Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

You can tell me, Liam.

She knows my eyes have no locks on them and people can wander in and out like they’re at an auction. She knows I want to talk about my life but it feels a bit like stealing from myself.

That’s impossible, she says.

I feel my life is stolen goods when I talk about it.

You can’t steal your own property, Liam.

I don’t know what is my own property, I tell her. I always thought my life was my own property and my daughter was in it, but now I’m not so sure any more that you can be the owner of your own life.

It’s bad for you to keep things to yourself, she says. It will burn a cigarette hole in your head.

All I have to talk about is my daughter.

Go on, she says.

My daughter is having doubts, I tell her. Maeve. She’s twenty-five and very successful at her work, she loves what she’s doing, but there’s something wrong. She’s with one of those online companies and they keep telling her that she’s part of the family, the company is her family now. I know it’s only what they say to make employees feel at home in the workplace, your new family. But she’s got all this doubt. I think she’s picked it up from me. Something missing.

Like what?

Her real family.

The main gate is in sight now, with the traffic beyond. We’re stopped right in the middle of the wide path, with the lake on one side and the mansion on the other side, switched around this time, from left to right. And I’m telling her all this stuff about my daughter, asking if there are human reasons for everything.

You’re blowing this out of proportion, Úna says.

I tell her my daughter has been asking questions.

What questions?

Maeve wants to know who she is. She’s asking all about me and Emily, her mother. The back story, she doesn’t believe us.

She’s nervous about the wedding, Liam, that’s all.

She’s thinking of calling it off, I tell her.

You can’t let her do that, Úna says.

She’s having second thoughts.

You can’t let her have second thoughts, Liam. You can’t let her cancel the wedding, that’s what happened to me. It was a perfectly good wedding and a perfectly good marriage only that I called it off. I thought it was too good to be true. Liam. Listen to me. You tell Maeve from me, not to call off that wedding. Please. She’ll spend the rest of her life having second thoughts.

Maybe she’s not ready for it.

You’re far too protective, Liam. Your precious little daughter. You’re all over her.

I don’t want to let her down.

You’re at the mercy of your own child, Liam. Come on, get a grip of yourself. That whole fatherhood instinct. Fathers loving their daughters to bits. It’s so repulsive, I’m going to get sick. Think of how other people feel, she says, that cosy little relationship you have going together, excluding everyone else. You’re refusing to let her grow up. That’s what you’re doing, Liam. You want her to remain a child. The child you want her to be. I bet you can’t even let her cross the street without holding her hand.

I love her.

What? You love her like an overheated room, she says. You love her like that glass cathedral over there, thirty-five degrees. You’re suffocating her.

You hate me talking about Maeve, don’t you?

She’s getting married, Liam. She’s out of your hands, let her go.

You can’t stand my daughter getting all the attention, is that it?

Liam. I’m only helping you to own your life.

Manfred is waiting for us. I can see him standing on the far side of the gate, staring into the park, keeping an eye out for a wheelchair. I begin to push the wheelchair towards the gate but she stops me once more.

Hold it, she says. Come here. Let me give you a hug.

So then I have to lean down and try to work out how to embrace her in the wheelchair. She lets go of the see-through bag with all her belongings and throws her arms out. And as I’m going into her arms, it’s hard for me to know where to put my own arms because they won’t go around her, the wheelchair begins to back away from me and I have to hold on to her bag, sliding down between us. I have to catch the bag with my knees. It seems too premeditated to put on the brakes or to put the bag down for a moment and do this properly. So I just improvise. I try my best to hold on to everything without making it look like I care too much about things that don’t matter right now. She reaches forward to pull my face down onto her shoulder for everybody in the Botanic Garden to see. I lean in towards her as much as I can but it’s only the side of her face that I’m in contact with and her arms are pulling me down further by the neck than it’s possible for me to go without the wheelchair rolling away. Her breathing is loud, I can hear the rhythm of it.

I’m still here, Liam, she says.

All I can say is nothing. I mean that, not a word. I’m leaning right across her in silence, trying not to hurt her, in spite of the fact that she’s in such pain and not saying a thing about it, only withholding it. As well as not having a son of her own to embrace, or even her brother.

Manfred is standing at the gate with his hands behind his back. His feet are placed apart. His chest is out. It looks like he’s been standing in that position for some time now, watching us. He doesn’t move. I wave to let him know that we’re on the way, we’re coming, but he remains still, as if he has not seen us yet. He continues looking straight at us, as though he’s going to carry on waiting for us to appear.

The will she made. She made a will that was like a short story with all the characters of her life. It was her way of gathering around the people she was close to and speaking to them personally after she was gone, leaving them a couple of words along with whatever she was intending to give them. From the way she wrote the will, it sounded like she was still very much present, keeping up the conversation. As if she was still telling people what to do with their lives. As if she still wanted to know what was going on and how everybody was doing. What was the news. Who was going to be the next president of America, that kind of thing.

She wanted to die with no money on her hands. She left most of her money to charity with children in mind.

Her last will and testament. You could say it allowed her to carry on living in some way, for a few more pages at least. People don’t disappear and stop talking suddenly when they die, do they? You carry on having the same conversation you were having before, in fact, the relationship you have with someone keeps growing, she said, only that you understand them much better after they’re gone. They become even more of a story that you want to keep telling.

She has forgotten nobody. Everyone is remembered, personally. The words she chose for each individual were non-transferable.

What she said to me in her will was already said alive. Very simple. I’ll never forget you bringing me to Berlin as long as I live. So thank you, Liam. Thank you. Thank you.

What can you say to that? No, it’s me alive who has all the reasons to remember and say thank you. Of course, it’s not possible to answer back. Not verbally anyway. She’s having the last word, and none of us have the right to reply, not until we write our own will.

A list of things, that’s what she said all writing was. Making a list. Your own list. Her final list.

I give and bequeath, it said at the top of the page, with the beneficiaries listed underneath along with the sums of money or property. She wrote the will after she returned to Dublin from Berlin and it was clear from the document that she had given it a lot of thought. She spent time carefully thinking up what she would say to us.