Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘I decided to kill you.’

  ‘For what I did? Did you say that?’

  ‘Yes. To stop the fall.’

  ‘Fall? What fall?’

  He felt sickened. Bile rose in his throat and his chest pained, but nothing like as badly as the first time, more of a warning squeeze, watch out, no more of this or it may lead to trouble.

  This conversation would have to be taken in hand immediately, or it would get nowhere, just remain an unpleasant residue that he would have trouble over. This sort of thing, from a defective personality, would become a source of worry night after night, and that would never do. A priest with ambition on his mind had to focus.

  ‘Tell me more plainly what you mean.’

  ‘I decided to kill you. That way I’d stop the falling into the black stairwell every night.’

  ‘Stairwell?’

  ‘It wasn’t fair. You had no right to say it would be all right if you did that bad thing. That’s why the fall and everything.’

  ‘Because of something I…?’

  Wait. He wanted to tell her to wait, there must be some misunderstanding, she had the wrong priest, she could not possibly mean himself.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’

  ‘Yes. You are Father Doran.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I killt you to stop the falling every night into the stairwell.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  A pause. Then, with deliberate care, ‘Lucy. You remember Lucy?’

  He felt his chest grip, slowly at first then with a seriously steady tightening that caused him to hold his breath, except he had not inhaled and needed the air. The next inhalation proved harder, but he got it going by conscious exertion. The pain stayed, his chest thumping now.

  ‘Lucy?’ he asked stupidly.

  ‘Yes. You remember, the night in the dormitory.’

  ‘Lucy?’ But Lucy died. She threw herself down the stairwell from her dormitory.

  ‘Yes. I sent a note.’

  ‘I just read it.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Where…?’

  He could not speak. Not from dizziness, but shortage of breath. He seemed to have run out, as if a canvas, seeming so wide, and the brush still laden and much more of the painting to convey, had run out of surface. Like a penny rolling across a table and reaching the edge and starting to fall. These were fanciful notions, irrelevant and childish, and would not do. He had to get on with the business of recovery and getting better to perform his duties.

  ‘St Joseph’s at Sandyhills.’

  ‘I don’t remember, child.’

  ‘The Magdalenes. You remember.’

  The name came at him like a physical blow and he gave a quiet grunt of distress.

  ‘I forgive you, Father,’ the girl said. ‘I wanted to say it to you because it wasn’t your fault. It was all my fault. I should not have behaved like I did. I was told to be on watch by Sister Natalia. I didn’t obey properly.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘I have to confess everything now.’

  ‘Wait.’

  He did not know why he was asking the girl to wait, or if she imagined he was someone else.

  ‘No, Father. I have to tell the Gardai everything.’

  ‘No.’ He strove to speak, articulating slowly. ‘What are you trying to tell me, child?’

  ‘I must confess to Mr Murragh and Miss Finty.’

  ‘No. Please.’

  ‘I should have stopped you and I didn’t.’

  ‘I remember now,’ he said, not needing any breath for this. He had never forgotten. Lucy was there within him, and always had been. She would stay for ever now, in clear thought.

  The receiver fell from his hand on the bed. He did not hear the girl say, ‘Hello? Hello?’

  The world slewed. He felt himself on some kind of vehicle starting to slide on black ice in the darkness lit by distant glims, some dots of light in chains and some in patches, one or two in flashes. The vehicle took hold of the surface, held firm a moment then started to glide, carouseling on.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said.

  Lucy had been found dead in bed. This had been told to him the next day. A girl had been discovered dead in bed. She had suffered a long illness, tuberculosis. The night before, he had taken her in the dormitory where she was resting that final night. It was the preliminary to her death, her last night.

  Hard to recall at this distance – what had it been now, four years, maybe five? – the words he had said, persuading her not to cry out or shriek for help. Some girl had been lying in the truckle bed opposite. He had seen her in the gloaming.

  The stairs were steep, far too steep for a cohort of children, he had thought. He had reached the top floor where Lucy lay, given her the last sacrament that afternoon, and been struck by the extraordinary pallor of her skin. Her features were less stencilled and merged into one lovely form, with those luminous eyes so huge and profound with their awareness of the meaning of suffering. In that instant, giving the last anointing, desire had begun. His hunger to associate himself with that radiance, that profundity of understanding that was in the girl, almost blinded him all the rest of that day. She dazzled. He had to see her again. To unite, even, with that comprehension was surely what God had intended for all mystics to accept, acknowledge and somehow know. So must Blake have sensed his tragical visions. So must great artists discover when, released by their art from morality and its shackles, they soared into the bliss of an ecstasy unknown on earth to themselves and to anyone who was not God.

  That instant of revelation became his. He knew it gave him an entitlement to use the girl, to return to the dormitory where she lay, and to have her, join in the most perfect union God designed for mankind. It would be the girl’s own release too, for she would confer that brilliance, and by her acceptance lift him to paradisical understanding of the nature of all religion. It would be perfection given by Lucy, to him alone, and he would see glory in its splendour.

  She would benefit by being his saviour, for he would always be denied the experience until she offered herself willingly and openly to him.

  He would prove it to her. When she heard his explanation she would realise his desperation and pacify him with visions of Heaven.

  Across the dark dormitory, he had once glanced around as if sensing someone watching. He had glimpsed twin points of light, or thought he had. They had instantly dowsed. He had gone on. And that next morning she was found dead, from her TB disease, in bed. By then he had gone, to return later to conduct her funeral service.

  There was no question about it. He had been truly and deeply affected, and his eyes had become moist, to the nuns’ evident satisfaction. They had said nothing specific about the sorrowful events. After all, a girl who had lived in a chronic state of poor health since being a child was going to succumb sooner or later. The local doctor had predicted her death, expected on every grounds. The funeral had all gone off quite as it should. Tragic, of course, but the girl had died after a long and steady decline in her condition despite all that the nuns could do. And there was no more caring body of sisters in Christ. They must have struggled to make the girl well, given her special treatment as good as they could afford.

  Only later, maybe one or two years later, had he heard of some rumours originating in a case at Sandyhills. At the time, he had been puzzled as to how something so remote in the past had surfaced. He remembered speculating that maybe some disaffected girl – wasn’t there always one? – perhaps motivating herself by imagined wrong, exercised her liberty after leaving the Magdalenes by writing, probably, malicious letters of accusation against the nuns who had cared for her and brought her up and given her a decent education and background in the Faith. The malicious libel was of a girl who had been sexually abused by a visiting priest. She was dying of the White Spit, and immediately after the abuse had killed herself by throwing herself down a stairwell. Desperate to conceal such an e
vent, the nuns had returned the dead girl to her bed, where she was discovered when nuns, dutiful as always, came to check on her, and found her dead. They removed her body to the Sandyhills chapel before the girls awoke to begin the day.

  Inevitably, the Church acted to show quite clearly how groundless such falsehoods always were. The Church, always oppressed, always came through by the grace of Almighty God. ‘When wicked men blaspheme Thee, we love and bless Thy Name,’ the good old hymn sang. How true that was.

  Some time after hearing about it, in a kindly well-intended telephone call from a monsignor in the local diocesan office, Father Doran now remembered how he was quite fairly called to a discussion – certainly no investigation or interrogation – with two prelates, on the first occasion. Later, after another month of deliberation in the higher levels of the office of Bishop MacGrath, a second appraising discussion took place. No opprobrium attached itself to his name, and he continued on in the Church, after a move to different localities.

  One question remained, and burnt in his throat with the bile taste that wouldn’t go. Who was this Lucy? For a girl had died. He had said Mass. She had the same voice he could clearly call to mind, as clearly as if she had…as if she had offered him a tea tray at the St Cosmo Care Home, when he had tea with Sister Stephanie.

  And who had been there, evidently waiting, when he had left old Mr Gorragher after they shared an illicit tipple.

  And who immediately started clearing up the alcove of the ward where Mr Gorragher’s bed was positioned.

  And who doubtless could have changed the content of the whisky.

  And who had given him that half-caught glance as she served that tray at tea-time.

  And who had…

  And…whose face he’d seen in the gloaming of the dormitory as he had taken the dying girl in Sandyhills.

  And whose face, those same features, he had seen at holy communion when serving her with the Host weeks ago. Whose eyes had flicked open and stared into him, instead of modestly remaining closed, as he had blessed her with Corpus Domine Nostre Jesu…

  And who was out there making malicious telephone calls, pretending she was Lucy who’d somehow survived that terrible fall.

  And who must have seen Lucy tumble to her death in a suicidal act.

  And who would now allege he had driven Lucy to suicide.

  Who clearly would not give up in her poisonous campaign of vengeance.

  Who had told him frankly that she would not give up. That she was going to confess everything in a deposition to the Gardai, leading to his prosecution.

  The pain was hard now, firm and unyielding. It was nothing quite like as bad or as evil as the first time, or as disorientating, but it would not leave. Like the memories of the blessed Lucy, or the presence of the hateful pretending one.

  Her revelations, in the confession she was on her way to make, would damage the Church. It would spell his own ruin, as it had spelt the ruin of so many priests and nuns before him. As it had led to the bankruptcy of mighty dioceses in the USA and elsewhere. As it had besmirched the holy name of the Church in Australia, in Canada, throughout Eire and elsewhere. Wasn’t there even that scandalous series of accusations in Scotland, even? Could the Church take any more?

  It called for sacrifice, of the sort martyrs made.

  He felt the gripping chest pain turn slowly to a stifling ache, and knew that God was making him an offer. It was an option, to endure, survive and brave the accusations out, when clearly the onslaught would simply go on and on with blame hounding him and the whole Church establishment. He felt aggrieved. The whole thing was unjust, an insult to a man who had dedicated his whole life to the Church. It was so unfair.

  Or he could proceed to a quiet act that would leave his place in the Church unsullied.

  He lay back, knowing what had to be done.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  That night, Magda dreamt a dream. It was how she murdered her friend Lucy. All she had said and done on the night Lucy began falling lived through her mind exactly as it was.

  Truly beautiful, but gorgeous in the evil way you saw in some paintings, with eyes looking and faces that shouldn’t have the right to even seem like real faces changed into something that might not be a face at all. She had heard the word ‘features’ several times. It was one of those words you longed to look into books to find out about, and eliminate problems like, when was a feature them Rocky Mountains in New York, wherever those things might be, and not a feature in some story like in Star Wars, or features of a baby you had to smile and say Awww at?

  She was back in the dormitory in Sandyhills.

  Lucy had coughed bad all that day, and been sent to lie in bed with nobody to see to her because she was shrinking all over her face, her body, and coughed blood and was damp of hair and hot.

  The other eleven – was it eleven? Some number anyway that sounded like a cerise colour; Magda had lately grown to like numbers because of the colours they imparted, like seven was always a dark umber; eight was, of course, yellow; thirteen, a terrible magenta. No number existed that ever shaded or faded at the edges, no. They were complete and total, all the way across. Well, the other maybe eleven girls in the dormitory were sent somewhere else. That night, the Dormitory Sister, a stout nun called Sister Natalia who wheezed and was said to eat non-stop, a feat the girls in St Joseph’s Sandyhills envied, made all eleven move into another dormitory where there had once been a fire and, rumour said, several girls died worse even than Cavan. But none of the girls in Sandyhills knew Cavan, so the rumour stayed where it was.

  ‘You will remain in your bed,’ Sister Natalia said sternly, smacking Magda’s face with flips of her backhand. That was what she did, backhand your face between things she told you. ‘What?’

  ‘I will stay in my bed, Sister Natalia.’

  ‘And pray if anything happens to Lucy in the night.’ Flip, flip.

  ‘And pray, Sister Natalia.’

  ‘Lucy is very sick.’ Flip, flip.

  ‘Lucy is very sick, Sister Natalia.’

  ‘And Jesus may take her into His bosom.’ Flip, flip.

  ‘And Jesus may take her into His bosom, Sister Natalia.’

  ‘If she calls out, you give her a drink of water.’ Flip, flip.

  ‘I must give her a drink of water, Sister Natalia.’

  ‘Now resume your duties.’ Flip, and a serious smack that almost knocked Magda over.

  She straightened, thanked Sister Natalia, the necessary phrase to obtain clearance to leave, and fled.

  That night it happened, exactly as it had ever since. Magda found herself watching, hearing, every event in sequence, leading to the terrible final separation when Lucy and she went apart in that slow fall in the gloaming of the stairwell, and Magda knew herself to be a murderess and Lucy the resigned victim of a murder.

  They went to bed after praying, Lucy coughing terrible and the pillow covered with a plastic bag that Magda had managed to get over it to save it from getting all bloody when Lucy coughed. They said the words in English because neither had the Latin off.

  It was a very special prayer this time, though it was commonly said by everyone at Sandyhills after the supper at five-thirty. This night, when Magda would murder Lucy, the prayer really did seem holy, not just things coughed up as Lucy said all the prayers in Sandyhills were, just pushed out like old spit or grolly. Kneeling at Lucy’s bedside, Magda wondered if prayers were any different if they were said elsewhere, like in them big churches that were supposed to be everywhere in Eire because St Patrick made sure of it. She supposed not, because otherwise Lucy, who knew almost everything, would have told her.

  ‘Deliver us, Lord, while we wake, and guard us while we sleep, that we may watch with Christ, and rest in peace.

  Amen.’

  They both dutifully said Ayyyy-men, as good Roman Catholics should, not the less abrupt Ahhhh-men of Protestants, who would go to Hell, serve them right.

  ‘Do you want a drink of water, Lu
cy?’ Magda asked.

  ‘No, ta.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. It’ll only set me choking.’

  ‘You might feel better.’

  Magda desperately wanted Lucy to say yes she’d have a drink of water because then nobody could flip her face, which still stung where Sister Natalia had flipped her when repeating her instructions about watching over Lucy as she died in the night. But if Lucy wouldn’t have a drink of water what could she do? There was a tin mug just for the purpose on the floor by Lucy’s truckle bed. Magda put water in it, making sure.

  ‘Goodnight, Magda.’

  ‘Night, Lucy.’

  ‘Magda? I might die tonight.’

  ‘No, you won’t, Lucy.’ Magda was frightened Lucy would die because she might get blamed for letting her, and then what?

  ‘I will. I know I will.’

  ‘Don’t say things like that, Lucy. I’ll bring you some water.’ Magda meant if she took Lucy the water and she drank it, she might not have to die.

  ‘I know I will. I can feel it sort of coming in my chest.’

  Magda was drawn to the notion of her one friend feeling something coming so serious and ending everything for her on earth.

  ‘What’s it like, Lucy?’

  ‘It’s just there. You know it’s going to happen.’

  Magda began to weep. ‘Don’t Lucy, please. You’ll get better.’

  ‘I’ll be better in Heaven. I’ll pray for you when I get there, Magda.’

  ‘Lucy, maybe they’ll discover something, like some special tablet that will stop the coughing and then you’ll be grown up and get out of Sandyhills in the nick of time.’

  Magda was a right one for phrases like ‘nick of time’ and ‘with one bound’ and ‘spur of the moment’. Not having the letters had somehow made her able to remember every passing phrase, whatever it was supposed to mean.

  ‘I’ll see inside Heaven, Magda.’

  ‘I’ll stop it happening, Lucy. I’ll pray all night to stop it.’

  ‘No. You’ll go to sleep.’

  ‘I won’t.’