Hidden Symptoms (6 page)

One day when he was small, a wasp had stung him at school. Miss McGuire applied her sovereign remedy for stings, which was malt vinegar painted on with a long-handled sable brush, but he had continued to weep pathetically (the smell of the vinegar was almost as bad as the sting). Miss McGuire then kissed him on the cheek, and he immediately forgot both smell and sting in the shock of discovering that her face was as warm and soft as his own. He still felt that it would be eerie and unnerving to discover by experience that Theresa's body was as warm, soft, mortal and sexual as that of anyone else.

“She never talks about her family,” he said.

“No,” replied Kathy, “and neither do you.” She leant over and kissed him on the lips, which made it physically impossible for him to either answer this retort or to ask any further awkward questions. For the first time that morning, he guessed correctly what was in her mind, but although he knew she wanted to keep him quiet, he could not know the reason why. The ruse worked, however: it provided sufficient distraction to turn his thoughts away from Theresa. He considered her now, together with the other women whom he knew. Theresa, Kathy, Rosie, his mother — what did any of them truly think and feel? And why? None of them were deliberately mysterious and yet they were all a mystery. He wished for understanding for the sake of pure curiosity rather than for the love which he might have had for any of them. There was always an obstruction. He had never felt real unity with any woman; worse, he had never once even reached a consensus by which they agreed to differ. He had drifted away from all the girls he had ever known with no more ultimate intimacy than there had been when they first met. He looked down at the crown of Kathy's head. Did he really want to understand her? No. Did he love her? No, and if he had been mistaken about what was in her mind when she was sitting at the window he was convinced that it was an error of time only. She did delight in what she was doing; he was her sin, he furnished the glamour of her being “bad.” So be it. He put his hand under her chin to raise her head and saw, to his puzzlement and utter exasperation, that her eyes were filled with tears.

A black-and-white photograph of her parents' wedding hung over the china cabinet in the parlour, and Theresa's attention was drawn to it again and again. She wondered how her parents — how anyone — went through with a white wedding, for she could never countenance even the possibility of it for herself. She thought that weddings were unspeakably vulgar and almost primitive in their hidebound custom and attention to detail: the white dress, the communal meal of cooked meats and a tall cake, the speeches, dancing and confetti, the crude remarks lipsticked across the windscreen of a car festooned with toilet paper and old boots. The unhappy happy couple were at least spared the Eastern ignominy of having their entire extended family beating at their bedroom door, demanding proof of lost virginity. As The Preacher said, there is nothing in this world that is new, and white weddings, Theresa thought, like the popular press and much television, are greatly dependent upon unoriginality and repetition for their ultimate success.

It was partly because of this that she found it hard to believe that her mother remembered her wedding day as a real day and not merely in terms of black-and-white photographs, a few dried flowers, some cards and telegrams and a yellowed tulle veil. These objects, like holy relics or objects in a museum, alienated Theresa from that to which they pertained, rather than bringing them closer, their frail, folded, dated state stressing for her how very old they were and how far in the past the event had been. It took an effort to remember that her parents'
wedding day had been a real day, a day with weather and milk deliveries. She could never fully catch and hold that idea, so that the day remained a series of images. She could make no satisfactory substitute for experience. Her isolation from her parents' marriage made her sad, because it was part of her isolation from her father and it made her very sad to think of his having died before she was old enough to remember him.

Somewhere in the house there was a large manila envelope containing an eclectic array of photographs of her father. There were some fuzzy little snaps stapled into covers of ginger cardboard to form tiny books; and a studio portrait of him when he was twenty, in which he was grinning at the camera with well-fed confidence. There was an oval sepia print of a scruffy little boy with a skew-whiff Eton collar; and a tattered class photograph taken when he was nine, and upon which he had later indicated his own tiny image with a heavily inked “X,” completely obliterating the face of the child directly behind him. Theresa's favorite photograph of him was one taken by a street photographer years before her father's marriage. He looked so young and happy, as unaware of death as he was of the eye of the camera. What had happened before and after that instant when, as he passed innocently down the street, a clicking shutter had made of him an eternal image for his unborn daughter? Around him, the city spawned and died. There was a cigarette between his fingers; moments later he would have extinguished it; an hour later smoked another and that evening bought a new packet, moving away from the moment of
the photograph and towards his own death. History of some sort had been made that day, for there was never a day so dull that the newspapers had no headlines, but what was for her its only significant event was unrecorded. No paper carried the leader: “Patsy Cassidy Snapped by Street Photographer.” She would have given a year of her life to know the day and the hour at which that photograph had been taken. She felt that such knowledge would have given her the power to pluck and save her father from the flux of time.

It was even worse for poor Kathy, she thought. Her mother absolutely refused to talk about her husband, of ‘whom there was not a single extant photograph. Mrs. O'Gorman evidently bore her bereavement through such silence and negation, but it was a source of deep resentment for her daughter. “He might as well never have lived,” she said bitterly.

As children, Theresa's father and mother had travelled frequently on the same local train; he and his father going from Belfast to visit a rural grandmother; she and her mother coming up to the city for a day's shopping. On every journey, the train stopped at Lisburn Station and the children saw a large metal advertisement which read “DON'T BE MISLED: CAMP COFFEE IS THE BEST.” Independently, they both thought that “misled” was pronounced “mizzled” and wondered what on earth it could possibly mean. Only after their marriage did they discover their shared misunderstanding.

So they met and married, then honeymooned in Clifden, a town which Theresa had never visited and never
wanted to visit. She accepted her mother's evocation of Clifden as she accepted Dostoyevsky's Petersburg. Each place was conceived in the memory, language and discourse of others, then took life in her own imagination; the illusory streets and squares and people rose before her. It would be futile to look for these towns, not because they had changed but because in the form in which she saw them they had never truly existed.

This honeymoon Clifden, then, was a dream, and the real nature of her parents' short marriage, the first days of which had been spent there, was also impossible to pin down. Once, only once, had her mother let slip: “It wasn't all roses,” and while this did not give the lie to the stories which she told of a kind and happy husband, it showed that the truth was only partial. She wished that her mother would say, “He was sometimes selfish and thoughtless and mean — but only sometimes; I loved him, so it doesn't really matter.” While she did not know the whole story, her father remained an affable but unreal stranger. She could not love him.

She could understand her mother's tendency to romanticize the memory of someone simply because they were dead: she did it herself with Francis. As if it had all been so perfect! Never a cross word? At times there had been nothing else. She could make herself forget almost completely the bitter rows they had had when he left university, but that did not mean that they had never happened. When she thought back now, she was still angry, she still thought that she had been right and Francis had been a fool, a stubborn fool.

“A supermarket, Francis? A bloody supermarket?”

“Yes, Theresa, a supermarket. I have to do it. It's what God wants for me now.”

“Before He formed you in the womb He knew you, and decreed that you be a filler of shelves, is that what you're trying to tell me? Are you to be a voice crying in the wilderness, ‘10p off Heinz Beans, this week's special offer'?”

He did not reply to that, but left the room, slamming the door behind him. She never missed a chance to mock and goad him. “I hope you're ambitious, Francis, I hope you aspire to high and noble things, like the bacon counter.”

He had once said, “You'll see,” but she never did. She still felt that she had failed in not managing to browbeat him back into college and she resented that he had proved his will stronger than hers by not yielding. She still could not see, and believed that she never would see, the virtue of his taking that brainless, pointless, futureless job. She might suspect his motivation, but she could not understand it.

He had had an exaggerated sense of the importance of his own life. He felt so strongly that life was a huge, blank, malleable and significant thing which one had a moral obligation to use fully and properly, that he had eventually frightened himself into doing nothing at all. He dabbled in various things — painting, playing the piano, geology — but never with any great conviction, and his halfhearted plans and projects always came to nothing. Eventually he gave up, and waited for that one big thing, that one act or event which would qualify his
whole life. It was as if by taking the job in the supermarket he was trying to hoard all his energy — trying to hoard life itself — for that one instant of action, union and justification. It was similar to the way in which all the trivialities of an artist's life became subsumed by the grandeur of his greatest work; but Francis, she thought, had been no artist. He had, however, been happier at the supermarket than at Queen's, there was no denying that. It all seemed so unimportant and foolish now that the fearfully conserved life was ended. The overwhelmingly significant thing now was her love for him. Even if she thought that he had been foolish or that he had shirked life, her love would have to accommodate these things because they were a part of him.

Where was Francis now? What was Heaven? A place of total and unqualified love; a place where there was never, ever the need to say “and yet,” “in spite of,” or “nevertheless.”

Towards the end of July, a television documentary was broadcast concerning former terrorists who were now living in exile in America, unextradited and unrepentant. Theresa's mother insisted that they watch it, although Theresa herself had strong misgivings. One man, wearing beach clothes and sitting on a white iron chair by a sunny terrace, deprecated with a wave of his hand the luxury in which he now lived. He spoke of the dangers of his position, and said that he was wanted by both the British Army and various paramilitary organizations. In a voice which had acquired a strong American twang, he
spoke of internal organization and communication; cell structures and factions; divisions, battalions and volunteers. Then the interviewer asked him about the actions which had led him to his present exile.

“Did you kill members of the security forces?”

“No comment.”

“Did you kill civilians?”

His eyes flitted left and right, looked slyly at the camera, and then looked away again.

“No comment.”

“Did you ever take part in any purely sectarian killings?”

He gave a little smile of exasperation.

“No comment.”

As Theresa had feared and expected, her mother broke down and cried. “I knew this would happen,” she said, and switched off the television, her mother's sobs sounding even more wretched and distressing against the sudden silence which this afforded. Her mother, her sweet, kind, thoughtful mother, who had made big scones, now lay wailing on her chintzy sofa. “I hope they rot in Hell for what they did to Francis, God curse them and their kind.”

“They're not all in California ate'n steaks and melons,” said Theresa roughly. “The one that did Francis is probably lyin' drunk in a gutter in Sandy Row.”

“Does that make it any better? He's alive and doin' what he wants. Francis is lyin' in Milltown.”

Theresa also began to cry then. She would never see him again in this world, never never never never never.
She thought that Francis had been beaten; he was an absolute victim. She resented even the longevity of little old ladies with velveteen hats and bile-green knitting, who clung to the railings for support as they toddled up the road to mass and who, merely by staying alive, had in some way bested Francis. Francis was a failure; he had failed even to continue existing. Now they would have to live out the rest of their lives without him.

“Uncle Bobby?”

“Yes?”

“What do you call a dwarf covered in cement?”

“Give up.”

“A wee hard man.” Tommy crowed with laughter and leapt across the sofa.

“Uncle Bobby?”

“What, Tommy?”

“What's big an' warm an' furry an' would look good on a Protestan'?”

“A fur coat?”

“No, an Alsatian dog.”

“Tommy, you stop that,” scolded Rosie. “That's not a nice joke, who told you that?”

“Daddy.”

“Well, it's not nice. C'm on, feet off the sofa and out with ye; away out to the back scullery an' play with yer worms.” Tommy stumped reluctantly out of the room and Rosie wearily drew her hand across her forehead. “God, yer up agin a brick wall tryin' to bring them up right in this day an' age, aren't ye?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Robert with sincerity, although he thought that she could have simplified her task considerably by marrying someone other than Tom, Provo or Provo sympathizer or whatever the hell he was, the miserable get. Robert had once seen the butt of a gun sticking out from under a bed in the house, and every time there was an army raid Rosie smashed a few plates or cups and got edgy. Wouldn't it be like the thing for them to lift Tom just when the baby was due? Wouldn't that be a nice picnic? As he thought this, he heard the sinister whine of an army Saracen passing, and against this convenient noise he deliberately asked Rosie, “Do you ever — ah — worry about Tom?” She, with equal deliberation, chose to be evasive, by not associating the sound and the question.

“Worry? Aye, he wants to be there when the baby comes and that worries me alright. He goes to these classes in the Royal and sees films about it and things, but he has no more notion than the cat, Robert.” The very thought of seeing a baby being born made Robert feel queasy. How could Tom countenance such a thing? God, but he hated him! He hated him for being so consistently cheerful and irresponsible and happy. He hated him for the way he was always trying to inveigle him, Robert, into talking politics, with his “British war machine” and his “revolutionary struggle” and his “imperialist oppression” and all his other clichés, and his unfailing way of concluding, “Amn't I right, Bobby?” His arguing unnerved Robert as much as it annoyed him, for Tom was persuasive and articulate: in spite of his jargon, he
knew what he was talking about. It did not matter whether Tom was right or wrong: what mattered was his blithe and total conviction that he
was
right, which Robert could counter only with ill-informed and badly thought-out arguments, made mainly for the sake of argument. The whole Northern Irish political issue wearied and bored him.

He had met Tom by chance in the city the previous week and had been obliged, with great reluctance, to go for a drink with him, over which Tom had told him a story about an old woman named Eileen who lived in the same street as Rosie and himself.

“Last week,” he said, “Eileen, she slipped an' fell at her own front door. There was a foot patrol of Brits goin' past and they stopped to give her a han' an' Eileen of course was effin' an' blindin' an' tryin' to beat them off, the more they were tryin' to help her, seein' as how they were Brits. Well, the leg was brave an' badly hurt, so she got it all strapped up an' three days later she's sittin' on a chair by her door with the leg propped up before her on a stool. What comes along, but an army lan' rover. It slows down, see, an' one of the Brits sticks his head out of the back an' he calls to her, ‘Hello, Eileen, how's your leg?' An' Eileen, Eileen, she calls back, ‘Still hingin' from me arse.'”

Tom almost choked with laughter as he came to the punchline of his joke, which Robert did not find particularly amusing. A stream of words drifted into his mind to describe the noises Tom was making: “a coughball of laughter leaped from his throat, dragging after it a rattling
chain of phlegm.” They were splendid words but they were not Robert's own, and as he watched Tom laughing and coughing he wondered which was worse: the claustrophobia of Belfast or the verbal deficiency which prevented him from adequately describing it.

Rosie sighed and shrugged away the thought of Tom as spectator at her confinement. “I saw your girlfriend the other day,” she said, “in Clonard.”

“Kathy?” he exclaimed in amazement. “In Clonard?” He did not know, nor care to know, all Kathy's movements when she was away from him, but he could not believe that the chapel of a Redemptorist monastery was one of her haunts.

“No,” said Rosie, “not Kathy. I don't know any Kathy. I mean Theresa, the girl you brought here.”

“Oh, Theresa,” he said. “Were you speaking to her?”

“Yes. She's nice. I feel sorry for her.”

“Why?”

“I don't know: there's just something about her.”

So the Basilisk went to Clonard, did she? One day when she was outside the library having a fag he would leave a note on her absented desk saying, “Nymph in thy orisons be remembered all my sins.” Rosie broke into his thoughts.

“Who's Kathy, then?”

“My girlfriend,” he said shortly. “It's through her that I know Theresa.”

“Oh.” She looked hurt and resentful, but he would still tell her nothing. She was bound to have already a fair idea of his lifestyle, but the details would shock her.
To suspect was one thing, but to know was quite another, and he was afraid that he would alienate her in exactly the same way in which he had alienated his mother. It would have been little comfort to her to say: “Rosie, I couldn't tell you the things even if I really wanted to.” There were things of which he was too ashamed. He could never tell her about what he had done on the night of their mother's death.

On the evening when her remains were brought from the house to the chapel he had, immediately on returning from the short service, gone up to where she had been laid out. He was taken aback by the ravished air of the little room. A small oleograph of the Sacred Heart had been tilted askew on the wall by the press of mourners. A few velvety petals had dropped from the little vase of roses on the dressing-table, the mirror of which was sheeted. On top of the chest of drawers were long pennons of paper which were printed with crucifixes and all stuck with beaded rods of creamy wax. The pennons were crumpled and torn as a result of having been removed from the candlesticks in great haste by the undertakers. Then he saw the bed with its quilt depressed and slightly dragged to one side, as if his mother had been merely sleeping there for half an hour in the afternoon, rather than lying in her coffin. But you could rumple beds with something other than sleeping or death, and that very night he brought a girl back to his flat and frightened her with passion.

She in turn startled him afterwards by saying sud
denly, “I spy with my little eye something beginning with B.T.”

“What?”

“Black tie. Who's dead?” she said playfully.

“My mother.”

He felt her body stiffen, and her voice changed.

“When?”

“Last year. I bought the tie for her funeral; it must have fallen out of the wardrobe.”

“Oh,” she said. There was a pause, then he felt her body relax again. “God,” she chuckled, “you had me worried there for a minute.”

He regretted his cowardly lie, even though the girl would probably have fled the place had he told her the truth. She never knew that she was turfed out early the following morning so that he could prepare for the funeral. Rosie would think he was an utter monster if she knew, and perhaps he was. If he had slept with a girl and was then told that her father had died the previous day he would have been shocked, so he felt that the shock of others was justifiable. He tried to remember the girl's name, and felt with a pang of regret that his grief had taught him nothing. He realized that Rosie was watching him beadily, and he fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair.

“The less you know about me the better, Rosie,” he said.

“Better for you or for me?”

“For both of us. I'd best be off.” He stood up.

“Robert, sometimes I wonder why you come here at
all,” she said, her voice hardening with uncharacteristic anger. “D'ye like to remind yerself how far ye've come? Cos I'll tell you something — it might not be just as far as ye think.”