Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  10

  We had the Botanic Garden to ourselves, give or take. We were like any other tourists, really, looking around, taking pictures. Apart from her being in a wheelchair, the people there would have thought nothing unusual, only that she was not up to walking, that’s all. She kept the cap on, so nobody knew what was going on underneath. We were unseen mostly, apart from a few onlookers here and there, more interested in all that stuff coming to life around us. It was warm, you could feel the sun pulling things out of the earth. The air was full of cross-fertilization.

  We brought our own summer with us, she said.

  It was spring, in fact, but she did that sometimes, quoting words from a song or a book. I didn’t always know what she meant, because she was not speaking to me directly but remembering a random line that made sense on its own, without being part of a conversation.

  Unless she was saying that you bring your own weather with you. Could that be right?

  I got the tickets in the small cottage, a gate lodge. She said it reminded her of going to the zoo in Dublin, with the entrance through black turnstiles beside a thatched cottage in the Phoenix Park, only there was no smell of elephants in the air here. We were both given a brochure through the window, what we could expect to find coming back to life again. There was a trail mapped out with the most beautiful places not to be missed.

  They were lovely gardens, I have to say. But the thing is, I might not have seen everything in Berlin with my own eyes, but through her eyes, for the last time. Our conversation was full of last things. I was here with her for the last time. And I would say that ninety percent of what you see is ultimately for other people.

  She called the trees and the shrubs by name, as if she knew them personally. I remember them like you never forget a face, but I can’t tell you what they are unless I read the names on the plaque or someone tells me. The copper beech, she said. As if it was the only copper beech tree ever, the same one she had seen many times elsewhere in Ireland or Europe or North America, and it had come to say goodbye to her at the Botanic Garden.

  There was a wide path that led between a mansion on one side and a lake with water lilies and ducks on the other. It was how you would imagine botanic gardens, maybe that’s why I didn’t notice much, only the conservatories in the distance and a water tower behind it. It made me think of those enormous jigsaw puzzles we used to get of beautiful gardens. People don’t have much time for them any more because they take over too much space and one or two of the thousand pieces always went missing before you got finished, if ever. And my father always thought it was a terrible waste of time. You had to make the most of your life, puzzles and board games were nothing but time-wasting.

  The conservatories were tropical. It was a different country in there. They keep the place at thirty-five degrees all year round. And the humidity, we were walking into a heat wave. They had radiators lined up underneath the glass, and there was steam blowing down from the pipes to give you an impression of where all these plants came from. She said it was like a huge glass cathedral. You could hear running water, like prayers. Not that I’ve been there, she said, but the rainforest reminds me of the interiors of a church. In fact, all those silent plants together under one glass roof made me think of what it must have been like before we were here, on earth, ages back. Some of the flowers you might have seen before in a florist or a petrol station, though I never saw a coffee plant before. It was good to see them where they belonged, in a more natural habitat. More authentic, undisturbed.

  And still there was something missing, I thought, the sounds of birds maybe, a few shrieks here and there, like monkeys up above, in the canopy. I was half expecting to see an iguana or a snake, a pair of eyes at least, staring out through the foliage occasionally. There were a few flightless birds brought in especially from the tropics to keep the insects down. Beneficial species, they call them. Apart from them there were only a few sparrows that managed to get in through the windows, doing no harm. I think people were primarily there for the horticulture and the peace of mind. It’s the absence of noise they were looking for. It occurred to me that this would be a great place to work, testing the soil and checking the temperature, picking off dead leaves, avoiding overcrowding, making sure the plants have everything they need and thinking of them as your own family. You could belong to a place like this, I thought. We saw one or two gardeners walking around in their inner world. There was a couple sitting on a bench meditating, either that or sleeping, it was hard to tell. And a man with a camera on a tripod taking close-up photographs of an orchid. He obviously had permission to do that. All in all it was perfect for a visit, only the environment was not right. It was not long before her breathing started giving trouble.

  I can’t breathe in here, she said. I’ll suffocate.

  She preferred being out in the open with the trees, everything afresh. She asked me to push the wheelchair off the path, right into a meadow of cowslips. That’s what I remember. She said cowslips as if they had disappeared last year in the west of Ireland and now they were coming up out of the ground in Berlin. They were part of her childhood and she must have been confused by her whereabouts. The ground was soft and the tyres sank into the earth and she sat there a while, sinking and thinking. What she said could easily have been said to the cowslips without me being there at all.

  I have a photo of her there to back it up, reaching down to touch the cowslips. Also a short video clip of her taken on my phone, more or less stationary, huddled in her black coat and the see-through bag hanging on the handle of the wheelchair.

  She was going to say something. About her childhood. She said you can’t possibly stop yourself from looking back.

  I agreed with her. You can’t avoid coming across things in your life that are pointing backwards, objects that surface in front of you, while you’re not looking, while you’re trying to delete things that cannot be deleted. Photographs, for example. Little bits of evidence that turn up where they don’t belong in your life any more.

  What are you talking about?

  Just when you’re trying to move forward, that is.

  Rubbish. I’m talking about the truth, she said. Not hiding anything. It takes too much energy to conceal things, Liam. She could no more stop telling her story than she could stop breathing. That’s all I was ever doing, she said, breathing and telling. Unless you want me to be silent like a gardener and keep my mouth shut. As if gardeners don’t breathe. And the idea of her becoming a gardener instead of a writer was never very realistic. She said she once heard about a writer in America who was told by a friend that looking back makes you go crazy. But the writer ignored all that advice and went straight home to look back and write a book about school, just to stop himself going crazy.

  I can no more stay silent than a horse can run backwards, that’s what she said.

  She remembered a man trying to reverse a horse out of an alleyway when she was a girl. The sight of a horse and cart was gone from the streets now and she wondered what was the point in remembering things that were always going to disappear. It was one of the things she collected as a child. Because she was a writer even before she could read, long before she ran down and told the woman in the shop, I can read, I can read. And the woman in the shop said good girl, aren’t you great now? They had to be careful what they said in future because she had turned herself into a collector. Collecting all kinds of useless things, hiding them like favourite stones under her pillow.

  The man collecting the scrap metal had the horse and cart in the alleyway. I was nothing but a girl, she said, standing in the street with one foot on top of the other. I had nothing better to do than watching the man trying to back the horse and the heavy load of metal out. I copied everything down in my head, she said, the wheels, the leather belt tied around the axle for no reason, the hind legs with white ankle socks and the eyelashes like a beauty queen. The man was standing in front of the horse negotiating, she said, but the horse had no wish to go bac
kwards. The horse was afraid time was going to start going backwards from there on and his legs were only designed to go forward, I knew that, she said. The horse kept rearing its head up, trying to look back over its shoulder at something it didn’t want to do. She remembered the fear in the horse’s eyes. The slippery sound of hooves on the cobbles. That was the first thing I ever collected, she said, the day of the horse refusing to go backwards. It took the man ten minutes, maybe an hour, maybe all day in her memory. Again and again he tried to coax the horse. A white string of spit was suspended from its mouth, she said. In the end the metal collector had to put a sack over the horse’s head and move forward and backwards until the horse was confused enough about the direction of time that he finally agreed to come out, a bit like a man coming down a ladder. And that’s how I started asking questions, she said, because everything had to be turned backwards, until it was out in the open. Until the horse was a horse again, trotting off along the street and the cart was tilted to one side under the weight of metal.

  11

  We’re in the field of cowslips and she asks me to take off her shoes. She wants to tell me something that she’s never figured out before. Something that happened between her mother and father.

  Liam, she says. I want to stand up.

  Here?

  Can you take off my shoes?

  You can’t do that, Úna. It’s too cold.

  I need to feel the grass, she says.

  What about pneumonia? What if she gets ill and people ask me why I took her shoes off in the park, in May?

  Your childhood is in the grass, she says.

  I know this is not good, but I’m already undoing the white laces, taking off the shoes and socks and helping her to stand up in her bare feet, because I can’t stop her going through her collection.

  She remembers waking up one night with the sound of knocking, she says. She got up and went downstairs because her mother and father were not in bed. She was only four or five at the most, and she understood nothing of what she was about to see in front of her.

  There was a light on down there, coming in from the kitchen door left open. My mother and father were in the living room, she says. My mother was sitting on my father’s knee, facing him, not sideways but straight ahead, with her legs out. I could see one of her bare knees. She was knocking his head against the wall and I thought she was killing him. I stood at the bottom of the stairs not knowing what to do, she says, because your mother can’t be doing something like that without explanation. She had her hands in his hair and I saw her banging his head against the wall again and again. She was shouting at him at the same time, not words that I knew from before, nothing people would have said in the shop but some terrible language that you could only hate somebody with.

  My mother saw me standing in the doorway, she says, watching her. And the look in her eyes was furious. I was afraid of her. I thought she was going to stop killing my father and kill me instead, she says, for being there, for seeing what was going on, for being a child watching.

  I’m listening to her, holding the red canvas shoes in my hand.

  My mother sighed, she says, and said my father had done a terrible thing. Your father has been very bold, my mother said, he has to be punished. She turned back to face him. Never let me see you do that again, my mother said to him, then she banged his head against the wall again. Very, very bold. Never do that again, ever, ever, ever.

  Her father didn’t look at her, she says. His mouth was open, like he needed water. I clearly remember the moonlight coming in from the kitchen and the crucifix on the wall and my father letting a word out of his mouth that was not a word at all but the sound of great pain.

  I’m only telling you what I saw, Liam.

  She was told to go back up to bed. None of the other children were awake, she says, she was the only one who saw this happening. I was afraid to tell them, she says. I lay in bed trying to work out what my father had done that my mother would hit his head against the wall, and him not arguing back.

  Úna. Please let me put your shoes back on.

  Why didn’t they tell me they were in love?

  Your feet must be freezing.

  What was so wrong with saying the word love? It took me years to realise that they loved each other, once. It was something I worked out backwards, like coming down the ladder. And it wasn’t moonlight either, only the fluorescent light left on in the kitchen.

  Why didn’t they just say?

  She’s looking down at the cowslips.

  Why did they make up that stupid story of punishment? Why didn’t my mother say they were only pretending? Why didn’t she stroke the side of my father’s face and say they were only playing and that she was going to make him some cocoa and we would all go back to sleep? It would not have been such a lie. And maybe it might have prevented what was coming. Because when you’re a child, she says, you believe everything, you take people at their word. You feel responsible for your father and mother, she says. Everything that happens to them is happening to you. When they’re afraid you’re afraid. When they’re happy you’re happy. And when they can’t talk about things, you will not be able to talk about them either.

  Finally she lets me put her shoes on again.

  Her mother’s eyes would not let her in after that, she says. It hurt my mother to look at the world without my father being at home. My mother was blinded, she says, because he was coming home without being there any more. Her eyes were closed even when they were open, she could not see a thing in front of her. My mother could do nothing but read books, she says. I remember her, she says, sitting on the rug spread out in the Phoenix Park, looking for my father in the book she was reading. There was a sign with a finger pointing to the Zoo. The monkeys were calling. Your father is not coming. And your mother is never going to find him in Tolstoy. There was nothing for me to do, she says, but to keep watching the world going by at random. I saw a woman and a man lying on the grass kissing. I saw the steam coming up from the brewery. I saw crows fighting over the crust of a sandwich gone pink with jam. I saw a man tucking his trouser leg into his sock and getting on his bike, whistling, ‘From a Jack to a King’. I recognized the song and it made the day very sad, because my mother was going in the opposite direction to the song, waiting for my father until she fell asleep with the roof of the book over her face. My brother said she was dead and I said she was drunk, so we ran away and left her there alone. We took off our shoes and ran across the grass quietly. I remember everything, she says, because I stood on a beer cap and it was like a shell under my foot, the sharp edges left a star-shaped mark.

  12

  There is a bit of confusion over gates. I have this conversation with Manfred on the phone which is basically me telling him that he’s not at the gate and him telling me that he is at the gate. What gate? Obviously, we’re at the wrong gate. He tells us not to move, he will drive around to our gate and I tell him to stay where he is, there is no point in switching gates. So we revert to the original plan. We’ll come to his gate, where we were supposed to be in the first place. I tell him it might take another while and he tells me there’s no rush, he will be waiting for us, at the main gate.

  She keeps stopping every few metres and I get the impression that she doesn’t want to leave. She wants to stay in these gardens and not move on in time. It’s warm. The sun is out and there is great shelter here, no wind. We come across all kinds of shrubs and trees that she recognizes and others that she doesn’t recognize. She tries to make out the information on the plaque underneath to see where they originated and whether she has been there yet. Now and again she reaches out her hand to feel some of the new leaves. She rubs the leaves between her thumb and forefinger and smells the scent. Then she puts her hand up for me to get the scent as well.

  And while we’re stopping to compare each shrub, we get talking about what it’s like to be a child and what it’s like to be a parent.

  My parents were careless, Liam. They didn�
��t care.

  She’s pulling at the branches of one of the shrubs and then lets go, so the shrub springs upright, shaking itself like an animal.

  I think she’s being too hard on her parents. When you’re a father yourself, you don’t have all that much say, I tell her. You can’t be made responsible for everything down the line that’s out of your hands. All you can do is obey the rules of what a child needs. You love your child regardless, but you still have to live yourself. I’m speaking for the parent here. Because that’s something I know a bit about, being a father.

  I’m at the mercy of the future, that’s what I’m trying to explain to her. She’s at the mercy of the past and I’m at the mercy of the future.

  She raises her hand to let me know that I’m pushing the wheelchair too fast, there’s something she missed. I have to reverse a bit. The bushes look exactly alike to me but she can tell the difference.