Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  She chose the black dress, too long but how could she shorten it? The nuns made the older Magdalene girls shorten or lengthen their habits. The oldest girls, nimble with their fingers and counting and working lengths out, made the nuns’ underskirts. You could always tell which girls knew spelling and counting, because their hands were always thick in the palms and their fingers often bled. They were paler and squintier than the other girls. And you could always tell the serving and washing girls by the sudden end to the hard chapped skin just short of the elbow, where the arms didn’t need to dip any further into the washing.

  The rest of her time she spent brushing the dress. She worried about her bottom, and spent a long time trying to position the mirror piece so she could see there was nothing going wrong back there so people would notice her stupid shape and be mortified by the sight.

  With trepidation she left, going back several times to make sure of nothing in particular, and caught the Sunday bus.

  Kev met her off the bus and they walked together, no arms linked today. She had a terror of railways, not knowing why except she didn’t know how to work the tickets and you’d have to ask and know counting.

  ‘It’s easier to come right up Ballybough Road,’ Kev said. He had a clean shirt on and jeans. Magda thought him debonair.

  ‘If you’ve a motor bicycle,’ Magda said, defending her secret ignorance. She smiled, to make a joke of it.

  He nodded, not smiling back. ‘There’s a bus from the Busaras goes straight to Tolka Park. Get off at Fairview.’

  ‘I’ll do that, then.’ She caught herself thinking, Jesus Mary and Joseph, would he now be dismayed that here’s this stupid girl with the effrontery to assume she was coming out here to every Sunday dinner just because he’d mentioned some old buses?

  ‘You’re right, Magda. I think everybody’s on a bike.’

  ‘I always imagined…’ being on a motorbike, was her next unthought tragedy that had to be extinguished before it got out properly into talk. She only meant Easy Rider, where they rode their old bikes across wild and free America and were so happy and cavalier, not caring. She didn’t mean she kept imagining him steering with one hand while he held her on the bike and they drove off into the sunset, no, nothing like that. ‘How hard it must be,’ she made up quickly, ‘to drive a motor bike. Do they show you in the Gardai?’

  ‘Yes. I learnt there.’

  ‘I can’t read,’ she said suddenly, thinking it had to be said straight out. ‘So I’d never learn.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘Not a word.’ She smiled, trying to lessen the shame of it, and made things worse. ‘I’m hopeless with numbers and all. I never learnt, you see.’

  ‘There’s lots like that.’

  ‘Not as bad as me.’

  ‘I’m colour blind,’ he said with candour. ‘So you’re lucky.’

  ‘Are you?’

  She was astonished. The world was so queer. Once, everything was simpler, back when wrong was her fault because of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Now, here was this hero, in the Gardai for Heaven’s sake, with a deformity. She knew some girls in the Magdalenes got punished for stubbornness when they got colours wrong, but that was just usual. One question, what colour was the priest’s vestments on a Feria day, which of course was a green chasuble, a girl said red as if it was a martyr’s Sunday like St Peter. The class went silent as the girl was called out and whaled. This was the first Magda had heard of words for it, colour blindness.

  ‘I’d have got on further if I wasn’t,’ he said, seeming not to care either way about it, which was superb.

  Magda always thought that all females – nuns, girls, the rest – were merely men who hadn’t quite come off, so to speak. It was right and just to know you were wrong all the time, because that’s what life was. Yet if God had made a lovely man like Kev then left something out like this colour blindness thing, what was God up to? It suddenly seemed like God was playing about, letting some have nothing at all wrong, and making others with a club foot that proved your mother or father, or both, had got up to no good, so serve you right. To be limited, as herself, was only right, deserving a bad start because of your mother’s sins, but Kev? With his authentic genuine family?

  Suddenly she slowed. Kev asked her what was wrong.

  ‘We’re nearly here,’ he said. ‘Just there, fifth along.’

  ‘I got a bit worried.’

  ‘What of?’ He laughed and she thought it was so marvellous laughing like that and not caring. ‘Us? We’re boring, and that’s the truth. You’ll see.’

  Boring? A real family in the image of the Holy Family? Her mind span, and she decided she must see this through. She walked on with resolve. This was a decision, an almost firm one, to carry something through.

  ‘Is it all right me coming?’

  ‘Why?’ He seemed surprised.

  ‘Because…the Magdalenes.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I’m an orphan, see? Do they know I’m a Magdalene girl?’

  He said with a frown, ‘I can’t remember if I said or not. Why?’

  Why? She wondered for an instant if he was deranged, not seeing things as they actually were. How could she explain to him, who failed to see the truth of things, when he was already pausing at this house, going up the steps to a grand door where a woman was coming out?

  She was smiling and wiping her hands on her pinafore and two girls were saying hello and taking her arm and saying to come on in.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m late,’ she blurted, because she’d heard it said on TV, a gentleman caller at a house in Berkeley Square, where coaches trundled and a sinister doctor was killing Victorian girls in gas-lit old Whitechapel, a typical piece of London immorality.

  ‘Oh, think nothing of it,’ a girl said, pulling her up the steps.

  ‘Sure, how could you get here if you’ve had to learn the way?’ the woman said. ‘I’m this spoilt brat’s mother, and everything he’s tellt you is wrong.’

  ‘Mam means me,’ Kev confided, not even minding, which shocked Magda.

  ‘We’ll put you straight,’ one girl said. ‘I’m Marla and I’m fifteen. Isn’t being a teenager rotten luck?’

  ‘Yes.’ Magda agreed without thinking, then asked herself, is it? She had never thought this.

  ‘I’m Beth,’ the taller girl told her. By now they were at the top of the steps and into a hallway with flock wallpaper of a strange reddish hue. ‘I design things. I’m eighteen. It’ll be marvellous to have somebody sensible to talk to. Kev’s hopeless, start to finish.’

  ‘Pay them no heed, Magda,’ Kev said.

  ‘Hello, Magda,’ Jean’s voice called. ‘Down in a sec.’

  Magda’s head was going round. Was this a family? All pretending to be at each other’s throats? She was taken into a room where a man was putting something into a small steam engine thing. His frown disappeared and he smiled, ruefully grimacing at his hands. They were covered in oil. Bits of metal scattered all over on a board.

  ‘I’m Dad,’ he said. ‘Anything wrong here, Magda, I’m responsible for, but blame Mam. That’s what she’s for. God knows, none of this brood’s good for anything except telling off.’

  Magda was gripped by fear. What had they done wrong, and why didn’t they even care when Father was cross? He grinned and said chiding to Mrs MacIlwam, ‘Give the poor girl a cup of tea, Ness, she looks done for.’

  ‘I’m not!’ Magda said, desperate to set things right.

  Silence came. The girls looked at each other.

  ‘OK,’ Marla said. ‘But I’m desperate for a drink, so you’ll have to have one too. And this old Dad of ours grumbles if he doesn’t get his rotten old tea, so we all have to suffer.’

  ‘That’s right. Isn’t he in a terrible mess?’ Mrs MacIlwam led Magda away. ‘Dad never finishes them heaps of rubbish. Would you believe he’s been working on the one wretched thing for a year now? Costs him the earth and he won’t give up.’

 
; ‘Dad’s a railway fanatic,’ Kev told Magda. He came with them. ‘Don’t let this rabble get you down. They’re trouble enough without a visitor. Heaven knows what they’ll be like now we have one for the first time in our history.’

  Magda almost went giddy with delight. A visitor! Like when that cleric arrived at the Bennet house and Mr Bennet had to receive him in his study! Just for one moment she thought, this is really happening to me!

  Jean came flying in and said hello. Her hair was different.

  ‘Come and see what we have ready.’

  They went into the kitchen, Dad calling after them that Magda would be more interested in hearing about his engine than any old women’s chatterboxing, but they just laughed. At their father! Magda felt nothing but amazement and doubt.

  As Mrs MacIlwam brewed tea and poured for Magda, she explained about Kev’s dad working on the trains. He used to travel a deal, but now nothing like so much. He worked in some engine centre, easier on his time.

  ‘Even when he comes home he’s fiddling with that toy,’ Jean said.

  From the front room came a shout, ‘Don’t say toy! It’s a model.’

  ‘It’s an old toy engine,’ Marla agreed without a care. ‘Child’s game.’

  ‘I can hear you!’

  ‘Shhh,’ Magda said, desperate.

  They only laughed. ‘Ignore him,’ Beth said. ‘Marla’s right. A grown man, too!’

  ‘Do you cook at home, Magda?’ Mrs MacIlwam asked. ‘We’re doing lamb and roasted potatoes.’

  ‘I have a Baby Belling thing,’ Magda admitted. ‘There’s only me, see?’

  ‘Haven’t you brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No. I was an orphan.’ She said it outright, bold as brass, readying herself to be asked to leave because she was the product of a sinful liaison.

  ‘What a shame!’ Marla said. ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ Beth said. ‘Well, never mind. You can share us for the whilst.’

  ‘I was a Magdalene girl.’

  Even this did not faze them. Marla nodded. ‘Kev told Dad that. Dad said you’re to have the top brick off the chimney for braving that lot.’

  Magda stared round the kitchen. It was plain, with just a sink, an old-fashioned kitchen range with a fire, and an iron oven of the sort she had seen illustrated in one of the Charles Dickens TV serials. This looked authentic, but the family’s words were extraordinary. So much disrespect around, or was it just casual and quite uncaring and even, she risked the thought, friendly?

  ‘Was it bad?’ Beth asked, anxious.

  ‘Stop all that,’ Mrs MacIlwam commanded. ‘You know what I told you. No cross-examinations, the lot of you.’

  ‘I only want to know.’

  ‘So do I, Marla,’ Beth said. ‘Grampa’s always on about the Industrial School and them Christian Brothers and the Rosimians—’

  ‘That will do,’ Mam said. ‘Enough questions. Magda will be driven demented.’

  ‘You know Grampa, Magda, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Except I’m only a cleaner. I don’t do anything with his treatments, just clean and help in the kitchen sometimes.’

  ‘Well, it’s a job.’

  ‘Magda worked in a paper packers, out of the Magdalenes,’ Jean said.

  Kev came in and took a mug of tea. Magda filled with admiration; him so full of confidence simply picking up a cup without even asking and putting his feet up on the chair’s stretchers, braving all kinds of rebukes and abuse. Transgression was Sister St Paul’s favourite sin.

  ‘Was it hard?’

  ‘Just ordinary.’

  The question puzzled Magda. Hard? What sort of a question was that? As if your thoughts of it mattered. Like asking if life was all right or not. How could you answer?

  Mrs MacIlwam talked of how she’d done the lamb, and how her mother had insisted on timing the cooking and getting the oven just right. Father came in wiping his hands on a rag and plonked himself down on a chair, feet up on anybody else’s chair’s stretchers and was given a mug of tea by his wife.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Magda,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Mr MacIlwam,’ she said formally.

  ‘Is Grampa much trouble?’

  She took her time adjusting to the notion of Mr Liam MacIlwam being Grampa, perhaps even once having lived here in this very house.

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  ‘He says you are the kindest there.’

  She felt her cheeks grow hot and Mrs MacIlwam exclaimed he was embarrassing the poor girl and to stop right there.

  ‘What Dad means,’ Jean translated without a blush, ‘is that Grampa says you aren’t cruel as them nuns.’

  ‘Now, then.’

  ‘It’s true, Mam, isn’t it?’ Marla was indignant. ‘Grampa says they’re treated like prisoners.’

  ‘It’s the Church,’ Beth said quite casually. She was buttering bread. ‘We don’t eat vegetables enough in Eire, do we? I have a friend who’s gone veggie.’

  ‘Vegetarian?’ Kev was interested. ‘Don’t you get anaemic?’

  ‘No, silly. They live longer, that’s all.’

  ‘Do they?’ Marla asked. ‘Do they, Mam?’

  ‘Nobody knows whether they do or not.’

  ‘It is the Church,’ Beth said. ‘Grampa says so. And he knew.’

  ‘I escaped by the skin of my teeth,’ Dad said. He was sent to clean his hands ready for the meal, and took his wife’s order without demur, just telling Magda he’d be back and to watch his tea so that nobody else would drink from it.

  The whole concourse of opinions and instructions, ignored or rebutted, confused Magda. She felt like crying because it was all too different.

  ‘Escaped?’ Magda wanted to know as he left.

  ‘Tell you in a minute,’ he said over his shoulder.

  She kept an anxious eye on his mug of tea, almost reaching out to keep it safe when Marla took some bread and butter without asking.

  ‘Make sure you eat the crust, Marla,’ Mam said. ‘It’ll make your hair curl.’

  ‘Do you have to curl yours, Magda?’

  ‘No. It does it on its own.’

  ‘Where do you go?’

  ‘I do it myself.’

  She explained how she didn’t know how to go into a hairdresser’s, and not being able to read or write properly.

  Marla and Beth were fascinated.

  ‘Oooh, Beth!’ Marla cried. ‘We can take her! Show you the ropes, Magda. There’s a decent one near Little Mary Street that charges the earth, but they’ve started an offshoot that’s half price on Wednesdays. We’ll go there.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Mam ordered. ‘You’re bewildering the girl. Let her decide what to do in her own good time.’

  ‘Grampa is very nice,’ Magda put in, hoping to avert the looming war.

  Kev cut in. ‘He was raised in an Industrial School, Magda. He suffered a lot. He got away into a ship from the Maltebior School one day, just didn’t go back when him and two other lads were out scrounging for things to eat.’

  ‘Sailed away,’ Marla said, proud.

  ‘And stayed a ship’s boy until he worked in England. He came back and got married. They had Dad.’

  ‘Who,’ Dad said, returning and waggling his clean fingers at his wife, who shook a fist in mock anger, smiling, ‘was told never to trust a word of them old holy folk. He sent me to a school, me and my three sisters, where there was no religious teaching.’

  ‘And Dad turned out the better for it.’

  Magda looked about, aghast. No crucifix, no pictures of Christ in agony on the walls. None of the girls wore a cross. She felt as if she had emerged into a Wonderland with no Alice to guide her.

  ‘That’ll do about religion,’ Mam said firmly. ‘Come to the table everybody. Fingers.’

  ‘Mam means wash our hands.’

  ‘Inspection in one minute.’

  Marla and Beth showed Magda to the bathroom and she diligently washed her hands. For some
reason she felt close to tears. The family seemed so contented, for all their pretence of squabbling that wasn’t squabbling at all. Was this how all families were, behind their doors and blind windows?

  Magda was going to hold out her hands for inspection but Mam seemed to have forgotten her order. She was given a chair by Marla, who kept asking her about the Magdalenes until Dad said, ‘That’ll do, Marla’, and she pulled a face at him and went unpunished. Marla was allowed to sit for the meal as if she had not shown the slightest defiance.

  Grace Before Meals never came, though Magda waited. They started their dinner straight off. Kev saw Magda’s hesitation and gave her a slight wink. She went red.

  ‘We’re not holy here, Magda,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Kevin,’ Mam said, serving, ‘Magda will start believing you, and then what?’

  ‘We’ll be the better for it,’ Dad said. ‘Are they nice people in them rooms, Magda? Where you live?’

  ‘I don’t know many, Mr MacIlwam. There’s one old lady, Mrs Shaughnessy, along the landing. The rent collector comes every Friday. There’s somebody on the ground floor who plays a lot of music. I think they’re two music students from Trinity College. One writer sings sometimes, they say he writes books but I’ve never seen him. On the ground floor. Then two women who work in a bank, and one who is a caterer. I don’t know any of them to speak to.’

  ‘Is that it? Who’re your friends?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  Magda almost started to say she had a friend called Emily who worked sometimes at the St Cosmo, but now didn’t even bother to come to work most days because she was going over the water to England to train as a veterinary nurse with animals. Faced with this family, though, it didn’t seem much of a friendship.

  ‘Well, there’s plenty of time,’ Mam said comfortably. ‘There’s plenty more, Magda, so start.’

  Magda looked at the plated meal. It was gigantic. She’d never seen so much food on one plate. The lamb was in great slices, and four roasted potatoes, gravy and green cabbage pressed dry, and carrots. She was offered some vinegary liquid with leaves chopped up floating in it. Kev took it from Beth and spooned out some to drip it onto his own meat.