Bad Girl Magdalene (11 page)

‘Then you came home.’ Magda wanted it all over and done, old Mr Gorragher getting to the terrible bits like he had to come back full circle before he’d let anybody go.

‘We got examined then back to the teeth arms. I was made a rifleman again, and we landed on the fucking sand with all kinds of shit flying. Know what?’

‘No.’ Magda was despondent, standing there knowing the hoover was silent and if Sister Raphael set up one of her shouts she would be for it. She hated these know-whats, because it meant the old man knew she was still there even though he was almost blind.

‘However bad it got in the army, even in prison camp, nothing was as bad as Ranter, that school right here in Eire. They killed another Irish lad’s brother in our unit. He got transferred to the Gunners, twenty-five pounders. Survived. I met him afterwards. He liked the army too, same reasons as me. We were safe there. Latree Industrial School was Christian Brothers too.’

‘I’ve to go now, Mr Gorragher.’

‘There should be a kind of court, but I wouldn’t go if there was. Would you?’

This was the point in the chat when Mr Gorragher would turn his head as if he could see properly again, and raise his chin like he was looking. Magda hated the trick. He only did it to keep her there when she wanted to go.

‘I don’t know, Mr Gorragher.’

‘You mean no.’ His chin sank then. She wanted to ask if it was disappointment that made his chin sink like that, but that would prolong the conversation and she’d catch it from Sister Raphael. ‘You mean no.’

‘See you, Mr Gorragher.’

‘See you.’ And as she carried the vacuum cleaner from the alcove, ‘Here, Father.’

‘Yes?’ she said. Talking to him tired her out more than work.

‘Would you like a spot of the old poteen? Good stuff, got from them Scotch, not local. Yes?’

‘Not just now, thank you.’

‘You sure?’

And, grotesquely, the old features would wrinkle even more and the old man would give a monstrous wink, moisture running down his face almost like tears, but only one eye.

‘Thank you, but not today.’

‘I’ve some right here.’

And the old man would pat his bedside locker and wink. Then Magda would leave. She had seen Father Doran pause, return just as he was about to leave, and reach into the locker for a flat bottle of brown liquid. And he would take one swig and sometimes another. The old man would cackle then, as if complicit in some crime.

Magda left, sickened by the recurring story, wondering if everybody her age or older had been slain inside by events at some horrible place they could never escape from. Prisoner-of-war camp better than school? War safer than the Church’s care?

On the way home, though, she remembered laying the tray for Father Doran, and the order of the things. Crockery just so, the Dundee cake exactly positioned, the small knives with their decorated blue handles and the cake plates with borders of flowers.

That evening she walked slowly down the Borro to the residence of the outdoor girl workers, and in her small room she tried to make one of the stolen white tablets dissolve in water,
then tried to press it in a chewed piece of bread. It wouldn’t melt or even go away. Whatever she did to it, it looked like a thick little wart of white stuck there, easily seen. Daring, she pressed it into her mouth. She felt it there, to her horror. Father Doran would spit it out and say, ‘What on earth is this, Sister?’ and they would send for Magda and then for the Garda Siobhana.

She washed her mouth out after washing the test tablet down the sink, and sat on the bed staring at the wall. The thing was, the bottle of fluid that Mr Gorragher had concealed in his locker, or somewhere near, might do. She resolved to test the tablet next day when she could get hold of some of that fluid, whisky or whatever the Scotch Protestant heathens brewed in their old bogs over The Water. She knew gin wasn’t coloured, whereas the tea-coloured fluid Mr Gorragher sometimes showed her was dark brown, or variations between coffee-coloured and a light tan.

That might be it. She abandoned the idea of feeding Father Doran poisoned cake, and settled for good and all on Mr Gorragher’s dark brown Scotch, if the tablets could be made to melt in a test drink.

One thing more worried her. Leaving Mr Gorrhager that day, she saw Sister Francesca standing by one of the other alcoves along the corridor. Just standing, and not doing a thing. Hearing Magda coming, she instantly moved away. Surely Sister Francesca couldn’t have been listening, could she? Other people eavesdropped, but never nuns.

Whatever had made Sister Francesca stay like that, so quiet for no reason, Magda knew that glimpse to be a special warning. She had to be careful of everybody, even if they were supposed to be on God’s side.

Father Doran’s appointment with Bishop MacGrath still stood, in spite of the press conference the bishop had arranged for three o’clock that afternoon. The prelate was affable to an industrial degree, creating the impression of posing during the interviews he conducted regularly during the day – two in the morning, two in the afternoon, one sometime round sevenish. Well known among his colleagues was his wish that the evening meeting would take place in some restaurant where the friend would pick up the tab. At such, his lordship would chuckle amiably and, tilting that giant head of bright silvery hair, say with twinkling benignity, ‘I pray my chiselling tactics will keep debtors from the diocesan door!’

‘Influence, Father Doran,’ he sighed, welcoming the priest and gesturing to an armchair. ‘The Church has lost influence, I fear. Look at the recent publicity.’

‘Indeed, m’lord.’

‘It is not as if we don’t try.’

‘I can’t imagine anyone trying harder, m’lord.’

‘Tea in a moment.’ The bishop gazed across his study at some
distant vista before going on. ‘The problem is, the university has asked for a debate. Title: Family Issues versus Church Doctrine.’

‘Soon?’ Father Doran asked, sharper than he intended.

‘Two weeks.’

‘Do they really mean versus?’

‘Without doubt.’

‘Inviting the diocese?’

‘Me in particular.’

‘Any particular department?’

‘Guess,’ the bishop said dryly.

‘Sociology?’

‘You have it.’ The bishop waited as a housekeeper entered and served the tea. Both clerics watched her fingers, the biscuits, the milk, teaspoons, and thanked her as she withdrew. ‘You can imagine such an encounter. It will be planned as a ritual very like the one Mrs Mahoney has just enacted. A service.’

‘Indeed. A sermon attended by a congregation of aficionados.’

‘That would have been so, once. No longer.’

Father Doran began to fear he was being sent to the firing line. The last thing he wanted was to invite publicity that might prove adverse. Times were changing. There would be no opportunity to withdraw if any scent of scandal rose. He had spoken only twice at such gatherings, and had had an uncomfortable passage at each. Foreign students, of course, were the unpleasant catalysts.

‘Modernists abound, James.’

‘Indeed, m’lord.’

That use of his Christian name disturbed the priest. Something unpleasant this way comes, he thought unhappily. Was this the bishop’s hint he would instead send some up-and-coming
younger man, who might prove more theologically nimble to the student body in Dublin?

‘I suppose it is the Catholic…?’

‘Yes. Though Trinity College has its moments.’ The prelate’s irony was not lost on the priest. Trinity College was the non-Catholic element in Dublin.

‘That is half a hurdle, then.’

‘I may suppose so.’

The bishop clinked his teacup. He had lately abandoned sugar, to his personal grief, some Lenten tactic that still oppressed. He did have some revisionary views about doctrine, elements of ordinary life. Taste was one such, for instance. He decided to move things on, because this Doran man was too cunning to commit many errors. Advancement into the diplomatic sphere of Church activities often came to mind after conversations with this priest.

‘As it happens, James, I am too busy on that date, so I am stymied. I simply can’t suggest an alternative date.’

‘Publicity, though, m’lord,’ Doran said unhappily, trying to give the bishop a way out. He saw he would have to deputise. It would prove a cauldron, considering the adverse media lately put about. ‘It might be embarrassing if no Church representative attended the debate. I suppose it is a debate, not a lecture?’

‘Debate.’ The bishop detected Doran’s reluctance. It amused him to keep the idea going a little longer. ‘How would one approach the topic?’

‘Modernists, m’lord.’

‘Modernists?’ Bishop MacGrath was surprised by the alacrity of the reply.

‘I should begin my argument – stability of society, proper detailed assessments of what happens in one age and another,
changing worlds – by stating how great modernists have managed in the past.’

‘Thinking particularly…?’

‘Tyrell, of course, as you already guess, m’lord.’ Father Doran allowed himself the liberty of a small challenge to the prelate’s sense of propriety, though meek as could be. ‘Parallels could be drawn between present circumstances, once one had gone over the modernist case.’

‘And add his tribulations. You could make out a case for our present situation being a possible instance of Tyrell’s problems.’

‘It would take some doing, m’lord.’

‘But with adequate planning?’

‘The Church could come out scented like roses.’

They thought, hesitating over biscuits. Bishop MacGrath did not move when a distant telephone rang.

George Tyrell was a famed, if not notorious, modernist in the Church during the nineteenth century. An undoubted intellectual, the Dubliner [sic] started life in 1861, a Protestant educated in the Church of Ireland who went as a young man to England and there became a Roman Catholic Jesuit. The then Pope Pius the Tenth published his inflexible doctrines on the priesthood in the encyclical
Pieni l’anima
. Subjected, however, to the new scientific forces represented by Charles Darwin, Huxley and the hectic advances in the Victorian era, Tyrell wrote his modernistic views under pen-names – AR Waller, and Dr Ernest Engels among them – but was inevitably discovered. He was dismissed from the Jesuits, to become something of a still greater rebel, and likened papal restrictions to those of the restrictive Czar of all the Russias. He refused to recant, and died shunned by the Church, in an English village on the South Downs.

‘He was not the first,’ MacGrath said mildly.

‘The point is, one could make a good case suggesting that modernistic revisionism was allowed by the Church despite the social and economic tenor of those times. Not that the Church devised the scenarios, just saw they had to be handled differently as times evolved into something sociologically new.’

‘Good. Yes, James. If it could be got over to a disaffected crowd of students in that fashion.’

‘With acting and apparent analytical thought, m’lord.’

‘We are becoming flippant, James. Stop it.’

They smiled. James Doran thought he was coming out of this threatened duty rather well. He could claim he had discussed the topic of the debate in some detail with the bishop before appearing at the Dublin society, and that he was merely recounting the history of thought. He could argue afterwards that media people always misrepresented his views. That would call for an enthusiastic but detailed reply to dissent. The way things were in Rome, not to mention Dublin, such a rejoinder would add to his reputation as a stern orthodoxian rather than some loose canon rolling dangerously about the Church’s deck.

He hated the idea of going, though. But duty done rather than duty shirked always found praise. It was settling for less. He was resigning himself to this notion when the bishop spoke, raising his hopes.

‘Please give me your frank opinion of Father Kilmain, James.’

The request startled the priest. He wondered what he was being asked for. Hope rose. A deputy for the debate at University College among all those students?

‘Father Kilmain? Agreeable, friendly. I find it hard to imagine Father Kilmain in any kind of bind whatsoever, m’lord.’

‘And in a wider sense?’

James Doran knew Father Kilmain for a rival, in line for the monsignorship. Dangerous, however, to run Kilmain down, so nothing but praise.

‘I would think he was the – what do they say in an American curriculum vitae? – the Man Most Likely To. Unless,’ he added with mock haste, making humour where none was to be found, ‘your lordship thinks otherwise.’

A natural talent, the prelate registered, and easy with it, when Doran must be apprehensive at doing battle with a crowd of students.

‘One problem, James, is the nature of the student body these days. They are so varied. We know how sentiment operates among the African, the Caribbean, the South American churches. Dissent seems to be the norm. No papal conclavical goings-on can ameliorate the problems.’

‘No, m’lord.’

‘So I thought of inviting Father Kilmain to deputise for me.’

James Doran knew to stay mute for a few moments. He tipped his fingers together a while, then quickly shoved his hands away in case the gesture annoyed. It was his best act.

‘Father Kilmain would cope well.’

‘He played rugby or something.’

‘Yes, m’lord. Hurling too. Not quite international level, but almost getting there when he was ordained.’

‘I shall send him.’

‘His report will be exemplary.’

The priest deliberately injected a little envy into the comment, merely sowing seeds of malignity, for a report of any dispute always created concern within. That might retard
the promotion of Father Kilmain, and do little harm to the cause of, say, a possible rival contender for advancement such as himself.

‘Not jealous, Father?’ the bishop joked ponderously.

‘Invariably. More tea, m’lord?’

They leant forward, smiling.

Magda woke and washed. No shower, and the girls were to use bath or the communal shower once every second day, no more.

She started the test with the whisky fluid stolen from old Mr Gorragher. The tablet shrank until it left only a kind of slushy white grainy sludge at the bottom of the glass. The label on the flat brown bottle had a picture of a London gent walking along with his monocle and grand boots and walking stick, who could have fed all Ireland if he’d only been moved by Christian charity to give it to the poor in Dublin. But no, there he stayed, strolling along on his bottle, grinning like an ape. She had been terrified that somebody would catch her – Sister Bernice was the likeliest snooper, or maybe one of the others. Magda was lucky, and got away with an old tablet bottleful. It was dark brown with some old label on, and had a water-tight lid that screwed on. Mr Gorragher’s friends from the Sheriff Street bar brought him a tipple every week. Fine.

She had put the bit of whisky in, screwed the lid tight down, and hid it in her pinny before escaping outside and breathing calmly there as she walked away from the scene of her theft. There’d been plenty still there in the bottle for the old man to give a glug to Father Doran.

Magda almost weakened, but remembered how he had been there and what he had done. Father Doran had seen Lucy
before she fell to her death, to keep on falling for ever. Magda was failing in her Christian duty if she backed out now.

The tablet – she sloshed it round and round – was surely smaller? She emptied what she could of the fluid, terrible smell it was and all, a miracle indeed that men would drink the stuff and seemingly get such merriment from it. It sent them mad as March hares sometimes, fighting all over the city. She gazed at the powder drying slowly on the piece of newspaper on the Baby Belling cooker.

Dry, the paper started to curl at the edges and looked stiff and crinkly. She felt it and tried shifting that old greyish – greyish? Why greyish now just because it had gone dry? – powder about. Sure as God it was hardly there at all. No sign of there being enough white stuff left to make a decent tablet of it now.

Therefore God was helping her. He had decided to make the white tablet so it could wash into the whisky the old man drank of a night, so secret was he, without being detected. That meant only one thing. All the drug’s power, that kept the old folks’ hearts working, would be taken up in the whisky. She had heard that’s what they were for, heart working. The old ladies all called them heart tablets. The men called them pills.

She was ready for her murder. The day after tomorrow, Father Doran would come again, and, praise the Lord, would stop to chat to the old man Mr Gorragher and take an illicit snifter with the old man.

The thought occurred only then to Magda that, with the poisoned whisky there large as life, large as death, if she poured it into Mr Gorragher’s secret whisky bottle with the smiling frock-coated London gent strolling along with his fine monocle, then what if the old soldier took a drink of the poison before the priest took his swig?

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she would kill Mr Gorragher too.

She felt so shaky at the notion she had to sit down. The danger was, postponing her murder of the priest would be intolerable, for hadn’t she made the devout promise to Lucy every single morning of her life since the nuns had carried the lifeless body of the poor mite away to be buried without a marked grave? Magda had sworn to rescue her, from keeping having to fall, and herself from never sleeping at all ever until the end of time.

No. No question of postponement. Magda knew she must do it.

She would go to Mass early in the morning and pray to be given Divine Guidance, for God Himself had shown her the way by making the chemists melt them old tablets into the whisky without trace. She felt sure God wouldn’t get a thing like this wrong. He knew what He was doing. Hadn’t he created the world, tablets and all?

Lucy had fallen quite enough, thank you, to her sojourn in Hellfire. God would help in the rescue. He would show Magda a way, what to do to stop the poison from killing Mr Gorragher and his hopeless arm and the wrecked head from the army gunfire in foreign wars, him and his daft old song about leaving Derry.

Plenty of hymns said it often enough: with God’s help who can fail, that kind of thing, over and over. Wasn’t the Heart of Jesus the fount of love and mercy?

I’m coming, Lucy, she said inwardly, throwing the paper with the remnants of the undissolved white heart tablet into the loo. I’ll rescue you, love, don’t you worry. We’ll kill Father Doran. God knew for Himself what kind of a man Father Doran was. Magda would set Lucy free from falling every time Magda closed her eyes.

One problem: in the evening she must meet the ginger-headed lad who stood astride the motorcycle and had said definite to meet him by the end of the Borro. Maybe he hadn’t been crying at all, being one of the Garda Siobhana, from his belt badge and the badge emblem on his stinking old bike. She hadn’t done anything wrong yet, so it would be safe to go. And she could honestly tell him she’d looked out for his grampa, Mr Liam MacIlwam.