Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

It’s lovely water, Úna says to the waitress. Is it tap water, just?

Yes, the waitress says. It’s ordinary tap water.

Úna says she started out trying to make sure she was not like her mother. She says she ended up being like her father. Or was it the other way round? Back and forth. I went to London, she says, to try and be myself. But the more I was myself the more I was like them.

It felt like they were coming after me, everywhere I went, I couldn’t get away. I remember them sending my brother over to London. My father sent him because he didn’t want to be responsible for his own son any more. He didn’t want his own son loitering around Dublin, getting into trouble, bringing his good name into disrepute. Because he was the king, she says, the king of journalism, the king of the city and all the people gathered at receptions. He didn’t want his son to be his weakness. He didn’t want to be reminded of his role as a father and having to love his own son. He wanted his son out of sight, out of harm, so he sent him to London for me to look after. Jimmy, she says, he was not even eighteen. He was only a boy and I should have done more for him.

She says she loved her brother so much she was afraid of him. He was our Don Carlos, she says, killed by his own father, sending him off to London with no love in him.

He was the baby in the family, she says. Curly hair and big open eyes, like his father. I was already in secondary school when he was born, she says, so I remember him sitting on my knee and I knew what it was like to be his mother. I put his shoes on and taught him how to tie his laces. I put stories into his head and heard them coming back through his imagination, everything repeated. I remember him sleepy after waking up, trying to make him laugh. You could never be angry with him. He followed me around the house, watching everything I was doing, asking me why was I drawing over my eyebrows with a pencil and where was I going and what was in the book I was reading. Not letting me out of his sight. He was there every morning, waiting for me to get up because his mother was still passed out from drinking the night before.

He was a child unable to grow up. He was like his father, good at being out in pubs with people around him. Like his mother, good at holding the drink and not opening his eyes. I could see him already ending up like his mother and father and maybe that’s what made me so afraid of him, his weakness.

My brother, my weakness, she says.

He stayed a few nights with me in London, she says, he slept on the floor. She went to work and he was there when she came home, waiting for her. He had that look in his eyes that says will you tell me what to do, will you show me where to go. He hardly had the confidence to fill in a form or make a phone call. He missed appointments and left things behind, lost money out of his pocket, she says. He thought everybody in London was like a big family. He expected the world to be his friend, just as he wanted his mother to be his mother, just as he wanted his father to be his father and not send him away over to London where he was on his own.

She says she was only finding her feet at the time. Do you understand me, Liam? I didn’t even know how to be my own friend. I gave my brother money but he had no idea how to hold on to it and came back looking for more. I told him he couldn’t be expecting me to be his mother and father for him, she says, he just had to get used to being on his own like everyone else.

Liam, she says, he looked into my eyes but I couldn’t let him in.

She says she remembered his birthday. Even if I got it wrong by a few days, she says, or a week. If there was ever a time I missed his birthday it was because he went missing and I couldn’t find him. I swear to God, Liam, I always remembered his birthday, like a big sister.

She picks up the napkin and holds it in her hand. She folds it up and then unfolds it again, not lifting it up to her eyes.

Her hands are swollen. She begins to search around in her bag and finds some hand cream that I didn’t know she had, maybe it was hidden by other things. She takes the lid off the tub and puts some of the cream on her hands. The smell of hand cream is like custard, vanilla sauce.

She wants to know more about my childhood but I have nothing much to tell her. All I remember is being out fishing and my father pulling on the oars and the water dripping from the oars. I remember honey dripping from the spoon at the breakfast table and my father twisting the spoon around quickly to stop the honey running. I remember the water hammering in the pipes at night and the mice running along the floor.

You must remember more than that, she says.

I tell her I’ve forgotten everything and my brother’s memory is far better than mine. I always wanted to put things behind me as fast as possible and I left it up to him to remember. He keeps everything in his head so I can forget. Dates, times, places, all the details of what happened. His memory is the same as mine, no difference, only that he knows where to find it.

That’s absurd, she says.

She doesn’t believe it’s possible for me to have so few personal memories. I must be suppressing things. I tell her my memory is unreliable. That’s not the word that I wanted to use, unreliable, not to be trusted. Resistant, recalcitrant, some word like that.

I’m only suppressing things I can’t remember.

She closes up the tub of hand cream and puts it back into her bag. Then she leans forward to let me know something. She says she once read about a writer who said you were always crawling towards the truth. Which is true, she says. She came from a time that was only crawling towards the truth and she couldn’t wait that long, she had to speak out. It’s all in my books, she says. I didn’t make it look beautiful. I didn’t make it look worse, or better. It was the honesty I was after, nothing else.

The rhythm of honesty, she calls it.

She’s afraid I have no rhythm.

She says I need to bring everything out into the open. I can’t be like an empty field any more with nothing built on it, it’s impossible to be alive without remembering.

Tell me about your father, she says.

So then I try to get into the rhythm, in Café Einstein. She’s a good listener and she gives me time to explain.

We were far too honest, I tell her. That was our problem, too much honesty. My father was a schoolteacher, I explain to her, so he had a good method for finding out what was going on inside your head. He cross-examined me and my brother separately, so we could never agree on a story together. The details were always a bit off. I was the reflection of my older brother, but we sometimes remembered things differently. We were easily confused, always caught out.

My father was trying to find out the truth, I tell her.

About what?

The Jesuit. My uncle, the Jesuit.

It was the silence, I explain to her. My father’s brother made our family very silent. We thought it was good to be silent. We were all trying to be as silent as a Jesuit and get away with saying nothing, so nobody could guess what was inside our heads. We used to go out to the field and play hurling, just the two of us, my brother and me, whacking the ball to each other, back and forth. I still remember the sound of the wood against the leather ball. I remember him catching the ball, taking it out of the air with his hand like you would pick an apple. A stinging apple. Then he would swing his body around and send the ball back. That’s all we did for hours, like a conversation with only one word. We were so honest, myself and my brother, we only said the most necessary things to each other. I think we were being exactly like my father and his brother, as silent as possible. They had nothing to say to each other apart from talking about world events, history, the economy. Me and my brother had nothing to say to each other either, nothing that ever connected up into a conversation. Only the essential practicalities, that’s all. And facts. A few bits of general information that we were trying to get right for my father, facts like highest mountains, largest lakes, longest roads, things you learn in school basically.