Bad Girl Magdalene (5 page)

The nuns had special days, which were the anniversaries of when they’d come into the Order, but that was some extra thing, like what Magda finally learnt to scent as meat. This was a grey slab of food, and was for nuns and teachers but not the girls, being exactly as God said it was to be. They were nuns and teachers. Girls were girls, forever. God said so, and all was right with the world.

There was an event when she was growing up that happened to Magda, and it concerned one lad called Damien, who shagged, or tried to shag, Magda against the wall of the commercial paper-packing sweatshop where Magda, being fifteen and supernumerary to the Magdalene commercial laundry, was sent out to work.

There were other events that preceded her departure. She was given a stern lecture three times over by Sister Sophia about Living Out Among the Heathen. These were mostly the people of Dublin who Had Truck With England, not to mention Liverpool, which was somewhere even worse. Dublin City, Sister Sophia said darkly, making Magda solemnly repeat her stern warnings, was utterly given over to drinking and speaking bad words for no other reason than that they were all heaving with sin day and night.

Magda, though, didn’t think the delivery man, her sole experience of the male gender until then, was wholly evil, for he whistled at his dog and called it affectionate names she didn’t understand. Spalpeen was one, which might actually have been its name. Magda wanted to see the dog, but it vanished when Magda was about twelve, and instead a new dog called Tearaway came to be shouted at. It was never called Spalpeen, which was kind of the delivery man, Magda thought.
She imagined Tearaway to be a giant thing because she once heard it snuffling when she waited with blood-spitting Lucy under the rainy archway of the kitchen door with all those lovely scented foody smells. It was there under the arch that she imagined meat most of all.

‘That must be a big bastard,’ Lucy said, shocking Magda to the core.

‘Lucy!’ Magda cried. ‘A word like that!’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s wrong!’

‘Why is it wrong?’ Lucy said, truculent. ‘We’re mostly bastards.’

‘We’re not.’

‘We are.’

‘We’re nothing of the kind!’

‘We’re mostly bastards. It’s why we’re here.’

‘I’m not.’ Magda wept at that.

‘You are,’ Lucy said with comfortable certainty.

By now Lucy was wheezing most of the time, though still slick when stealing bits of bread from other girls at meals. She would even steal a spoonful of gruel if you weren’t quick enough to stop her, but the ensuing struggle, if you dared try to prevent her hands from getting at your dinner, sometimes caused spillages and you might get spotted by the invigilating nun and sent out of the refectory without finishing your food and you then went without.

‘I’ll die soon,’ Lucy often said, having proved that Magda was a bastard like herself. Lucy was the thinnest in the class.

‘No, you’re not, Lucy.’

Magda didn’t know why it was important to stop Lucy talking like this. She knew nothing about dying, though it was
a happy business because the nuns said so, and in Religion and Doctrine they had to learn the Stations of the Cross by heart and the Canon Laws of the Church and other essentials for the Meaning Of Life. When you died you were in Heaven and that was the best you could hope for, especially illegitimates and orphans, who were lucky to get anywhere.

‘Course I am. I’ll get a special place in Heaven. You know the first thing I’ll do?’

‘No?’

‘I’ll take away all seventeen telephones the King has in his grand palace in London.’

Magda was awe-struck. ‘Will you?’

‘Serve him right. The Pope has only one telephone, but the King has seventeen. Who needs seventeen telephones?’ Lucy spat blood, which was all right because it was raining and her spit swam away in the puddles outside the kitchen archway.

Magda had heard this before, because it was often preached as evidence of the sinfulness of the Protestants, who had tons of money they stole from Catholics down the ages, which was why the Pope was so poor and the Protestants could drink all day long and resort to sin. Lucy also knew about numbers.

‘See, those of us who have names count as bastards, though we weren’t born out of wedlock like One-One-Three. That gives us promotion when we die.’

‘Ta, Lucy.’

Without Lucy’s guidance Magda would have known none of these essentials, though that wasn’t quite true. It was more that Lucy explained things for Magda so she could understand what the nuns were saying. Magda cried her heart out when Lucy, true to her prediction, died. She died one night, being found twisted and bloody in her blanket that was wet through
from sweat. Except it wasn’t that simple, because Magda knew what had happened, which was why she now had the duty of murdering Father Doran.

Magda felt really bad about things. She told herself she guessed, but wasn’t sure and nobody ever explained, that Lucy had tried maybe to get out of bed to get some water, having sweated so heavily that even her pillow was damp and the blanket stuck to her with blood. She had pooed herself, her shit sticking black and smelly to the blanket and the brighter blood she had sicked or coughed – maybe both? – staining the blanket and her chin.

It was Seven-Eight, who secretly was Vera and claimed to know her surname – yet another lost element of identity Magda knew would prove another insuperable weight-age problem – who claimed to have found Lucy like that, though it wasn’t true. It was about four in the morning, and the dorm was soon a silent parade of lights, torches, nuns flitting and bringing things and carrying canvas with two long sticks they had difficulty shoving inside the tough hemmed edges. They made Magda, still in the gloaming of the coming dawn, close her eyes tight and pray while Lucy went to her eternal rest, because it was a specially holy moment and one they all had to learn from to their lasting benefit throughout life.

Magda was fearful and betrayed Sister St Paul by pretending to herself that she was unable to cross her thumbs exactly right without opening her eyes just a crack to see as the nuns panted by carrying…carrying what looked like potatoes lumpy and long in the canvas thing. One nun actually told the other off, who held the flashlight to show the way to the door, because the older nun, whose name Magda didn’t know, had forgotten to bring the brace-irons for the stretcher, whatever those were.
It looked like one long tube of canvas, and Magda tried to pray but the words didn’t stick themselves together the way they should in any ordinary prayer.

And Magda cried that morning all through the
De
Profundis,
feeling really sad even though Lucy was joyously wrecking the Protestant King’s seventeen telephones from her special place in Heaven and happily feasting on meat and milk and honey and whatnot on the Right Hand of God. And Magda was smacked three times for keeping on weeping when she should have been dancing with joy at Lucy experiencing ineffable joy up there among all the saints. She chimed in with,

When
my
hair
stiffening
on
my
head
shall
forbode
my
approaching
end…

Lord
have
mercy
on us…

But who would wipe Lucy’s chin, as Magda so often did in the night when Lucy whispered she was frightened her mouth blood would show on the sheets? Would those stealthy nuns, carrying her off in a thing like a sack because the old nun had forgotten the brace-irons, wipe her chin? And did they mop her clean? And wash her bottom and legs after all that black stuff came out of her bottom when she died? And did anybody remember to give Lucy a drink of water before she went to be buried? And where exactly was Lucy now? Magda badly wanted to go to see where Lucy was, so she could pray over the headstone and make things all right. She felt it was shameful, but maybe that’s what happened to everybody when you died.

‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,’ Sister St Paul intoned during the Litany For The Dead, which probably explained all that blood and dark colour. Only One-One-Three, who was Sally, cried like Magda did that day, and got her legs smarting
too with Sister Annuncion’s thick round ruler just like Magda for wasting time in superfluous grieving.

Nothing else really happened in the Magdalenes, except numerous disappointments, but they were like weather and came every day in different guises, until Magda went to work unpaid in the paper packers. The girls who reached the age to live out were sent to families, if they could read and write and were decent, or to a job under matronly supervision, returning at evening to sleep in the Living Out Block under a nun’s stern monitoring.

There she met Damien, who didn’t last long, except he caused ructions within Magda that almost caused her to take her own life, but she got lucky and managed not to, mostly from fear.

Magda was sent to the Living Out Block, in another dormitory. No school this time, just girls working. It was a revelation.

There, Magda heard so many new things that she was lost. One strangeness was newspapers. People mixed willy-nilly in the street with anybody. Churches were islands of familiarity of sight, sound, incense scent. There was no King with his seventeen telephones and hadn’t been for many years, though a Queen over the water doubtless had as many phones, and Liverpool was a place where footballs teams caused serious arguments in Dublin bars.

Damien strove to insert his fingers in her behind the paper packing sheds and caused some blood but the month passed and Magda was relieved she was not pregnant. She was told by two other girls she’d had a narrow escape. A girl called Emily, who had a last name and been raised in a different convent of a different order because her auntie was one of the nuns there,
explained to Magda all about sex. It was astonishing, and made Magda shocked but thankful Jesus and his Mother Mary had escaped that terrible business. She associated sex, whatever it meant to mankind, with a struggling grappling turmoil behind some paper-packing shed where the foreman might come upon you and send you to prison or worse.

‘Just think, Magda,’ Emily warned. ‘You might have had a baby and then what?’

‘What?’ Magda asked, stricken.

‘The baby would go into the Magdalenes like you did, and then you’d be back there for life.’

‘Would I?’

‘Course you would. That’s what they’re for. Machinists most of them, or in laundries for life.’

The baby, though, would do what Magda had had to do – grow up there. Damien was uncaring about everything, and reputedly had several other episodes – though only two reached the dick, Emily explained blithely, because the lads are mortal scared of doing more than fingers in case they got forcibly married or punished by the courts. The girls were well known, and Magda was one of them, being pointed out by some of the other lads who were drivers and loaders of the baled papers the firm sent out at five o’clock of a working day.

Magda couldn’t understand how the system of sex – snogging, mauling, getting as undressed as far as you could manage without letting anybody see what was actually going on, getting the lad to spill into some convenient paper or rag that was afterwards thrown away among the waste – had come to be when it was forbidden everywhere. Vaguely she eventually came to believe that it was possibly not all the fault of the English, who had, until she grew out of the convent, been
wholly responsible for the persistence of sin everywhere. It was a mystery who kept sex going among the Faithful, though she knew she had a deal to do with its persistence, having started out early by having Christ crucified before she was even five.

She was eighteen when she recognised the priest she knew she had to murder. It was almost a relief, because it brought into her mind the understanding that there was a degree of finality to the problem of sinfulness and deaths of lovely people like Lucy.

And, more to the point, of Lucy as she kept falling, because that was the one event that Magda could not get rid of. In fact, she often wondered, after her sixteenth birthday, when she’d felt so full of herself that she’d allowed Damien to do his rutting and work his fingers into her so painfully, how it came to be that she had been so idle in thinking of this horror that she had waited so long before deciding that steps had to be taken.

The memory caused serious distress still, though she never spoke of it to anyone and, as far as she knew, while still in the Magdalenes nobody else ever mentioned it. It was as if it was some secret they had all agreed never to reveal in case the wrong people got hold of it and it might do damage to the entire system of life on earth and the Church in particular.

Magda never could get the hang of thoughts, because they sometimes proved wayward. It was only when she recognised Father Doran and knew instantly what she must do, that she felt a kind of release, like seeing a pathway she knew would, whatever the hardships and obstacles that might lie along the route, eventually resolve her state of mind. This was a self-indulgence, of course, something that no doubt would prove costly when she’d have to explain it in confession. Or, worse,
when finally she was summoned to stand before the Throne of God for the terrible Last Judgement when all would be revealed and she would be made to explain – dear
God
!– every evil thing she had done and all her wrongs would be exposed before the Company of Saints and Mother Mary would stare accusingly down. It was selfish to want peace of mind. Was she not fit to carry the Cross of Christ by staying mute and attentive, in a state of obedient duty, as Sister St Paul had so often made her swear on the Holy Book? Not really, not after Lucy’s death. Killing Father Doran, however, would straighten it all out, she hoped.

She went to work at the Cosmo Care Home, run by a compassionate Order of nuns, and there she developed and worked hard and for wages she actually kept herself. It was to be her life, she told herself. It might get her off part of the penances she was doubtless accumulating, to be paid back for the Final Judgement. She would need a deal of holy indulgences to expiate those sins, for she started a kind of regularity of sin that proved so hard to stop.