Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

In loving memory of many pints.

For a new teapot after the one I broke.

For all the messages left on my phone which were like a fire to come home to and I’m sorry if I didn’t reply at the time.

For a new pair of gloves. Although. That seemed to be more like a private joke and the person receiving the money for gloves must have had some story which only they would remember.

For looking after Buddy with such great fondness and being so good to him when I was away.

For wit and imagination.

For putting up with my sourness. For not getting angry whenever I just turned my back and picked up the newspaper and ignored everyone else at the dinner table as if I was better off alone.

For the time we got soaked, remember. When we were watching the waves. The anger in them.

For the time I got lost in Wicklow and I couldn’t find the cottage and then I did find it after all.

For knowing everything about Dublin that I could not remember. All the things I would never think of without the company of somebody else to talk to. For reminding me where exactly the door to the ladies used to be in Kehoe’s, before it was all changed. For remembering the crankiest barman in the world. For remembering what was there once in Dublin, all the streets and the corners and the women selling flowers and Bewley’s, when it was still Bewley’s and you could spend all day reading and drinking the same cup of coffee and eating the same cherry bun gone pink, only looking up every now and again to see who was who. What order the shops were in, with the bookshop still on Grafton Street and the only restaurant we could afford on South Anne Street. And the time we went for a big slap-up dinner in a fancy place intending to do a runner without paying, but the meal was far too heavy in my stomach even to walk, so we got up from the table in a great hurry and ran to the door, only for me to change my mind at the last minute, so I ran to the bathroom instead, like I needed to go very badly, and came back and paid the bill after all. For those things I would have forgotten by now. For remembering Dublin when the city was nothing but a few pubs. For remembering the people and the order they stood in at the bar and the type of things they were saying and God knows where they are now?

For keeping the time. For keeping the time we were in.

She looked after all the people who were import-ant to her. She distributed some of her furniture and itemized certain things, remembering particular people who used to visit her and where they normally sat at the table, what cups they drank from. To one person she left her second-best chair, for example, which was obviously another private joke they were having a laugh over during her lifetime and long after.

To various people she left money for pure friendship, for their songs, for inspiration, for being so encouraging and supportive. For allowing me to be myself, she writes, for giving me the lift when I needed it. Her will was full of optimism. She left a lot of praise for people, reminding them that how good they were was far more important than how bad they were. She said they were to remember the good times, the future would take care of itself.

I’ve no idea if people followed her instructions. There was no way of compelling them to keep her furniture or to spend the money in any particular way, legally. And converting the money into cash usually gets rid of any personal significance. Or maybe they converted the money into memory, blowing it on something unspecified like going on the tear and getting rat-arsed and drugged-up on her behalf, if that’s the case. Who knows what the money was spent on in the end? They could even pay the car tax or allow the money to flow into the general household budget and spend it on frozen pizzas in memory of her. Which was all fine, for all I know, as long as they actually felt the money in their pockets for a moment at least.

To a fellow writer she gave the yellow curtains she bought in New York, drifting in the open window.

To another writer friend she left a sum of money for all the walks not yet walked without a map.

For Noleen she left money to keep on travelling.

I was thinking about her shoes, the shoes she had on in Berlin. The red canvas shoes. I’ll remember them as long as I live. I wonder where they went to. Because the shoes keep you. They keep you always. After you’ve stepped out of them. Is this making any sense? Your presence remains in the shoes after you take them off and you park them under the bed at night. You might as well still be in them, even when you’re not. They look like they’ll start walking by themselves.

Maybe the shoes were given away along with her clothes, everything dispersed, distributed, whatever word you can use for personal things that cannot be put in a will or passed on to anyone else. I wonder did her shoes end up in a charity shop somewhere, in with all the other people’s stuff, in with the second-hand smell left behind in their clothes and their shoes? In with all those things that people wore and had regard for once. One of those places where people root around in other people’s belongings, to see if there is anything of value. Where you find things like a doll’s house, or a game of Monopoly still intact, things like wall lamps that are perfectly good only missing the second one to make up a matching pair. Things that creep up on you like St Patrick’s Day medals that you would not have seen since you were in school, or a hurling stick with grass stains which somebody has signed, or those luminous statues of St Christopher that people used to stick onto the dashboard of their car. My own father had one because he was obsessed with safety. Teapots with animal faces, and Toby jugs, and a mug with Lady Di and Prince Charles when they were young and getting married with the handle missing. A milk bottle for the World Cup. People not paying much attention to anyone else, only occasionally looking about to see what other people had found. As if you don’t know what you want until somebody else wants it. People going through a trolley full of old DVDs while somebody else is plugging in a perfectly good hairdryer to see if it’s still working and not just blowing out cool air instead of hot.

And all the shoes, racks of shoes that people wore all over the country, who knows where they’ve all been. Shoes that carried people across the world, on trains, around airports and shopping centres and cinemas, shoes that tell the story of their journeys. Shoes that people gave away for no good reason and that had nothing wrong with them, completely new-looking, maybe only briefly lived in, maybe the wrong size, ill-fitting. Runners, loafers, deck shoes, boots with fur around the rim, shoes with heels you cannot imagine anyone wearing, lots of ordinary shoes and lives you cannot imagine anyone living.

I remember once she told me about driving down the country and going into a house where an artist had glued shoes up against the wall. She wrote about that in one of her books. How she came across this exhibit that an artist had made with shoes. I wish I had seen it myself. All along the wall, right up to the ceiling. And maybe that’s what I’m thinking, that maybe her shoes ended up in some kind of montage, that they might have been kept by someone, those red canvas shoes.

They were frayed a bit and slightly faded, with the shape of her feet indented, the toes, the heel gone shiny and worn down from contact with the street. And yes, one broken white lace. That’s how I remember them.

She was helping me to look back and deal with my memory. There was this thing I told her about which was going on in my family. I’m still not sure exactly what it was, because nobody talked about it very much. That’s what happens to people who don’t talk, she said, they behave the same as their own fathers and mothers and father’s brothers, in my case. I tried my best not to be like my father and I ended up being more like my father’s brother. The Jesuit. He never said very much. He spoke only when absolutely necessary.