Every Single Minute (3 page)

She’s on a lot of steroids to help with her breath-ing. She’s searching in her see-through bag and takes out some medication. She reads the label and drops it back into the bag. She holds up the bag and looks inside. Because it’s easier to find things like that from the outside. She reaches in with her hand once more and takes out other medication, then looks at the label and drops that back into the bag also. It’s hard to know if she’s picking out the same one each time or if they’re always different.

She said your life is a pair of lungs. Time is a pair of lungs. Could that be right? You’re only as good as your lungs and her lungs had run out of time, something like that she said.

She described to me what it’s like going into hospital for a breathing test. The nurse gets you to sit down in front of a machine called the pulmonary function test. You put your lips around a nozzle that looks like a gum shield attached to the machine, then the nurse tells you to take in a deep breath until your lungs are completely full up and you hold it for as long as possible. Then you blow all the way out until your lungs are completely empty. And when you’re ready, she said the nurse says it all like a breathing song. Take in a deep breath, all the way in, right up to the top of your lungs and hold it, hold it, hold it, she says, hold it, hold it, very good, now blast all the way out, all the way, all the way, keep going, she says, all the way, all the way, all the way, keep going, every last bit, very good, excellent, well done, she says, until your face has gone all red from the effort and the nurse tells you to relax and breathe in normally and let’s try that again, one more time.

As well as the steroids, she’s also taking painkillers. And they’ve given her Xanax, too, so she can relax and sleep at night.

At the hotel she told me that she was afraid sometimes. I’m afraid of drowning, she said. I’m afraid my lungs will fill up and then I’ll drown. That’s what happens, you know, when you get pneumonia, it’s like drowning. I’m afraid of drowning alone, she said. The Xanax was meant to stop all that anxiety. She said it makes you more like yourself, back to the way you were before, the real yourself. Because she was worried, naturally, and she found it difficult to concentrate. Apart from a few articles in the newspapers, I think she had trouble absorbing too much news. She was more interested in seeing things first-hand now, listening to people. She couldn’t write. She didn’t see the point in putting things down any more. She had no time for things that were made up, she couldn’t read a novel or watch a movie, for example, there was no time for anything invented.

Only
Don Carlo
, because it was so personal to her.

She offers me a Xanax in the car, as if I need it. She starts laughing and shaking her see-through plastic bag around. Like she’s offering around mints or chocolate. Here, would anybody like a Xanax? Manfred ignores her. He’s in his own world and remains focused on the driving. Anyway it’s not something that should be given to a person operating machinery. I don’t need one either, but she says it will do me no harm, why not? So I take one for a laugh, see if it does anything for me.

I tell her that my daughter, Maeve, is getting married.

That’s great news, Liam.

She thinks I’m obsessed with my daughter. She doesn’t like me going on too much about Maeve all the time, I can understand that, because she has no children herself and this whole father and daughter thing gets to her a bit. I think it makes her feel excluded. She usually tells me to shut up. So I give her the details in brief, the wedding is planned for August.

That’s very soon, she says.

You’ll be getting an invitation, I tell her.

Thanks, she says.

And then I realize what I’ve just said. There’s not a hope in hell of her being able to attend the wedding. Maybe it’s the Xanax. It must be making me feel more like myself.

I’m coming, she says.

But it’s three months away.

I’ll be there, Liam. Whether I’m dead or alive. Where are they having it?

It seems like the future has abandoned her, all these things carrying on in her absence.

The wedding, Liam? Where are they having it?

On the farm, I tell her, his farm, Shane. It’s his mother and father, they’re very keen to have a wedding on the farm. They have these great barns and the ruins of an old church on their land. They want to have the wedding in the old ruins and then I suppose they’re intending to get a marquee, just in case of the weather. It’s a fully working farm, with live cattle and so forth. But knowing Shane, he will get that all fixed up, taking into account the wedding guests and their clothes and shoes, I would imagine. At least, that is what they’re talking about.

A farm wedding, she says. I would love to be there.

She once showed me a photograph of herself when she was the same age as Maeve. No more than twenty-four years old, twenty-five at the most. With lots of curls. It was taken before she went to London, before she worked as a chambermaid, when she was getting out, leaving her family and her country behind. With no fear and no idea what was coming. I wish I had met her then, the life in her. She must have been great fun in that photograph, full of danger and up for anything, all kinds of things not even thought up yet. The look in her eyes. Staring right at you. I think it was the eyebrows you noticed most. Striking, you would have to say, drawn by a child. Her eyes look like they had great questions to ask.

She has the same eyes in Berlin. They are the eyes of a twenty-four-year-old girl, with the eyebrows left intact, even though all her hair is gone from radiation and her lungs are working very hard and she can’t get enough air to say all the things she still wants to tell me.

She talks about a place she once went to which was great for the lungs. The salt mine she went to visit in Romania, in Transylvania. It was an active salt mine, fully operational, but all the people with bad lungs came there because the salt dried the air for them. That’s when she was travelling with Noleen. Herself and Noleen, they travelled all the way down from the Ukrainian border, right down to Tirana and back around the coast to Italy.

Lots of people told them to go to the salt mine. Patients with pulmonary trouble came from all over the country, all over the world in fact. People even asked them where they were from, as if they had come especially for their lungs, all the way from Ireland. She told them she had lungs like a damp cottage and they said she had come to the right place. It’s a famous mine, she says, like a place of pilgrimage without prayers, with the same air temperature day and night. She describes the trucks carrying out boulders of stone-white salt, and the people coming to inhale and straighten out their shoulders. Lots of people in wheelchairs. Grandmothers and all. Even people who were off the cigarettes having a cigarette, why not? Because the air was so clear it was crackling in your nostrils, she says. Whole families going for a picnic down there with fold-up chairs and a portable cassette player making hardly any noise because the place was so big. All the children breathing up and down and playing football in a huge underground stadium, she says. With floodlights. And goal posts marked out on the salt walls.

And after the salt mine, she’s telling me, they went swimming nearby in a salt lake that never freezes. It was the strangest feeling, she says. Floating on top of the water. Their legs were rising up out of the lake in front of them like buoyancy bags, you couldn’t keep them down. That’s what happens, your legs feel weightless, she says. And Noleen had a way of turning everything that went wrong into something to laugh at. When they were coming out of the lake they must have chosen a spot that was very muddy, because they were covered in mud like female wrestlers, the two of them laughing and holding on to each other, hardly able to stand up.

Travelling unlimited, she says.

She says her lungs are left in Romania. My lungs are in Romania, she says, and my head is in New York and my feet are in Berlin and the rest of me is in Dublin.

I heard her speaking a number of times in public. I saw her on stage once at the literary festival in Ennis, County Clare, in the Old Ground Hotel. I also saw her in Colorado, in Aspen. It was my first time in the Rocky Mountains, but they were very familiar to me already. I had a good memory of those mountains from watching television as a boy. I had also heard a lot of songs that were written about that part of America.

Some of the things she said in Ennis she also said in Aspen. She was there to speak about herself and her family. What life was like for a Dublin woman in her own time. How things have changed and how much better things are now and how much has gone missing. She was well known for speaking straight from the heart, no matter where she was, Ennis or Aspen. She was the world expert on her own childhood and what happened inside her family, nobody could argue with her about those facts. People everywhere in Ennis and Aspen loved hearing what things were like in Ireland and why she could never forgive her mother and father.

The problem was that every time she spoke in public, she would get herself worked up, she got angry, she cried openly. People wanted to hear everything in person nowadays and that left her vulnerable, stepping back into her own childhood and remembering it all over again as if it happened only recently and it was never going to be over. Every time she spoke about these things in public she had to back them up emotionally, in tears, as if nobody would believe her unless she cried.

Sometimes I was afraid the story was getting magnified each time she told it. You know the way you remember things larger than they actually were, whenever you speak about them, just because somebody is good enough to listen. People in the audience were so enthusiastic, she may have been forced to make things look worse. Or maybe it was just a matter of finding the best words to describe the worst things. She had a good memory for bad memory, so she said herself.

Or does everything get smaller when you talk about it?

My concern at the time was her not being able to let go. I hated seeing her crying in public. It was hard to watch her taking out a handkerchief from her sleeve, or not even doing that, allowing herself to cry openly without any attempt to hide her tears. So I made a suggestion to her, as a friend, in good faith. I think it was being away in Aspen that made me say things I would never have thought of in Ennis. The mountains allowed me to put forward the idea that she might try to understand her mother and father a bit more. Not that she would have to forgive them or anything like that, I was not questioning her story or saying it didn’t happen, only that sometimes when she spoke, it took too much out of her. Why not try and put it behind you?

For your own peace of mind.

I was saying this because I had the same problem with my own father following me all the time, even though he’s dead now. The fact is, he never goes away and I’m still afraid of his anger. Sometimes I think it might be better to pretend you never had a father, even for a while now and again, like a short vacation from your memory, instead of sitting up all night like a child waiting for him.

She listened to me. She tilted her head as usual and allowed me to speak my mind. I thought I was doing quite well, making some good points that were worth considering at least. I was only saying that remembering your childhood is not all that it’s made out to be. And you need to give your father the right to reply, especially if he’s not around to speak up for himself. Otherwise it’s like a military tribunal. That’s all I’m saying, you need to step into their shoes and see their point of view.

That’s rubbish, Liam.

She said the altitude was beginning to affect me. I was not thinking properly. The clouds were below the hotel and the air was so thin, oxygen-depleted, my understanding of things had become a bit simplistic.

It’s my life, she said.

I’m only trying to help you get over it, I said.

You want me to abandon my brother?

She was having a yoghurt, I remember. In her room, overlooking the mountains. She was telling me that her memory was all she had to go by. Your memory keeps changing and you have to keep up with it, she said. The yoghurt was finished but she was still finding tiny bits. She picked up the tin-foil lid and licked the remaining yoghurt off until it was shining and then she went back to the carton again.

She said that’s what writers do, they search around for things to write about in their memory, like a human laboratory. It’s not really possible to make things up out of nothing, she said. Nothing is invented, only things that have already happened in some way or another happening all over again in your imagination in more and more fantastic ways.

She continued going around the yoghurt carton with the spoon, so I got the impression she was looking for something in it to write about.

You’re not going to find anything more in there, I said.

She stared at me. You never knew how she was going to take something like that, she might laugh with you or she might go the other way.

You’re living in a fantasy, Liam. That’s what she said to me. You think it’s possible to walk around with no memory. You think it’s humanly possible to put everything behind you and walk away like you’re leaving behind an empty field, or an empty barn?

Ah Jaysus, Úna. I’m only saying, give your parents a break, you can’t blame them for everything.

Well you should have heard her. She accused me of trying to take her childhood away from her, stealing everything she had to write about. I could hear the emotion rising in her voice, as if she couldn’t speak the words fast enough. I can’t even remember half of what she said, all about children being kept quiet by letting them put their hand in a jar of satin sweets so they wouldn’t listen to what the adults were saying. She said I was trying to claim that she was a child invisible, with no interest in the world.

You’re just like the rest of them, she said. You want me to keep my mouth shut, don’t you? You want me to pretend I never heard what happened to women inside their own homes. You think I just went to school peacefully with the nuns and slept with my hands crossed over my chest.