Every Single Minute by Hugo Hamilton

story of their journeys. Shoes that people gave away for no good reason and that had nothing wrong with them, completely new-looking, maybe only briefly lived in, maybe the wrong size, ill-fitting. Runners, loafers, deck shoes, boots with fur around the rim, shoes with heels you cannot imagine anyone wearing, lots of ordinary shoes and lives you cannot imagine anyone living.
    I remember once she told me about driving down the country and going into a house where an artist had glued shoes up against the wall. She wrote about that in one of her books. How she came across this exhibit that an artist had made with shoes. I wish I had seen it myself. All along the wall, right up to the ceiling. And maybe that’s what I’m thinking, that maybe her shoes ended up in some kind of montage, that they might have been kept by someone, those red canvas shoes.
    They were frayed a bit and slightly faded, with the shape of her feet indented, the toes, the heel gone shiny and worn down from contact with the street. And yes, one broken white lace. That’s how I remember them.

16
    She was helping me to look back and deal with my memory. There was this thing I told her about which was going on in my family. I’m still not sure exactly what it was, because nobody talked about it very much. That’s what happens to people who don’t talk, she said, they behave the same as their own fathers and mothers and father’s brothers, in my case. I tried my best not to be like my father and I ended up being more like my father’s brother. The Jesuit. He never said very much. He spoke only when absolutely necessary.
    Everybody loved the Jesuit in the family. I had an aunt on my father’s side who left all she had to the Jesuits and the donkey sanctuary. Not that anyone should ever be expecting prize money from relatives when they die, or pegging their memory of a person to the sum received. Which is far from the truth in this case, because my aunt was very kind to us. We loved her. Me and my brother will never forget the time she took us down to Cork to see the donkey sanctuary for ourselves. I know it meant a lot to her. Also the Jesuits meant a lot to her.
    It was not long after my aunt lost her husband, so she was still in mourning and didn’t want to travel all that distance alone. She took us with her for the company. We will never forget that journey to Cork because my aunt was in tears sometimes while she was driving, telling us about everything, the Rock of Cashel coming into view around the bend. We never imagined that anything as old as the Rock of Cashel could still exist in our time. I think it made my aunt feel better to be travelling. And then the car stalled on the steepest hill in Ireland, in Cork City. I can still remember the sound of the engine straining and her laughing, a frightened laugh that frightened us, thinking she had forgotten the handbrake and we were going to roll all the way back to where we came from. Until she stopped at an angle in the middle of the street and we got out. She said she knew somebody in Cork who could point the car forward again, back down the hill. She brought us for fish and chips which was something we never had the taste of before because my father was against food that was not cooked at home. Fish and chips was something foreign to our family and we never even spoke about it or wanted it. Fish and chips was for other people, not us. So having fish and chips in Cork was something I could never forget. It was the greatest kindness. Like something left to me in a will, something I can keep, something I can’t spend.
    My aunt had the best smile that I ever saw, mostly with her eyes. She was very generous. She put us up in a hotel in Cork. I think it was the first time we ever stayed in a hotel. She had her room and we had our room, though I had to sleep with my brother in the same bed and we tried our best to stay separate, as far away from each other as possible. We said good night to my aunt, but