Every Single Minute (24 page)

She continued listening to the music.

I should have brought him with me, she said. I should have gone travelling with him.

The music was lifting her words as she began talking about all the places in the world she never got to see because she had not thought of bringing her brother with her. If only I had not abandoned him. He would have given me the courage to go places I had only dreamed of before.

I should have dropped everything, she said. I should not have been so worried about my independence and wanting to create something for myself. Sure what have I got in the end, he’s my story, my reflection, my weakness. I should have been his big sister, his friend, his travelling companion. I should have said to him, listen, Jimmy, we are going to go travelling together. You and me. Come on, Jimmy, I should have said, let’s go away.

Anywhere away.

If only I could go back, she said, I would bring him with me this time. That’s what I would do in my next life. If there was such a thing as the next life, I would take him with me and never let him out of my sight. Jimmy, are you ready, I would say to him. The tickets are booked. We would live like it was the only life. We would start in Berlin and then we would go on trains all across Europe. And when we were finished with Europe, we would move on to Asia and Latin America, all down through South America we would travel together. I would give up writing books and speaking in public. I would stop talking about my life and my family, my memory. We would remember nothing about where we came from and what happened back home, we would keep on travelling, just the two of us, me and my brother Jimmy.

It said in the death notice that she was with her brother now.

Sure what does it matter that he was drinking, she said.

On the gravestone, they have the name of her brother and her own name underneath.

Sure what does it matter that he was taking drugs.

Only the two names together, along with the dates of birth and the dates they died.

We could have had the time of our lives, she said, travelling up and down the world, across the equator how many times, round as often as we liked, all down to the Galápagos and the Indian Ocean and Sri Lanka and Tibet, all those parts of the world in whatever order they come, places that I don’t know yet, all the people we would meet and all the packed trains and suitcases and people sleeping where suitcases are supposed to be kept, back over to Africa where life started in the first place and God knows where do you go on to from there, she said, to the ends of the earth. I should have gone to the ends of the earth for him.

Sure what does it matter as long as we were travelling, she said. What does it matter only that we kept on travelling.

The shoes. The red canvas shoes. I keep thinking that if I had them, I would have brought them back to Berlin with me. That’s the place for them, I feel. I’m only imagining this now. If I had her shoes, I would take them with me in my bag, I would be looking for some place that would keep them long-term. Of course, I don’t know where the shoes are, sneakers, Converse, whatever they’re called now, with the white rubber soles and the rough white stitching and the little steel eyelets for the laces and one lace broken. If it was up to me, if I was in charge of her shoes, I would be storing them somewhere around the city, but where? I’m thinking of the
U-Bahn
, I would love to put them on top of one of the yellow trains. I would tie the shoelaces together to stop them from getting separated. They would travel back and forth forever underneath the city, indefinitely. But these trains get cleaned regularly, don’t forget, so the shoes might disappear and never be seen again. Better still. If I had them, her shoes, I might even take them with me to the Pergamon Museum, into the room with all those bits of marble that don’t fit together any more, unfinished. There’s a pillar I’ve been looking at, medium height, where I could easily throw them up on top. They would be there forever, part of this permanent exhibition of Greek artefacts. But it’s only a thought, of course, never to be carried out. Maybe the rightful thing to do with her shoes would be to bring them back to Clare, that’s where they belong. Where her shoes covered most ground. Maybe they should be brought back to the Burren, somewhere out along the cliffs. On a ledge somewhere, out of reach. But I don’t have them. The shoes. The red canvas shoes. I have no idea where they are.

I’m going through the photographs of Berlin and there is one I have of her at the memorial. She is surrounded by all those grey columns. It shows her from the side, sitting in her wheelchair, shoulders hunched against the wind. Her hand is holding the collar of her black coat around her neck. She looks cold. Her head is bowed, uncovered, no hair. She’s staring at the ground. And it’s not one of those photographs like so many of the others where she’s doing her best to smile at the camera.

She has taken off her cap. Why? I don’t know.

It’s a hard photograph to look at, with her head bare and nothing but grey columns around her, some that are not straight either, leaning to one side, uneven, sinking columns.

I think it was a hard place for her to go to. Because she was dying and still she wanted to remember millions of other people dead. It was hard for her, I think, to say to herself that she was less important than all those other people. She felt small and insignificant, so she told me afterwards. As though her death was not really much to speak about now. Not even the death of her own brother could matter here. There was something about sitting among the grey columns that haunted her. As though she was in a church with no roof and no windows and you were not really meant to speak.

I suppose it’s such an instinctive thing, taking a photograph. I get the camera out of my pocket, I don’t know why. I suppose I’m trying to keep something, trying to hold on to her. In fact, it’s only when I step back to take the photograph that she takes off the cap. She holds the collar of her coat around her neck with one hand and takes her cap off with the other. I don’t really know why she has made the decision to take off the cap at this moment, in the cold. This is the time to put on your cap, not the time to take it off. But maybe it’s something she does out of respect. It looks like her head has been shaved. Her skull is exposed to the wind. She looks like she’s closer to death than ever before. She cannot get any closer to death. But she is still alive in that photograph. And there is still time in that photograph to push the wheelchair away, there is still time to get back to the car and back to the hotel, there’s still time for her to see her family, there’s still time to get her back to Dublin before she is dead.

I know she must be freezing by now. We have been there for a long time and she has said nothing about being cold. I have no idea that she is shivering, not until I get her back to the car and Manfred says it. After he lifts her back in and he turns around to me, folding up the wheelchair.

Your mother is shivering, he says.

So we get her back to the hotel as quickly as possible. We don’t have far to go, only around the corner. We could easily walk it, but it’s too late and she’s too cold and this is not the time to take our time. And when she gets back to the Adlon, she says she’ll be fine. I tell her that she’s shivering but she denies it. And then of course she goes missing and when I find her at last in the basement of the hotel, she is definitely shivering.

The only thing for me to do is to give her a bath. I have to get her warm again. I have to get the life back into her. I get her up to the room and run the water and it comes gushing out very fast. Big brass taps. And a lovely heavy stopper on a chain. It’s a very spacious bath and the bathroom is full of steam, there’s a nice echo around the tiles of water flowing into water.

Her hands are cold and I have to rub them to try and get the heat back into them. I take each one of her hands into my hands and rub as fast as I can. I rub her wrists as though I’m putting a shine on them with the heel of my hand. Then I do the same with the feet. I get the shoes off, the red canvas shoes which are absolutely no use for the cold, even with socks on. They’re only good for the summer. I start rubbing her feet and the ankles, with both of my hands moving like a machine to get the circulation going.

I’m running around preparing the towels, very large, thick towels, laying them out on a chair. I put all the bath salts available into the bath and almost half a bottle of the amber stuff that makes the whole bath bubble up so you can hardly see the clear green water underneath. I don’t know how much is enough. Nothing is enough and I add a drop of the other jade bottle as well. So the scent around the bathroom is comforting, the lighting is soft and maybe that will begin to get her back to herself again.

You’ll soon be warm again, I tell her.

She can’t speak. She seems to have no feeling at all. She’s not even conscious of me removing her clothes and her eyes are glazed over, hardly even aware that she’s in a hotel bathroom with the bath filling up right next to her and the foam rising.

Her arms are gone floppy. It’s easy to lift them and take her blue jumper off, but I have to make sure not to drop her arms each time, they have no energy in them to stay up by themselves. It takes a while for me to get the bra undone and she doesn’t help. I slip her clothes off and place them on a chair. I switch off the water and test it with my hand and add a bit more cold, then I test it again with my elbow, the way you do for a baby.

I’ve completely overdone it with the foam.

I place her arms around me to lift her up out of the wheelchair. I manage to lift one leg up over the rim of the bath and into the water, then the other, so she’s standing in the bath and I’m holding on to her. I let her sink down slowly and the temperature seems just right. Only when she’s sitting down in the warm water and her senses are slowly coming back to her, then she can finally begin to speak again.

Thanks, Liam, she says.

She’s sitting forward with her knees up and her arms around her knees. The foam comes all the way up around her neck, right over the rim of the bath, separating into lumps and falling out on the floor. I can hear the foam crackling, balls of it sticking to my arms.

And then her body gives a big shake. As though she’s got a fright. Her body shudders with all that sudden warmth around her. Her mouth makes a sound, something she can’t stop herself saying, only it’s not a word, just the sound of her calling out. Like she’s shivering in reverse now, shivering with the heat. Shivering with the life coming back into her. Because it’s quite a shock, going from such a cold place with all those grey columns to such a warm place inside the hotel bathroom.

I dip the face-cloth into the water with all the soap and I lay it out across her back. Her skin is very smooth, very soft to touch. I can feel her breathing under my hand. She is leaning forward with her hands up to her face and I rub the cloth very lightly around in circles.

It’s all right, I tell her.

Because I know she’s crying. I can feel it in her back, the movement in her body. I can’t see her face, but I know from the quiet rhythm in her back that she is crying and all I can do is keep rubbing the cloth around and around in circles, telling her it’s OK.

Everything is fine now, don’t worry.

She’s only crying because she’s getting warm. She’s beginning to feel her own pulse and her own blood moving. The life is coming back into her, that’s why she’s crying. She’s crying because she’s alive and she’s feeling better now, back to herself again. She is crying for the cold and the warm. She is crying for all the cold and all the warm and all the cold again.

There I am on the train, going east. I would love to have been able to tell her about this. I wish I could have told her about continuing the journey, beyond Berlin. I made a stop along the way, near the Polish border. A photographer invited me to visit a farm where he has set up a camera that you can walk into. A box camera, if you like, only life-size. It’s nothing more than a room or a shed made out of salvaged wood, no windows. It’s lined from the inside with blackout material, every bit of daylight is blocked out except for one tiny pinhole of light coming in. Even the door is covered with heavy black curtains so that when you walk in you’re in complete darkness. You can’t even see your own hand in front of you. I could hear children giggling right behind me. It turned out they were sitting on the floor and they could see me stumbling around like a blind man. It took a while for me to get accustomed to the dark, and the light. Until the room slowly became brighter and I could see everything turned upside-down on the walls. That’s what they had all come to see. Everything gets turned upside-down, I knew that from school, but I had never actually seen it for myself. The sky and the clouds were down close to the floor. And up near the ceiling, a line of upside-down trees and houses with red roofs. Then I saw the children and their mothers sitting around me, while their fathers were outside, jumping upside-down with their arms in the air, falling out of the sky. That was it, I stayed there for a while inside the box camera, looking at the world on its head, then I left and got back on the train.

Many thanks to Peter Straus, Nicholas Pearson, Olly Rowse, Robert Lacey, Colm Tóibín, Daniel Arsand, Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, Petra Eggers, Georg Reuchlein, Charles A. Heimbold, Joseph Lennon, John and Kathy Immerwahr, and especially to Mary (Boyce) Doorly (Limerick/Ottawa – February 2012) who gave me the title
Every Single Minute
.

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The Love Test

Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow

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Sad Bastard

The Speckled People

The Sailor in the Wardrobe

Disguise

Hand in the Fire

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins
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