Bad Girl Magdalene (19 page)

The nurse swept on by. Magda hurried away to the other end of the corridor as the nurse spoke to Sister Stephanie, to promise she would have the patient ready soon. The ambulance men could be brought in. They spoke of the priest’s condition. The nurse was frank about his prognosis.

‘Dr Strathan will be there when he arrives at the hospital, Sister. I must say he’s concerned about Father Doran’s lack of improvement.’

‘I got the same impression. Has he given different instructions?’

‘Dr Strathan? No. Just the one small drink of plain tea before he goes.’

‘Is he ready now?’

‘Any minute.’

‘Then he can leave. I’ll come.’

In the sick room, Magda took the drink to the priest. He was flushed, lying back on the pillows, dozing. He did not open his eyes.

Magda had only a few moments, but that was all it took. She had twice seen the nurse administer the fluids through the tube, and had the small syringe in her pinafore pocket. He stayed somnolent throughout. She replaced the spigot in the tube and slipped the syringe into her pocket, and was out and down the corridor making a show of domestic industry when Sister Stephanie and the nurse crossed to the sick room.

Magda went downstairs to the sluice where she was checked out by Sister Hilda.

‘Did you finish off up there, Magda?’

‘Yes, Sister Hilda.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘Did they tell you anything about Father Doran leaving?’

‘No, Sister.’

‘Very well.’ The nun went to enquire while the domestic staff talked.

‘Is he very poorly?’ Magda asked. She felt amazingly calm, as if she had passed one of those examinations other girls were always doing.

‘The priest? Of course he is. Heart attacks are dreadful. I had an uncle once died of one.’

‘Poor man, God rest his soul.’

‘Does the soul know if it’s going to die?’

‘That’s a funny question, Magda. What makes you ask that?’

‘I was just wondering.’

She did not say, but thought the priest’s eyes had flickered
for just one instant as she had inserted the nozzle of the syringe into the gastric tube. Except he would have raised Cain if he had sensed that someone was actually there, giving fluid into him without making a single sound, wouldn’t he? You don’t just lie there and let folk come in and do anything they want, do you? She had heard him being cheery with the nurse only half an hour before.

‘He’s coming down.’

They heard the heavy footfalls of the ambulance men on the stairs, and listened in something like awe to the shuffling and the grunts of the men as they lifted the priest downstairs on a stretcher.

‘There ought to be a lift here, a building like this,’ Mrs O’Hare said. ‘I keep telling them that.’

‘Shall I go out and see if there’s any way I can help?’ Mrs Connery asked, but Mrs O’Hare rebelled immediately.

‘You stay put, m’lady,’ she said rudely. ‘I know what you’re up to, seeing if your stinking dabs round your earholes work on them ambulance men. No, stay here.’

‘You’ve a terrible mouth on you, O’Hare.’

‘You’ve an ugly face on you, Connery.’

‘Please,’ Magda said, distressed. ‘Don’t fight. Heaven alone knows what’s happening to the poor priest out there being carried away to his ambulance.’

‘There!’ Mrs O’Hare said angrily to Mrs Connery. ‘See what you’ve done? Upsetting the poor simple girl.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Mrs Connery shot back. ‘It was you, mouthing off like that.’

‘Please.’

‘There, girl,’ Mrs O’Hare soothed. ‘Don’t take on. We’re only pretending, really. We’ll all pray for the poor priest.’

Even Mrs Connery was touched by the girl’s tears. ‘He’ll get better, just you see, Magda.’

‘Sure he will, girl. He’ll be right as rain once they get him in that old hospital.’

‘All them doctors. They say it’s the best hospital in the world. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes. That’s true enough. Everybody knows that.’

The three listened as the main door closed and the ambulance started up and drew away.

The two old women talked. For nursing convenience their beds were pushed into the one alcove. Normally it was Mrs Borru’s, but when night came she sometimes drew the short straw – her husband’s old phrase for luck unwelcome but not disastrous. By this she meant Mrs Duffanan, who was from Temple Lane South, near Wellington Quay, lying auld bitch that she was. Mrs Borru knew deep down Mrs Duffanan was all fur coat and no knickers, so said her crude old, now dead and God rest the poor restless bugger, husband Fergus. And no prizes for guessing how his firm conviction was found out. Fergus had been all hands, a randy old sod.

Not difficult to tell, when readying oneself to die as gradually as the St Cosmo Care Home usually managed. Wheeled into a shared alcove for a night’s long impatience, waiting for one dawn after another, you had time to reflect what kind of girl an old crow like the wizened Mrs Duffanan would have been. Mrs Borru kept herself to herself and never revealed anything, no. Sure to God, enough would be called out right in front of all them angels and Seraphims and things
once she shuffled off the mortal coil, so gossip could wait until then.

About one-thirty of that night, Mrs Duffanan began to talk. For a daft old bat, her voice was surprising, quite mellow and gentle. Maybe that’s what sleep did, somehow annealed thoughts to make them presentable for anyone who chose to listen. Normally the beds were rolled by the domestics into alcoves that were deliberately alternated – Mrs Borru would sometimes draw the affable, perennially dozing Mrs Cafferty, who never was awake long enough to put on airs like Mrs Duffanan.

‘I wish I wasn’t so old,’ Mrs Duffanan said into the air. Only minutes since, she’d been snoring like an old carthorse. This was her usual beginning.

‘You always wish that,’ Mrs Borru said back, also as usual.

‘You don’t.’ Mrs Duffanan, ever ready for any old argument, even in her doze. ‘When you’re small, you want to be older so’s you can decide things for yourself. It’s when you’re older you want to be young.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

This was as it usually started, quite a litany. Mrs Borru loved the sequences. She even loved the sacred Litany against the Jews, though nobody seemed to do that nowadays in the Church services. Too many changes. This liberal thinking did it. The Litany against the Jews really went with a swing. It was the only bit of Church she had enjoyed when a child in the Magdalenes. Nobody went to sleep in that, all the children bawling the responses with gusto, approval glowing from the nuns.

‘Don’t want to be back there.’

‘You were a Magdalene?’

‘Course I was. Everybody was.’

‘Everybody wasn’t.’

‘They were.’

‘They weren’t.’

‘They were.’

And so on, quicker and quicker, keeping it quiet but going ever faster until they gave up exhausted and lay in silence, staring up at the ceiling that was hardly visible in the red-stained darkness. Mrs Borru hated the red pilot light further down the lane of alcoves. Why put it there? It ought to be switched out, or shared about the place. Fine, it would need a workman to make another plug, but that’s what your workman is for.

Mrs Duffanan knew what Mrs Borru thought of her. Well, she hadn’t the benefit of a rascally bit of harlotry that Mary Duffanan had made for herself round Ha’penny Bridge and the fine old bars that grew up all over Dublin in them days. One was a grand place for a riot. They called it Ha’Penny Bridge Inn, like some grand Elizabethan tavern from some wicked old English novel, when it was only the old roaring place where she’d learnt to give a decent wank to some randy boy for as many coppers as you could squeeze out of him. It was only later she began to regret not having used her time better, got on and made something of herself. She heard the sneers in the old bitches’ voices when she got talking of a night, never fear. The joke was on them, for how many of their loyal husbands had she sucked off in the dark along the towpath of the Grand Canal, and them glad to pay for the privilege?

She gave a cackle at the image. Them fine husbands walking in to Holy Mass of a Sunday, arm-in-arm with their proud spouses, when they were still glowing inside from the ecstasy of some night shoving into a busy girl’s cunt. It was a laugh.

‘What’s the joke, Mary?’

Mrs Duffanan was surprised Mrs Borru remembered her first name, though it was only one she’d made up for herself once she’d got out of the Magdalenes. She decided it for herself that day, and she stole some girl’s name off a notice in a shop window, all expensive frocks and dresses of the oddest colours, in Winetavern Street. An advert, a glossy card leaning on a window-dressing plaster model wearing outlandish clothes that surely nobody in their right mind would ever buy, announced
Just
right
for
Mary!!!

She had always been good at her letters, and slowly translated it into words until somebody came out from the shop and moved her on, angrily demanding to know what she was doing standing there gaping. Well, the joke was on her, the miserable old bitch, because that name Mary had been stolen from under her nose, for that was how Mary became Mary Duffanan. The Magdalenes had changed her name from whatever it had been, and she’d been Two-One all her time in their evil buildings. She hadn’t even known her name when she decided to leave of her own accord, and had simply not turned up at work, just gone.

‘I was so surprised they didn’t come after me.’

‘When? Who?’

‘The whole Saorstat Eireann with them sirens wailing.’

‘Then you were old enough to be forgot.’

‘That’s what a friend said.’

‘What friend?’

‘Somebody I met.’

A navvy still with the street dust on him from his digging at some old paving near the old Cattle Market, where they were making a new place for folk to eat and drink, could you imagine? Mary was more interested in what he was going to
build than getting him milked dry and herself with enough to get some new shoes if he paid up.

He’d told her, ‘They won’t come after you, not from them old Magdalenes, not if you’ve been out more than two months. They give up, think you’re on the boat to England.’

She was really proud of that. People really imagining she’d had enough to catch the boat to Liverpool and be free to wander, even if it was among all them heathens and pagans or whatever they had over there.

‘What number were you, Mary? I was Four.’

‘Is that all?’ Mary exclaimed it with glee, for Two-One was obviously better than miserable old Four.

‘I hated being just a number.’

‘Me too.’

‘Know what I hated worse even than the pail lock-up?’

‘No. What?’

‘Knowing I’d go to Hellfire for all eternity from being jealous.’

‘Jealous? Who were you jealous of?’

‘Monica. She was the mother of St Augustine.’ Silence, as the other realised the misunderstanding and rushed to explain. ‘No. I didn’t know the saint, God, no, just the girl Monica. She had this grand name. It sounded to me like a raspberry toffee in a wrapper, so I always wanted to be called Monica.’

‘Why did they leave her with that posh name, then?’

‘Being a saint, see? And you could never tell. Maybe the girl was really going to be come for, and saved out of the place.’

‘I saw that happen once.’

‘Did you? In the Magdalenes?’

‘It was early one Sunday. A gentleman came. There was wild talk among the girls, whispering all along the pews about something going on.’

‘Somebody had been come for?’

‘Yes. It was a small girl who was always crying, not tough, see? She was seven or maybe eight. I never worked out how old we were from our sizes, though some already came in knowing their age.’

‘What happened?’ with real excitement in the old croaky voice, because a rescue was a remarkable thing, whoever it happened to. Even now it still had a wondrous allure.

‘This gentleman came with another who, the girls were talking wild like you do, seemed to be some kind of servant, because he kept bringing out papers from a leather case when the gentleman said.’

‘Where?’

‘In the Mother Superior’s office.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He was a real relative.’

‘A
real
relative!’

‘That he was. He mentioned his dead sister, who was the small girl’s mother.’

‘What did the Mother Superior say?’

‘She asked to see the court papers.’

‘And did they have any?’

‘They had sheaves of the things. The Mother Superior signed, and then the man, and the servant man said something about concluding and the court would be satisfied.’

‘And that was it?’

‘That was it.’

‘And the girl got carried out in a grand carriage!’

‘No. She was left outside in the corridor, frightened out of her wits.’

‘Which corridor?’ as if they knew, though they had been in places miles and miles apart.

‘The one outside the Mother Superior’s office.’

‘Get on with the rescue.’

‘I’m telling you, I’m telling you. They called her in and the gentleman stood up and smiled and said to her he was her uncle and had come to fetch her. And an auntie, a genuine real auntie, was outside in the Austin motor waiting to take her home.’

‘Home!’

‘Home. We all whispered “home” like it was Paradise, all that day and all the next. Imagine.’

‘Having a home, just like…’ But there the sentence ended, because home was the place you’d been taken from, and wasn’t too good to recall even if you could reach that far back.

‘She went out just as she was. The man smiled – Six-Three heard him say the very words – and said to the girl he was rescuing, “No, Beatrice, no need to bring anything with you. You shall have new. My two children, your cousins, will take you shopping later. They are all waiting downstairs for us.” And they went.’

‘Beatrice!’

‘She was called Beatrice, evidently.’

‘All the time she was called Beatrice?’

‘She didn’t know, or maybe she knew and made sure she forgot in case she got the old whacks for remembering.’

‘But he knew her name.’

‘He did for sure. He asked if she wanted to say goodbye to any of her friends and she just cried. He didn’t know what to
do. He kept saying, “Here’s a thing, here’s a thing.” Then he just said, trying I suppose to be kindly, “Oh, well, you can always come back for a visit to see your little friends if you want to, eh, Beatrice?” Then they went to the main exit, Mother Superior and all.’

‘Did Six-Three see them in that Austin motor?’

‘No. She got whacked for listening in the corridor when she should have been washing the steps.’

‘Well, yes. That was fair.’

‘She never came back that we saw.’

‘Well, would you have?’

‘Even now I listen out for somebody called Beatrice. I’d like to tell her how she was the talk of the place, her getting out like that. It was like them stories where the airmen and soldiers were kept in prison during the war and made a tunnel to get out.’

The two old ones were silent, then one said, ‘I think somebody’s taking the medicines again.’

‘Who?’

‘Somebody clever, like one of them prisoners.’

‘Did you see them do it?’

‘No. It’ll be Mrs Wheelan.’

‘It’s time she got over it, taking everything the way she does.’

‘She hasn’t. Nobody ever can, you know that.’

‘We don’t steal things, though.’

‘We do things just the same, like we can’t get rid of habits they put in you when you’re little.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Mrs Wheelan always steals things. There was that newspaper, wasn’t there? That visitor to the men’s wards laid
his newspaper there with that little plant thing, a poppy, I think, and Mrs Wheelan couldn’t get out of bed for her bad arm, but sure as Jesus she had that old newspaper with its flower away quick as a wink.’

‘Mind you, I know a man who collects old bus tickets from the floor, right there in the Busaras in Store Street. Can’t get enough of them.’

‘They never got it back, that flower.’

‘With Mrs Wheelan, I’m not surprised. They’d never have kept her in prison, not them. She’d steal the cross off a donkey.’

‘What does he do with them?’

‘The ticket man? Puts them in a shopping bag, he does, takes them to where he lives.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘How do I know?’

And after a silence, ‘There’s a lot of us like that.’

‘Who is taking the medicines?’

‘I heard Mr MacIlwam saying something. I think the men might know.’

‘It won’t be Mrs Wheelan, or the men would already have found out.’

‘That’s true. Men think different. All them engines, I suppose. My husband couldn’t get enough of them old engines.’

‘They talk boring, men, I always think.’

‘Me too. You’ve to be polite to them though.’

A prolonged silence, so extended the nun listening in the curtained shadows of the corridor thought they must have nodded off. She had so far made no sound, and was all the more certain for it.

‘What was your pail lock-up?’

‘That place at the top of the cellar steps? You got locked in for being bad.’

‘How long?’

‘One girl was in for a whole day. Wetting the bed, see?’

‘For wetting the bed they stood us outside by the class doors. You had to stand against the wall where everybody could see you. If you wet your bed, out you went with your wet mattress and had to stand with it on your head, but so they could see your face. You’d to do it sideways. They give you the old whacks too, your bum, and your back or the inspectors would see.’

‘Did you ever see inspectors?’

‘One. A lady who had spectacles. I thought they were grand things, all shiny. I prayed to Jesus to get me some spectacles. It was no good.’

‘Did anybody say anything?’

‘Glory be to God, no! How daft do you think we were?’

‘I wet the bed. We had plastic sheets under. You had to stand there with the wet sheet wrapped round our head. I had to do it when it was raining. Once when it snowed. I went blue.’

‘When I was about seven or eight I got it too.’