Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

She goes silent. All that talk of travelling has made her go into a dream. She loves nothing more than hearing the names, the further away the better. She says it’s like Castlebar translated into Polish. Ennistymon. Milltown Malbay. Imagine Ballyvaughan in Russian. Imagine reaching Fanore in Chinese. Imagine taking the overnight train and waking up in County Clare, at Spanish Point, with the sea at your feet.

I’ve never been anywhere like that, she says. I’ve never even been to Kraków. Or St Petersburg. I’d love to go.

She tells them about travelling with Noleen. All the way down through Macedonia and Albania.

I remember a small town, she says, where a man climbed into a walnut tree for us. His feet were in the branches, shaking down the walnuts. Big green leaves like big green donkeys’ ears around his head. The man said we looked like sisters and we called each other sisters, she says. Eating walnuts like sisters. I remember his wife standing by with a basket in her arms and fruit flies around her head. At night we slept like sisters. I remember a cockroach running across the floor and we laughed because Noleen said it looked like he was embarrassed to be seen.

They tell her about the restaurant. They explain why it’s so famous and why people wanted to be seen there before everything began to shift after the wall came down and people found new places in the east of the city to be seen in. It’s a has-been restaurant, so they say, but some people still go for nostalgia. The tables are close together, the waiters are older men, wearing white aprons down to the floor. There’s a cashier. Have a look at the cashier, they say. So she looks around and smiles at the cashier, a young woman wearing a white blouse sitting at a desk, high up. It’s like a pulpit, she says. Not really a pulpit, more like an open-deck cubicle, a half cubicle, with a half door and the cashier sitting down, but yes, like a pulpit, too, if you like. The waiters shout numbers across the restaurant to the cashier and the cashier knows what everybody is eating.

They remember cashiers like that in Dublin. Cubicles for cashiers no longer in use. They remember all kinds of other things that have gone out of existence, like sums done on the back of brown paper bags in pencil. Things that belong to the past that you might be more likely to see if you get on the overnight train.

White asparagus, she says.

It’s a big thing here in May, they tell her. White asparagus.

White asparagus soup.

They watch her cutting the asparagus. Her hand shakes a little as she chases a piece of it around the bowl, until she traps it with her thumb and lifts the spoon up to her mouth. And while they’re talking to her, she looks around at what the others are eating, comparing what they’re having to what she’s having. She reaches over to take some French fries off my plate and throws them into her soup. French fries floating in the asparagus soup.

Why am I so hungry? she says.

It’s great to see her eating. She’s ordered lamb cutlets, and when they arrive, she picks them up and eats them by hand, holding them by the bone. She doesn’t care who’s looking. She’s on a lot of steroids and that gives you a horse of an appetite, she says.

We’re taking our time, sitting around the table at the Paris Bar, talking about history. About the war, going back to the Nazis. The whole twentieth century happened in Berlin, so they’re saying. I wish I could remember some of the stories they were telling. But I was not fully paying attention, to be honest. Sometimes I get left behind. It’s like being at school and I’m not concentrating and they have already moved on, talking about Northern Ireland when I think they’re still talking about the Second World War and the Nazis. Sometimes the words used for one part of history match in with those for another part, no difference, only the names of places you have to watch out for. And the personalities. Some words, of course, you can’t mistake. You know it’s Ireland by the way they say let’s hope so. That narrows it down. It’s still in the future, at least. Or maybe only just in the recent past.

Whatever it is, they’ve lost me. I can’t pick up the trail and I’m left thinking about irrelevant things. Personal matters that I have told her about and that have absolutely nothing to do with the people around me at the table, they wouldn’t be interested.

I’m still trying to work out what was going on inside my own family. What went on after we saw my aunt and my father’s brother coming out of the hotel in Cork. We had no explanation for it. We had the facts but we had no story, no context. There was a lot of talking behind closed doors. And the Jesuit, my father’s brother, was no longer coming to our house with sweets in his pocket.

We were told he was on retreat. He was having a crisis in his life, that’s all my mother would say. I think she wanted to tell me more but she would not allow herself. I was afraid that she might have told my brother more than me, or he was better at picking things up, and he was keeping it all to himself. She told me to pray for my father’s brother because he had difficult decisions to make. He had to make up his mind whether he was still living under the same roof with the Jesuits or staying under the same roof with my aunt. We got no further explanation at the time, it was not something we were allowed to ask any more questions about.

I’m not sure my mother even had an explanation to give herself. She was left trying to figure out why my father’s brother was not coming to see us any more. Had she done something wrong? I had no idea why my mother was so upset about all this. My aunt didn’t come to the house any more either, on her own or with the Jesuit. We were like a family left behind. My mother kept trying to contact him but he was out of reach. She left messages, inviting him out to the house as before, she was ready to welcome him back like a real Jesuit and put him at the head of the table with a cake in the middle, his favourite coffee cake, but he wouldn’t come. Maybe he was afraid of my father. Maybe he thought my father would subject him to interrogation in the front room, what was he doing coming out of a hotel in Cork arm in arm with my aunt right in front of us when he was meant to be a Jesuit?

My mother was unable to live without knowing. So one day she decided to go and see my father’s brother face to face. I don’t know if my father was even aware of her going to visit his brother on her own. She went on the bus, two buses in fact, to get to the red-brick house where the Jesuits lived under one roof together. She had a long walk up the drive with the windows of the building looking out over the person arriving. She said she thought she saw my father’s brother watching her from one of the windows, but she didn’t want to wave at him in case it was another Jesuit. She walked up the granite step and rang the bell beside the brown door. It takes a while before one of the Jesuits appears. You can hear doors opening and closing and footsteps coming along the corridor. And when a Jesuit finally comes, it’s the wrong Jesuit. He let her into the reception and went to find the right Jesuit, my father’s brother, our Jesuit, wherever he was, so that took more time and she was left sitting there listening out for doors opening and closing, hoping it was him, the Jesuit in our family.

She was told that my father’s brother was busy, in prayer. He could not to be disturbed. The Jesuit was very polite, as always, speaking as if he was only allowed to use the least amount of words. He said it would be a while before our Jesuit was available, so perhaps it might be better to come back another time.

My mother said she would be happy to wait.