Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

I think you need lessons in sadness. I had no idea what grief was at the time. I could see it in other people, but I didn’t realise that I carried it with me all along. It was accumulating without me knowing it, like some dormant virus that can eventually erupt when you’re least expecting it. When I saw my mother crying I could see everything, her whole life, her childhood, her memories, how much she must have been in love and how much she must have been loved, no matter how hard my father was on the family. Whenever people were sad, they showed all their happiness as well. I didn’t think sadness should be revealed in a person, it was a weakness. I was only doing what everybody else was doing at the time, I thought, trying to avoid sadness. I was under the impression that everyone in Ireland was doing their best to pretend there was no such thing as sadness, singing, drinking, talking, telling stories, anything at all to keep themselves from looking sad, only when they were singing sad songs. I kept laughing at myself, laughing at the world, laughing at death, laughing at pain, laughing at things I liked, laughing at love and all those things that could hurt you if they were taken away, laughing at everything that makes you fall victim to sadness. I wanted to let everyone know that I was not afraid of my father dying, I was not bothered by any of that, so I told myself.

When my mother died I was still afraid to be sad. She was alone after my father died because her best friend, my father’s brother, refused to visit her. All I knew how to do was to be her son. But he was her real companion, my father’s brother, the Jesuit in the family. And then he stopped coming to see her. I didn’t know the reason for this at the time. I knew there was a reason, but it’s not something I worked out until much later. She would sit looking out at the back garden and wait for my father’s brother, saying why does he not come and visit me? He was there at her funeral, the Jesuit. My father’s brother. He came to say Mass for her. Although I was hardly present myself. I was there with the family, but I was more or less absent from then on, avoiding everything, shaking hands with my father’s brother outside the church and not saying anything, wishing I was invisible, as if you cannot see your own life clearly when you’re actually in it.

This time I was present.

Travelling around Berlin in the car for two days, pushing the wheelchair in through the gates of the Botanic Garden, for example, allowed me time to say goodbye to my own mother and father, in retrospect, from a distance. This time I was fully aware of what it means to lose somebody. And you know what, this may sound like the wrong thing to say, but there was something about Úna dying that triggered off something alive in me. It made me feel as though I was actually taking part in my own life for the first time. In fact, I think I was a bit elated being there near the end, with her. Even joyful. Exhilarated, you could say. Am I getting this right? It made me feel more myself. Or more like an exemption from myself, somebody released on parole or something like that, as if I never had to pay the fare again, as if all my debts were paid, that sort of feeling I had. I think. It felt as if none of the ordinary things mattered any more. That’s what I thought. Or maybe it was the other way around, it was only the ordinary things that mattered, like buying the entrance tickets to the Botanic Garden and letting Manfred know that he had plenty of time to go for coffee, I would call him in a while when we were ready to leave again.

She told me about her love life. She said she first had sex with a man when she was fifteen. He was twice her age. She said she loved all the attention her body got in her school uniform. How was she supposed to know that he was a married man? She said she was lucky that her father found out and called her a slut and took her out of school and sold his car and borrowed another car to take her to a boarding school in the north of the country where she would be out of danger and it was too cold and damp to think about men. She said you could see your breath when you went to sleep. And there was nothing to think about only the Virgin Mary and other girls.

This is not word for word. This is more like a reconstruction, the back pages, she called it, made up of some of the things she said about love and sex and happiness, not all of it in Berlin. She loved sex. Especially on Dublin afternoons, she said, with the sound of buses going by and squeaking brakes. She loved the sound of people’s feet walking past the basement window while the word fuck was flying out of her mouth.

Fuck was not a word she used that often.

She said love and sex were a bit like writing a novel, it had everything to do with fabrication. That’s what I think she said. She said the best lover was the best storyteller, something like that. The problem with a lot of books, she said, was the writer trying to tell you what to feel. Writers getting the better of their readers, forcing themselves on their characters. Like one man she was with who told her that she was mistaken and that what happened between them was consensual, only that she was too young at the time to know the difference. She didn’t like being told what to feel.

She had a boyfriend in London once who said she could not make love but she had to sit up in bed with a book afterwards. He hated me reading, she said, the way other people sat up in bed and smoked a cigarette. Which she did also, but with a book. He thought it was the biggest insult to a man. The book. He said she made sex look like doing the dishes and she couldn’t wait to get back to her book, so he took out all the light bulbs. Every one of them, she said, just to make sure she stayed in the room and didn’t escape with the book. But even in the dark I withdrew into my imagination, she said, like my mother did with my father. Even with no light in the room and no book to read I still crept away into a childhood corner of myself alone, rocking myself to sleep.

She said it was a great adventure, her love life. Sometimes she came across moments that were unforgettable, like seeing something from a moving train that you wanted to bring with you only it was already gone by and all you could do was try and write it down. She said it was delicious. Sex was delicious. I know it’s an old word now, but it’s an honest word, she told me, and I have no reason to doubt her. The meaning of delicious may not have changed all that much and sex may not have changed all that much either, it was all discovered in her time.

Delicious, she said.

She lived with a man for a long while who was a great reader and they went to lots of places together in Europe. He used to read aloud to her after breakfast, books that she had never heard of before. Things in books that she would never have noticed without talking about them and pointing them out to each other, like they were still learning to read. She said it was the only secure relationship she ever had and they could have got married but that would have put an end to all the travelling, wouldn’t it? She said she didn’t know what made her so afraid of getting married, only the fear of becoming her own mother. The wedding was called off and people were left holding their wedding gifts.

Because she always had the need to be alone again. She had to be herself. It was her greatest fear, not being herself, being restrained by the people she loved. Afraid of being in love because you might not be free. She could remember standing in the street listening to him telling her not to walk away, please, and all she could think of was keeping one foot on the pavement and the other foot off the pavement, everything swirling in her head, waiting for him to stop talking so she could walk away. Swirling was another word she used a lot and maybe that doesn’t change much, it’s still in the same place as before, like the word please, and the word finished and the word over. She used to sit alone in her room drinking wine like her mother. She would let the phone ring and not answer it, as if there was nobody in her life only the characters in the books she was reading. She thought there was something noble about being alone. She thought your family was where you trained how to be alone. She thought every person you loved would leave and you had to leave every person you loved. She had to be herself and being alone was the purest form of being yourself.