Every Single Minute. Hugo Hamilton

with the entrance through black turnstiles beside a thatched cottage in the Phoenix Park, only there was no smell of elephants in the air here. We were both given a brochure through the window, what we could expect to find coming back to life again. There was a trail mapped out with the most beautiful places not to be missed.

      They were lovely gardens, I have to say. But the thing is, I might not have seen everything in Berlin with my own eyes, but through her eyes, for the last time. Our conversation was full of last things. I was here with her for the last time. And I would say that ninety percent of what you see is ultimately for other people.

      She called the trees and the shrubs by name, as if she knew them personally. I remember them like you never forget a face, but I can’t tell you what they are unless I read the names on the plaque or someone tells me. The copper beech, she said. As if it was the only copper beech tree ever, the same one she had seen many times elsewhere in Ireland or Europe or North America, and it had come to say goodbye to her at the Botanic Garden.

      There was a wide path that led between a mansion on one side and a lake with water lilies and ducks on the other. It was how you would imagine botanic gardens, maybe that’s why I didn’t notice much, only the conservatories in the distance and a water tower behind it. It made me think of those enormous jigsaw puzzles we used to get of beautiful gardens. People don’t have much time for them any more because they take over too much space and one or two of the thousand pieces always went missing before you got finished, if ever. And my father always thought it was a terrible waste of time. You had to make the most of your life, puzzles and board games were nothing but time-wasting.

      The conservatories were tropical. It was a different country in there. They keep the place at thirty-five degrees all year round. And the humidity, we were walking into a heat wave. They had radiators lined up underneath the glass, and there was steam blowing down from the pipes to give you an impression of where all these plants came from. She said it was like a huge glass cathedral. You could hear running water, like prayers. Not that I’ve been there, she said, but the rainforest reminds me of the interiors of a church. In fact, all those silent plants together under one glass roof made me think of what it must have been like before we were here, on earth, ages back. Some of the flowers you might have seen before in a florist or a petrol station, though I never saw a coffee plant before. It was good to see them where they belonged, in a more natural habitat. More authentic, undisturbed.

      And still there was something missing, I thought, the sounds of birds maybe, a few shrieks here and there, like monkeys up above, in the canopy. I was half expecting to see an iguana or a snake, a pair of eyes at least, staring out through the foliage occasionally. There were a few flightless birds brought in especially from the tropics to keep the insects down. Beneficial species, they call them. Apart from them there were only a few sparrows that managed to get in through the windows, doing no harm. I think people were primarily there for the horticulture and the peace of mind. It’s the absence of noise they were looking for. It occurred to me that this would be a great place to work, testing the soil and checking the temperature, picking off dead leaves, avoiding overcrowding, making sure the plants have everything they need and thinking of them as your own family. You could belong to a place like this, I thought. We saw one or two gardeners walking around in their inner world. There was a couple sitting on a bench meditating, either that or sleeping, it was hard to tell. And a man with a camera on a tripod taking close-up photographs of an orchid. He obviously had permission to do that. All in all it was perfect for a visit, only the environment was not right. It was not long before her breathing started giving trouble.

      I can’t breathe in here, she said. I’ll suffocate.

      She preferred being out in the open with the trees, everything afresh. She asked me to push the wheelchair off the path, right into a meadow of cowslips. That’s what I remember. She said cowslips as if they had disappeared last year in the west of Ireland and now they were coming up out of the ground in Berlin. They were part of her childhood and she must have been confused by her whereabouts. The ground was soft and the tyres sank into the earth and she sat there a while, sinking and thinking. What she said could easily have been said to the cowslips without me being there at all.

      I have a photo of her there to back it up, reaching down to touch the cowslips. Also a short video clip of her taken on my phone, more or less stationary, huddled in her black coat and the see-through bag hanging on the handle of the wheelchair.

      She was going to say something. About her childhood. She said you can’t possibly stop yourself from looking back.

      I agreed with her. You can’t avoid coming across things in your life that are pointing backwards, objects that surface in front of you, while you’re not looking, while you’re trying to delete things that cannot be deleted. Photographs, for example. Little bits of evidence that turn up where they don’t belong in your life any more.