Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

She said New York was a great place to be alone. She got to know a lot of people there and a lot of people knew her. In fact, people more often knew her when she didn’t know them, people nodding to her as if she should remember them from somewhere. And then she would realise how much she needed people more than ever. Being alone was like denying the weather, something you could not avoid being in and out of, like having a mother and father, like having brothers and sisters, like religion, like being brought up in a Catholic school and needing to get away, being a writer.

She said she spent her life searching for men who were like her father. And one time late in her life she met an Irish truck driver who was like a real father. The trucker knew how to make up a story. The trucker with the false teeth, she said.

Love with false teeth.

Love without teeth, she said, so he could suck on my breasts.

I told her it was wrong to put all that into her book about the trucker. I wouldn’t like those kind of details made public, if I had false teeth.

Jesus, I hope his wife didn’t read it, she said.

His wife probably recognized the false teeth, I said.

Don’t laugh about it, she said. That trucker was full of love and travelling. One night he came to me and he was unable to have sex, she said, he wasn’t up to it. Too much on the road. So we just left it and went to sleep. And during the night I woke up to find him stroking my back. We didn’t speak. He was sitting up in bed, gently stroking my back and I imagined him travelling across Europe, she said, off to England, across to France and Germany and down through Austria, all that mileage and all those road signs in different languages, all the faces of people he must have seen and spoken to, picking up his consignment of Italian tiles and bringing them all the way back along the big European roads, back on the ferry to Dublin. He travelled in his sleep, in silence, stroking my back, she said. Then he had to go home to his wife. He left me asleep and awake. He made himself a cup of tea. He didn’t give himself time to drink it. He left the cup on the table. He walked out the door and continued on travelling.

I couldn’t keep him, she said. I kept his letters. Beautiful letters, I kept them all. I brought them with me wherever I went travelling, a bundle of them in my suitcase all over the world. I kept them and read them from time to time, but I couldn’t keep him. I couldn’t keep anyone. The only way I had of keeping anything in my life was in my book.

I told her a bit about my love life. I didn’t tell her when I first had sex, she didn’t ask me. We talked about who I fell in love with when I was around nineteen. Her name is Emily and she is the mother of my daughter, Maeve. We talked about love and travelling and she wanted to know all about my back pages. How I took Emily down to Milltown Malbay in County Clare, when we were escaping from her boyfriend. Emily was living in a basement apartment with him and she invited me down for breakfast, a boiled egg. Her boyfriend was out, and before he came back, Emily asked me to take her away somewhere. Anywhere away. So that’s what I did, I took her to away to Milltown Malbay.

It’s a funny thing, you go somewhere abroad and right away you start talking about home, making connections. It’s mad, isn’t it. You go to Berlin and you end up talking about Clare and Milltown Malbay. She’s sitting in her wheelchair and we talk about how much we both love the west of Ireland, Clare in particular. She has a house there, a small two-roomed cottage where she used to go to work on her books and walk across the Burren with Buddy. When she came back after living in London, she went down to Clare for the first time and she said it was like finding a place on the far side of the world that she had never heard of before, undiscovered.

We talk about the music festival in Milltown Malbay every summer. She remembers the musicians and the listeners on the street because there was never enough room and the pubs were turned inside-out.

I remember a piper sitting on a chair, she told me, brought out on the pavement. Men with their shirt sleeves rolled up to work the fiddle and women with accordions strapped across their chests and the knees going up and down like engines in the machine room of a ship. People bringing out drink and ham sandwiches to keep them going. She said there was always a man or a woman in the audience who got so excited by the speed of the music they would yelp and shout fair play to you, right in the middle of the tune, just to make sure they could be heard listening. And the pub where everybody was suddenly trying to get back in, like it was the only place in the world to be at that moment and there was no way a pub that small could accommodate the amount of people already inside. Where the crowd squeezing in at the door was like the people in London, she said, trying to get on the Underground. Only they were straining to hear a singer who had started up a song unaccompanied, with his eyes closed, holding on to the bar counter to steady himself.

I asked her about that pub, what was the name of it? But she could not remember the name. Was it a pub where women had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom at the back of the house, I wanted to know. And was there was a big bath in there with all these cracks. A huge bath with a million tiny hairline cracks in the enamel. She said she remembered a lot of bathrooms in the living quarters at the back of pubs and they all had cracked sinks and cracked tiles and mirrors that were gone freckled with black spots and plaster flaking off the ceiling and the geyser above the bath where the water came out boiling.

You must have seen the bath, I said to her. The bath with a million hairline cracks in the enamel.

Not that I remember, she said.

It was in that same pub, I said. I’m certain of it.

I was asking her all that because I was there myself at that festival, the year I escaped with Emily, possibly at the same time, listening to a man of that description standing at the bar, steadying himself on the counter. He was belting out this song with his eyes closed. And then who walks into the crowded bar, only Emily’s boyfriend. I don’t know how he could have known we were there, but Emily said she saw him squeezing his way through the crowd. I didn’t actually see him myself, only that Emily looked up suddenly and said, shit. Then she took my hand and dragged me through the crowded bar, out the back, through the kitchen with the smell of rashers and eggs and tealeaves. As we passed through I saw a range and an armchair in the corner with a holy picture on the wall above. Through the house Emily pulled me, into the bathroom where they had the cracked bath. She locked the door and that’s where we stayed and waited. We could hear the man singing in the bar still, it must have been a hundred verses. You could hear a pin drop, as they say, as if there was nobody out there but the singer by himself alone, just the occasional cough or the sound of empty glasses, you know the way a barman puts a finger in each glass and sweeps them up with a clink, three or four glasses in one go, as many fingers as he has available. Emily was sitting on the side of the bath with the million hairline cracks, wearing a green dress and black boots and a light-brown cardigan with the top buttons open. Her hair was long and she had lots of freckles. She was playing with the chain, swinging the grey stopper around while I was standing with my back to the door. We didn’t say a word. I was not smiling or laughing or anything like that, and nor was Emily, only that she lifted her shoulders as if to say, what else can you do?

I don’t remember how we got out of there in the end. All I remember is Emily sitting on the edge of the bath with all the hairline cracks and whispering to me that maybe there was time to have a quick bath together while we were waiting, only that there was no soap except ivy soap and that was for washing the floor, not for washing your body. What a pity we didn’t bring a candle. And what a pity we didn’t bring our drinks with us at least, Emily added.