Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

This is the proof that I am her father, as far as I’m concerned. The stories. The photographs. The school reports. All those times she came back from being away on holiday with her mother, visiting Emily’s parents in Canada, how much she had grown in three weeks, all the things I had to catch up with, the whole trip, from what the flight attendant said to her to what she saw along the straight roads of Ontario, the cornfields like forests where they said children sometimes get lost and are not found again until the corn is harvested.

I’ve kept all the things that made her afraid and all the things that made her laugh. I still have the drawing she made of a castle with three entrances, one where you climb up a ladder, another one where you climb up by this long plait of hair, and also across a bridge straight through the main door. I have everything. I’ve even kept her mispronunciations, the family words, I suppose you call them, like what in earth, instead of what on earth. Like coldy and warmy, instead of cold and warm.

That’s the only proof, I swear.

What else is there to be said? Apart from the fact that this was my story, the story I told to Úna in Berlin, that’s who I am now. I am the story of doubt and never being sure and always having to prove that I am the only father that matters. I am the story of a man who loves his daughter even more because of all this doubt, the story of a man who would not exist without the story of his daughter.

So yes, absolutely I’m still her father, one hundred percent, just not biologically.

Ah Liam, Úna says.

She begins to take all her things off the table, throwing them back into the see-through bag in no particular order. As if they don’t matter very much now and all the care she took in placing them on the table was for nothing. All on top of each other, including the Pergamon brochure. The medication was the last to go in and she rattled the Xanax in the air, offering me more. What harm? I take another one, just to be myself again.

Manfred is bringing her back down in the hydraulic lift. She’s waving at me and holding her see-through bag against her chest with the other arm. He helps her out of the lift and straight into the wheelchair, which he’s already left at the bottom of the steps. The car is waiting with the sliding door open, but instead of getting back in, she decides to go for a walk. She wants to see a bit of the area, on foot, so to speak. She takes my hand and gets Manfred to push the wheelchair. We walk side by side, not saying anything, just holding hands. We walk around the island of museums, past other museums we could have gone into if only we had more time. We stop for a while on a bridge. It’s still warm enough out and she has her cap on. I want to take a photograph, but she tells Manfred to take it instead, with myself and Úna together.

She won’t let go of my hand in the photograph either. We’re like a couple. She’s smiling and I’m smiling.

I think she’s trying to distract me from myself, so she starts asking Manfred questions. Where did they get married? How did he meet his wife? And what time of the year did they get married? Manfred answers all the questions in reverse order. He says he got married in May, around this time of the year. He met Olga at a cookery course. They got married here in Berlin. It was a funny time for us, Manfred says, a big wedding with a great mixture of people from Turkey and Poland and Germany.

He says the Turkish side of the family were the noisiest. You cannot imagine, he says. His cousins got the entire fleet of cars out for the day, everybody blazing their horns, he says. Blazing, is this correct?

Blaring, she says.

Yes, blaring, he says. Blaring. Blaring. We do this in Berlin, like in Turkey. We drive through the streets to let everybody know that somebody is getting married.

I know what you’re saying, she says. It puts people in a great mood. You want to catch a glimpse of the bride’s face passing by.

Manfred tells us that his cousins stopped the whole fleet of cars on Potsdamer Platz. Crazy, he says. In the middle of the junction. Many beautiful cars, Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, mostly black, he says, decorated with ribbons. And Turkish flags. Like Potsdamer Platz was deep in Turkey, a village in Antalya, can you imagine? The men and women got out and danced, he says. Me and Olga had to get out and join them, in the street. The traffic was held up for five minutes, more. Very crazy.

Manfred shows us some pictures on his phone.

And the police didn’t interfere, Úna says.

By the time the police come, he says, everyone is gone. I am a driver myself, he says. I have seen it many times. You see a wedding and you say, OK, relax, this will take time. If you are in a hurry, please take a different route.

We look at the pictures of Manfred and his bride Olga dancing in the street with the Sony Centre in the background. The car doors are left open behind them. Ribbons and brightly coloured scarves tied to the wing mirrors. The wedding guests dancing in a circle, holding hands. A dancing human chain, if you like. Women in long dresses. Big men linking up with their little fingers, so it seems to me.

Can you imagine, Manfred says. On Potsdamer Platz. Blazing horns everywhere, very crazy. It was so funny for us, he says. Dancing with the music from the car. People were standing on the street watching. Very crazy. Very crazy. The men were whistling, he says. And some of the women were screaming. No. Shouting. Down at the back of the throat.

Ululating, she says.

Yes, Manfred says. The women were doing that and the men were whistling. Then everyone got back into their cars. My cousins directed the traffic and we were all gone again.

You could pick up a few ideas, Liam, she says.

I come through Potsdamer Platz twenty times a day, Manfred says, and every time I want to blaze the horn, just to remember.

You should, she says. Manfred, absolutely, you should do it for Olga, no matter who you have in the car. Will you promise? You must do that.

Very crazy, he says.

Then we’re back in the car again and Manfred has forgotten to switch off the radio. He’s left the station on and we can hear the voice a woman singing. Úna asks him what the music is. Is it Turkish music? Yes, he says. It’s more Berlin-Turkish music, like hip-hop Turkish, you might say.

I love this, she says. Turn it up, Manfred.

She opens her window and lets the music off the lead, out into the streets, full blast. The singer’s voice sounds very young, twisting in all directions. Of course we have no idea what the words are, so we can imagine anything we like. She might be singing about love, like most pop songs, I suppose, maybe she’s singing about a wedding. Out in the open, with the sun going down. And her head shaking from side to side. Like she’s bending over backwards until her hair is touching the ground.

Holding hands. It was not like her to hold hands, they told me after the funeral. Man or woman. She was not the type of person you could put your arm around without warning, they said, she didn’t like you hanging out of her like a schoolgirl. Something in her childhood made her afraid of affection. Even in the company of those who loved her.

Noleen loved her, so they told me. They said Noleen loved her and she wanted to see the photographs of Berlin, so I passed them on.

They told me about the time in Dublin when there was a big group of them sitting around the table in a restaurant. Journalists and writers, people from the TV. Everybody was arguing about what was happening at the time in Northern Ireland, then they turned around to see Noleen with her arm around Úna. So that became the news instead, women in Dublin falling in love with each other.