Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  She gave a cackle at the image. Them fine husbands walking in to Holy Mass of a Sunday, arm-in-arm with their proud spouses, when they were still glowing inside from the ecstasy of some night shoving into a busy girl’s cunt. It was a laugh.

  ‘What’s the joke, Mary?’

  Mrs Duffanan was surprised Mrs Borru remembered her first name, though it was only one she’d made up for herself once she’d got out of the Magdalenes. She decided it for herself that day, and she stole some girl’s name off a notice in a shop window, all expensive frocks and dresses of the oddest colours, in Winetavern Street. An advert, a glossy card leaning on a window-dressing plaster model wearing outlandish clothes that surely nobody in their right mind would ever buy, announced Just right for Mary!!!

  She had always been good at her letters, and slowly translated it into words until somebody came out from the shop and moved her on, angrily demanding to know what she was doing standing there gaping. Well, the joke was on her, the miserable old bitch, because that name Mary had been stolen from under her nose, for that was how Mary became Mary Duffanan. The Magdalenes had changed her name from whatever it had been, and she’d been Two-One all her time in their evil buildings. She hadn’t even known her name when she decided to leave of her own accord, and had simply not turned up at work, just gone.

  ‘I was so surprised they didn’t come after me.’

  ‘When? Who?’

  ‘The whole Saorstat Eireann with them sirens wailing.’

  ‘Then you were old enough to be forgot.’

  ‘That’s what a friend said.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Somebody I met.’

  A navvy still with the street dust on him from his digging at some old paving near the old Cattle Market, where they were making a new place for folk to eat and drink, could you imagine? Mary was more interested in what he was going to build than getting him milked dry and herself with enough to get some new shoes if he paid up.

  He’d told her, ‘They won’t come after you, not from them old Magdalenes, not if you’ve been out more than two months. They give up, think you’re on the boat to England.’

  She was really proud of that. People really imagining she’d had enough to catch the boat to Liverpool and be free to wander, even if it was among all them heathens and pagans or whatever they had over there.

  ‘What number were you, Mary? I was Four.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Mary exclaimed it with glee, for Two-One was obviously better than miserable old Four.

  ‘I hated being just a number.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Know what I hated worse even than the pail lock-up?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Knowing I’d go to Hellfire for all eternity from being jealous.’

  ‘Jealous? Who were you jealous of?’

  ‘Monica. She was the mother of St Augustine.’ Silence, as the other realised the misunderstanding and rushed to explain. ‘No. I didn’t know the saint, God, no, just the girl Monica. She had this grand name. It sounded to me like a raspberry toffee in a wrapper, so I always wanted to be called Monica.’

  ‘Why did they leave her with that posh name, then?’

  ‘Being a saint, see? And you could never tell. Maybe the girl was really going to be come for, and saved out of the place.’

  ‘I saw that happen once.’

  ‘Did you? In the Magdalenes?’

  ‘It was early one Sunday. A gentleman came. There was wild talk among the girls, whispering all along the pews about something going on.’

  ‘Somebody had been come for?’

  ‘Yes. It was a small girl who was always crying, not tough, see? She was seven or maybe eight. I never worked out how old we were from our sizes, though some already came in knowing their age.’

  ‘What happened?’ with real excitement in the old croaky voice, because a rescue was a remarkable thing, whoever it happened to. Even now it still had a wondrous allure.

  ‘This gentleman came with another who, the girls were talking wild like you do, seemed to be some kind of servant, because he kept bringing out papers from a leather case when the gentleman said.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Mother Superior’s office.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He was a real relative.’

  ‘A real relative!’

  ‘That he was. He mentioned his dead sister, who was the small girl’s mother.’

  ‘What did the Mother Superior say?’

  ‘She asked to see the court papers.’

  ‘And did they have any?’

  ‘They had sheaves of the things. The Mother Superior signed, and then the man, and the servant man said something about concluding and the court would be satisfied.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘And the girl got carried out in a grand carriage!’

  ‘No. She was left outside in the corridor, frightened out of her wits.’

  ‘Which corridor?’ as if they knew, though they had been in places miles and miles apart.

  ‘The one outside the Mother Superior’s office.’

  ‘Get on with the rescue.’

  ‘I’m telling you, I’m telling you. They called her in and the gentleman stood up and smiled and said to her he was her uncle and had come to fetch her. And an auntie, a genuine real auntie, was outside in the Austin motor waiting to take her home.’

  ‘Home!’

  ‘Home. We all whispered “home” like it was Paradise, all that day and all the next. Imagine.’

  ‘Having a home, just like…’ But there the sentence ended, because home was the place you’d been taken from, and wasn’t too good to recall even if you could reach that far back.

  ‘She went out just as she was. The man smiled – Six-Three heard him say the very words – and said to the girl he was rescuing, “No, Beatrice, no need to bring anything with you. You shall have new. My two children, your cousins, will take you shopping later. They are all waiting downstairs for us.” And they went.’

  ‘Beatrice!’

  ‘She was called Beatrice, evidently.’

  ‘All the time she was called Beatrice?’

  ‘She didn’t know, or maybe she knew and made sure she forgot in case she got the old whacks for remembering.’

  ‘But he knew her name.’

  ‘He did for sure. He asked if she wanted to say goodbye to any of her friends and she just cried. He didn’t know what to do. He kept saying, “Here’s a thing, here’s a thing.” Then he just said, trying I suppose to be kindly, “Oh, well, you can always come back for a visit to see your little friends if you want to, eh, Beatrice?” Then they went to the main exit, Mother Superior and all.’

  ‘Did Six-Three see them in that Austin motor?’

  ‘No. She got whacked for listening in the corridor when she should have been washing the steps.’

  ‘Well, yes. That was fair.’

  ‘She never came back that we saw.’

  ‘Well, would you have?’

  ‘Even now I listen out for somebody called Beatrice. I’d like to tell her how she was the talk of the place, her getting out like that. It was like them stories where the airmen and soldiers were kept in prison during the war and made a tunnel to get out.’

  The two old ones were silent, then one said, ‘I think somebody’s taking the medicines again.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Somebody clever, like one of them prisoners.’

  ‘Did you see them do it?’

  ‘No. It’ll be Mrs Wheelan.’

  ‘It’s time she got over it, taking everything the way she does.’

  ‘She hasn’t. Nobody ever can, you know that.’

  ‘We don’t steal things, though.’

  ‘We do things just the same, like we can’t get rid of habits they put in you when you’re little.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Mrs Wheelan always steals things. There was that news
paper, wasn’t there? That visitor to the men’s wards laid his newspaper there with that little plant thing, a poppy, I think, and Mrs Wheelan couldn’t get out of bed for her bad arm, but sure as Jesus she had that old newspaper with its flower away quick as a wink.’

  ‘Mind you, I know a man who collects old bus tickets from the floor, right there in the Busaras in Store Street. Can’t get enough of them.’

  ‘They never got it back, that flower.’

  ‘With Mrs Wheelan, I’m not surprised. They’d never have kept her in prison, not them. She’d steal the cross off a donkey.’

  ‘What does he do with them?’

  ‘The ticket man? Puts them in a shopping bag, he does, takes them to where he lives.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  And after a silence, ‘There’s a lot of us like that.’

  ‘Who is taking the medicines?’

  ‘I heard Mr MacIlwam saying something. I think the men might know.’

  ‘It won’t be Mrs Wheelan, or the men would already have found out.’

  ‘That’s true. Men think different. All them engines, I suppose. My husband couldn’t get enough of them old engines.’

  ‘They talk boring, men, I always think.’

  ‘Me too. You’ve to be polite to them though.’

  A prolonged silence, so extended the nun listening in the curtained shadows of the corridor thought they must have nodded off. She had so far made no sound, and was all the more certain for it.

  ‘What was your pail lock-up?’

  ‘That place at the top of the cellar steps? You got locked in for being bad.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘One girl was in for a whole day. Wetting the bed, see?’

  ‘For wetting the bed they stood us outside by the class doors. You had to stand against the wall where everybody could see you. If you wet your bed, out you went with your wet mattress and had to stand with it on your head, but so they could see your face. You’d to do it sideways. They give you the old whacks too, your bum, and your back or the inspectors would see.’

  ‘Did you ever see inspectors?’

  ‘One. A lady who had spectacles. I thought they were grand things, all shiny. I prayed to Jesus to get me some spectacles. It was no good.’

  ‘Did anybody say anything?’

  ‘Glory be to God, no! How daft do you think we were?’

  ‘I wet the bed. We had plastic sheets under. You had to stand there with the wet sheet wrapped round our head. I had to do it when it was raining. Once when it snowed. I went blue.’

  ‘When I was about seven or eight I got it too.’

  The listening nun wanted to see their faces as they spoke, though she knew well enough who they were. It would have been more right to see how they looked when they talked, but she had never been caught yet. She did not know quite what she would do if ever they called, ‘Come out, Sister, come out. We know you’re there listening away!’ It would be so shaming.

  ‘What did you have for a lock-up?’

  ‘A tin bath. It was on the steps outside.’

  ‘You had to get in?’

  ‘No. You got put under it. It was put upside down on the ground, see? You had to be invisible, and the girls coming past on the way to dinner or prayers had to hit it. It made you get sick. I was sick all over myself more than once, I can tell you, that banging. Like being in a drum.’

  ‘How long were you kept in that old bath?’

  ‘Half a day. For bed-wetting, see?’

  ‘Oh, well, there is that.’

  ‘I always got the whacks as well. There was a leather belt thing the nuns wore round their middles, some part of their habit, I suppose. This one nun would take hers off when it was time for me to come out, and that was me up for the belting.’

  ‘I prayed a nun would die.’

  ‘Was she poorly?’

  ‘She started going pale, but much we girls knew about being pale. She had to lie in her bed of a day at the finish, and we older girls – I must have been fourteen, maybe, because I think I’d started my periods – had to take turns watching over her.’

  ‘They always did that.’

  ‘It was the white spit.’

  ‘We called it the bloody spit.’

  ‘It was the cough I hated. That nun coughed her old lungs out.’

  ‘The nuns always went to sleep in the night. It was me always got the spit watch.’

  ‘I prayed for this one to die, and die she did.’

  ‘You didn’t…?’

  ‘No. How could I? I was nothing but a barn myself.’

  ‘I used to try to filch the food, if there was any left.’

  ‘From the dying nun?’

  ‘This one didn’t die. She seemed asleep when I started to nick her slice of egg-and-butter in a sandwich. I had a night light to see by, how she was getting on. And she said, as my hand went out, “I can see what you’re doing,” and that was the end of my watching. I got the whacks.’

  ‘Was your place as bad as St Kyran’s?’

  ‘Darmuth? How should I know? That was the Sisters of Mercy, only for boys, wasn’t it? County Wicklow?’

  ‘One of the men – I think he was the one who went to England and won a bright silver chalice for bowling – went to St Kyran’s.’

  ‘Then he deserves all the silver things he earned, poor lad.’

  ‘Did any of them old nuns…y’know?’

  ‘No, thanks be to God. I heard of lots.’

  ‘You can never tell, though, can you?’

  ‘Not now. Only those of us who were there.’

  The pause almost set the nun thinking of moving from the shadows into the corridor and stealing away, when one old lady said, ‘Them things. The one the person’s nicking. Is it tablets or medicines?’

  ‘Tablets, I think. I’ve forgotten. My mind’s not what it was.’

  ‘The wrong things stay in your mind, don’t they? I find that. I went to England, stayed with some cousin who’d turned up and had a fine little house on the outskirts of a town called Oldham. She was frightened because I kept waking up from my sleep and her children got scared. I was twenty-two, or so I thought.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘My cousin took me to see a doctor, right there in that Oldham. He was worried, and sent me to see a psychiatrist. He made sure it was a lady, because then I’d not be frightened.’

  ‘Did she make you better?’

  ‘No. She said just to pretend nothing bad ever happened back when I was little.’

  ‘It doesn’t work.’

  ‘She said forgetting’s the best. She didn’t seem to have heard of any schools like we lived in, and wrote what I said down, but I got scared, because what if the old Gardai came after me for telling on everybody? She asked me to come back again and she’d see me a few more times, but I couldn’t stay with Glenda, my cousin, after that and came back to Eire.’

  ‘When’s the next meeting?’ the nun was startled to hear one of the old ladies say in a matter-of-fact voice. There were no meetings in the St Cosmo, except among the nuns.

  ‘Two days or so.’

  ‘Who is telling us?’

  ‘I think that old Liam. It was Mr Gorragher last time.’

  ‘Will it be when they put us out by the pond where the fishes are?’

  ‘How on earth do I know?’

  Sometimes, the nun thought, the old ones who had to stay most of the time in bed got wheeled out in chairs or their trolley beds to sit under cover where they could see the goldfish in the pond. One or two were allowed to feed the fish, but you had to watch them do it because they’d empty every packet of fish food, like they were doing something surreptitious. The fish food cost a fortune, but the old folk seemed to think everybody and every living thing, flesh, fish or fowl, was secretly starving and had to be fed with anything to hand. It was the old folks’ sickness.

  ‘They’ll tell us.’

  ‘Did you ever find
out who’s pinching the medicines?’

  ‘You’ve forgot. We didn’t know.’

  ‘Maybe it’s that old Mrs Wheelan.’

  A sigh. ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Did you hear about when she pinched the newspaper with that plant in it? I think it was a poppy.’

  ‘Yes, I heard. Go to sleep.’

  ‘I wonder where she puts all them things she steals? She’s a terror, that Mrs Wheelan.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I go, I don’t want them to bury me just as that old number. I’ve a name.’

  ‘Names are best.’

  ‘They always bury you by your name, don’t they? Not some old number.’

  ‘Always a name. That’s the truth.’

  ‘Mrs Wheelan’s a terror.’

  ‘You’re right. She is that.’

  Sister Francesca stole silently away. The old ladies slept.

  Chapter Twenty

  There had once been, Father Doran remembered, floating as free as if he flew on some power-free glider, a place dedicated to the care of children, in the tender mercies of Holy Mother Church.

  Who burnt them to death.

  This was in living memory. The nuns had protected the little girls so well that death by burning was almost inevitable. It was not the only incident. He tried not to think about the terrible fire, but it kept coming into his almost absent, drifting mind.

  He floated, mildly uncaring of his being moved from one place to another. Beautiful, this airy sensation. He heard one of the ambulance men – was that accent Galway? – say to his mate, ‘Down that end a bit,’ and on he glided into the ambulance.

  So many strange things had happened. Not many minutes since, there he was, doing as he was told by Nurse Duggan, SRN, with her, ‘Go to sleep and rest, then you can go jogging, ha ha.’

  First was that he had realised he was going to recover after all his terrible imaginings. Being struck down, and with calamitous results to this ticking heart of his with its frequent wobbles on those traces across the screens – now four of them, for Heaven’s sake – would scare anybody, even the most religious and well-balanced personality. He was no exception. He truly had been really frightened. Now, though, it would be smooth sailing. ‘Once we have the wrinkles ironed out, Father Doran,’ Dr Strathan had said only this early morning in his predawn visit, ‘you’ll be into hospital then you’re off my hands, thank the Lord.’ The doctor’s usual quip, provoking the right sense of confidence in the patient. Was it all a mannered front? Father Doran did not care. It sufficed.