Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

I think it might have been an hour, maybe more. They didn’t offer her anything, no tea and biscuits, only the same Jesuit coming back to see if she had gone home yet. She was sitting with her coat still on, in the small reception room, surrounded by magazines about the missions and the new schools being built. The same room where I had to meet my father’s brother once or twice, for causing too much trouble at home, and once more to discuss sexual matters. Something to do with a man and a woman. That’s what it was called in our family, things that happened between a man and a woman, even though it was too embarrassing to speak to my father’s brother about anything at all, he didn’t really have much to say about any man or any woman and neither did I, so we left it at that.

My mother said she was not leaving until she had spoken to him. And when he finally came to see her, he sat down on the far side of the room with his hands still in prayer on his knees, staring at the floor, as if she was not even in the room and it was only the holy-order magazines left.

Just tell me, my mother said.

She wanted to know the truth, that was all. She wanted to hear it from his mouth. He looked up at her and thought for a long time about what he was going to say, carefully selecting his words. But then he told her nothing, just made it clear to her that he was not going to answer any of her questions. He was even more full of silence than ever before, if that’s possible, to be full of something that does not exist. He had nothing whatsoever to say to her. He was used to people confessing everything to him. He was not going to turn around and start confessing everything to my mother. She had the wrong Jesuit. What he was thinking had nothing to do with her. It was none of her business what went on between a man and a woman.

It’s my business, that’s all he said.

Then he got up and left her sitting there empty-handed. He didn’t shake hands or embrace her. He just disappeared. She came home by the same long driveway with the well-kept lawns and the windows staring at her, two buses, the same journey in reverse with no explanation. And maybe that was the explanation.

There’s a lot of art on the walls at the Paris Bar. Mad paintings, all the way around the entire restaurant. A light-box attached to the ceiling, illuminated in different colours with the words ‘stand still and rot’. I mean, the art is pretty out there, for a restaurant. Where people are forced to eat. There is a large black-and-white photo of a man and a woman naked, in their twenties, having sex. The woman has the man’s penis in her mouth. And this other couple are having their meal right next to it in silence, paying no attention whatsoever to the man in the photograph looking down with an unhappy expression on his face while the woman is leaning sideways over him with her knees apart. As if it’s the most normal thing in the world for a man and a woman to have their lunch beside the man and the woman having sex, like it’s all part of the same thing and you don’t have to keep staring at it.

I want to know where they are now, the man and the woman in the photograph. What age are they now and do they still remember. Do they ever come back to the restaurant to look at each other? Do they maybe come back and have dinner together from time to time underneath the photo of themselves having sex? And would people know it was them having sex so close to them having dinner?

She wants to know about the artists, so they give her some of the names that are famous now. The artworks, they say, were mostly left behind by artists who were broke at the time and couldn’t pay for their dinner.

I like that, she says.

Some of the art is not worth the price of a dinner.

I could leave behind a couple of words, she says.

Some of the art is worth a million dinners.

A million asparagus soups.

They tell her that a lot of famous people have come to the restaurant over the years for dinner. A lot of words have been overheard and found their way into the newspapers. A lot of words are forgotten and only the art on the walls is left when all the people who had their dinner are gone.

You can’t eat art, she says.

They stand up when she stands up. That’s the way I remember it. I’m narrowing down the conversations and the small talk around the edges. They talked for a while about somebody’s father being her lecturer in university. There was probably a lot more said than that, but you would have to ask the others, I was not paying enough attention. I can only remember her asking herself, or asking me, why asparagus soup would make you want to cry.

I send Manfred a text giving him plenty of time to come over, whenever he’s ready. He sends me back a text to say that he is always ready. I only meant it as an expression, whenever you’re ready, but he thought I meant it literally, when are you ever ready? I am here, he says. I am here always. Waiting for you and your mother, he says. Then I look out the window and see that he’s been there all along, parked right outside, waiting for us.

As they’re standing around and she’s getting back into the wheelchair, they don’t start talking to each other, ignoring her, looking to see what time it is and what they’re going back to. Nobody wants to say goodbye to her. It’s something they have forgotten how to do. As if there are no words for it and they cannot imagine not ever seeing her again. They wait while she’s being shown around the restaurant to look at the art, without pointing at anything in particular or bothering people who might be having their dinner right next to it. The staff are smiling. Staff, I don’t think she would have called them staff. The waiters are smiling and shaking her hand and saying they look forward to seeing her again.

And then I get a phone call from the Adlon, letting me know they have the tickets for Don Carlo . I want to tell them we don’t need them. She’s doing fine. I want to let them know that she’s dying and she’s not up to it. I’m trying to protect her from her family. I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to go back to see that same story again, re-enacted in front of her.

Three hundred and fifty euros each, the last tickets available.

We’ll take them, she says. I’ll never be here again.

So I get back to the man at the hotel reception to tell him we’ll go for it. Two tickets only. So now I’ve booked them and we have to go.

I met her father once. Way back, long before I knew her. I had this job for a short while as a copy boy with the newspaper that he wrote for in Dublin. It was my duty to deliver bits of paper from one desk to another and make tea for people, get sandwiches and biscuits and buttered rock buns, sometimes a burger, sometimes a kebab. The journalists were always using their pens to stir the tea and leaving the teabags on the table, staining an old newspaper.

Her father was rarely seen in his office, only occasionally when he came back late in the evening to write his column. He was standing at the top of the stairs one day on his way out, that’s how I remember it, just as I was going up. I had no dealings with him. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t shake his hand. I’m not in a position to say what he was like as a father. I can’t even say that I met him, properly, only that he stood in front of me and smiled as if he wanted to talk to me. I remember him wearing a carnation in his lapel, like he was coming from a wedding. Or maybe he just made Dublin look like there was always somebody getting married.

He was in no hurry. He looked me in the eyes and I felt he knew me for some reason, but it was only that I knew him. He was checking to see if I was somebody. Anybody. He gave me a chance to say who I was and where I was from and who my mother and father were and what school I went to, if I was related to anyone in public life. He waited to see if I had anything to reveal, that is, if I knew anything interesting about anyone at all that was worth remembering, anything worth passing on or publishing in a newspaper column. He said good evening to me, but I forgot how to speak. I didn’t have the words put together in the right order in my head. I couldn’t get the sentence I was hoping to say off the ground. I wanted to tell him everything I knew, but I didn’t know what that was yet.