Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

Emily kept repeating the baby’s name, trying to feel close to her. Maeve. Maeveen. She kept wanting to find out if there was any news yet, but there was nothing we could possibly do only wait.

And the thing was this, I was mad about her. I loved Emily in a way that you can only love a mother after having a baby. I was ready to do anything in the world to distract her and make her happy. So I got her into the car and started driving, just to stop her worrying about what the baby was going through. I don’t know what came over me only that I felt I had to take action, go somewhere, get away from what was making her so sad, she had all this milk love in her breasts. I know this sounds crazy and it is, but all I could think of doing at the time was to keep driving through the streets, any direction. I had the music on and the windows open, it was absurd. I kept talking, saying anything at all that might cheer her up and make her smile again.

Remember the bar with the bathroom at the back, I kept saying to Emily. Where you had to go through the kitchen, through the smell of soup and washing-up liquid and tea leaves. Emily, remember us when we were escaping, you were sitting on the edge of the bath with the enamel all cracked, a million hairline cracks. Because that’s what happens when you pour boiling water into old baths like that, the enamel begins to crack into tiny surface fractures, no real harm done, only that it makes the bath look even older than it is. A bath with wrinkles, that’s what Emily called it back then. I reminded her how we laughed about it, wondering how many people must have had a bath in it over the years. How many generations of mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers would fit together in a bath like that with the water up to their ears? And how many children lay back and put their heads down, only their noses and their eyes up over the surface, looking at the steamed-up tiles, listening to the world with all the sound gone under, the pipework clicking and the overflow plughole slurping and the underwater sounds coming from the bar, the empty glasses being collected and the voice of a singer like an engine humming and a lot of swallowing.

I’m just driving. Driving with this thing stuck in my head, something I want to re-create which has nothing to do with what’s happening right now in our lives. Emily is sitting beside me, asking me where we’re going and I’m not listening to her. I keep on driving and wondering what it would be like to go back, if the cracked bath is still there at all any more, or has it been replaced. I imagine it like a re-enactment. Emily and me going into that bar in Milltown Malbay, sitting down for a drink together. And after a while she gets up to go to the bathroom, because the men’s toilets are out in the yard, so it’s up to her to check. I wait for her in the bar, looking around to see how much I remember. For a place that was so full of people the last time we were there, it seems very empty now, only the barman stacking bottles. Then she comes back out to the bar and sits down beside me, smiling. Yes, Liam, she says. The bath is still there, with all the cracks left in it. And the hot water boiler above. And the two green lines. And the chain with the stopper gone grey.

That’s how I imagined it. Everything the same as it was. The road to the coast. The seaweed baths, the Pollock Holes, the sky, the rocks, the empty landscape, all intact. The entire shoreline unchanged.

There is no way of explaining this, even talking about it feels like waking up on the edge of the cliffs, opening my eyes and staring down at the way I was then. I was obsessed with making up a story for myself. My imagination was more real than my life.

I mean, this is the mother of a two-week-old baby in hospital. Emily was still very pale after the birth. It showed up her freckles. The milk love in her breasts was leaking all over the car so I brought her straight back to the hospital. She was crying and she left the car door open. She ran, or half-ran, that’s how I remember it, in through the revolving doors. I saw her turning right, then left, then right again before she disappeared. I parked the car and went in after her and it was as if she couldn’t recognize me, as if I was not even the father and she could not speak to me until she was told that the operation was over, the baby was fine, sleeping now. She asked if she could sit beside the cot.

Manfred gets back. I see him appearing around the corner but I don’t actually believe it’s him until he comes right up to the car and smiles in through the window. He opens the door and hands me a small white plastic bag with the nail clippers. He apologizes for taking so long, but Úna tells him it’s fine, we were having a chat and we didn’t even notice him gone.

The nail clippers come in a plastic wrapper and it takes me ages, you know those sealed packages that are almost impossible to open up without mutilating yourself. I have to tear away at the cardboard backing. She’s waiting patiently and then I finally manage to wrench the nail clippers out. We’re ready to begin. The big pedicure, I say to her. I put my jacket on my knees and lift her feet up. We can’t rush this, I’m telling myself. It’s a delicate thing. I ask Manfred to wait, because we can’t be driving and cutting toenails at the same time.

I can be good at this. I start with the big toe and work my way down to the little toe. I just concentrate on what I’m doing and she watches me. She starts telling me something about Bob Dylan, did I know that you can look at the entire double album being played on the internet now.

No, I say, not looking up.

I come from a time of vinyl, she says. And vinyl is making a comeback. At least you can see the double album being played again, she says. A pair of hands brings out each disk and lays it down on the turntable. The disk begins to spin and the needle touches down with a scrape and a hiss, the way it used to. Imagine, she says. You can listen to the whole thing and watch the printed information on the centre label rotating. Columbia, she says. All the crackles underneath the songs, completely authentic.

I offer to play it for her on my phone, but she doesn’t want that, she doesn’t have the attention span now.

When I’m finished doing her toenails I gather up the bits and put them into the paper bag that came with the toenail clippers. I put the clippers into her see-through bag and I put the bag with the cut-off toenails into my jacket pocket. She says her feet are quite itchy and hot, so I rub some hand cream on them. The sensation has come back into her feet and she starts laughing, it tickles. She’s laughing and coughing, so I have to stop. I tell Manfred to go ahead, he can drive on. I open the windows to cool her feet and she stretches out her toes, wriggling them in the breeze. Then I put her shoes and socks back on.

Thanks, Liam.

There you are now. How does that feel?

My feet are my own again, she says.

I tie the shoelaces and one of them breaks, so I put the broken piece of white shoestring into my jacket pocket as well. Where else do you put these things?

I had no idea how to be a father. I was completely unprepared when the baby came out of hospital. I thought things would just fall into place. I was like a boy on a bike. There’s no other way of describing it. A boy freewheeling through the puddles with my legs out.

I think she rescued me. Maeve. Maeveen.

There was a fire at the house where we had been living. It was not fit for a baby any more, never was. Emily and myself had a flat in a terraced house where people had a lot of parties. Spontaneous parties that erupted late and sometimes went on till lunchtime the next day, all kinds of stuff being taken. Bottles left on the stairs. It was that type of place, there was a great turnover of faces, you hardly got to know anybody properly. We had a great time, it has to be said, and it would be misleading to give the impression it wasn’t me and Emily throwing most of the parties ourselves, but now we had moved on to the family stage.