Читать книгу Every Single Minute - Hugo Hamilton - Страница 12

We’re heading to the Botanic Garden and I get this mad phone call from Dublin. She has to listen to me saying hold it, Gerry, hold it. I’m with somebody. I’m in Berlin. She can hear me telling him that I’m not in the least bit interested in going to a school reunion, it’s probably the last thing in the world I want to do. You can forget it. But they’re all depending on me to be there, so he’s saying, as if they can’t have a school reunion without me. I tell him he can count me absent, but then he continues trying to persuade me by reminding me of some of the funny things that happened at school. Do I remember the two Kenny brothers and one of them had a big birthmark on his forehead, they used to call him Star Trek. Yeah. Hilarious. This is exactly the kind of stuff I don’t want to hear about. I don’t want to hear about the Lynch brothers either and how one of them is bald now working in the Pidgeon House power plant, or was he always bald, he asks, which is a ridiculous question, how could he be bald at school? I don’t want to hear another word, so I end the call as quickly as possible and she wants to know what’s going on.

You need friends, she says, why not meet your old pals from school?

Why not? I’ll tell you why not.

Don’t be like me, she says.

She knows I don’t like looking back. She knows I’m always trying to put things behind me. She knows I’m trying to forget as much as possible, particularly things you can do nothing about. She says I’m still allowing my father to make my decisions for me. She says all my relationships with other men are copies of my relationship with my father. My father will be around for all eternity if I go on like this, she says, the world is full of men who are my father in disguise.

Be yourself, Liam, she says.

I’m not sure what Manfred thinks of all this talk going on inside his car and if he’s the kind of person who keeps driving and not listening to what his passengers are saying to each other, or whether he hears it all and is only pretending to be the driver.

I tell her that I have no intention of going to a school reunion. Myself and my brother both wore the same coloured jumpers, given to us by my father, identical. They couldn’t tell us apart. They thought I was my brother. They beat him up thinking it was me. I used to hate my brother not standing up for himself. I hated him because I loved him. I loved him and I hated him and now I love him even more because I had to pretend he was not my brother.

There is absolutely no way that I’m going to spend thirty euros on a dinner in the Camden Hotel, sitting down with those savages, pretending it’s all in the past. Even if it is in the past. The reunion of savages. Everybody laughing like savages and talking about how far they’ve come up in the world and how we’re not savages any more.

Calm down, Liam. You’re in Berlin.

I am calm.

She wants to know what my brother is doing now and so I fill her in on my family. Peadar, my older brother, is married and living at home and he’s got a problem with water hammer. She has no idea what water hammer is, so I explain it to her. It’s something my brother has inherited along with the house, it has to do with the old pipes, the old plumbing. Water starts hammering like a hammer due to air locking, if you run water or flush the toilet in two different places in the middle of the night, for example. It can wake up the whole house. It used to drive my father mad. It’s virtually unheard of nowadays, a thing of the past which happens mostly in old houses.

I tell her that my brother has hardly done a thing to the house in the meantime, he’s kept everything the way it was, unchanged. He wants to preserve it all according to his memory. He still has the same problem with mice that my father used to have. My brother’s father is the same as my father, no difference, only that everybody has their own father to deal with. I still believe my father is after me. Even in the hotel sometimes, when I hear a door opening at night, I think he’s coming to get me even though he’s been dead for years and it can’t be him, I checked. It was somebody who got the wrong door. Swedish tourists, I think, who thought I was in their room by mistake. And every time this happens to me, I discover nothing new, only that my father has better things to be doing than following me around for the rest of my life. I’ve been imagining him, that’s all. It’s only now that I know what I’m dealing with.

Liam, stop it, she says.

Also. The yellow door. The door I’ve been afraid of since childhood is not the door of the place where my father brought me when my mother was in hospital and I thought she was never coming back, the yellow door that still gives me the taste of custard at the back of my throat every time I pass by, and it’s not the blue door of the school either, because the colour is irrelevant, so I’m told, it’s not any of those doors but the door of my own home when I was a child that I should be coming to terms with and walking into without fear, whatever colour it was, dark green. A kind of deep green gloss that people had on doors in the past but which is not in use very much any more now.