Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

We were looking over the photographs of her in Berlin and they said it was not like her to wear a baseball cap either. She normally left her curls out for the rain. I told them it was my baseball cap to keep her warm.

They told me that when she was travelling with Noleen in Romania, she once gave away all her money to a woman in the street. It was an enormous amount of money, apparently, so they said, too much and not enough. The woman looked at the money in her hand as if it was poison. She hid the money in the top of her dress, they said, then she picked up her child and fled. But then Úna and Noleen were worried what her husband would think, would he be asking her if she had turned herself into a prostitute with the child for that kind of money, so they went looking for her, not to take the money back, only to explain to her husband that they had given it to her in good faith.

I told them that she told me that story in Berlin.

They said she came from a time of big families. When there was not much money around. When there was plenty of alcoholism. When there was always some child sick with breathing trouble. A time when you were told to put your head over a basin of hot water and eucalyptus oil, breathing in and out, hold it, hold it, as long as possible, with a towel over your head like a hood. That was the solution to all breathing problems. The basin on one chair and you sitting on another chair underneath a tent, with all that steam. And you were to stay in there until you were suffocating and it was sheer relief to come up for air again and breathe normally. In kitchens all over the country there were heads under towels, they said.

They told me how she got drunk one night at a party in Dublin and drove straight out to the west, down to Clare, in the middle of the night. It was close to Christmas, they said, and even with all the people around her at the party she felt alone. And after all that drinking she went home and got the dog, Buddy, and the cat she had that time, then she drove through the night with all the towns going backwards past her and all the Christmas lights on in the houses, until she got as far as Clare, speeding along the narrow winding roads and she ended up crashing the car, turned over, so they said. That’s the way she was found, upside down in the ditch, they said, lucky to be alive. Not even injured, they said. She was more worried about the cat gone missing. Buddy stayed with her but the cat was gone, so the next day she put an appeal out on the radio to say that she would be spending Christmas alone and her cat was missing somewhere along the road around Corafin, or was it Ennistymon they said? She said herself and Buddy would be so lonely and worried, looking out the window at the rain, but then the guards arrived at the door of her cottage two days later with the cat.

They told me that she never wanted to be perfect. She loved mistakes. She loved people who allowed their mistakes to be seen. She loved all the accidental things that people said and did quite innocently without thinking too much beforehand, things that were said and done without people trying them out in their heads beforehand. They remembered her saying that some people used words like make-up and some people used words like food and some people used words like sunglasses, to avoid people looking into their eyes. They said she could be mean at times, or impatient, or thoughtless, maybe that was the word they used. Obsessed with herself. They told me how she was once invited to give a talk at an event in Galway with a poet. The venue was packed out as always, the poet never had such a big audience before. But then she insisted on going first and she talked for almost two hours, answering questions at length. There was no time for the poet, they said, because when she was finished talking, people came rushing up to get their books signed. Then she left and the audience left with her.

There was nothing I could think of adding to that. I was not there to defend her. All I said was that she was very generous to the waitress.

I told them she didn’t like to be confined. She had to have the hotel-room window open at night. She didn’t like being inside in the conservatories, at the Botanic Garden, because it was too hot and she couldn’t breathe.

They told me how she loved being alone with the light coming in from the street. She loved the headlights of cars going backwards across the ceiling in her house in Dublin. They remembered her saying how she loved the voices of drunken people outside the window, all the fights going by and the sound of bottles and cans and pissing and puking and laughing and women screeching in their bare feet because their high heels were killing them, women shouting fuck and bitch and cunt, you fucking bitch, they said, and the songs people sometimes burst into at night with no intention of finishing, only the first two lines before they were gone out of reach again.

I told them that she got lost in the hotel in Berlin.

How could she get lost in a hotel? The Adlon of all places?

I explained that I had to go and talk to Manfred. Manfred the driver, I said, to make sure that was clear. All we had left to do at that point was get to Don Carlo , the opera. The State Opera was within walking distance, there was no need for the car. It was up to me to go and tell Manfred while she went up to her room to be alone for a while. I brought her as far as the elevator. I thought she would be fine from there. She was well able to manage. She had the room key in her hand.

You let her go, they said.

She wanted to manage, I said.

I told them that I took care of her see-through bag, just to make it easier for her. I should have stayed with her, I know, but she waved her hand and told me to go back out and talk to Manfred. You see Manfred was insisting on waiting for us after the opera, just in case it started raining. He kept saying that he didn’t want me and my mother walking back in the rain. She was not my mother, of course, but I didn’t want to disown her. And he said it was not a question of extra money for him or anything like that, just a favour he would like to do for us. I will be outside the opera house, Manfred said. But she would not hear of it. You will not be outside the opera house, she had said to Manfred already. There was not going to be any raining. I had to go and make sure he understood that he was to go home to Olga and the children, right now, and stay there. He was not to come out again and he was not to be at the opera house.

They could not believe I brought her to see Don Carlo .

It was her last chance.

Don Carlo ?

She really wanted to go, I said.

They explained to me how her brother came back from London. He was pretty bad at that point when she got him home to Dublin. If home is still a good word for home, in his case, they said. Home is the only word you have for what you remember, they said, what’s left behind, what her brother was trying to get back to, what he kept inside all this time. He had nothing going for him, so they told me. He had the years of an older man inside the face of a young man. He was very thin. His teeth were bad. His mother and father were both dead at this stage. He still had the eyes of his father, but his memory was gone with all the people walking in and out of his life, helping themselves. He looked as though nothing meant anything to him, and coming home was even harder than going away. There was nobody enquiring for him, nobody around who really knew him. The city had moved on without him. The streets had forgotten his name. The place where he grew up had not even been aware that he was away. He might as well have been in a foreign city, looking for familiar faces, sweet shops, street names. They said he walked around talking to himself, talking to the wide granite slabs underneath his feet, expecting the railings to talk back to him at least.