Read Online Hidden Symptoms by Deirdre Madden - Free Book Online Page B

sort had been made that day, for there was never a day so dull that the newspapers had no headlines, but what was for her its only significant event was unrecorded. No paper carried the leader: “Patsy Cassidy Snapped by Street Photographer.” She would have given a year of her life to know the day and the hour at which that photograph had been taken. She felt that such knowledge would have given her the power to pluck and save her father from the flux of time.
    It was even worse for poor Kathy, she thought. Her mother absolutely refused to talk about her husband, of ‘whom there was not a single extant photograph. Mrs. O’Gorman evidently bore her bereavement through such silence and negation, but it was a source of deep resentment for her daughter. “He might as well never have lived,” she said bitterly.
    As children, Theresa’s father and mother had travelled frequently on the same local train; he and his father going from Belfast to visit a rural grandmother; she and her mother coming up to the city for a day’s shopping. On every journey, the train stopped at Lisburn Station and the children saw a large metal advertisement which read “DON’T BE MISLED: CAMP COFFEE IS THE BEST.” Independently, they both thought that “misled” was pronounced “mizzled” and wondered what on earth it could possibly mean. Only after their marriage did they discover their shared misunderstanding.
    So they met and married, then honeymooned in Clifden, a town which Theresa had never visited and neverwanted to visit. She accepted her mother’s evocation of Clifden as she accepted Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg. Each place was conceived in the memory, language and discourse of others, then took life in her own imagination; the illusory streets and squares and people rose before her. It would be futile to look for these towns, not because they had changed but because in the form in which she saw them they had never truly existed.
    This honeymoon Clifden, then, was a dream, and the real nature of her parents’ short marriage, the first days of which had been spent there, was also impossible to pin down. Once, only once, had her mother let slip: “It wasn’t all roses,” and while this did not give the lie to the stories which she told of a kind and happy husband, it showed that the truth was only partial. She wished that her mother would say, “He was sometimes selfish and thoughtless and mean — but only sometimes; I loved him, so it doesn’t really matter.” While she did not know the whole story, her father remained an affable but unreal stranger. She could not love him.
    She could understand her mother’s tendency to romanticize the memory of someone simply because they were dead: she did it herself with Francis. As if it had all been so perfect! Never a cross word? At times there had been nothing else. She could make herself forget almost completely the bitter rows they had had when he left university, but that did not mean that they had never happened. When she thought back now, she was still angry, she still thought that she had been right and Francis had been a fool, a stubborn fool.
    â€œA supermarket, Francis? A bloody supermarket?”
    â€œYes, Theresa, a supermarket. I have to do it. It’s what God wants for me now.”
    â€œBefore He formed you in the womb He knew you, and decreed that you be a filler of shelves, is that what you’re trying to tell me? Are you to be a voice crying in the wilderness, ‘10p off Heinz Beans, this week’s special offer’?”
    He did not reply to that, but left the room, slamming the door behind him. She never missed a chance to mock and goad him. “I hope you’re ambitious, Francis, I hope you aspire to high and noble things, like the bacon counter.”
    He had once said, “You’ll see,” but she never did. She still felt that she had failed in not