Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  Perched on the edge of the tin trunk, she began to cry for him as she had not cried for a very long time, reflexively, almost; she could not stop herself and it hardly occurred to her to try. And while the body cried (the eyes wept, the mouth wailed and the fists tried to wipe away the tears), her mind seemed independent of this spontaneous grief. Something within her, calm and apparently rational, was thinking that it was impossible for her to continue living without him, that she needed him as she needed air. She did not believe that she could bear the loneliness of being in this world without him.

  Such absolute loneliness had come to her the first night after his death, when she went to bed. Lights out, she put her head down and then, too, she had started to cry automatically. When they were children, she had fingered the pink satin bindings on the edge of the blankets until they were frayed and split; and Francis, before sleeping, had plaited the fringes of the rug. Always for her to be in bed in a dark room was to be in a place timeless as the sea. Now she lay under those same blankets and rugs and a cold stiff sheet, but everything had changed. The fact of his death was something which she would have to take to bed with her for the rest of her life, a new reality which ended innocence as absolutely as lost virginity; ineluctable, irreversible. On waking, his death would still be there. For every moment of every day until she also died, his death would be there, and if she forgot about it for a moment, a week, a year, even if it were possible for her to put it from her mind forever, it would not change the truth. His death would still always be there, waiting silently to be recognized and remembered.

  When she had stopped crying, she lit a cigarette and while she smoked it tried to control her thoughts. It was dangerous to think too much about his having been murdered: that was to risk being lost in bitterness and hate. She tried to make herself think only of the pain of loss: that in itself was enough.

  When she had finished her cigarette she brushed some ash from her knee, and left the attic.

  Three days later, Robert received a brief, polite letter thanking him for a most interesting and enjoyable evening. That afternoon, on emerging from the revolving doors of the Central Library, he discovered the writer of the letter standing on the top step, her irregular eyes narrowed in concentration as she lit a cigarette.

  “You’ll kill yourself with those things,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, after a slight pause, looking at him sideways. He said that his car was parked nearby and he offered her a lift home.

  “Are you going towards West Belfast?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m going to see my sister. I can leave you off.”

  She thanked him and they walked to the car together. When her cigarette was finished she immediately lit another. She spoke little. He wondered if she was shy, and as he drove up the Falls Road he glanced over at her and decided she was most definitely not.

  “You must meet Rosie,” he said with insincere warmth as he turned into the street where his sister lived, thinking that the encounter might be revealing.

  Unlike Robert, however, Theresa did not react with perceptible revulsion to the vulgarity which came out to meet them at a front door bristling with knobs, knockers, brass numbers and bell-pulls. She did not start at the sheer ugliness of the living-room and, although he cringed at Rosie’s attitude of good hostess, she did not.

  Only Rosie and little Tommy were at home. The latter lay sleeping on the sofa, one arm stretched out Romantically and the other clasping a tatty cuddly toy: the dead Chatterton with a Womble. Rosie shook him awake to meet the visitor and, smitten with shyness, he stuck his face in his mother’s armpit.

  “Come on now, none of that. Show Theresa the good boy you are. Do Shakin’ Stevens for her.” From her apron pocket she produced a ten-pence piece as a bribe. “Go on, Tommy, do Shakin’ Stevens for her. Go on, do Shakey.” She waved the coin enticingly before his nose and a pudgy, covetous fist shot out to grab the money, but she raised her hand higher. “No, Tommy, only when you’ve done Shakey for Theresa.” His eyes flickered sadly. He was torn between timidity and greed, but timidity won out and he would not perform.

  Rosie went into the kitchen to make tea and took Theresa with her, while Robert eavesdropped shamelessly from the living-room. Their conversation centered around the object which Robert probably hated more than any other in the house: a small plaque which hung over the sink and incorporated a stump of grey plastic to represent the Madonna, a few flowers of coloured tin, and the words “A la Grotte Benie j’ai prié pour toi.” He could hear Rosie saying that if her Premium Bond came up she would go to Lourdes; she had always wanted to, but unless she won something it would be years and years before she could ever afford it. And to his amazement, the Basilisk was heard to reply that she had always wanted to go to Lisieux because her real name was Marie Therese; she was called for the Little Flower.

  Robert at this point congratulated himself on having brought her to the house. This was a new side altogether! Little Flower! He almost snorted aloud in scorn. Then he heard his sister’s voice say very softly, “Robert doesn’t practise his religion any more. It’s very sad, he got sort of — cynical — as he grew up.”

  “Oh, that often happens,” he heard Theresa answer airily. “People read things and they get fancy ideas in their heads; they think they know it all. He’ll grow out of it.”

  “I doubt it,” said Rosie solemnly. “He’s twenty-eight now.”

  And Robert was furious to realize immediately on Theresa’s re-entering the room (although she gave him neither grin nor glance to intimate this) that she had known all along he was listening in, and that her last remark was a deliberate gibe to which he could not reply without revealing that he had been ear-wigging.

  *

  For a long time after that, every time he saw a flower or heard one mentioned he grimaced to think how inappropriate a symbol it was for his angular and defensive friend. To savour fully its absurdity, he stopped one day before a florist’s window in Royal Avenue, where the display of blooms was exact and exotic as a Rousseau jungle; and Robert started in surprise when a florist’s face suddenly appeared through the foliage, bright as a naif tiger. She removed a green tin vase of Baby’s Breath and retired, but her action had exposed to Robert a much more significant vase. It contained bunches of Tiger Lilies, magnificent in their beauty and perfection, and yet when Robert looked at them closely they unnerved him. From the heart of every flower started long, whip-like stamens, each terminating in a blunt, dark and dusty anther. The thick, creamy-white petals were prickled slightly towards the centre of each flower and the fleshy points were stippled bright red, as if with blood. He imagined a heavy, cloying perfume. If she were any sort of flower, he thought, this was it: not a soft, sweet-smelling innocent little blossom, but this bloody, savage, phallic, heartless flower. He thought of how incessantly she smoked, and wondered why he found her so frightening.

  At Robert’s mother’s wake, seemingly countless women with tired faces who were fresh from kissing her corpse and touching their Rosary beads to her hands had grasped Robert by the forearm and quavered, “Your mother was a saint, son.” His mother died when he was twenty-two, his father having long predeceased her, dying when Robert was eight. Sometimes it bemused him to think how slight the effect of that first death had been upon him, and how faint were his memories of his father; so faint that, ludicrously, he even wondered at times if he had imagined him. Outside a Christian Fundamentalist Church on the Donegal Pass, he had once misread the words of their Wayside Pulpit and saw on the virulent pink poster not “Have You Ever Thought Of God As Your Father?” but “Have You Ever Thought Of Your Father As God?” And in a strange vision the God in whom he did not believe became one with his father, whose existence he also doubted. The unreal Supreme Being flashed across his mind as a mild little Belfast man with a loft full of pigeons and a weak heart. People also praised him highly after his death. “He’d have given ye two ha’pennies for a penny, your Da.”

  As Rob
ert grew up he found it increasingly difficult to live with his mother. He did not understand her. He did not understand the strange, intense religion which dominated her life. He had no patience with her saints, her statues, her novenas, her holy pictures, her holy water, her blind, total, absolute faith. As a child, he had disliked religion because it made him feel guilty and he became increasingly disenchanted as he grew up. By the time he left school he did not believe in God, nor did he want to.

  He was a total disappointment to his mother, rejecting both her religion and the petit bourgeois aspirations which she nurtured on his behalf. She wanted him to marry a nice Catholic girl from a decent Catholic family; a teacher or nurse, for choice. She wanted him to “get on,” to get a good steady job, and although she was pleased that he went to university his choice of subject — English Literature — dismayed her. Although uneducated herself, she was astute enough to know that an arts degree was not an instant passport to a highly remunerative or socially acceptable career. He refused to study law, refused teacher training, refused to apply for a clerical post with the Civil Service. And although all this vexed her a great deal, perhaps they could have muddled along with minimal acrimony had it not been for Robert’s total lack of religion.

  “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?” How often had she said that to him? She believed that everyone had their own particular cross to bear in life and he was obviously hers. Sometimes she looked as though she actually had to carry all six foot two and twelve stone of him around on her frail and narrow back. Her face was tired and sad during their habitual disagreements, but only once had she lost her temper and that was on the unforgettably embarrassing day when, in the course of tidying his room, she found a packet of contraceptives. When he came in that evening she faced him with it, and he saw that she was deeply shocked: her own son was a damned soul, an evil and wicked person. What she had found proved his perdition to her as conclusively as a box of black tallow candles.

  Robert’s memory operated in a cruel and unfortunate manner, clouding his happy memories and sharpening the unhappy; and so when he thought, reluctantly, of scenes which he would rather forget — scenes of pain and anger and embarrassment and grief — they always returned to him in absurdly vivid detail. He could still feel the terrible cringing shame of that moment when he walked in and saw the offending packet sitting at the extreme edge of the kitchen table, as far away as was possible from half a black-crusted bap swathed in tissue paper and a bone-handled knife, smeared with butter and jam to its hilt. He saw the wedding ring bedded into the red flesh of his mother’s hand, which trembled with what he perversely imagined to be fear: he was genuinely surprised when she flared out angrily.

  “Aren’t you the big fella, eh? Aren’t you the smart lad? Will ye be so smart if some of yer lady friends has a baby? Then what’ll ye do?”

  “Oh, come on, Ma,” he had mumbled, “the whole point is that they won’t have babies.”

  At this she lost her temper completely and began to hit him, her anger immense but her blows pathetically weak and puny. With one short, effortless movement of his arm he could have shoved her out into the back scullery to cool off in the company of the mangle, a red net sack of Spanish onions and a meat safe, but he could not bring himself to do it. Instead, he stood there gormlessly while she hit him, and wished that her thumps were more powerful and painful and worthy of resistance. At last, worn out, she started to cry and left the kitchen: he could hear her sobbing as she clumped upstairs to her room.

  Home life was extremely frosty for a very long time after that and the eventual thaw was never complete: they were never on the same footing again. She still railed at him frequently for being irreligious and immoral, but never again referred to the row or its cause. They were more polite to each other than they had been before. He was quite surprised that she did not insist upon his leaving home; in fact, when he broached the delicate question one day, she said disarmingly, “Why would ye do that? D’ye think I’d put me own flesh an’ blood out on the streets?”

  “I’d get a flat,” he said foolishly.

  “Ye’ve no money,” was her pragmatic reply. “Ye’ll be time enough when ye’re earning.”

  The following year, Rosie married and Tom moved in, Robert left university, started working for a local arts magazine and moved out. But he was under no illusions. He always knew what his mother thought she was up against, and she developed a way of looking at him that made him shiver. She saw him as damned but not past redemption, and his lack of the desire to be redeemed was a real torment to her.

  She died almost a year after Rosie’s marriage. On the day she was hospitalized, Robert was sitting by her bed when she opened her eyes and gazed vaguely around the ward.

  “Ma,” he whispered, “it’s me, Robert. Is there anything I can do for you?” And she had slid her tired, watery eyes sideways, looking at him with ridicule and pity. As if he needed to ask what she wanted of him! He was spoiling her death; he was the unfinished business she would take to her grave. He hoped she realized that she was not responsible for whatever was wrong in him. Did she know that people who didn’t believe in God (and who didn’t want to — could she understand that?) — such people could not change to belief at a moment’s notice merely to oblige their mothers.

  But she had looked away again, closed her eyes and three hours later became comatose, remaining thus for three more days, at the end of which time she died.

  Theresa’s mother stretched up and ripped off a little page from the wad of months stitched together beneath a reproduction of Murillo’s “Flight into Egypt.” “First of July,” she said, scrunching up June in her fist. “Feast of the Holy Blood.” Theresa warmed the teapot and tossed two tea bags into it; her mother threw the crumpled page into the fire and then glanced over the list of feasts for the new month. “Our Francis was a martyr, wasn’t he?” she said.

  “I suppose he was,” Theresa replied, “but he had no choice, had he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean martyrs usually have a choice; if they deny their religion they’re allowed to live, and if they won’t deny it, well, they martyr them. And they just killed Francis because of his religion, he had no choice.”

  “How do you know?” said her mother.

  She paused. “Well, yes,” she said, “you’re right, I don’t. We don’t know anything at all about what happened to him, only that … I suppose he was a martyr.”

  She made the tea, poured it out and they drank it without speaking. Theresa also had a cigarette to calm herself, angry at having set up that little exchange. Such talk reminded them of how very little they knew of the circumstances in which Francis had died. Once, while reading a terrorist court case in the paper, her mother had said, “Maybe when they catch the person who killed our Francis, we’ll find out more,” but Theresa found the thought of this horrifying. Unlike her mother, who was haunted by the idea of the “someone” who had killed her son, Theresa could hardly believe that such a person existed. Only on two occasions had she been completely convinced of the reality of Francis’s murderer, and she had found it overwhelming.

  It first happened shortly after his death, when she awoke from a nightmare in the small hours one morning and realized that just as it would be impossible to find Francis now, no matter where in the city or the world one went, so also it would be impossible not to find somewhere the man who had killed him. That person was somewhere out there as surely as she was in bed in her room, and his invisible existence seemed to contaminate the whole world. She lay awake until morning, afraid to sleep in the darkness which contained him.

  A few days after that, she arrived too early for an arranged meeting with Kathy in a city-centre pub. She bought a drink and while she waited she looked around at the other customers, the majority of whom were men, until slowly the thought of the man who had killed her brother crept back into her mind. Those men who were laughing over in the corner; that man
with reddish hair and big, rough hands who was drinking alone; even the white-coated barman, cutting wedges of lemon for gin-and-tonics: any one of them might have done it. She gazed at each of them in turn and thought in cold fright: “Is he the one? Did he do it? Is he the man who murdered Francis?” It was, of course, improbable, but it was possible, and that grain of possibility took away the innocence of every man in the pub, and of every man whom she would ever see in the city. Every stranger’s face was a mask, behind which Francis’s killer might be hiding. The barman approached the table and said, “Will I get you another drink?” She could not bear to raise her eyes to look at him, but shook her bowed head in refusal of his services. From that day on, Belfast was poisoned for her. She could not conceive of Francis’s killer as an individual, as a person who might be arrested, tried and punished, but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met. It was as if the act of murder was so dreadful that the person who committed it had forfeited his humanity and had been reduced to the level of pure evil. He had dragged that world down with him: everyone was guilty.