Every Single Minute by Hugo Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

sound of empty glasses, you know the way a barman puts a finger in each glass and sweeps them up with a clink, three or four glasses in one go, as many fingers as he has available. Emily was sitting on the side of the bath with the million hairline cracks, wearing a green dress and black boots and a light-brown cardigan with the top buttons open. Her hair was long and she had lots of freckles. She was playing with the chain, swinging the grey stopper around while I was standing with my back to the door. We didn’t say a word. I was not smiling or laughing or anything like that, and nor was Emily, only that she lifted her shoulders as if to say, what else can you do?
    I don’t remember how we got out of there in the end. All I remember is Emily sitting on the edge of the bath with all the hairline cracks and whispering to me that maybe there was time to have a quick bath together while we were waiting, only that there was no soap except ivy soap and that was for washing the floor, not for washing your body. What a pity we didn’t bring a candle. And what a pity we didn’t bring our drinks with us at least, Emily added.
    There was a picture of Pope John the Twenty-third and John F. Kennedy in the bathroom with us. Maybe the only one left in Ireland. The picture was quite faded with the steam from so many baths. John F. Kennedy had his head tilted to one side and there was a water cloud covering half his face. Pope John held his hand up in a blessing and his white robe was gone brown, buckled up with age. I know that because Emily asked me to look at the picture carefully while she was having a piss.
    Listen to the song outside, she said.
    And then I ended up bringing Emily for a bath after all, the next day. The seaweed baths. Out along the coast, a place with blue painted doors and blue window frames, where people came from all over the world, men and women from Germany and Scandinavia, in their dressing gowns. The centre for hot seaweed baths. They gave Emily a cubicle to herself with a bath she could not even put her toes into first it was so hot, full of brown seaweed, like brown leather straps. There was steam everywhere and echoes of people splashing water around their bodies in other cubicles, talking to each other in Swedish over the wooden partitions. When Emily eventually lay back in the bath, she said it felt quite slimy at first, a bit like floating in cod liver oil, but she liked it because it’s meant to be good for your health, you’ll never get rheumatism, all those promises going back hundreds of years. Her face was flushed from the heat and she played with the seaweed straps all around her body, making a long brown, underwater dress for herself with seaweed straps around her thighs and seaweed straps covering her breasts and going around her shoulders. You’d never forget the smell of seaweed either, it stays in your memory, you recognize it instantly as soon as you get to the coast. Emily’s skin was very smooth afterwards, I remember, I don’t really have the word for it exactly, so smooth it was almost not there, more like holding your hand under running water. And afterwards, to rinse the oily feeling from her body we went out to the Pollock Holes near Kilkee, Pollies they’re called, these natural pools in the rocks where people in dressing gowns go swimming when the tide is out, because the water left behind in those pools is so clear and warm and deep and calm and full of minerals. And all the time I was looking around me, searching up and down the shore to see if we were being followed.

10
    We had the Botanic Garden to ourselves, give or take. We were like any other tourists, really, looking around, taking pictures. Apart from her being in a wheelchair, the people there would have thought nothing unusual, only that she was not up to walking, that’s all. She kept the cap on, so nobody knew what was going on underneath. We were unseen mostly, apart from a few onlookers here and there, more