talk about them either.