Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  HIDDEN

  SYMPTOMS

  Deirdre Madden

  FOR MY MOTHER, MARY MADDEN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  When Theresa was small…

  Robert also had a duty visit to make…

  I love my squint, thought Theresa…

  Theresa was glad to see…

  The day before the dinner party…

  The evening evolved strangely.

  They kept lumber up in the attic…

  Three days later, Robert received…

  At Robert’s mother’s wake…

  Theresa’s mother stretched up…

  Late that night, Theresa lay in bed…

  As one walks across St. Peter’s Square…

  Snuggled down in bed…

  A black-and-white-photograph of her parents’ wedding…

  Towards the end of July…

  “Uncle Bobby?”

  Little Tommy held to his eyes an oblong…

  The coda to that summer…

  Night had fallen.

  Theresa looked at her hand where it lay on the pillow…

  Theresa knocked timidly at the door…

  Robert and Kathy sat in the Bonne Bouche Café…

  Robert had found Belfast dull…

  “I can’t understand how you could do this to me…”

  When he arose the following morning…

  In Boots’ baby department…

  Kathy did not keep her appointment…

  September arrived damp and cold…

  Feeling wilful and trapped…

  “Do you reject Satan?”

  They all went back to Rosie’s and Tom’s…

  Robert sat at his desk in the library…

  Three times that afternoon…

  About the Author

  Copyright

  When Theresa was small, she thought that the saddest thing she had ever seen was a Bavarian barometer with a little weather man and a little weather woman. It was so sad that always when Hans was out Heidi was in and vice versa: never together, always alone, so near, so far, so lonely. Poor little gaudy wooden painted people! One wet day, in pure compassion, she had tried to winkle the little lady out of her niche by means of a hooked finger, so that she could join the little man in his lonely vigil, but with a loud crack the mechanism broke, and the barometer was later thrown away.

  When she was older, she went to the circus. Chimps in frilly knickers or dungarees performed clever tricks and then beat together their pink palms in a manner which seemed to give credence to Darwin, thrilled with their own smartness. It did not make her laugh: that, too, she found pathetically sad. Older still, in supermarkets, her heart ached to see tins of soup of one. Each tiny red tin evoked for her so poignantly the homes of lonely pensioners, and grim bedsitters where all the coathangers were made of wire, and the solitary soup-drinker might at any moment be plunged into darkness by an expiring meter.

  In later years, she smiled when she thought back to these notions, but there had been truth, undeniable truth, in them, for when something happened which was truly dreadful it was the little peripheral pains which made the central agony so inescapable and so intense.

  At the beginning of the summer which marked the end of her first three years at the university and the twenty-second year of her life, she was shocked to discover, while rummaging through the attic, how very ugly Rose was; Rose who had once been her favorite doll.

  Had she truly loved and lavished affection upon this grimy thing, this object made of cold, hard plastic with baked-on eyes, a seam running from ear to ear across its moulded head, and “Empire made” stamped on the nape of its neck in tiny letters? From this I was inseparable? she wondered, perched on the edge of a tin trunk. She sat amazed that she could have loved so hideous a thing, and on returning to her room she picked up with suspicion a large china egg of which she was particularly fond. Why did she like it? Would the day come when she found it ugly? Charmed in the shop by its elegant shape and the cool, smooth translucence of the china, she had bought it as a gift to herself: it was, therefore, not liked because imbued with the wishes of a friend or relative who had given it to her; nor did it have the virtue of being antique, by which it would have proved that it had been beautiful for at least a hundred years, and therefore might well continue to be beautiful for years to come. She liked the egg, thought it to be beautiful, but could not say with conviction that that was how she would feel about it forever. And yet surely some things were absolutely beautiful: but why, and how did one recognize them?

  Life became a series of evaluations and increasingly her confidence in her judgment was wavering, melting away, so that by this time only on things literary would she pass judgment with any degree of assurance. That assurance, at least, was still strong: the following afternoon, when asked for her opinion on an article which she had just finished reading, she did not hesitate to say firmly: “Trash.”

  The question was asked in a Belfast city-centre cafe, and the questioner, on entering, had noticed at first not Theresa, not that she was drinking tea and eating a doughnut, not even that she was dressed completely in black: he had noticed nothing except that she was reading a certain local “little magazine” and that there was a seat free at her table. He quickly sat down beside her, ordered a cup of coffee and as she turned the page smiled and said, “Good article, then?”

  “Trash,” she said firmly, taking a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and continuing to read.

  “Oh,” he said, deflated. “Why?”

  “Because,” she replied, waving a match to extinguish it, “it supports the view that Belfast, bombed, blitzed, beaten and bankrupt though it may be, is undergoing some sort of literary renaissance, that it is becoming a type of cultural omphalos, which I think is a nonsense. Badly written, too.” She flicked ash into a little tin-foil ashtray, and her questioner seemed disgruntled.

  “Lots being written,” she admitted, “but this writer tries to compare it to the Irish Literary Renaissance. Cretin.” She turned to look at the man beside her. He had, by this stage, noticed her dark clothes, dark hair, pale skin, her general angularity and her plain face, but he was taken aback by the large, brown eyes, which had a pronounced cast, so that even while she looked at him she seemed to be looking elsewhere. She wondered who this person was, with his two gold finger-rings and a very pronounced after-shave, who had looked so put out by her candour.

  “Whose little boy are you, anyway?”

  He took the magazine from her hand, turned to the head of the offending article, and pointed to the name: “Robert McConville.” He was pleased to see that she went slightly red, but she shrugged her shoulders and said, “You’ve got a lot to learn then, haven’t you?”

  “And to what do you owe your great literary authority?” he sneered.

  “I know a lot about literature,” she said frankly. “I’ve read a great deal, and I can tell the difference between good writing and rubbish.”

  “Are you a writer, too?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m a student,” and the expected sneer appeared on his lips. “Go on, then,” she snapped, “boast to me of how little you know about literature, tell me how many times you failed your O-Level English — now which play is it that has Portia in it? — and yet it hasn’t stopped you being a writer, has it; go on, give me all that, that’s today’s line, isn’t it?”

  “I have a degree in English from Queen’s,” he said, piqued.

  “Then why smirk at me?” She ground out her cigarette, put her magazine in her bag and stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, for she looked very angry and upset (although later he wondered why he had apologized, as it was she who had i
nsulted him).

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, “it’s foolish to argue over a little thing, I don’t know why I did it. Excuse me, please,” and, moving past him, she left the café.

  Although it was late June, it was cool and overcast as Theresa returned home, and West Belfast looked bleak from the bus window. Had it been a city abroad, in France, say, or Germany, she would have been frightened, equating its ugliness with constant danger, but she could cope with Belfast, because she had watched it sink since her childhood from “normality” to its present state. She even found this new Belfast more acceptable than the city of her earliest memories, for the normality had always been forced, a prosperous facade over discrimination and injustice. Just as when she was small she had been very ill and the doctor diagnosed the illness as measles (for some reason the spots had failed to appear), Ulster before 1969 had been sick but with hidden symptoms. Streets and streets of houses with bricked-up windows and broken fanlights, graffiti on gable walls, soldiers everywhere: Belfast was now like a madman who tears his flesh, puts straws in his hair and screams gibberish. Before, it had resembled the infinitely more sinister figure of the articulate man in a dark, neat suit whose conversation charms and entertains; and whose insanity is apparent only when he says calmly, incidentally, that he will club his children to death and eat their entrails with a golden fork because God has told him to do so; and then offers you more tea.

  She alighted from the bus two streets ahead of her usual stop, bought two fish suppers in the chip-shop and then hurried home, where her mother had plates and cutlery waiting by the hearth. The local news was beginning on television as they unrolled the greasy white packet and tipped chips onto the plates. The first item reported was the funeral of an RUC reservist who had been ambushed on his way to work earlier that week. Theresa, with a hot chip in her mouth, frowned and turned to BBC2 before the screen could show the flowers, the hearse, the coffin, the widow; she turned the sound down and they ate in silence, until her mother began to grumble about a visit which she was obliged to make that evening.

  “Don’t lie to me, you can’t wait, you love every moment,” said Theresa, and her mother groaned, for the lady whom she was to visit was struggling to bring up her children to be cultured. “Do your Shakespeare for Mrs. Cassidy, dear,” she would say, and her ten-year-old son would obediently go down on one knee to declaim a portion of blank verse in a loud, ranting voice. “If I have to listen to thon’ wee warthog playing The Merry Peasant’ on the piano once more, I’ll walk out, so I will. Boring old snob.”

  “Nice Mrs. Boomer. Clever little kiddies. Wish I was going. Give us a chip.”

  While her mother was preparing to leave, Theresa went upstairs to fetch a book. As she returned, she put her hand on the door-handle of her brother’s room and paused, but she did not go in, descending instead to the parlour, where she passed the evening alone, reading, smoking and thinking.

  Robert also had a duty visit to make that evening, to his sister and her family, the very sight of whose little red-brick terraced house always oppressed him and filled him with a powerful sense of the need to escape; a sense which was, in spite of its strength, vague, abstract, foolish even, when he seriously thought about it. For this had once been his home and he had escaped, he thought; he called only to please his sister, he called from free will and choice. If he really wanted, he need never go to that grim, narrow street ever again. Gloomily he rang the bell and his sister opened the door, beaming in delight when she saw him.

  The whole family was at home: Rosie, her husband, Tom, who was watching television and nodded at his brother-in-law, “What about ye, Bobby” (Robert loathed abbreviations); and their little son, Tommy, who was playing with Lego on the floor. Rosie and Tom both hoped that the baby due in the autumn would be a little girl.

  “Tea, Robert?” He refused but she insisted, heaving herself from the chair and shuffling into the kitchen. Tom said nothing. Robert rubbed his hands over his eyes and wanted to flee the place. He ran an eye around the room. Why were these houses so uniform? he wondered, looking at the brown-and-cream suite with wooden trim and the acrylic carpet with its busy pattern of abnormally large autumn leaves. Was there a working-class parlour in Belfast that lacked these fittings? A right tat palace this is, he thought. Above the fireplace was a huge picture in a broad plastic frame of a little boy with tears pouring down his cheeks, a work which should have appealed to none but sadistic pederasts. On the opposite wall was a large block print of Constable’s “Haywain” with an excessively blue tint to it. In between were a string of horse brasses and two plates which had been there since before his mother died, one bearing a picture of Pope John XXIII and the other a picture of John F. and Jackie Kennedy. There was a sunburst clock of wood and metal and on the window-sill a clown of Murano glass. Tommy, still on the floor, was now sitting up eating liquorice torpedoes out of a crumpled bag. They look like pessaries, Robert thought dully, and shivered with vicarious nausea as the child slid another little torpedo into its plump, wet mouth. Rosie came back with a cup of tea and two Jaffa cakes for Robert just as the local news was beginning on television, and together they watched the funeral of the RUC reservist. “Good sauce for the bastard,” said Tom, and Rosie frowned, looking at Tommy, but said nothing. She was sitting by the window, her head near to the gaudy glass clown, and as Robert drank his tea he watched her, wondering what it must be like to see the world through his sister’s eyes, unable to empathize with the strange sensibility which could look around this room and perceive beauty; which could see aesthetic worth in, say, acid-green pampas grass.

  “More tea, Robert?”

  “Thanks.”

  When the main points of the news were over, they made conversation together, Rosie claiming that she felt fine. The doctors said that everything was alright and the only worry was that the summer would be a bit tiring, what with the heat and Tommy under her feet all day during the school holidays. Tommy himself said that Goldie, his pet fish, had died. He had made a wormery in the redundant round bowl, and Robert was obliged to go out to the back scullery to see these new pets, visible at intervals between the soil and the glass. Rosie told him innocent gossip about neighbors whom he had almost forgotten through absolute indifference; he said that his work was going well, Tom talked sport and at seven o’clock Robert had fulfilled his duty and left.

  After such visits, Robert always liked to go straight back to his flat, which was near the university. There was, he thought, a smell in his sister’s house: not a bad smell, but the smell of people and cheap food: a smell of poverty. He felt it clinging to his clothes and skin, and he removed it immediately on his return with a hot shower and lots of male toiletries which smelt bitter, sexy and expensive. As he dried himself afterwards, Count Basie on stereo, he took comfort in looking around his flat at his possessions: the pale wicker furniture, his French theatre posters and a cunning little water-colour of two deck chairs. In his heart of hearts he despised himself for gaining any sort of peace and comfort from such trivia, but their power as symbols of successful escape from the squalor that was home was, to him, undeniable.

  I love my squint, thought Theresa, as she tried to gaze at herself in the mirror late that night. The man in the café had seemed distinctly disconcerted by it. It was hers alone, untraceable to any ancestor, unlike her nose and legs, which she had inherited from her mother as definitively as one might make a grandfather clock and a pair of Meissen candlesticks. She found it slightly weird to look at her mother’s First Communion photograph, where the little sepia legs below the frock of white watered silk had just such an artful kink in them as her own legs did. Hamlet, I am thy Father’s spirit, an’ begob it was an’ all, for you could tell the young fella off the Da by the nose on him. People even said that she looked like her grandmother, who had died before Theresa was born, and vestiges of that dead face were then looking back at her from her own reflection. How strange and arbitrary it all seemed to be, people marrying, mating and
mixing genes; unavoidable choice and chance producing cocktails of children with inherited traits and yet still new people with their own particularities, like Theresa’s squint. She wished suddenly that her father had not died when she was so very young.

  I’ll probably meet again that man whom I insulted, she thought as she got into bed. Belfast was so small, incestuous almost, in the way paths crossed. And she hated that; she was still bumping into people who sympathized with her, Oh that’s the girl, even once or twice on introduction they remembered or at least conjectured, you could see it in their eyes. Only one of hundreds and the case short, obscure: what of those whose losses were famous and had made the English papers, Newsweek, history?

  A light summer rain beat softly on the window. So little mattered. The temptation to make one’s response as big as the disaster had to be resisted, for in truth what could one do, save collapse down to the horror of little details and keep living? She had read somewhere that there was a museum to the Holocaust in Israel, and that one of the exhibits was a tiny broken shoe upon a pedestal. “But what can we do?” Inexorable time: often it was truly too late to do anything.

  A mere two days later she had her comeuppance. While browsing in a bookshop she was brightly accosted by Kathy, who was her only friend from Queen’s, and beside her stood the insulted journalist.

  “Hello, Theresa, are you buying, or just looking? Do you know my boyfriend, Robert? He’s a writer.” Theresa smiled at both definitions, made with such pitiful firmness and pride.

  Robert grimaced. “We met a few days ago, in a café. Theresa didn’t think much of my last article.”

  “Well, it wasn’t very good, now, was it, Robert?” said Kathy firmly. “In all honesty, you have written much better. He’s compiling a book now,” she added to Theresa, “a directory of Northern Irish writers. It’ll be very comprehensive.”