Bad Girl Magdalene (13 page)

‘They always did that.’

‘This Brother used to let out a right roar of a cheer if he caught you. I got the staggers. That’s what we called it when we got to falling around the place after a whacking. I still can’t bend my elbow from falling that way.’

After a pause, ‘You know what?’

‘No? What?’

‘I reckon Holer had his elbow bent like that from a breaking of it.’

‘How’d it get broken, then?’

‘One Brother had a leather hoop he put your arm through on the wall to stop you ducking. You had to face the wall anyway, so you’d try to stare back over your shoulder, kind of, see the old thing coming, like a rocket it was. The loop stopped you twisting out of its way, see? I broke my elbow doing that. Got mysel’ whacked for it.’

‘You knew Holer from before, then?’

‘No. I tellt you, no. But I reckon he knew. Jaysus, a fine marksman he was. I reckon the Army should send him a turkey at Christmas for what Holer did.’

‘Seen him since, have you?’

‘No. I heard somebody say he might have gone to work the ships in Cork somewhere. Has a wife and two grand children. Somebody said they’d seen him walking along to the park of a Sunday. Stands watching the games. Never speaks to anybody, just stood watching them two children of his, turned out like new pins. He just watches.’

‘Watches them, does he?’

‘Somebody went right up to him and asked if he was Holer. He just stared straight ahead and said, eyes on them two grand little children of his, “Never heard of anybody by that name, friend” and turned away. Odd, that.’

‘That’s not odd.’

‘No. I didn’t think it was.’

‘I hated the well.’

‘I heard they filled it in.’

‘It’s a housing estate now.’

‘Some lad drowned. Nobody knew why.’

‘They make a lot of money from the housings.’

‘That’s how they can buy them auld racehorses.’

Grumblings of laughter at the thought of owning racehorses, and some recollections of which they would bet on next time they went to Leopardstown, made them laugh and chuckle and set the calls to shut up from along the ward corridor. The silent nun thought they themselves were quite like a sort of weather, and reflected how strange men were, so different from women. She almost started wondering how it was that they could speak to each other from those frail minds of theirs and their even more fragile memories, and why God had made everyone so different in the genders.

‘I’d burn down Daingean,’ Ted said simply, after a long gap.

‘I got beaten for peeing my bed, started when I was four.’

‘I heard I had a cousin somewhere in St Joseph’s. He got whacked terrible for bed-wetting. I was scared to ask anybody if I really did have a cousin or not in case they started on me for having a cousin who peed his bed.’

‘I got whacked in the night.’

‘I don’t like nights, not even now.’

‘Nor me.’

‘That’ll be why old Mr Gorragher sings all the night through, to stop it being night.’

‘I have to have everything in the house laid out in order. That’s what you had to do not to get whacked.’

‘I’ve a tube in my dick, save me peeing my bed now I’ve got the dribbles. I was so happy the doctor said that and the nurse stuck it in.’

‘So you’d not pee the bed?’

‘Course. That’s what that bottle’s for underneath.’

‘I tellt my daughter, anything in the house, don’t throw that away. I keep on saying it, and she says, “Dad, it’s only yesterday’s, and what do you want with an auld newspaper anyway?” I don’t let her.’

‘Saves me peeing the bed, my tube.’

‘She clears them out while I’m down the boreen having a drink. She thinks I’m so gaga I don’t notice, but I do. Sometimes I take them right out of the dustbin and put them in order on the table. She goes mad.’

‘I’d burn that old Ranter school down to the ground, if I could get away with it.’

‘The Australians were as bad.’

‘Were they?’

‘Christian Brothers do it to the little ones. They’re called abusers nowadays. I seed it on the television.’

‘Even over there?’

‘They showed it.’

‘There was that great page, pages of it, in the newspapers.’

‘There was this great spread, double, saying the Church had gone sorry over what they did.’

‘No good now.’

‘It’s to save the Church money.’

‘It’s unnatural.’

‘The trouble is when you get through the day.’

‘I like to think of the war instead of times I was small.’

‘That’s God’s truth. Wars are best.’

‘And horse racing.’

‘I don’t like to watch the hurling.’

‘Nor me. Horse racing’s better. Football, maybe too.’

‘And the war. I had a pal went into the RAF. He liked being not spoken to, in the bombing. Bomber Command, him. He did bomb-aiming. He said it was so quiet, just his old bomber humming away.’

‘Was he in the Industrial School with you?’

‘No. I think he was from Encrelge in County Wicklow somebody said.’

‘Bomb-aimer, eh? Clever, he must have been.’

‘They had pencils and maps to work out where they were.’

‘Clever lad. They picked them out special, I heard.’

‘Said it was so quiet and peaceful. He made up hymns from the airplane.’

‘What hymns?’

‘One particular. I forget what it was.’

‘I’ll bet I know.’

‘Bet you don’t.’

‘Bet I do.’

‘Go on, then. Guess.’

‘If I guess right you’ll say I’m wrong so’s you win the bet.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will.’

‘Bet you a punt.’

‘Who’ll decide who’s right?’

‘Me.’

‘What’s the point of that?’

Calls began from down the corridor, complaints of George and Ted talking. Sister Francesca gathered her skirts and silently moved away.

Magda was late, from instinct more than accident. She deliberately took her time walking along the Borro, bold as brass, about to meet her young man.

Over and over she said it to herself, meeting
her
young man. Greatly daring, meeting her young
man
. Then meeting her young man. It made her breathless, though the whole day she’d done nothing but forget everything she decided to do. Twice she started the hoovering without plugging the thing in at all. And once Mrs MacLehose, with the five children (with her still saying, wicked old ironing woman that she was, ‘and no more of that malarkey, I can tell you now’), had to reprimand Magda for daydreaming, who was secretly saying over to herself about meeting her young man. ‘Sure to God it’ll be some young feller-me-lad she thinks is going to be her bonny for ever and a day like in them fairy stories, that’s it, sure as Sunday.’

Magda thought Mrs MacLehose dreadful sometimes, but Oonagh laughed at her and even egged the old ironing woman on with, ‘Tell ’em, old un,’ causing Mrs MacLehose to erupt with a mouthful. This only started Oonagh off laughing all the more.

Oonagh it was who told Magda about lipstick. Magda said it was the tool of the devil himself, because they’d kept reading out bits from St Jerome’s letters, and he was a saint sitting up there at God’s right hand. Oonagh said no, St Jerome hated women being beautiful because he knew girls were always up to something, but as long as you kept your hand on your ha’penny you’d be all right. She lent Magda a lipstick and gave her her first lesson about cosmetics.

‘It doesn’t mean you’re hanging out of the windows in Babylon, Magda, just because you dab a bit of stuff round your eyes and use scent and colour on your mouth.’

‘It’s wrong, Oonagh.’

‘Stuff that old nonsense, girl. Watch.’

And Oonagh got on with it right there and then, standing in front of the mirror by the bathroom door in the St Cosmo with her lips all pursed up like she was going to kiss the mirror. Magda exclaimed in alarm, remembering that if you looked too long into the mirror the devil himself would stare right back at you.

‘Now you do it.’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘Let me.’

And Oonagh ran the lipstick over Magda’s lips slowly, making her stretch her mouth tight. Magda felt really strange. Her face looked so different.

‘See?’

‘I look funny. Not like me at all.’

‘You’d be nice if you had any colour. Jesus, but you’re a pale girl.’

‘I’m the same as I always was.’

Magda didn’t know if this was true, because she’d never really had a mirror inspection before, except when the Inspectors
came to the Magdalenes. Strange, but she felt something of disloyalty to the Magdalenes right now, seeing herself changing before that old mirror. Hadn’t she ought to have done this before, her getting on to her twentieth birthday this coming Twenty-Second of July next time round?

‘Magda Finnan, you never are. You can’t be.’

‘What? Why?’

Magda didn’t know what she meant. She was becoming flustered, what with Oonagh busying herself about her little handbag she had right there with a scent bottle, a funny shape and blue as blue, a powder compact like the Whore of Babylon and a blackish pencil for her eyes.

‘Stay still and I’ll do your face.’

‘I’d feel horrid.’

‘No, girl. You look horrid as you are, white as an old sheet straight from Mrs MacLehose’s iron and a sight less interesting, sure y’are.’

‘Does everybody do this?’

‘Sure we do. The whole world. Keep still.’

‘Won’t people notice?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘It’s not…’

‘Who’s to say the Virgin Mary herself didn’t run a bit of lippie round her own gob the instant she knew she was going to have Baby Jesus?’

‘Oonagh, that’s terrible.’

‘Shush. Keep still or I’ll poke your eye out. You can really look and make your mind up. If you think you’ve gone over the top you can get it off in half a sec then do it again, until you look like a million.’

‘Will they tell me off?’

‘Old Sister Stephanie will, sure as God, but that’s only par for the course. Go easy at first, seeing you’re new to it all. You know they keep marks on us?’

‘On who?’

‘On us workers here. They have a tally sheet, like them old dockers used in England to keep score of how many sacks they load on them old Liverpool ships.’

‘Tally sheet?’ Magda sprang away from the cosmetic lesson.

‘Mrs MacLehose tellt me. She stows her ironed sheets in the nuns’ quarters, them being too busy being holy to carry much. She’s seen it, a table like the old men are forever talking about in the football league in the morning papers.’

‘Is my name on it?’

‘Course it is.’ Oonagh was amused at Magda’s alarm.

‘What’s it for?’

Magda thought she was done with all that now she was in a place of her own. Well, nearly her own, in a block where all the other releasees lived among real other people who were getting on a bit, like the old lady along the landing she had to be wary of when Bernard her Garda man came calling to do his sad thing to Magda.

‘To keep count of us, what we do.’

‘To report us, take us in charge?’

‘No, silly. They can’t do that. Look, Magda.’ Oonagh shoved her down on the edge of the bath. ‘What would you do if they said they were going to send you back anywhere?’

‘I don’t know.’

Oonagh could be impatient sometimes, and made a swipe at Magda in a pretend temper. ‘Work it out, for God’s sake.’

‘I don’t know.’ Then, timidly worrying about it, ‘What would I do?’

‘You’d collect your things from here, see, girl? Then you’d catch the DART to Dun Laoghaire and get off there, and buy a ferryboat ticket to England. That’s what you’d do.’

‘And then what?’ Magda stared at Oonagh, aghast.

‘Sail to England and go wherever you wanted. God sakes, Magda, you’re not stupid, are you, girl?’

‘Yes,’ Magda said, because she couldn’t read or write, and what on earth would she do when she got to England? And Oonagh was so snappy Magda was afraid to speak anything except tell the truth.

‘You’d never look back, Magda.’ Oonagh spoke slowly, looking straight at her. ‘What we do now is up to us, see?’

‘Up to us?’

‘Lipstick and all.’

‘Then what’s their tally book for?’

She was frightened to ask, but had to because it was bad enough not sleeping from seeing Lucy falling into the stairwell all night long without having another nightmare to haunt her.

‘It’s for them, see?’

Magda didn’t see at all. ‘No.’

‘It’s because they can’t stop making tallies, like somebody can’t keep on counting things because they’re sick inside their old heads, see? Like these old men as can’t help storing up bits.’

‘Like old Mr Niall?’

Old Mr Niall had no second name, having come from an Industrial School in St Joseph’s in Latree where he was simply Seven. He was a right one for collecting bits of broken things – pens were a favourite, because he was able to snaffle them and keep them under his pullover until he could carry them out to the old shed where he helped with planting and cleaning the
gardening tools. He had a sack, rescued from the dustbins and cobbled together with ordinary string from tying some trailing roses. The roses fell and looked weary once old Mr Niall stole their string, but at least he had it to mend his old sack from the dustbins. He collected useless things like paper clips, safety pins, and papers with pins in rows. If anything went missing, like old ladies’ knitting needles and bookmarks from the lounge where the oldies read of an afternoon, you could bet it was old Mr Niall away with it in his pullover. He always looked guilty, like he was going to get punished for stealing, but Magda let him say he hadn’t got whatever was lost. Once he stole Mrs Borru’s size nine knitting needle, length fifteen inches and thick as a pipe, that she had to have to make cardigans for the children in Thailand or somewhere.

‘That’s it.’

‘How can the nuns be like them old men, then?’

‘It’s the way they’ve been made to think.’

‘God made nuns, Oonagh,’ Magda said, full of reproach.

‘God made us any old how, Magda. Don’t ever forget that. How you get on is up to you.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘It’s true. The nuns can’t help it. They’re a waste of time. I think they know it deep down, because of all the fuss there’s been since the papers and the old telly got hold of them and started on the old Church. They got a right rollicking.’

‘About them tallies?’

Oonagh sighed and pulled Magda to her feet.

‘No, Magda. Just let’s finish making you gorgeous. Forget what I’ve been saying. It just doesn’t matter any more.’

But Magda thought over every word Oonagh had said, and ran it over and over in her head hours at a time, endless. This
is how she learnt things. She was marvellous with words heard and moved mouths, but hopeless with things read or signed or shown. She might have been clever. That’s what Bernard said when he did his thing to her, and she didn’t really mind even if it made him sad.

The evening she was to meet Kev MacIlwam, she did her face with a lipstick she had bought, and it cost a fortune. She felt so aggrieved at the price she almost fainted in the shop. It was outrageous, worse even than a loaf. And she didn’t know what to ask for or she’d have gone wild and bought one of them blue-black stick pencils to rub round her eyes. She was scared it would never rub off or that Kevin MacIlwam would laugh when he saw her, then she’d be so ashamed she would run away.

Except she did look truly pale, but Oonagh hadn’t got any further in that lesson. Magda hadn’t gone on experimenting, just did what bit she’d learnt with the lipstick. The one she’d got was not so red as Oonagh’s. Another thing was, even though she had paid a king’s ransom for the lipstick – so it must be made of stuff that was priceless anyway – the colour on her mouth seemed not quite what the colour was on the wrapping. In fact, Magda looked doubtfully at the colour of the stick itself as it came screwing its way out of the shiny gold tube.

It was a risk. Would she look like a harlot of Sodom and Gomorrah? She wondered if she should take it back, but that was hopeless because she was due to meet this Kevin and here she was dolling herself up like one of the scarlet women who had tempted pilgrims on their way to Rome.

She blotted the lipstick almost off, and thought she looked maybe a little better, safer, but how could you tell? She had the idea everybody would be looking at her all the way down the
street outside from the St Cosmo Care Home to go meeting her young man.

Except maybe he was married and had seventeen children and was going to arrest her for stealing those white tablets from Mrs Borru and pinching some of old Mr Gorragher’s whisky and mixing them up to poison Father Doran, which she was due to do on the stroke of four o’clock the following afternoon.

She had to be brave. That was what girls were, wasn’t it? They had to be brave. Get through this meeting with her young man, and she would be free to stick to her plan.

And Lucy, God save her dear friend, would stop falling, and Magda would sleep soundly for the rest of her life. It was her duty to rescue Lucy, Magda’s primary task, nothing to do with herself, no. Lucy came first, God rest her dear soul.

Kev wore a tie, at which Magda was astonished. He went into a café with her. He simply tilted his head the way men did, and they went into the small place at the end of the Borro, where the buses turned left into the street you had to call the shopping mall now, with its grand hair salons and multiple stores – better than Powerscourt Centre, so locals held.

‘Tea, is it?’

‘Yes, please.’ She sat, embarrassed to be served by him. She scanned the prices on the board behind where the ladies served as if she could read, and decided to make out she was scandalised at the prices they’d be charging. She tried to hear what Kevin, in his grand tie and clean shirt, was having to pay, but couldn’t hear for the working men talking away. This was really free and adult, here she was a common old girl who was just a Magdalene, being treated to tea in a genuine café. It was like a dream.

Kevin came back.

‘There’s sugar on the table.’

‘Thank you.’

She didn’t know whether to offer him money for her tea but didn’t know how much it was anyway. She saw a man and a woman talking and looking at a bus timetable – she recognised it from the one hung on a string in the St Cosmo vestibule. Visitors were forever asking if she could get a new one and she had to keep pretending she’d go straight away and bring the latest one, but she only hid because she couldn’t read the dates on them.

‘Magda, is it?’ He knew she was Magda.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking about. People would notice if she got arrested in a minute.

‘I’m Kevin MacIlwam. I’m a garage man for the Gardai.’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr MacIlwam’s one of them you looks after, is that right?’

‘Yes. Not on my own.’ Hadn’t she told him this? ‘There’s others. There’s nurses come, they have uniforms. Then there’s the nuns.’

‘The nuns.’

‘Yes. Sister Stephanie is in charge. I’m only a domestic. That’s like me and Oonagh and the others who do the cleaning and washing.’

‘Is that right.’

‘We don’t do the cooking.’

‘No, right.’

She wanted desperately to keep the conversation going. It must be hard for him, wondering when he was going to have to arrest her, if that’s what he was going to do.

‘There’s kitchen staff to do that. They cook for the nuns as well.’

‘I visited Grampa.’ Magda stared at Kevin when he said this because he seemed to go longer in the face and his eyes didn’t want to look at her. He went on, avoiding her gaze, ‘I don’t usually want to come to him because…well.’ He shrugged.

‘You don’t?’

‘No. Well, because…’

‘Because what?’ Magda leant forward across the table, ignoring the puddles of old tea spilt on the Formica. ‘It’s a terrible waste, that is.’

‘What is?’