Every Single Minute by Hugo Hamilton

still too hot or too cold, she doesn’t know the difference any more. She stands still for a moment, holding on to the table, maybe it’s the pain. She sits down. She takes off the cap and everybody knows. She smiles back at them. Let them look.
    She told me about her father and I told her about my father.
    She orders coffee, tea for me. She wants nothing else. She’s fine with the coffee because she’s already had plenty of chocolate earlier on. And when the coffee arrives along with a tiny glass of water, she drinks the water and admires the glass. She opens a sachet of sugar and ends up spilling it across the table. She gathers it all up, placing her palm on the table and pulling the grains of sugar together towards the edge. She sweeps them into the catching hand, then pours them into the coffee and slaps her hands free. She stirs the coffee and takes a sip, then sits back to look at faces. She examines all the faces available, the waitress, the people sitting opposite, two women facing each other, looking at their mobile phones.
    She remembers her father’s eyes. She wanted to be like her father, not like her mother. His eyes didn’t care what was left behind. Her father was happier than her mother was, he loved himself more than her mother could ever love herself.
    I’ve ordered Apfelstrudel for myself and when it arrives she leans forward to examine it. She notices that they’ve given me custard, even though I’ve asked for it without custard. It makes me think of the yellow door, that’s all. It says custard on the menu, she says. Vanilla sauce, they call it, paler in colour than custard.
    She picks up my fork and digs a corner off the Apfelstrudel. Then she dips the piece into the custard or vanilla sauce and puts it into her mouth, a leaf of pastry that looks a bit like soft leather with icing sugar. She nods to me and says it’s lovely, how can you not like custard? And then she continues eating as if she’s ordered it for herself. Until it’s nearly half gone, then she puts down the fork and leaves the rest.
    Úna. You’ve eaten half of it.
    She laughs. Sorry.
    You might as well finish it now, I tell her.
    Don’t give me any more, she says. She pushes the plate away and looks at the two women sitting across from us, travelling together. One of the women is now leafing through a guide book trying to decide where they want to go next. The other woman holds a camera in her hands, probably going back over the photographs of where they have already been.
    My father’s eyes had the city and the country in them, Úna says.
    She tells me that her father made all the connections between people and towns. He knew where they were from and what brought them to the city. His eyes understood what they owned and what they wanted and what they had lost. He collected all the talking and the noise and the smell of smoke and beer in their clothes. What people said when they were squashed together at the bar counter. She remembers the bar in Dublin where he often went. It had a phone box in it so you could close the door and keep out the noise while you called home to say you were held up.
    She’s opening another sachet of sugar. Or not. She is flapping it back and forth in preparation without actually doing so.
    Her father’s eyes kept everything they saw. Her mother’s eyes denied everything they saw. My father’s eyes kept all the occasions, she says, the celebrity weddings and the public functions in the Mansion House. All the black-and-white photographs of Dublin in the sixties, people drinking wine they were not used to yet in Ireland. People smiling a lot. People self-conscious and not aware of what they owned yet. When having no money was not such a bad thing as it is now, because people really had no money then, only an account in the grocery shops. When things were getting better than before. It was a time, she says, when you had dance halls and function rooms full of smoke and sweat and perfume in the