Every Single Minute

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Hugo Hamilton (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1 (#ulink_3f83f4e0-0058-55d3-9e29-b39c6746d6ad)

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 theMet, 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.