Every Single Minute (16 page)

That’s a serious accusation. Murder. I know people use the word all the time in a light-hearted way. But still and all, I said, calling your own father a murderer.

She looked astonished. She could not believe I would turn on her like this, in the Pergamon Museum of all places.

Listen, Liam. My father killed my brother when he sent him to London with no love in him.

Premeditated.

Liam. My brother had a hole in his chest where love went right through him. He had no protection, Liam, no defence. He had no way of forming a normal relationship with the world. You see him in a photograph before he went away and he looks great, very handsome, like he had everything going for him. Then you see him in another photograph some years later and he’s a wreck, like he’s lived a hundred lives. He never learned how to respect himself or find anyone else to respect him. Something destroyed him early on, in his childhood. I’m not going into all this here, Liam, but his father might as well have taken his life at birth because he sent him off with nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I swear to God, Liam.

I would hate my daughter calling me a murderer.

Don’t compare yourself to my father, she said.

I’m only saying, Úna. Your father was human, not somebody in an opera.

What?

Well, that was it. I thought she was trying to stand up out of the wheelchair and walk away. She shouted my name across the room so that everyone in that part of the museum suddenly turned to look at us.

Liam, she shouted. You have no right to question me. My father took my brother from me. I’m not going to forgive him for that, as long as I live.

The visitors at the museum were beginning to pay more attention to us than to the ancient artefacts. They were probably wondering what I had done to her. She was helpless, sitting in a wheelchair with her head bare from radiation, unable to escape from my questions.

My brother was too afraid, she said, too alone, too damaged to live a normal life. What do you call that, Liam? That’s murder. My mother and father took everything that belonged to us. They gave us our lives and they stole them back again. My father not only stole my brother, she said, he stole my children from me too. The children I could never have, Liam, because I was afraid they might end up like my brother. I was afraid of what I saw in his eyes. I was afraid of what my brother had seen happening when he was a child, what he could never talk about.

She was holding on to her anger.

Yes, she said. I am holding on to my anger. Because that’s all I have left. My family, my anger, my grudge. My family rage, whatever you want to call it, Liam. What you get from your father and mother. From your country. What you spend the rest of your life trying to escape from. Things that follow you. It’s what made me want to get even with the world, in my own words. It’s the artistic rage, Liam. Every writer has that rage, she said, otherwise they wouldn’t be writers, they’d be too special, too much apart from the rest of us. Without that rage they’d be too obsessed with genius, they’d sound just like priests, or cardinals, making a holy cult of themselves. They wouldn’t be good writers, they wouldn’t be human enough without their own little line of anger and guilt and grudge and envy and failure and desperately wanting to be loved more than anyone else in the world.

Don’t take that away from me, Liam.

I had to let it go. It felt too much like the final judgement, interrogating her about her father in a place like this. I turned the wheelchair around and pushed her towards the exit. It looked as though she was being removed like a noisy child.

I forgive nobody, she said.

It’s all right, Úna.

I wish them all the fires and ice of hell.

Calm down.

Beckett was right, she said. If only I had thought up those words myself. I wish them all an atrocious life. I wish them lots of delays, cancellations, no refunds. I hope there’s always somebody ahead of them in the queue. And in the life hereafter, she said, they can have an honoured name as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t start going like Beckett, I said.

Look what they did to him, she said. They named a bridge after him.

The Beckett Bridge.

It’s unforgivable.

That’s a beautiful bridge, I said.

It’s an atrocity, she said. A bridge over the river Liffey. He would freak out if he heard that. I’m serious, if he was still alive today, the poor man, he would put an end to it, right now, he would go no further. Not for another second. They waited until he was dead so he could not object to it himself, in person.

It’s like a musical instrument, I said.

Exactly, she said. A bridge in the shape of a harp. For Samuel Beckett, of all people. Think about it, Liam. A fucking bridge over the Liffey in the shape of an Irish harp.

Calm down, you’re in Berlin.

I got her as far as the souvenirs and told her to keep her voice down. I told her I’d make sure there would be no bridges named after her.

She was laughing again.

What would you say to a roundabout? I asked her.

I swear to God, Liam.

I leaned down behind her and whispered in her ear. There might be one or two roundabouts in Limerick still unnamed, I told her. Every time people come to the roundabout they’ll think of you, I said, wouldn’t that be nice? Then she half-turned around in the wheelchair and said she would come back and kill me. She would kill the whole lot of us.

I’ve got her a small brochure about the history of the Pergamon Altar. I’ve bought her a drink of apple juice mixed with fizzy water, a cloudy drink. I ask her would she like a cake and she wants a scone. Do they not have any fruit scones and jam, raspberry jam? Blackberry jam, I don’t suppose they have that, she says. They have no scones in the café at the Pergamon Museum, so I get her one of those almond cakes, like a horseshoe with both ends dipped in chocolate. She loves those. She’s eaten hers very quickly so I give her one of the remaining chocolate ends off my horseshoe as well. She drinks the apple juice and takes some more pills and I ask her is everything all right now?

I’m fine, she says.

She starts taking things out from her see-through bag. She places them on the table one by one, her medication, her reading glasses, the room key, the nail clippers, the mobile phone, switched off. All the contents out on the table for everyone to see. As if she was at home. She looks at each item individually. She examines the tub of hand cream as though she’s never seen it before, reading the label, holding it away from her to look at the design on the lid, seeing what’s underneath, reading the label a second time, opening it up to smell it and closing the lid again. Then she picks a spot on the table for it. She looks into her bag once more, outside and inside. She takes out more and more things, I don’t know what for, does she want to make sure she’s got everything?

Liam, she says. We better not forget the sheets.

No problem, I’ll remind Manfred.

She has an overview. She’s playing dominoes with her things, shifting them around on the table to make the display more logical, creams together, hotel belongings together, reading materials with reading materials. She looks at everything in front of her on the table, all in order.

I’m only putting this together now.

She’s thinking back, wondering what more she could have done for her brother. She talks about him coming to see her on her birthday once. He was living up in the north of London at that stage, Wood Green, I think she said it was. She’s talking about how she hardly ever got to see him. And one day she found him standing in the reception, where she was working. He was talking to the porter at the door. Her brother was the image of his father, she says, chatting to the nearest person available to see what story they had. He had come to bring me out for a drink on my birthday, she says. Even though he didn’t really have the money to stand a drink. And I had already arranged to go out with friends, colleagues from work. So I was caught between the two. He was standing there with a big smile on his face and I had to introduce him to everyone, she says, what else could I do? I brought him with me to the pub and they all loved him. They were buying him drink and he was really happy, telling stories.

For a moment, she says, I thought it was great having a brother, like some kind of credentials, so people knew I came from a normal family where everyone drank and sang songs around the table. But I knew where this was headed, she says. I could see the thin façade I had going for myself in London was steadily being dismantled. There was no telling what he would say. I was about to be found out. Having my brother around was like wearing my heart on my sleeve, she says.

At one point, she got her brother up to the bar so he could help carry a round of drinks back to the table. It was the only way she could talk to him privately.

Don’t start getting any ideas, she said to him, you’re not here for the night.

He kept getting more and more drunk, she says, just like his own mother. It was the only thing he ever learned at home, how to look forward to the next drink, how to go all the way and get properly out of the head. I didn’t know what to do with him, she says. You know the way it is, you can dismiss your own brother and think of him as a failure, until you’re in company and you feel you have to be nice to him, in front of people. You see other people taking him seriously. You see what they see in him, the pity they have for him. It was the disaster in my brother that reminded me of the potential disaster in myself, she says. I was afraid they could see that whole family disaster coming out bit by bit the more drunk he got.

So I got him out of there, she says. When the next opportunity arose, she says, I took him by the arm like we were the best family in the world. I made excuses, she says. I told them we had to go because we were expecting a call from home. Which was a big lie. There was nothing I wanted more than to keep drinking with my brother and my friends, if they even were friends, but I had to stop him before he got totally paralysed and let me down. I didn’t want him to see me being myself either. So I sent him off in a taxi, God forgive me, she says, all the way up to Wood Green, it cost me a fortune. Imagine that, Liam, I packed my brother off in a taxi to whatever Godforsaken place he was living and I went back to the even sadder, Godforsaken place where I was living, just to be on my own, on my birthday.

I didn’t know how to help him, she says. I didn’t think it was up to me. I was his big sister but I had no idea. I should have given him things to do. Some kind of task to carry out. Something to get him started. Something he could be proud of.

Then she turns to me and wants to know would I do her a favour. After she’s gone, that is, would I go somewhere she’s never been before.

Where?

If I had children, she says, that’s what I would do. I would give them tasks to carry out. I would send them all over the world, places I could never get to. Go to Tibet, that sort of thing. Go to one of their temples. Bring me back something, I would say to them, she says. Come back with a stick or a small piece of cloth. Dried fruit. Anything at all.

Will you do me a favour, Liam? After me. Will you go to Kraków? I always wanted to go to Kraków. Please, Liam, will you do that for me?

I told her what it was like being a father. I told her that once you become a parent yourself you keep wondering if there’s something you have deprived your child of and you hope it’s not love.

I told her about my daughter, when she was only four years of age. She went ahead of me one day, at top speed, on her scooter. She went down the hill, waving at the rabbits in the window of the pet shop, all the way down past the church. No sense of danger. I was shouting after her to stop but she kept going. She was miles ahead and I was sure she would end up going straight on to the main road. I ran after her. I legged it as fast as I could, with all these Italian students across the road laughing at me. And at the bottom of the road she disappeared around the corner and fell off. I picked her up and held her in my arms and I felt so lucky that she was all right, unharmed.

What are you saying, Liam?

I couldn’t stop my daughter growing up and asking questions, I said. Maeve. She must have overheard. Because she was upstairs when I was asking Emily all these questions I should never have asked. It was my last chance not to ask questions. But that’s the truth for you, it’s like a hair in your mouth. Emily was standing in the kitchen saying she was not going to answer any questions, why should she? It was not a question she was able to answer. And I kept saying I didn’t believe her. My question was following her around the house, out on to the patio while she suddenly had to look after some potted plants in semi-darkness, back into the house the question was still following her into the bathroom while she was going to the loo and she asked me to let her close the door at least, through the hallway while she was putting on her coat, searching for something in her bag as though the answer was there all along. And Maeve was standing at the window upstairs watching while Emily was walking out the front door not knowing where to go from there, stopping to look right and left on the pavement, and me still asking her to come back and answer the question.

What question?

Like, am I the real father?

Is there some doubt?

It finally came out because of the wedding, I explain. Everything is up in the air because the wedding is not happening, it’s been cancelled. All these second thoughts that Maeve is having. She feels it’s better not to commit to anything, as if she’s only going to be repeating all the mistakes that went before her, as if there’s something keeping her from starting her life.

It was me who gave her that doubt, I point out. All these second thoughts she picked up from me in the first place. Doubts I should have been keeping to myself and which were suddenly out in the open.

One evening she came out to see me on her own. Just Maeve and myself, the two of us alone in the house. I had everything ready, laid out on the table. She came in and kissed me. Then she passed me by and dropped her bag in the middle of the hallway, by the stairs. She threw her coat on the sofa and looked around as usual and said, Jesus, look at the place, Dad. You’re so fucking tidy, it’s unbelievable. Because she was always accusing me of tidying around people, saying there was nothing I enjoyed more in life than clearing up, coming to the end of a packet, or a carton, a bottle of shampoo, getting the dishwasher stacked properly. She said I behaved as if I wanted to be invisible, as if I didn’t want to leave any evidence behind. As if real people were too real for me and I could not bear them leaving their belongings around the place. At least give me a chance to make a mess, Dad, before you start picking things up. She said you had to leave some trace of yourself behind or else you don’t exist. So I left her bag where it was in the hallway and her coat on the sofa, with one arm reaching down towards the floor. I was glad to see them there, where they were dropped.