Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Macules.’

  ‘These macules, or anything. If we had, we’d have … well, we’d—’

  ‘But it is possible, Mrs Brennan. This is the most unpredictable of disorders. Often no signs are visible to the naked eye. None whatsoever. You might go through your entire life unaware that you were carrying it. You might have nothing more than these tiny imperfections in the eye. It can happen.’

  ‘Oh God,’ my mother sighed.

  Dr Finnegan waited for her to uncover her face before he continued. ‘The alternative,’ he said, ‘is that we’re looking at a spontaneous mutation.’ A pause, and then the plain person’s version: ‘Your son could well be the first in the family to have it.’

  The word ‘mutation’ had concussed my mother: for a few moments her mind was populated with vague ideas of monsters, laboratories, panic-stricken scientists. When her thoughts regained coherence, she did not find Dr Finnegan’s explanation persuasive. The notion that a disorder of such severity (and the fearsome name of the disease, plus Finnegan’s frigid and fearsome manner, were proofs enough of its severity) might have arisen spontaneously within her son’s body sounded as improbable as the proposition that I’d been infected by gamma rays from the Crab Nebula. Immediately convinced that she had unwittingly blighted her offspring (perhaps all three of them – ‘no signs to the naked eye,’ the doctor had said), she had been pierced by a shaft of guilt, and though Dr Finnegan’s assurances had some palliative effect (‘It’s very far from uncommon, Mrs Brennan: almost half of the patients I’ve seen have had no family history’), the wound was still painful, and she was to suffer acutely until it had been established that I was indeed the solitary freak of the family. (Even then her guilt was transfigured rather than eradicated: she still felt obscurely that she was to blame for not contracting the disease herself, as if the faulty chromosome had been some sort of spore floating above the Brennan family, and she rather than her son should rightly have been the one to catch it.) ‘There’s no doubt that this is what it is?’ she asked.

  ‘None,’ replied the doctor, in a tone of adamantine certainty, with a thin gloss of sympathy applied.

  Head bowed like the handmaid of the Lord, my mother submitted to our fate.

  ‘Fear not,’ Dr Finnegan only now instructed her – or words to that effect. ‘This is not as rare as you might imagine. Many people have it and get through life unhindered. Daniel’s condition may progress no further than it has already.’

  ‘The lump will go?’

  ‘Of its own accord, no. But we can make it go away. Excision would be straightforward.’

  ‘It won’t grow back? You said it’s unpredictable.’

  ‘That is correct,’ Dr Finnegan confirmed, bringing together delicately the fingertips of his raised hands before touching the hands lightly to his lips.

  ‘So more could appear. It could stay the same or it could get worse.’

  ‘That is possible, yes.’

  ‘He’s young. He has one now, so it must be likely he’s going to get more.’

  ‘There is no way of telling.’

  So now the anguish of guilt was compounded by the anguish of uncertainty. It might have been better if she had been told that her son’s body would continue to produce excrescences in riotous profusion, that his face would end up resembling a coral reef and his torso a monstrous root of ginger. Possibilities and probabilities tended to make my mother uneasy; she liked situations in which the variables were minimal. (Thus, whereas some girls might have found Charles Brennan – my father – a little deficient in spark and vim, in the eyes of Sylvia Wilkins – my mother – this manifestly steady young man was far more attractive than any flashy charmer. Celia might have been created specifically to drive her to the brink of madness.)

  ‘But as I say,’ Dr Finnegan went on, ‘for many people it does not have a significantly detrimental impact upon their day-to-day lives. None at all, quite often.’

  ‘For some it does, though,’ my mother would have responded, lured by the glint of gloom.

  ‘For some it does. Yes.’

  ‘So what could happen? At worst.’

  ‘Various things could happen, Mrs Brennan, but I think at this stage what we—’

  ‘I want to know the possibilities.’

  Dr Finnegan duly told her that we might expect further neurofibromas to develop. ‘Nearly all adults with this disorder have dermal neurofibromas,’ he explained. ‘The lesions tend to appear, when they appear, from puberty.’

  ‘So it will get worse. If you’re talking about nearly all adults, that’s a safe prediction.’

  ‘Yes. But many neurofibromas are minor blemishes. And in many instances we can deal with them easily.’

  ‘You can cut them out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what else can go wrong?’

  Reluctantly Dr Finnegan tallied the manifold complications, with the emphasis on infrequency wherever appropriate. Hyperpigmentation and hypertrichosis were mentioned, as were long bone dysplasia, scoliosis and optic gliomas. ‘Reduction or loss of visual field,’ he explained, then added the good news: ‘Nearly all optic gliomas appear in the first four years of life, so we can be confident that Daniel is in the clear.’

  ‘What else?’ my mother persisted.

  ‘A small percentage will develop facial plexiform neurofibromas. Some of these – a very small minority – may undergo malignant change.’

  ‘How small a percentage? How small a small minority?’ Dr Finnegan gave her the figures, which were indubitably small. My mother reverted to the question of the neurofibromas: he’d said that many could be dealt with quite easily – this implied that some could not. She wanted to know about these.

  Dr Finnegan impressed upon her that by far the commonest complication of her son’s condition was a degree of mental impairment, typically manifested as difficulties with visuospatial orientation, attention span and short-term memory. ‘This is not an issue with Daniel, is it?’ he encouraged her. ‘Never had difficulties at school, has he?’ My mother having agreed that this was so, I was brought back into the presence of Dr Finnegan. ‘We’ll monitor the situation,’ he said, rising from his seat. ‘But please, try not to worry. Neither of you should worry.’ At the door he shook my hand. I remember that. His watch had a black face and lime-green hands.

  Years later, my mother would say that her appointment with the horrible Dr Finnegan was the worst hour of her life. It wasn’t the worst of mine. She relayed to me, as we hurried along the shiny, tangy corridors of the hospital, the essence of what the doctor had told her: in one or two percent of cases like mine, the illness may give rise to cosmetic problems. Those were good odds, I thought, and cosmetic problems sounded trivial – they were the sort of things that make-up could take care of. And I had quite enjoyed my visit: it was rather gratifying to be of such interest to these important medical people, and the nurse had been very nice to me too – she was from India, and had a lovely soft voice.

  My mother and I walked to a bus stop not far from the hospital. We stood side by side, gazing down the road, and as the bus came into view she took a small, lace-fringed handkerchief from her handbag. Dust had been blown into her eye, she said, and I remember looking at the pavement and seeing quantities of grey dust swirling about, like a scaled-down sandstorm. The bus came to a halt and drove away without us; my mother hugged me strongly then we went to a café, where she bought me a large ice-cream in a glass. I remember this as well, and catching a glimpse of her looking at me as if I’d been away from home for months and might be going away again soon.

  I don’t know when I first noticed that my mother was subject to episodes of anxiety and heaviness of spirit, but some time before the consultation with Dr Finnegan I had come to suspect that I had an explanation for these troughs. Between my parents there was very rarely any show of discord, and so, with marital difficulties excluded as the cause, it seemed probable that the children were to blame. Looking after three offspring
(and a husband whose contribution to the manual labour of the household rarely extended beyond an occasional turn with the tea-towel) was enough to rub the shine off any woman (as Celia, from the age of twelve or so, often pointed out to obtuse Charlie), and of course the burden must have been heavier when two of those offspring (after years of getting along just fine) were regularly in conflict. (In the years before the illness emerged I was the easy one, my mother would tell me. Post-diagnosis, I soon was not.) Photographs of our mother as a young woman gave support to this analysis. There she is on the pier at Margate, with a couple of friends from the typing pool, waving her arms above her head and laughing so wildly that she doesn’t look like herself. Crossed-eyed, she sticks out her tongue as she paints the fence of the house in which Charlie was born. She runs down a grassy hill with her skirt tucked into her knickers. Sitting on a rock, wearing a polka-dotted sun-dress, she tilts her head back and gives the camera a joyful smile, a smile such as I cannot recall ever seeing, except in this and a couple of other pictures. There’s a similar smile, with a hint of exhaustion about the eyes, in a photo of her holding new-born Charlie, and then the other kids arrive and the face becomes more strained with each year.

  ‘That’s what happens: women get knackered,’ Celia informed her brothers, in a precocious show of gender solidarity. Charlie couldn’t see that a woman’s lot was terribly arduous, and was never convinced that the photographs of our worn-out mother proved anything. On this latter point he was right, but it was not until after she had died that this became apparent. Walking back from the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon, our father reassured Celia (it was the week of his birthday; Celia had come back for a few days) that he had a wealth of memories to keep him going. He had been fortunate to have had so happy a marriage, he told her. (Only to Celia would he ever have said this, though it was understood that Celia was permitted to pass on to her brothers as much as she saw fit to.) He knew of very few marriages that had been as solid as theirs, he went on, and Celia prepared herself to receive her father’s habitual commiseration for her lack of success in the search for the right man. Instead, he remarked that the marriage of Sylvia’s parents (and only to Celia was our mother ever referred to by her name – to the boys she was always ‘your mother’) had also been strong, and then there was a pause, a long pause, and Celia could tell, from a glance he gave her, that he had never spoken to her about whatever he was now on the point of telling her. She took his arm to lead him across the road. ‘But you know,’ he began, ‘there was always a shadow. Her father. It all goes back to him.’ In the half-hour that followed, Celia’s understanding of her family was altered so markedly it was as if, she said, some of the pictures in the photo albums had suddenly changed from black and white to colour.

  The maternal grandparents – Jim and Iris – were the ones we children preferred. When we went to their house we were let loose in the back room with a pile of games and scrap paper and coloured pens, and a pitcher of ginger beer and a plate of biscuits to keep us going until tea-time; at the house of Grandpa Stanley and Grandma Emily, on the other hand, we were confined to a corner of the room in which the grown-ups were talking (left unsupervised, we might have rearranged the cushions or pushed up the thermostat a degree or two), and were fed sandwiches that contained salmon paste spread to a depth of one molecule. Stanley and Emily made us conscious that we were being assessed according to timeless and stringent standards of behaviour (obedience and gratitude being the primary virtues), whereas Jim and Iris seemed to like us for who we were. Grandpa Jim had remarkably soft hands that he would press against our cheeks when we arrived, and he talked to us as if everything we said was of interest. For myself and Charlie he’d make wooden swords and boats, and for Celia he’d make doll-beds and other items of miniature furniture. But when we turned up at their house, we never knew if we would be seeing him. He’d had to go out, Grandma Iris would apologise (she never explained where he’d had to go), but then one afternoon Celia went to the upstairs toilet and heard a creak of springs from the bedroom, and as soon as we were back home she told me and Charlie what she’d heard. After that we were given the truth: that Grandpa Jim suffered from headaches called migraines, and these were sometimes so bad that he had to stay in bed, in the dark, and not talk to anyone. That was the story, and there was never any reason to question it.

  Sylvia had told the same story to Charles Brennan, after they had been courting for several weeks and he still had not set eyes on his girlfriend’s father. Charles and Sylvia had met on the steps of the cinema, where they had gone to see The Ladykillers – Charles alone, Sylvia with her mother. Leaving the cinema, Mrs Wilkins tripped, toppling her daughter as she fell, and it was Charles who came to the rescue, using a pristine handkerchief to bandage the wound on Mrs Wilkins’ shin. The next week, seeing Sylvia across the street, he crossed to ask after her mother. The week after that, he appeared in the shop in which she worked, and as she was assisting him to select a scarf for his mother’s birthday (a birthday that was still four months off – not that she knew this) he admitted that it was not coincidental that he’d chosen this particular shop for his purchase. (He didn’t yet confess that he’d followed her all the way to the shop after their last conversation.) His embarrassment at his own boldness was immediately appealing, as had been his solicitude towards her mother. The fact that – as she soon discovered – he’d been to France and Italy gave him a kind of glamour as well, but what made her realise how unusual he was, what above all else made her fall in love with him was his extraordinary patience. (Charles, for his part, would tell his daughter that he had known he was in love right away, when Sylvia had smiled at him on the steps of the cinema.)

  Any other man, in the early weeks of courting, would have demanded to know why, all of a sudden, his sweetheart had to stay at home to look after her mother every night until some unspecified point in the future, and would not have been content to be told that it was a family problem which had nothing to do with the way she felt about him, and that one day she’d be able to explain exactly what was going on. Yet Charles did accept it, and when at last she did explain – that her father sometimes fell into the doldrums and found it impossible to speak to anyone except her mother, and that when this happened her mother had a very great need of her company – the delicacy of his sympathy made her cry, and within a month she had said she would marry him. The doldrums, as she always called her father’s bad times, came upon him in the winter usually, but sometimes in summer too, as abruptly as a light being switched off; sometimes the darkness would last for no more than a few days at a time, but sometimes it would go on for weeks, and they would begin to think that, this time, there’d be no end to it. At his worst he would take to his bed, talking to no one, not even his wife. He had been like this since he was a child (he was an intelligent pupil, but his teachers didn’t know what to do with a boy who could get a mark of eighty percent in a test, and only twenty percent in the same subject the following month; he left school as soon as he could), and when things became serious with Iris he had told her the truth about his affliction. Other girls had been unable to bear his moods, but Iris had succeeded (albeit not without crises along the way) in adapting to the wild climate of Jim’s mind: she ensured that they made the most of the good spells, and when the darkness descended on him she would leave him alone, because this was all she could do for him. She would make up a bed for herself in the back room, and take him his meals (he might be barely capable of filling a glass of water), for which sometimes she would not receive as much as a word of thanks. During the terrible periods, when Jim could not work (he was an electrician, and poking a screwdriver into a socket is not something you want to be doing on days when you’re having problems distinguishing left from right), she did the odd bit of temping. When her husband emerged again, she managed to resume their life as if the hiatus had merely been a suspension of normality.

  For Sylvia, however, her father’s depressions came to pervade the atmosphere
of every day, not just the days when he was not himself and her mother was in need of her company nearly as much as her mother was needed by her father. Even when he was back with them, and she was expected to carry on as doughtily as her mother, she could not rid herself of her awareness that everything was precarious. At any moment, as an ordinary person might sneeze, her father could simply break. Each day was like tiptoeing across a fraying rope bridge that she knew might fall apart before she reached the other side. And sometimes her father would experience spasms of happiness that were almost as difficult for her to bear as his bouts of gloom: more than once he grabbed her without warning and squeezed her so hard that she’d felt her chest crackle; and there was a day on holiday that she could never forget, when she saw her father, as still as a statue, staring into a rock pool, and she couldn’t bring herself to approach him, not knowing if he had plunged into misery or floated off into a trance of joy.

  Sylvia too, in the early years with Charles, had occasional bouts of uncontainable happiness (he remembered in particular a twirling dance under oak trees, on a sunny day in Wales), some of them so acute that once or twice she worried that she might after all be a bit mad, like her father – but to Charles it was obvious that, more than anything else, it was relief at being freed from her life at home that accounted for these outbursts of skittishness, outbursts which became less frequent as a new and stable life replaced the old. (And as these brief interludes of radiance dwindled, she became subject to attacks of guilt at having left her mother to cope with her father alone.) So, to sum up, life with her parents had made Sylvia an adult at an age when other girls were still playing with skipping ropes – and an adult who, wherever she looked, saw fragility and impermanence before anything else.

  Ellen says she’s not happy about reading what I’ve written about my mother. ‘I feel like I’m intruding,’ she says. ‘There are things here your parents wouldn’t have wanted strangers to know.’