Read Every Single Minute Online
Authors: Hugo Hamilton
Every Single Minute
Every Single Minute
For Mary Rose
Where can I find another brother, ever?
Sophocles/Seamus Heaney
Table of Contents
She’s wearing those red canvas shoes. They’re in all the photographs. They’re there at the airport, while she’s being helped down the steps. They’re there in the Botanic Garden. At the Pergamon Museum. Also outside the opera house. They made her feel light on her feet. You know them, those flat canvas shoes with the white rubber soles and white rubber toe-caps and rough white stitching. Sneakers, people sometimes call them. Converse, if you prefer, with two rows of steel eyelets punched into the canvas for the laces, white laces. And two extra eyelets on each side for no other reason than to make them look more sporty, I suppose, more industrial maybe.
They’re there at the hotel, beside her bed. She’s sitting in her chair, ready to go out. She’s got white socks on, from some long-haul flight, I think, and I’m helping her on with the shoes, the red canvas shoes. I get the laces done up and help her onto her feet. I’ve double-parked the wheelchair next to her chair so I can swing her around, holding her by the elbows and letting her down slowly. I can hear her breathing.
Will she be warm enough? By right she should have some kind of scarf to put on because her neck is quite exposed. She says she’ll be fine, she can always hold the collar of her coat up.
She wanted to be brought to Berlin. I was bringing her. She loved travelling and it was her last wish to go somewhere away. Anywhere, she said. Anywhere away. So why not Berlin, I suggested, and she said yes, why not? Berlin was one of those places she had always been putting off and now she was afraid she might never see the city in her own lifetime. I love the way they do potatoes in Germany, she said. I want to see the Pergamon Museum. I want to see the Botanic Garden. I want to see the church that’s been left in ruins since the war.
This is different, she said to me a couple of times on the flight coming over from Dublin. She was actually crying in that photograph, taken by the flight attendant. She was crying and smiling at the same time, saying this is different, Liam. This is different.
I think she might have been afraid of what the photograph was doing to her. It was keeping her. It was keeping her and it was leaving her behind.
She kept saying it was different because there was a bit of travelling left in her and going to Berlin was giving her something to live for. It was like extra time, if you can call it that. There’s nothing wrong with me only I’m dying, she said. I suppose she was trying to laugh it off sometimes, doing her best to ignore the reality, you can understand that. She had all this energy, she wanted to see everything. All the galleries. All the museums, all the gardens, all the places unvisited before, the history, the whole place changing after the Berlin Wall, the way the city looks here and now, alive and breathing and remembering, everything we can humanly fit in, she said. She had a list made out, written on hotel paper, the itinerary, if you like.
I won’t forget this, she said to me.
She said she loved every single minute. She said she would remember this journey as long as she lived. I know that doesn’t make sense under the circumstances, but you know what she was getting at. What people say is not always word for word. She said a lot of hopeful things about the world and the future, because it’s hard to get out of the habit of looking forward and being optimistic. It’s hard to stop saying as long as you live, even though you can never tell how long that’s going to be for.
She only had a bit over a week after that.
She asked me to book tickets for the opera. She wanted to go to the Berlin State Opera, it’s not far from the Adlon where we were staying.
Don Carlo
was running at the time.
Verdi, she said. We have to go. The last time I saw
Don Carlo
was at the
Met, in New York.
Unfortunately the performance was sold out. I called the reception at the hotel to see if there was any chance of them getting tickets for us. They were extremely helpful. They did say it was a bit late in the day, but they assured me they would do their very best and if there was a spare ticket to be found anywhere in Berlin it was hers.
I told her it was looking good.
Thanks, Liam, she said.
And then she pulls off the wig that she’s wearing. A full head of hair, with light brown curls, not unlike her own. She pulls it off with both hands like a child and throws it across the room as if she never found anything she hated as much. In fact, the first time she put the wig on she had to laugh. As if she was only pretending to be grown up, wearing something belonging to the adults, don’t I look very funny in this? You wouldn’t recognize her in those photographs if you didn’t know her. She looks so unlike herself without the curly hair, so uncovered. Her face is a bit puffed up with medication, swollen around the eyes. I think the real reason for the wig was so as not to frighten people, because she could see the shock in their eyes when they saw her head bare, how quickly this can happen to anyone.
I’m not wearing that thing, she says.
I don’t blame you.
I want to be myself, she says.
The wig is left lying on the floor like an animal that’s been run over on the motorway. I pick it up and carry it away, back to her suitcase.
Then I take off my cap and give it to her, because she can’t be going out with nothing covering her head. This is Berlin in May we’re talking about. We can’t be sure if it’s going to be warm or cold.
Here, why don’t you wear my cap?
What I have is a grey baseball-type cap, pretty ordinary, no brand name on it. She examines the cap in her hands for a moment. She makes no comment, she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t trust mirrors. The cap fits her and I’m hoping she will keep it on, she looks great. I tell her it goes with the shoes, the red canvas shoes.
Now you look like Steven Spielberg.
She laughs.
Sure what does it matter? she says. I’m here in Berlin, nobody can see me.
And the way she said things like that you’d never forget. You’d recognize her anywhere by the way she spoke in a high voice, quite innocent, as if everything was new to her. Her voice was a girl. Her mind was a girl. She loved everything she didn’t know yet. She loved the whole idea of letting on that she knew nothing so that people would explain things to her very clearly, in simple words, and she would not be expected to say anything. She would tilt her head and listen carefully and wait for them to tell her things they might never say to a grown-up woman, or a man.
Nobody sees a child watching, she said.
Some of the things she said, I have to admit, didn’t make sense to me until after she died. While she was still alive I may have been prevented from understanding a lot of what she was saying until now, looking back. I know this sounds like a contradiction, but it’s hard sometimes to see exactly what’s in front of you until you get around to remembering. I hope this is accurate. I hope I’m getting it all in the right order. I’m only going by the photographs and the places we went to see. And what she said at the time might not be the same as what I remember she said.
The bag she had. She had this see-through plastic bag with a white zip across the top. I think it might have come with a pillow, or a duvet cover, something like that. It was a heavy-duty bag with proper white rope handles, completely clear with no product name, so you could see all the contents inside. Everything she had with her, all her belongings, if you like. From the outside you could see her purse, her medication, her tissues, her reading glasses, her passport, the key card for the hotel room, bits of newspapers she was keeping for later. A book she was never going to read. Her mobile phone, switched off. Things taken from the hotel room like free pens.
And chocolate. Lots of chocolate.
What are we only children? That’s what she said to me.
Not that she was stuck for a bag. She could have got herself any bag she wanted, only handbags were never a great priority in her life. That see-through bag was perfectly good, she said, too good to be thrown out. She held on to it for environmental reasons, obviously, but also to let people know that she was not the kind of woman who would spend a lot of money on a designer bag, that’s not who she was. She wasn’t here to make a big impression, it was only a bag to put her things into. I think she was making the point that her life was very open, nothing to hide. It could only have been her bag and nobody else’s, unmistakable. And it was handy being able to see into the bag from the outside while searching with her hand inside at the same time. Her hand became one of the items in the bag and the plastic made a squeaking sound while she was looking for something, her glasses, checking to make sure she had her glasses, with the wine-coloured frames. She had only recently bought them in New York and she told me that the optometrist had nice breath. She tried to get him into conversation, but all he ever said was look up, look down at the floor, look at my left ear. And the same thing again for the other eye, look up, look down, look at my right ear. He was so close in front of her that she got the smell of blackberries on his breath, like blackberry jam.
We’re only children. That’s it. We’re only just children, she said.
She liked to imagine that every day was the first day of her life. She loved being at the Adlon, a bit of luxury, she said. The foyer was wide, with a section cordoned off at the centre for tables and chairs where people sat having coffee and cake, a glass of champagne, like they had done for years, I suppose. There was a high dome lit up in the middle of the ceiling and a balcony overlooking the foyer where people could look down from above at the people below. The reception was to the left as you came in, that’s how I remember it, and a cocktail bar to the right. And there was a long marble corridor leading away to the back past the elevators. It was a calm place, all in all, even when it was busy, with a piano playing most of the time and voices chatting and the sound of the elevator doors. She loved meeting new people, for example the hotel staff. She got into conversation and made friends with them right away, asking them questions, personal questions like do you believe in ghosts? Do you have a boyfriend? What do you think of Lady Gaga? And they always responded truthfully, out of courtesy. She talked to them like she was one of the hotel staff herself, which she was once, long ago, in London, a chambermaid, if that’s what you still call room service now. She was like one of them, having a chat to fill in the time, keeping them from their work.