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.
36
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.
37
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.
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 t
he 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.
She was in New York at that time. She had her writer’s room in Manhattan and her speaking engagements, so she was unable to come back to look after him, so they said. She received letters from him. She recognized his quiet handwriting. There was no bitterness in the words, even when he was speaking about his father.
Her brother was like a child. He was unable to sort himself out with accommodation, so she got him an apartment in Dublin. She could afford to do that for him with all her success. She was still hoping that he would pick himself up and become independent. But she was hoping for too much. She drew the line at giving him money, because she was afraid of him ending up like their own mother. So then he went to Noleen asking for money. They told me that Noleen leaves the door of her house open while she’s working at the kitchen table writing, all the neighbours say hello to her passing by. It’s the way it was when Noleen grew up and there was no need to change any of that, the door was always left open for somebody coming back.
This was long after Úna and Noleen had broken up, they said. Úna got used to being away, t
ravelling on her own and giving talks right across America in places like Aspen. And Noleen always loved her. Noleen loved her so much that when her brother came asking for money she got out every penny she had in her bank account and gave him the lot.
38
Manfred says you can buy everything you want. You can buy every coat. Every perfume. Every television. You can buy shoes made from the eel, he says. They are no more than a strip of skin. It’s not true that the eel is ugly, he says. It’s not true that the eel will suck a baby’s blood and the eel does not milk the cows. People tell lies about the eel, he says. He read quite recently in one of the papers that KaDeWe are selling eel-skinned shoes and that people pay a lot of money for them, a Russian woman bought three pairs without even trying them on.
Úna says she has no intention of looking at eel-skinned shoes.
Everything you want is there, Manfred says.
And sheets?
Yes. Every sheet.
She loved the warm air of KaDeWe blasting towards you as you went inside, like arriving on holidays. She loved the height of the ceilings. She loved the spotlights shining on the merchandise like a stage lit up, ready for the actors to come out and speak. She loved the display of fountain pens and watches for men. She loved seeing people going up and down the escalators, standing still, crossing over each other.
Every Single Minute Page 14