Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

We went up a mountain together once without saying much for a whole day. We were afraid to talk about seeing my father’s brother coming out of the hotel in Cork with my aunt. We didn’t even want to admit that we were in Cork at the same time. We didn’t want to tell each other that my aunt and my father’s brother were cousins. The less we knew the less could be extracted under pressure. Anything you say to yourself you end up saying out loud in the end, I knew that, so we pretended we didn’t carry any of that information with us.

The sound at Café Einstein keeps renewing itself. Cups and plates and pots of coffee clicking as they are being set out on the tables. She’s listening to everything I’m saying. Then she finds some lip balm that I didn’t know she had in her bag either. Where did all these things come from? Her lips are very dry. She’s dehydrated, even though she’s been drinking lots of water.

We were on a fishing holiday, I explain to her. Staying in a hotel right next to a lake. The lake was called Lough Conn. And out through the windows of the hotel we could see a mountain called Nephin.

The mountain was asking to be climbed. Every morning it was there at breakfast like a challenge. So one day my father allowed us to climb the mountain, me and my brother, we were only about thirteen and fourteen at the time. We had sandwiches and soft drinks in a rucksack each, identical. We set off from the hotel with the lake behind us and the mountain rising up ahead. The cattle were chewing. There were rushes in the fields, like eyebrows. Fuchsia hedges along the side of the road with a line of bright red dust underneath. I can clearly remember a tractor passing by, followed by a dog, followed by the smell of diesel. The man on the tractor raised his hand without looking back. And the mountain came back into view every now and then, a big surprise around the next bend, closer and larger than before.

All these things I remember, but we never spoke about them, we didn’t trust each other.

It was like a silent country we were walking through. We cut in off the road where the fields came to an end and the bog took over. The bog was covered in heather, like a complicated softness under my feet. I felt the breeze in my armpits. The fields were shrinking behind us and there was nobody around, no other witnesses. About halfway up the mountain, we sat down and had our sandwiches. The lake looked more stretched out, more like a piece of blue tiling, reflected. We lay back for a while staring at the clouds moving across the sky above us. Every time the sun went in it was like the end of the day and every time the sun came out again was like a new day beginning. Sometimes it looked like the clouds had come to a standstill and we were forced to believe that the mountain was carrying us away.

And then my brother spoke to me. He talked about the Jesuit and said it was better for us to agree on a plan. So we made an official agreement to remain silent. We agreed to be as silent as my father and my father’s brother and not speak a word about having chips or staying in the hotel in Cork and seeing my father’s brother with my aunt, two cousins holding hands.

I remember getting up and telling my brother we better carry on before it started raining. He told me to go ahead, he would catch up. So I kept going and left my brother behind me. Every once in a while I looked back down and he was still there, lying on his back looking at the clouds taking him further and further away. I remember the strong wind and the rocks where the heather stopped growing and the small cairn at the summit. The view was gone, the rain came down, I was inside a cloud.

My brother disappeared. When I got back down again I looked for him. I called him. Maybe I came down in a different place, so I thought at the time, where he was not to be found. So I had to carry on back to the hotel on my own, without my brother. I was worried what my father might ask him to say, so I hurried along the same road back to the lake to try and catch up with him, past the cattle bunched together in the corner of a field, past the same rushes dripping and the sound of water left running. I kept thinking of my brother walking only yards ahead of me, but I was mistaken.

I was the first to get to the hotel and it was my brother who was still missing. My father questioned me, but I only gave him the most necessary information, that myself and my brother split up, that’s all. I told him that I went up to the top of the mountain and then it started raining, we lost each other. My father said it was very irresponsible to split up like that and my mother told him to wait until my brother came back before he said any more.

We were all staring around the room waiting. There were photographs of the lake and the mountain everywhere, to remind you of the real lake and the real mountain outside. And fishing. No matter where you went, in the corridors, the bedrooms, you couldn’t get away from men holding up a salmon or a lake trout, hanging their catch on the weighing scales. Men in boats, men in oilskins, men smiling and raising a glass of whiskey afterwards. Famous men who had come to the hotel, lucky enough to catch a fish while they were there. And flies for sale at the reception. Thousands of beautiful flies in colours that you could never believe, nothing you could ever imagine seeing in real life. They had workshops for people learning how to tie mayflies with bits of chicken feathers and deer hair and I knew I would be very good at that kind of thing if I let myself. The biggest pike ever caught on the lake was in a glass case over the bar, with his mouth open, serrated teeth. And beside him, the coloured fly on a hook that he had been caught by.

It was getting late and my mother was even more worried standing up than she was sitting down. She wanted to call the rescue services because it was nearly dark. And then my brother walked in the door.

He has decided to come back, my father said.

My mother ran to embrace my brother and the front of her dress got soaked. My father was even more angry at seeing him back safe again, so after my mother changed my brother’s clothes and dried his hair with a towel and sang a song to calm him down, my father asked him for a full explanation. My brother told him that he followed me up to the top of the mountain and I was gone. My mother tried to intervene, but my father told her to keep out of it, she had not been on the mountain, so she had nothing to say. My brother said it started raining and I said it started raining and my father said he couldn’t believe either of us.

And what happened then?

My brother gave in. I think he was trying to save me from getting punished. He told my father about my aunt giving us fish and chips in Cork. How the car was left on a hill and somebody who knew how to drive had to come and point it in the right direction again. My brother explained how we stayed in a hotel for the night and we were not tired, so we got dressed and went downstairs to explore without permission. We didn’t do anything, my brother said. We were only there by accident when my aunt came out of the hotel with my father’s brother. We were standing at the railings minding our own business, he said. He told my father everything, the smile my aunt had in her eyes, full of sadness and happiness. How she went arm in arm with my father’s brother, and he was wearing a light-grey suit, like an ordinary man, not a Jesuit.

My mother began to cry.

My father said he was glad the truth had been told, finally.

My mother cried and said now she knew why my father’s brother, the Jesuit, was no longer coming to our house to visit.

Instead of punishing us, my father came over to embrace me. He held my head sideways against his chest, so I could feel the sharp point of a pencil in his top pocket against my face. He embraced me for a long time and I wanted to escape. The pencil was sticking deeper into my face the more he loved me. I was more afraid of his love than I was of his anger. His love and his anger were nearly the same, no difference, full of things that could not be put right in his family, lots of cruel reasons and lonely times he spent as a boy in West Cork without a father. It made him press my face harder and harder against his chest. He would not let go, possibly for two minutes, maybe three or four. When he finally let go, he turned to my brother and embraced him in the same way, for the same duration, to make sure he loved us both equally, no difference.