by Bill Walsh
Pippa says. What’s it like, Matilda?
Do it and find out.
I changed me mind.
I’ll kill you. See, I told you you’re always tryin’ to get outa things.
I’m only jokin’.
Are you?
Pippa puts her top teeth out over her bottom lip then takes them back in again, then out, then in again.
Hurry up, Pippa.
Fuck! she says, and laughs so much she starts to cough but at least she’s done it and so did I and I’m pure faintin’ because now I can talk like the rest in here. I can say fuck off fuck you fuck her fuck the nuns and never have to say no, twice.
Gimme that.
No.
Give it to me.
Fuck off!
If I can say fuck I can say arse. That’s easy. Easier than fuck. You’re a pain in the arse, girl, fuck off. And if I can do all that then I can learn how to stand up for myself in here. I’ll learn how to fight. I’ll be the best fighter in the Holy Shepherd only I can’t do it right now because a strange lorry carrying wheelbarrows, shovels and a big yellow cement mixer that looks ready to topple over is parking in the playground. A hundred children jump in the back, dance on the roof, and climb through the windows yelling to the driver, What’s your name? Have you children?
Pippa and me climb down from the roof and run across the playground to ask the driver, What’s the wheelbarras for, mister?
For takin’ away children who ask too many questions, he says.
The younger kids run away bawling to tell the first penguin they find there’s a man in the playground taking us away in wheelbarrows, while Pippa jumps into one.
Gis a spin, mister?
I push Pippa around the playground in the wheelbarrow and a gang of kids take off behind us shouting, Me next, me next. There’s a fight. Mona and another big girl are rolling around on the ground pulling what hair they have off each other’s heads over whose turn it is and everyone else is still swinging from the lorry.
More lorries come and soon the playground is filled with lorries and workmen in blue overalls and we pester them as to why they’re here till there’s no use asking anymore. They pull their caps down over their eyes and tell you, Mind yourself there now, we’re busy. Stand back, child. Bejasus, if a nail flies you’ll lose an eye and what would you do then with a black leather patch over the hole like Long John Silver and not a parrot in sight. Ha, ha.
Pippa wants to ask Doyler and torments me to go with her. That’s what we call Missus Doyle, the hairdresser who started a few weeks ago. She was mauled with girls demanding plaits, pageboys, perms, ponytails, curls, bobs, bob tails, rinses and ringlets. All she had was the nuns’ electric razor and we still ended up looking like convicts. Pippa said whoever told Doyler she was a hairdresser was either bald or blind or both. One look at Doyler’s own hair should have told us. It looks like it was shaped with a piss pot.
Doyler is small. She has a broom that comes up to her chin that she chases us with, but she never catches us. She wears pink and blue aprons and tiny gold-framed glasses with no sides hanging on the tip of her nose. Her voice is the biggest part of her. She’s forever booming across the playground, I hear yee over there. I know what yee’re up to. We believed her too, till we found out she as deaf as an ear of corn. She complains about her aches and pains, ailments she reads about in medical books, and she has those same symptoms herself, would you believe. Gabriel says Doyler’s a hypochondriac but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her.
Pippa and me go into her when she’s tidying up the refectory. We have to be careful because we know from Mona that people who’re a bit deaf can be contrary.
Doyler says, I knew I’d have a delegation in here sooner or later. It wouldn’t be up to me to tell yee. Sure I wouldn’t have any say in a thing like that.
Pippa whispers to me, What’s a delegation, Matilda?
You don’t have to whisper, Pippa. She can’t hear us.
I hear yee over there. I know what yee’re up to.
Doyler runs at us with the broom and Pippa turns on her heel and scatters out the door but I take a chance and hold my ground. There’s no point being able to say fuck if I’m going to run from Doyler. I have to start someplace.
Ah, come on, Doyler, tell us.
Pippa sticks her blonde head around the door and when she sees I’m still alive she comes back and stands behind me. Doyler leans on the broom and tells us it’s to do with the government and isn’t it about time too? Mind you, the nuns are none too pleased. They don’t tolerate interference. I worked in schools in England for over twenty years and never came across a kip like this. I’d like to do something about it myself and let me tell you two girls there are days when I’m tormented to distraction but daren’t open my mouth. Reverend Mother would have me out that door so fast this broom wouldn’t touch the floor. And me with my complaints. No, it’s best I keep my mouth shut and do what I can behind the scenes. Am I right, girls?
Yes, Doyler.
Who’d cut your hair if I left? It’d be back to the nuns again.
Did you cut hair in England, Doyler? says Pippa.
I did.
I’d say they were glad to see you go.
What?
I said they were mad to let you go.
Doyler smiles at Pippa and goes back to her sweeping.
Pippa and me go out to the playground and watch the workmen come in cars, trucks, on bicycles, their lunch dangling from the handlebars. On the outside of the building they put scaffolding up the three floors. They rip out the crumbling windows and the rusty steel bars, and hack away the old grey dash so rough that, when you fall against it, it reefs the skin off elbows, knees, foreheads. Upstairs, in the dormitory, they build a solid wooden partition that they hammer behind. Our beds are moved to the far end of the dormitory where the big girls sleep. They don’t want us here and we don’t want to be down here with their bras and stockings hanging from the heating pipes. I have to lie here every night tormented by bras and fights over who robbed the make-up. Make-up is important. If you don’t have it you stick a pin in your finger for the blood to rub in your cheeks and use the nuns’ black shoe polish on your eyelashes.
A lot of the workmen are young. Doyler says they’re apprentices and the big girls are always saying, Look, there he is, and he’s gorgeous. There are penguins everywhere, watching everything. I’ve never seen so many in one place except mass. The tinkers stick their foxy heads out the big holes where the windows were shouting. Hey, mister, any chance of a shag? Hey, mister, she wants teh ride yeh. Hey, mister, are yeh as good as me Daddy? Then hide buckled up laughing on the ground.
Pippa and me ask Mona what shaggin’ and ridin’ is but she tells us, Stick your nose back on your puss where it belongs, you’ll find out when you’re older. Mona is twelve and goes to the big girls’ school in the Sisters of Mercy where they learn all about shaggin’ and ridin’ from girls on the outside. Pippa says, Never mind, Matilda. It’s letting a boy put his tongue in your mouth. That’s how you gets babies. I heard it in school.
Really, Pippa?
And if you wear a black bra you’ll have twins. Cross me heart.
The big girls are going mad because the tinkers are sneaking over to the green sheds where the apprentices have their lunch. The penguins hunt them away, screaming, You were told to leave those boys alone, but as soon as the penguins are gone the tinkers are back smoking fags and disappearing to the small toilets under the chestnut trees with the apprentices and soon the big girls are down there too. They say if tinkers can get a ride and free fags down in the toilets then so can we.
Some days I sit up in the chestnut trees watching the big girls and the apprentices. I have to do watch out in case a nun turns up when she has no business and through the broken glass in the toilet window I see them glue their mouths together. And that’s only for starters.
At the end of the summer Reverend Mother calls us all together in the common room
that we use for the Christmas pantomine. She stumbles as she climbs the three steps to the stage and needs help to get the rest of the way. She threatens us with the walking stick telling us we don’t deserve what we’re getting, sinners that we are. We’ll all end up in the laundry. The room is filled with penguins. They’re like wallpaper and all of them waiting for the first snigger so they can hit someone.
Reverend Mother tells us the news: we’re to be broken into three groups and each group will have its own section in the convent like three houses on a street with really big families in them. The first group will have my family and fifteen others. Sister Gabriel will live with us and be our mother and that’s what we’re to call her, Mother.
It’s nice to have someone to call Mother again, even if it is a nun.
A week later the bishop arrives for the blessing in a pointy red hat. He showers us with holy water out in the playground. He sprinkles doors, window and walls. The penguins line up in front of him and kiss his red ring and, when he leaves in a long white car with red flags flying from the bonnet, Gabriel trots around the playground tapping everyone in her group on the head to form a line at the door that leads from the playground to where we’re to live.
Gabriel tells us we can go in now but there is to be no tearing around or we’ll be on our way to Cork where they know how to deal with girls who tear around. Ask Maggie Shore the next time you see her, which will probably be in some dark corner in Hell itself.
Inside, the smell of fresh cream paint is everywhere. The old wooden floors are gone from downstairs and instead we have red tiles with a yellow border. There’s a sitting room with a television and a kitchen with a cooker. Proper tables and chairs. A fridge with sausages, butter, not margarine, and a fat blue chicken stuffed to the neck with eggs. Big brown eggs with speckles that you’d need two hands to hold. When I’m shown my own bedroom upstairs I just sit on my new bed with the pink candlewick bedspread and breathe everything in. Smell how fresh it is. The sunshine through the window brightens the room and I never saw anything so fresh or new in all my life. I sit on the bed with my hands under my knees and let my legs swing and look down at my new white sandals and wish I could sit here for ever so they’d never have dirt on them. In the corner I have a wooden locker with a drawer on top and a press underneath. There’s a new window with pink curtains and whenever I look out they’ll say there’s Matilda at her window and when I’m in the playground I can look up and say that’s my window and inside is my room with my things in it.
Doyler sticks her head around the door and smiles because she knows how strange I feel with everything, especially after what happened yesterday. I like Doyler. She understands us. I think it’s because she has kids of her own. Doyler is to be part of our group, to give Gabriel a hand. And she’ll need a big bloody hand with you lot, she says. Doyler sits beside me on the bed and admires my sandals and laughs over the new shoe van that came yesterday.
The new shoe man opened the van doors and the inside was packed to the roof with shoeboxes. Gabriel ran when she saw us coming but the shoe man got trampled in the stampede and we tore the van to pieces fighting over the shoeboxes. Right in the middle of it the nuns’ blue mini-bus parked in the green sheds. There was boys in it and we ran to Gabriel complaining we didn’t want boys here eatin’ our food an’ starvin’ us all to death and fartin’ up our faces and the little pricks needn’t think they’re gettin’ our shoeboxes either.
Then I saw them. I just stood there with the shoebox in my hand. My hands trembled and I wanted to cry but I knew if I started I’d never be able to stop.
The boys, ten of them, walked past with their shaved heads bent down and their shoulders hunched. Sheamie hasn’t changed much. Same red hair; he’s just taller. Hands down to his kneecaps like they were growing faster than the rest of him. Danny dressed in a little hand-me-down Communion suit. The sleeves were up past his wrists and the stitching torn at the arms. The loose heel of his left boot clacking behind him. He lifted his head and looked straight at me with his round eyes the colour of chestnuts. I smiled at him but I knew he didn’t know me. I wanted to pick him up and bring him to the big shops on the Quay and buy him new clothes and shoes so he’d be all cute and cuddly the way little boys should be but all I could do was stand there with the empty shoebox in my hand. When they were gone through the gate we went back to fighting over the shoeboxes. I was so angry I punched the first nose I saw. We left the playground littered with new white sandals. It took the shoe man all day to match them in pairs.
The poor man, says Doyler. Did you ever see the like?
There’s a smell of ointment from her elbow when she puts her arm around my shoulder and pulls me to her. I didn’t know the boys were coming either, Matilda, she says.
She knows I’m confused because there’s so much going on. Confused by bedrooms, bathrooms, baths and brothers, because I haven’t had them for so long. It’s different when you live on the outside, where you grow up with bedrooms, bathrooms and brothers. But I don’t know why I got them. Nobody said I was getting them or how long I can keep them or if they’ll be taken from me again.
Doyler leaves and I feel like Cinderella. I sit on the floor in the corner frightened to leave in case everything disappears and I’ll have no brothers and a pumpkin for a bed.
Later I go downstairs to watch television just to make sure we really do have one. Gabriel even lets us stay up to watch The Late Late Show.
When everyone is asleep I tiptoe down the corridor to the tiny little bathroom that looks out over the playground. I turn on the hot tap and while I’m waiting for the bath to fill I sit on the deep window ledge with my knees tucked under my chin and my cheek pressed to the cold glass. The sky is awash with stars like the eyes of all the mothers in Heaven are watching over their sleeping children. Here, in the quiet darkness, I look for my star. My very own Special Star and think of my mother. If she is in Heaven it will be her star too. Maybe she is alive and if she is maybe she is looking up at my star and thinking of me. I tell her my brothers are with me and we’re all together again. I tell her how much I love her. How much I miss her. How much I need her to hold me and mind me and be my Mum again. I wish she would come and take us home. Maybe she’ll come tomorrow.
7
Saturday morning there’s a gang of us playing down by the pond when Pippa comes running through the gap in the hedge. I’m nine, Pippa’s ten. Her cheeks are glowing and I know she’s excited because Pippa never runs anywhere. She stops where the ground is muddy in case she dirties her shoes and tiptoes along by the bushes where the ground is dry and cracked making sure she doesn’t snag her cardigan on a briar.
Matilda, we’re allowed out.
Allowed out? I nearly fall out of my tree. Has our mother been found? Am I going home? No. It wouldn’t happen like this. Covered in mud in the Holy Shepherd and Pippa running down to tell me. I wouldn’t need to be told. I’d feel it. I’d know. Before I land plop in the muck so close to Pippa I can smell the carbolic on her.
Out where, Pippa?
Outside! Gabriel said so.
To you?
Sheamie told me. And we’re getting pocket money too. We can go to Kennedy’s shop at the corner on Fridays and we can go to town if a big girl comes with us. I swear it’s true, Matilda. She makes the sign of the cross on her throat to prove it, though that doesn’t mean anything with Pippa. She wants me to go to the gate with her to see if it really is true.
I search the playground for Sheamie but can’t find him. Mona is sitting in the green sheds with the older girls. Her arms are folded under her chest and I know they’re talking about boys and don’t want to be disturbed about gates. The big girls don’t need gates. They just sneak out the bathroom window when the nuns are asleep.
Danny is playing on the fire escape with a bunch of little girls fighting each other over who’s playing with him next. The fire escape is mostly white with rust coming through. It runs up the three storeys and there’s a pole o
n the outside running from the top to the ground holding the whole thing together. The little girls tell us Sheamie got in a fight with Mickey Driscoll and Mickey Driscoll gave Sheamie a bloody nose because Sheamie said Pele was a better soccer player than Bobby Charlton. Danny is seven and the youngest boy in the convent so the little girls love him, and even some of the bigger girls love him because he’s cute. The nuns love him because he’s the best little altar boy and what a pleasure it is to have such a quiet little lad amongst us. If only the rest of you were as quiet as Danny. The nuns love all the boys. The boys can let their hair grow so they’ll look like boys on the outside and won’t get picked on in school or mistaken for skinheads and wouldn’t that be even worse. I think it’s a strange world where boys have longer hair than girls even if it’s not as bad as it used to be and you can nearly let your hair past your shoulder before the razor comes out.
Danny knows we’re his sisters now but it doesn’t really mean anything to him and sometimes it doesn’t mean anything to me either and that makes me sad. He’s just another kid in the convent. He hardly remembers living in our grandmother’s house. I tell him I’m going up to the gate and ask him if he wants to come. He sees Doyler coming down the yard with the broom in her hand and he says, Hang on, Matilda. Give us a minute.
Doyler makes a run at him with the broom.
Get down from that fire escape. You were told enough not to be on it.
Instead of getting off, Danny climbs to the first lift and waits for Doyler who’s chasing after him but before she can catch him he takes off to the second lift and waits for her again. Danny keeps it up all the way to the top with Doyler getting slower with every step. By the time she gets to the top she’s bent over and using the broom to hold herself up. I don’t know why she bothers. Maybe she thinks some day she’ll catch him. We can barely see them from the ground but Doyler’s heading for him with the broom raised ready to clobber him over the head, when he climbs out over the railing and slides down the pole leaving Doyler stuck four storeys up.
