Bad Girl Magdalene (26 page)

‘No!’

‘I heard he’s improving.’

‘I know.’

Mr Liam MacIlwam opened his eyes. He seemed almost amused.

‘Did you ask after him at the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was doing all right, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m gasping for a cuppa.’

‘I’ll get it now.’

‘Have Ted and George already had theirs?’

‘Yes. I gave it them earlier.’

‘You’re a good girl, Magda,’ Mr Liam MacIlwam said comfortably. ‘Don’t let anybody tell you different.’

‘Thank you, Mr MacIlwam.’

‘Anything you want?’

She could have sworn he was being roguish, this wicked old man who pretended he wasn’t somebody everybody who’d been a war soldier knew about. He was somebody famous for doing the oddest things, like crouching among rubble to kill somebody else and pooing his pants. It didn’t seem rational, when there was freedom out there, for a start.

‘Yes, Mr MacIlwam.’

‘What is it?’ He grinned, closing his eyes for comfort. ‘Not that I’ve got much.’

Magda had noticed that people going to tell the truth closed their eyes, like, here goes and I’m hiding from your face when the words hit.

‘I want to read.’

‘Read what?’

‘Lettering. Books. Numbers on a clock.’ She knew she sounded miserable. ‘Anything, really.’

‘Easy as pie. There are folk who do nothing but how to teach people that stuff. It’s free, too. Any evening class’ll do it for you.’

‘I’m old.’

His eyes opened and he laughed, really laughed so he set himself coughing and she had to bang his back. ‘You’re a titch, Magda, that’s what you are. Barely out of the egg, and you’re old? This is old.’

He made a comical face, drawing his neck down like a chicken so she had to laugh, looking round with guilt in case somebody heard her and she got told off.

‘Where do I go, then?’ she asked, right out, bold as brass.

‘Ask anybody, they’ll tell you.’

Thrilled by knowledge – for that’s what this gem was, pure knowledge – she thanked him and went to put her things away and wash her hands and fetch his tea.

The nuns were coming from the chapel as she came back with it. She could hear their footfalls on the polished corridor. She guessed the clock would strike soon, bongs with long intervals between. There always seemed more bongs in the middle of the day than any other time. She wondered if one was half-past anything. Pretty soon she might know that, and even the numbers round the clock faces. Some, though, wouldn’t you just know it, had faces with no numbers at all, just dots the clock’s fingers pointed at.

Prayers would be said for Father Doran at three-thirty, Sister Stephanie told Magda a moment later. Everybody on the staff would attend. Magda said ‘Yes, Sister,’ and so the day
was ordered. All society needed order, and continuity gave the world peace. It could not be upset without grave consequences. Magda knew that was so. God had made society in His own image of Heaven, if only we behaved as He intended. It was a long job, sure enough, but once she was in the learning school she’d help to straighten her bit of disorder, and make the rest of the world all right.

They prayed for Father Doran, the intercom scratching out the prayer for the sick.

‘It’s all a waste of time,’ Mrs O’Hare said under her breath to Magda as they stood in the utilities sluice, saying the words with Sister Stephanie’s voice.

‘What is?’

‘He’s going to get better, isn’t he?’

‘Is he?’

Magda fervently hoped so. She had done her best to make reparation for her terrible sin of poisoning him, but it was still a horror that, oddly, did not replace Lucy’s ghastly fall each night. Magda found that strange. You’d think that a real sin, such as murdering a priest, a man of the cloth, just to help a ghost that was in difficulties, would take precedence over what…over (Magda steeled herself), over what had happened that night. You couldn’t even think about it in the daytime, but in the lantern hours it became so truly awful it stopped you doing anything else except watch.

‘Course. He is a priest, isn’t he?’

‘Do they always get better?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Mulready, sent in for special work on the movable posh furniture because the bishop might come the following week. This was her special job, and she was seen as an interloper from the cabinet maker’s shop down Temple Bar. Mrs Mulready considered herself a cut above the rest of humanity. The resident ones grumbled that Mrs Mulready didn’t do anything the other cleaners couldn’t do. It was putting them down, bringing in this snotty nosed cow. Magda didn’t mind, because the lady must know an enormous range of things about furniture, such as, did furnishings need special polish or didn’t they? That sort of thing you saw on antiques shows on early evening TV.

‘Don’t they?’ Magda was in doubt. God would be bound to take a priest to Heaven, so it was all right.

‘No,’ said Mrs O’Donahue. She was unhappy at having been brought in to do the ordinary clearning work before Mrs Mulready did her stuff, for Mrs Mulready hated having to actually move furniture before she started her special polishing. ‘Look at Father Kilfoyle.’

‘Who?’ Magda asked, not knowing any Father Kilfoyle.

‘He came in here to be an oldie,’ Mrs O’Donahue said, ignoring the looks darted at her by other cleaners.

‘Well, that’s all over,’ Mrs O’Hare said.

‘It’s over for Father Kilfoyle all right.’

‘What happened to Father Kilfoyle?’ Magda asked.

The prayers were continuing over the loudspeaker for Father Doran but the women had stopped saying them, more interested in the argument being worked up in the sluice room.

‘He died of a sudden, in that side ward where they do the flowers.’

‘When?’

‘Some time since.’

‘What of?’

‘Magda,’ Mrs O’Hare said sharply. ‘That will do. We ought to be praying for the poor Father Doran.’

‘He died so sudden the Gardai came,’ Mrs O’Donahue said. She was one of those women who secretly liked a good row, and would pick at something until it unravelled into open conflict.

‘Did they?’ Magda asked, wide of eye and wondering if one was Sergeant Bernard or even Kev.

‘They did. Asked us all what went on.’

Mrs O’Donahue grinned, tossing her head, like she was saying them Gardai should mind their own business.

‘Like they had a right to know every little thing.’

‘They do,’ Magda said. She had never heard people say anything like this before. It was just as strange as visiting Kev’s house for dinner, everything the wrong way round, but this time queer instead of nice.

‘They just think they do,’ Mrs O’Donahue said sharply. ‘They ask too many questions.’

Magda shut up at that because criticism was always aimed at her.

‘It’s best forgot,’ Mrs O’Hare said.

‘As long as it was all above board,’ said Mrs Mulready.

She was inspecting her cloths and special polishes that she brought in a box with a curved wooden handle, but Magda knew she was only pretending. Magda wanted to know what had happened to Father Kilfoyle.

‘I think we should pray for Father Doran,’ Magda offered nervously, for peace.

‘I think we should, too.’

‘Father Kilfoyle came here to be in a place where he got respect,’ Mrs O’Hare told them just as Mrs Cussen came in, singing the hymn
Now
With
The
Fast-Departing
Light,
Maker
Of
All!
that was just starting with Sister Francesca on the piano in the chapel.

‘Respect? Father Kilfoyle is it?’

Mrs Cussen had a son who played football for some team in England far away, so she couldn’t be touched whatever she said or even did. Magda really admired Mrs Cussen because she sometimes swore, which was really terrible and would incur unimaginable penalties when she died, but she said when anybody pointed this out – as Magda once had, trying to save her from Purgatory – ‘Like I should care, with my back?’ And she’d go on about her bad back for hours if you let her, and from there to her varicose veins, to which she was a martyr. Mrs Cussen went to Wales where she stayed with her son’s girlfriend, a Welsh virago who was often drunk and whose photograph got into the papers for it, but you daren’t tell Mrs Cussen it was improper behaviour or she went mad.

‘Well he did,’ Mrs O’Donahue said. ‘Father Kilfoyle told me that himself.’

‘Didn’t get his old respect, then,’ Mrs Cussen said with a wink at Magda. Magda was shocked by that, because it suggested something had gone wrong with poor Father Kilfoyle, subject of an investigation by the Gardai. ‘Only in here.’

‘That’ll do, Millie,’ Mrs O’Hare said in a warning voice.

‘I’ve got to get on.’ Mrs Mulready gathered up her box and left the sluice, taking her list of furniture with her. She was uneasy, Magda knew, and alarmed at the turn the conversation was taking. ‘See you later.’

‘Not waiting for the end of the service?’ Mrs O’Donahue said quietly after her, knowing she spoke too softly to be heard by the departing polisher. Then she laughed to herself, getting her mops in line for a double wash and rinse after the grime was squirted out. Magda had copied her method when coming here first because it worked best. Rinsing alone didn’t do half as well. You could learn a lot from the older women.

‘You can’t blame him,’ Mrs Cussen said. ‘Not really.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever made the mistake.’

‘Nobody would, in their right mind.’

‘Are the prayers for Father Kilfoyle too?’

‘Best if you don’t mention Father Kilfoyle, Magda.’

‘Was he very sad at the finish?’

Mrs O’Donahue barked a laugh. ‘He didn’t know when the finish was, girl. It come far too sudden, and that’s the truth.’

‘I mean the mistake,’ Magda said, not wanting to pry if it was too sad to remember.

‘Look, Magda,’ Mrs Cussen said, as if she’d suddenly lost patience. ‘You being a simple girl, you’ve got to realise not everything is as it seems. You Magdalenes know to keep your mouth shut.’

It began to frighten Magda, like when her first period came and she was petrified because another girl in her class who it happened to had been beaten something terrible for having blood down her legs and on her clothes when she couldn’t do anything about it. It was there, coming up ahead like maybe tomorrow and nobody to ask or tell you what to do, and knowing you’d get blamed for being dirty and the girls all white and frightened too because they remembered their first time or it was to come. Magda had prayed to Mary to tell Jesus
she should like to die, please, before it all happened, but Jesus had spared her for a life after the Magdalenes, out here among the strangest things.

Magda would have said she didn’t understand, if she’d been talking to Kev or maybe the old lady along the landing, or even maybe Mr Liam MacIlwam with his tendency to smile when he was supposed to sleep.

‘About Father Kilfoyle?’

‘That’s your man.’

‘Was it before I come here?’

‘Sure it was, girl. Nothing to do with you.’ She banged a pail across the sluice sink and started the tap running. Mrs O’Hare tutted in annoyance because the prayers for Father Doran were still going on the loudspeaker. They were all supposed to be praying along.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry.’ Mrs O’Donahue gave that muted cackle and slowed the tap down to make the sound quieter. ‘Nobody else was, except them old Gardai.’

‘They went on for days,’ Mrs O’Hare put in.

‘It was a mistake, see? Anybody asks you, Magda, you know nothing except you heard maybe somebody made a mistake.’

Like
I
pretended
to
make
that
same
mistake
? Magda wanted to ask it out loud.

‘Yes, Mrs O’Donahue,’ she said.

‘It was somebody pulled the tube out of his throat, see? Or it fell out. Or somebody forgot to leave the red emergency button within reach.’

‘And did Father Kilfoyle…?’

‘About seven in the morning when the day shift started in.’

‘Was he worse?’

‘He was dead, girl. Sister Stephanie was pale as death herself. Everybody was lined up like in them fillums where they identify the murderer.’

Magda’s hand crept to her throat. She would rather be singing hymns than listening to this.

‘They said somebody might have done it deliberately.’

‘And had they?’
Like
me
?

‘Nobody knows.’

‘It couldn’t have been,’ Mrs Cussen said with a hard look at Mrs O’Donahue, ‘could it? Who on earth would be so cruel, to hurt a poor old man in a care home?’

‘No,’ Magda said fervently. ‘Course not.’

‘Then there you go.’

‘You mustn’t be so frightened,’ Mrs O’Donahue told Magda. ‘You can talk yourself into being so scared you’re too worried to do anything. It’s no way to be.’

‘The word was,’ Mrs Cussen said, ‘that somebody in the St Cosmo had—’

‘Now, then,’ Mrs O’Hare said.

‘The word was,’ Mrs Cussen said in defiance, ‘that somebody had known Father Kilfoyle when he was the priest in Winterhills.’

‘And they didn’t forget things that happened there.’

‘It was for girls.’

‘Sisters of Mercy ran it.’ Mrs Cussen stopped everything and stared into space. ‘It seems unreal, things the old ladies tellt me about that place. Some outside girls went to the same school as the orphans. What must they have thought, being taught along of all them little scarecrows?’

‘They got punished a lot, Magda. That’s what Mrs Cussen means.’

‘And worked to death. It wouldn’t happen except with religion.’

‘Mrs O’Donahue!’

‘It’s true.’

‘That’s enough, now.’

Magda tried to think where Father Kilfoyle must have been, in what alcove and what corridor.

‘Did people reproach him?’ she asked, picturing it in her mind, an old priest in bed, really sick with candles all round the panelled bedroom with relatives in their crinolines and gentlemen in their fine frock coats and lace ruffles at the throat like poetry. And Father Kilfoyle, feeling his hair stiffening on his head, like in the prayer for when you started to die, as it forebode your approaching end, would summon them round his death-bed and beg their forgiveness. And the most beautiful lady, who was some relative (couldn’t be his long-lost daughter who was going to marry Mr Darcy or whoever in this grand house called Mandalay) would say tenderly, looking quite like Margaret Lockwood in
Madonna of the Seven Moons
, though she got up to no good with a raggle-taggle gypsy, ‘Yes, Father Kilfoyle, I forgive you. Please do not suffer.’ And the priest would know everything was all right now and peacefully die with images of his mother and father, such decent and hard-working folk, floating about and he would smile up at them and his soul would wing its way to Heaven.

‘They didn’t need to, Magda.’

‘He was told about it the day before.’

‘Told about what?’

‘That more than one person in here – I don’t mean nuns, of course – remembered him only too well.’

But forgiveness, Magda almost cried out, and the floating images, and the ladies and gentlemen being really smiling and forgiving all round his sick bed, what about them? She said nothing.

‘No good grieving, girl. It can linger.’

‘In some,’ Mrs O’Hare said, ‘not all.’

‘Them as were there, it can.’

‘So we’ve heard tell,’ Mrs O’Hare said with determination, ‘but don’t go on about it.’

‘Some of the men knew Father Kilfoyle from before, too.’

‘It makes you wonder what goes on that nobody hears about.’

‘I still don’t agree, whoever it was did it. I mean, they could have reported him.’

‘Like that would have done any good. They’d have sent him somewheres else. They always have, always will.’

The prayers ended then with the Glory be to the Father, and that was the end of the conversation. Magda wanted to know more about Father Kilfoyle, the visits of the Gardai, and knew she would never ask. What she had heard distressed her, though she didn’t understand. Something bad had happened in the past, maybe someone on the staff here, or maybe the oldies. Shocking, that Father Kilfoyle arrived to become one of these same oldies, thinking he was entitled to respect only to get died.

It was touching, the notion of a safe harbour at the end of a long and serene life serving the Lord. Magda filled up. Mrs Cussen misunderstood and put her arm round Magda.

‘Look, girl. Memories are long in Eire. Things happened when people were small, and you don’t tend to forget. Ask anybody. Don’t get upset.’

‘I’m not, Mrs Cussen.’

‘That’s good, Magda. If somebody here pulled that wicked old bastard’s tubes out so he choked to death, well, serve him right for what he’d done to them children. That’s what I say. If the law doesn’t do what it should, then people will.’

‘People?’ Magda asked, thinking, what is Mrs Cussen saying?

‘Children grow up, and if they take it into their heads to take revenge, then there’s no power on earth’ll stop them if they’ve a mind. And who’s to stop them anyway? It’s maybe the only right thing. That’s the way to see it, Magda.’

‘The only right thing?’

‘There, now. Talk over. Them old prayers have shut up, thanks be to God. Time we got on ourselves, or we’ll be for it from them old black bats.’