Bad Girl Magdalene Read online

  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.

  Poor Lucy, of course, kept falling in Magda’s nightmares, but eventually there might be a way of helping the poor mite, and give her peace. It was a worthy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they might be loosed from their sins, Magda knew, because that’s what the prayer said. That being so, wasn’t it also a worthy and wholesome thought to think of doing something about Lucy to stop her from falling night after night in order to not only loose her from her sins, poor thing, but also give her eternal rest?

  And let Magda sleep. But that was selfish.

  Chapter Six

  Magda set her mind on confession. The big question, in her mind ever since she recognised Father Doran at Mass, was what to confess.

  ‘See,’ she told Grace who worked in the sluice at the St Cosmo and was forever saying her Rosary, ‘it’s what you say to them, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve to tell them everything.’

  ‘Every single thing?’

  In Magda’s mind, besides Lucy, there was the problem of the lad whose rough busy fingers made her bleed that time and set her worrying she was going to get pregnant so she’d be shunted back into the Magdalenes and the baby, her baby as never was, would never even set eyes on her, its very own mother. Glory be, what a way to live, all because of some lad gasping like a landed trout, though Magda had never seen a landed trout. She imagined having all kinds of telltale evidence about her from Damien trying it on, like maybe evidence on her one tubby-shape cut-down skirt that a simple girl called Margaret had given her – that is, given, truly a real gift, because Margaret was going to live in a house where a proper family of real people lived, and they would buy – that is, buy, pay for in a shop – clothes for her. And Magda felt like a queen when she wore it, though it was too long but that was all right because long meant concealment, there being lads who looked and whistled and did things with their fingers in the air and grinned when they went past.

  Grace was definitely holy, and could tell you things about the lives of the saints that would curl your hair. Like St Jerome, who was always condemning harlots about lipstick and putting powder on your face and hanging out of windows looking at street lads and soldiers but who was the cleverest saint in the whole of God’s Church Militant, even counting St Augustine who had been a bad child and a worse lad and who wrote it all down to warn sinners.

  ‘You go to Hellfire if you don’t tell everything,’ Grace warned.

  She was a saint herself, with all the stinky stuff she had to sluice from the old people in the Care Home. One was especially foul – not his fault of course because he too was made in the image of God Almighty, but he was old as the hills and shat his bed. It was a lucky day when old Mr Liam MacIlwam didn’t shit his bed and need the whole bedclothes changing.

  Magda didn’t mind helping in this terrible chore because it was like
when Christ was crucified. The women and them saints who put Christ into His shroud and then put him into that old tomb of His, well, they must have polished Him up because that’s what is the ineffable duty of women. So Magda said a prayer to Christ when she helped Grace to wash Mr MacIlwam’s bedclothes, and it was the one that Sister St Union said was meant to tell you how to keep your soul clean and pure for the time when you and God would become one in Heaven, so you had to stay clean all the time, in thought, word and deed. And it was this:

  Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas, et circumdabo aktare tuum, Domine, ut audiam vocem laudis.

  Which meant, Magda had learnt by heart from listening to Lucy, who read the English out to her when they were allowed to share a Small Roman Missal at Holy Mass:

  ‘With the pure in heart I will wash my hands clean, and take my place among them at thy altar, Lord.’

  This was as far as she could get, because Magda could never get the hang of reading, which was the reason she still had something of a limp on her left leg, from nuns giving her a right whack with that old round ruler they often carried, though some were rounder and longer than the ones other nuns carried.

  She dreamt of the time when, with maybe some friend from outside if ever she found one, she would get learnt her letters, but there they stood on that old page and never jumped into her brain like they did for Lucy. It was unfair, Magda would have thought, if she’d dared to think like that, that Lucy hadn’t had the power to leave a will in writing, so the courts would see it through for her to get Lucy’s great gift of reading. Then Magda would be able to read away like any old priest and any old nun and wouldn’t be slow and simple, because that’s how she learnt she was too stupid to read.

  ‘There is a place in Heaven,’ Sister Annuncion told her more than once, which was really kind.

  ‘For me, Sister?’

  ‘Of course for you, stupid girl. Who else?’

  ‘Because I can’t read like the others.’

  Magda had just guessed she was rising nine, and had marked the day down as her birthday, so naturally she was interested. But this was when Lucy was still alive and hadn’t been carried off by the White Spit, that the nuns called TB. It was strange that, because Lucy’s spit was rusty, then bright red and even full of blood and nothing in it of grolly – as the girls called the phlegm that was thick and pussy yellow when you got a bad cough – and it should be called Red Spit, though what did a girl rising nine know if she couldn’t even read? God rest Lucy, though.

  Anyway, she was cleaning up old Mr Liam MacIlwam, who had shat himself again, when she saw he was wide awake. And looking at her. She was embarrassed, because the old man was always fast asleep when the nun – this particular day it was Sister Claire – did his last wash, which included his lower regions where nobody was allowed to see because there were men’s things that women hadn’t to see.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  Sister Claire was gone down the ward to bring the clean sheet and the plastic under-sheet that was always put under the old folk in case they got shitty so the mattresses didn’t get dirty.

  Old Mr MacIlwam’s eyes were wet. She stared at him with horror, in a panic wondering if this was the start of a stroke because that’s what one old woman had done in the other ward, twisted up on her right side and pissed herself and shat in the bed then her eyes had run water like Mr MacIlwam’s eyes were doing.

  ‘I keep seeing Terry,’ Mr MacIlwam said.

  His voice was creaky like the dormitory door back in the Magdalenes. The only time Magda had heard it before was when he had suddenly tried to sing along and join in a hymn and the nun had told him to sing it silently because it would help the others if he kept quiet.

  It had been Sweet Heart of Jesus Fount of Love and Mercy, the hymn, and Magda had heard Sister Claire tell Mr MacIlwam that and thought what a shame, because God might actually like that old scratchy voice. It might have reminded Jesus of some door in St Joseph’s carpenter’s shop in Galilee or wherever and brought a smile to His Face, though you never did hear of Jesus smiling in the Gospels. At least, Magda had never heard of it. But old Mr MacIlwam shut up as he was bound to do and stayed silent all through until the end of the hymn.

  ‘Terry?’

  Who was Terry? Magda wondered if she should run and bring Sister Claire from the laundry cupboards, where she could spend half an hour, always tutting and then going off to tell some other woman from the other side, where the healthy old folk were, that they ought to keep the cupboards tidier because it made difficulties for everybody else and had they no pride in being decent handmaidens of the Lord?

  ‘Terry,’ old Mr MacIlwam said in his cracked-door croak. ‘You remember Terry.’

  ‘Yes,’ Magda bleated as quietly as she could so as not to get the old man in trouble, for conversation had Seeds of Iniquity when exchanged unlawfully. For this reason, Mary the Mother of Jesus never got a look-in in the Gospels, poor woman, because it might have given way to thoughts other than what was holy, because you never could tell. So said Sister Annuncion. One girl back in the Magdalenes got a good point for asking that question when it was Religion and Doctrine, and Magda wished she could read so she too could discover things like that in the Gospel and get a point.

  A good point didn’t give you anything, but the other girls in the same section of the class always treated you better for getting a good point, in case it gave something they might share if anything came of it.

  ‘I keep seeing him falling.’

  Magda almost swayed and fell in a faint at that. She even sank onto the edge of the bed, which made old Mr Liam MacIlwam look surprised because nobody had ever done that. Magda went dizzy too. Nobody else, surely, had the same terrible dream, of seeing the girl falling like she did. Also, Mr MacIlwam was a man, who could only have been in a boys’ school, so how could he have seen the girl fall?

  She had a sudden vision, Lucy’s cardigan so close Magda could have touched her before she moved, and those words Magda could never remember but which were clear as day…

  ‘Falling,’ she repeated, frightened out of her wits.

  ‘Falling down. In the cold.’

  ‘In the cold.’ Magda could have fallen down herself.

  ‘In the schoolyard.’

  ‘Schoolyard!’ Magda repeated with relief, ‘Schoolyard!’

  ‘You remember it, don’t you, Tom?’

  ‘Yes,’ Magda bleated, quietly now so as not to betray Tom, whoever Tom was and wherever he might be.

  They might have been boys forbidden to watch Terry falling down in the schoolyard, and people said funny things in fright or when daydreaming. She knew that, having several times been caught out in the school or at work in the kitchen or in Holy Mass, even, suddenly saying something out loud that one of the other girls heard and repeated along the kneeling line so they started giggling and that’s how you got found out and your legs made all chapped and red and blistered from round ruler whackings.

  ‘It was the day after mitching.’

  ‘Mitching.’

  Running away from school when you were not allowed was mitching.

  Mostly the girls who mitched were the ones who had families somewhere. They were girls to be envied, because at least they had families to run away to, but the ones that got treated worst and whacked more than most were the girls who had no families at all and who came from orphanages. And they included Magda, and were a Stigma on Holy Mother Church, being evidence of past sinfulness in their families and so deserved their fate.

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Yes?’ Magda said, being Tom for the whilst.

  Old Mr MacIlwam beckoned like men beckoned, with a kind of tilt of the head. Magda had tried this, even in the mirror of the corridor where she had to clean the wooden things with Mansion Polish, which was a terrible sin because you looked in the mirror often enough and Satan himself would stare right back at you and that would be that. In the big rectangular mirror she tried the men’s gesture, tilting her
head so as to say come here, like the old inmates of the Care Home, but it didn’t look right at all. Maybe it was something the men were all taught and maybe even born with. She wondered if Christ Himself had done it to his earthly father St Joseph, the carpenter, saying, ‘Pass that hammer, St Joseph,’ or some such, or maybe instead of saying, ‘Here, St Joseph, come and see how I’ve made this television table’ or whatever it was, simply jerking His head and saying, ‘This here table, will it do?’

  ‘I wanted to go instead with Tom when he mitched off.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Sure to God I did. Anything to be away from them old Christian Brothers.’

  ‘Really?’

  Magda prayed hard for Sister Claire to come back with the plastic undersheet but she could hear her clear as day down the end of the room telling somebody off (‘Yes, Sister,’ and ‘No, Sister,’ and ‘I truly repent, Sister,’) and going on and on when she should be coming back fast to save Magda the terrible responsibility of hearing all this from old Mr Liam MacIlwam.

  ‘You never did, Tom, though, did you?’

  ‘No,’ Magda answered.

  ‘I watched long after you’d gone in. I took the risk, and saw Terry fall. He was blue with cold.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘They stood the three lads in line, all three of them, in the cold all through the playtime.’

  ‘Playtime.’

  ‘You remember when we came out to get our dinner they were all three in a line there, lying in the cold and blue. I was frantic. I cried and those two lads from Canav started laughing and kicked me stupid.’

  ‘Kicked you.’

  ‘I bled like a stuck pig all afternoon.’

  ‘All afternoon.’

  Surely it wasn’t sinful to say the words old Mr MacIlwam was telling her when she didn’t even know what the story was about? Except she was so sad about Terry being left in the cold all morning and through the midday and then into the afternoon, stiff and blue in the cold on the floor out there.