Bad Girl Magdalene Page 8

  ‘I have sometimes made mistakes, Father.’

  ‘What kind of mistakes?’

  ‘Serious ones, Father.’

  No good beating about the bush, not now seeing she’d got so far with her story. It was now that she should come clean, like they had to on the late-night telly when she earned extra money by sitting up with some old person who was serious poorly and the nuns had to be elsewhere, praying for all the poor children so that the world would be a better place. When that happened, Magda sat in with the sick old person and switched the telly on, and if it was RTE, she’d maybe listen and watch with the sound turned almost down to nothing at all, and watch the fillums from America or even England, though she always said a Hail Mary in case, especially when it was from England because they were not Catholic like Americans were. There was a lot of gangsterism about the American pictures, often serious bad. In them pictures the baddies always had to come clean, as they said when they were strapped in a chair and the detectives shouted in their faces. A lot of detectives smoked, she noticed in American pictures, though only in old English pictures, a rerun of one made a long time ago in black-and-white.

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘To do with tablets, Father.’

  There. It was out. It was what he might make of it now. There was no going back, because a priest had to ask the nature of the sin, and what it meant as far as God was concerned, or there was no arrangement between God Almighty and the penitent. That was the Church’s teaching.

  It was the Canon Laws of Holy Mother Church, and was made by the Holy Father in Rome so as to keep the Catholic religion, the One True Faith, unsullied by the depredations of the sinful Protestant corruption that was, in Sister Annuncion’s words, ‘now extending its pernicious tentacles everywhere to erode our Faith.’ Magda had learnt this by heart, nearly got a good point by asking Sister to repeat it so she had it off by heart, saying it over and over. She might not be able to read, could not sign her own name, but she had a good memory for the word spoken.

  ‘What kind of tablets?’

  This was it, the finality of her presence kneeling before the priest who was, for the moment, God, there through the grill. Apart from the lad in the paper-packing warehouse place, Magda had never been so close to a man except in confession and during Holy Communion when the priest put the Host in her mouth, and Bernard.

  ‘Please Father, some little white tablets. I don’t know.’

  That was true. She felt relieved, striking a blow for truth and honesty against all those evil religions, from Jews to Mohammedans, from other Christians to Quakers, none of who ought to be allowed but were out there against the Catholics.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Please Father, no. I tried to read the bottle but couldn’t.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Did you tell the sisters in charge?’

  Here was a real problem. To say no would mean she had concealed the missing tablets. Magda tried hard to remember if she had said there was more than one missing or only one. Odd that she would have remembered instantly if it had been something she’d heard somebody else say, but trying to recall what she herself said was difficult.

  ‘Please Father, no.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Please Father, I said to the lady who had the tablets. She has to take one every so often. She knows when.’

  ‘You told her?’

  Well, Magda thought, I might as well have told her, because after all when she asked me I didn’t deny it, like when the cock crowed and St Peter tried so hard to say he was a friend of Jesus, but couldn’t bring himself to say it out because they’d have been cross with him as well.

  She felt for the moment like Peter, who would surely understand, and said, ‘She asked me if she was missing a tablet.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Pause, with anguish in her heart and soul, which was having a terrible time of it, and Magda was so close to admitting to God and revealing all, and betraying Heaven in its eternal strife against evil forces.

  ‘Did you admit that you had been careless?’

  ‘Yes!’ Magda felt so happy. All was resolved for her, in that one phrase.

  God had spoken out in favour of what she was about to do. She felt close to tears. Her voice choked when she said, ‘Yes, Father. I let her know that I had lost the tablet.’

  There in one sentence was all that St Peter had done and the cock had crowed and who was the worse off? Nobody, because the poor saint by the campfire on Good Friday Eve couldn’t do anything to help Jesus anyway, could he?

  ‘Tablet’ was a bit of a sin, though, singular instead of plural, because Magda had her store of tablets, including the pink ones and one dusky brown thing that could have been anything or the same, she didn’t know. There was no way of telling, short of reading all the bottles in the drugs cupboard to which the nun in charge alone held the keys.

  And there was another sin in there, only words God would understand. ‘Admit’ was fine, though she had not told the old lady outright that she had stolen the tablets. She just cleared her throat and went on with what she was doing, followed by Mrs Borru’s bright understanding old eyes. That was an admission, really, wasn’t it?

  ‘Please Father, yes, I did.’

  ‘Good.’ The priest leant forward, closer to the grille. ‘You do understand that it is vitally important to Our Lord that you confess all the sins you have committed in the most honest way you can?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘And that Our Lord is crucified over and over every single time you deny him, do you not?’

  ‘Please Father, yes.’

  ‘Then make a sincere act of contrition, and say a penance of three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers.’

  She said her prayer and left with relief. In a way, she mourned more than anything the inability to read, because she could have read through the Small Roman Missal, and come to some arrangement about the coming murder.

  But Lucy had to be stopped from falling, because it was so hard on her to keep suffering so, with her worn woollen cardigan with the cotton stitches over the three holes in the right shoulder where she had tried to darn it in Free Time when they were to pray after doing the nuns’ knickers. Tuesday duty, they had to sit in a circle with the other girls and do ‘subsidiary tasks to the benefit of the community’, as they were called. That was the day, inevitably, Magda’s hand often bled from the long needles. She got whacked with the round ruler for not handling the needles properly. She hated Tuesdays. One day, she thought, she would have her own knickers bought from a shop, maybe, but that would be cruel because all it meant was that some little mites like herself would be out there sewing away and making their little hands bleed just for grand pennies for others. That would be so hard. There was just no way round these things.

  For the penance and the confession she had just made, though, Magda felt really proud. She had worked something out all by herself. It was perfect so far as it went because she hadn’t yet murdered the priest. It would come up soon. She thought it would be a sign from God, if her tablets proved quite sufficient to the job in hand, and killed him there and then when he came to have his tea with Sister Stephanie in the Care Home. That would confirm that the Almighty had approved, and that she was doing right. What more could she do except tell the priest that she was going to kill Father Doran, who had been at the Magdalenes the night Lucy started her falling?

  That awful sad day, Lucy had wept so bitterly, and then during the night. And, in her stitched and badly rucked cardigan, she had then fallen for the very first time in the dark stairwell and had been falling ever since. It might possibly end soon, if Magda played her cards right and poisoned the priest so he died on the spot at the nuns’ tea party, which they held in their grand conservatory.

  ‘Conservatory’ always sounded to Magda like a kind of jam, but who knew? Maybe it was where they used to make jam in the olden days when
the English were here instead of in Liverpool playing their football.

  When she got to work, she reported as usual to the nun in charge, who today was Sister St Simeon, an elderly nun who had grown fatter, Grace said, from too much praying over the past year. She spent much of her time at a desk instead of doing what Sister St Jude did – rushing about checking whether the kitchen staff were weighing out the food proper and decent for the cooking of the day. Sister St Jude was much to be preferred over the stout wheezing older nun because she got things done and it was more in tune with what Grace and Magda knew was the right way for nuns to behave. Sometimes, you could hear Sister St Jude shouting in anger from the other end of the building, and that wasn’t always pleasant, but you knew things were as they should be when she was in charge. This pair tended to swap duties, one taking the morning rota and the other the afternoon, with both sharing the evening when things were in a rush. Some sets of relatives sometimes visited their old folk regular.

  This particular morning, though, Magda was worried, because when she got to the Care Home she saw that a man was astride a motorbike in the gateway of the drive, where there had been an old statue, doubtless those old English with their Protestant madnesses. He looked for all the world like he was about to zoom off on his filthy machine the way they sometimes did so you took your life in your hands crossing the Kilfoyne Road, where the traffic lights kept you guessing anyway.

  When she got nearer she could see the man was not moving, just sitting in the nook the hedgerows made with the rose garden, where old Bert who, folk said though Magda was always too scared to ask, had been a soldier and fought in wars and who was the only paid gardener the Care Home could afford, dug and weeded and wheeled things away in his wheelbarrow to set fires near the yard with the barking dog.

  There was nobody about when she began to walk, but now there was this man. She could see he was young and thought she recognised him. He sometimes visited old Mr Liam MacIlwam, the old man who kept shitting himself so he needed extra sheets.

  Magda was always disturbed by men, almost as much as by the very thought of them, because when you got down to the reason there were men and women made by God in His image, it was truly strange. There was your man, with his thing that, she knew from her meagre experience, was a rubbery dangling thing from his belly down, made to do nothing else but to stick inside a woman so they could procreate and increase the human race according to The Scriptures. That was all right. But the feeling you got from contemplating this was profound. Magda had always been good hearing words and registering them. She knew at least as many words as anybody else she knew of, just from listening, though God alone knew how them words spilt their little inks onto the pages in the right shapes. Anybody except herself could read them out and all get them sounding the same. ‘Profound’ was a word made for serious things, like contemplating men, and their sticking business of their rubbery thing into some woman. It was truly strange. And she could not help wondering who’d first thought of doing…well, doing that to a woman. Adam, she supposed. Sure to God it was bound to be the man because rumour and gossip and the women domestics she overheard sometimes often laughed about things like that. Magda tried to shut her mind to them because it was sinful, probably, though they seemed not to think so. They thought it a hoot.

  And here was this youngish man, though maybe a bit older than she herself, who, now she was freed of the Magdalenes, was getting on for at least nineteen, due to move up to that special number in July, which was about halfway towards Christmas, at a guess.

  The trouble was, the young man looked like he’d been crying. Now, this was new.

  Magda wondered why. Maybe he too saw sometimes in his sleep (or near-dozing before he really went off in bed) somebody falling? You could never tell, because ‘nobody knows the hour’ as Sister St Union kept telling the girls at the school. Lucy said it was the time you died, though how could nuns know if that was true or not? Magda told Lucy not to be so terrible, because nuns had things explained to them that ordinary people didn’t. They were close to God and sure to get to Heaven unlike everybody else, except priests.

  But here was this man who looked like he had been crying, though how could you tell? And it couldn’t possibly be, because Magda had once seen him visiting Mr Liam MacIlwam wearing a belt badge of the Gardai, yet there he was with tears streaming down his face and dripping, actually dripping, off his chin onto the bulbous tin of his motorbike where the oil went, if Magda guessed right. And his filthy motorbike had a badge on it, too. Maybe it was a cold? You got colds from, she guessed, driving about like a maniac. Them great noisy gadgets sounded like the clap of doom haring up and down the Borro. And him presumably being Garda and all.

  She ducked her head, intending to walk on by, shamed and ashamed by the spectacle, pretending she hadn’t noticed the man looking like she’d never seen before. Crying was for women, not for men to sit astride motorbikes in the alcove of a gateway and looking like they’d been weeping.

  She had almost succeeded when the man’s voice followed her and she heard him say, ‘You the bird as sees to Grampa?’

  It was in a normal voice so maybe she’d seen wrong, like when something was going on bad at the Magdalenes and you weren’t to see or even remember, and you hadn’t to raise your head and look. You’d just to walk on by and forget what you’d seen. It didn’t always work, like when Lucy kept falling, because how could you forget everything that happened the night when Lucy fell the first time and carried on doing it night after night and day after day still, when it was how many years ago? She kept her eyes down on that old shingle path Bert scraped with a rake, whistling some tuneless song, the old gardener liking his daft old tune.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, scared of getting told off indoors for talking to a man in the street, well nearly in the street, by the gateway.

  ‘Half a sec.’

  ‘I’m due in.’

  ‘Give us a sec.’

  ‘I’ll get told off.’

  ‘It’s quarter to.’

  ‘I know.’

  A lie, though only venial and making her due for Purgatory sure as apples, yet wounding to God all the same. Still, it was either that or Sister St Union’s tongue and extra work instead of a break. And what had forced this possibly weeping man on her but the events of the day? The only event that so far had happened was that she’d gone to confession. She could have been taking her time.

  ‘You nurse Grampa MacIlwam, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  That too was possibly another venial sin, because she was no nurse, not like real nurses who came in every second day and saw to the old folk, mostly those with horrid tubes in their bellies and that, not the ordinary oldies who were normally taken care of by girls like herself. This was proving a seriously contorted day and it had hardly started yet.

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ There was the sound of his boot – he wore chunky kinds of leather-looking boots to drive his stinking machine. She’d seen him at it once or twice, scaring all the birds in the garden and setting old Bert’s dog crazy, wanting to bark twice as loud and go running after it.

  She stopped. ‘I can’t stop,’ she said, not turning round yet. ‘I’m due in.’

  There. That made it all right and maybe cancelled out her lie. Maybe she’d even rescued God from Heaven-knows-what torment caused by her previous untruth. Mrs Fogarty, a married woman about forty but in any case getting well on for senile, who cooked in the kitchen and supervised the food being prepared for the hundred or so inmates of the Care Home, said fibs caused no harm, here or Up Above. Magda thought that was a truly sinful thing to say because the Church knew best. Mrs Fogarty just said, ‘Oh, well, you think what you like. You’ll learn yourself different in God’s good time, girl.’ Grace, who overheard that, said she should tell Sister St Simeon and did, but nothing came of it, just the nun’s lips grew sort of tight when she walked by Mrs Fogarty, who still made the most noise banging her old tins about the kitchen of a morning
whatever people, even nuns, said, telling her to keep the noise down please.

  Then he said something that really stopped her right there.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  He was ginger-haired, when she turned and looked at him. It was uncanny to be there in broad daylight, staring at somebody who was male, that word beyond which there was no other sense or meaning, just the word itself. He had shiny, blackish, leatherish tight clothes on, with those thick giant boots. He was propping up the bike by simply letting his legs stretch to the ground. She had the notion that he didn’t even care whether the bike toppled or not, so casual he seemed. It was quite at odds with his great wet tears streaming down his face to his chin, setting the garments even blacker where they dripped onto him. She told herself, yes, it must only be one of them old colds and soon he’d start sneezing all over her to prove it.

  ‘You see to Grampa MacIlwam, don’t you? I know you do.’

  ‘Yes.’ She struggled with honesty a few moments. Maybe he saw her difficulty because he gave her time. She felt a bit of gratitude, though why? It was her difficulty, her time come to that, nothing to do with him and his old smelly bike. ‘Sometimes, when he’s…when the old gentleman’s not been very well.’ How could she describe the mess old Mr MacIlwam got into, to this man? God, how did married people get on with their terrible lavatory secrets revealed for each spouse to see? Jesus, the thought made her head swim.