Hidden Symptoms

FOR MY MOTHER, MARY MADDEN

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 insulted 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 win
dows 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.