Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

I thought the baby would be fine there for a while, we made it nice. I should have planned something better, but to be honest, I had no money and I was not very good at making plans, only planning to get out of things, planning to get away from my father, for example, away from home. I got used to living unprepared, with people coming and going through my life. I was doing what I thought everyone else in Ireland was doing at the time, planning to have no plans, hoping everything would look after itself, and if not, you could always leave it behind and go away, abroad. And then there was a fire downstairs one day, somebody careless with a cigarette or a candle, it was bound to happen. We came back to find the front door open and water all over the hallway. There was some half-burned furniture and curtains thrown into the front garden. The banisters were charred, you could see where the flames had begun to bite into the paint, dark teeth-marks in the wood. The walls were blackened with smoke along the stairs. Our rooms had been broken into by the fire officers in order to secure the building, they had opened all the windows. I can still remember the smell of dampness and burned wood. It was in our clothes, in the books, in everything we owned, even the electrical equipment. A sharp smell of things half-eaten, coughed up by fire.

How could you bring a baby back there?

What was I thinking? We had to find somewhere to stay for the night. So I brought Emily and the baby to the only place I knew. Not far from where I grew up. There were some guesthouses along the seafront that I remembered from when I used to go swimming as a boy. It was the only thing that came to mind. I couldn’t go home, for all the obvious reasons. And for somebody who was so keen on getting away from home, it’s strange to think I came up with nothing better than getting accommodation so close to home, back to where I started.

It was me and Emily and the baby, the three of us together. We were on our own now. And I had the impression that everything I was doing was making up for something that went wrong before. As if having a baby was the only way of repairing anything. Each small thing was correcting something else. Each minute apologizing for the one that went before. That’s what I thought.

Is it possible to be saved by your own child?

It was dark by the time we got a place. Baby Maeve was asleep in a carrier basket, like it was our suitcase and we had just come in late off the ferry. We found a bed and breakfast place overlooking the harbour. I had passed it by many times before as a boy. Seaview, it was called. An ordinary name you might see repeated many times in towns all along the coast, but the name was even more familiar to me because I had said it aloud to myself so often without ever thinking that I would be one of the people going to stay there for the night. The woman running the guesthouse knew my face. She had seen me passing by many times. She was surprised to find me standing at the door so late. It must have looked like I had come back from swimming with a mother and baby and decided to stay overnight in a guesthouse instead of going home. As if we had found the baby on the rocks while the tide was out. Maybe she thought I was too young, only out of school. Or maybe she thought I was only pretending to be the father. She didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t explain why I had no prior arrangements made. She knew where I lived. She wanted the money in advance to make sure I wouldn’t change my mind halfway through the night and go home after all, leaving the baby behind.

We pretended that I was a visitor from far away, as if myself and Emily had come on holidays to the place where I had grown up. It felt so close to home without being at home. Emily was breast-feeding in the bed and I was looking out at the place where I used to go swimming, the lighthouse shining across the water towards me, the cargo ships waiting, as if we were just making it up as we went along.

We arrive at the restaurant a bit late. Through the car window I can see the people inside, sitting around the table. The white tablecloth. The faces waiting for us. Some of them stand up when they see her. Because she’s here now, they can see the wheelchair on the pavement. They can see her being helped out of the car by Manfred. She has taken off her cap, so her head is bare, that’s how they recognize her now. She’s looking all around, at the front of the restaurant, at the tables outside, at the name over the door. She wants to know where she is. What kind of street is this and how busy is the traffic and what else might need to be remembered? She doesn’t bother putting on her coat to go from the car into the restaurant.

She asks Manfred would he like to join us for lunch.

No thank you, he says. He has sandwiches made up by his wife and he’ll have them in the car.

Your little helper made your sandwiches for you, she says.

She can be like that occasionally, Úna. She can snap from time to time, I’ve experienced that. The angry side in her breaks out with no warning. She can be mean, for the sake of it, not letting anyone get away with a thing.

What would you do without your little helper? she says to Manfred.

Ah, come on, Úna, I say to her. Give it up. You can’t call his wife a little helper.

Manfred doesn’t take offence. He must think your little helper is what you call your wife. We can’t stop him calling his wife a little helper.

My little helper, he says. At the moment, my little helper is doing a doctorate in waste management. What will we do with all the baby nappies in the world? This is what she is studying, he says. So now I am her little helper for a while, Manfred says. Thank you for your kind invitation, he says, but Olga is still the best little helper for sandwiches.

Maybe Úna is disappointed that Manfred has turned down her invitation to be part of her lunch party.

I can be a bit of a bitch sometimes, she says.

Ah, you’re not that bad.

A right wagon, Liam. God forgive me.

The Paris Bar is where some people say Marlene Dietrich gave her farewell party. One of her parties at least, Manfred says. Before she moved to Paris. She went to Paris to die in private and then she came back to be buried in Berlin, the round trip, Úna calls it. She’s making the same round trip from Dublin to Berlin and back. Manfred has given her all the information about Marlene and he offers to drive us to the graveyard where she’s buried. It’s not very far, he says. It’s a lovely place, a quiet city graveyard, with red-brick walls. After lunch, maybe. He has brought quite a few people there to put little stones on Marlene’s grave, a train ticket, maybe, with the name of the town they come from. Only last week he tells us he brought an old man there to sit on a bench under the trees in silence.

I don’t need to go to a graveyard now, she says.

Thanks, Manfred, I say on her behalf. I take the wheelchair and push her into the restaurant, then she turns to me.

Why does he want to bring me to a graveyard?

He’s doing his best, Úna.

A farewell lunch. A small group of people coming to see her off at the Paris Bar. Friends and other writers she knew. A journalist. Somebody from the embassy. They’ve organized this lunch out of courtesy, to wish her well.

They are translating the menu for her.

Asparagus soup.

They talk as if there is nobody else at the table but her. They turn towards her and don’t even see each other. She’s looking into everybody’s eyes, blinking a lot, smiling, nodding. She draws everyone out of themselves. Each person feels alone with her, taking turns to tell her things that will interest her.

They. Why am I saying they? We.

We are trying to cheer her up. Somebody says Berlin is a good place to radiate from. It’s right in the middle of everywhere. One of the best places in Europe to think of going to other places from. Like Poland. Warsaw. And Kraków, they say, even further east. St Petersburg. Moscow. Trans-Siberia. It’s only a matter of picking where you want to go. Lots of people don’t think any further. They’re telling her it’s a good place to get the overnight train from. And some of the trains from the east are battered by hailstones, they tell her, with white scratches along the roof, from the fierce weather. You can see the weather written on the outside of the carriages, as if it’s written in Cyrillic.