Hidden Symptoms (4 page)

Three days later, Robert received a brief, polite letter thanking him for a most interesting and enjoyable evening. That afternoon, on emerging from the revolving doors of the Central Library, he discovered the writer of the letter standing on the top step, her irregular eyes narrowed in concentration as she lit a cigarette.

“You'll kill yourself with those things,” he said.

“Good,” she said, after a slight pause, looking at him sideways. He said that his car was parked nearby and he offered her a lift home.

“Are you going towards West Belfast?” she asked.

“Yes, I'm going to see my sister. I can leave you off.”

She thanked him and they walked to the car together. When her cigarette was finished she immediately lit an
other. She spoke little. He wondered if she was shy, and as he drove up the Falls Road he glanced over at her and decided she was most definitely not.

“You must meet Rosie,” he said with insincere warmth as he turned into the street where his sister lived, thinking that the encounter might be revealing.

Unlike Robert, however, Theresa did not react with perceptible revulsion to the vulgarity which came out to meet them at a front door bristling with knobs, knockers, brass numbers and bell-pulls. She did not start at the sheer ugliness of the living-room and, although he cringed at Rosie's attitude of good hostess, she did not.

Only Rosie and little Tommy were at home. The latter lay sleeping on the sofa, one arm stretched out Romantically and the other clasping a tatty cuddly toy: the dead Chatterton with a Womble. Rosie shook him awake to meet the visitor and, smitten with shyness, he stuck his face in his mother's armpit.

“Come on now, none of that. Show Theresa the good boy you are. Do Shakin' Stevens for her.” From her apron pocket she produced a ten-pence piece as a bribe. “Go on, Tommy, do Shakin' Stevens for her. Go on, do Shakey.” She waved the coin enticingly before his nose and a pudgy, covetous fist shot out to grab the money, but she raised her hand higher. “No, Tommy, only when you've done Shakey for Theresa.” His eyes flickered sadly. He was torn between timidity and greed, but timidity won out and he would not perform.

Rosie went into the kitchen to make tea and took Theresa with her, while Robert eavesdropped shamelessly
from the living-room. Their conversation centered around the object which Robert probably hated more than any other in the house: a small plaque which hung over the sink and incorporated a stump of grey plastic to represent the Madonna, a few flowers of coloured tin, and the words “A la Grotte Benie j'ai prié pour toi.” He could hear Rosie saying that if her Premium Bond came up she would go to Lourdes; she had always wanted to, but unless she won something it would be years and years before she could ever afford it. And to his amazement, the Basilisk was heard to reply that she had always wanted to go to Lisieux because her real name was Marie Therese; she was called for the Little Flower.

Robert at this point congratulated himself on having brought her to the house. This was a new side altogether! Little Flower! He almost snorted aloud in scorn. Then he heard his sister's voice say very softly, “Robert doesn't practise his religion any more. It's very sad, he got sort of — cynical — as he grew up.”

“Oh, that often happens,” he heard Theresa answer airily. “People read things and they get fancy ideas in their heads; they think they know it all. He'll grow out of it.”

“I doubt it,” said Rosie solemnly. “He's twenty-eight now.”

And Robert was furious to realize immediately on Theresa's re-entering the room (although she gave him neither grin nor glance to intimate this) that she had known all along he was listening in, and that her last
remark was a deliberate gibe to which he could not reply without revealing that he had been ear-wigging.

For a long time after that, every time he saw a flower or heard one mentioned he grimaced to think how inappropriate a symbol it was for his angular and defensive friend. To savour fully its absurdity, he stopped one day before a florist's window in Royal Avenue, where the display of blooms was exact and exotic as a Rousseau jungle; and Robert started in surprise when a florist's face suddenly appeared through the foliage, bright as a naif tiger. She removed a green tin vase of Baby's Breath and retired, but her action had exposed to Robert a much more significant vase. It contained bunches of Tiger Lilies, magnificent in their beauty and perfection, and yet when Robert looked at them closely they unnerved him. From the heart of every flower started long, whip-like stamens, each terminating in a blunt, dark and dusty anther. The thick, creamy-white petals were prickled slightly towards the centre of each flower and the fleshy points were stippled bright red, as if with blood. He imagined a heavy, cloying perfume. If she were any sort of flower, he thought, this was it: not a soft, sweet-smelling innocent little blossom, but this bloody, savage, phallic, heartless flower. He thought of how incessantly she smoked, and wondered why he found her so frightening.

At Robert's mother's wake, seemingly countless women with tired faces who were fresh from kissing her corpse
and touching their Rosary beads to her hands had grasped Robert by the forearm and quavered, “Your mother was a saint, son.” His mother died when he was twenty-two, his father having long predeceased her, dying when Robert was eight. Sometimes it bemused him to think how slight the effect of that first death had been upon him, and how faint were his memories of his father; so faint that, ludicrously, he even wondered at times if he had imagined him. Outside a Christian Fundamentalist Church on the Donegal Pass, he had once misread the words of their Wayside Pulpit and saw on the virulent pink poster not “Have You Ever Thought Of God As Your Father?” but “Have You Ever Thought Of Your Father As God?” And in a strange vision the God in whom he did not believe became one with his father, whose existence he also doubted. The unreal Supreme Being flashed across his mind as a mild little Belfast man with a loft full of pigeons and a weak heart. People also praised him highly after his death. “He'd have given ye two ha'pennies for a penny, your Da.”

As Robert grew up he found it increasingly difficult to live with his mother. He did not understand her. He did not understand the strange, intense religion which dominated her life. He had no patience with her saints, her statues, her novenas, her holy pictures, her holy water, her blind, total, absolute faith. As a child, he had disliked religion because it made him feel guilty and he became increasingly disenchanted as he grew up. By the time he left school he did not believe in God, nor did he want to.

He was a total disappointment to his mother, rejecting both her religion and the petit bourgeois aspirations which she nurtured on his behalf. She wanted him to marry a nice Catholic girl from a decent Catholic family; a teacher or nurse, for choice. She wanted him to “get on,” to get a good steady job, and although she was pleased that he went to university his choice of subject — English Literature — dismayed her. Although uneducated herself, she was astute enough to know that an arts degree was not an instant passport to a highly remunerative or socially acceptable career. He refused to study law, refused teacher training, refused to apply for a clerical post with the Civil Service. And although all this vexed her a great deal, perhaps they could have muddled along with minimal acrimony had it not been for Robert's total lack of religion.

“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?” How often had she said that to him? She believed that everyone had their own particular cross to bear in life and he was obviously hers. Sometimes she looked as though she actually had to carry all six foot two and twelve stone of him around on her frail and narrow back. Her face was tired and sad during their habitual disagreements, but only once had she lost her temper and that was on the unforgettably embarrassing day when, in the course of tidying his room, she found a packet of contraceptives. When he came in that evening she faced him with it, and he saw that she was deeply shocked: her own son was a damned soul, an evil and wicked person. What she had found proved his perdition
to her as conclusively as a box of black tallow candles.

Robert's memory operated in a cruel and unfortunate manner, clouding his happy memories and sharpening the unhappy; and so when he thought, reluctantly, of scenes which he would rather forget — scenes of pain and anger and embarrassment and grief — they always returned to him in absurdly vivid detail. He could still feel the terrible cringing shame of that moment when he walked in and saw the offending packet sitting at the extreme edge of the kitchen table, as far away as was possible from half a black-crusted bap swathed in tissue paper and a bone-handled knife, smeared with butter and jam to its hilt. He saw the wedding ring bedded into the red flesh of his mother's hand, which trembled with what he perversely imagined to be fear: he was genuinely surprised when she flared out angrily.

“Aren't you the big fella, eh? Aren't you the smart lad? Will ye be so smart if some of yer lady friends has a baby? Then what'll ye do?”

“Oh, come on, Ma,” he had mumbled, “the whole point is that they won't have babies.”

At this she lost her temper completely and began to hit him, her anger immense but her blows pathetically weak and puny. With one short, effortless movement of his arm he could have shoved her out into the back scullery to cool off in the company of the mangle, a red net sack of Spanish onions and a meat safe, but he could not bring himself to do it. Instead, he stood there gormlessly while she hit him, and wished that her thumps were more powerful and painful and worthy of resistance. At last,
worn out, she started to cry and left the kitchen: he could hear her sobbing as she clumped upstairs to her room.

Home life was extremely frosty for a very long time after that and the eventual thaw was never complete: they were never on the same footing again. She still railed at him frequently for being irreligious and immoral, but never again referred to the row or its cause. They were more polite to each other than they had been before. He was quite surprised that she did not insist upon his leaving home; in fact, when he broached the delicate question one day, she said disarmingly, “Why would ye do that? D'ye think I'd put me own flesh an' blood out on the streets?”

“I'd get a flat,” he said foolishly.

“Ye've no money,” was her pragmatic reply. “Ye'll be time enough when ye're earning.”

The following year, Rosie married and Tom moved in, Robert left university, started working for a local arts magazine and moved out. But he was under no illusions. He always knew what his mother thought she was up against, and she developed a way of looking at him that made him shiver. She saw him as damned but not past redemption, and his lack of the desire to be redeemed was a real torment to her.

She died almost a year after Rosie's marriage. On the day she was hospitalized, Robert was sitting by her bed when she opened her eyes and gazed vaguely around the ward.

“Ma,” he whispered, “it's me, Robert. Is there anything I can do for you?” And she had slid her tired,
watery eyes sideways, looking at him with ridicule and pity. As if he needed to ask what she wanted of him! He was spoiling her death; he was the unfinished business she would take to her grave. He hoped she realized that she was not responsible for whatever was wrong in him. Did she know that people who didn't believe in God (and who didn't want to — could she understand that?) — such people could not change to belief at a moment's notice merely to oblige their mothers.

But she had looked away again, closed her eyes and three hours later became comatose, remaining thus for three more days, at the end of which time she died.

Theresa's mother stretched up and ripped off a little page from the wad of months stitched together beneath a reproduction of Murillo's “Flight into Egypt.” “First of July,” she said, scrunching up June in her fist. “Feast of the Holy Blood.” Theresa warmed the teapot and tossed two tea bags into it; her mother threw the crumpled page into the fire and then glanced over the list of feasts for the new month. “Our Francis was a martyr, wasn't he?” she said.

“I suppose he was,” Theresa replied, “but he had no choice, had he?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean martyrs usually have a choice; if they deny their religion they're allowed to live, and if they won't deny it, well, they martyr them. And they just killed Francis because of his religion, he had no choice.”

“How do you know?” said her mother.

She paused. “Well, yes,” she said, “you're right, I don't. We don't know anything at all about what happened to him, only that … I suppose he was a martyr.”

She made the tea, poured it out and they drank it without speaking. Theresa also had a cigarette to calm herself, angry at having set up that little exchange. Such talk reminded them of how very little they knew of the circumstances in which Francis had died. Once, while reading a terrorist court case in the paper, her mother had said, “Maybe when they catch the person who killed our Francis, we'll find out more,” but Theresa found the thought of this horrifying. Unlike her mother, who was haunted by the idea of the “someone” who had killed her son, Theresa could hardly believe that such a person existed. Only on two occasions had she been completely convinced of the reality of Francis's murderer, and she had found it overwhelming.

It first happened shortly after his death, when she awoke from a nightmare in the small hours one morning and realized that just as it would be impossible to find Francis now, no matter where in the city or the world one went, so also it would be impossible not to find somewhere the man who had killed him. That person was somewhere out there as surely as she was in bed in her room, and his invisible existence seemed to contaminate the whole world. She lay awake until morning, afraid to sleep in the darkness which contained him.

A few days after that, she arrived too early for an arranged meeting with Kathy in a city-centre pub. She bought a drink and while she waited she looked around
at the other customers, the majority of whom were men, until slowly the thought of the man who had killed her brother crept back into her mind. Those men who were laughing over in the corner; that man with reddish hair and big, rough hands who was drinking alone; even the white-coated barman, cutting wedges of lemon for gin-and-tonics: any one of them might have done it. She gazed at each of them in turn and thought in cold fright: “Is he the one? Did he do it? Is he the man who murdered Francis?” It was, of course, improbable, but it was possible, and that grain of possibility took away the innocence of every man in the pub, and of every man whom she would ever see in the city. Every stranger's face was a mask, behind which Francis's killer might be hiding. The barman approached the table and said, “Will I get you another drink?” She could not bear to raise her eyes to look at him, but shook her bowed head in refusal of his services. From that day on, Belfast was poisoned for her. She could not conceive of Francis's killer as an individual, as a person who might be arrested, tried and punished, but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met. It was as if the act of murder was so dreadful that the person who committed it had forfeited his humanity and had been reduced to the level of pure evil. He had dragged that world down with him: everyone was guilty.

It was a hot day. She took another cup of tea and a cigarette out to the back yard, a tiny flagged area where a few drab flowers grew in tubs between the dustbin and the coalhouse. The smoke trailed up from the cigarette
between her fingers like a fine filament of grey silk. She slitted her eyes and looked up at the bright sky. All of July to get through. All of August. All of September. All of her life.

At the beginning of July, Theresa and Kathy's examination results were released. They met in the city centre and walked out nervously together to the university, found their names on the boards and then went to Robert's flat.

“Crack the Bollinger,” said Kathy gleefully when she opened the door. “I made it again, albeit by a whisker. Needless to say, Theresa here breezed through.” They went inside and Robert produced a bottle of cheap sparkling wine. “Not Bollinger, but the best I can manage,” he said.

“It'll do,” said Kathy. “Keep the vintage stuff for the finals.”

He opened the wine and while they drank Kathy happened to mention the flags and bunting which they had seen up along Sandy Row in preparation for the Twelfth.

“I think that the way in which society tolerates the Orange Order is ridiculous,” said Theresa. “I mean, they even encourage them by televising their tasteless marches. Can you imagine the National Front or the neo-Nazis being treated like that? Can't you just hear the television commentary? ‘And the sun is smiling down today on the men of the Ku Klux Klan.'”

“Oh, come on, Theresa,” said Robert, “that's a bit strong. The Twelfth processions are not that bad. They're just a bit of folk culture. They are vulgar, I'll grant you
that, but surely it's best to let them march; isn't it harmless that way?”

“Harmless? You seem to forget, Robert,” she said stiffly, “that the Orange Order is, first and foremost, an anti-Catholic organization. They hate Catholics, Robert, and hate is never harmless. It worries me that intelligent Protestants can't see that, but when it bypasses an intelligent Catholic then I'm no longer worried, I'm afraid.”

“I'm not a Catholic,” he said shortly, and was startled by the vehemence of her reply.

“Oh, come on, Robert,” she snapped, “spare me that. I know your background and it's about as Catholic as you can get.”

“But I don't believe in Catholicism. I don't even believe in God. Religion's a lot of eyewash as far as I'm concerned.”

Theresa laughed cynically. “Just tell me this: if you were found in the morning with a bullet in your head, what do you think the papers would call you? An agnostic? No, Robert, nobody, not even you, is naive enough to think that. Of course you don't believe: but there's a big difference between faith and tribal loyalty, and if you think that you can escape tribal loyalty in Belfast today you're betraying your people and fooling yourself.”

Kathy was startled to see the turn which the conversation had taken, but already it had gone too far for her to stop it.

“Christ, Theresa, with people like you around it's no wonder the country's in the state it's in,” said Robert.

“And if we were all like you it would be a right little
Utopia, wouldn't it? You must have really enjoyed life under the Stormont Government. Do you feel like a second-class citizen, Robert? Do you feel that people hate you because you're a Catholic? Well, you ought to, because they do. Don't believe one half of the liberalism you hear, for do you know what they really think we are? Expendable vermin. They don't care how many of us are killed, because we breed fast, and so the numbers go up again. They'd like to see us all dead. The ones with the tattoos and sashes sweating under the weight of a Lambeg drum may be the only ones who'll show their hatred but, believe you me, there's a hell of a lot more of them have it hidden in their hearts.”

“She's a fanatic,” said Robert to Kathy, “a bloody, raving fanatic.”

“I'm not,” said Theresa, standing up, “but you're blind and self-deluded. Don't ever say that you weren't warned, or that you didn't know.” She walked out and Robert and Kathy were left there, stunned by the way in which the little celebration had ended. They sat in silence. Robert topped up their glasses but still they neither drank nor spoke. Against his will, Robert found himself thinking of the first night of a friend's play which he had attended with Kathy only the previous week. A sizeable group of friends, Robert and Kathy included, had gone for drinks afterwards, and the course of the conversation had turned first to politics and then to a particular politician. They had laughed at him. They had ridiculed the way in which he maintained power by playing on the fear of unintelligent people, telling them only what
they wanted to hear. They had imitated to perfection his booming, hectoring voice, and laughed as if he were some great harmless buffoon; but then there had been a lull in the conversation and someone had said, “Mind you, there's a lot of truth in some of the things he says.” No one had contradicted this. Kathy had looked across at Robert, and Robert had felt afraid.

Kathy now picked up her glass. “Robert,” she said slowly, “remember that play we went to see last week?”

“Yes.” His voice was harsh, daring her to say what was in both their minds. “What about it?”

Cravenly, she sipped her cheap wine.

“It was very good, wasn't it?”