It was so hot in the laundry that girls often fainted for want of fresh air, for want of lighter clothing, for want of a ten-minute break. Julia’s own sweat pooled into her scratchy underwear, seeped into the fibers of her dress, ran down the space between her breasts. She kept looking down to see if it was showing through. But nothing showed through those dresses. Nothing except blood.
Julia’s arms were deep inside the sink, soapsuds to her scalded elbows. Cecilia joined her with a fresh load of dirty laundry, leaned close so she could whisper without the nun in charge that day hearing.
“Am I bleeding?” Cecilia asked.
Julia started, afraid that her friend had injured herself, but Cecilia turned slightly to show the back of her dress.
“I’ve my . . . monthlies,” she whispered. “They’ve only just come back after the baby. And it’s been too busy to change my rags in the bathroom.”
“There’s nothing,” Julia assured her.
Cecilia bit her lip. “I can feel it, though.”
Timidly, Julia managed to beg the supervising nun, Sister Theresa, to let her and Cecilia run to the bathroom.
While Cecilia changed her bloody rags as best she could (there were no pads and belts in the laundry, only thick wads of fabric that got cleaned at the same time as everything else), Julia stood a moment in front of the bathroom mirror, breathing in the air that, while it smelled of piss and poor plumbing, was easier to breathe than the steam of the laundry.
She was so warm. She ran the tap, splashed cool water on her face. She pulled up her heavy dress and cupped more water in her hands to run it down the front of her overheated body, to wash off some of the day’s sweat.
“Oh, that’s an idea,” Cecilia said when she opened the bathroom door, and she joined Julia at the sink, pulling up her own dress and splashing herself with water. They shivered and giggled at the cold against their skin.
“Oh look!” Julia laughed, delighted. “The baby likes it.” The skin just beside her belly button pulsed out with one of the baby’s limbs.
“Hello, baby.” Cecilia touched Julia’s stomach, feeling the baby kick under her palm.
That was how Sister Theresa found them. Dresses pulled up in front of the mirror, water running down their stomachs in shining droplets, Cecilia’s hand on Julia’s skin. She grabbed them both and marched them to the Mother Superior’s office, gripping their arms so hard they were both bruised for days.
“We were only warm,” Cecilia cried when Sister Theresa told the Mother Superior what she had walked in on. “We were only trying to cool off from the heat.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Julia whispered. “The baby was kicking. The baby was kicking, that’s all.”
The Mother Superior looked grave, nodded toward Sister Theresa, who reached over into a drawer and took out a pair of scissors.
Julia felt the blood drain from her face. She didn’t even struggle when the Mother Superior grabbed her by the hair and forced her into a seat. Cecilia gasped.
The nun took Julia’s thick red ponytail in one fist and with five decisive snips cut it off just under her ears.
She pushed Julia, sobbing and shaking, out of the chair and pointed at Cecilia, who came over without a word.
Sister Theresa gathered up the fallen hair, damp and dirty now, lifeless, red mingled with brown, and threw it all in the bin.
“You must never touch each other’s bodies,” she said to Julia and Cecilia. “Do you understand? It’s unclean. It’s unholy. You must never, never do anything like this again.”
As the Mother Superior watched them leave her office, Julia could have sworn she heard the old nun say, “Or your hair’s not the only thing you’ll have cut.”
* * *
—
After that, Julia’s and Cecilia’s beds were separated. They barely spoke. Instead, Julia cleaned with more fervor than before, scrubbing the blood off clothes and sheets, and as she worked she prayed. She prayed when she folded the linen; she prayed when she fed cotton sheets through the rollers, when she brushed the steam-sweaty hair out of her eyes; she prayed when she felt her baby kick as she knitted in the evening with the balls of scratchy wool that was the only kind the nuns allowed. She was not sure to whom she prayed, but she knew for whom she was praying. Small spark of life fluttering and growing. Small love in her belly making her soft and round.
Love wasn’t something Julia had thought of before with great seriousness. She’d loved her parents and her sister, Lizzie, that much she knew. She’d loved the animals on the farm—especially the bull. She knew she didn’t love the grocer’s son or the pretty village girls. She knew she didn’t love in the way the priest described each Sunday: all bored responsibility and weekly devotion that sounded like a sermon more than an emotion.
Instead, Julia discovered that she loved fiercely. She loved desperately. She loved blindly. She could not see who it was she loved apart from the push of a limb against the skin of her belly, the tossing and turning at night, and something undefinable that somehow touched her heart.
* * *
—
In the evening, Julia wrote letters with hands bandaged over steam scalds from the laundry. To her parents. To her sister. She didn’t put anything in about the hair cutting, about the hard work for no pay, about the fact that she hadn’t been to school in months, that doctors only visited when the girls were dying, that she hadn’t been outside the high barbed wire walls once, that it was like she imagined prison would be. She didn’t write these things because she knew that the nuns read every letter that left the laundry. Instead, she wrote about her knitting and her prayers, about the daydreams of the future she had, and how excited she was to see her family again. She asked, in every letter, when she would be allowed to come home. But the answer never came.
What she didn’t know was that, while the nuns read the letters, they rarely if ever sent them. They also rarely gave the girls letters from their families back home. Once, in secret, worried that her letters were getting no replies, Lizzie called the laundry’s office, asking for news of her sister. The Mother Superior answered, told her not to be wasting her daddy’s money on phone calls like that, and put down the telephone.
* * *
—
Julia had been in the home three months when she felt the first contractions in the middle of the night. She ignored them in the way she’d ignored the cramps, the heartburn, the discomfort. She rose and washed and cleaned. She had no stomach for her porridge. Halfway through the morning, there was a tightening belt of fire around her. It started in her lower back and wrapped around her whole body, sent her shuddering on all fours to the floor of the laundry, convinced she was going to die.
The nuns, who were trained midwives, brought her onto the ward. They were stern, but kinder than she’d expected. They laid her down and mopped her brow and moved out of the way when she retched out what little porridge she’d eaten onto the floor from the pain.
She wanted to move, get off the bed, but the nuns held her down. She wanted to roll over, to get some relief from the great weight pressing in on her abdomen, but the nuns told her to lie still on her back.
“This is your penance,” they said. “The pain is your punishment.” They did not say this to be cruel, just so that she would understand. “You’re not the first girl to come through these doors,” they told her, “and you won’t be the last. Now. Chin up, trust in God. It’ll all be over soon.”
It was not over soon. Julia’s labor lasted for thirty long and excruciating hours. At some point around hour twelve, the nuns called in a doctor from the town who came with his bag and his instruments, who asked the nuns to brace Julia’s feet up, who stuck things inside her and pressed so hard on the cage of her pubic bone that she could almost feel it breaking.
And even that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was after. Like the other girls h
ad said. The worst was when it was over.
Her baby’s head crowned close to two in the morning. Julia was so exhausted she could barely bring herself to push. The doctor held her baby’s head in his gloved hands. Suddenly, in a wet, sucking squelch, Julia’s baby was born.
She heard the baby crying, heard the doctor tell the nurses that he was a boy. She could hear her own voice croak that she wanted to see him. She knew what she wanted to name him. William. But they wrapped him up and took him away.
Julia slept, and the following day she went back to work—with blood spilling into her skirt, milk leaking into her apron from her breasts, her belly still round, still contracting, the skin mottled like a sponge, just like the other mothers who stood beside her.
Four times a day, and twice at night, they filed into the nursery to feed their newborn babies at their breasts. Precious stolen moments to coo and cuddle, to smell the spicy milk scent of the crown of their heads, to stroke their tiny fingers. Four times a day, and twice at night, they were sent back to the laundry, to their rooms, to their penance.
One year. That was how long they were forced to stay in the home after their babies were born, to pay for their birth and their care by working six days of every week for the nuns. Seeing their children for one hour a day only, after their early infancy. Just enough time for a cuddle, a song, a story. Just enough time for the tiny child to recognize his mother. Just enough time for her heart to break again, and again, and again.
William was all Julia thought about. When she made her bed in the morning. When she ate her porridge at breakfast. When she worked through the noise and steam. She dreamed of the day they would be together, without whitewashed walls and rows and rows of identical cribs, without nuns watching their every move.
She dreamed of him all night, lying alone in a crib on the other side of this enormous building, separated by stairs and doors and nuns.
* * *
—
On the day of William’s first birthday, Julia’s father came to fetch her. He folded her into his arms and said, “It’s over now, it’s over. You’re coming home.”
Julia ran to the nursery to get her baby. The nuns stopped her at the door. They shook their heads.
“We’ll take care of him, Julia,” they said. “Go home now, and be with your family. Go home and take your second chance for a proper life.”
Inside the nursery, the babies were crying. The toddlers stared at her with round, open eyes. They understood nothing. Julia understood nothing.
The nuns took her hands, took her elbows, took her under her arms when she started crying, started screaming, started trying to run back to the nursery, pleading, “I’ll stay, I’ll stay, I’ll work here forever, just let me keep my baby.”
They kept walking; they held her up; they wouldn’t let her fall; her—fallen woman already. They led her to her father, who bundled her into her old coat, pinning her arms to her sides. She had screamed all there was in her to scream.
As her father pushed her gently into the car, one of the nuns said, “You’ll see, Julia. You’re one of the lucky ones. From a good family. You can still have a good life, find a husband. Nobody in your parish needs to know.”
The other nun patted Julia’s shoulder and said, “Now you can put all this behind you.”
Julia still believed somehow, in the depths of her heart, that her family would send for her baby when he had finished his nap. That she would raise her beautiful baby to love the animals on her family farm, to become a bustling and loud darling little boy. To see him off to school in the morning. To mend his clothes and kiss his knees when he skinned them. To tell him stories and sing him songs and let him fall asleep in her arms.
Her father would allow her to fetch him. She’d tell him—she’d explain the all-encompassing love she felt. She’d explain that none of this was her son’s fault. That he shouldn’t have to suffer for his mother’s sins.
The nuns shut the car door and Julia finally managed to speak, croaked the words out of the open window: one last plea.
“I didn’t even say goodbye.”
Her father started the engine. The nuns waved as the car pulled away. Before they left, Julia heard one say, “You see, it’s a kindness. It’s a good thing we didn’t let you get too attached.”
23.
The fallen and the forgotten
Donegal, 2012
The morning was something unexpected, as if not a single one of us thought we’d wake up to see the dawn. And yet eventually, as it did every morning, then like now, pale white light shone through the high empty windows, painted the stone walls a lighter gray. After a virtually sleepless night, our faces had taken on the same hue.
Outside our salt circle, darkness retreated, slightly, to the corners of the room, pooled in the shadows of the old bedframes. Or perhaps we had grown accustomed to the gloom. We turned away from the stairs that led up to where we’d seen the girl the night before, and instead walked deeper into the building. The doorway at the far end of the hall had once been bricked up, but had since been broken open, stones stacked neatly to either side. Beyond it, time was strange—simultaneously paused and speeded up, stark and startling.
This room was even larger than the one we had slept in. Long tables filled the space, covered in dirt and creaky Singer sewing machines under faded dustcovers. Measuring tapes, rusted scissors, and needles littered the floor. Over each door, a large crucifix and a framed photograph of an old pope.
Weak sunlight filtered through windows set high in the walls, illuminating the long fluorescent lights that swung on rusted chains from the ceiling. Pipes ran underneath the windows, over the exposed walls, disappeared into other rooms like worms inside a dead animal. Only our footprints disturbed the dust.
As we walked, the sound of our steps echoed off the ironing boards and steam presses, the pumps and hydraulics of the boiler, the giant vats for bleaching, the industrial-sized washing machines twice as tall as the tallest of us (Finn, whose face was the same stone gray as the walls underneath the ancient peeling paint).
Through a far door was an office, its walls covered in cardboard boxes on metal shelving, interspersed with ceramic statues of Mary (the Virgin, naturally, not the Magdalene). Inside the boxes were folders, files, stacks of metal hangers, the same detergent and fabric softener that Rachel used at home.
In a corner stood a large fridge-freezer, empty now, door yawning open. On the countertop beside it, an electric kettle, a radio—a cluster of reminders that this place was open not so long ago.
“This looks . . .” Ida spoke suddenly, broke the silence. “This looks newer. I mean, more modern than I thought it would.”
I realized I had been picturing everything happening in the early 1900s, unconsciously filing excuses for the very existence of such a place because of the time period. But Julia’s time here was only seventy-six years ago, and now the past seemed suddenly even closer.
Ida flicked through some of the files. “1993,” she said heavily. “This place was still operating in 1993.”
Silence fell like a weighted press.
We opened the boxes, flicked through the files. They were invoices, accounts, details of the hotels, companies, and hospitals that used the laundry for their businesses. There was nothing about the women the laundry used as unpaid labor. Nothing about the children stolen from the women. No names, no details, no death notices.
Ida, her phone glowing, read with a heavy voice from the screen. “They didn’t keep records, and those they did were destroyed when the first investigations into abuse were called for. They didn’t want people knowing what went on here. They didn’t want the numbers getting out. The babies sold to rich couples in America. The illegal adoptions. The deaths.”
Finn whispered, “How many babies were buried in that garden since Nellie’s?”
I grabbed hold of the neare
st hand without thinking and squeezed it. Somebody squeezed back quickly, before letting go.
Shock made my face sting. Tears pattered into the dust at Ida’s feet.
“Can we go now?” someone said. It could have been any of the four of us: me or Ida, Finn or Cale. It could have been somebody else.
“Yes. Yes. It’s over. It’s finished now. We can go.”
Retracing our steps through the building, between the imposing walls, Finn whispered, “Fuckers, fuckers, fuckers,” under his breath over and over.
“I was born in 1996. If I’d come along a few years earlier, this is where I could’ve ended up,” Ida said. “Unmarried mother, barely eighteen. They’d’ve taken Mandy in and then pushed her back out again. I’d’ve been raised by nuns and then shipped off to America with a new name.”
“Things were different back then,” Cale said, touching Ida’s shoulder gently, but I gave a hard, dry laugh.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
A seventeen-year-old girl in 1936 was still a seventeen-year-old girl, was still a whole person, regardless of her time. Her baby was a whole person too.
When I took a moment to consider the timeline of my family history, realization rose like steam. Dates shuffled in my mind. Julia gave birth to her son in 1936. The same year my father was born. Julia was my grandmother. My father was born in this place.
There’s a lot you don’t know about your sister, he had said, but clearly there was a lot we hadn’t known about him as well.
* * *
—
We walked to the nearest bus stop silently, and people appeared around us: old ladies off to hairdressing appointments, mums with babies in strollers, old men with dogs on leashes. The world had kept turning somehow. Did they know what had happened in the old crumbling building that stood, silently overlooking the town? Perhaps, if some people had known, they’d forgotten. Maybe even women who once were in there had forgotten. We do whatever we can to survive.
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