Kate

by Siobhán Parkinson

  ‘How I wonder what I am!’ Lily joined in, grabbing Eddy by the hands and dancing around the kitchen with him.

  ‘Where do the stars go in the daytime, Da?’ I asked. I shouldn’t have. I didn’t have time, but it had been bothering me for ages.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Da said, and he reached into the press and brought out a stub of a candle. ‘Watch now,’ he said, and he lit the candle with a spill from the range.

  I watched.

  ‘Well?’ said Da. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see a flame,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but is it a very bright flame? Is it as bright as it would be if the room was dark?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s hardly there at all, Da.’

  ‘That’s it. You see, a small light is hardly visible in the morning sunshine. Same with the stars. They’re still there, only we can’t see them in the daytime, because it’s too bright.’

  He leaned over and blew out the candle.

  ‘You should’ve been a teacher, Da!’

  ‘Would you look at the time!’ Da said. ‘Get out of my sight!’

  I had the girls’ schoolbags in my hands, all stuffed, I hoped, with the right books and copies.

  ‘Come here to me till I put these on you,’ I said. ‘Come on, look sharp.’ I sounded just like my mother.

  ‘As the fork said to the knife,’ said Da. Da sounded like himself, as usual.

  Ten to nine and we clattered down the stairs and out the door, passing by the toilet just inside the street-door opening, pinching our noses with our fingers and thumbs. All the passing drunks used it during the night, and it stank permanently. Our family never used it. We had a chamber pot in the bedroom, but mostly we had trained ourselves to hold on till we got to school. My mother said we would get a disease if we used the house toilet, she said it was full of germs, which I used to think was a slang word for Germans when I was younger. That was enough to put me off. I’d heard all about the Germans from my granda, who’d fought in the Great War, and then there was that Hitler fellow who was always yelling on the wireless, he didn’t sound a bit nice. But even without the threat of Germans, I wouldn’t have wanted to use the toilet anyway. The floor was always ankle-deep in water and the smell was disgusting.

  We flew through the streets, our schoolbags bouncing on our backs as we ran, dodging in and out between the oul’ ones out with their shopping bags, waiting impatiently while the buses trundled by. We were nearly at the school and going like the clappers, when Madge fell at the kerb and cut her knee.

  There was no time to go home to wash it, so I whisked out my hanky and spat on it. Madge said she didn’t want my old spit on her sore knee, but I said spit was good for healing. I didn’t know if that was true, but I had to say something, I couldn’t let Madge go to school with dirt on her cut, she might get blood poisoning, which was worse than pneumonia, I knew that, it ran through you and killed you stone dead in a matter of hours. Madge screamed when I dabbed at the cut, but I held on to her leg for dear life and I kept going and I managed to get the grit out of it. Then I kissed it, which made Madge scream even more, but my mam always kissed sore spots, and I thought it might help. I could hear the school bell clanging.

  ‘Come on!’ I called to the others. ‘We’re late!’

  The school bell gave a final clang as we got to the gate. A nun was just coming to lock it. They always locked the gate at bang on nine, and if you weren’t on the right side of it, you were in trouble. We raced across the road, as the gate came swinging towards us. I made a dive forward, pushing the other three ahead of me and into the closing gap. They lurched and stumbled, but they made it to the other side. I didn’t, though. The gate came clanging against the gatepost as I stepped forward and the bar came down right in front of my body with a clatter, and settled into position. I put up my hand to open it, but the nun rattled the bars.

  ‘No pushing,’ she shouted. ‘I’m locking it. It’s after nine.’

  ‘It’s not! It’s not!’ I squeaked desperately, shaking the gate.

  A clock started up then, from the tower of the nearest church, ringing the hour, so I knew it couldn’t have been nine o’clock when the nun closed the gate. I pointed in the direction of the ringing, but the nun shook her head. It was Sister Eucharia, the one who never smiled. Her face looked as if it was made out of bacon fat, dirty white and featureless. I stood there while the clock rang out the hour, still pointing hopelessly towards the church tower. Sister Eucharia pushed her fingers in at the side of the starched white bib she wore on her chest and pulled a large man’s watch out of a pocket that was hidden behind it. She held the watch up, face out, between the bars of the gate. It showed a minute past nine. The church clock must have been slow – or else Sister Eucharia’s watch was fast. The oul’ rip, she could have given me the benefit of the doubt.

  I slumped dejectedly against the locked gate, feeling the iron cold against my forehead. It was my third time to be late this term, and that meant I had used up all my chances and now I would be for it. At the very least, I would be sent to the head nun.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mother Rosarío

  It happened as I expected. When all the girls had filed into the school, Sister Eucharia came back to the gate to let me in. She sent me straight to Mother Rosario’s office.

  ‘Well, madam?’ said Mother Rosario icily, by way of greeting.

  Everyone said she was strict but fair, only I had never noticed the fair part. She always called girls ‘madam’ when she wanted to show her displeasure.

  ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ Mother Rosario went on.

  ‘Sorry, Mother,’ I said in a small voice. I tried to sound very humble and contrite. Nuns liked that.

  ‘I don’t mean that, I mean, have you got an excuse, girl? Speak up, now. If you have a good reason for being late, maybe we could overlook it this once.’

  That must be the fair part, I thought, but it wasn’t much good to me. I couldn’t possibly tell Mother Rosario that my mother had gone out in the night to attend a birth. Nuns didn’t understand these things. They had no children. They lived in a convent and said their prayers. Birth and babies, and getting my sisters’ hair brushed in the morning, and helping my da to make the breakfast, and the disaster that burning the porridge was – it was all too difficult to explain. If a nun burnt the porridge they probably just threw it out to the pigs and made more. Nuns wouldn’t understand what it was like to have to count every slice of bread, every spoon of oatmeal, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her and bring shame on my family. Nuns were notorious snobs. Then there was the added complication about Liz O’Brien not being married. I couldn’t work that one out, but I knew for sure that I mustn’t let it slip to the nuns, or I might bring even worse shame and retribution down on my family and neighbours.

  ‘Madge fell and cut her knee, Mother,’ I offered, helplessly. ‘I had to clean it for her.’

  ‘I see. She fell because you were late and running to school?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘And why were you so late that you had to race over the roads like corner boys instead of walking at a brisk and steady pace, like young ladies?’

  ‘Patsy got grease on her blouse, Mother.’ It wasn’t working, I knew that, but I couldn’t find a way to explain the piled-up details that had made the morning go all wrong.

  ‘Indeed?’ Mother Rosario’s very black eyebrows disappeared under the stiff white forehead band that hid her hair and held her long black veil in place.

  ‘Because we had fried bread for breakfast,’ I went on.

  ‘Well, aren’t you well off! Fried bread, indeed!’

  I didn’t know how to answer that one. It hadn’t occurred to me that fried bread was some sort of awful luxury that I shouldn’t dare to mention for fear of offending the nuns. It was never very clear to me what would offend the nuns. They seemed to think differently from ordinary people.

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I murmured, hopeless
ly.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what, Mother?’

  ‘Don’t give me cheek, Kate Delaney!’

  ‘Sorry, Mother. I burnt the porridge.’

  ‘You burnt the porridge. Well, now we’re getting places. Wasn’t that careless of you?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. And then I had to find a clean blouse for Patsy and Da was singing some stupid song and the girls were giggling and Eddy was singing too and I was in a rush, I didn’t sleep last night, I was up looking at the clock in the kitchen all night, and …’

  ‘Enough!’

  I stopped.

  ‘Sorry, Mother,’ I murmured again, looking at the floor, wishing it would open up and swallow me whole.

  ‘It seems to me, Kate, that you are blaming everyone but yourself, here. Madge fell. Patsy tore her blouse. Your father …’

  ‘No, Mother, it was grease, Patsy got grease on her blouse.’

  ‘Kate!’ Mother Rosario’s voice was like thunder now. ‘Will you stop blathering and rawmayshing out of you! Grease, torn, it doesn’t matter. The point is, you are deflecting all the blame on to your unfortunate family, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘Don’t contradict me, child!’

  ‘No, Mother. Sorry, Mother.’

  I could feel tears running down my face. I licked my lips. Salt.

  ‘Sorry, Mother,’ I said again, in a tiny voice, willing the nun to stop pestering me and just slap me and let me go to my classroom.

  Mother Rosario stood up and came around to the front of her desk. She wore giant rosary beads suspended from her waist, like all the nuns, but in addition to this, because she was the head nun, she also carried a gigantic bunch of keys and a wide, flat slat, which she used to slap people on their upturned palms.

  She was right, of course. If I hadn’t asked the stupid question about the stars, we’d have made it.

  I closed my eyes and screwed them up hard, held my breath, and held out my hand for a belt of the slat.

  Nothing happened. I waited, hand outstretched, wishing the nun would whack me and get it over with. Three on each hand was usual. I hoped I wouldn’t have to have more than that. Three was just about bearable. It hurt horribly at first, and it went on stinging for hours, but it didn’t break the skin or cause bruising. You could write within an hour or so, though your hands burned.

  Still nothing happened.

  I opened my eyes. Mother Rosario was looking at me.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ Mother Rosario said in a voice that was almost kind. ‘But I’ll have to see your mother, Kate. I can’t have girls coming late to school with no reasonable excuse and looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.’

  I dropped my hand to my side. The wreck of the Hesperus! I looked down at myself for the first time that day. I was still wearing the old clothes I’d thrown on in a rush that morning. I’d forgotten to change into my neat school skirt and blouse.

  And now I remembered also that with the fuss about brushing the others’ hair, I had forgotten all about my own. I put a hand to my head, and sure enough, my long curly hair was good and tangled – I could feel the knots under my fingers. I must look a right mess.

  But that was a minor point. My mother was being sent for! That was the worst possible punishment, because it meant I’d be in trouble at home as well at school, and then I’d have nowhere where I could feel safe and free.

  ‘No, Mother, please don’t, I’ll be good.’

  I could feel the tears coming again, and now there was a drip coming from my nose too. The embarrassment of it! I wiped it quickly with the back of my hand and fished up my sleeve for my hanky, but of course it was streaked with dirt and blood, and I stuffed it quickly back up my sleeve again before Mother Rosario could see it.

  ‘Kate, Kate, you don’t understand.’

  Then the unbelievable happened. Mother Rosario dipped into the deep pocket of her long, long black nun’s skirt, and produced a huge blue check, starchy clean handkerchief and handed it to me. I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t possibly put it to my nose and soil the holy nun’s hanky.

  Mother Rosario took the hanky back and dabbed at my tear-streaked cheeks herself, and swiped at my nose and mouth with it too. Then she handed the hanky to me again, and said, ‘Keep it for today. You can wash it and bring it back to me another time.’

  I nodded, disbelievingly, crumpling the handkerchief between my fingers. I would rub it and scrub it and rinse it and starch it and iron it until it was a perfectly crisp square again.

  ‘Now, listen to me, my child,’ the nun went on. ‘I need to see your mother just to make sure everything is all right at home. I find that when good girls start coming late and giving back answers …’

  ‘I don’t give back answers!’ I wailed.

  ‘There, you’re doing it now!’ said the nun. ‘I find that when girls who are usually good start misbehaving, it often means there is trouble at home, and I just want to satisfy myself that this is not so in your case.’

  ‘It’s not, Mother, I swear. Cross my heart and hope to die. There’s nothing wrong at home.’

  I couldn’t bear the thought of my poor mother being humiliated by the nuns poking their noses in and asking personal questions about our family life. She would die of shame.

  ‘We don’t swear, Kate.’

  ‘No, Mother, but really, there’s no need to send for …’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that, Kate. Now, you go on to your class and tell Miss Glynn that you were with me and it’s all right, you’re not to be punished. Tell her I’ll speak to her later. Have you got that, now?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘And here, Kate.’ Mother Rosario opened a small stripy pink tin she had on her desk and extracted a bull’s-eye. My eyes opened wide. ‘You’d want to suck that fast now, so it’s gone by the time you reach the classroom.’

  ‘Thanks, Mother,’ I whispered, and slipped the bull’s-eye into my mouth. The sweet, pepperminty taste spread immediately, deliciously, over my tongue.

  ‘And don’t worry, I won’t upset your mother. I just need to talk to her. It’ll be all right.’

  I pushed the sweet into the side of my cheek with my tongue, and managed another ‘Thanks, Mother.’

  ‘Mother?’ I asked then.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mother, was Saint Patrick a Catholic? Only how come the Protestant cathedral is called after him?’

  Mother Rosario looked at me and shook her head.

  ‘That’s too complicated for today,’ she said.

  She was as bad as my mother, evading questions. At least she hadn’t said, ‘It’s a mystery,’ which is what nuns usually said when you asked them something about religion that they couldn’t answer. I sighed, but I didn’t argue. I just trotted off to my classroom, sucking the bull’s-eye as hard as I could. I needed to get it down to a manageable size before I reached the door, so I could store it neatly inside my cheek and still be able to speak clearly to Miss Glynn.

  CHAPTER 3

  Brown Bread

  Mam was furious at being summoned to the school. She didn’t know who to be more annoyed with, me or the nun.

  ‘I have a good mind to give you a walloping over this, Kate. Can I not trust you to behave yourself at school and not be drawing attention to yourself?’

  ‘Sorry, Mam,’ I said. I seemed to be saying nothing but sorry these days.

  ‘And as for that Rosario one, I’ll give her a piece of my mind, you mark my words.’

  I was shocked to hear the head nun referred to by her name, without the respectful title ‘Mother’.

  ‘Mam, don’t show me up in front of the nun!’

  I pleaded. ‘You know what nuns are like. If any of the mothers stand up to them, they take it out on us.’

  This didn’t exactly fit with the kindness of Mother Rosario yesterday, lending me a hanky and giving me a sweet, but all the same, I didn’t want to risk getting into deeper trouble. And
it was true that the nuns didn’t take kindly to mothers who ‘interfered’.

  ‘We’re as good as they are any day,’ said my mother stoutly, though she knew that wasn’t how the nuns viewed it. Everyone knew that if you came from the tenements, the nuns were much harder on you than if you came from the Artisan Dwellings, which were the neat, yellow-brick, two-up-two-down houses around Pimlico and the Coombe, where the better-off workers and tradesmen lived. The nuns thought they had a better chance of making something of their daughters than of the daughters of the poorest classes – that was us – who would only marry young and produce broods of sickly, dirty children, many of whom died young. The awful thing was, it was true. Our neighbours were always having babies, and half of them died before they were a year old. It was terrible.

  ‘Tuppence looking down on three-ha’pence,’ muttered Mam proudly, pulling on her best Sunday coat and ramming her smart black hat with the cocky little feather in it over her springy curls, the one she only wore on state occasions and bonfire nights, as she put it herself.

  ‘Oh, Mam, don’t be going on like that!’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Being all proud and everything. Nuns like you to be humble.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Mam and she picked up her handbag. She had nothing to keep in a handbag, but she carried it all the same, when she was dressed up, for the look of it, riding on her hip, held in place by the straps that she kept tucked into the crook of her elbow.

  I trotted along beside her, wishing to goodness this day was over, and giving her instructions all the way about what she was to say and what she wasn’t to say to Mother Rosario.

  ‘Don’t say you were at a birth, Mam,’ I begged.

  ‘Don’t tell me what to say, Kate,’ said Mam grimly. ‘It’s time those nuns heard how real people live.’

  ‘Mam, you’ll make a holy show of me!’

  ‘I had to attend a neighbour in an emergency,’ Mam said to Mother Rosario, when we were shown into her office. ‘In the middle of the night. That’s why Kate was late for school.’