Every Single Minute (7 page)

I’m listening to her, holding the red canvas shoes in my hand.

My mother sighed, she says, and said my father had done a terrible thing. Your father has been very bold, my mother said, he has to be punished. She turned back to face him. Never let me see you do that again, my mother said to him, then she banged his head against the wall again. Very, very bold. Never do that again, ever, ever, ever.

Her father didn’t look at her, she says. His mouth was open, like he needed water. I clearly remember the moonlight coming in from the kitchen and the crucifix on the wall and my father letting a word out of his mouth that was not a word at all but the sound of great pain.

I’m only telling you what I saw, Liam.

She was told to go back up to bed. None of the other children were awake, she says, she was the only one who saw this happening. I was afraid to tell them, she says. I lay in bed trying to work out what my father had done that my mother would hit his head against the wall, and him not arguing back.

Úna. Please let me put your shoes back on.

Why didn’t they tell me they were in love?

Your feet must be freezing.

What was so wrong with saying the word love? It took me years to realise that they loved each other, once. It was something I worked out backwards, like coming down the ladder. And it wasn’t moonlight either, only the fluorescent light left on in the kitchen.

Why didn’t they just say?

She’s looking down at the cowslips.

Why did they make up that stupid story of punishment? Why didn’t my mother say they were only pretending? Why didn’t she stroke the side of my father’s face and say they were only playing and that she was going to make him some cocoa and we would all go back to sleep? It would not have been such a lie. And maybe it might have prevented what was coming. Because when you’re a child, she says, you believe everything, you take people at their word. You feel responsible for your father and mother, she says. Everything that happens to them is happening to you. When they’re afraid you’re afraid. When they’re happy you’re happy. And when they can’t talk about things, you will not be able to talk about them either.

Finally she lets me put her shoes on again.

Her mother’s eyes would not let her in after that, she says. It hurt my mother to look at the world without my father being at home. My mother was blinded, she says, because he was coming home without being there any more. Her eyes were closed even when they were open, she could not see a thing in front of her. My mother could do nothing but read books, she says. I remember her, she says, sitting on the rug spread out in the Phoenix Park, looking for my father in the book she was reading. There was a sign with a finger pointing to the Zoo. The monkeys were calling. Your father is not coming. And your mother is never going to find him in Tolstoy. There was nothing for me to do, she says, but to keep watching the world going by at random. I saw a woman and a man lying on the grass kissing. I saw the steam coming up from the brewery. I saw crows fighting over the crust of a sandwich gone pink with jam. I saw a man tucking his trouser leg into his sock and getting on his bike, whistling, ‘From a Jack to a King’. I recognized the song and it made the day very sad, because my mother was going in the opposite direction to the song, waiting for my father until she fell asleep with the roof of the book over her face. My brother said she was dead and I said she was drunk, so we ran away and left her there alone. We took off our shoes and ran across the grass quietly. I remember everything, she says, because I stood on a beer cap and it was like a shell under my foot, the sharp edges left a star-shaped mark.

There is a bit of confusion over gates. I have this conversation with Manfred on the phone which is basically me telling him that he’s not at the gate and him telling me that he is at the gate. What gate? Obviously, we’re at the wrong gate. He tells us not to move, he will drive around to our gate and I tell him to stay where he is, there is no point in switching gates. So we revert to the original plan. We’ll come to his gate, where we were supposed to be in the first place. I tell him it might take another while and he tells me there’s no rush, he will be waiting for us, at the main gate.

She keeps stopping every few metres and I get the impression that she doesn’t want to leave. She wants to stay in these gardens and not move on in time. It’s warm. The sun is out and there is great shelter here, no wind. We come across all kinds of shrubs and trees that she recognizes and others that she doesn’t recognize. She tries to make out the information on the plaque underneath to see where they originated and whether she has been there yet. Now and again she reaches out her hand to feel some of the new leaves. She rubs the leaves between her thumb and forefinger and smells the scent. Then she puts her hand up for me to get the scent as well.

And while we’re stopping to compare each shrub, we get talking about what it’s like to be a child and what it’s like to be a parent.

My parents were careless, Liam. They didn’t care.

She’s pulling at the branches of one of the shrubs and then lets go, so the shrub springs upright, shaking itself like an animal.

I think she’s being too hard on her parents. When you’re a father yourself, you don’t have all that much say, I tell her. You can’t be made responsible for everything down the line that’s out of your hands. All you can do is obey the rules of what a child needs. You love your child regardless, but you still have to live yourself. I’m speaking for the parent here. Because that’s something I know a bit about, being a father.

I’m at the mercy of the future, that’s what I’m trying to explain to her. She’s at the mercy of the past and I’m at the mercy of the future.

She raises her hand to let me know that I’m pushing the wheelchair too fast, there’s something she missed. I have to reverse a bit. The bushes look exactly alike to me but she can tell the difference.

Getting born is something that’s done to you, she says.

We’re retracing our steps at this point, back past the field of cowslips. We can see the tiered gardens and the symmetrical hedges and the lawns between the paths. We come back past the statues of the naked boy and the naked girl on each side. And the conservatories, the green water-tower on top of the red-bricked base in the background, it’s in one of the photographs.

That was one of the reasons why she decided to have no children herself, so I gather. She didn’t want to be her own mother. No more than I wanted to be my own father, so to speak, even though you can’t help it.

She didn’t want to feel responsible for the future.

The population, she calls it.

I think she wanted to stop the future at herself. She wanted to be her own child, her own offspring. She wanted women to have the freedom to be themselves and not have to bear children if they didn’t want to, to become artists and writers and musicians instead of surrendering their entire lives and rearing children like her mother did. She didn’t believe all that stuff they told Emily about not having anything during the birth, no epidurals, embracing the pain, as they call it, because it makes you bond better with your child. Úna wanted to bond with the world, I suppose. She wanted the right to do things to herself. She didn’t want to do the same to a child that was done to her, in other words. She didn’t want her own reflection following her around for the rest of her life. She wanted only to be responsible for herself, in her own lifetime, her own person, her own body.

I’m gathering all this now, in retrospect.

She had enough trouble breaking out of her family plot without starting a new one. Your family, your country, where you were brought in. The entry point, she calls it. It stays with you, it’s after you no matter where you go.

It’s in your shoes.

She wanted the freedom to write and tell the story. She says your life is your story. And she’s often said this before, in public, in Ennis and Aspen. Sure what are we only stories. That’s all we are, Liam, only walking stories. We are at the mercy of our stories and our children and our families. Because that’s all there is, the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories that are told about us, the stories we tell about each other. And the stories withheld. The stories we have to make up because they have been kept from us.

There was a great freedom in being so open with her. I told her things that I would never have said to anyone else alive, all kinds of things that she was not going to remember. In those last few days, I could tell her everything because she was going to take it all away with her, off my shoulders.

Is there something you’re not telling me?

She stops the wheelchair with one foot skidding on the ground. She tells me to stand in front of her. Liam, where I can see you. Look into my eyes. Is there something you want to tell me?

Because she has the ability to reach all the way inside my head and find out what she wants. With or without my consent. It’s one of those things she picked up from her father. In through the eyes, take what you like. He was a famous journalist and she became a famous writer after him. Her father had those eyes that everybody wanted to be seen by. He made people forget about themselves and hand over things they never even knew they had. She inherited that gift of being able to walk through an open door and help herself. Go through people’s belongings without them even knowing. Anything that remained concealed, closed to the public, even those things you were keeping from yourself, she had a good guess at. Her eyes won’t let go. That’s what made her a writer, you came out of a conversation with her feeling a bit ransacked. She was interested in everything that was undiscovered. Undisclosed. And there was no stopping her from working out what she didn’t know, by intuition, by multiple choice. By remaining silent and letting you walk your way into the empty space.

You can tell me, Liam.

She knows my eyes have no locks on them and people can wander in and out like they’re at an auction. She knows I want to talk about my life but it feels a bit like stealing from myself.

That’s impossible, she says.

I feel my life is stolen goods when I talk about it.

You can’t steal your own property, Liam.

I don’t know what is my own property, I tell her. I always thought my life was my own property and my daughter was in it, but now I’m not so sure any more that you can be the owner of your own life.

It’s bad for you to keep things to yourself, she says. It will burn a cigarette hole in your head.

All I have to talk about is my daughter.

Go on, she says.

My daughter is having doubts, I tell her. Maeve. She’s twenty-five and very successful at her work, she loves what she’s doing, but there’s something wrong. She’s with one of those online companies and they keep telling her that she’s part of the family, the company is her family now. I know it’s only what they say to make employees feel at home in the workplace, your new family. But she’s got all this doubt. I think she’s picked it up from me. Something missing.

Like what?

Her real family.

The main gate is in sight now, with the traffic beyond. We’re stopped right in the middle of the wide path, with the lake on one side and the mansion on the other side, switched around this time, from left to right. And I’m telling her all this stuff about my daughter, asking if there are human reasons for everything.

You’re blowing this out of proportion, Úna says.

I tell her my daughter has been asking questions.

What questions?

Maeve wants to know who she is. She’s asking all about me and Emily, her mother. The back story, she doesn’t believe us.

She’s nervous about the wedding, Liam, that’s all.

She’s thinking of calling it off, I tell her.

You can’t let her do that, Úna says.

She’s having second thoughts.

You can’t let her have second thoughts, Liam. You can’t let her cancel the wedding, that’s what happened to me. It was a perfectly good wedding and a perfectly good marriage only that I called it off. I thought it was too good to be true. Liam. Listen to me. You tell Maeve from me, not to call off that wedding. Please. She’ll spend the rest of her life having second thoughts.

Maybe she’s not ready for it.

You’re far too protective, Liam. Your precious little daughter. You’re all over her.

I don’t want to let her down.

You’re at the mercy of your own child, Liam. Come on, get a grip of yourself. That whole fatherhood instinct. Fathers loving their daughters to bits. It’s so repulsive, I’m going to get sick. Think of how other people feel, she says, that cosy little relationship you have going together, excluding everyone else. You’re refusing to let her grow up. That’s what you’re doing, Liam. You want her to remain a child. The child you want her to be. I bet you can’t even let her cross the street without holding her hand.

I love her.

What? You love her like an overheated room, she says. You love her like that glass cathedral over there, thirty-five degrees. You’re suffocating her.

You hate me talking about Maeve, don’t you?

She’s getting married, Liam. She’s out of your hands, let her go.

You can’t stand my daughter getting all the attention, is that it?

Liam. I’m only helping you to own your life.

Manfred is waiting for us. I can see him standing on the far side of the gate, staring into the park, keeping an eye out for a wheelchair. I begin to push the wheelchair towards the gate but she stops me once more.

Hold it, she says. Come here. Let me give you a hug.

So then I have to lean down and try to work out how to embrace her in the wheelchair. She lets go of the see-through bag with all her belongings and throws her arms out. And as I’m going into her arms, it’s hard for me to know where to put my own arms because they won’t go around her, the wheelchair begins to back away from me and I have to hold on to her bag, sliding down between us. I have to catch the bag with my knees. It seems too premeditated to put on the brakes or to put the bag down for a moment and do this properly. So I just improvise. I try my best to hold on to everything without making it look like I care too much about things that don’t matter right now. She reaches forward to pull my face down onto her shoulder for everybody in the Botanic Garden to see. I lean in towards her as much as I can but it’s only the side of her face that I’m in contact with and her arms are pulling me down further by the neck than it’s possible for me to go without the wheelchair rolling away. Her breathing is loud, I can hear the rhythm of it.