Hidden Symptoms Page 6

  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 Ro
sie 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 suddenly, “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.”

  Little Tommy held to his eyes an oblong of red plastic, thrice dimpled, in which had nestled some of Mr. Kipling’s Exceedingly Good Jam Tarts. He saw the world in the round; rosy-pink when the light was strong and changing deeper to red as the light dimmed; and he saw it roughly because of the way in which the plastic was stippled. The view he obtained of his home city was thus narrow, inaccurate and highly coloured: defensible in a five-year-old peering through a piece of cake-box packa
ging, but not in the older citizens who shared his vision. The violence and political struggles had effected less change than was generally acknowledged: it had not altered Belfast’s perception of itself. It remained an introverted city, narcissistic, nostalgic and profoundly un-European (this latter in spite of one’s now being able to purchase there croissants in tins).

  Robert worked hard that summer, primarily in the fine arts department of the Central Library. He frequently raised his eyes to the little artist’s pallets which formed part of the stucco ornamentation around the ogee’d skylight, and inwardly he groaned. He felt that he deserved something better than the boredom of summer in Belfast, and the dull, uncreative work on which he was engaged. He had vaguely expected a more exciting, a more fulfilling life, and only in instances did he realize that it had not materialized and that it probably never would. In lucid flashes, he feared that this tedious summer was a microcosm of his whole future life: lonely, frustrating, dull, dragged out in a lunatic, self-destructive city. He could not have defined the life he wanted; could not have named another person whose art or scope he desired. Perhaps every life was unsatisfactory; perhaps the feeling which predominantly united humanity was not loneliness or love, but a deep sense of failure. He knew no one whose life seemed a fair compensation for the horror of having to die.

  The only new person whom he had met that summer was the unlikable Theresa, whose newness and surliness gave her at least a certain novelty value. She also frequented the fine arts department, and was there almost as often as Robert, her desk piled with books and papers, journals, magazines and literary reviews. Her labours seemed even more aimless and unsatisfactory than Robert’s, lost in a welter of paper, reading erratically or scribbling in a large red notebook. At worst she was killing time in the library, putting in a summer which had to be got through in some way; at best she was trying to make sense of things through what she read and wrote, but it gave her little comfort. Her own definitions were unsatisfactory; but what she read frequently confirmed her fear that loneliness was inescapable.