Every Single Minute (11 page)

She says she loved her brother so much she was afraid of him. He was our Don Carlos, she says, killed by his own father, sending him off to London with no love in him.

He was the baby in the family, she says. Curly hair and big open eyes, like his father. I was already in secondary school when he was born, she says, so I remember him sitting on my knee and I knew what it was like to be his mother. I put his shoes on and taught him how to tie his laces. I put stories into his head and heard them coming back through his imagination, everything repeated. I remember him sleepy after waking up, trying to make him laugh. You could never be angry with him. He followed me around the house, watching everything I was doing, asking me why was I drawing over my eyebrows with a pencil and where was I going and what was in the book I was reading. Not letting me out of his sight. He was there every morning, waiting for me to get up because his mother was still passed out from drinking the night before.

He was a child unable to grow up. He was like his father, good at being out in pubs with people around him. Like his mother, good at holding the drink and not opening his eyes. I could see him already ending up like his mother and father and maybe that’s what made me so afraid of him, his weakness.

My brother, my weakness, she says.

He stayed a few nights with me in London, she says, he slept on the floor. She went to work and he was there when she came home, waiting for her. He had that look in his eyes that says will you tell me what to do, will you show me where to go. He hardly had the confidence to fill in a form or make a phone call. He missed appointments and left things behind, lost money out of his pocket, she says. He thought everybody in London was like a big family. He expected the world to be his friend, just as he wanted his mother to be his mother, just as he wanted his father to be his father and not send him away over to London where he was on his own.

She says she was only finding her feet at the time. Do you understand me, Liam? I didn’t even know how to be my own friend. I gave my brother money but he had no idea how to hold on to it and came back looking for more. I told him he couldn’t be expecting me to be his mother and father for him, she says, he just had to get used to being on his own like everyone else.

Liam, she says, he looked into my eyes but I couldn’t let him in.

She says she remembered his birthday. Even if I got it wrong by a few days, she says, or a week. If there was ever a time I missed his birthday it was because he went missing and I couldn’t find him. I swear to God, Liam, I always remembered his birthday, like a big sister.

She picks up the napkin and holds it in her hand. She folds it up and then unfolds it again, not lifting it up to her eyes.

Her hands are swollen. She begins to search around in her bag and finds some hand cream that I didn’t know she had, maybe it was hidden by other things. She takes the lid off the tub and puts some of the cream on her hands. The smell of hand cream is like custard, vanilla sauce.

She wants to know more about my childhood but I have nothing much to tell her. All I remember is being out fishing and my father pulling on the oars and the water dripping from the oars. I remember honey dripping from the spoon at the breakfast table and my father twisting the spoon around quickly to stop the honey running. I remember the water hammering in the pipes at night and the mice running along the floor.

You must remember more than that, she says.

I tell her I’ve forgotten everything and my brother’s memory is far better than mine. I always wanted to put things behind me as fast as possible and I left it up to him to remember. He keeps everything in his head so I can forget. Dates, times, places, all the details of what happened. His memory is the same as mine, no difference, only that he knows where to find it.

That’s absurd, she says.

She doesn’t believe it’s possible for me to have so few personal memories. I must be suppressing things. I tell her my memory is unreliable. That’s not the word that I wanted to use, unreliable, not to be trusted. Resistant, recalcitrant, some word like that.

I’m only suppressing things I can’t remember.

She closes up the tub of hand cream and puts it back into her bag. Then she leans forward to let me know something. She says she once read about a writer who said you were always crawling towards the truth. Which is true, she says. She came from a time that was only crawling towards the truth and she couldn’t wait that long, she had to speak out. It’s all in my books, she says. I didn’t make it look beautiful. I didn’t make it look worse, or better. It was the honesty I was after, nothing else.

The rhythm of honesty, she calls it.

She’s afraid I have no rhythm.

She says I need to bring everything out into the open. I can’t be like an empty field any more with nothing built on it, it’s impossible to be alive without remembering.

Tell me about your father, she says.

So then I try to get into the rhythm, in Café Einstein. She’s a good listener and she gives me time to explain.

We were far too honest, I tell her. That was our problem, too much honesty. My father was a schoolteacher, I explain to her, so he had a good method for finding out what was going on inside your head. He cross-examined me and my brother separately, so we could never agree on a story together. The details were always a bit off. I was the reflection of my older brother, but we sometimes remembered things differently. We were easily confused, always caught out.

My father was trying to find out the truth, I tell her.

About what?

The Jesuit. My uncle, the Jesuit.

It was the silence, I explain to her. My father’s brother made our family very silent. We thought it was good to be silent. We were all trying to be as silent as a Jesuit and get away with saying nothing, so nobody could guess what was inside our heads. We used to go out to the field and play hurling, just the two of us, my brother and me, whacking the ball to each other, back and forth. I still remember the sound of the wood against the leather ball. I remember him catching the ball, taking it out of the air with his hand like you would pick an apple. A stinging apple. Then he would swing his body around and send the ball back. That’s all we did for hours, like a conversation with only one word. We were so honest, myself and my brother, we only said the most necessary things to each other. I think we were being exactly like my father and his brother, as silent as possible. They had nothing to say to each other apart from talking about world events, history, the economy. Me and my brother had nothing to say to each other either, nothing that ever connected up into a conversation. Only the essential practicalities, that’s all. And facts. A few bits of general information that we were trying to get right for my father, facts like highest mountains, largest lakes, longest roads, things you learn in school basically.

We went up a mountain together once without saying much for a whole day. We were afraid to talk about seeing my father’s brother coming out of the hotel in Cork with my aunt. We didn’t even want to admit that we were in Cork at the same time. We didn’t want to tell each other that my aunt and my father’s brother were cousins. The less we knew the less could be extracted under pressure. Anything you say to yourself you end up saying out loud in the end, I knew that, so we pretended we didn’t carry any of that information with us.

The sound at Café Einstein keeps renewing itself. Cups and plates and pots of coffee clicking as they are being set out on the tables. She’s listening to everything I’m saying. Then she finds some lip balm that I didn’t know she had in her bag either. Where did all these things come from? Her lips are very dry. She’s dehydrated, even though she’s been drinking lots of water.

We were on a fishing holiday, I explain to her. Staying in a hotel right next to a lake. The lake was called Lough Conn. And out through the windows of the hotel we could see a mountain called Nephin.

The mountain was asking to be climbed. Every morning it was there at breakfast like a challenge. So one day my father allowed us to climb the mountain, me and my brother, we were only about thirteen and fourteen at the time. We had sandwiches and soft drinks in a rucksack each, identical. We set off from the hotel with the lake behind us and the mountain rising up ahead. The cattle were chewing. There were rushes in the fields, like eyebrows. Fuchsia hedges along the side of the road with a line of bright red dust underneath. I can clearly remember a tractor passing by, followed by a dog, followed by the smell of diesel. The man on the tractor raised his hand without looking back. And the mountain came back into view every now and then, a big surprise around the next bend, closer and larger than before.

All these things I remember, but we never spoke about them, we didn’t trust each other.

It was like a silent country we were walking through. We cut in off the road where the fields came to an end and the bog took over. The bog was covered in heather, like a complicated softness under my feet. I felt the breeze in my armpits. The fields were shrinking behind us and there was nobody around, no other witnesses. About halfway up the mountain, we sat down and had our sandwiches. The lake looked more stretched out, more like a piece of blue tiling, reflected. We lay back for a while staring at the clouds moving across the sky above us. Every time the sun went in it was like the end of the day and every time the sun came out again was like a new day beginning. Sometimes it looked like the clouds had come to a standstill and we were forced to believe that the mountain was carrying us away.

And then my brother spoke to me. He talked about the Jesuit and said it was better for us to agree on a plan. So we made an official agreement to remain silent. We agreed to be as silent as my father and my father’s brother and not speak a word about having chips or staying in the hotel in Cork and seeing my father’s brother with my aunt, two cousins holding hands.

I remember getting up and telling my brother we better carry on before it started raining. He told me to go ahead, he would catch up. So I kept going and left my brother behind me. Every once in a while I looked back down and he was still there, lying on his back looking at the clouds taking him further and further away. I remember the strong wind and the rocks where the heather stopped growing and the small cairn at the summit. The view was gone, the rain came down, I was inside a cloud.

My brother disappeared. When I got back down again I looked for him. I called him. Maybe I came down in a different place, so I thought at the time, where he was not to be found. So I had to carry on back to the hotel on my own, without my brother. I was worried what my father might ask him to say, so I hurried along the same road back to the lake to try and catch up with him, past the cattle bunched together in the corner of a field, past the same rushes dripping and the sound of water left running. I kept thinking of my brother walking only yards ahead of me, but I was mistaken.

I was the first to get to the hotel and it was my brother who was still missing. My father questioned me, but I only gave him the most necessary information, that myself and my brother split up, that’s all. I told him that I went up to the top of the mountain and then it started raining, we lost each other. My father said it was very irresponsible to split up like that and my mother told him to wait until my brother came back before he said any more.

We were all staring around the room waiting. There were photographs of the lake and the mountain everywhere, to remind you of the real lake and the real mountain outside. And fishing. No matter where you went, in the corridors, the bedrooms, you couldn’t get away from men holding up a salmon or a lake trout, hanging their catch on the weighing scales. Men in boats, men in oilskins, men smiling and raising a glass of whiskey afterwards. Famous men who had come to the hotel, lucky enough to catch a fish while they were there. And flies for sale at the reception. Thousands of beautiful flies in colours that you could never believe, nothing you could ever imagine seeing in real life. They had workshops for people learning how to tie mayflies with bits of chicken feathers and deer hair and I knew I would be very good at that kind of thing if I let myself. The biggest pike ever caught on the lake was in a glass case over the bar, with his mouth open, serrated teeth. And beside him, the coloured fly on a hook that he had been caught by.

It was getting late and my mother was even more worried standing up than she was sitting down. She wanted to call the rescue services because it was nearly dark. And then my brother walked in the door.

He has decided to come back, my father said.

My mother ran to embrace my brother and the front of her dress got soaked. My father was even more angry at seeing him back safe again, so after my mother changed my brother’s clothes and dried his hair with a towel and sang a song to calm him down, my father asked him for a full explanation. My brother told him that he followed me up to the top of the mountain and I was gone. My mother tried to intervene, but my father told her to keep out of it, she had not been on the mountain, so she had nothing to say. My brother said it started raining and I said it started raining and my father said he couldn’t believe either of us.

And what happened then?

My brother gave in. I think he was trying to save me from getting punished. He told my father about my aunt giving us fish and chips in Cork. How the car was left on a hill and somebody who knew how to drive had to come and point it in the right direction again. My brother explained how we stayed in a hotel for the night and we were not tired, so we got dressed and went downstairs to explore without permission. We didn’t do anything, my brother said. We were only there by accident when my aunt came out of the hotel with my father’s brother. We were standing at the railings minding our own business, he said. He told my father everything, the smile my aunt had in her eyes, full of sadness and happiness. How she went arm in arm with my father’s brother, and he was wearing a light-grey suit, like an ordinary man, not a Jesuit.