Every Single Minute by Hugo Hamilton Page A

air. Men in bow ties and women with off-the-shoulder dresses and holy medals well hidden. People being continental, looking rich, behaving modern, even though it was still Dublin and everybody knew everyone else, she says, everyone knew what you had or didn’t have. So it was not possible to be anonymous.
    Anything that was not worth seeing through her father’s eyes was not worth happening. Because it was his job as a journalist to know what receptions were worth attending and who was worth talking about and what was worth remembering. What politicians liked to be seen in the company of women who were still women. When times were glamorous like they never were before in Ireland, she says, when it was glamorous to be an air hostess, when it was glamorous to be a journalist, glamorous even to be a priest. A time before avocadoes. A time before yoghurt. A time before toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches, even.
    Her father wrote about it all, she says. All the people busy catching up with the future. People not letting on where they came from. When the taste of freedom was new and the history of Ireland was only just gone by. When the country was smaller than it seems now, she says, more compact, more innocent. When the only colour in the streets was the golden glow of the pubs, she says. When it was customary to sing in maternity wards and you’d see empty bottles of Guinness rolling under the new mother’s bed. When divorce was not a word and going to London was the saying for expecting a baby and a baby not born yet was more alive than the mother. When being a woman was the word for not being a man. When going abroad was the word for Europe. When Ireland was still far away, full of scenery and flag days and motorcades and hurling finals and signs painted on granite walls by the sea, reminding swimmers that togs must be worn. Conversations full of men only and pink male bodies coming out of the cold sea.
    And togs well worn, she says.
    Her father brought her with him to the horse fair in Smithfield, she says. She can remember sitting in the back of the car, looking at his eyes in the mirror. I wanted to keep his eyes, she says, and be a man. I wanted to be the driver of a car, smoking out the window and looking back in the mirror. I wanted to be a woman like a man. A woman with the viewpoint of a man. A man only a woman, in a women-only way. I admired him as a small girl of six would, she says, the confidence in him, like a packet of cigarettes gave you confidence and the person who owned a packet of cigarettes owned the world. I remember everything, she says, the people coming up to shake his hand, offering him a cigarette, a drink, inducements of friendship. I remember people handing over their life stories like they were giving away everything precious they had inherited. People eager and shy, wiping their hands on their trousers before they shook his, because they may have touched a horse or a cow or a shovel before him. Women with flour on their hands clapping.
    He wore the city in his suit, she says. He carried the power of words before it was called the media.
    She can remember the men at the horse fair showing the horses how to smile. Her father was laughing with a woman who was not her mother. And the woman who was not her mother smiling like the horses. And then a boy on a runaway horse came racing through the crowd. He could not be stopped, so the woman who was not her mother grabbed her hand and everyone had to scatter with their backs against the wall of the pub. And she spilled the red lemonade on her dress.
    She says the woman who was not her mother started coming to the house. I remember them arguing over dinner together, she says, around the table, my father and my mother and the woman who was not my mother. The woman who was not my mother got up over something that was said by my mother and walked straight out the door, with my father after her and my mother after him. That’s how I remember it, she says. We