by Bill Walsh
Through the open window, I hear the others running out to the playground and I don’t want to play this guitar. I don’t want to stand next to that lunatic, playing some stupid song he made up himself so I can praise the Lord while he preaches his gospel to the sinners of Waterford or London or wherever he plans to take us. I just want him to leave me alone.
I take the guitar from under the bed and sit on the bed with the guitar on my lap. Maybe if I learn a few chords, that’ll stop him hitting me. It probably won’t. After the guitar there’ll be something else, something new for him to say I’m useless at. There will always be something. I know that now. He’ll pick on me until I skip and dance around him in the playground like Pippa, or run from him in terror like Mona and Sheamie and Danny. He’ll torment me until he breaks me, until he controls me. I don’t know when it was I understood that. I just woke one morning and the answer was beside me on my pillow. It was as if the Tooth Fairy finally found out where I lived.
I’ll break a string, that’s what. I’ll break a string and say it just broke. Who’s to say it didn’t? I’m sure it happens all the time. Probably did it himself. But no, he’ll say, You stupid bitch for breaking the string, because people with the Lord in their fingers don’t break strings. I’ll say one of the other children broke it, one of the younger kids who won’t say I’m a liar. They’re always getting at things and breaking them. But I can’t do that either. He’ll say, You stupid bitch for leaving the guitar where a child can get it. What am I going to do? I’d practise if only my hands would stop shaking. I pray, Please, God, please, Jesus and Holy Spirit who’s in everyone. Please help me. I’ll be good. I won’t curse, I won’t fight, I’ll do whatever Gabriel says. Please just stop my hands from shaking. But he doesn’t answer. He never answers.
I get down on the floor and put my hands under my legs and sit on them. I’ll sit here for as long as it takes thinking about good things, but I can’t do that either because the only good thing I have is this stupid fuckin’ guitar.
I stand at the window watching the others playing on the swings and roundabout and fighting over everything. I’ll go outside and walk around for a while. I won’t talk to anyone in case they want me to play. I’m just not in the humour for playing. I know they’ll say I’m pure faintin’ and won’t talk to anyone because I got a new guitar, but I don’t care, it’s better than him beating me.
The sunlight stings my eyes when I walk out to the playground. Gabriel is sitting on the low red-brick wall around her garden talking to Sister Ellen. Gabriel smiles at me like I’m a great girl altogether and asks how the guitar is coming along. I’m sure you’ll be a fine guitar player, Matilda. You have the fingers for it.
I don’t answer. I’m not in the mood for her. I don’t know what torments me more about Gabriel. How she can be so sweet to my father or that stupid smile she gives me, and I don’t see what’s so special about my bleeding fingers that the Lord is in them and they’re so brilliant for playing guitar.
Danny kicks the football to me from across the playground. It lands at my feet and he stands there like he’s expecting me to kick it back.
Come on, Matilda, are yeh playin’ or what?
I’m nearly fourteen. I’m stuck in a Mad School, my father’s tormenting me with that damn guitar, my brother’s tormenting me to play football and I can’t get a bra for love nor money.
Gabriel says, Give it a break, Matilda. You’ve been up there all morning.
All morning and I haven’t even held the guitar properly.
There’s no use tormenting myself. I’ll play ball for a while and maybe I’ll feel better later, only we play ball until dark and later never comes.
My father comes to the convent most days now. He takes me to town and we sit in the apple market talking to Umbilical Bill or other people my father knows from when he was young. Those are the all right days. Other days he takes Pippa and me to town to preach. Some days he only takes Pippa. I’m to stay here and practise my guitar.
On a rainy evening in July, Pippa and me are in the sitting room practising disco dancing to the Bee Gees on Top of the Pops. Gabriel doesn’t mind the Bee Gees and even does a few steps herself. It’s like she’s just discovered she has legs, and they’re not bad either, for a nun.
The song has just finished when I hear Gabriel out in the kitchen telling my father we can use the Madonna’s room. I go upstairs and take the guitar from under the bed and, when I come down, my father is sitting in the armchair by the window. On the table beside him there’s a bunch of dead lilies in a vase. This is all I need. The Madonna’s blue eyes staring at me from one corner and my father’s yellow eyes glaring at me from the other.
Come here and show me your fingers, Matilda.
What do you want to see my fingers for?
I want to see if you’ve been practising.
I have.
Show them to me.
He pulls my fingers closer and I feel his breath on my palm.
Those are teeth marks.
They’re not. It’s from the strings.
Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to your father.
One way or another I’m dead. They are teeth marks but if I tell him they’re not he’ll kill me for telling lies and if I tell him they are teeth marks he’ll kill me for not practising. I’d have practised if I knew what I was practising but there’s nothing written down because people with the Lord in their fingers don’t need things written down.
He gives me a thump to the temple that drives me onto the floor. I crawl under the table and crouch close to the wall with my hands over my head and he’s kicking chairs out of the way to get at me. I see Gabriel’s short skirts bustling across the red carpet.
Out. I want you out of here now. Leave that child alone and don’t come back here again or I’ll call the gardaí.
He’s holding a chair – I can see the legs dangling above the carpet. His toes curl tight in his Moses sandals when he turns to face Gabriel. He’d go for Gabriel when he’s like this and she knows it. I hear the banging in my chest when he takes a step towards Gabriel. She takes a step back and a bunch of fresh lilies drop from her hand to the floor. I try to find a prayer but there’s darkness in my head and the words don’t come. A gang of younger kids run in and my father slams the chair against the wall and storms out.
I crawl as far as the leg of the table and look up at Gabriel. She kisses her crucifix, mumbling a prayer. She goes out to the hallway and locks the door and when she comes back she tells me to come out from under there, he’s gone. Will you just look at what he’s done to this chair? It’s beyond repair. I’ve had enough of him. I really have.
She bends to pick up the lilies when the kids run in yelling, He’s back, he’s back, he’s back, and we hear him banging his fist on the glass. Gabriel goes back out to the hall and I run after her and hide behind her black skirts while she threatens him with the gardaí again. I can’t really see him, just the green of his jacket through the wire glass. The younger kids run up and down the hall shouting the gardaí are coming. They’re so excited something new is happening, if my father dragged Gabriel and me out to the playground and hung us from a chestnut tree they’d light a bonfire and dance around us like Indians. The bigger kids are gathering around Gabriel, terrified in case anything happens to her. Mickey Driscoll is telling me to hide.
Upstairs, Matilda. Hide under me bed. He won’t look there.
Doyler is waving her tea towel. Get away from that door. She runs down the corridor checking the windows are locked. One of the young kids pushes her face up to the glass and sticks her tongue out then runs and hides under the kitchen table. Pippa runs to the kitchen and hides under the table too. I think about following but decide to stay behind Gabriel. I can’t run from him if I’m under a table. My father could break the glass but he’s doing enough. He’s frightening Gabriel and that’s what he wants. He’s making sure she never interferes with him again.
When he’s gone, Gabriel is trembling. She takes out
her rosary beads and prays for strength. An hour later, she gets off her knees and puts her rosary beads back in her pocket.
That’s it. That’s the last time he’ll set a foot in here.
Even as Gabriel’s saying it we both know it’s not true. Grandmother rings Father Devlin who rings Reverend Mother who says, Of course, Father Devlin, I’m certain there’s been a mistake, and on a cold Saturday in August he’s back telling Gabriel how sorry he is and here’s something I thought you’d like, Sister Gabriel.
He’s bought her a record player. I know he bought it second-hand in the Apple Market and a cardboard box stuffed with long-playing records and all of them about God.
Gabriel isn’t happy with Reverend Mother for leaving my father back in here. I catch her glaring at her behind her back when she thinks nobody’s looking. I know there’s nothing Gabriel can do and she’ll put up with it as long as my father behaves and she’s not distracted from putting her feet up with Sister Ellen so they can listen to Elvis Presley blaring out ‘Amazing Grace’ all over the place.
There’s an argument over which group gets the record player. Our father bought it so our group thinks it should be in our group, but the other groups complain that’s got fuck all to do with it.
Stop that swearing, says Gabriel.
Sister Ellen says the record player is for everybody.
Gabriel says, Yes, Sister Ellen, it is for everybody. But it’s staying in my sitting room.
Sister Ellen puts on a long face but grabs the nearest seat and for a week there’re fifty of us cramped in the sitting room until we get so sick of Elvis cryin’ and bawlin’ in the chapel we go back to the playground, leaving Gabriel and Ellen to argue over who they’ll listen to next.
Monday afternoon, he’s waiting for me outside the Mad School in his army jacket and Moses sandals. He’s leaning against the gate pillar watching the school door, making sure I don’t get past. I’m so ashamed, I run out to see what he wants when I’m still wearing the grey uniform. I walk behind him to his blue van parked at the back of the Cathedral where he takes a banner rolled around two long wooden poles from the roof rack. He puts them on one shoulder and a white wooden box he takes from the front seat on the other. We walk to the Cathedral where the purple banner opens larger than a bedspread. It has a picture of the Lord standing on a cloud and he has golden light coming from his head. My father stands on the white box, with one hand gripping my wrist and his long hair swept over his shoulders, and in that calm, powerful voice begins to preach.
The Cathedral is on the busiest street in the city and it’s throbbing with people. My father preaches to them all. He preaches to the people coming from or going to the Cathedral, lured to the temple of evil by the Catholic Church, the instrument of Satan himself. He preaches to the people who hurry past, blessing themselves, and the ones who just hurry past. He preaches to the ones who cross the street and the ones who stop to listen. He preaches to the ones that laugh and move on and the ones who listen and then move on. He preaches to the ones who stay and hang on every sweet and beautiful word. They’ve found a Saviour. They found my father.
19
I’m fifteen and still breaking as many plates as I did when I was six, still getting stopped pocket money. I know things aren’t as strict as they were but plates still cost money. Sometimes the convent hardly seems like a convent anymore. We still have rules, but I suppose every home has rules. And that’s what the convent is to me now, my home. There are barely twenty of us here between two groups. When we’re gone, the convent will be closed.
In some ways it’s better like this – at least if you leave something down it’s still there when you go back – but there’s nobody my age to go stealing with and I feel stupid stealing on my own with a blue poncho that’s too small.
I’ve tried to get rid of it. I’ve left it in rubbish skips and thrown it in the bins covered in banana skins but I always go back. Not because I need it for stealing, well, a little maybe, but because it came from our mother’s brother and it reminds me I have a mother and I have to have a mother, even a mother who never came back for me, just so I can feel real. Feel that I belong in the world.
The nuns got Pippa a job in a country house hotel run by Missus Schultz, a fat little Danish woman, who for years has been taking girls from the convent to work as waitresses because the Holy Shepherd girls make the best workers and, Goodness, they’re oh so cheap. Missus Schultz lets her stay in the hotel but it’s so far away and she gets really lonely and if it wasn’t for the Black Forest gateau she’d go demented. I miss her. It’s like my family is vanishing before my eyes.
But I’m happy for her. It must be great to be sixteen getting a job and eating Black Forest gateau. I keep asking Gabriel to get me a job, to take me out of the Mad School, but she keeps telling me, no, and today when I come from school she’s fuming at the mantelpiece.
Suspended again, Matilda.
Sister Joan found out I was mocking Missus Clancy, the pastry teacher who comes Wednesday afternoon to teach the Mad Kids how to cook a scone without burning the school to the ground. She has a drip at the tip of her nose so big that on a sunny day you can see your reflection in it. It grows until it’s so heavy it drops into the pastry and she keeps on stirring. The Mad Kids love it. They laugh so hard, Sister Joan has to douse them with cold water and line them up in the playground to dry in the sun.
Suspended, Matilda. Six times in four months. It’s not good enough.
I was trying to get expelled.
I have no doubt about it, Matilda. But it won’t happen.
Then get me a job, Mother.
I’m tired of telling you, you go to school until you’re sixteen.
Can’t I get a job and still live here?
You know you can’t. I’ve told you a thousand times, it’s the law. You can’t live here unless you go to school!
Well, it’s a stupid law. You know I should never have been sent to that school. It was your fault. You should have stopped them sending me.
She folds her arms under her chest and I fold my arms under my chest and we stare at each other across the room. It took me long enough to get a chest and I’m not wasting it now. Gabriel shakes her head as if she’s wasting her time but I see the guilty look in her eyes.
She sits at the kitchen table and begins embroidering one of those white pocket-handkerchiefs and I think she’s finished but she hasn’t.
First thing in the morning you start in the laundry.
What’s the laundry got to do with us?
It was Reverend Mother’s decision. She has made it clear if there’s any more nonsense, you’ll be sent to Cork. That’ll knock the nonsense out of you. I don’t want that to happen to you, Matilda. Miles away from everyone you know. And either do you. Now buck up. It’s your last chance.
I know Gabriel thinks she’s found a way to get the better of me. She knows the one thing worries me is I’ll be sent to Cork.
The laundry is hot and noisy from the big washing machine full of suds and soapy water, and steamy from the big dryers with the glass doors where sheets tumble like dry white clouds. I’m sent to work in the basement where there’s a damp smell and Jesus on the cross to keep me company. There’s a metal chute where sacks of dirty sheets and towels from the hotels and guesthouses drop from the road above to the cold concrete floor. I empty the sacks into the green bins that one of the old women leaves by the door. Sometimes she nods and I nod back but it’s hard to see her face because the room is dim. The sacks are heavy and I have to use my knee to get them to the bin lid and I’m glad when Sister Madeline comes at ten o’clock with warm tea and a ginger biscuit and an elastic band for a ponytail. I sit in the corner on the empty sacks fixing my hair and wonder how Sheamie is. Why hasn’t he written? Is he dead or alive? Will he be like our mother and disappear for ever?
All morning, the same old woman comes for the bins. Before lunch, she smiles and I smile back. Sister Madeline brings bread and jam with my te
a and biscuit and I sit cross-legged in the corner eating, until she comes for the empty cup and the old woman comes with the empty bin. I asked Gabriel once why the old women are here but she wouldn’t say. I’ve seen young girls come here to have their babies and leave after a year or two when someone might come and sign them out, but the old women never leave. The only thing Gabriel would say was they’re Penitent. It must have been a terrible sin if the laundry is their penance.
The sacks tumble from the chute all afternoon and each one seems heavier than the last, and the harder I work the faster they tumble from the chute and I’m happy when it’s time to go home. The old woman waves from the front door and it’s hard to wave back. My hands and feet are killing me. That evening I can barely walk to Our Lady’s Grotto. I don’t race anymore. I just like coming down here to help. Sonny only trains the kids up to under-sixteen. He wanted me to join another club. I wouldn’t go. It just wouldn’t be the same without Sonny. I wouldn’t swap Sonny for all the medals in the world.
Sonny sits on his hands and shifts himself on the wall. He takes a long look at me. Them nuns can be villains.
They can, Sonny.
Not to worry, Matilda. One day the world will be your oyster.
What’s an oyster, Sonny?
We sit on the wall talking about oysters and everything and nothing. You can do that with Sonny, and the time flies. Sonny gives me a tube of green ointment he says burns like Hell and stinks to high Heaven, but rub it in your knees and elbows and you’ll be as right as rain in the morning, Matilda.
Sonny is right. In the morning the aches and pains are gone and it’s pissing from the heavens.
The brown canvas sacks are already tumbling when I go in and when the old woman whispers, Good morning.
I say, Hello, but I feel strange, as if speaking to her somehow makes me part of the laundry.
The chute spits sacks on to the concrete floor all morning and I wonder about the rich people in hotels and guesthouses in the world above, eating Black Forest gateau and oysters while their beds are made by girls from the Holy Shepherd or places like it. The old woman and her bin come to the door as if they’re a part of each other. I wonder did she ever sleep in a hotel and eat Black Forest gateau and oysters. Is she better if she did or if she didn’t? I’d hate to sleep in a hotel and eat Black Forest gateau and oysters then end up in the laundry attached to a green bin all day. Would it be even worse to spend your life pushing bins and never know about Black Forest gateau and oysters? Either way I pity her. To spend your life pushing sacks full of rich people’s laundry is no way to live.
