Free Hidden Symptoms by Deirdre Madden Page B

seein’ as how they were Brits. Well, the leg was brave an’ badly hurt, so she got it all strapped up an’ three days later she’s sittin’ on a chair by her door with the leg propped up before her on a stool. What comes along, but an army lan’ rover. It slows down, see, an’ one of the Brits sticks his head out of the back an’ he calls to her, ‘Hello, Eileen, how’s your leg?’ An’ Eileen, Eileen, she calls back, ‘Still hingin’ from me arse.’”
    Tom almost choked with laughter as he came to the punchline of his joke, which Robert did not find particularly amusing. A stream of words drifted into his mind to describe the noises Tom was making: “a coughball of laughter leaped from his throat, dragging after it a rattlingchain of phlegm.” They were splendid words but they were not Robert’s own, and as he watched Tom laughing and coughing he wondered which was worse: the claustrophobia of Belfast or the verbal deficiency which prevented him from adequately describing it.
    Rosie sighed and shrugged away the thought of Tom as spectator at her confinement. “I saw your girlfriend the other day,” she said, “in Clonard.”
    â€œKathy?” he exclaimed in amazement. “In Clonard?” He did not know, nor care to know, all Kathy’s movements when she was away from him, but he could not believe that the chapel of a Redemptorist monastery was one of her haunts.
    â€œNo,” said Rosie, “not Kathy. I don’t know any Kathy. I mean Theresa, the girl you brought here.”
    â€œOh, Theresa,” he said. “Were you speaking to her?”
    â€œYes. She’s nice. I feel sorry for her.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI don’t know: there’s just something about her.”
    So the Basilisk went to Clonard, did she? One day when she was outside the library having a fag he would leave a note on her absented desk saying, “Nymph in thy orisons be remembered all my sins.” Rosie broke into his thoughts.
    â€œWho’s Kathy, then?”
    â€œMy girlfriend,” he said shortly. “It’s through her that I know Theresa.”
    â€œOh.” She looked hurt and resentful, but he would still tell her nothing. She was bound to have already a fair idea of his lifestyle, but the details would shock her.To suspect was one thing, but to know was quite another, and he was afraid that he would alienate her in exactly the same way in which he had alienated his mother. It would have been little comfort to her to say: “Rosie, I couldn’t tell you the things even if I really wanted to.” There were things of which he was too ashamed. He could never tell her about what he had done on the night of their mother’s death.
    On the evening when her remains were brought from the house to the chapel he had, immediately on returning from the short service, gone up to where she had been laid out. He was taken aback by the ravished air of the little room. A small oleograph of the Sacred Heart had been tilted askew on the wall by the press of mourners. A few velvety petals had dropped from the little vase of roses on the dressing-table, the mirror of which was sheeted. On top of the chest of drawers were long pennons of paper which were printed with crucifixes and all stuck with beaded rods of creamy wax. The pennons were crumpled and torn as a result of having been removed from the candlesticks in great haste by the undertakers. Then he saw the bed with its quilt depressed and slightly dragged to one side, as if his mother had been merely sleeping there for half an hour in the afternoon, rather than lying in her coffin. But you could rumple beds with something other than sleeping or death, and that very night he brought a girl back to his flat and frightened her with passion.
    She in turn startled him afterwards by saying suddenly, “I spy with my little eye something beginning with