Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘My arm got broke that time. Callum from the Frackrelett Industrial School. He was a transfer, from fighting back with one of the Brothers there. It healed bent wrong.’

  Sure enough Mr MacIlwam’s left arm stuck out at an angle that wasn’t quite right, the elbow being at an odd shape with the wrist turned as if he was always reaching into his pocket or trying to lift something that was just that bit too heavy.

  ‘The Christian Brothers said it was the judgement of the Lord for staring at Terry on the playground floor when I should have hurried into class when the bell rang.’

  ‘It was really Callum from Frackrelett?’ Magda, helping the old man along.

  ‘You weren’t there when they set on me. The whole class got punished.’

  ‘What happened to Terry?’ she asked, drawn in.

  ‘Terry got better. The other lad, Six-Nine, was taken away.’

  ‘Taken away where?’

  ‘Taken away.’ The head-beckon pulled her slightly closer. She could hear Sister Claire’s voice in that tone of finality, ‘Well, just you remember your solemn duty, all of you!’ so there would be no more time for all this listening.

  ‘The cold was mortal bad that day. The frost never went. The snow began about the last Angelus. The lads were covered in white, blue under the layer of snow, see?’

  ‘Snow?’

  ‘They didn’t move. They all finally fell down. Brother Patrick did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘He was the one always did it. We said you never came back when you went to get punished by Brother Patrick.’

  ‘Never came back? Terry never came back?’

  ‘Course not. You remember. You were in the same team.’

  ‘So I was,’ Magda said, baffled.

  ‘Six-Nine never came back. He went for good. Terry got better. The other lad I didn’t know. He had a dad come for him in the end, with papers and everything. He wanted to be a singer, but there was no way to get his voice going. No song in him, see.’

  ‘No song.’

  ‘I always had a good voice.’

  ‘You did, sure you did.’

  The old man’s eyes clouded and then ran more sad rain down his cheeks. Magda looked away.

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘Who? Six-Nine?’

  ‘Yes, him.’

  ‘They said he died.’

  ‘Six-Nine died?’

  ‘They always said – we said, we told each other – they got buried in Tooley Cemetery, but the graves were never marked. We didn’t know if that was true or not.’

  ‘Tooley?’

  ‘Tooley Cemetery. How could we know? We never went out.’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t know.’

  Sister Claire’s footsteps sounded on the linoleum, closer and closer. When they went quiet for a beat of two steps, Magda would know she was coming within earshot because there was a piece of carpet tacked there on the linoleum for the nuns’ feet to rest on.

  ‘I blame myself, Tom.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘See.’ The head-beckon, and she bent closer still. ‘If I had maybe tried to go with him, maybe he wouldn’t have been killed like that.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘Maybe they’d have thought, them old Christian Brothers, that we were four, and that four was too many. Are you seeing my argument?’

  ‘Yes. Would it have made a difference?’

  ‘Honest? You think not, honest?’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t.’

  The answer was that Six-Nine would have died anyway, poor lamb, stuck there in the cold playground until he fell and froze from cold and went blue so he had to be taken away to the Tooley Cemetery.

  ‘Haven’t you finished yet?’

  Sister Claire came wafting in, and that was the end of the conversation. Magda was almost faint from relief at seeing the nun, and dutifully completed her tasks.

  She asked permission to help Grace to wash old Mr Liam MacIlwam’s bedsheets once she was free, and the nun said that was a Christian compliance to a worthy labour, and that she could.

  Magda helped Grace with the washing in silence, and Grace asked what was the matter. Magda said nothing about old Mr MacIlwam’s story of the boy Terry who fell down in the frosty playground from being kept standing there until night from mitching from the Christian Brothers. She did not know where the idea came from, her being hardly able to tell one formed alphabet letter from the next, but it took form and held in her mind.

  Killed.

  That was the word that took hold and somehow came to dominate the rest of her mind as she rinsed and then wrung the clothes out in the mangle with the heavy iron handle. She caught the sheets on the other side of the rollers in a bowl and hung out in the yard with those silly pegs with the chipped wooden ends that gypsies made from wood they stole from trees and even gate-posts along the roads, so it was rumoured.

  Killed?

  ‘Grace,’ she said after a while, when she had returned from hanging out the washing. ‘What do you tell the priest in confession?’

  ‘You’ve to tell them everything, silly.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. You have to. It says everything.’

  ‘Does it?’

  Grace knew Magda could not read, in fact, had to be shown the page, even, and then helped by letting her pretend to follow where your finger had got to in the Ordinary of the Mass so it didn’t look too bad if the nuns came along, scouring the girls with their eyes for any backsliding.

  ‘I mean, every single thing? What about if you have done something like, well, if a lad says something to you?’

  ‘If you didn’t do anything with the lad, then you needn’t say anything to the priest because you resisted temptation.’

  ‘Then how do people get married?’

  ‘They stay pure until they are married, see?’

  ‘What if it’s something they’re going to do wrong?’

  This was the bit that mattered to Magda, who was by then already well into her plan of storing up those small white tablets in a safe place so she could poison Father Doran, and the Lord God would be pleased and maybe lift Lucy to eternal glory so she could stop falling. Then Magda could sleep the sleep of the just and her life would be one white cloud of holiness, even in this job.

  ‘That’s wrong.’

  ‘Is it? Every single time?’

  ‘Course it is.’ Grace was scathing. ‘You’d be able to say you were going to rob the railway station in Galway, like, and the old priest wouldn’t be able to tell anybody because that’s against God’s law.’

  ‘He couldn’t tell?’ Magda had heard this was so. No harm making sure.

  ‘No. He’d go to Hellfire if he did, and that would be the end of him. It would be wrong.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Presumption,’ Grace said. ‘It’s not allowed, otherwise there you’d be, robbing the station in Galway where all the tourists go, and then you’d get clean away.’

  ‘It’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s not allowed. You’d get spotted. God spots things like that.’

  This was a new difficulty. Magda asked Grace if she could make a kind of confession without saying what she was going to do, but Grace grew suspicious and looked funny at Magda, so she shut up and said nothing more.

  Killed, though.

  She wondered how many more people in the world of Eire – the truly good Catholic world where God ruled and all was well in Heaven and Earth because of Ireland – kept seeing other friends falling down, and why. Until then she had somehow seen men, the whole lot of them, sinners that they were because look at Adam and Cain and that old Pontius Pilate and all them evil Jews who crucified God Almighty, the whole lot of them as almost all-powerful and able to do everything they wanted. Though she had, of course, heard of the lads in the Industrial Schools being punished, though some grown-ups said it wasn’t so bad and they had to somehow keep order. Others said different but wouldn’t talk, and Mag
da never knew any well enough to even ask. Still more stayed silent, which was a truly terrible thing, for a man had no right to stay so silent you didn’t even know what was going on in his mind.

  And maybe she knew now, after listening to old Mr Liam MacIlwam tell his terrible dream memory of the boy Six-Nine falling like his pal Terry in the school playground in that horrid old frost and snow, that maybe many people, who had once been children, kept dreaming and screaming silent in their minds.

  In penance, she kept her pay packet unopened all the weekend, as punishment for herself for having imagined she was the only one to suffer from seeing anyone fall time after time, like Christ who was continually crucified every time some sinner sinned against Him.

  And sometimes Magda remembered the name of the girl who kept falling, and on those nights she woke screaming in herself but stayed quiet and never uttered a sound. She had promised.

  Some promises were hard to keep. This was one promise she would keep to her dying day, because she had promised Lucy, the falling girl, she would never say a word about it to another living person. She had never even said a word about it to the priest in confession, and he was standing in for God, wasn’t he?

  If she forced herself, she knew she might, just might, be able to speak it, but that would be a kind of betrayal. Lucy’s name had to be kept away from her mouth. That way the secret could be kept even from God in the confessional of a Saturday.

  Chapter Seven

  Kev MacIlwam’s mother told him he had to go. He didn’t want to.

  ‘It’s your turn, Kevin.’

  ‘I’m due in work on the hour, Mam.’

  ‘That can wait. Table tennis isn’t work. That old sports club.’

  ‘Won’t you be going to see him later on today?’

  ‘Going this morning is you.’

  ‘I think Teresa should go. It’s time she went.’

  ‘She’s got Inter examinations and needs her time.’

  ‘I need my time for practice. The championship’s next week, and you know what they’re like.’

  ‘Teresa’s got enough to do, Kev. Spend time arguing, there’ll be no time for anything.’

  ‘I went last week.’

  ‘Once.’

  Mam could get scathing when she’d got her mind set on anything and if she suspected Kev particularly of trying something on. This was the worst sin in Mam’s vocabulary, people ‘trying something on’, which meant escaping duty. Times were changing too fast. They should stay the same. All right, things always do change, but it should be slower, give her time to adjust. Too many folk talked too often of money, getting something for nothing. Everybody was always trying it on.

  ‘OK.’

  Kevin had a motorbike, a small old Velocette, true, but still going despite being on the blink now and then. The other Gardai at the garage joked about his sole means of transport, and sometimes left bottles of strangely concocted fuels, daring him to use it for his bike. He’d had a scrap or two over them slipping the odd glug into the fuel tank. Well, it was dangerous, and they’d since stopped all that. He supported Manchester United over the water in Lancashire, and his mate stuck up for Liverpool, where his brother Jerome was a prison warder.

  He grumbled some more, finished his breakfast, ignoring the cereal despite Mam’s protests that it was all the goodness he was leaving behind and only eating fatty things that were bad for you.

  She kept up the diatribe as he got his leathers on.

  ‘You’re a fiend for fat, which will rot your heart away clear when you’re forty. You should eat the corn flakes.’

  ‘It doesn’t fill me.’

  ‘You never try it.’

  ‘Eggs and bacon’s good. I only have sausages at dinner time.’

  Mam knew that wasn’t true but kept the family peace by arguing as if it were.

  ‘It’s in all the papers all the time about fat foods.’

  ‘What’s up with Grampa?’

  ‘They said to come this morning. If it’s anything, you phone and tell me after you’ve seen him.’

  ‘OK.’

  He said his so-longs, shouting up the stairs to Teresa, who still hadn’t come down yet though the bus was due in ten minutes, when she’d come flying down in a rush and catch it by a whisker to the convent school at Sandyhills.

  He drove to the Care Home to see old Grampa MacIlwam, grousing to himself about the lack of practice for the table tennis. He’d been chosen for the championship and took his selection seriously. He hoped to win a sizeable bet on himself – eight-to-one wasn’t bad, and he’d got in early at Joe Reef’s corner emporium. With his winnings, if he made it, he might have enough to pay for a trip over the water to the Cheltenham Gold Cup, where he knew of a certain winner that would break the French bastards who – with them two new training stables they’d got, all Mohammedan Arab money from Kuwait, the sods – were trying to muscle in and own everything. It wasn’t right. He’d punish them in coin, if only he had half a chance by getting enough money together to lay a decent bet on when the racing came.

  To do this, though, you really needed to be there, see the call-over before the Gold Cup, see the horses enter the parade ring as they stirred and walked, see the sweat on their flanks, get the crack around the stables. He had a second cousin in Aintree who’d give him the last word, and together they might actually make a killing. Money in rather than money out. He would have to give Eoin a chop, of course, maybe a sixth of the whole bet for the quiet mother, the word that would determine his final choice of horses in the sacred ring in Gloucester, which had seen so many past Irish champions, but he would try to talk Eoin down to accepting maybe as little as a tenth.

  It was hardly fair, though, to interrupt his training at the sports club on his one day off from the garage at the Gardai because of Mam’s dedication to her stupid duty.

  He went to see Grampa MacIlwam. With luck he could be in and out in ten minutes, and be in Blackrock in double quick time. Mam wouldn’t know how long he’d spent.

  Magda went to confession.

  It was Father O’Reardon. Of course, she thought in trepidation, it would be the one made her go almost silent. You couldn’t change your position in the queue just when you heard the priest’s voice – she could never read the name on the door, hung there by a nun before confessions started, because the letters always ran into each other and, in any case, the light in the church wasn’t all that good.

  Also, it was a shameful rejection of God to decide you wanted to go to this priest rather than that priest, because it only meant that, in your heart of hearts, you were unwilling to accept God’s law. The priest was set there by Canon Law to sit in the place of God Himself. How could you reject the Almighty? ‘Who,’ Sister St Union would say, eyes raised and shining piously at the ceiling, with that half-smile Magda always found so disturbing, like the nun was secretly enjoying something hidden and really rather horrid, ‘who among us sets herself up to be above the good Lord Himself, instead of humbly submitting to His decisions made for us in His ineffable mercy?’ On a bad day she would go round the class, picking on girls and asking, ‘Do you, Bridget? Do you, Five-Oh-Two? Do you, Six-One?’ Six-One was Magda. This was especially bad because Magda could never speak out in class and it would be the old round ruler and the legs aching and getting all chapped again.

  So she shuffled along, taking her turn and moving up slowly with reluctance towards the low door, to rise and go in after the one before came out.

  Father O’Reardon put the fear of God in her. She thought he had hair down to his fingernails when he hadn’t. They gave out Holy Communion just like the dainty fingers of Father Byrne, but she felt Father O’Reardon seethed with hatred and passionate denunciation of everything outside his dark confessional.

  She went in and knelt. She heard him pray something in Latin. Well, she would say it as she always did, as she had had drummed into her.

  ‘Pray Father give me your blessing for I have sinned. It is one week since my
last confession.’

  The fact was, she sometimes thought afterwards, and even before, that she had no real idea whether she had sinned or not. Well, that wasn’t quite right because she always had, for hadn’t she the mortal Original Sin on her soul, from having been born human? And inherited the stain of terrible sins that could only be washed clean by a pure and blameless life?

  ‘Yes, my daughter?’

  The low register made the confessional rumble. And now here it was, the terrible question of whether to tell him what she was going to do. Father Doran would visit the St Cosmo Care Home this afternoon, which was why she had come to make her confession this early before work.

  ‘I have told three lies, Father, and was slow in my work when I should have been working in eager obedience.’

  She paused.

  Could she say, and I have stolen some tablets with malice in my mind towards one of the priests who come visiting the Care Home, or not? Would he tell the Gardai and send them chasing after her in their marked motors? Would they put her in them handcuff things, to her shame and the shame of all the girls and nuns at the Magdalenes throughout the world and cause the horrible re-crucifixion of the Baby Jesus? She wasn’t really sure, but she kept thinking maybe she had already done that several times over by stealing the tablets in the first place. The old lady Mrs Borru had spotted her, so the Gardai would be able to prove she’d stolen them, because if one old lady had known all along then they with their bottles and jars and computer things could tell it was herself in a trice.

  ‘Yes. And?’

  ‘I have deliberately shirked my duties at the…’

  Longer pause this time, because this was skating near the edge of some terrible crack in the ice.

  ‘Yes?’

  She decided to risk it, and said, ‘At the Care Home. That’s where I work, you see, Father.’

  Another pause, breathless this time, and she could feel her breathing trembling all the way across her.

  ‘Yes?’

  He was becoming impatient. This would not do. Once they got it into their head that the penitent was hiding something, they became like terriers, never letting up until they’d hunted their way down those tunnels into the mine and then cornered the rat of suspicion and worried it to death. She wondered for an instant how she had acquired that image, because she was still mystified by those extraordinary creatures called dogs that everybody else seemed to take for granted, just things that were there knocking about to no purpose or on a string while you went out for a walk. There was old Mrs Derrig, who was allowed to keep a small thing called a Yorkshire, a barkish animal like a small rug that chased about in the backyard until the groundsman put it into its kennel at various times. Mrs Derrig took it for a walk round Carrick Park, where it did its business on the grass, which Magda thought wasn’t too good because what if poo dried up and became dust and blew into the old folks’ food of a mealtime? Then it would mean the old folks, far from being looked after, were actually eating what they shouldn’t be made to eat at all, but she couldn’t say that and never broached the topic, not even with Grace. Grace said all animals were sweet, and God’s creatures just like us.