Being Magdalene (17 page)

‘Luke, what’s the phone number there?’ Nina broke in. ‘We’ll ring you tonight to talk more, but we need to get Magdalene to the doctor shortly.’

We said goodbye. Zillah looked at me, her eyes shining. ‘They’re not dead to us, they still love us.’ She dived at me and threw her arms around me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s good. It’s so good.’

Rebecca and Miriam arrived to take Zillah to school. Before she left she gave me another fierce hug. ‘The doctor will make you better, Magdalene. Then you can come to a real school with me.’

She whirled away in a trail of excitement, telling our sisters about the phone call. I envied her.

Ellen came. She drove me to the doctor. He asked me questions but all I could do was sit there and shake
my head. I couldn’t find words to tell him how I felt. I didn’t know how I felt. I was frightened — I didn’t know who I was any more. I didn’t know how to be a worldly girl. Nobody needed me. My aunt and uncle could care for Zillah much better than I’d been able to. I should go back to look after Mother.

It was a relief when he talked to Ellen instead …
therapy
…
waiting lists as long as your arm
…
antidepressants as a last resort
…

Ellen took me back to the house, helped me to take off the pretty clothes and tucked me back into my bed.

I HAD A SENSE
of my family being around me, surrounding me with love, but I felt apart from it. I couldn’t get warm even when I sat in the chair where the sun poured through the window. I had no purpose in being here. I should go back. Mother needed me.

Always, there was somebody else in the house, although nobody seemed to stay for the whole day. One morning it was Miriam who came in and sat on my bed to talk.

‘You’ll come right,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t be in this mess if our dumb father wasn’t such a gullible idiot.’ She gave a shudder. ‘Ugh! I can’t bear to even talk about him. And, when I think about him chucking us out instead of kicking the Elders and the Rule to hell, it makes me mad enough to spew.’ She took several deep breaths, not speaking until she was calm again. ‘Sorry. Rant over.’

‘Do you hate him so much?’ Her rage hurt my heart.

‘Not talking about him any more.’ She leaned
forward to kiss me. ‘Ask me stuff. What would you like to know? Being worldly is mega-confusing at first. I remember thinking I’d never understand it.’

I couldn’t even smile at her. Too tired. I didn’t hear her when she left the room.

On Sunday, a week after our arrival, Kirby, Miriam and Rebecca came to the house with Ellen. Zillah wanted me to go with her and our sisters to Nina and Jim’s worldly church but Nina said, ‘Another time, Zillah. Don’t worry, Magdalene will get better and then she can come to church — if she wants to.’

They didn’t make you go to worship? I tried to think about that while they were away but it was too hard. It was easier to listen to Ellen and Kirby teasing each other and singing as they prepared lunch. They didn’t act as if they were worried about staying away from worship. They didn’t seem like mother and daughter either. They were like friends.

I didn’t want to think about my own parents, who would be worshipping at temple today, because Miriam’s angry voice kept sounding in my head when I did. I wanted to see Rachel and Hope and Theodore. I tried to feel joy that we could talk to Abraham, even though we were doomed and damned. Luke would be going back home today and I’d never see him again either.

When my sisters returned from worship, we sat down to lunch and they told us more about their lives. Miriam taught at the art school she’d gone to and she was getting ready for another exhibition. Rebecca was studying psychology. ‘I want to work with children
and families,’ she said. Her eyes lingered on me as she talked and I knew she was worried about me.

Zillah said, ‘You should help Magdalene. Why aren’t you helping her, Rebecca?’

Rebecca said, ‘I don’t know enough yet. One day, I will. But, Magdalene, you’ll be fine again long before then.’

I wanted to believe her.

Kirby was studying building science. ‘Sustainable engineering,’ she added, as if that would help me understand. One day I’d ask her what it meant, but not yet. I was tired, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

I think it was the next day that Nina came into the bedroom. It must have been early. Zillah was only just awake.

My aunt said, ‘Magdalene, we’ve found somebody we believe will be able to help you. I think you’ll like her. She’s called Octavia and she says you can stay with her until Ellen finishes her shift at the hospital this afternoon. We know it’s a big step for you, but we’d like you to give it a try.’

This woman, she’d ask questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.

Nina sat on my bed, leaned forward and smoothed the hair off my face. Zillah stood beside her, eyes wide with worry. ‘Octavia’s an artist, but she used to be an art therapist before she retired. We’ve talked to her and we trust her.’

Zillah said, ‘Is she old if she’s retired? Elder Stephen’s old and he’s mean.’

‘She’s eighty,’ Nina said. ‘But she’s very different
from Elder Stephen. I promise you.’

I couldn’t listen any longer. Miriam was banished for creating worldly images.
Evil, damnation, death
.

Nina took my hand. ‘Don’t worry, honey. She won’t make you do a single thing you don’t want to do. If you really don’t like her, you don’t have to go back. But we’d like you to give it a go.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll stay here.’

Nina slipped her arm under my shoulders to sit me up. ‘You can’t, honey girl. None of us can stay with you today. Octavia will give you lunch and Ellen’s going to pick you up.’

‘I can stay by myself. I’ll be all right.’

Nina stood up. ‘It’s against the law for a child under fourteen to be home alone.’

The Children of the Faith broke that law. My worldly family obeyed it. It was easier to get dressed than think about it.

I didn’t want to spend time with anyone strange. An eighty-year-old woman couldn’t help me, especially not one who painted. Elder Stephen was eighty. In my mind, Octavia’s eyes were mean and sorrowful like his. Her body would be slow like his, and I believed her voice would be soft too and it would become another weight on my heart.

Jim drove me through the city. He didn’t talk. The radio played music with no singing. He parked the car and got out. I stayed where I was. I couldn’t do this.
Painting. Eighty years old. Sorrow, weight, meanness.

Jim opened the door and helped me out. ‘You poor old sausage. Things will get better. I promise you they will.’

I wanted to believe him but all I could do was follow him up echoing stairs in an old building. At the top, he knocked on a door. It opened. He said, ‘Bless you, Octavia. This is Magdalene, my most beloved niece.’

He left me alone with her.

She was thin like Elder Stephen, but when she moved her steps were light. Her eyes were dark like his but there was no sorrow in them, and her mouth was much readier to smile than his could ever be.

I wished she’d leave me alone, but she gave me a big shirt to cover my clothes. Soon, she’d start asking questions I wouldn’t be able to answer. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t know where home was any more.

She led me to a table. ‘Take a seat, Magdalene.’ She put a lump of muddy dirt in front of me. ‘This is clay. Have you used it before?’

‘No.’

Her eyes smiled. ‘It’ll be a treat, in that case. Get your hands in there. Mush it up. Squash it. Do what you like with it. When you’ve had enough, we’ll bash it into a lump again and put it back.’ She pointed at a big tin.

After that, she didn’t talk to me. There were no questions, no preaching, nothing. She didn’t watch me either, but I watched her move around the room, work at a computer, stand behind an easel.

Time passed. She came out from behind the easel.
‘Don’t know about you, Magdalene, but I’m in need of coffee and cake. Wash your hands over there.’

I looked at my hands. They were covered in clay. I stared at them. They were dirty, just like when I had hurt them at the beach. I was frightened. ‘Are they bleeding?’

Octavia sat beside me, taking my grubby hands in hers. ‘Look at them. They’re fine, good hands. Don’t worry about getting them dirty. It’s not time to think about that yet.’ She helped me up and led me to the sink.

She drank coffee and made hot chocolate for me. We ate pastries filled with apricot and custard. ‘Too much of this and it’ll no doubt kill me,’ she said. ‘What a way to go!’

‘But you might go to hell.’ The words came out before I could stop them.

That made her laugh. ‘I’d rather be there than in heaven if that’s where your old Elder Stephen ends up. I don’t want to be anywhere near him. He sounds like a nasty piece of work.’

It wasn’t right to say such things even though they were true. We didn’t speak again until I was back at the table with the lump of clay in front of me. This time, I was scared to touch it.

Octavia said, ‘Pick it up, sweetheart. Good girl.’ She went back to her own work, but after a bit she said, ‘You’ve felt squeezed and crushed, Magdalene?’

I was doing it again — mushing the clay in my hands, squelching it between my fingers. I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Looks like that feels bad,’ she said. ‘Who does it to you?’

I watched my hands moving and moving, and I couldn’t stop them. ‘Elder Stephen. Elder Hosea. They’re mean and they pretend to be holy.’

‘Anyone else?’ Her voice came to me from far away and I didn’t answer. I felt her hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Magdalene. You’re safe here. Look around you. Tell me what you see.’

It was an effort to concentrate. ‘Windows. Colours. This table. Drawings on the wall. Lots of books. A piece of driftwood. Three sunflowers.’

‘Well done.’ She sat down opposite me, reached out and covered my hands with hers. They were bony. She had silver rings on each finger of her left hand. Her hands felt strong and warm. She asked her terrible question again. ‘Who else crushes the life out of you?’

My hands twitched, wanting to crush and squeeze, but they couldn’t. At last I said, ‘Father does. And Mother. I have to obey the Rule. They have to crush me. It is the Rule.’

She released me. My hands were dirty again. I was crying and so tired.

Octavia wiped my face gently with a pink tissue. ‘There now, everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see.’ She prodded the clay. ‘Pretend that’s the Rule. How about you bash the hell out of it?’

She said such shocking things. I couldn’t do it.

She didn’t get angry. She leaned towards me. ‘Tell me about this old Rule thing. What does it say you have to do?’

I recited the words my parents had so often spoken to Zillah and me. ‘Girls must be seemly and modest. They must dress modestly, they must never run, they must always cover their hair in public.’ There was so much more.

‘I’d hate that.’ She gave a dramatic shudder. ‘How did it make you feel?’

With both hands I picked up the clay, holding it tight until it oozed between my fingers. ‘Like that.’

‘Crushed? Squashed? Not allowed to be the real Magdalene?’

She said such puzzling things, frightening things. ‘I
am
Magdalene. I’m real.’

She came round the table to hug me. ‘You surely are. Don’t worry. That’s enough for today. Wash your hands and you can watch me work, or curl up on the window seat and have a snooze till lunchtime.’

I slept until she woke me. We ate bread rolls filled with lettuce, cheese, chicken, tomato and something spicy I didn’t recognise. She sat beside me in the sun. She didn’t say grace. Down below us, the traffic surged and ebbed as the lights turned from green, to amber, to red.

WHEN ELLEN CAME TO
collect me, she took one look at Octavia and me, and said, ‘We’re so lucky to have found you!’

Octavia patted her shoulder. ‘I’m glad to do what I can.’ She turned to me. ‘We’ll do some different things tomorrow, Magdalene. You can tell me if you don’t like it and we’ll change to something else.’

I got to my feet. ‘Thank you.’ It was all I could say.

I followed Ellen down the stairs to her car. As she drove home, she said, ‘Nobody can know what it’s really like, not if they haven’t been where you and I have been.’

‘What … how …?’

She pulled her mouth down. ‘The short version is that my father — your grandfather — beat me up and threw me out of the house on my sixteenth birthday. He broke my jaw.’

I stared at her, jolted out of my numbness for a moment. ‘Had you transgressed?’

She shook her head. ‘A man had transgressed against
me, but I was the one who got punished. I’ll tell you the whole story, but not until you’re well again.’

I let the miles tick past before I said, ‘Octavia said I wasn’t the real Magdalene. But I am real, I am.’

She said, ‘That’s not what she meant, sweetheart. She was talking about how when you’re in the Faith you can never say what you feel. If you’re a woman, you can’t ever have an opinion or idea of your own.’

I closed my eyes. All my ideas and opinions had been about Zillah. I didn’t need to have them about me.

She stopped the car at Nina and Jim’s house. ‘I found my real self and so will you. I promise you.’

We hadn’t been home long before Zillah came racing in the door. ‘Are you better, Magdalene? Did Octavia make you better?’

Ellen grabbed her up in a hug. ‘It’s going to take more than just one day, kiddo. Your sister’s had thirteen years of the Rule and the Elders. You don’t recover from that in an instant.’

I couldn’t bear the disappointment on Zillah’s face. ‘I want to come to school with you. I want to learn things. I’m getting better — I really am.’ If I said it often enough, it might come true.

Daniel rang in the evening. He didn’t get a chance to say much while Zillah spilled out her excitement about school, but at last she said, ‘Here’s Magdalene, Daniel. She’s getting better but it’s slow and I think it’s slow like when a plant grows.’

I took the phone and heard his voice in my ear. ‘You okay there, sis?’

I breathed in. ‘Yes. Octavia’s nice.’

It was good to talk to him. I missed Luke and Abraham.

The next day Octavia put a pile of magazines on the table. She set scissors, glue and a book with blank pages beside them. Magazines were dangerous. They were full of evil, worldly images. To read them was to stray from the path to salvation.

She sat opposite me, picked up the top magazine and flicked through it. ‘Flowers. Colours. Pretty things, Magdalene. Don’t worry, there are only good things in these. Have a look through and, when you find a picture you like, cut it out and stick it in here.’ She tapped the book. ‘I want you to make a scrapbook of things and colours that make you happy. You can look at it whenever you don’t feel so good, and it’ll help.’

She got up and left me alone with worldliness and temptation.

It took me until we’d had our morning break of coffee and hot chocolate before I began cutting out the pictures. She was right about them. They were pretty.

Octavia didn’t talk. She was gentle company and I felt peaceful. When we stopped to eat our lunch, she looked at the page I’d finished. ‘You’ve got a good colour instinct,’ she said. ‘This is a pleasure to look at.’

She didn’t say anything strange today. All I had to do was cut out the pictures and stick them in the book.
When Rebecca came to collect me, I was surprised. The time had gone fast.

Octavia handed me the pile of magazines. ‘Take them home. Work on your book when you feel like it.’

In the car, I asked my sister, ‘Are you sorry you left? Do you ever wish you’d stayed and married Elder Stephen?’

She sighed. ‘I was sorry about leaving Rachel, about not being able to see her baby or even know if she was okay. I missed you and Zillah. The boys too. For ages I couldn’t even think about the pain Mother and Father would be feeling.’ She stopped the car. ‘Come on, we need ice cream.’

We sat on a seat by the sea. My ice cream was apricot ripple. Hers was rum and raisin. ‘I was going to marry him. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I felt I had to. Elder Hosea must have suspected I’d run, though, because he grabbed hold of me when we left the house. I pushed him backwards into the rosemary bush by the front door. I bet he didn’t tell you that!’

‘Rebecca! You didn’t! Oh, I wish I’d seen him.’

She grinned. ‘Quite a big transgression, eh? Have they made a rule about it yet?
It is a sin to push an Elder into a rosemary bush
.’

We were quiet while we finished our treats. ‘Do you still feel like a Faith girl?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘I’m me now, not something the Rule says a girl should be.’

I still didn’t understand. I changed the subject. ‘Do you like learning? Was it hard to go to a worldly school?’

‘I love it. And yes, it was hard. The other kids knew heaps of stuff I’d never heard of.’ She put her arm around me. ‘It won’t be easy for you either, but you’re smart. You’ll get there, and don’t forget we’ll all be able to help you.’

Some evenings later, Daniel rang to say he would be home for the weekend. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’ He sounded happy.

Zillah said, ‘What’s he going to tell us? Is it a secret? Why doesn’t he tell us now?’

Nina said, ‘He wants it to be a surprise, but I think it’s about him and Xanthe.’

Zillah frowned. ‘What’s a Xanthe? Is it a car? That’s not exciting.’

Nina laughed. ‘Xanthe’s his girlfriend. She’s a doctor too. She’s lovely. You’ll see.’

So many changes. ‘Does that mean he’s betrothed to her?’

Jim said, ‘I think that’s what he’s going to tell us. Worldly customs are different from Faith ones. It’s called being engaged to be married, not being betrothed. They didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission. It’s something people decide for themselves.’

Zillah was quiet for the rest of the evening. When I went to bed, she put down the book she was reading. ‘Magdalene, I don’t like Xanthe. I don’t want Daniel to marry her.’

I sat on her bed. ‘Daniel wouldn’t choose a horrible
wife. You can’t say you don’t like her when we’ve never even seen her.’

She thumped the book with both fists. ‘Can so say it! You have to go to school for ages to learn to be a doctor. And now she’ll just cook and have babies. I think it’s a proper sin. They shouldn’t have let her learn to be a doctor. It’s a waste.’

I didn’t know what to tell her. We sat in silence as she sniffed back tears, and again I felt the weight of her pain until my brain started to function. ‘Zillah, we can ask Nina and Jim about this. They’ll talk to us, they really will.’

She stuck her lip out. ‘All right. But it won’t make any difference.’

I stood up. ‘Well, we don’t have to worry about being put in the discipline room if we ask.’

I went to find my aunt and uncle. When I’d explained Zillah’s worry, Jim looked at my aunt. ‘You can field that one, sweetheart!’

Nina cuffed him over the head, went to the bookcase and took out a slim book. In the bedroom she pulled up a chair. ‘Zillah honey, things are different for worldly people. Xanthe will probably want to keep working after they’re married. If they decide to have children, they’ll both look after them. Or else the children will go to day care — that’s sort of like school for little kids.’

Zillah’s lip stayed stuck out. ‘But if they’re getting married they will have babies.’

So that evening we learned how babies were made, how they were born and how not to have them if you
didn’t want them. Nina kissed us and left the book for us to study. ‘Ask me anything you don’t understand,’ she told us.

We stayed in stunned silence for ages until Zillah said, ‘The Elders would have a fit.’ She bounced in her bed. ‘It’s great, isn’t it, Magdalene? Don’t you just love people telling you stuff?’

Yes, I did, although I felt winded. Girls weren’t meant to know such things.
The secret of the marriage bed. Your husband will tell you.
I thought of Rebecca. I was glad she’d run away from Elder Stephen.

It was a long time before I slept, even though my heart felt lighter. I didn’t understand why until I heard Zillah move in her sleep. She still needed me. I was still useful.