Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  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?”

  Late that night, Theresa lay in bed, unable to sleep. It was two years to the day since she had left for Italy with Francis. She could hear the noises of the road: traffic, footsteps, voices. As the night wore on, the sounds became more infrequent and increasingly bizarre. When she heard a drunk man singing “Melancholy Baby,” the booming amplification of which suggested that he had borrowed a large plastic traffic cone from adjacent roadworks to serve as an impromptu megaphone, she sighed, picked up her alarm clock and held its luminous dial close to her eyes: 2:25. The voice of the lonely singer tailed off into the darkness. The clock ticked.

  She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth.

  And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do.

  Whenever she tried to define for herself her own feelings, she kept coming up again and again with the same images: a wall, a pit, a hole. When Francis died, she felt that she had fallen into a deep, dark pit, with cold smooth sides, out of which it was impossible to climb. She did not deny her desolation, nor believe that she could escape from it either by self-stupefaction or by trying to make others suffer as greatly as she herself had done. She lay in bed, sat, stood or walked and she said nothing and did nothing. She waited, and already this waiting was in progress. She had gone past the stage of the panicked desire to escape to a place where death was not, for she knew now that in all the world no such place existed. She did nothing, for she did not know what she could do that would be of help; there was nothing possible but to sit and feel this pain of her loss and loneliness wander through her soul. She thought with bitterness of people who said that they wanted to live intensely, “in extremis.” She did not believe that they understood what they wanted: only a perverse and masochistic mind would think this a desirable state. She did not want to suffer: she wanted to be happy, even though she did not think that this was a laudable desire; but truthfully there were moments, and this was one of them, when she would have changed eternal joy — eternal anything — for mer
e temporal and finite happiness. She wanted to have Francis back with her. She was saddened by her capacity for forgetfulness: the particular inflections of his voice, the texture of his skin: she had become too used to his absence. She felt a sudden dread of death which was not fear of dying herself, but of being passed over by death, of being left behind, alone. Morbid fantasies concerning her mother flooded her mind. Mammy walking out of the house and having half her head blown away by a stray bullet. Mammy in a shop when a bomb explodes and her body bursting into a scattered jumble of bloody pieces. Mammy being burnt alive in a firebombed restaurant. Mammy —

  “No,” she said aloud, “no, this is foolish and childish, this fear that she will be killed.” But it was the thing which, in all the world she dreaded most. And it was not an illogical fear, for Francis had been killed and Belfast was small: it might well happen again.

  At the end, she thought, death must be desirable: Jane Austen heaving her last spiked breaths to say, when asked what she wanted, “Nothing but death”; the wrinkled Sybil, lying withered and motionless save for a bright flickering eye, who said to the inquisitive boys, “I want to die.” She could only think that, after he had been so severely tortured (stabbed and beaten and burnt), Francis, too, had felt relief to be at last released into death. And Francis (terrible irony) was the only person in the world whom she loved so much that she would have died for him.

  For what the undertaker called “obvious reasons,” the lid of the coffin was not removed at any stage of the funeral ceremonies. When they trundled the solid lozenge of pale wood into the hospital’s chilly mortuary chapel prior to the removal of the remains, all Theresa’s grief was overpowered by anger against the God who could have prevented this but who had permitted it to happen. She would not love such a God and she decided immediately that she would not believe in Him. The undertaker led them in a decade of the Rosary but she did not join in; she stood trembling by the coffin and looked with shock and tenderness at Francis’s name engraved upon the little chrome plaque.

  Yet to decide not to believe: what did that mean? If God existed, He existed and her refusal to believe could not alter that. The simple withdrawal of her faith (or anyone’s, or everyone’s) could not destroy God. She had never in her life doubted His existence for a single moment, and she did not doubt it now. This was a problem of love, not faith. God was real: she was quite free to hate Him.

  But where did Francis come into this? If there was no God, death was the end and the people who had killed Francis really had destroyed him absolutely, leaving only a body which was too terrible for his own family to see and which would soon be rotting in the grave. This cruel, hated God was her only link with Francis and if she lost God she lost Francis; if she could stop believing in God, she would have to stop believing in her brother.

  Each alternative was dreadful: a God with a divine plan, part of which was that Francis should be tortured and shot; or no God and no plan, so that all this was chaos and there could never be any justification or explanation and might really was right. Some people really did have the power to take away the lives of others and no one could ever vindicate or expiate their acts. And she knew that her ineluctable belief did not leave her free to choose her alternative, and although she had resented it deeply only moments before, it offered the only possible shred of comfort.

  They concluded the prayers, and as she followed the coffin out to the hearse she resigned herself silently to belief in God and knew that she would have to learn to love Him again, although there was resentment and little understanding in her heart.

  As one walks across St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the four rows of Doric pillars which form Bernini’s Colonnade merge and shift so that they seem to increase then decrease in number and their colour changes from golden-grey to deepest black. There are, however, two small stones in the vast, cobbled square which are the focal points of the sweeping grey arcs and, when one stands upon these stones, all four rows fall into order, so that one sees only a single row of pillars.

  Theresa and Francis had found these stones; Francis had stood on one and said simply, “This is what it’s like when you begin to believe that God loves you.”

  She had asked him then how his belief in God affected him, and he had said, “I feel as if I’m being watched all the time, as if a big eye is looking at me and through me for every second of my existence. I see God in everything, but God also sees everything in me. There are eyes everywhere: the sun, moon, stars, every light and every window, but worst of all are the eyes of people. God looks straight out at me through the eye of every human being, asking me to look straight back at Him. But I know that I can’t because I’m not good enough, and I can feel the eyes catch on me like hooks. Everywhere I look, I see only eyes, God’s eyes, God telling me what He did for me and wanting to know what I’m doing for Him; God looking and looking and wanting me to try to look steadily back.”

  “That sounds terrible,” said Theresa. “I can imagine few things worse.”

  “Oh, there’s something infinitely worse,” he exclaimed.

  “Which is?”

  “Not being looked at at all.”

  The huge square was thronged. People grouped themselves around the fountains for photographs; tourists scurried in groups behind guides, some of whom brandished a little flag, a closed umbrella or a plastic flower. “Just look at all these people,” he said, “a fraction of all those who are now in the Vatican, in Rome, in Italy, in Europe, in all the world; think of all the people who ever were, who are and who will be, and then think that you are just one amongst them all, and that no one in particular is looking at you. No matter how good family and friends are, they can’t look at you absolutely in the eye always and forever: it’s never perfect, never total. Other people never understand fully and never love fully, Then they die. Oh, I’d much rather be looked at than not!” And so he had known even then the best and most dreadful truth.

  When they had finished speaking, she put her arm through his and they walked across the square to the basilica. In spite of the heat and the deep blue sky against which the building loomed, the associations which she instinctively made were of coldness, not warmth, as she remembered the souvenir snowstorm which she had owned as a child. The real basilica evoked the flooded plastic edifice, and its cold, breakable beauty still was there: she felt that the frail cupola, gilded within, could be shivered easily as an eggshell (“for Thine is the KINGDOM, the POWER and the GLORY”) just as she had shattered the dome of the snowstorm. Without water, the model basilica had looked pathetically shoddy and small.

  Once inside, she tightened her grip on Francis’s arm, for as they walked around looking at the beautiful things, at the paintings and statues and magnificent altars and marble floors, she had felt a terrible passion for this God of whom he had spoken, this God Who looked and looked and Who wanted you to return His gaze; but she was conscious of Him through Francis’s words and not through the lapis lazuli, the alabaster or the white Carrara marble. They stopped in front of the Pietà, and she thought, idly, were it not for the distance and the plate glass, how much damage I could so quickly do with a hammer or a hatchet. And then Francis had broken into her thoughts, saying softly, “Were I to break that, I would only be breaking stone. People do not look for God, they look only for bits of metal and stone and glass. They come for art’s sake; they don’t believe.”

  “And without belief,” she said, “it’s just a piece of white stone.” He replied that, even with belief, it was nothing more, that it was merely a thing so very beautiful that it obstructed what it ostensibly stood for, which is infinitely more beautiful and which cannot be destroyed.

  And that same evening, they had found by chance the little church which houses Bernini’s statue of Saint Theresa of Avila in Ecstasy. The air inside was fusty with the smell of burnt wax and stale incense, the church dim and almost empty. Together they stood before the statue, not speaking, until Francis whispered, “It’s absolutely beautiful. Tha
t’s what it is to be lost in the eye which never closes or looks away.” She knew what he wanted and she could understand his desire to be in that state, to be like Saint Theresa, stunned into ecstasy by union with God, but she could not fully share that desire and it frightened her. The little white feet were shockingly still among the panicked, ruffled marble folds of the habit. And Francis was looking unflinchingly at the gilded arrow in the hand of the angel. Suddenly, his sister had felt very lonely: she would never feel so lonely again until he died. She turned away, for she could not bear to look at him, and she waited at the back of the church until he was ready to join her.

  They left Rome the following day.

  Snuggled down in bed with the duvet tucked up around his chin, Robert, with the fascination of a small child, watched Kathy putting on her make-up. She was sitting at the far side of the room before a pier glass which Robert had bought in Smithfield, although she was using mainly her own little hand mirror, which caught sharp flashes of yellow morning light as it streamed through the uncurtained windows to brighten and soften the whole room. She had put Robert’s dressing-gown on over her underwear; the rest of her clothes were draped over a large wicker chair nearby. Not for the first time Robert thought about the possibility of her moving in with him, and how strange and lovely it would be to have her clothes and possessions permanently in his home. The otherness of women fascinated him. “The opposite sex,” therein lay the mystery, so different and yet still human! Her clothes were beautiful, piled there in sensuous disorder — her jacket of plum velvet; her soft grey silk blouse, her pale tights, translucent as rose petals. From where he lay he could not, of course, savour the great richness of their smell, which they had acquired from contact with her body. That smell itself was a mystery; a glorious unnamable blend of perfume, cosmetics and something that was Kathy.