Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘I can’t get enough of this mint,’ he said. ‘Oh, sorry, Magda. I grabbed it first.’

  ‘Manners, Kev.’

  ‘He was always a rude lad,’ Dad said. ‘No hope for some people.’

  ‘Oh, he’s very…’

  Magda halted and Mam said quickly, ‘Grampa is worried because somebody keeps losing some medicines, Magda. That’s not the reason I was glad when Kev said he’d asked you here.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s just that Grampa was a sniper during the war,’ Kev said. ‘So he notices things. Even when you think he’s dozing, he’s really awake in a bit of himself.’

  ‘They called him Holer,’ Mrs MacIlwam said. ‘Didn’t they, Dad?’

  And Dad said, ‘Yes. I believe he was very famous. I only learnt that from somebody who came up to him in the park while I was at the lads’ football one Saturday.’

  ‘He’s got medals.’

  ‘Doesn’t like to talk about it. He told this chap, “No, you’re mistaken. I was never in the wars.” It’s not true. Just he doesn’t like talking about it.’

  ‘Thanks for looking out for Grampa, Magda,’ Kev said. ‘I feel you’re an ally in that old place.’

  Magda was stunned. An ally and a visitor all in one day.

  ‘I’m always frightened,’ she said.

  ‘Frightened?’

  They were interested in that. Marla even stopped eating. Magda noticed how, despite their proximity to each other, none of them had need to guard their dinners from the rest. That was family, she supposed, or maybe that Mam and Dad were there to see it didn’t happen.

  ‘What of?’

  ‘The nuns telling you off. They look after the old people.’

  ‘Why are you scared, though?’ Jean was indignant. ‘They’ve no right.’

  ‘If you get told off and it’s not your fault, you just tell them to stuff their silly old job and walk out.’ Beth glared round the table.

  Mr MacIlwam said in a bland voice, ‘Easy for us to say. Difficult for many.’

  ‘I can’t see why.’

  ‘That’ll do, Marla.’ Mam made Marla keep quiet a second time and Marla became even more outraged, then started on about the prices they charged in supermarkets for meat these days, and how the costs were going up, Euros or not.

  From there Kev started on the routes to get into Dublin, best on a Sunday for bus and train services. Marla grumbled about the buses she had to take to school. Beth said it was all the same to her because she was going to work in a video shop selling videos, and then would be promoted and make TV films. Magda admired their bravery and said so. Beth said it wasn’t bravery, it was taking opportunities.

  Marla asked how Magda managed, not being able to read, and kept on despite the warning signals from her mother. Magda told her of her many tricks, such as pretending she’d hurt her hand for a signature, then the business with the bank card and her wages, and then about telephones she didn’t know how to use. Marla thought it lovely, really sweet. Beth and Jean decided Magda was clever. Magda had never told these things before, not to anyone.

  Dad blamed them nuns, and said the only way out of the Pit of Despond, which Magda had of course heard about, was for Eire to go socialist and get rid of the Church altogether. Kev grinned at that and said, sorry, it was one of Dad’s soap boxes, and that when Eire did vote for a socialist Dail everybody would have to do model engineering for a hobby. Everybody laughed at that, even Dad, just when Magda was waiting for his explosion of anger.

  ‘Ignore them, Magda,’ Dad said. ‘Have some more or you’ll starve to death in this house.’

  ‘Toy trains will be compulsory in school,’ Kev said.

  ‘You can laugh, son.’ And the father confided to Magda, ‘My ambition is to make a scale model of the Great Eastern, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s wonder of the world. I’d start with a scale model outlined in wood before tackling the metal components…’

  ‘Hello,’ Kev said. ‘That’s torn it. Off we go.’

  His family groaned as one.

  Beth said, ‘We’ve had it now. He’ll not stop his old yakking now until it’s dark.’

  The family meal frittered itself in mild squabbles until it was time to leave. Magda was shown back to the bathroom by Beth, and when she came down, worried she hadn’t been polite by using the loo when Kev was waiting to take her to the bus stop, nobody seemed to think it was anything out of the ordinary. It was an astonishment.

  Magda said her goodbyes as well as she could without going on too much. Mrs MacIlwam said it had been a pleasure to welcome her and she hoped she would see Magda again soon.

  Kev took her to the bus stop and waited with her, telling her about his sisters and how they came to be living in that house and everything. She got the bus after a lovely wait, and that was the end of her visit to a real live family and a Dad who didn’t fight or hit her and a Mam who didn’t shriek or hit her and their children who weren’t being taken away to prison and who talked about doing her hair and making models from tin.

  She thought it was the most marvellous experience in the world, and she their ally and visitor all at one go.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Waking was a double thing, unreality first, followed by a sense of wonderment. Father Doran could not think for a moment. The five senses kicked in, the distinctions of sight, sound, touch first, then he knew taste, and finally smell with the overpowering anonymity of hospital scents. And at last the senses cobbled him together.

  With a sombre awareness of something not quite right, he took in the room, the window looking into the hospital corridor, the green sheen on the ceiling where monitors showed they were still supervising away, beyond the mere few senses God had started Homo sapiens off with. They were in charge, technology sneering at the Almighty, You did whatever You could, with paltry tools and the minuscule imagination of the neophyte, but now, Friend, You are superfluous. You might think You have a place in all this technology, but You are done for, God.

  It could go on, this computerised world of know-how that religion had to eschew, unite with, or condemn. No means of redress, if you thought yourself hard done by. Nothing you could argue would benefit you more, because it wouldn’t, it can’t and it won’t. The harsh world will see to that. The technical computer world was controlling this defective organism made in God’s own image. Society now refuses to acknowledge that He made it, and people refuse to give thanks on their knees to God.

  That might be it, for all the sense it made to Father Doran lying there staring about. He was afraid to move. The last time he had been in this position – waking in territory unknown, in a state of dependence and impotence – was in the sick room at the St Cosmo Care Home, with that idiot girl seated across from him and himself unable even to see her.

  He remembered with sickening directness how she moved and talked…about what? Something about a girl. Or something even vaguer, with him lying there baffled and becoming really rather frightened. Then, blessed moment of relief, the nun had walked in, come into his arc of view. He had been so relieved. The girl had gone.

  The girl had brought him a drink, her with her strange glance. How curious that her look should be the very first memory coming into his mind. For he knew that he was in hospital. He could recapture, if he wanted, being seen off in the ambulance, the two paramedics – is that what they were called? – and the nun’s voice, and somebody promising they would do a Novena for his certain recovery, so trusting.

  The operation. He could remember nothing, he thought with relief. There were these tales, weren’t there, of people waking up and actually hearing and even feeling surgeons talking and pulling and cutting…Dear God, what a horror. But was it real, with all this super technology busy flicking and bleeping and calling everybody’s attention to the fact that the staff out there were actually superfluous to requirements? The miniaturised world of technocracy ruled. Whose requirements? Why, the computer’s, for what the technology wanted was essentia
l, and all else a monstrous irrelevance.

  ‘Father Doran?’

  His heart skipped a beat – well, perhaps not; it beat steadily under the iron control of gadgets, the centre of whose attention he was. No, no extrasystoles, just a twinge of anxiety.

  A nurse in some kind of overall, her hair strapped to her head and globular spectacles and flex clamped to her chin.

  ‘You’ve done well, Father Doran.’

  ‘I have?’

  But he had done nothing except lie supine while they slit and tinkered with his heart then handed him over to these machines.

  ‘And you’re going to do better.’

  ‘Thank you for all you’ve done, Nurse.’

  ‘Moira,’ she said. ‘It’s all first names now.’

  ‘Me included?’

  She laughed, checking the arrangement of some tube thing and several wires, dabbing her fingers at a console behind his head.

  ‘Not those connected to the Almighty, Father, no. We’re not that pushy.’

  ‘Yet,’ he said, an attempt at humour that merely got a nod.

  ‘Heard about the robot surgeons? They have them in London and the USA. The surgeon just sits in a glass bowl and watches the robot do the business. It’ll come, Father, it’ll come.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then we can all go on holiday with the boyfriend.’

  ‘Can I have a drink of something?’

  ‘Maybe in an hour. I’ll be right here. None of this in-and-out business like it used to be.’ She laughed again, adding, ‘Make sure we get you well enough to get shut of you.’

  It was evidently her standard joke, and he smiled. He was surprised to find he had a tube in his nose, and another in his mouth making a hissing noise.

  ‘There’ve been messages for you. Bishop MacGrath called from the diocese. The people at the St Cosmo, a Sister Stephanie, and others. They are on the locker there.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Masses being said for you.’

  ‘So kind.’ He began to feel a little dreamy. This was always a dangerous state, meaning risky for morality, not health.

  ‘The doctor says you can have fluid by mouth in an hour, so we’ll drag you up from your pit there and set you going.’

  ‘Going?’

  ‘None of this lying about for days at a time after surgery, Father. Don’t think it’s going to be easy. You’re up and about almost as soon as you’re awake these days.’

  ‘You mean today?’

  She laughed again. He liked Moira.

  ‘Certainly. No exceptions, Father. You’ll start today, no mistake.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He dozed and went through a few daydreams until she came back. He could not believe it was a whole hour. The fluid was bland, tasted like nothing more than water and seemed far too much, but he drank obediently and was lifted by two nurses into a semi-recumbent position. He could see through the long window into the hospital corridor, people passing, nurses pausing, banks of monitors on the walls.

  ‘Your notices of banns and births.’ Moira, joking as usual, pointing to the bedside locker. ‘Keep up your fluids, or we’ll catch it from the surgeons. They’re doing their rounds thirty minutes from now.’

  ‘Am I getting on all right?’

  ‘You’re fine, Father. No worries, our Australian registrar’s always saying. Like we’re worried sick until he says his old catch-phrase.’

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘Don’t say it. We nurses pull the wool over the doctors’ eyes pretending we’ve done everything they told us to.’

  Another of her jokes. He moved and grimaced. His chest was starting to hurt. She caught it and said he’d have that for quite a few days.

  ‘Once the physiotherapists get in, that’ll be the end of you.’

  ‘Today?’ he asked, alarmed.

  ‘Tomorrow you’ll end this idleness and abandon. In your state, you might never make it. They’re formidable people, them old physios.’

  He found her jokes somewhat wearing but smiled gamely along.

  ‘Thanks for all you do, Moira.’

  She indicated the sheaf of messages on the locker and left, promising to be no further than the window. He watched her go through and perch at the counter to deal with a keyboard. Everything was keyboards and monitor screens.

  It was a relief to get to handwritten messages.

  He opened the first and read. So kind of people to think of him. Soon to be out and back in circulation? Strange how those waking thoughts had deceived him into imagining all sorts. He recalled his five senses, trying to collect his thoughts about the order in which they governed awareness. Were we nothing more than an organism somehow developed, presumably by this evolution mechanism of survival of the fittest, into a being with philosophy, memory, the ability to comprehend the workings of the mind and to understand the soul? Odd that one should revert so. Presumably God had left this tendency there as a reminder of mortality. Human beings were always vulnerable and, being so, could not hope for any further advancement unless God Himself entered into the scheme of things.

  He said a short prayer, choosing the humble prayer from the Compline, Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes…asking to be saved while awake and to be guarded while asleep.

  He had difficulty managing the cards and notes off the locker, with the wires trailing from his chest. Avoiding looking at his dressings in case they made him queasy, he decided to read through them all later. He felt better, but it was right to re-commence his duties, as a small thanks to the Almighty for making him well again.

  Magda woke in her bed-sitter. The day filled her full of new resolutions. She would somehow learn to read and write, though the terror of doing such a thing brought all her fears back. Fear of the classroom, of nuns, of punishments, of the way she had been so often left out because she was thick and stupid and never going to amount to anything, being an orphan.

  On duty today, because somebody was going somewhere and they were a nurse short. She and Mrs Brady from the polishing were due to do floor work.

  Glad to be told she was on time arriving at the St Cosmo, Magda started working out, while she took the mop (no queuing rows to get mops in first on Sundays), how she knew it was time to be at work. The buses tended to come along at regular intervals. Another clue was what people said to each other, ‘Ooh, I’m nearly late this morning, what with our Jamie’s leg,’ that kind of thing. Then teams, going out to Mass already carrying football kits so they could go straight to the pitch and start their hooting and hollering after some stupid ball. And she could ask the time, if she had a clue what the numbers meant. Half-past something was her great favourite, because it always meant she was maybe in time for work. The rule was, she started work on the hour sharp, and half-past something meant early or late. She had once arrived in tears and terrified because her half-past had let her down something awful, being late. She got less money that week, and Mrs O’Hare had explained to her, maybe guessing she hadn’t a notion in her head, that it only meant you were not punished in any other way.

  And Mrs O’Hare had said afterwards, thinking Magda out of hearing, ‘Poor girl thinks everybody’s out to give her a thrashing. Let anybody try it on me, they’d get a seeing to. My daft auld husband’d be at them with both fists and elbows out, sure to God.’ And Mrs Doherty from the kitchen said, ‘I blame them Magdalenes.’ They agreed it was the nuns’ fault, yet still they went to Mass, which proved things should stay as they were. You had to agree with the whole world.

  Armed with these clues, Magda decided on vigilance as a means of learning. She would look at the clock, this time staring at the clock and trying to keep the numbers in her mind. They seemed odd, the first time she tried it this morning, because they were all straight lines. Those on Mr Liam MacIlwam’s clock were curled, except for some. It was strange. She wondered if they told different times.

  She couldn’t feel the same towards Mr Liam MacIlwam since she had been a visitor at
his house and met by his grandson Kev from off the bus. And just knowing that his son, Kev’s father, made tin toys on an oil soaked board while his grandchildren pulled their father’s leg without mercy. The family only pretended to get cross when they were really amused by the whole thing. That experience, so new, made Magda proud – though pride was a sin so you had to watch it. Did she now have friends? The image of friendship caused her to almost keel over with pride, which had to be curtailed. Realising you had pride meant you had to end thinking in that fashion.

  ‘One, two, three,’ she knew, from hearing them said, but which was which? Was it the straight numbers she was saying, or the bent ones?

  She gave up, for the moment. She had to make her friends think she wasn’t just giving in. Dad MacIlwam back there with his tin toys – no, models – didn’t give in when everybody laughed because he was a grown man. No, he got on with it. Sooner or later he’d set to, making that Great Eastern thing, and Magda knew the world would be a better place for it. Also, there was this strange conviction: if there was half a chance, even, of Dad MacIlwam’s daughters Beth and Marla and Jean helping their father to make that thing, even though they pulled faces, Magda knew they would all try their very best. The fact that he’d be delighted must make it, to them, worthwhile. And Kev too.

  And if she wanted any more proof, you’d only to look at the way they called after her on the doorsteps, ‘Thanks for looking after Grampa,’ which set her eyes leaking wet down her face just like Kev’s that day.

  Who knew? If she learnt to write and read lettering on a page so she could say it out loud quick as talking at a bus stop, she might be able to help Dad MacIlwam to make that model thing on his oily board, and make the world a better place. It would make her feel so grand.

  ‘Here on Sunday, Magda?’

  That was Mr Liam MacIlwam, talking with his eyes shut and making her jump. She’d been sweeping under his bed so quietly nobody could possibly hear. Except she now knew, from being in his house as Kev’s guest at dinner, that he was Holer who always was a bit awake from shooting enemy people even when everybody else was fast asleep.