Bad Girl Magdalene Read online

  This time, he continued spending into her somewhat longer than usual, which Magda didn’t mind because what your man did was of a pattern. He held her in a grip so punishing she could not get her breath going until he eased, and she was glad to inhale and work out how she felt. She knew Bernard was not being different, just vehement, so that was all right, staying within the tramlines of his carry-on. It did not mean new behaviour, no. That would worry her. Magda naturally wanted the creature to stay all of a sort, fixed in the things he did and said, however strange, and what on earth could be stranger than this that he kept doing every single time?

  Magda often wondered how a man learnt this. She thought, I mean, it can’t simply be that they tell each other what to do, can it? For that would get about, folk would hear and they’d get a right royal thrashing from the priests and the Gardai too, and questions would be asked in the Dail and the Taoiseach would go mental over the terrible state of morals in Eire, and it might even get into the holy papers.

  No, Bernard stayed the same. It was just that Magda watched out for switches in his mood, for moods can be anything. If it meant he moved out of her ken, away from her understanding, then the mood was bad and dangerous – never mind how or why, it was definitely to be abhorred. If he stayed in his tramlines, then he was all right and she was safe in her mind. It was the way God made each and every one of us, even the sparrows. The Bible said that, so there you go.

  This time, though, she felt his behaviour was a little changed. It wasn’t just the long spillage he’d just come to an end of, no. It had something to do with the thinking in his brain, and that meant he might say it out or keep it to himself. In either case, it was nothing she’d done bad or wrong, just that he wasn’t quite what she could now predict as safe and tramlined.

  Fine, he had a wife, and had two children fathered of his very own, which was all right because marriage was immutable. People had to stay married for life, except where the English had their foot in the door to start everybody divorcing like mad, being Protestants and therefore evil by nature like Communists. No, nothing to do with her, just something in himself. Magda couldn’t help wondering if it was to do with those occasional silent, no-crying tears he kept to himself that she was never to notice at all. That might cause Bernard’s behaviour to change, which would never do because that would be her fault. He wouldn’t leave, no, she was certain of that.

  She never helped him to dress up in his fine gear afterwards. She often wondered about that because when he’d had his meal she usually, unless he was in a desperate hurry, had time to help him take off his jacket. But afterwards? No. Was it that he felt he had to be careful and show no sign so he’d not leave traces of Magda others might see? Something simple like that. He was going on duty and had to know where everything was – pen, watch, notebook, a set of forms and a small telephone thing he didn’t want her ever to touch at all.

  ‘You’re a fine man, bonnie,’ she told him. A man was an admirable thing despite his ferocities, which was probably why God made Himself male and left the other things to females or nuns.

  He was checking himself in the mirror. ‘I wish to God I was, Magda.’

  ‘Oh, y’are, Bernard, a grand sight.’

  ‘I wish all men were, Magda.’

  And he sat down, which was a rare thing for Bernard to do after he’d done it and dressed, because usually he was out of the door with her listening on the landing for Mrs Shaughnessy, who had ears like a bat and a voice like a Liverpool ship’s foghorn.

  ‘Oh, all men are made—’

  ‘Stop that.’

  He said it in his Garda voice, which meant she was to say no more until this was over and done with. She knew it was that silent trouble come back again, best cleared up before he left.

  ‘Sorry, bonnie.’

  He stayed with his fingers linked, his arms on the rests of the wooden chair, his knees apart and staring into the fire, which she always made when she knew he was going to call. It was as important as feeding him, this fire, and warmth in her place while he did the thing. She had only seen him adopt that posture once before, when he had found somebody dead in a garret, though it was natural causes only and caused no real fuss at the Gardai station, where he had to fill in a stack of forms causing him trouble for days.

  He said, eyes into the firelight, ‘I passed a man today.’

  ‘Ah.’ Here it was, the threatened silence coming out.

  ‘I knew him.’

  ‘Did you now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She knew to stay quiet, not busy herself about the place nor even take his hand like felt natural. He didn’t offer more. Into her mind came the terrible sight of her friend Lucy. Falling into a dark stairwell was a fearsome thing only God could explain, if He could bother with Magda wanting to understand so terrible a death.

  ‘I knew his name, once.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Magda felt resentment against educated folk. They could read, have whole sentences they might say at times like this so the man would be pleased. If she had the letters and the writing clear in her mind, her words would soothe the man and he would be made well, which only went to show how fine it was for girls who were made educated and how hard it was for those who weren’t. Times like this she almost hated educated girls, trying to be better than God made them and mimicking the English.

  ‘He was but a lad when I caught him.’

  ‘You caught him,’ she said, soothing away, the best voice she could manage.

  After a time he said, ‘He was on the town hall windows. Broke one.’

  ‘Broke it, y’say.’

  ‘Broke it. We took him in, me and Gallagher. You don’t know Gallagher. He was from Ballybrack. Had two sisters and a brother who played in the hurling.’

  ‘Ah, the hurling team.’

  ‘Because he broke the window, they sent him to the Maltebior.’

  ‘Ah, there.’ She felt blank.

  ‘The fishing school. It’s in Sors.’

  ‘Sors.’ She’d heard tales of a terrible place by that name, a place of suffering children.

  ‘He was a lad of seven, maybe eight, and he’d broken a window.’

  Magda had never heard of it, thanks be to God from the way Bernard was staring, with firelight setting his gaze glinting like he was seeing some hellhound.

  ‘He can’t be more than twenty-one now, mebbe twenty-two. He’s a broken man, Magda. He looks like to die.’

  ‘God help the poor soul.’

  ‘He walked stooped, hands in his pockets, like wanting to beg but hadn’t a hope of getting a copper from any passing soul.’

  ‘What a shame.’ Magda could keep this up all day long, and night too if she had to, lacking anything else for the man.

  ‘He didn’t recognise me, thank God.’

  ‘Ah, he didn’t.’

  ‘He didn’t look, either. He just saw my uniform.’

  ‘Ah, your uniform.’

  ‘He shrank away, Magda. Crossed to the other side of the street. He looked hardly able to walk.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘He’d drink taken. His trousers were stained, like he slept in his clothes. And looked a hundred years old.’

  ‘God help the man.’

  ‘Sure, Magda.’ Bernard stood and straightened. ‘God help the man, for sure as death we didn’t. I didn’t. The magistrates didn’t. The Church didn’t. And they didn’t at Maltebior.’

  Magda knew she should have asked (if he was different somehow or, maybe to the point, she was) why he didn’t call after the disturbing man in that street who seemed to have been made such a wreck. She might have said, ‘Oh, bonnie, why for goodness’ sake did you not think to perhaps invite him round to your house for afternoon tea, or convey him to your club at St Stephens Green, perchance?’ like they did in the grand TV stories she was addicted to and which she couldn’t ever get enough of during the nights she stayed awake with her tiny TV set watching black-and-white reruns to stay awake so
she needn’t dream of Lucy forever falling. But Bernard would have thought she had taken leave of her senses, which she would have, to talk to him like that. And anyhow in those stories the gentlemen were always called Sir Willoughby Maltravers or something, and she would be Mistress Euterpe Devonish-Fanshaw with servants and carriages and all and visiting squires who left cards on silver trays carried by servants.

  No, that kind of talk was not for her, nor for Bernard. Not because, she instinctively understood, we are Irish in Dublin, but because things come from the past in each of their lives. Like, Magda knew, her friend Lucy, and you didn’t have the right to say things out loud.

  This explained the fault of Eire itself, the green sod where all that was natural and holy lay. Eire’s great pretence was that dark events were in the past. If there was trouble with the Taoiseach’s rivals in the Dail, then it was the fault of some famine long gone. Everybody knew that. The greater the traffic hazards, it was the fault of the English who’d left streets deliberately tangled so they always got in a stew round Trinity College and caused horrific road accidents. If an Irish horse lost in the Grand National, why, some royal duke in England had nobbled the poor beast so it fell at the last fence before the run-in, despite fervent prayers for its success at the Cathedral in Liverpool. Past events lurked. All were evil. Blame elsewhere had to be found, logic as ever was, in politics everybody could talk of safe and sound and know they would get agreed with.

  She herself looked straight into the fire. Sometimes, if he wasn’t sorrowing, she would take out a breast and put it to his mouth and he would chomp on it quite like a barn, poor lamb, and he would say nothing until afterwards when he’d give her a curt thanks and get up and check his appearance once more. Not vanity, understand, just checking.

  He left soon after that, and Magda knew the trouble, whatever had caused it, was over and Bernard would be right as rain. She felt so relieved. People had tramlines to guide their behaviour, and that was that. Stay in them old tram rails, you went in the right direction and life stayed fine. She decided she might say a prayer for Bernard maybe about teatime, before she had to get ready to go to work at the St Cosmo Care Home. There was still time for a bath, though she hated washing man-scent off her. Its possession was a secret she carried about for the rest of the day, and she knew she wore that knowing smile that had the merit of irritating her friend Oonagh from Armagh, who was a little older than Magda but not half the experience, having been fostered out to an aunt when she was ten and raised like a good Christian. That had undoubted merit, but didn’t get the chance to irritate and madden friends the way a more varied life could.

  Chapter Three

  The old folks home was called the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly. Magda had worked there, not since she’d left the Magdalenes, but as a result of meeting Faith. It was when Faith O’Banyon came looking for a job after failing the nursing course at the hospital. Magda had been cleaning the ladies’ toilets and Faith had come in. It changed Magda’s life.

  Faith was irreverent. She’d been doing her hair after complaining about the state of the loos. It was one of the many extra jobs Magda did at the paper-packing firm where she was sent as an out-worker among the older girls at the Magdalenes, who’d all finished their schooling and had to go out to work from there.

  ‘Who’s supposed to do these loos out?’ Faith demanded on that fateful day that changed Magda’s whole life. The paper factory was noisy. Faith had to shout.

  ‘Me,’ Magda remembered bleating in a panic.

  ‘There’s no loo paper.’

  ‘I’ll get some!’ Magda rushed to get the cupboard door open.

  She straightened to find Faith standing watching her, cool as a cucumber.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Nothing! Please don’t tell!’

  But there was loo paper still in the loo Faith had just used, only not very much left on the roll.

  ‘Look at the state of you, girl!’

  Faith let Magda scurry past. Once inside the loo Magda didn’t know what to do with the new roll, because there was still a bit on the old roll and there was never a place to put the new one.

  ‘Only we’re not allowed.’ Magda was close to tears. This was bound to get back to the nuns, and Sister Philomena would have her walloped sure as God made everything.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘They’ll get angry. Please don’t complain.’

  ‘All right,’ Faith said, though Magda didn’t know she was Faith back then, her being a stranger and just calling in.

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’

  Faith stayed still, observing Magda’s dilemma over the toilet paper, and said, cool, ‘Are you that scared?’

  ‘No!’ Magda’s voice rose almost to a shriek. She glanced guiltily at the door and said in a whisper, ‘No, no. I’m sorry for doing wrong.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Magda. Magdalene really.’

  ‘Last name?’

  ‘I have no last name. They say I’m Finnan, because I was taken in from somewhere by there.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Not really. I was Six-One at school in the Magdalenes.’

  ‘Six-One, Magda Finnan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You work here?’

  ‘It’s where I…’ Magda’s problem was words. That was why she longed to read but couldn’t. She didn’t want to tell this new worker from outside anything at all, from shame. All the time she was trying out new words, every moment of her time. But Faith’s question needed answering. Where I belong? Where I live? Where I stay? Where I am? ‘Here,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Is it to tell on me?’

  And Faith smiled. It was so lovely. ‘No, Magda. Not to tell. I never tell. Just to remember your name, OK?’

  ‘What for?’

  Magda stared at this apparition, knowing she would be trying to recall every stitch the girl wore, every turn of the head, every bit of her features and how she walked and the things she said, the minute she’d gone. Magda was always like this, for whoever she saw might even be some relative, and she had had none right from the minute she was born and taken to the Magdalenes.

  ‘Nothing at all, Magda Finnan. Just friendly.’

  And Faith left. Magda was so baffled by the interlude that she actually went back into the loo Faith had used and stared at the place as if it had changed somehow, or thinking it might be different from all the other cubicles in the place. It was as clean as Magda could make it. She was always good at cleaning, always had been, had to be because of the domestic supervisor, Sister Philomena, who got reports back from the factory.

  That was how Magda met Faith O’Banyon. And three weeks later a letter came from Sister Stephanie, supervisor of the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly, and on the recommendation of ex-Nurse Faith O’Banyon, who suddenly was transformed from stranger into long-lost cousin, Magda Finnan was changed from part-time paper-packer in paid employment to paid employee of the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly. It was to be on probationary trial. Magda had to get Faith to read it out to her, and tell her the address and how to get there.

  The switch was an ordeal because Magda had no idea what was happening. At first she thought it was a punishment. She couldn’t get the hang of the special instructions given her by Sister Superior when she went on trial. It was only when Faith explained she was to stay free and lodge in a nearby block of bed-sits, where she would have her own special place all to herself, that she stopped thinking of the change as a dream.

  Two months later, when the probationary period had expired, Magda realised for the first time she was free.

  Life changed for ever. She got registered as a legitimate employee and was paid, working a month in hand as Faith called it.

  Faith was irreverent, and tried to get Magda to be the same. They kept up the falsehood of being cousins, but that business went by the boar
d after a while and Faith told Magda to forget it, because it had only been a trick to spring Magda. Faith was full of slang words, ‘spring’ being one, meaning to cheat people and get away if you didn’t like them. Faith left soon after, never to be seen again. ‘Going to England,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough of getting told off.’ She said ta-ta, and went.

  When she realised, Magda wept for three nights running, for she’d never had a relative all to herself before, and now she was back to being on her own without another living soul.

  It was there, after a while, that she met Bernard.

  It was terrible busy when Magda got on duty.

  She had difficulty with her housemaid’s cap. So much frill and every edge to be ironed, like the hems in petticoats that needed ironing really flat though never to be seen by mortal eye, of course, because if it wasn’t ironed everything sagged and didn’t lie true. Sister Stephanie – of whom Magda was mortal scared, she having once supervised the Magdalene Sisters of the Third Order Regular, where Magda had been worked and taught over in Sandyhills – always insisted on everybody being properly turned out, which only went to show rumours spoke true.

  Other girls tried continually to get away with it and skimped on the ironing, only to be found out and given a hard time by Sister Stephanie. And one girl in particular, a Mrs MacLehose, who had five children, said in quiet asides to Magda, ‘and no more of them children, thank God, knowing what I know now,’ which was most terrible indeed and might surely send her down the chute to Hell when she died, God rest the poor screaming soul heading for eternal damnation. Worse, when discovered talking like this and Sister Stephanie standing there like the wrath of God with her hands tucked inside the folds of her sleeves about to deliver rebukes that would freeze the heart of Cromwell himself, Mrs MacLehose would sniff and say, ‘Sister, I’m a busy woman and I’ve work to get on with, so if you’ve quite finished I can earn me merit with the Good Lord and mebbe store up some indulgences with Him, seeing I do my very best and me with my arthritis and all that comes from slaving for my children.’ And, while the whole world froze in horror at such sledging right back into the very face of the staff supervisor nun, Mrs MacLehose would say, casual as you like, to somebody standing like Lot’s Wife in the Bible (who turned into a block of salt when she looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah being crushed under fire raining down from Heaven), ‘Would you pass that next pile, Magda, so I can get on instead of standing here all day dreaming.’ And should Magda or whoever it was not move fast enough, she would give out a rebuke of her own, even in such a terrible plight: ‘Well, girl? Will you help instead of standing there with your two arms the one length?’ And that would set everybody scurrying and Sister Stephanie would march away with her lips set in that thin line that meant somebody soon was going to catch it. It was always somebody else, never Mrs Jenny MacLehose.