Bad Girl Magdalene (23 page)

‘Whose work is idleness?’

Satan’s
work,
Sister.

‘Why is it evil?’

Because
it
offends
against
so
good
a
God,
Sister.

‘What is your resolution?’

To
never
more
do
Satan’s
work,
but
to
act
in
true
and
faithful
obedience
to
our
holy
Mother
Church,
Sister.

Magda decided to make a choice of her own. Nervous about it, she went to the damp bench outside the entrance and sat, looking round guiltily. She kept turning, to deceive anybody who might think she was just there being idle, maybe even on the way to falling asleep and earning punishment in Purgatory.

It didn’t work. In a minute, she was up and into the hospital. She asked the woman at the desk how Father Doran was.

‘He is poorly with his heart,’ she said, following her rehearsed speech. ‘He is under the knife today.’

‘Father Doran?’ The lady seemed disinterested, clicking on some computer thing and not even glancing at Magda.

‘Yes. He’s…’

‘Yes. Cardiothoracic. Take the lift to…’

Magda heard little of the speech, but went in the direction indicated, mystified by the signs, following a woman who was having difficulty marshalling her three small children. Maybe they were going to see some father, husband, brother, under the knife too?

The choices seemed to be several, Magda thought in dismay, too many. The Church was no choice, sure, being there by God’s orders anyway. Everybody did as the Church said, except for Lucy, and just look what happened to her. And except Emily, who did whatever she wanted anyway. It was controlled and had to be obeyed.

Then there was this strange entity that was Kev. In the background was Sergeant Bernard, or did he not count now? And Damien. In it too was her own behaviour, so inept when Kev talked to her, and not knowing what to say to his sister Jean in that bar. This strange world of reality was all of a piece. In it too was her poisoning Father Doran to kill him dead, and the listening hard she did so much of. The lay cleaning women lived more in this radical reality-driven world than ever they did in the holy ritualistic Church.

Then there was a pretence world, which was the dangerous world of imagination. This was the no-work world of idleness the nuns condemned in God’s name. It was wrong, discipline was essential, or the world would come to grief. All history, Magda had learnt, was there to prove that calamity followed where immorality led, and civilisations tumbled.

She followed the stout lady and the three children. At the lifts, she asked the lady where the Cardiac Unit was. The lady saw her bafflement, and went with her up to the third floor in the lift, pressing the buttons as if she was familiar with everything.

Magda stepped out into mayhem.

A bench with a table, some magazines and two armchairs seemed safe enough. She took up her stance of waiting for someone, and stayed seated there while everybody moved by. Frightening, it was, disturbing the mental order Magda was trying so hard to construct. The problem was
how
to decide things. If she had practice, she might have been able to make up her mind. The choice was the threat, not the decisions she might make. Guess wrong, people out here in this reality just said, oh, well, and started a different thing entirely. How on earth did they have the nerve?

She sat there. The visitors stopped coming. The nurses seemed to change duty – Magda recognised the signs, some coming on and wanting to know what about this, about that, and signing things. Doctors went by. A patient was wheeled by, bottles and tubes and shuffling gowned staff leaning on the trolley, their hands about the patient’s face. It could have been anyone, so wrapped up. Surely, she thought, they’d be too hot under all that? For an instant the patient’s eyes opened, gazed in her direction with a flat kind of opacity. She believed it might be a man. The eyes seemed vaguely familiar, but by now Father Doran would be sitting up in bed having his no-poison tea and reading his old breviary. Then the figure was glided off on them quiet wheels, all them boots squeaking away.

By now she was desperate to go to the loo, but didn’t know if she would be allowed. She didn’t know how to get back to the outside.

A nurse came to her. ‘Are you waiting for someone?’

‘Yes. To see Father Doran.’

‘Father Doran? He went to theatre. He’s long back.’

‘Is he…?’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No. I’m…’

‘He’s not to have visitors just yet. Do you want to leave anything?’

‘No.’ It came out sharper than Magda had wanted, and she said it again but softer, ‘No. I wanted to say something about…’

‘Can I have your name? You could leave a message.’

‘No. I’ll come back.’

The nurse pointed the way to the lifts. Magda went in the right direction, hoping to see that little black mark that meant
the women’s loos were through the signed door. Then she felt bold. Had she come all this way, dithering like an imbecile, to leave without at least telling how she’d done wrong and was sorry? Yet she had worried herself sick, thinking all that about how there were three lives she was trying to live all at once. You had to keep trying, even with one life at a time. That was what God said, she was almost sure.

Returning, she said to the nurse, ‘Could I leave a message for Father Doran please?’

‘Certainly. Do you want to write it?’

‘No.’ Magda took the plunge and said out loud, right to the nurse’s face, the nurse in her grand uniform with its badges and everything, ‘I can’t write. I’m sorry.’

She could have made up her usual tale about needing spectacles. Her favourite was, ‘I dropped them under the sofa,’ which didn’t sound too bad because she hadn’t a sofa either so it was a complete falsehood.

‘That’s all right.’ The nurse found some paper, a whole notepad, and a ballpoint. ‘What do you want to say?’

‘Could you please say, Dear Father Doran, I’m sorry for that wrong stuff.’

The nurse wrote, repeating the message. ‘Is that it?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘No name? He’ll want to know who it was from.’

‘Oh.’ Magda knew the nurse must watch that old telly on duty of a night. Well, no time for speculation. She couldn’t say the full details, not even to this friendly nurse. The nurse must want a decent ending, like in them old stories in country houses.

‘A name?’

‘Yes. Unless he’ll know who it’s from.’

This was a dilemma. To give the nurse the whole tale would get the priest arrested when he was poorly. You had to visit the sick, like honouring thy father and thy mother, if you ever learnt who they were.

‘Say,
Yours
sincerely,
Lucy.
’

That was a brainwave, signing it Lucy. He would know straight away it was to do with Magda’s friend. That would ease his mind, telling him he was forgiven. Then maybe they’d meet like under that tall tree in that great park where Mr Darcy comes walking up to the lady seated in a bower, where flowers grew and everything and they became all friends again. It was such a peaceful arrangement, nobody got whacked and their legs made black and blue where the inspectors could never see.

‘Yours sincerely, Lucy,’ the nurse repeated. ‘That it?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

Magda waited a moment, then turned and walked away towards the lifts. As she went past one of the rooms full of machinery, with nurses and them tubes all round a patient, the desk nurse called, ‘Oh, Lucy.’

Magda turned in fear. ‘Yes?’

‘No address?’

‘He will know,’ she said, and left.

Luckily, two doctors got in a lift and asked where she wanted to go. She told them the outside.

‘Car park?’ one said, smiling just like Mr Darcy. ‘You were lucky to get space. Never seen it so crowded.’

‘True,’ Magda said, thinking she was being brilliant, like that Sherlock Holmes when he got the Spider Woman, and that old police Inspector Lestrade in his daft bowler hat went off grinning with the Spider Woman on his arm.

She went outside. On the way, greatly daring, she entered the door with the sign and went to the loo, washing her hands afterwards with the most beautifully scented soap ever. It was a pity to waste it in old water just to wash, but she didn’t need telling what was right and what was wrong, no.

Sunday dawned with Magda frantic. The thing was, she had two things to wear. Choice was a terrible thing.

This became more terrible today. She thought of praying, and went to church full of devout pleas to Jesus to help, because he was sort of neutral. Then the Virgin Mary, then St Veronica. She was never quite sure of St Veronica, who did all that cloth business and ought to know a thing or two about material. She came away none the wiser, and went home to do baked beans on toast in the most ineffectual grill in County Dublin, her Baby Belling on full.

She had one nearly black dress, her best. It troubled her because it needed cleaning and the dry cleaner’s at the corner of Crown Alley was extortionate. Worse, it picked up every dust fleck, every hair, every fragment of lawn blowing from the silly displays at the Dublin Woollen Mills, to nobody’s benefit but the dry cleaners of the world. She wanted a string of pearls, as worn by – who, Jean Kent? Patricia Roc? – the previous night in
Wicked
Lady
when out riding on her horse, in her crinoline or whatever, singing that lovely song about love
stealing your heart, so pretty. Luckily, James Mason got shot. He always frightened Magda so she had to turn the sound off when he was talking in case his words started coming through when Lucy started falling as Magda dozed off, as the outside darkness slowly became its usual morning grey.

Well, like that set of pearls, but Magda had none.

Her other dress was a flowery thing one of the cleaning ladies had passed on to her, handed on from her daughter, who was more or less Magda’s age. It didn’t really fit, but was the one she usually wore all the time. Magda rattled on about it. She knew it had some signs on the label behind the neck, but since she couldn’t read she had to have it cleaned.

She had started a savings account, putting her wage money in. She listened to the saving place people as they explained the ins and outs, and said she had hurt her hand so she couldn’t sign her name at all. They gave her a plastic card. This was even more trouble but in a new way, since she had to hand the card over when she took her wage to them at the end of the week. She asked for what she thought she’d need, guessing on their say-so, and they kept the rest.

They got to know her, and she deliberately crooked her right hand as if it were twisted from birth like Mrs MacConnigal’s, who cried every night from terrible things that had happened, poor lady. She had been taken away to a mental hospital at the finish, and she had no family to speak of so it was hard. Magda often wondered where Mrs MacConnigal had got to, and thought how nice it would be to go and see the old lady, maybe to telephone her and just ask.

Magda’s entertainment was listening to the people telephoning on the concourse of the railway station. ‘Take it easy!’ blared some Tannoy all the time for a whole month or two once, when
Magda first started going there. It sounded demented and put the heart across you, but there was no stopping it. They’d given the slogan up now, thanks be to God.

She made a habit of standing there as if waiting for some train, or perhaps meeting some gentleman in his natty trilby, like Trevor Howard, who’d take some train dust from her eye, and then start up a romance at the snack bar, nothing carnal that would call for confession or anything. It was only the listening to the old telephones that she did.

Every single life she overheard at them old telephones was worth it. Sometimes there were rows, though these happened in the very best circles, she knew from her informal education at the TV screen of a night. Usually they talked pleasant. Some were disappointments, just a barked instruction to do this or that or meet somewhere. Those didn’t repay all the effort Magda went to, positioning herself just to hear what was being said. Other times there was a serious talk, some relatives might be poorly or, once, in a breathtaking chat of sorrowfully brief duration, about whether the man talking and the lady at the other end should go ahead and buy some house. It was exhilarating. Sometimes Magda walked away as if floating on air, delirious with pleasure at the images raised in her mind, better than any old fillum, that was for sure.

The trouble was that nobody she would ever come to know by all this watching and listening ever revealed how it was they came to some decision. Worse, there was a terrible final realisation. However well she eavesdropped at the telly and heeded what the lords and ladies said on their galloping steeds, Magda never would know the outcome of their decisions. Did that smiley lady with the pearls and getting the love of that lord as they sang riding on the moors ever think back and tell
herself, ‘Goodness gracious, how exciting to hold up some London coach with the cry “Stand and deliver!” then ride off laughing with the wind in your hair’?

That’s the bit she needed to learn about. If she’d got her age right, she must be knocking twenty, the twenty-second of July, to be about as precise as guessing allowed.

Maybe this was an opportunity? Kev was probably checking his family was getting on with it as they came back from Holy Mass. She felt scared, like she was going to get clouted by Mrs Rooney and Sister St Paul as they set about her in so much anger they shook with rage over her slow carrying them frosty vegetables in. Worst had been the time Lucy had coughed so bad Magda had had to carry them in on her own and hadn’t been strong enough to do them as fast as she should. Lucy, poor sainted thing, coughed under the lintel of the kitchen door, and Sister St Paul had berated Lucy for setting herself choking on something she’d stolen from the vegetables and walloped her hard. Then they gave Magda a leathering for concealing Lucy’s theft of vegetables. It wasn’t true at all. Magda found herself weeping at the pain, but was it right to cry when Lucy too got a whacking when she’d done no wrong?

Magda looked into her cracked mirror. She looked a fright, and her hair was a ghastly mess. She did her own hair with a brush and comb, and washed it in the sink along the landing. She would have liked to have done it at the St Cosmo but that wasn’t allowed. You were stealing time from God Almighty, and stealing the St Cosmo water supply and heating.

She combed her hair. It wouldn’t stay straight, curling in a troublesome manner. She gave up and let it get on with it. The hairdresser two shops down from where Dame Court did that sudden end into Exchequer Street looked pleasant. They
showed you a list of things they could do to your fright of hair, but how could she read it? They showed you lists of dinners in bars too, that Kev had coped with so magnificently, checking with a casual glance the wall list. He was elegant, so much in command. This was the difference that God surely intended when He designed the world.

She chose the black dress, too long but how could she shorten it? The nuns made the older Magdalene girls shorten or lengthen their habits. The oldest girls, nimble with their fingers and counting and working lengths out, made the nuns’ underskirts. You could always tell which girls knew spelling and counting, because their hands were always thick in the palms and their fingers often bled. They were paler and squintier than the other girls. And you could always tell the serving and washing girls by the sudden end to the hard chapped skin just short of the elbow, where the arms didn’t need to dip any further into the washing.

The rest of her time she spent brushing the dress. She worried about her bottom, and spent a long time trying to position the mirror piece so she could see there was nothing going wrong back there so people would notice her stupid shape and be mortified by the sight.

With trepidation she left, going back several times to make sure of nothing in particular, and caught the Sunday bus.

Kev met her off the bus and they walked together, no arms linked today. She had a terror of railways, not knowing why except she didn’t know how to work the tickets and you’d have to ask and know counting.

‘It’s easier to come right up Ballybough Road,’ Kev said. He had a clean shirt on and jeans. Magda thought him debonair.

‘If you’ve a motor bicycle,’ Magda said, defending her secret ignorance. She smiled, to make a joke of it.

He nodded, not smiling back. ‘There’s a bus from the Busaras goes straight to Tolka Park. Get off at Fairview.’

‘I’ll do that, then.’ She caught herself thinking, Jesus Mary and Joseph, would he now be dismayed that here’s this stupid girl with the effrontery to assume she was coming out here to every Sunday dinner just because he’d mentioned some old buses?

‘You’re right, Magda. I think everybody’s on a bike.’

‘I always imagined…’ being on a motorbike, was her next unthought tragedy that had to be extinguished before it got out properly into talk. She only meant
Easy
Rider,
where they rode their old bikes across wild and free America and were so happy and cavalier, not caring. She didn’t mean she kept imagining him steering with one hand while he held her on the bike and they drove off into the sunset, no, nothing like that. ‘How hard it must be,’ she made up quickly, ‘to drive a motor bike. Do they show you in the Gardai?’

‘Yes. I learnt there.’

‘I can’t read,’ she said suddenly, thinking it had to be said straight out. ‘So I’d never learn.’

‘Not at all?’

‘Not a word.’ She smiled, trying to lessen the shame of it, and made things worse. ‘I’m hopeless with numbers and all. I never learnt, you see.’

‘There’s lots like that.’

‘Not as bad as me.’

‘I’m colour blind,’ he said with candour. ‘So you’re lucky.’

‘Are you?’

She was astonished. The world was so queer. Once, everything was simpler, back when wrong was her fault because of Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Now, here was this hero, in the Gardai for Heaven’s sake, with a deformity. She knew some girls in the Magdalenes got punished for stubbornness when they got colours wrong, but that was just usual. One question, what colour was the priest’s vestments on a Feria day, which of course was a green chasuble, a girl said red as if it was a martyr’s Sunday like St Peter. The class went silent as the girl was called out and whaled. This was the first Magda had heard of words for it, colour blindness.

‘I’d have got on further if I wasn’t,’ he said, seeming not to care either way about it, which was superb.

Magda always thought that all females – nuns, girls, the rest – were merely men who hadn’t quite come off, so to speak. It was right and just to know you were wrong all the time, because that’s what life was. Yet if God had made a lovely man like Kev then left something out like this colour blindness thing, what was God up to? It suddenly seemed like God was playing about, letting some have nothing at all wrong, and making others with a club foot that proved your mother or father, or both, had got up to no good, so serve you right. To be limited, as herself, was only right, deserving a bad start because of your mother’s sins, but Kev? With his authentic genuine family?

Suddenly she slowed. Kev asked her what was wrong.

‘We’re nearly here,’ he said. ‘Just there, fifth along.’

‘I got a bit worried.’

‘What of?’ He laughed and she thought it was so marvellous laughing like that and not caring. ‘Us? We’re boring, and that’s the truth. You’ll see.’

Boring? A real family in the image of the Holy Family? Her mind span, and she decided she must see this through. She
walked on with resolve. This was a decision, an almost firm one, to carry something through.

‘Is it all right me coming?’

‘Why?’ He seemed surprised.

‘Because…the Magdalenes.’

‘What about them?’

‘I’m an orphan, see? Do they know I’m a Magdalene girl?’

He said with a frown, ‘I can’t remember if I said or not. Why?’

Why
? She wondered for an instant if he was deranged, not seeing things as they actually were. How could she explain to him, who failed to see the truth of things, when he was already pausing at this house, going up the steps to a grand door where a woman was coming out?

She was smiling and wiping her hands on her pinafore and two girls were saying hello and taking her arm and saying to come on in.

‘I’m sorry if I’m late,’ she blurted, because she’d heard it said on TV, a gentleman caller at a house in Berkeley Square, where coaches trundled and a sinister doctor was killing Victorian girls in gas-lit old Whitechapel, a typical piece of London immorality.

‘Oh, think nothing of it,’ a girl said, pulling her up the steps.

‘Sure, how could you get here if you’ve had to learn the way?’ the woman said. ‘I’m this spoilt brat’s mother, and everything he’s tellt you is wrong.’

‘Mam means me,’ Kev confided, not even minding, which shocked Magda.

‘We’ll put you straight,’ one girl said. ‘I’m Marla and I’m fifteen. Isn’t being a teenager rotten luck?’

‘Yes.’ Magda agreed without thinking, then asked herself, is it? She had never thought this.

‘I’m Beth,’ the taller girl told her. By now they were at the top of the steps and into a hallway with flock wallpaper of a strange reddish hue. ‘I design things. I’m eighteen. It’ll be marvellous to have somebody sensible to talk to. Kev’s hopeless, start to finish.’

‘Pay them no heed, Magda,’ Kev said.

‘Hello, Magda,’ Jean’s voice called. ‘Down in a sec.’

Magda’s head was going round. Was this a family? All pretending to be at each other’s throats? She was taken into a room where a man was putting something into a small steam engine thing. His frown disappeared and he smiled, ruefully grimacing at his hands. They were covered in oil. Bits of metal scattered all over on a board.

‘I’m Dad,’ he said. ‘Anything wrong here, Magda, I’m responsible for, but blame Mam. That’s what she’s for. God knows, none of this brood’s good for anything except telling off.’

Magda was gripped by fear. What had they done wrong, and why didn’t they even care when Father was cross? He grinned and said chiding to Mrs MacIlwam, ‘Give the poor girl a cup of tea, Ness, she looks done for.’

‘I’m not!’ Magda said, desperate to set things right.

Silence came. The girls looked at each other.