‘SIVE. What kind of name is that? Do you have no Christian name? Have you even been baptized?’
Sister Mauritius studied my completed piece of paper.
‘I have no other name,’ I did not know the nuns before had called me Mary. ‘I have been baptized though.’
My mother had told Noreen this when she enquired.
‘What age are you?’
Sister Mauritius had poured herself a cup of tea, none was offered to me. She posed the question because it was hard to tell with dark skin, she had come across a lot of it in her London noviciate. A woman of the world was Sister Mauritius.
‘I’m nineteen.’
‘Have you done this kind of work before?’
‘I’ve cared for my mother when she was ill.’
‘Your mother would not be old,’ she said warningly. ‘These people are old, they need more minding and watching. But it’s good enough you have some experience. You’re a big girl, you’ll be strong enough to lift the men and there’s a job going on their ward. You will be expected to clean, serve food, make beds as well as take care of them. Now. I cannot put down Sive here. That is not a Christian name. You will be called Mary here,’ surmising that I was needing of work and so would agree to having my name taken from me. ‘Sign here.’
I bowed my head and signed with Sive.
‘No, that will not do.’
I said I could not sign Mary since I was not Mary.
‘Very well then, Mary Sive it will be,’
And she put the Mary in front of the Sive I had written.
‘Where is your father?’ Sister Mauritius asked.
‘I have none, Sister.’
Eddie had warned me not to look her in the eye and to say sister to her.
‘No notion of who he is?’
‘None, Sister.’
‘And your mother?’
‘Carmel Moriarty, Sister.’
‘That’s a quare accent you have.’
‘From London, Sister.’
‘I was in London myself, London ways are not our ways, you’ll pay mind to that here.’
Her eyes came over her nose, they nestled under the large bridge of her forehead and ample eyebrows. So it was that Sister Mauritius always looked down her nose at you.
The money she offered me I could have earned in one night.
She pressed a buzzer and a small, squatty woman with large feet flapping before her came in. She did not look at Sister Mauritius either.
‘Margaret, this is the new worker for St Michael’s. Starting tomorrow. She’s big, so you might not have anything to fit her in the line of uniforms. Give her one of Magdalene’s if so. Call her Mary.’
‘Very good, Sister.’
There was no goodbye, just the turning of her attention to some papers and a stiff nod from Margaret towards the door.
‘Who was Magdalene?’ I asked Margaret, whose feet continued to fall heavily on the linoleum corridor floor and would have woken a country.
‘The old cook. She wasn’t black like you, but she’d been to Africa. She was a nun on the missions and she fell in love with a black man and they found out and they sent her home. She stopped being a nun then and she called herself Magdalene. She used to make us African stew with a load of oil, eggs and mince in it. Do you make African stew?’
Her face folded up when I said I did not, she stood stock still, bringing her bowl-shaped eyes up to me.
Magdalene’s uniforms were all that would fit me. They were sweat-stained from her time over the stove. But there was a comfort in the smell of another woman, whose scent, I could tell, had not been put down by life and would continue to adventure into her unknown days.
Margaret showed me to the door and did not close it until I had my way down the drive and out of her sight. On down the hill I went, all the while looking forward. If I looked back I would not have been able to go there the next morning.
16 ∼ Them Together Again
MYRNA SAT AT the kitchen window and watched the small figures of Eddie and Carmel on the beach. Them together again, as if they had never been apart.
Why, then, the unease at their coming together? Why did she see dark shadows dance all around them and in and out of the day? Why did her old skin prickle so when they were near and together?
Noreen came to stand beside her. She pointed at her daughter and her daughter’s love.
‘I know,’ Myrna sighed. ‘I feel something wrong, but they’re happy for the moment.’
Noreen smiled and put a hand on Myrna’s slight shoulder.
‘Would the young ever grow old if they knew what we know?’ Myrna asked.
Noreen shook her head.
* * *
When I came through the door my mind was set in a trap of tomorrow and what I had to do for money for us all. I made tea and I scalded my tongue on it. Noreen left and Myrna took up the cards and began to shuffle them on the kitchen table. I did not pay any mind to Myrna’s muttering and twisting of the cards.
‘What will come of this?’ she was asking them. ‘What is being hidden from me?’
‘I just got the job,’ I told her. ‘And I am called Mary.’
She was not listening. Through the window she was watching the pair on the beach and a long, slow tear trickled down her cheek, an overturned card in her hand.
Later she came to my room and sat on the bed.
‘You are to go to work there,’ she said. ‘You are not Mary. You are Sive. They cannot change that.’
Then she left the room speaking soft words, which I could not hear. But they come to me now for their shape was formed in this house and remains as all words do in the place where they are spoken.
‘And we are the ones to be left behind and without.’
In her hand the card of Three Shadows and the card of Beginnings.
‘Who are the shadows?’ Myrna asked the night. ‘When will the shadows make themselves known?’
17 ∼ Laid Bare
THE FOLLOWING DAY Margaret was waiting at the gate for me and through all her chatter I did not take my eyes off the house of St Manis or make a sound of my own.
‘You’ll be on St Michael’s ward. That’s the worst of them all,’ she began gleefully. ‘Just to let you know, that’s all. How much are you getting paid? Your sister is Sister Saviour and she’s, like, the worst slave-driving old wagon you’ve ever met. But she looks after the men. Sister Mauritius hates her because she looks after them too well. Mauritius just wants them all to die quickly so she can fill the beds again. And she gives out. Your sister, Sister Saviour—’
Margaret stopped advising as I made to walk in the front door, the heavy door.
‘No! Not that way! Staff go in through the side door, Sister Mauritius doesn’t want the front door opening and closing all day. She says it lets out too much heat. Anyway your sister, Sister Saviour, she just wants everything clean all the time.’
She asked again how much I was being paid for the work, and this time I could not avoid telling her.
‘Is that all she’s giving you? It’s because you’re part dark if you don’t mind me saying so. She thinks you’re still a slave or something.’ Margaret’s feet flapped furiously as she tried to keep up with my quickening steps, her imagination fuelled by the pace of them.
‘That’s why she put you in St Michael’s, you’ll definitely be a slave there. Are you from Africa or Arabia? You look like both. Do they have harems still in Arabia? Where is Arabia exactly? I know where Africa is. Did your mammy get shipped out to one of the harems?’
No answer from me. We pushed open the side gate and walked the long corridor with no doors off it and turned at the end into a small cloakroom where I hung up my coat with those of people I did not know. I felt all their separateness and their common end in this place. Margaret watched me all the while and would not take her eyes from me and she spoke hushed now.
‘Just so as you’ll know. You’ll be working with Joe O’Reilly. He’s a full nurse only
he got the sack for stealing drugs and selling them. Sister Mauritius pretends she doesn’t know but everyone else does and she got him, fully signed up at nursing, for half nothing, for a carer’s wage—’ She paused for breath as we left the cloakroom. ‘You just come to me if you need to know anything – I know everything.’
When I reached the ward, Margaret did not leave. She was quiet now, but her voice was still in my ears. There was a smell of sleeping, a stale smell from men whose lives had grown stale, a smell of men who found it harder each night to leave sleep behind.
The night staff had gone home and the day staff had yet to arrive. Sister Saviour was seated at a table in the small kitchen off the ward. A woman of straight features dressed in a spotless nursing uniform. Her hair was hidden but for roots which showed it to be as white as her short, nun-nurse veil.
She looked up from her paperwork with eyes that did not expect me to look away, or down. I could see her kindness was well-guarded but still present. She smelt of carbolic soap and her face had the tightness of endless hard work and more still to do for the men in her care. She was not tender. She talked in proclamations about necessities.
‘A good big girl! I hope you will pull your weight! Sister Mauritius tells me your name is Mary! Not Mary you say! What is it then? It is Sive? Good so, Mary Sive you are! I am Sister Saviour! Slack work is for sick minds! I see Margaret has already found you!’ This proclamation carried a note of irony. ‘Well we’ll let her introduce you to the men! She knows them all better than they know themselves!’
She checked her watch, which was pinned to her lapel, and said briskly, ‘Pay no mind to Margaret’s tales! They’re taller than she is herself! Make sure you present yourself here in fifteen minutes! Plenty to be done!’
Margaret’s square chin set, but she soon recovered herself with the joy of revealing the secrets stored in each of the beds. Secrets that were stolen and presented as common knowledge to the stranger I was to them.
‘This is Liamy. He used to work in England, too. Came home to the farm. Fell down a well and was up to his neck in water for two weeks before anyone found him. Softened all his bones it did. Then he got Parkinson’s, then he got a stroke, now he’s like this.’
This was a gaunt man whose face was all cheeks and chin and all that remained of his eyes were lashless slits. Hair wisps under a cap the brim of which was no longer than his chin. He moved his curled up hand out of the sleep state as I drew near, the movement was sharp and had warning in it.
Margaret stepped back, ‘Watch out! Used to box he did. Watch out for the punches! Shush!’ Margaret warned me with glittering eyes as if I was the noisemaker. ‘You’ll wake them all and then you’ll have to deal with them all.’
Margaret went on.
‘And this one is Mr Black, with a temper to match and that one is Young Brian, because he’s gone mental and thinks he’s still forty. He was forty when they first put him in here all right. Now he’s really sixty.
‘That’s Dennis, used to be a priest but they kicked him out and now he’s a strokie – they’re all mostly strokies – had a stroke like – and he’s a right pain in the hole, a big snitch and a whinger. Don’t do nights or he’ll have you pestered for sleeping tablets.
‘That’s Ted – he’s got loads of money so Sister Mauritius is up his hole most of the day, which is why her face is so brown. But she can’t give Ted the private room at the end of the ward, because that’s Peter’s.
‘Peter has the private room even though he hasn’t a shilling. His daughter pays for it. He shouldn’t even be in here, there’s nothing wrong with him. This is a hospital-home for people who need medical care. But his daughter, she shoved him in here as soon as he had a stroke, even though he can still walk and dress himself and do everything.
‘The rest are all vegetables, most not as cooked as Liamy, mind you. That’s a colonel and the only way to get him on to the commode, now he’s gone senile, is to say “hut, hut, hut!” and up he goes like a rocket at take off and then you’ve a job trying to get him off it. He locks his knees and you have to tickle behind them, Joe says, and the stink of his old lad’s poo would make you want a peg on your nose.
‘But most of them don’t even do number twos on their own – you have to give them the enema and that’s Joe’s job. He’s the nurse, he says, so it’s his job. Like you need a nurse to go up after shite.’
And Margaret laughed and laughed at that.
I learned the lives of ten men I had never met before that day. They were the ones whose bed curtains were open. I did not learn anything of the one whose curtains were still drawn.
‘The one behind there is a piece of work. He’s work and plenty of it. We’ll wake him, will we? The rest of them will work you too if you don’t know their tricks. If you give in the first few days they have you. You have to ignore them. Clout when they clout you, scrawm back when they scrawm you. Give them a good pinch and walk away quick if they don’t do what they’re told.’
Margaret spoke in a loud whisper to me about the men, as if they were too beyond to hear. But the men heard. The men knew they were laid bare before me. They chose not to face me or greet me. Some closed their eyes. Some stared far away beyond us to a place where they once had a choice in who they would meet and who they would not meet, in who they were and where they were.
Margaret was called sharply by Sister Saviour.
‘Margaret, you’re wanted on your own ward!’
Margaret skittered off, lighter for what she had imparted, but grimacing with the disappointment of not having managed the final introduction to the life hidden behind curtains.
Sister Saviour came to stand beside me and barked that the time for introductions was over and the time to work had come.
‘Your first job can be to sort him out!’
And she pulled back the curtains with a swish that almost took the rail off the wall. She did not look once at what she was revealing.
‘Strip the bed! Strip the patient! Dress the bed! Dress the patient!’
She opened a large cupboard and pulled out a plastic bottle and a rag.
‘Clean the waterproof sheet with this! Put it back on the bed again! Sheets down the hall!’
The chemical cleaner was strong, but not strong enough to mask the smell of urine-soaked sheets, which caused the man in the chair to look down and away from me. He had slept upright in the chair once the night staff had moved him. He had called for a bottle. It had not been brought in time.
He wanted to talk to me, to say that he did not make a habit of this. But he did not talk and I did not look at him. Since his head was bowed I could see only his twisted shell, his white hair was as full as his young days and would have been as white as Myrna’s had it not been stained yellow. I thought at first that it was urine he had poured over himself. Carmel had done this to put out her heart fires. I did not know that the dayroom smoke choked him and his hair. I had no eyes to see beyond what he was.
I cleaned the bed and took the soaking pyjamas off. They were not his because his body was too big for them, even in his wasted state. Long ankles stared mournfully at me, long wrists, one curled unnaturally, held by what could have been a proud, fine hand used to work. Now the nails were ragged and uncared for, the dirt underneath them grey. He hid his twisted arm like a secret, using a strength in him where pride once stood. The striped top and pale blue bottoms of the new pyjamas bore the nametags of men who had not known this man and had been smaller than him in life. Fitting the pyjama top over the twisted arm brought a grunt from him. No other sound. Margaret came back as I was dressing his feet in socks that did not match or fit, but would keep out the cold. His feet had been bare and blue up to this.
‘He won’t do anything for you. Never talks, this one.’
I had not yet seen his eyes.
The day was long and the work was hard and by the early evening when I was free to go I was glad that my walk home was downhill.
* * *
When I came in the door that night Myrna and Carmel were sitting at the table.
‘How was the place?’ Myrna’s eyes did not leave me.
‘I don’t know. I just washed the beds and the floors and the walls, the toilet bowls and the dishes and the old lads and then I came home. I know it’s clean anyway.’
I drank warm sweet tea which brought me back to myself and away from the man dressed in things not his own. I had remembered my own days and life spent in cast-offs.
The doorlatch lifted and Eddie stepped in out of the cold.
‘Should I have knocked?’ he asked, catching sight of my face.
‘Might as well walk in,’ I said. ‘Might as well make the place your own, the furniture’s yours anyway.’
Carmel and Eddie said they were going for a walk, as they said every night, as they did every night. I sliced bread and buttered it and moved into the chair beside the fire to chew it.
Myrna came and sat in the chair opposite. She said nothing to me or I to her for a long time. Though it was still early she stood to go to bed. I raised my head and she saw what she wanted to see in my eyes.
‘We might go for a walk of our own,’ she suggested. ‘I would like to walk on the shore. I have not walked on a shoreline for a long time.’
* * *
We walked to the beach down the thick, brambled way and on to the grey stones and then on the grey sand that smoothed the path between stones and sea. Myrna walked slower than time passes.
It was a warm evening on the edges between winter and spring. The sky was thick with the rain that had not yet fallen. The air was expectant. Myrna turned me away from her, towards a dark pewter sea.
‘Look – all can be seen here, not like in London. There is always a building in the way. When I was a girl I lived by a lake that was as big as a sea to my eyes. I thought I would never want to leave it and I had to. I travelled the whole world and I never found the same vastness or space that I had found in that one place.’
‘Would you never have gone back?’ I asked.
‘By the time I got there it would have been somewhere else.’
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 10
