Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  Still the other girls kept on accusing them of stealing. Lucy in particular always hotly denied stealing potatoes, which puzzled Magda because how did Lucy know there were potatoes in any basket? Magda had never even looked inside. She and Lucy had to take the empty baskets out after prayers before they went to sleep, putting them in a stack in the hatch so they could be lifted out by the delivery man next time he came. You had to do it that way or the man might see in and watch the nuns, which was a terrible crime that Sister St Paul said would deserve Hellfire for all eternity.

  Magda asked Lucy, ready for rebuke, if that’s what her question deserved, ‘Lucy. How do you know there were potatoes in them baskets?’

  ‘They smell of them.’

  Magda was astonished at this. Weights, and now smells? Potatoes smelt?

  ‘Do potatoes smell?’ she asked with timidity.

  ‘Course they do, daftie.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Potatoes, of course.’

  ‘Does everything have a smell?’

  ‘Course it does. Carrots smell of carrots. Potatoes smell of potatoes, lettuces of themselves.’

  ‘Is it just them old vegetables?’

  ‘No.’

  Lucy looked round so as not to be heard by anyone. They were in the laundry where, having small-girl jobs, they had to drag the empty linen skips into the yard. When they were older they might be allowed to work inside where it was steamy but warm and in out of the cold and the rain. Once you got wet there was no drying you until you dried in class, and like as not got told off there for wetting the benches with your wet clothes. The nuns had a terrible suspicion that the girls who stained the benches with damp had peed in their knickers, and peeing in knickers was the most terrible insult to the Order and thereby to Almighty God, who ‘detested filth in thought, word, and deed,’ as Sister St Paul put it.

  This nun did a lot of hunting for transgressors. Two girls were always at it, peeing their knickers and getting blamed for every drop even of rain that clung to garments and skirts and the thin shawls the girls were given. Magda did what many girls did when they were in the yard and it came on to rain. Instead of covering themselves with their shawls, they would press into the entrance archway, and wrap their shawl round their middle. That way, the shawl would get a good soaking from the rain but the skirt would stay dry as near as could be, depending on the downpour. That way, they could take the shawl off when called inside, and the skirt was almost dry. With astute arranging, it would not show dampness of rain on the bench. The shawl was put with the rest on the window sill for collection afterwards. Your hair got wet, sure, but wasn’t that the price to be paid when avoiding Sister St Paul’s clouts from suspicion of wetting the bench from a sinful pee?

  ‘What else is there?’

  The food was gruel, a runny oat water, with a bread every second day, butter Fridays and the same repeated. Lucy sometimes stole bits. The one time Magda tried stealing from somebody else on the same table they caught her and she got walloped first by the nun and then by two of the other girls and had her hair pulled so it bled. Lucy was fast, but never gave any she stole to Magda. Lucy kept it for herself and ate it on the way out if she could, which was only fair because Lucy was older.

  ‘Meat,’ Lucy whispered.

  ‘Meat?’

  ‘Yes. There’s meat. Y’know, from sheeps and that. Cows, more like.’

  Magda knew the older girls’ lay teachers and the nuns had meat, for it set your mouth filling with wet spit. She vaguely remembered meat but didn’t remember where from. It was hardish and floppy on a plate that had pictures on it – blue drawings of funny little people walking on a bridge over water with waves, also blue, and trees that stayed the same all the time and had branches shaped the same as the waves. Magda tried remembering more about the picture on the plate but couldn’t. It was back from before she came to the Magdalenes. Two people in the picture had long frocks on, and an umbrella each. The huts they were walking to were stacked up almost on top of each other on to the edge of the plate. She often wondered how she knew about the blue-pictured plates. Somebody cut the greyish meat up for you and you could eat it with your fingers, or you could use a shiny pusher thing while somebody laughed and said about people being clever to learn that. And a deep slow chuckly sound, that went huckle-huckle-huckle and a scent Magda ever after associated with meat, though it came from a bottle she was allowed to play with on the floor. But that was then, and there was no such plate with pictures and things at the Magdalenes.

  ‘Yes, daftie. It comes from the butchers.’

  Magda wondered if she had once been in a butcher’s house. Doubtless there would be meat there.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Wednesdays. Never Fridays.’

  ‘Do we not bring it in the baskets?’ Magda was disappointed.

  ‘No, daftie. Meat’s mortal heavy.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Magda admired Lucy for knowing so many things. She wanted to be like Lucy, really clever, and longed to see this heavy thing called meat. Maybe she could remember more things about pushers and plates and being on a carpet and playing with a bottle, if only she saw this meat.

  ‘Course it is, daftie. It comes to the postern gate when we’re in class.’

  ‘Is it like a dog?’

  Magda knew the delivery man had a dog, because he shouted it to guard. Magda knew what a dog was, remembered lying on a carpet with a dog that snored. She had heard one of the older girls telling her mates that she stood on a chair to see, when the nun was out of her class, and claimed she saw a delivery boy, the butcher’s, delivering meat in boxes. ‘Fish on Thursday for Fridays, see,’ Lucy said, but she was only guessing. Lucy was good at being full of scorn. Magda suspected, but had no way of proving, that Lucy even thought and sometimes quietly spoke, her scorn about the nuns, which was sinful.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. A dog is a dog.’

  ‘Is it heavy?’

  ‘Course it is.’

  Lucy nudged Magda, seeing the shadow go by the end of the corridor, which meant the boss nun was coming back so they’d have to stop talking and stand in ‘an attitude of dutiful obedience and preparedness,’ in Sister St Paul’s sworn oath. This meant feet together, standing with hands folded and looking at the floor until spoken to when they would have to respond quickly and do as they were told.

  ‘Time you shut up about it,’ Lucy said. Lucy could get angry quick as wink.

  ‘What?’ Magda couldn’t follow what Lucy meant.

  ‘You’re always on about how heavy’s this and that.’

  ‘Sorry, Lucy.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Lucy was jaunty, which thrilled Magda. It must be great to be jaunty, thinking all sorts of wild things Magda wouldn’t even dare let into her head for fear of Hellfire.

  She had the nerve to ask. Learning Lucy, her admired partner, was seven years old – whatever seven was – Magda asked how old she was, of that same Sister St Paul, and was told, after a cursory glance of appraisal, ‘You’re five, I’d say.’

  ‘Five, Sister?’

  ‘Five. How old were you when you came?’

  ‘Please, Sister, nobody told me.’

  ‘Five, then. What date did you arrive?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sister.’

  ‘Then you’re rising five. Do not ask again, understand?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  So at rising five, Magda had an age and a definite date for it. To Magda, this was momentous, to stay unforgot for life. She asked another nun, Sister Annuncion, what saint’s day it was in Religion and Doctrine, and got a point for asking such a holy thing. She was told it was the twenty-second of July, this being the feast day of St Mary Magdalene.

  So then Magda knew that, thanks to God being kind, she was rising five that very day, and she had a birthday all her own, and it was the twenty-second of July, whatever those words meant. And rising five, she learnt from Lucy, meant the day following whatever this rising business was. So on
that day she would become five. Nobody said anything when the next day came. Magda was disappointed, though nobody else ever seemed to have any birthdays to speak of, not even Lucy, who had developed a mortal bad cough.

  Lucy couldn’t worry much about birthdays, she told Magda. She said quite cheerily, ‘I’ll be dead soon because my cough spits blood. That’s always bad. I’m going to the arms of Jesus, Mary and Joseph soon, and I’ll have proper dinners and tea in white cups and saucers with coloured grapes drawn on them.’ Other girls said that was a truly terrible way to talk because it meant you were ungrateful to being part of the Church Militant Here On Earth among the pagan foes, but Little Sally, who you had only to call by her number, One-One-Three, because she, like Magda and others, had been born out of wedlock, said it was an affliction and made your shit go black. It had happened to her mother, which was why she was in the care of the Magdalenes.

  None of the other girls took any notice, because it was only Little Sally. If you were born out of wedlock it didn’t matter who your mother was or what happened to her because she’d been bad and serve her right.

  The nuns had special days, which were the anniversaries of when they’d come into the Order, but that was some extra thing, like what Magda finally learnt to scent as meat. This was a grey slab of food, and was for nuns and teachers but not the girls, being exactly as God said it was to be. They were nuns and teachers. Girls were girls, forever. God said so, and all was right with the world.

  There was an event when she was growing up that happened to Magda, and it concerned one lad called Damien, who shagged, or tried to shag, Magda against the wall of the commercial paper-packing sweatshop where Magda, being fifteen and supernumerary to the Magdalene commercial laundry, was sent out to work.

  There were other events that preceded her departure. She was given a stern lecture three times over by Sister Sophia about Living Out Among the Heathen. These were mostly the people of Dublin who Had Truck With England, not to mention Liverpool, which was somewhere even worse. Dublin City, Sister Sophia said darkly, making Magda solemnly repeat her stern warnings, was utterly given over to drinking and speaking bad words for no other reason than that they were all heaving with sin day and night.

  Magda, though, didn’t think the delivery man, her sole experience of the male gender until then, was wholly evil, for he whistled at his dog and called it affectionate names she didn’t understand. Spalpeen was one, which might actually have been its name. Magda wanted to see the dog, but it vanished when Magda was about twelve, and instead a new dog called Tearaway came to be shouted at. It was never called Spalpeen, which was kind of the delivery man, Magda thought. She imagined Tearaway to be a giant thing because she once heard it snuffling when she waited with blood-spitting Lucy under the rainy archway of the kitchen door with all those lovely scented foody smells. It was there under the arch that she imagined meat most of all.

  ‘That must be a big bastard,’ Lucy said, shocking Magda to the core.

  ‘Lucy!’ Magda cried. ‘A word like that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s wrong!’

  ‘Why is it wrong?’ Lucy said, truculent. ‘We’re mostly bastards.’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘We’re nothing of the kind!’

  ‘We’re mostly bastards. It’s why we’re here.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Magda wept at that.

  ‘You are,’ Lucy said with comfortable certainty.

  By now Lucy was wheezing most of the time, though still slick when stealing bits of bread from other girls at meals. She would even steal a spoonful of gruel if you weren’t quick enough to stop her, but the ensuing struggle, if you dared try to prevent her hands from getting at your dinner, sometimes caused spillages and you might get spotted by the invigilating nun and sent out of the refectory without finishing your food and you then went without.

  ‘I’ll die soon,’ Lucy often said, having proved that Magda was a bastard like herself. Lucy was the thinnest in the class.

  ‘No, you’re not, Lucy.’

  Magda didn’t know why it was important to stop Lucy talking like this. She knew nothing about dying, though it was a happy business because the nuns said so, and in Religion and Doctrine they had to learn the Stations of the Cross by heart and the Canon Laws of the Church and other essentials for the Meaning Of Life. When you died you were in Heaven and that was the best you could hope for, especially illegitimates and orphans, who were lucky to get anywhere.

  ‘Course I am. I’ll get a special place in Heaven. You know the first thing I’ll do?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’ll take away all seventeen telephones the King has in his grand palace in London.’

  Magda was awe-struck. ‘Will you?’

  ‘Serve him right. The Pope has only one telephone, but the King has seventeen. Who needs seventeen telephones?’ Lucy spat blood, which was all right because it was raining and her spit swam away in the puddles outside the kitchen archway.

  Magda had heard this before, because it was often preached as evidence of the sinfulness of the Protestants, who had tons of money they stole from Catholics down the ages, which was why the Pope was so poor and the Protestants could drink all day long and resort to sin. Lucy also knew about numbers.

  ‘See, those of us who have names count as bastards, though we weren’t born out of wedlock like One-One-Three. That gives us promotion when we die.’

  ‘Ta, Lucy.’

  Without Lucy’s guidance Magda would have known none of these essentials, though that wasn’t quite true. It was more that Lucy explained things for Magda so she could understand what the nuns were saying. Magda cried her heart out when Lucy, true to her prediction, died. She died one night, being found twisted and bloody in her blanket that was wet through from sweat. Except it wasn’t that simple, because Magda knew what had happened, which was why she now had the duty of murdering Father Doran.

  Magda felt really bad about things. She told herself she guessed, but wasn’t sure and nobody ever explained, that Lucy had tried maybe to get out of bed to get some water, having sweated so heavily that even her pillow was damp and the blanket stuck to her with blood. She had pooed herself, her shit sticking black and smelly to the blanket and the brighter blood she had sicked or coughed – maybe both? – staining the blanket and her chin.

  It was Seven-Eight, who secretly was Vera and claimed to know her surname – yet another lost element of identity Magda knew would prove another insuperable weight-age problem – who claimed to have found Lucy like that, though it wasn’t true. It was about four in the morning, and the dorm was soon a silent parade of lights, torches, nuns flitting and bringing things and carrying canvas with two long sticks they had difficulty shoving inside the tough hemmed edges. They made Magda, still in the gloaming of the coming dawn, close her eyes tight and pray while Lucy went to her eternal rest, because it was a specially holy moment and one they all had to learn from to their lasting benefit throughout life.

  Magda was fearful and betrayed Sister St Paul by pretending to herself that she was unable to cross her thumbs exactly right without opening her eyes just a crack to see as the nuns panted by carrying…carrying what looked like potatoes lumpy and long in the canvas thing. One nun actually told the other off, who held the flashlight to show the way to the door, because the older nun, whose name Magda didn’t know, had forgotten to bring the brace-irons for the stretcher, whatever those were. It looked like one long tube of canvas, and Magda tried to pray but the words didn’t stick themselves together the way they should in any ordinary prayer.

  And Magda cried that morning all through the De Profundis, feeling really sad even though Lucy was joyously wrecking the Protestant King’s seventeen telephones from her special place in Heaven and happily feasting on meat and milk and honey and whatnot on the Right Hand of God. And Magda was smacked three times for keeping on weeping when she should have been dancing with joy at Lucy experiencing ine
ffable joy up there among all the saints. She chimed in with,

  When my hair stiffening on my head shall forbode my approaching end…

  Lord have mercy on us…

  But who would wipe Lucy’s chin, as Magda so often did in the night when Lucy whispered she was frightened her mouth blood would show on the sheets? Would those stealthy nuns, carrying her off in a thing like a sack because the old nun had forgotten the brace-irons, wipe her chin? And did they mop her clean? And wash her bottom and legs after all that black stuff came out of her bottom when she died? And did anybody remember to give Lucy a drink of water before she went to be buried? And where exactly was Lucy now? Magda badly wanted to go to see where Lucy was, so she could pray over the headstone and make things all right. She felt it was shameful, but maybe that’s what happened to everybody when you died.

  ‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,’ Sister St Paul intoned during the Litany For The Dead, which probably explained all that blood and dark colour. Only One-One-Three, who was Sally, cried like Magda did that day, and got her legs smarting too with Sister Annuncion’s thick round ruler just like Magda for wasting time in superfluous grieving.

  Nothing else really happened in the Magdalenes, except numerous disappointments, but they were like weather and came every day in different guises, until Magda went to work unpaid in the paper packers. The girls who reached the age to live out were sent to families, if they could read and write and were decent, or to a job under matronly supervision, returning at evening to sleep in the Living Out Block under a nun’s stern monitoring.

  There she met Damien, who didn’t last long, except he caused ructions within Magda that almost caused her to take her own life, but she got lucky and managed not to, mostly from fear.