Every Single Minute (6 page)

I don’t remember how we got out of there in the end. All I remember is Emily sitting on the edge of the bath with all the hairline cracks and whispering to me that maybe there was time to have a quick bath together while we were waiting, only that there was no soap except ivy soap and that was for washing the floor, not for washing your body. What a pity we didn’t bring a candle. And what a pity we didn’t bring our drinks with us at least, Emily added.

There was a picture of Pope John the Twenty-third and John F. Kennedy in the bathroom with us. Maybe the only one left in Ireland. The picture was quite faded with the steam from so many baths. John F. Kennedy had his head tilted to one side and there was a water cloud covering half his face. Pope John held his hand up in a blessing and his white robe was gone brown, buckled up with age. I know that because Emily asked me to look at the picture carefully while she was having a piss.

Listen to the song outside, she said.

And then I ended up bringing Emily for a bath after all, the next day. The seaweed baths. Out along the coast, a place with blue painted doors and blue window frames, where people came from all over the world, men and women from Germany and Scandinavia, in their dressing gowns. The centre for hot seaweed baths. They gave Emily a cubicle to herself with a bath she could not even put her toes into first it was so hot, full of brown seaweed, like brown leather straps. There was steam everywhere and echoes of people splashing water around their bodies in other cubicles, talking to each other in Swedish over the wooden partitions. When Emily eventually lay back in the bath, she said it felt quite slimy at first, a bit like floating in cod liver oil, but she liked it because it’s meant to be good for your health, you’ll never get rheumatism, all those promises going back hundreds of years. Her face was flushed from the heat and she played with the seaweed straps all around her body, making a long brown, underwater dress for herself with seaweed straps around her thighs and seaweed straps covering her breasts and going around her shoulders. You’d never forget the smell of seaweed either, it stays in your memory, you recognize it instantly as soon as you get to the coast. Emily’s skin was very smooth afterwards, I remember, I don’t really have the word for it exactly, so smooth it was almost not there, more like holding your hand under running water. And afterwards, to rinse the oily feeling from her body we went out to the Pollock Holes near Kilkee, Pollies they’re called, these natural pools in the rocks where people in dressing gowns go swimming when the tide is out, because the water left behind in those pools is so clear and warm and deep and calm and full of minerals. And all the time I was looking around me, searching up and down the shore to see if we were being followed.

We had the Botanic Garden to ourselves, give or take. We were like any other tourists, really, looking around, taking pictures. Apart from her being in a wheelchair, the people there would have thought nothing unusual, only that she was not up to walking, that’s all. She kept the cap on, so nobody knew what was going on underneath. We were unseen mostly, apart from a few onlookers here and there, more interested in all that stuff coming to life around us. It was warm, you could feel the sun pulling things out of the earth. The air was full of cross-fertilization.

We brought our own summer with us, she said.

It was spring, in fact, but she did that sometimes, quoting words from a song or a book. I didn’t always know what she meant, because she was not speaking to me directly but remembering a random line that made sense on its own, without being part of a conversation.

Unless she was saying that you bring your own weather with you. Could that be right?

I got the tickets in the small cottage, a gate lodge. She said it reminded her of going to the zoo in Dublin, with the entrance through black turnstiles beside a thatched cottage in the Phoenix Park, only there was no smell of elephants in the air here. We were both given a brochure through the window, what we could expect to find coming back to life again. There was a trail mapped out with the most beautiful places not to be missed.

They were lovely gardens, I have to say. But the thing is, I might not have seen everything in Berlin with my own eyes, but through her eyes, for the last time. Our conversation was full of last things. I was here with her for the last time. And I would say that ninety percent of what you see is ultimately for other people.

She called the trees and the shrubs by name, as if she knew them personally. I remember them like you never forget a face, but I can’t tell you what they are unless I read the names on the plaque or someone tells me. The copper beech, she said. As if it was the only copper beech tree ever, the same one she had seen many times elsewhere in Ireland or Europe or North America, and it had come to say goodbye to her at the Botanic Garden.

There was a wide path that led between a mansion on one side and a lake with water lilies and ducks on the other. It was how you would imagine botanic gardens, maybe that’s why I didn’t notice much, only the conservatories in the distance and a water tower behind it. It made me think of those enormous jigsaw puzzles we used to get of beautiful gardens. People don’t have much time for them any more because they take over too much space and one or two of the thousand pieces always went missing before you got finished, if ever. And my father always thought it was a terrible waste of time. You had to make the most of your life, puzzles and board games were nothing but time-wasting.

The conservatories were tropical. It was a different country in there. They keep the place at thirty-five degrees all year round. And the humidity, we were walking into a heat wave. They had radiators lined up underneath the glass, and there was steam blowing down from the pipes to give you an impression of where all these plants came from. She said it was like a huge glass cathedral. You could hear running water, like prayers. Not that I’ve been there, she said, but the rainforest reminds me of the interiors of a church. In fact, all those silent plants together under one glass roof made me think of what it must have been like before we were here, on earth, ages back. Some of the flowers you might have seen before in a florist or a petrol station, though I never saw a coffee plant before. It was good to see them where they belonged, in a more natural habitat. More authentic, undisturbed.

And still there was something missing, I thought, the sounds of birds maybe, a few shrieks here and there, like monkeys up above, in the canopy. I was half expecting to see an iguana or a snake, a pair of eyes at least, staring out through the foliage occasionally. There were a few flightless birds brought in especially from the tropics to keep the insects down. Beneficial species, they call them. Apart from them there were only a few sparrows that managed to get in through the windows, doing no harm. I think people were primarily there for the horticulture and the peace of mind. It’s the absence of noise they were looking for. It occurred to me that this would be a great place to work, testing the soil and checking the temperature, picking off dead leaves, avoiding overcrowding, making sure the plants have everything they need and thinking of them as your own family. You could belong to a place like this, I thought. We saw one or two gardeners walking around in their inner world. There was a couple sitting on a bench meditating, either that or sleeping, it was hard to tell. And a man with a camera on a tripod taking close-up photographs of an orchid. He obviously had permission to do that. All in all it was perfect for a visit, only the environment was not right. It was not long before her breathing started giving trouble.

I can’t breathe in here, she said. I’ll suffocate.

She preferred being out in the open with the trees, everything afresh. She asked me to push the wheelchair off the path, right into a meadow of cowslips. That’s what I remember. She said cowslips as if they had disappeared last year in the west of Ireland and now they were coming up out of the ground in Berlin. They were part of her childhood and she must have been confused by her whereabouts. The ground was soft and the tyres sank into the earth and she sat there a while, sinking and thinking. What she said could easily have been said to the cowslips without me being there at all.

I have a photo of her there to back it up, reaching down to touch the cowslips. Also a short video clip of her taken on my phone, more or less stationary, huddled in her black coat and the see-through bag hanging on the handle of the wheelchair.

She was going to say something. About her childhood. She said you can’t possibly stop yourself from looking back.

I agreed with her. You can’t avoid coming across things in your life that are pointing backwards, objects that surface in front of you, while you’re not looking, while you’re trying to delete things that cannot be deleted. Photographs, for example. Little bits of evidence that turn up where they don’t belong in your life any more.

What are you talking about?

Just when you’re trying to move forward, that is.

Rubbish. I’m talking about the truth, she said. Not hiding anything. It takes too much energy to conceal things, Liam. She could no more stop telling her story than she could stop breathing. That’s all I was ever doing, she said, breathing and telling. Unless you want me to be silent like a gardener and keep my mouth shut. As if gardeners don’t breathe. And the idea of her becoming a gardener instead of a writer was never very realistic. She said she once heard about a writer in America who was told by a friend that looking back makes you go crazy. But the writer ignored all that advice and went straight home to look back and write a book about school, just to stop himself going crazy.

I can no more stay silent than a horse can run backwards, that’s what she said.

She remembered a man trying to reverse a horse out of an alleyway when she was a girl. The sight of a horse and cart was gone from the streets now and she wondered what was the point in remembering things that were always going to disappear. It was one of the things she collected as a child. Because she was a writer even before she could read, long before she ran down and told the woman in the shop, I can read, I can read. And the woman in the shop said good girl, aren’t you great now? They had to be careful what they said in future because she had turned herself into a collector. Collecting all kinds of useless things, hiding them like favourite stones under her pillow.

The man collecting the scrap metal had the horse and cart in the alleyway. I was nothing but a girl, she said, standing in the street with one foot on top of the other. I had nothing better to do than watching the man trying to back the horse and the heavy load of metal out. I copied everything down in my head, she said, the wheels, the leather belt tied around the axle for no reason, the hind legs with white ankle socks and the eyelashes like a beauty queen. The man was standing in front of the horse negotiating, she said, but the horse had no wish to go backwards. The horse was afraid time was going to start going backwards from there on and his legs were only designed to go forward, I knew that, she said. The horse kept rearing its head up, trying to look back over its shoulder at something it didn’t want to do. She remembered the fear in the horse’s eyes. The slippery sound of hooves on the cobbles. That was the first thing I ever collected, she said, the day of the horse refusing to go backwards. It took the man ten minutes, maybe an hour, maybe all day in her memory. Again and again he tried to coax the horse. A white string of spit was suspended from its mouth, she said. In the end the metal collector had to put a sack over the horse’s head and move forward and backwards until the horse was confused enough about the direction of time that he finally agreed to come out, a bit like a man coming down a ladder. And that’s how I started asking questions, she said, because everything had to be turned backwards, until it was out in the open. Until the horse was a horse again, trotting off along the street and the cart was tilted to one side under the weight of metal.

We’re in the field of cowslips and she asks me to take off her shoes. She wants to tell me something that she’s never figured out before. Something that happened between her mother and father.

Liam, she says. I want to stand up.

Here?

Can you take off my shoes?

You can’t do that,
Úna.
It’s too cold.

I need to feel the grass, she says.

What about pneumonia? What if she gets ill and people ask me why I took her shoes off in the park, in May?

Your childhood is in the grass, she says.

I know this is not good, but I’m already undoing the white laces, taking off the shoes and socks and helping her to stand up in her bare feet, because I can’t stop her going through her collection.

She remembers waking up one night with the sound of knocking, she says. She got up and went downstairs because her mother and father were not in bed. She was only four or five at the most, and she understood nothing of what she was about to see in front of her.

There was a light on down there, coming in from the kitchen door left open. My mother and father were in the living room, she says. My mother was sitting on my father’s knee, facing him, not sideways but straight ahead, with her legs out. I could see one of her bare knees. She was knocking his head against the wall and I thought she was killing him. I stood at the bottom of the stairs not knowing what to do, she says, because your mother can’t be doing something like that without explanation. She had her hands in his hair and I saw her banging his head against the wall again and again. She was shouting at him at the same time, not words that I knew from before, nothing people would have said in the shop but some terrible language that you could only hate somebody with.

My mother saw me standing in the doorway, she says, watching her. And the look in her eyes was furious. I was afraid of her. I thought she was going to stop killing my father and kill me instead, she says, for being there, for seeing what was going on, for being a child watching.