Free Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden Page B

my work was being praised, it would have killed off any pleasure I might have felt; it would have enraged me. But I couldn’t find the words to say all this to Molly.
    All this had happened at the start of the year, and now it was midsummer. Now I was sitting in a spare bedroom in Molly’s house, gazing down into her garden and trying to write a new play. Now I was beginning to realise how severely damaged my confidence had been by all of this. As I sat at the desk, struggling with the idea of the man and the hare, I couldn’t help wondering if I was unconsciously trying to close down my own imagination, sothat I wouldn’t be able to write another play, and as a result would never have to go through such a grisly experience again. My computer screen had gone black yet again, as coloured geometric shapes morphed languidly across it. I moved the mouse just for the sake of it, to cancel the screen saver and bring up what little text was there, to give myself the illusion of actually doing something. As one does in such circumstances I tried to find an excuse, and decided it was to do with the room in which I was working.
    It had been Molly’s idea that I sleep in her bed and set up my computer in the de facto spare room. There were white gauze curtains figured with daisies. When I stayed with her in winter, Molly always lit a fire for me in the tiny fireplace. The bed had a pink quilt and was piled with small lacy pillows. There was the desk and chair at which I was working and a comfortable chintzy armchair. It was soft and bright and restful.
    Once, many years ago, not long after I first met Molly and a short while after she’d bought the house, I came at her invitation to spend a day with her. When she met me at the door she looked thoughtful and concerned. ‘Fergus, my brother, is staying here with me,’ she said. ‘He’s had a kind of breakdown.’ She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t pursue the matter. I had never met Fergus. He was closed away in the spare room and he didn’t appear at all for the duration of my visit, but there wasn’t a moment throughout that day that we weren’t aware of him.
    Sometimes, on stage, not showing something can be more powerful than showing it. The idea that murder or torture is taking place behind a closed door is more disturbing than watching actors grapple with each other,ineffectually mimicking horrors. And so it was that day in Molly’s house. She went up a few times to see Fergus; I could hear soft voices and then the sound of the solid bedroom door closing behind her before she reappeared, looking worried and upset, but she said nothing about him and I knew better than to ask. At one point I went upstairs to the bathroom and from behind the shut door of the spare room I could hear the sound of someone crying, although to say that doesn’t begin to do justice to it. It was the most heartbreaking sound I think I’ve ever heard, such suffering there was in it, such terrible abandonment and grief.
    Thereafter, I always associated the spare room with Fergus, and I didn’t like it. It was as if his sorrow was so intense it had infiltrated the curtains and the carpets, the very walls, and could never be eradicated. No matter how softly pretty its furnishings it had for me always an air of melancholy; I even fancied it was always a couple of degrees cooler than the other rooms in the house at any given time. This was nonsense, of course, as was the image that I conceived of Fergus. I could never forget that terrible weeping I had heard, and he became in my mind some kind of monster of grief, the embodiment of human misery. ‘Unhappy.’ That was as much as Molly would say about him for a long time. Poor Fergus, he’s so unhappy . She was vague about what was actually wrong with him, vaguer still about the cause of it. But one thing soon became apparent to me: Fergus was the most important person in her