Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

Liam, she says. We better not forget the sheets.

No problem, I’ll remind Manfred.

She has an overview. She’s playing dominoes with her things, shifting them around on the table to make the display more logical, creams together, hotel belongings together, reading materials with reading materials. She looks at everything in front of her on the table, all in order.

I’m only putting this together now.

She’s thinking back, wondering what more she could have done for her brother. She talks about him coming to see her on her birthday once. He was living up in the north of London at that stage, Wood Green, I think she said it was. She’s talking about how she hardly ever got to see him. And one day she found him standing in the reception, where she was working. He was talking to the porter at the door. Her brother was the image of his father, she says, chatting to the nearest person available to see what story they had. He had come to bring me out for a drink on my birthday, she says. Even though he didn’t really have the money to stand a drink. And I had already arranged to go out with friends, colleagues from work. So I was caught between the two. He was standing there with a big smile on his face and I had to introduce him to everyone, she says, what else could I do? I brought him with me to the pub and they all loved him. They were buying him drink and he was really happy, telling stories.

For a moment, she says, I thought it was great having a brother, like some kind of credentials, so people knew I came from a normal family where everyone drank and sang songs around the table. But I knew where this was headed, she says. I could see the thin façade I had going for myself in London was steadily being dismantled. There was no telling what he would say. I was about to be found out. Having my brother around was like wearing my heart on my sleeve, she says.

At one point, she got her brother up to the bar so he could help carry a round of drinks back to the table. It was the only way she could talk to him privately.

Don’t start getting any ideas, she said to him, you’re not here for the night.

He kept getting more and more drunk, she says, just like his own mother. It was the only thing he ever learned at home, how to look forward to the next drink, how to go all the way and get properly out of the head. I didn’t know what to do with him, she says. You know the way it is, you can dismiss your own brother and think of him as a failure, until you’re in company and you feel you have to be nice to him, in front of people. You see other people taking him seriously. You see what they see in him, the pity they have for him. It was the disaster in my brother that reminded me of the potential disaster in myself, she says. I was afraid they could see that whole family disaster coming out bit by bit the more drunk he got.

So I got him out of there, she says. When the next opportunity arose, she says, I took him by the arm like we were the best family in the world. I made excuses, she says. I told them we had to go because we were expecting a call from home. Which was a big lie. There was nothing I wanted more than to keep drinking with my brother and my friends, if they even were friends, but I had to stop him before he got totally paralysed and let me down. I didn’t want him to see me being myself either. So I sent him off in a taxi, God forgive me, she says, all the way up to Wood Green, it cost me a fortune. Imagine that, Liam, I packed my brother off in a taxi to whatever Godforsaken place he was living and I went back to the even sadder, Godforsaken place where I was living, just to be on my own, on my birthday.

I didn’t know how to help him, she says. I didn’t think it was up to me. I was his big sister but I had no idea. I should have given him things to do. Some kind of task to carry out. Something to get him started. Something he could be proud of.

Then she turns to me and wants to know would I do her a favour. After she’s gone, that is, would I go somewhere she’s never been before.

Where?

If I had children, she says, that’s what I would do. I would give them tasks to carry out. I would send them all over the world, places I could never get to. Go to Tibet, that sort of thing. Go to one of their temples. Bring me back something, I would say to them, she says. Come back with a stick or a small piece of cloth. Dried fruit. Anything at all.

Will you do me a favour, Liam? After me. Will you go to Kraków? I always wanted to go to Kraków. Please, Liam, will you do that for me?

I told her what it was like being a father. I told her that once you become a parent yourself you keep wondering if there’s something you have deprived your child of and you hope it’s not love.

I told her about my daughter, when she was only four years of age. She went ahead of me one day, at top speed, on her scooter. She went down the hill, waving at the rabbits in the window of the pet shop, all the way down past the church. No sense of danger. I was shouting after her to stop but she kept going. She was miles ahead and I was sure she would end up going straight on to the main road. I ran after her. I legged it as fast as I could, with all these Italian students across the road laughing at me. And at the bottom of the road she disappeared around the corner and fell off. I picked her up and held her in my arms and I felt so lucky that she was all right, unharmed.

What are you saying, Liam?

I couldn’t stop my daughter growing up and asking questions, I said. Maeve. She must have overheard. Because she was upstairs when I was asking Emily all these questions I should never have asked. It was my last chance not to ask questions. But that’s the truth for you, it’s like a hair in your mouth. Emily was standing in the kitchen saying she was not going to answer any questions, why should she? It was not a question she was able to answer. And I kept saying I didn’t believe her. My question was following her around the house, out on to the patio while she suddenly had to look after some potted plants in semi-darkness, back into the house the question was still following her into the bathroom while she was going to the loo and she asked me to let her close the door at least, through the hallway while she was putting on her coat, searching for something in her bag as though the answer was there all along. And Maeve was standing at the window upstairs watching while Emily was walking out the front door not knowing where to go from there, stopping to look right and left on the pavement, and me still asking her to come back and answer the question.

What question?

Like, am I the real father?

Is there some doubt?

It finally came out because of the wedding, I explain. Everything is up in the air because the wedding is not happening, it’s been cancelled. All these second thoughts that Maeve is having. She feels it’s better not to commit to anything, as if she’s only going to be repeating all the mistakes that went before her, as if there’s something keeping her from starting her life.

It was me who gave her that doubt, I point out. All these second thoughts she picked up from me in the first place. Doubts I should have been keeping to myself and which were suddenly out in the open.

One evening she came out to see me on her own. Just Maeve and myself, the two of us alone in the house. I had everything ready, laid out on the table. She came in and kissed me. Then she passed me by and dropped her bag in the middle of the hallway, by the stairs. She threw her coat on the sofa and looked around as usual and said, Jesus, look at the place, Dad. You’re so fucking tidy, it’s unbelievable. Because she was always accusing me of tidying around people, saying there was nothing I enjoyed more in life than clearing up, coming to the end of a packet, or a carton, a bottle of shampoo, getting the dishwasher stacked properly. She said I behaved as if I wanted to be invisible, as if I didn’t want to leave any evidence behind. As if real people were too real for me and I could not bear them leaving their belongings around the place. At least give me a chance to make a mess, Dad, before you start picking things up. She said you had to leave some trace of yourself behind or else you don’t exist. So I left her bag where it was in the hallway and her coat on the sofa, with one arm reaching down towards the floor. I was glad to see them there, where they were dropped.