Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  And that evening after dinner, Magda stole a tablet, to help herself kill the priest. Not that Father Doran doubtless had some good in him somewhere, for who could judge another person? It was written in the Good Book, if you could read, that you hadn’t to judge somebody ‘unless ye yourself be judged’ or something that way on.

  Once she got started, Magda stole the tablets slightly different every time because you couldn’t be too careful. This was her way:

  Old Mrs Borru had to take two little white tablets each day, and everybody in the whole wide world knew it was so, like some rule St Benedict himself had laid down. You heard old people always saying to each other through the livelong day, ‘Is it time Elsie had her tablet now?’ and somebody else would say, ‘Elsie? No, not yet. That comes at eight o’clock after supper.’ And somebody would add, ‘She took this morning’s one because I was there and that man we all like was reading the news.’ And then everybody would go on about who liked the weatherman on RTE and who hated that girl who forever was showing off with her posturing and smiling so fetchingly in front of the TV weather map of rain over the Irish Sea and saying how the ferries from Stranraer were going to be delayed again. In fact, Magda too hated that weather girl, but there you go, because hate was a sin and you had to do penance for a venial sin, venial being only small, because the pretty weather girl really was horrid and thought too much of herself.

  Back to the tablets. They were little and white and mortal strong and came in a little dark bottle. There was a theory that dark-bottle pills and potions stayed effective, that in transparent glass they degenerated and lost strength. Sister Stephanie said so.

  That particular day, old Mrs Borru spilt the tablets, a few lying white and shining on the carpet. Magda had already hoovered.

  ‘Goodness, Mrs Borru. You’ve dropped your tablets,’ Magda said.

  ‘What, my dear?’

  The old lady could hardly see but spent her days watching RTE. Whatever was on did for her, even football and those endless snooker games and athletics. She even hummed along to any old music, even if it was from radio programmes in the next room. Sometimes she seemed deaf, other times she had hearing like a bat.

  ‘Your tablets. I must call one of the nurses.’

  Magda rushed to find Nurse Maynooth, who was on duty that particular day, but of course Murphy’s Law struck and she was nowhere to be found, so it was Magda herself who scraped the tablets up and put them back in the bottle, all the time worrying herself stupid that they had no power in them now they’d been dirtied on the carpet, though she herself had vacuumed exactly that spot earlier. I mean, she argued with herself, what if the tablets lost their vigour from touching the Wilton pile? It might be so. And how like the English to make a fine carpet that had a secret power of sucking the tablets’ force out instead of leaving them strong as ever.

  ‘No need for that, dear.’

  Mrs Borru hadn’t the faintest notion who Magda was. She said the same thing to the removal men when they’d had to take away one of the old beds that kept falling through. Mrs Borru thought one of the men was her husband and tried telling him off to bring his van round to the side door and take the bed out through the kitchen, though of course the poor man didn’t have a van at all and wasn’t her husband.

  ‘Will the tablets be all right still, Mrs Borru?’

  ‘Leave off your worry, dear. It doesn’t do, a girl young as you.’

  Which was really kind of Mrs Borru. And maybe secretly she too was scared of the nurses or the nuns raising a fuss and telling her off. So that day Magda let the matter go, yet anxiously waited for the nurses or the nuns to come round counting everybody’s tablets and, finding one or two missing, blame Magda saying she’d spilt them and had left Mrs Borru to take the blame.

  She later told Sheilagh, who was almost as casual as Faith, because Sheilagh truly was going to be a nurse, trained and registered, when she got her exams, her father (a real live father) being an accountant with a head full of the numbers. And Sheilagh laughed.

  ‘You are a hoot, Magda,’ she said. ‘Dear God in Heaven. Who has time to go counting tablets already in bottles with the pharmacy stamp already there on the side with all them initials and letters after their name?’

  ‘What if there’s one lost, though, Sheilagh?’

  ‘Then it gets sucked up in your hoover machine, and gets thrown into the Pit of Despond.’

  Magda didn’t know what the Pit of Despond was, and wondered if she ought to search in the mounds of dust and rubbish to look for Mrs Borru’s tablet. She learnt, asking Sister Stephanie as casual as you like about it, that it was a place like Hell that an English Protestant called Bunyan once wrote about and not to bother her head. Sister Stephanie was displeased with Sheilagh for mentioning that to Magda because many girls were impressionable. The upshot was, Magda was mighty relieved and thankful there would be no counting of tablets or speculating what if one tablet got itself missing.

  Which set Magda wondering, because on the bottle there was said to be a stark warning that nobody, nobody, was to take the tablets except as prescribed by a doctor. They were poison. Sheilagh said warnings were on every medicine bottle, and that was what the letters meant.

  Now, poison set Magda thinking of Lucy, and the murder she had to be doing fairly soon.

  The one thing Magda remembered was, there was a time when Lucy hadn’t fallen at all. They were both back there in St Joseph’s at Sandyhills, in the Magdalenes, and it hadn’t yet happened.

  Part of Magda’s sorrow and determination to kill Father Doran came from the feeling that, if God Almighty Himself, or maybe some fairy, like in those pantomimes at Christmas that Magda had seen on RTE TV (men actors dressed as old women and girls dressed as young men and swaggering and talking like they were saying poetry and everybody laughing and shouting back from the audience) offered Magda the chance of saving Lucy from falling by putting the clock back to those times when Magda and everybody was still back there in the Magdalenes, Magda knew she would kneel and say, ‘Thanks, God, for the offer, but I could never go back there in a million years ever again, so ta, but no. I accept that Lucy would stop falling if You put the clock back, but I couldn’t bear it. In fact, I’d be the one to start myself falling down the centre of a massive stairwell to certain death and burning for ever in Hellfire, sure as You made apples.’

  So Magda was a murderess in her heart even before she recognised Father Doran saying Mass that day in St Saviour’s Church, for she would never live her horrible childhood over again, not even in order to save Lucy dying over and over the long nights through. So it was right that she, Magdalene Finnan, if that was her name, should be punished by them terrible dreams.

  And in the next spell of afternoon shift of duty at the St Cosmo, Magda pinched a tablet from the brown bottle and stored it in a paper tissue in her pinny pocket, as if it was no more than a paper handkerchief she intended to use for hygiene around the old folks, in case she sneezed.

  She kept it wrapped for darkness in an old Bisto Gravy bottle, well washed and dried in the oven at the St Cosmo kitchen, so as not to wash out any of the poison power in the tablet. It stayed back in her bed-sit like it was simply an empty gravy bottle, and became a slowly growing store of poisonous white tablets over the weeks.

  By the time she made sure it truly was Father Doran by going to sit at the front in St Saviour’s, she had several tablets. Now she was certain. Tomorrow, she vowed to steal another one.

  She became skilled at the art. She made sure she called Nurse Maynooth to see next time Mrs Borru spilt her tablet bottle over the side of her bed. It was during a TV Old Tyme Music Hall from Leeds in England, where they sang and all dressed up in old time clothes like in the time of Queen Victoria, bad cess to the country that was condemned to perpetual excommunication by the Holy Father himself. Magda pointed out to Nurse Maynooth that the old lady seemed to have fewer tablets than there had been this very morning.

  Magda didn’t tell it in c
onfession, not all of it. She simply said she had been careless with the tablets of some old folk where she worked, though she made sure she hoovered everywhere ‘after having a careful look under the beds and everywhere,’ and the priest always gave her three Hail Marys and one Our Father for penance. That was as far as Magda ever got of a Saturday when she confessed about the gathering of poison tablets ready to kill Father Doran. Indeed, Magda had a sense of fair play so strong that she once went to Father Doran to confess that she had ‘tried to make sure that the old people’s tablets were always counted exactly right,’ adding she wasn’t sure for they sometimes spilt them.

  He reassured her, which was really kind. Magda was careful, however, not to push her luck by going to him for confession every Saturday, no. She went instead to Father Culkin and even Father Duddy, who scared her stiff with his black swarthy hair and his loud voice, and whose black hair even seemed to grow down to his finger nails like a gorilla’s.

  ‘You’ll turn to stone standing there, Magda,’ Sister Francesca said crossly one day after Magda had stolen another tablet, successfully, she thought, until much later after she’d done the deed, ‘when I want you to be scouring the kitchen swill out for the refuse collectors.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister Francesca.’

  ‘Then get on instead of being sorry and you won’t need to,’ Sister Francesca gave back, sharper than ever that day, though usually she never gave much blame around. ‘There’s one old lady worse than ever, and her husband’s come in sicker than herself tonight.’

  A grand opportunity came to take more than one poison tablet from another old folk’s bottles three days later. It was easy. Magda pretended to count out the whole bottle of white tablets (though she couldn’t be sure it was the same poison as the little white things she had a store of in the Bisto Gravy bottle back in her place) after a lady died. She counted the tablets, all three sorts, out with utmost care after Nurse Maynooth and Mrs Jenny MacLehose had been told by Sister Stephanie to clear out the bedside cupboard because they were about to perform the last offices and wash the body. She couldn’t do the counting, of course, just pretended.

  She left the small bottles, all three in a row, on the bedside locker, and Nurse Maynooth said well done and even Sister Stephanie said it was good to see one of the girls being so careful, as she took the bottles of tablets away.

  And Magda saw her later washing the tablets, and one small bottle of sticky cough medicine from the stock cupboard, down the sluice sink without even counting any or measuring the sticky cough medicine, which was a grand relief because it meant Magda’s prayers were being answered so far. This was wondrous because it meant that one or even two tablets from any of the old people’s bottles would not be missed, most probably.

  So Magda’s store in her room hidden behind her one-grill Baby Belling cooker, went up gradually.

  Lucy kept falling during the nightmare, and it was all Magda’s fault because she was to blame.

  She sometimes imagined that same questioning, with God saying, ‘Magdalene Finnan, if that’s your name, what if I, in My infinite mercy, allowed the clocks to go back to the time before Lucy fell to her death? How about it? What would you say? Yes or no?’

  And Magda knew she would answer, ‘No, thanks, Lord God. I couldn’t bear to go back among the Magdalenes, not even for that.’

  ‘You sure, Six-One?’

  ‘Yes, Lord God. I’m so ashamed. I’m so sorry, Lord God, but I’m not up to much. Forgive me, I pray.’

  ‘Then it’s down to you that Lucy, your friend, keeps falling in that old nightmare. Just you remember that, OK?’

  ‘Yes, Lord God,’ Magda in this particular dream kept saying back, kneeling and keeping her head and eyes cast down so she didn’t stare Him in the Face and see His agony at her backsliding nature.

  It was all the more piteous when she kept remembering how God had died on the Cross for her sins, and here she was adding to things and making it all worse.

  ‘Yes, Nurse Maynooth,’ she said again to something, and got down to cleaning the sluice.

  The priest came that evening to give Extreme Unction to a dead old folk, and the whole of the St Cosmo was deathly quiet. The old people were shut in and kept themselves quiet and sombre as if working out who was oldest and who was next.

  The store of tablets, by innocent planning and meticulous taking of chances, grew until finally Magda had almost plenty of little white tablets, plus a few pinkish larger ones, and a variety of small coloured oval jobs. And she knew it would soon be time to judge when she was ready. In a way it was sad. In another way, it wasn’t anything of the kind.

  Chapter Four

  The first time Magda did it with Bernard the Garda was the time he saw her back to her room in the girls’ resident block the day an old man called Mr Brannigan died. He bled from his mouth and Magda had the awful task of cleaning up the mess. There was blood everywhere, and his sheets and blankets were soaked dark brown, very little of it looking like the red of her month and that the cowboys and Red Indians shed once they got shot in the chest in the westerns Magda loved on the night TV. Only once had she been to the Gem Cinema on Connaught Road down beyond the Blackrock bus stop, but it smelt musty and she was troubled by so many people.

  Mr Brannigan had been a soldier, very brave some people were saying after he passed on, in the wars when he’d gone fighting. He had scars on his chest. Mrs Borru turned lucid for an hour or two after hearing of Mr Brannigan’s death and smiled to herself and began to tell how, to Magda’s horror and the scandal of God’s ears should He be listening, which of course He would be, Mr Brannigan and she, Mrs Borru, had been kind to each other in the lantern hours when the place was asleep.

  ‘When who was asleep?’ Magda had asked.

  ‘Everybody, silly girl.’

  ‘Kind? What about?’

  ‘Solace, silly. A man needs solace, whatever his years. It’s what women are for, even in this place.’

  ‘What place, Mrs Borru?’

  ‘This place. Don’t you listen? You’ll do bad at school, cloth ears you have, never listening to a word anybody says.’

  ‘Kind, eh?’ Magda remembered saying that fateful day when Mr Brannigan died. ‘That must have been nice.’

  ‘It was,’ Mrs Borru said, dreamy and smiling distantly at the far wall where the Sacred Heart was in a coloured effigy showing His Heart to the cruel sinful world to demonstrate how hurt it was when people were sinful. ‘He liked my knickers off and on the floor by the draining board in the kitchen.’

  Magda thought she misunderstood. ‘Your what?’

  ‘He was a one for breasts. He loved bosoms, did old Jim Brannigan. He was a gay old stick.’

  ‘What?’

  Magda finally began to understand and was struck with alarm hearing this.

  ‘He was slow – being on them tablets they give old men whose blood pressure goes up. That and being old.’ Mrs Borru frowned at the far wall and the holy effigy. ‘Or is it down? Do you know?’

  ‘Know what?’ Magda said, almost shouting out the question, desperate for the next query from the old dear to be something innocent, like what was for tea and could she have Earl Grey or maybe the impossible Lady Grey tea instead. Or maybe asked for a buttered crumpet for a change, instead of the Battenberg they had on Thursdays.

  ‘Them tablets. Though I heard Mrs O’Brien in that end ward, with the leg, has the same coloured tablet as Mr Brannigan, so maybe it doesn’t count whether you are man or woman.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Magda yelped, frantic at what was coming out.

  She had been sent to make sure Mrs Borru had been to the loo so she had to stay and find out. The commode hadn’t even been moved since the morning, so there was no way to tell unless Magda went round the entire place – somebody said all sixty-five of them inmates, but Magda couldn’t count so didn’t know – asking if Mrs Borru had been to the loo today and been cleaned afterwards. She had to do her job right, or she might get sent
back to kneeling and scrubbing and getting walloped at the Magdalenes amid those girls with the white faces where Lucy had done her first fall. Magda had only been a little girl back then, not nineteen.

  ‘Mr Brannigan was a right lad.’ Mrs Borru went back into her dreamy mode. ‘The first time we did it, we did it right here in this bed. He said I was brilliant.’

  ‘He said…’ Magda tried faintly.

  ‘He said my arse was sweet as a nut.’

  ‘Your…’

  ‘I think there’s two sorts of men, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll learn, girl.’

  ‘Two sorts?’

  Magda tried not to ask the question but was drawn in despite herself. For some reason she thought of Chaucer, which she’d heard of when, unlettered as she was, she’d listened to the lettered girls in the Magdalenes talking after collecting the papers for the girls’ exam. One girl had said, ‘Just our luck, eh?’ and told Magda the notices said On No Account Is Chaucer To Be Allowed. Magda forever associated Chaucer, whoever or whatever he or it was, with evil thoughts, the sort you let in if you weren’t determined when you woke suddenly in the nights. Sometimes, she couldn’t sleep and wondered why she was this shape, and what God in His infinite wisdom thought He was playing at.