Bad Girl Magdalene Read online

  ‘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.

  She racked her brains before the terrible thought struck. Had the lad learnt in some terrible secret stealthy manner that she had been stealing the tablets? She now had almost a handful, and with luck might get more tomorrow.

  No. For hadn’t he asked if she nursed Mr Liam MacIlwam, and told her his name was MacIlwam too? Now, she never stole tablets from Mr MacIlwam – or had she? She became confused, and stopped herself thinking. The little radio was on, some comedy talking they were sending out from London or maybe Liverpool, far funnier than those from Dublin because they were more careless and had more laughing. She couldn’t say she understood much of what they were on about, and in any case some of them were foreign-sounding, like they came from India or maybe Africa or the West Indies. She knew there were plenty of them over there in wicked old England, though so few here they stood out plain as day.

  She never slept much, to save Lucy from falling. Only when she found herself dozing and her head nodding enough to roll off and away did she see Lucy start to fall, her cardigan with the bad mending receding before her into the giant space that was the stairwell. Magda’s eyes would, even in her sleeping, start to fill and it would wake her, and in her dream she be running again back to the cold dormitory and staying huddled there under her one blanket, praying and praying to God for forgiveness and saying, please, God, please Baby Jesus and Mary Mother of God, please don’t hurt Lucy any more from now on, and forgive me for what I did.

  She never really slept at all, just went about in a daze of exhaustion from morning to night and beyond into the next day. Mrs Shaughnessy, who took rent from her every Friday, had given her a small television set that plugged in. It showed old fillums the livelong night through, and was a godsend. Old period pictures were Magda’s favourites, ladies in crinolines with fans, gentlemen on horses, and everybody so lovely and safe and polite. Magda liked those most because they kept her awake longest, and saved Lucy that fall to her death all over again.

  Magda knew all about crying. The Garda man MacIlwam had been weeping all right. Magda knew all about that. She had begun it properly, true decent weeping for things done and never to be recalled and made right, over Lucy. Magda knew herself guilty for it. Until that flash of vision in Holy Mass when Father Doran had turned from the altar to give the blessing to the congregation, and she had finally known it was him. Father Doran, it was. And he started coming to the St Cosmo. The chance of rescuing Lucy herself from Hellfire had finally come, exactly as she had prayed for every night.

  Yes, Magda knew all about weeping. What had the lad’s name been? Kevin MacIlwam. She’d better call him ‘Sergeant’, please him so he’d not blame her if he’d found out something terrible about her. Dear God, she thought, he surely couldn’t have found out about Lucy, could he? And was coming to arrest her like they did on the pictures, take her away in the Gardai car with its squares like a chessboard, to be hanged in some prison?

  No. She would simply ask him when they met.

  Chapter Eleven

  The old man was talking.

  The lights were out, except for the one at the end of the ward that cost, the nuns said, only two pennies an hour, but even that had to be paid for or the light would go out. That’s why it was red, which cost less, instead of the usual yellow. This was after Mrs McCaddon complained there should be a brighter light so she could see if she tried to get up in the night.

  ‘My brother was Bonham, that’s what I always called him,’ the man said.

  The other man across the alcove – two in each if you were stuck with being so old you couldn’t move or if you had tubes in – said, ‘You knew him, then?’

  ‘Sure I knew him.’

  ‘Bonham’s what we used to call the new-born piglets, in St Joseph’s.’

  ‘Which St Joseph’s?’

  ‘Nigl. Industrial School, St Joseph’s. I was Nine-Four. That was my name. I ate the swill. Some of it was grand. I was on watch during the night to see if any of the bonhams got borned during the night.’

  ‘Your brother still alive, is he?’

  ‘No, God rest him.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  The first old man let out an almighty fart and relaxed with a sigh. ‘Pardon me, George.’

  ‘Better out than your eye, Ted.’

  ‘Did you all go by numbers?’

  ‘Sure we did.’

  ‘So did we.’ Another fart, then, ‘We’ve got to change the beer, this old place.’

  The old men cackled. One said, ‘That old feller-me-lad, Mr Gorragher. Has a tin plate in his head from getting shot. Know he was the best marksman with that old three-oh-three Lee Enfield as ever trod land?’

  ‘Him? Sings a lot in the night? That one?’

  ‘The same. They said he did it listening to the wind. You can get him talking about it, if you ever take a walk down that lane.’

  They cackled and laughed, because both were now bedridden, no chance of taking a walk anywhere.

  ‘Wasn’t he a gunner? Royal Artillery or something, in the war?’

  ‘Got hisself transferred. Don’t know why. He never says anything about it.’

  ‘Never heard of a marksman getting hissel’ transferred to the Gunners before.’

  ‘Must have been good if he was champion marksman. I once saw one from the Buffs put a hole in a bell tower somewhere in the Ardennes. There was a sniper in the bell tower of this church, see. Our marksman takes a shot after kneeling for six hours looking with some mirror thing he’d made, still as a heron hunting. All of one whole day, then he takes a shot and his sergeant sez, ‘Missed, you pillock,’ but the marksman just says nothing and picks up the spent casing to put in his BD pocket.’

  ‘Picked up a spent bullet casing? What for? I never heerd of anybody doing that.’

  ‘Well he did. Every time, every shot. Carried them about until the night came, then
buried them like he was a poacher leaving no trace.’

  ‘What about the bell tower?’

  ‘Come morning, we wakes up and he’s still there in the rubble, wide awake and still. The lads all got muttering and complaining because he’d pissed himself just staying there, same position. Come ten o’clock of that morning he takes one shot. And gets the sniper. The sergeant sez, ‘Jesus, Paddy, you shot him through the hole you made yesterday!’ Nobody in the whole unit had ever seen anything like that. He just took up the casing, put it in his pocket, and went to have a crap and a piss.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Ever since then, the lads called him Holer. Know why? ’Cos he shot through the hole he’d already made, see? He didn’t mind. The English lads said he was the best in the world, and they had some shooters among them, a couple or three from Lincolnshire who’d been poachers, great shooters, they. Our company corporal wanted to put Holer in for some competition when we went on leave, but Holer wouldn’t have it. Know why?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘He tellt his missus and them at home he was a truck driver. Would you imagine that?’

  ‘Why’d he say that?’

  ‘I reckon marksmen isn’t natural. Something in them, to wait that long to do it, pretend he drove a truck all through the fucking war. Know what else?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘He couldn’t drive, either. I often wonder how he got on after the war, coming home like having driven a three-tonner all the war then not being able to drive a pram, let alone a Dublin bus.’

  ‘Where was he from?’

  ‘He was schooled at Ranter.’

  ‘Jesus. Ranter, you say?’

  ‘I don’t remember him, but there were so many of us, d’you see?’

  Somebody in an alcove further down complained about their talk. They simply responded by staying mute a while then resuming. When they did this, their voices started low then grew as the sentences came and their old ideas took shape again until finally they were talking as if it was broad daylight.