Every Single Minute (12 page)

My mother began to cry.

My father said he was glad the truth had been told, finally.

My mother cried and said now she knew why my father’s brother, the Jesuit, was no longer coming to our house to visit.

Instead of punishing us, my father came over to embrace me. He held my head sideways against his chest, so I could feel the sharp point of a pencil in his top pocket against my face. He embraced me for a long time and I wanted to escape. The pencil was sticking deeper into my face the more he loved me. I was more afraid of his love than I was of his anger. His love and his anger were nearly the same, no difference, full of things that could not be put right in his family, lots of cruel reasons and lonely times he spent as a boy in West Cork without a father. It made him press my face harder and harder against his chest. He would not let go, possibly for two minutes, maybe three or four. When he finally let go, he turned to my brother and embraced him in the same way, for the same duration, to make sure he loved us both equally, no difference.

We kept our memories separate after that. My brother and me. Just like my father and my father’s brother. We were like counterspies in the same house, sitting at the same breakfast table and passing each other by on the stairs.

Maybe I should be talking to your brother, she says.

I don’t have his memory, Úna.

You did too many drugs, Liam.

No. It’s not that.

I tell her it has nothing to do with drugs or not being able to remember. It’s got to do with who owns that memory, me or my brother. He wanted to keep that story of the mountain. Like he kept the story of my aunt and the Jesuit arm in arm. Please, he was always saying, let me remember the mountain story. So I gave it to him. I decided to let him keep it. I told him it belonged to him and he didn’t have to worry, I was not going to take it back off him or tell anyone it was mine.

As we were coming out of Café Einstein the waitress came running after us. Manfred was helping Úna into the car and she was already sitting down putting her seat belt on when we looked around and saw the waitress standing by on the pavement with the money in her hand.

This is not right, the waitress was saying.

It was embarrassing with all the people passing along street and the waitress calling – Hallo, excuse me, this is not right. There must be some mistake. Even though it was not the mistake you would expect, not what the people watching would have thought when they saw the waitress with the money in one hand and the restaurant bill in the other. It was the opposite. The truth of the matter was that the tip Úna left behind on the table was so enormous, there had to be some kind of mistake.

She smiled at the waitress and told her to keep it. It was no mistake, because she knew what it was like to be a waitress, she knew what the money was like to receive, more than what it was to give.

Put that away now, she said. You keep that for yourself.

She said it like an aunt. Like a mother. Even though the waitress continued saying it was a mistake, she could not accept it, please, take it back, it’s far too much. I remember the waitress closing her fist on the money and holding it up against her chest, in tears, because I think she knew the money was being transferred from a dying person to a living person. She stood on the pavement waving goodbye.

Then she’s asleep.

Your mother is asleep, Manfred says. Will I stop the car?

I ask her would she like to lie down. Would you like to go back to the hotel and lie down for a while? But she doesn’t answer. Her eyes are closed and she doesn’t hear me.

I tell Manfred to keep going.

Where?

Anywhere, just keep driving.

The back of her head is rolling from side to side, lolling, if you prefer. Until the side of her forehead comes to rest against the frame of the car. The bag has slipped from her grasp. I just about catch it before the contents spill out and put it on the seat beside her. I place her hands in her lap, one across the other, palms up. Her mouth is open, she could be dead.

She’s asleep with all the architecture going by. All the streets that she’s missing. Look at all the people passing us by, I want to say to her. All the things I’m seeing for her, with my own eyes, while she’s asleep. Like what? Houses. Shops. Traffic. Overhead trains. A whole city slipping by, street by street. All the graffiti on the walls and the doors and shops and train stations. Graffiti up high where people don’t go. Graffiti on trees. Graffiti on people. Graffiti on the plinth of a horse rider, an oversized nobleman still on his horse with the weeds growing around him. Riding through the city weeds. Riding past the people. And the people riding past him on their bikes, in every direction. Layers of memory over memory over shops over banks over schools over courthouses and galleries and everything that moves.

What else?

If she wasn’t asleep I would tell her to look at the two men embracing outside a train station, kissing each other cheek by cheek five times before they part and one goes down the steps and the other walks away along the street. I want to tell her about the man I see waiting for another man to finish the bottle he’s drinking so he can have it to add to all the other bottles he’s collecting in a blue Ikea bag on his shoulder. I want to tell her I saw a man checking the contents of the street bin with a small flashlight. I saw a woman with two children on her bike, front and back, talking to them both as she’s passing by. Also. An old man with a ponytail sitting outside a café with a red rug over his knees. Also. A man wearing a white apron and a white cap on his head, smoking a cigarette outside a restaurant, with white flour on his hands and face. Also. A father and daughter crossing the street. He’s wearing a leather jacket with
psychobilly
written on it. You’d hardly know they were father and daughter, more like brother and sister maybe. Only that they’re holding hands and she looks like him. I have no idea what they could be talking about, maybe something to do with a dog. That’s what I’m guessing. I think she’s asking him if they can get a dog.

Maybe the people are like the city they live in, I’m thinking, or is it the other way around, the city is like the people that live there. Úna would have something to say about that, I’m sure, but she’s asleep and we’re driving around in circles with her mouth open.

I get talking to Manfred. I ask him general questions. Who else does he normally drive around the city? He speaks over his shoulder and tells me he drives around men in suits mostly. He never likes asking them what they’re up to, unless they tell him. It’s not his business. It’s not his car. He’s only the driver and the fleet belongs to his cousin.

Manfred tells me about an American hip-hop artist he collected from the airport recently. He gives me the name but I’ve never heard of him before. The hip-hop artist apologized for not speaking German, Manfred says, then he kept talking all the way from the airport to the hotel, in English. He had a strong American accent which Manfred could not understand very well, it had such a fast rhythm and it was hard for him to stop the flow. Manfred says he had a red beard and he wore the clothes of his sister. If he had a sister, Manfred says. A light-blue jumper with a diagonal pattern of rabbits and lightning strikes. Blue lightning strikes, he says, across the chest. He was also wearing green shorts and luminous green socks, up to his knees.

I checked him out afterwards on the net, that’s how I remember the green socks and the green shorts.

Manfred tells me that he brought the hip-hop artist to the venue and that he was invited to stay for the performance, so that he could bring him back to his hotel afterwards, very late. The venue was packed, so Manfred is saying. The hip-hop artist had a huge fan base and the place was full of people dancing and crashing into each other. It was very loud, you would have to wear earplugs. Manfred says he’s not accustomed to that volume any more. My ears were whistling for two days, he says. Crazy. I couldn’t hear my own television. There are two drummers in the band, he says, the rest is mostly technology, and there is a large green skull over the stage which keeps lighting on and off to the music. When the lights go off, Manfred says, the green skull is flying high over the crowd. The green skull flickering on and off very rapidly to the beat. The green skull man. Or was it the skull of a green woman? Who knows? He has no body but he has a life, Manfred says, with the music.

Manfred tells me that he’s a family man now. And when you have children, he says, you forget how important all that clubbing scene is. It’s good to know that it’s all still there, he says, within reach, without you, all those things he might or might not have done before, without going into the details. While Manfred is talking I get the feeling that I’ve been in the wrong place up to now. I should have been here in this city from the start. I’ve been missing something. Like music I was not aware of and should have been listening to if I wasn’t already listening to something else. I should be here, where everything is available. Everything is in your grasp, so I thought to myself.

This city doesn’t mind what age you are, Manfred says.

And as we’re stopped briefly at traffic lights again, I’m looking out at some people sitting on a bench. It seems to me that it’s a grandfather and a father and a son. Three generations. You can tell, they look very alike, only different ages, that’s all. Three different stages of the same man, you could say. The father is talking to the grandfather, telling a story, using his hands. The grandfather has some beads in his hand and he’s listening to his son telling the story, while his grandson is playing with a piece of blue twine. The boy begins tying the blue twine around his grandfather’s head. The grandfather hardly notices the twine going around his own head because he’s listening. The father keeps talking, occasionally elbowing the boy, telling him to stop doing that to his grandfather. But the boy ignores him, because his father and his grandfather are so deeply involved in the conversation that they are not really bothered by the thin blue twine going around the grandfather’s chin, around the ears, up over his bald head and back down under the chin again. The father continues telling the story and the grandfather continues listening and the boy continues tying the blue twine around the grandfather’s head. That’s all I saw. We moved on, so I didn’t find out what happened after that.

She wakes up. She makes a barking sound at the back of her throat and looks out the window to see where she is.

Was I asleep with my mouth open?

No, I say.

Liam, you’re such a liar, she says. I hate that, sleeping with my mouth open.

It’s as though she has the ability to remember everything that’s been said while she was asleep. Because she tells me to grow up, my clubbing days are over. Be yourself, she says, there are plenty of other things in the city apart from the night-life. And then I’m thinking that maybe she was not asleep at all, only sitting with her head back like a listening device, picking up everything myself and Manfred were talking about, including the green skull.

And then we have an emergency in the car, her feet were causing trouble, so I remember.

Liam, I can’t feel my feet. My feet don’t belong to me any more. They’re not my feet, Liam. Could that be right? My feet don’t feel like my feet any more, she said.

Is it the medication? Is it her circulation? Would she like to go back to the hotel now? No, she says, keep going, because there’s nothing much to do back in the hotel room and she doesn’t want to sit in the foyer of the Adlon listening to piano music all day, whether it’s a real piano player or just a piano playing of its own accord, doesn’t matter. It’s only her feet, they feel so tight, squeezed into her shoes. The best thing for me to do in that case is to raise her legs up onto the seat, so she’s travelling sideways.

Free the feet, she says.

I loosen the laces and pull her shoes off by the heel. I put the socks into her bag and then she wants her toenails cut.

Look at them, she says. They’re too long. They’re jamming up against the tips of my shoes.

Fair enough.

They’re cutting into my toes, Liam.

We’re going to be late for a lunch meeting, but what does that matter?

This has nothing to do with time-keeping, it has to do with now, here and now. So I ask Manfred if he could do us a favour and stop so we can get a pair of nail clippers. What would be the best place around here, without going too much out of the way? So Manfred tells us not to worry, it’s probably best for him to park somewhere and go out himself to get the nail clippers. She says thanks Manfred, this is very kind of you. Make sure it’s a good pair of nail clippers, she says, proper industrial ones, not those cheap ones that go sideways and slip out of your fingers and don’t even cut the nail only score it with a little mark before it breaks. Manfred knows exactly what she’s talking about.

I understand, he says, big nail clippers for the feet.

Manfred disappears. We’re watching the street corner where he went out of sight, waiting for him to come back with the nail clippers. Another man appears and it takes a moment for us to realize that it’s not Manfred, until he walks right past ignoring us. We go back to waiting for Manfred.

I want to ask her something about Milltown Malbay. The singer she told me about, holding on to the bar counter. During the music festival, with the pub so crawling with people that nobody could move in or out the door. Was he wearing a blue suit jacket? Did he have a black T-shirt underneath?

Yes, she says. I think so.

Did he have the other hand on his hip?

Yes, I think so.

Had he got his eyes closed? Had he got his chest out and his shoulders back? Because that’s the way I remember it, the man singing in the crowded bar in Milltown Malbay, he had his eyes open just once, very briefly, to look at something over the door. Even though there was nothing up there to look at and he was only doing so to remember the words, then he closed his eyes again.