Hidden Symptoms (5 page)

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 mere 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 bran
dished 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. That'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.

If there really were such a thing as magic, he thought, it had something to do with women's bodies.

He watched while Kathy stretched open her deep-set eyes by carefully drawing a mascara brush across each set of eyelashes in turn, an action which he found slightly alarming for the way in which it momentarily lifted the eyelid away from the eyeball. She then smeared a purply-coloured powder on the lids and her eyes remained miraculously wide, their naturally piggy look lost. He watched while she changed the shape of her face by carefully dabbing her cheekbones with an ochre fluid; and while she painted her lips deep red. She kissed a tissue and painted them again, then turned a countenance like a water-colour towards the pier glass to survey the final effect. She saw that he was looking at her looking at herself in his mirror, and without turning round she bounced a smile off the pier glass and across the room to him. The smile revealed a tiny speck of lipstick on her teeth: she carefully wiped it away. She then gathered together all the little bottles and tubes and replaced them in their small corduroy make-up bag, checking in turn that the lid of each was tight.

Robert would have gained a distinctly voyeuristic thrill from watching anyone transform themselves from the sleepy-eyed and tousled person who crept out of bed in
the morning into the dressed and groomed creature who normally faced the world: that it was Kathy simply made it more aesthetically pleasing. As a child, it had been a revelation for him to discover that Miss McGuire, the harridan who taught him when he was in Infants, was not born wearing her brown tweed pinafore. She had to undress herself and go to bed every night and she had to dress herself in the morning in layers, just as Robert himself and his family had to do. It took some believing that other people's clothes were like his own and not all of a piece, like the paper clothes which Rosie's cardboard dolls wore, hanging over their printed underwear from the little tabs at their shoulders. It was hard to believe that other people had real lives utterly independent of his own and, more amazing still, that in the humblest and most mundane features these other lives were just like his own. (Oh, the sight of Miss McGuire that Saturday morning, buying a quarter of cinnamon lozenges! And his father's mirth afterwards as he told his mother, “If ye'd seen the eyes of him, near out on two stalks, he thinks she comes up out of the floor to teach him and then goes back down again!”) Of all his childhood fancies, this had been the most powerful and the most comprehensive. It was the only one about which he was loath to speak, because it still existed in a residual, but strongly perceptible, form. He liked it when his girlfriends stayed the night with him instead of going back to the empty facades of their family homes to wait for their next cue into his life. By staying and sleeping with him and letting him see them putting on their make-up and their clothes
in the morning, they seemed to extend their existence: to re-create themselves. He like that: it helped confirm reality for him.

Kathy was now brushing out her hair. She fastened it up with two combs of tortoiseshell plastic, then moved across the room to a chair by the window and sat in profile to him, looking out into the street.

What was in her mind? Most likely her own sins, he thought. He had never yet met a woman with the guts for atheism; they were all cringing with at least vestigial Christianity at heart. A few nights before that they had inadvertently begun to talk about religion, and when he asked her outright if she believed in God she had said, “No,” but with a “No” so reluctant and so diffident that he did not believe it. He had teased and nagged her, “You do, you do, go on, admit it,” until at last she lost her temper. “Alright, so what if I do? You can be a right pig, Robert McConville, a right bully.”

So what? It put the power of real sin in her hand. Amorality was a bland business, but Kathy was immoral, and spectacularly so. She believed in free choice for right and wrong, and she wilfully, gleefully, chose wrong. It was exciting to dabble with perdition. With a mixture of alarm and sadness, he had listened to the discourse which she poured in his ear one night in bed a short time after he had first known her, a long seamless speech concerning her mother. “So-then-she-said-and-then-I-said …” She told him about the scene there had been when her mother found out that she had been sleeping with her boyfriend, information which she had volunteered not because she
had to, but because she wanted to annoy. “I hope she's happy now she knows that I'm as bad as she always said I was.” It was mainly because of this that he did not believe that she loved him, in spite of her frequent claims to the contrary. He didn't care about being loved but he despised her for lying about it. She had practically admitted to her mother that she did what she did only for the sake of sex and sin, not love. Why, then, would she not admit it to him? As well him as another. Damn, he would make her admit to it, just as he had made her admit to her sneaking religion.

“Kathy,” he said, softly, perfidiously, “penny for your thoughts.” Would she say something cosmetic and coy — “I was thinking about us”? She shook her head and said nothing.

“Kathy? Come on, tell me.” She was silent for another moment before speaking.

“I was thinking about Theresa,” she said.

“Oh,
her,
” he snorted, disappointed at the inaccuracy of his guess. Now there was one person whom he would not want to see prove their reality in the morning. He would have preferred conclusive evidence that she was merely a figment of his imagination, a bad-tempered, chain-smoking hallucination.

“Yes, Theresa,” said Kathy crossly, “and you needn't take that tone when you're talking about her.”

“Oh, but Kathy, she's so belligerent, so aggressive. You saw the way she got at me the other day, making a personal attack out of a political discussion.”

“You deserved that, Robert, and don't try to tell me
you didn't. She said no more than the truth. If you thought about it at all you'd see that she's right.”

“I do think,” he said indignantly.

“No, you don't. Oh, come on, Robert, admit it: you pride yourself on being apolitical, away above all that. It doesn't even interest you.”

“Well, there's no need for her to be so bloody ardent.”

“There's nothing wrong with being ardent, Robert. It's better than being apathetic.”

He did not like the direction this exchange was taking; now he would either have to lose face or let it develop into a full-scale row. “She smokes too much,” he eventually said lamely. “That really gets on my wick, so it does, Is she on commission from Rothman's, or what?”

“It's nerves,” said Kathy.

“Nerves? What has she got to be nervous about?”

“She hardly smoked at all when I first knew her,” said Kathy, which was not an answer to the question which he had asked; and saying that she had been thinking of Theresa had not been strict truth, either, for although she had been thinking of her while putting on her make-up, by the time she moved to the window she was thinking of Francis.

Theresa and Francis were twins. They started at Queen's the same year as Kathy and all three were in the same class. They soon developed the custom of meeting each day in the Union for coffee and Mars Bars, while Francis, the most inveterate and most inept doer of crosswords she had ever met, attempted the Simplex puzzle in the
Irish Times
.

“Twelve down. Bubbles on the skin. Eight letters. No idea.”

“Blisters. Easy-peas,” she crowed. “Gimme another.” After his death, Theresa had given her as a keepsake a
Daily Telegraph
book of crosswords in which every single puzzle had been attempted, but not one of which was complete.

From the first she had preferred Francis to Theresa, because she was reserved while he was genuinely shy: he made a much greater effort to be friendly than his sister ever did. They were always together. Sometimes Kathy wondered if Theresa resented slightly her friendship with Francis. She was hurt and surprised when he left college after the Easter vacation in first year, for he had not given even a hint that he was thinking of such a move. When she asked Theresa about it, Theresa said crossly, “Oh, Francis! Don't even start me on that. He said he was leaving Queen's because he couldn't get to grips with it, as lightly as you like, as if it was an evening class in O-level crochet or something. We can't get wit out of him, you might as well talk to the fireplace.”

“What will he do now?”

“I shudder to think.”

He took a job filling shelves in a city-centre supermarket. Kathy saw him often between his leaving university in the spring and his death that autumn. She used to call into the supermarket and saw him in his brown overall, stacking up jars of instant coffee or putting price labels on tins of condensed soup. She asked him why he did not try to find a more interesting job.

“I like boring work,” he said. “It leaves my mind free for higher things. Anyway,” he added, “I don't expect to be here for very long,” a remark which, with hindsight, she understood even less than she had done at the time. Her friendships with Theresa and Francis became consolidated for their being conducted separately. She was immensely fond of Francis, who had the most tender and lovely smile she had ever seen. When Francis smiled at her she felt important and loved, although in sustained conversation he failed utterly to maintain eye contact; his glance flitting from his shoes to displays of cornflakes to huge yellow posters saying “Low Low Prices.” Before they parted, he always dared to look her in the face once more.

He took her out to lunch a few times, to a seedy little café where the sandwiches indecorously turned up their crusts to reveal their fillings; and a solitary, stale pork pie lurked under a perspex dome like the control of a scientific experiment which had gone horribly wrong. “Have a fly's graveyard,” he would say, “or a wee cement biscuit, they're nice.” Kathy was often lonely, and then she would envy Theresa her gentle, eccentric brother. She had never known two people so close. She wished that she was half of such a loving couple. Maybe if she had had a brother or sister, it might have been like that. It wasn't fair that she was an only child with a mother who didn't care for her and a dead father whom she couldn't even remember, and a fluctuating fund of men, none of whom had ever really cared for her any more than she cared for them. But then Francis died, and she
felt guilty for envying Theresa. She knew that the greater the love, the harder it must be now.

She would never forget the first time she saw Theresa back in college after the murder, sitting at a table in the Union, and looking abnormally solitary. She looked incomplete and shockingly different; even her hair and clothes seemed bereaved. Kathy had been unable to approach her then and had gone away and cried and cried. Looking at Theresa alone, she had felt intense pity and fear.

“Think kindly of her, Robert, please. You don't understand her.”

“And you do?”

“Not completely, but still better than you do.” She came over and sat beside him on the bed. “It's wrong for you to judge her, you mustn't do it.” She leaned against him and put her arms around his neck, thinking how very lucky she was to have Robert. At least somebody loved her.

Robert gently removed the plastic combs and ruffled her hair. Bloody women. He would never understand them. He thought Theresa a most unlikely friend for Kathy and wondered what the attraction could be. Probably that of an unplumbed opposite, he guessed. Theresa's strange eyes had their effect seemingly without any willed effort on her part; her gaze was like that of an indolent cobra. She was a right oddity, he thought. In a way she wasn't really like a girl. Never before had he met anyone so angular and androgynous; indeed, never before had he known anyone for so long and so little considered their sex. It had only really come to his at
tention some two days before their recent argument, when he had been again obliged to give her a lift home from the library. On reaching her street, the door-lock on her side was stuck, so he had leant across to open it, and as he did so, through the thick fog of cigarette smoke which permanently hung around her, he had smelt the faintest whiff of a light, flowery perfume. He felt not the tiniest frisson of sexuality, but a major tremor of shock: for the first time ever, he was conscious of her body. It begged more questions than it answered. He wondered if she was a virgin, but balked at the notion, for he shuddered to imagine what it would be like to kiss her, much less sleep with her. Kissing Theresa, he thought, would be dangerous and painful; it would sting the lips as it did to kiss a poisoned Bible or a religious statue daubed with Belladonna in a Jacobean tragedy. To embrace her would be like driving an iron spike into his chest.