Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

I went up the steps to the top of the altar and waved down at her from the temple. She smiled back at me. And maybe it was all that marble around us that made me think of her as part of the story of ancient Greece. Seeing her from a distance, sitting there waving at me, gave me the feeling that I was looking back over her life, like one of those archaeologists. All these questions I had not even thought of asking yet.

There were things I couldn’t let go. As a father myself. I felt I had to speak up for her father, out of his mouth. I got back down and pushed the wheelchair into the next room. It was quieter in there with lots of stone columns and assorted bits of anatomy in no human order, arms and heads and half men, like a puzzle waiting to be put back together. I found a place behind a pillar and decided to ask her what exactly happened to her brother. I wanted to know the truth, because I couldn’t imagine being murdered by my own father.

Úna, I said to her. Did your father really kill your brother?

Yes. He was murdered.

How?

They gave him his life.

Come on, Úna. That’s not murder.

My brother had a terrible life, she said.

That’s a serious accusation. Murder. I know people use the word all the time in a light-hearted way. But still and all, I said, calling your own father a murderer.

She looked astonished. She could not believe I would turn on her like this, in the Pergamon Museum of all places.

Listen, Liam. My father killed my brother when he sent him to London with no love in him.

Premeditated.

Liam. My brother had a hole in his chest where love went right through him. He had no protection, Liam, no defence. He had no way of forming a normal relationship with the world. You see him in a photograph before he went away and he looks great, very handsome, like he had everything going for him. Then you see him in another photograph some years later and he’s a wreck, like he’s lived a hundred lives. He never learned how to respect himself or find anyone else to respect him. Something destroyed him early on, in his childhood. I’m not going into all this here, Liam, but his father might as well have taken his life at birth because he sent him off with nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I swear to God, Liam.

I would hate my daughter calling me a murderer.

Don’t compare yourself to my father, she said.

I’m only saying, Úna. Your father was human, not somebody in an opera.

What?

Well, that was it. I thought she was trying to stand up out of the wheelchair and walk away. She shouted my name across the room so that everyone in that part of the museum suddenly turned to look at us.

Liam, she shouted. You have no right to question me. My father took my brother from me. I’m not going to forgive him for that, as long as I live.

The visitors at the museum were beginning to pay more attention to us than to the ancient artefacts. They were probably wondering what I had done to her. She was helpless, sitting in a wheelchair with her head bare from radiation, unable to escape from my questions.

My brother was too afraid, she said, too alone, too damaged to live a normal life. What do you call that, Liam? That’s murder. My mother and father took everything that belonged to us. They gave us our lives and they stole them back again. My father not only stole my brother, she said, he stole my children from me too. The children I could never have, Liam, because I was afraid they might end up like my brother. I was afraid of what I saw in his eyes. I was afraid of what my brother had seen happening when he was a child, what he could never talk about.

She was holding on to her anger.

Yes, she said. I am holding on to my anger. Because that’s all I have left. My family, my anger, my grudge. My family rage, whatever you want to call it, Liam. What you get from your father and mother. From your country. What you spend the rest of your life trying to escape from. Things that follow you. It’s what made me want to get even with the world, in my own words. It’s the artistic rage, Liam. Every writer has that rage, she said, otherwise they wouldn’t be writers, they’d be too special, too much apart from the rest of us. Without that rage they’d be too obsessed with genius, they’d sound just like priests, or cardinals, making a holy cult of themselves. They wouldn’t be good writers, they wouldn’t be human enough without their own little line of anger and guilt and grudge and envy and failure and desperately wanting to be loved more than anyone else in the world.

Don’t take that away from me, Liam.

I had to let it go. It felt too much like the final judgement, interrogating her about her father in a place like this. I turned the wheelchair around and pushed her towards the exit. It looked as though she was being removed like a noisy child.

I forgive nobody, she said.

It’s all right, Úna.

I wish them all the fires and ice of hell.

Calm down.

Beckett was right, she said. If only I had thought up those words myself. I wish them all an atrocious life. I wish them lots of delays, cancellations, no refunds. I hope there’s always somebody ahead of them in the queue. And in the life hereafter, she said, they can have an honoured name as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t start going like Beckett, I said.

Look what they did to him, she said. They named a bridge after him.

The Beckett Bridge.

It’s unforgivable.

That’s a beautiful bridge, I said.

It’s an atrocity, she said. A bridge over the river Liffey. He would freak out if he heard that. I’m serious, if he was still alive today, the poor man, he would put an end to it, right now, he would go no further. Not for another second. They waited until he was dead so he could not object to it himself, in person.

It’s like a musical instrument, I said.

Exactly, she said. A bridge in the shape of a harp. For Samuel Beckett, of all people. Think about it, Liam. A fucking bridge over the Liffey in the shape of an Irish harp.

Calm down, you’re in Berlin.

I got her as far as the souvenirs and told her to keep her voice down. I told her I’d make sure there would be no bridges named after her.

She was laughing again.

What would you say to a roundabout? I asked her.

I swear to God, Liam.

I leaned down behind her and whispered in her ear. There might be one or two roundabouts in Limerick still unnamed, I told her. Every time people come to the roundabout they’ll think of you, I said, wouldn’t that be nice? Then she half-turned around in the wheelchair and said she would come back and kill me. She would kill the whole lot of us.

I’ve got her a small brochure about the history of the Pergamon Altar. I’ve bought her a drink of apple juice mixed with fizzy water, a cloudy drink. I ask her would she like a cake and she wants a scone. Do they not have any fruit scones and jam, raspberry jam? Blackberry jam, I don’t suppose they have that, she says. They have no scones in the café at the Pergamon Museum, so I get her one of those almond cakes, like a horseshoe with both ends dipped in chocolate. She loves those. She’s eaten hers very quickly so I give her one of the remaining chocolate ends off my horseshoe as well. She drinks the apple juice and takes some more pills and I ask her is everything all right now?

I’m fine, she says.

She starts taking things out from her see-through bag. She places them on the table one by one, her medication, her reading glasses, the room key, the nail clippers, the mobile phone, switched off. All the contents out on the table for everyone to see. As if she was at home. She looks at each item individually. She examines the tub of hand cream as though she’s never seen it before, reading the label, holding it away from her to look at the design on the lid, seeing what’s underneath, reading the label a second time, opening it up to smell it and closing the lid again. Then she picks a spot on the table for it. She looks into her bag once more, outside and inside. She takes out more and more things, I don’t know what for, does she want to make sure she’s got everything?