Every Single Minute (8 page)

I’m still here, Liam, she says.

All I can say is nothing. I mean that, not a word. I’m leaning right across her in silence, trying not to hurt her, in spite of the fact that she’s in such pain and not saying a thing about it, only withholding it. As well as not having a son of her own to embrace, or even her brother.

Manfred is standing at the gate with his hands behind his back. His feet are placed apart. His chest is out. It looks like he’s been standing in that position for some time now, watching us. He doesn’t move. I wave to let him know that we’re on the way, we’re coming, but he remains still, as if he has not seen us yet. He continues looking straight at us, as though he’s going to carry on waiting for us to appear.

The will she made. She made a will that was like a short story with all the characters of her life. It was her way of gathering around the people she was close to and speaking to them personally after she was gone, leaving them a couple of words along with whatever she was intending to give them. From the way she wrote the will, it sounded like she was still very much present, keeping up the conversation. As if she was still telling people what to do with their lives. As if she still wanted to know what was going on and how everybody was doing. What was the news. Who was going to be the next president of America, that kind of thing.

She wanted to die with no money on her hands. She left most of her money to charity with children in mind.

Her last will and testament. You could say it allowed her to carry on living in some way, for a few more pages at least. People don’t disappear and stop talking suddenly when they die, do they? You carry on having the same conversation you were having before, in fact, the relationship you have with someone keeps growing, she said, only that you understand them much better after they’re gone. They become even more of a story that you want to keep telling.

She has forgotten nobody. Everyone is remembered, personally. The words she chose for each individual were non-transferable.

What she said to me in her will was already said alive. Very simple. I’ll never forget you bringing me to Berlin as long as I live. So thank you, Liam. Thank you. Thank you.

What can you say to that? No, it’s me alive who has all the reasons to remember and say thank you. Of course, it’s not possible to answer back. Not verbally anyway. She’s having the last word, and none of us have the right to reply, not until we write our own will.

A list of things, that’s what she said all writing was. Making a list. Your own list. Her final list.

I give and bequeath, it said at the top of the page, with the beneficiaries listed underneath along with the sums of money or property. She wrote the will after she returned to Dublin from Berlin and it was clear from the document that she had given it a lot of thought. She spent time carefully thinking up what she would say to us.

In loving memory of many pints.

For a new teapot after the one I broke.

For all the messages left on my phone which were like a fire to come home to and I’m sorry if I didn’t reply at the time.

For a new pair of gloves. Although. That seemed to be more like a private joke and the person receiving the money for gloves must have had some story which only they would remember.

For looking after Buddy with such great fondness and being so good to him when I was away.

For wit and imagination.

For putting up with my sourness. For not getting angry whenever I just turned my back and picked up the newspaper and ignored everyone else at the dinner table as if I was better off alone.

For the time we got soaked, remember. When we were watching the waves. The anger in them.

For the time I got lost in Wicklow and I couldn’t find the cottage and then I did find it after all.

For knowing everything about Dublin that I could not remember. All the things I would never think of without the company of somebody else to talk to. For reminding me where exactly the door to the ladies used to be in Kehoe’s, before it was all changed. For remembering the crankiest barman in the world. For remembering what was there once in Dublin, all the streets and the corners and the women selling flowers and Bewley’s, when it was still Bewley’s and you could spend all day reading and drinking the same cup of coffee and eating the same cherry bun gone pink, only looking up every now and again to see who was who. What order the shops were in, with the bookshop still on Grafton Street and the only restaurant we could afford on South Anne Street. And the time we went for a big slap-up dinner in a fancy place intending to do a runner without paying, but the meal was far too heavy in my stomach even to walk, so we got up from the table in a great hurry and ran to the door, only for me to change my mind at the last minute, so I ran to the bathroom instead, like I needed to go very badly, and came back and paid the bill after all. For those things I would have forgotten by now. For remembering Dublin when the city was nothing but a few pubs. For remembering the people and the order they stood in at the bar and the type of things they were saying and God knows where they are now?

For keeping the time. For keeping the time we were in.

She looked after all the people who were import-ant to her. She distributed some of her furniture and itemized certain things, remembering particular people who used to visit her and where they normally sat at the table, what cups they drank from. To one person she left her second-best chair, for example, which was obviously another private joke they were having a laugh over during her lifetime and long after.

To various people she left money for pure friendship, for their songs, for inspiration, for being so encouraging and supportive. For allowing me to be myself, she writes, for giving me the lift when I needed it. Her will was full of optimism. She left a lot of praise for people, reminding them that how good they were was far more important than how bad they were. She said they were to remember the good times, the future would take care of itself.

I’ve no idea if people followed her instructions. There was no way of compelling them to keep her furniture or to spend the money in any particular way, legally. And converting the money into cash usually gets rid of any personal significance. Or maybe they converted the money into memory, blowing it on something unspecified like going on the tear and getting rat-arsed and drugged-up on her behalf, if that’s the case. Who knows what the money was spent on in the end? They could even pay the car tax or allow the money to flow into the general household budget and spend it on frozen pizzas in memory of her. Which was all fine, for all I know, as long as they actually felt the money in their pockets for a moment at least.

To a fellow writer she gave the yellow curtains she bought in New York, drifting in the open window.

To another writer friend she left a sum of money for all the walks not yet walked without a map.

For Noleen she left money to keep on travelling.

I was thinking about her shoes, the shoes she had on in Berlin. The red canvas shoes. I’ll remember them as long as I live. I wonder where they went to. Because the shoes keep you. They keep you always. After you’ve stepped out of them. Is this making any sense? Your presence remains in the shoes after you take them off and you park them under the bed at night. You might as well still be in them, even when you’re not. They look like they’ll start walking by themselves.

Maybe the shoes were given away along with her clothes, everything dispersed, distributed, whatever word you can use for personal things that cannot be put in a will or passed on to anyone else. I wonder did her shoes end up in a charity shop somewhere, in with all the other people’s stuff, in with the second-hand smell left behind in their clothes and their shoes? In with all those things that people wore and had regard for once. One of those places where people root around in other people’s belongings, to see if there is anything of value. Where you find things like a doll’s house, or a game of Monopoly still intact, things like wall lamps that are perfectly good only missing the second one to make up a matching pair. Things that creep up on you like St Patrick’s Day medals that you would not have seen since you were in school, or a hurling stick with grass stains which somebody has signed, or those luminous statues of St Christopher that people used to stick onto the dashboard of their car. My own father had one because he was obsessed with safety. Teapots with animal faces, and Toby jugs, and a mug with Lady Di and Prince Charles when they were young and getting married with the handle missing. A milk bottle for the World Cup. People not paying much attention to anyone else, only occasionally looking about to see what other people had found. As if you don’t know what you want until somebody else wants it. People going through a trolley full of old DVDs while somebody else is plugging in a perfectly good hairdryer to see if it’s still working and not just blowing out cool air instead of hot.

And all the shoes, racks of shoes that people wore all over the country, who knows where they’ve all been. Shoes that carried people across the world, on trains, around airports and shopping centres and cinemas, shoes that tell the story of their journeys. Shoes that people gave away for no good reason and that had nothing wrong with them, completely new-looking, maybe only briefly lived in, maybe the wrong size, ill-fitting. Runners, loafers, deck shoes, boots with fur around the rim, shoes with heels you cannot imagine anyone wearing, lots of ordinary shoes and lives you cannot imagine anyone living.

I remember once she told me about driving down the country and going into a house where an artist had glued shoes up against the wall. She wrote about that in one of her books. How she came across this exhibit that an artist had made with shoes. I wish I had seen it myself. All along the wall, right up to the ceiling. And maybe that’s what I’m thinking, that maybe her shoes ended up in some kind of montage, that they might have been kept by someone, those red canvas shoes.

They were frayed a bit and slightly faded, with the shape of her feet indented, the toes, the heel gone shiny and worn down from contact with the street. And yes, one broken white lace. That’s how I remember them.

She was helping me to look back and deal with my memory. There was this thing I told her about which was going on in my family. I’m still not sure exactly what it was, because nobody talked about it very much. That’s what happens to people who don’t talk, she said, they behave the same as their own fathers and mothers and father’s brothers, in my case. I tried my best not to be like my father and I ended up being more like my father’s brother. The Jesuit. He never said very much. He spoke only when absolutely necessary.

Everybody loved the Jesuit in the family. I had an aunt on my father’s side who left all she had to the Jesuits and the donkey sanctuary. Not that anyone should ever be expecting prize money from relatives when they die, or pegging their memory of a person to the sum received. Which is far from the truth in this case, because my aunt was very kind to us. We loved her. Me and my brother will never forget the time she took us down to Cork to see the donkey sanctuary for ourselves. I know it meant a lot to her. Also the Jesuits meant a lot to her.

It was not long after my aunt lost her husband, so she was still in mourning and didn’t want to travel all that distance alone. She took us with her for the company. We will never forget that journey to Cork because my aunt was in tears sometimes while she was driving, telling us about everything, the Rock of Cashel coming into view around the bend. We never imagined that anything as old as the Rock of Cashel could still exist in our time. I think it made my aunt feel better to be travelling. And then the car stalled on the steepest hill in Ireland, in Cork City. I can still remember the sound of the engine straining and her laughing, a frightened laugh that frightened us, thinking she had forgotten the handbrake and we were going to roll all the way back to where we came from. Until she stopped at an angle in the middle of the street and we got out. She said she knew somebody in Cork who could point the car forward again, back down the hill. She brought us for fish and chips which was something we never had the taste of before because my father was against food that was not cooked at home. Fish and chips was something foreign to our family and we never even spoke about it or wanted it. Fish and chips was for other people, not us. So having fish and chips in Cork was something I could never forget. It was the greatest kindness. Like something left to me in a will, something I can keep, something I can’t spend.

My aunt had the best smile that I ever saw, mostly with her eyes. She was very generous. She put us up in a hotel in Cork. I think it was the first time we ever stayed in a hotel. She had her room and we had our room, though I had to sleep with my brother in the same bed and we tried our best to stay separate, as far away from each other as possible. We said good night to my aunt, but then we got up again. We got dressed and went downstairs, I don’t really know why. I think we just wanted to be awake. We thought it was a waste to sleep in Cork. We didn’t talk, but I knew what my brother was thinking and he knew what I was thinking. We agreed without agreeing, saying only the least words necessary. We left the room and went down the stairs to explore, I suppose, that’s what we called it without saying the word.

We walked through the reception, out the door. I think we wanted to see the street in darkness, the front porch of the hotel with the lights on, one missing. We wanted to see people, anybody out there smoking, the smell of cigarettes in the open. The air in the street at night. Our own breath like smoke. And cars going by. Guessing by the headlights and the sound of the engine what model it could be, particularly motorbikes, what CC they were and what the maximum speed was on the speed dial.

And as we were standing there, we saw a man and a woman coming out of the hotel together holding hands. It took a few seconds to realise that we knew them. There was my aunt, walking towards us. I thought she must be coming to tell us to go to bed, we had no permission to be out there on the street. The man she was with was wearing a light-grey suit, so we didn’t recognize him at first. It was my father’s brother, the Jesuit. Even though he was not dressed as a Jesuit, we knew it was my father’s brother because we recognized his face and his voice. He had only recently been at the funeral of my uncle, my aunt’s husband, a few weeks before that, saying Mass for him.