Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

This city doesn’t mind what age you are, Manfred says.

And as we’re stopped briefly at traffic lights again, I’m looking out at some people sitting on a bench. It seems to me that it’s a grandfather and a father and a son. Three generations. You can tell, they look very alike, only different ages, that’s all. Three different stages of the same man, you could say. The father is talking to the grandfather, telling a story, using his hands. The grandfather has some beads in his hand and he’s listening to his son telling the story, while his grandson is playing with a piece of blue twine. The boy begins tying the blue twine around his grandfather’s head. The grandfather hardly notices the twine going around his own head because he’s listening. The father keeps talking, occasionally elbowing the boy, telling him to stop doing that to his grandfather. But the boy ignores him, because his father and his grandfather are so deeply involved in the conversation that they are not really bothered by the thin blue twine going around the grandfather’s chin, around the ears, up over his bald head and back down under the chin again. The father continues telling the story and the grandfather continues listening and the boy continues tying the blue twine around the grandfather’s head. That’s all I saw. We moved on, so I didn’t find out what happened after that.

She wakes up. She makes a barking sound at the back of her throat and looks out the window to see where she is.

Was I asleep with my mouth open?

No, I say.

Liam, you’re such a liar, she says. I hate that, sleeping with my mouth open.

It’s as though she has the ability to remember everything that’s been said while she was asleep. Because she tells me to grow up, my clubbing days are over. Be yourself, she says, there are plenty of other things in the city apart from the night-life. And then I’m thinking that maybe she was not asleep at all, only sitting with her head back like a listening device, picking up everything myself and Manfred were talking about, including the green skull.

And then we have an emergency in the car, her feet were causing trouble, so I remember.

Liam, I can’t feel my feet. My feet don’t belong to me any more. They’re not my feet, Liam. Could that be right? My feet don’t feel like my feet any more, she said.

Is it the medication? Is it her circulation? Would she like to go back to the hotel now? No, she says, keep going, because there’s nothing much to do back in the hotel room and she doesn’t want to sit in the foyer of the Adlon listening to piano music all day, whether it’s a real piano player or just a piano playing of its own accord, doesn’t matter. It’s only her feet, they feel so tight, squeezed into her shoes. The best thing for me to do in that case is to raise her legs up onto the seat, so she’s travelling sideways.

Free the feet, she says.

I loosen the laces and pull her shoes off by the heel. I put the socks into her bag and then she wants her toenails cut.

Look at them, she says. They’re too long. They’re jamming up against the tips of my shoes.

Fair enough.

They’re cutting into my toes, Liam.

We’re going to be late for a lunch meeting, but what does that matter?

This has nothing to do with time-keeping, it has to do with now, here and now. So I ask Manfred if he could do us a favour and stop so we can get a pair of nail clippers. What would be the best place around here, without going too much out of the way? So Manfred tells us not to worry, it’s probably best for him to park somewhere and go out himself to get the nail clippers. She says thanks Manfred, this is very kind of you. Make sure it’s a good pair of nail clippers, she says, proper industrial ones, not those cheap ones that go sideways and slip out of your fingers and don’t even cut the nail only score it with a little mark before it breaks. Manfred knows exactly what she’s talking about.

I understand, he says, big nail clippers for the feet.

Manfred disappears. We’re watching the street corner where he went out of sight, waiting for him to come back with the nail clippers. Another man appears and it takes a moment for us to realize that it’s not Manfred, until he walks right past ignoring us. We go back to waiting for Manfred.

I want to ask her something about Milltown Malbay. The singer she told me about, holding on to the bar counter. During the music festival, with the pub so crawling with people that nobody could move in or out the door. Was he wearing a blue suit jacket? Did he have a black T-shirt underneath?

Yes, she says. I think so.

Did he have the other hand on his hip?

Yes, I think so.

Had he got his eyes closed? Had he got his chest out and his shoulders back? Because that’s the way I remember it, the man singing in the crowded bar in Milltown Malbay, he had his eyes open just once, very briefly, to look at something over the door. Even though there was nothing up there to look at and he was only doing so to remember the words, then he closed his eyes again.

He had a voice like a new car, I remember. She agrees with that. He sang a song called A stór mo chroí , my heart’s love. We agree on that as well. We also agree that he was not a famous singer, not professional. He never made a recording. He only became a singer at that very moment, as he began to sing. It was the song that turned him into a singer, as soon as people called for silence. So that was his only recording, the people listening. We were his recording. He was our recording, because we were there at the same time, myself and Emily, listening to the man with his eyes closed and a voice like a new car singing.

I tell her about a time I was trying to go back to Milltown Malbay. Around the time that my daughter was born. I couldn’t believe what was in my grasp, holding the baby’s head, looking at her eyes opening, the tiny fingers, the cry, quivering. You could say I was astonished at the idea of being a father, excited, exhilarated, all those words that don’t really explain anything. I was delirious, no other word for it. I had the feeling that I was escaping from myself, that for once, nobody was following me.

When she was only two weeks old, it was discovered that the baby had a cyst on one of her breasts. Something she was born with, I would never have noticed it myself. A tiny growth that seemed completely harmless but could have turned malignant. The paediatricians were telling us it would be a matter of concern, if it was not removed right away, surgically. She was only two weeks old and she was having to go for an operation, under general anaesthetic. They said it would leave no more than a small scar, but all the same. It was more serious than we thought. I kept reassuring Emily that it was nothing. The baby would not even remember it. No. That’s not true. Of course I knew it had to be a total nightmare and the baby would feel abandoned. Only there was nothing we could do, that’s what I was saying, the operation had to proceed and we could not be present in theatre.

Emily was asked to provide some breast milk. So she got a breast pump and filled a lot of sterilized jars full of her milk and brought them in to be labelled and kept in storage. The baby’s name was written on all the jars, my surname.

We were only just getting used to calling her Maeve.

So there we stood on the street outside the hospital not knowing what to do, we felt so alone without the baby. Emily kept looking up at the windows. I have no idea what she was hoping to see. Medical staff dressed in green gowns and green masks over their faces. I had to pull her away down the street by the arm and we sat in a café with nothing to say, not even looking into each other’s eyes, not drinking the coffee or eating the scones we ordered either, only me talking and her not listening, as if she couldn’t hear me.