The Convent

by Maureen McCarthy

  ‘Hey, Peach.’

  ‘Det!’ The girl looked up from the table she was clearing. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing.’ The pregnant girl’s voice was droll. ‘Thought I’d come down and check out the poor slaves in the salt mines.’

  ‘You want tea?’

  ‘No, I want strong coffee, but yeah, I’ll have tea.’

  Cecilia had noticed the pregnant girl before. She always sat in the same place, the table nearest the door. Her head was usually bowed over one of the big fat notebooks she always had with her. She always had a pot of tea in front of her, and sometimes she smoked.

  A couple of times the girl had looked up and their eyes had locked. It had been Cecilia who turned away first, but she’d felt safe enough in her sunglasses and hat, and until now she’d not thought anything of it.

  ‘Anything to eat, Det?’ the girl called as she moved away.

  ‘Yeah.’ Her voice was low now and raspy,.‘One of those muffin thingos.’

  ‘Take-away?’

  ‘Nah.’ After Perpetua had disappeared inside, the pregnant girl looked at Cecilia. ‘Mind if I sit here?’

  ‘Please do.’ Cecilia had a moment of foreboding. The girl’s usual place was empty and there were a lot of other unused tables. She found herself being coolly scrutinised by the pregnant girl, who was now sitting opposite.

  ‘So when is the happy event?’ Cecilia forced a lightness she didn’t feel.

  ‘Eight weeks.’ The girl’s tone was cold.

  ‘You looking forward to it?’

  The girl shrugged and looked away.

  They said nothing while one of the young men from inside put the tea and a big muffin in front of her. She heaped the spoon with sugar and began to stir.

  ‘Great place this, isn’t it?’ Cecilia began. ‘Are you a local?’

  ‘I live with her.’ Det indicated with her head back to the cafe entrance.

  ‘Oh.’ Cecilia was beginning to feel claustrophobic, which didn’t make sense as there was plenty of air. She drained her cup and packed her book into her bag.

  ‘Her parents are away and so I live in a bungalow.’

  ‘Sounds … good.’ Cecilia tried to smile but panic was gripping her internal organs. Had she given anything away over the days she’d been coming to the convent? Occasionally she’d taken the dark glasses off and refitted her hat. Oh God. ‘So, just the two of you?’ she asked lightly, on the point of standing up.

  ‘Her sister, too.’

  ‘Oh?’ She couldn’t help herself, she was greedy for details. ‘How old is the sister?’

  But the pregnant girl didn’t reply. She just sighed as though she couldn’t be bothered conversing anymore and they both turned to watch Perpetua rush by to collect another tray of used crockery before disappearing inside again. When Cecilia turned back the pregnant girl was still staring at her.

  ‘I know who you are,’ the girl said in a low voice. ‘So don’t fuck around with me.’

  Stunned by the tone as much as what the girl had said, Cecilia could do nothing but sit and wait for what would come next. Her head was filled with a mass of impossible knots. Breda had warned her. And now … caught out! Snooping. When she looked up again the girl’s gaze had moved to Cecilia’s hands, to the flat gold ring with the one small deep ruby that Peter had given her. She wore it on her middle finger of her right hand, and she’d never taken it off, except for once when she’d tried to give it back to him.

  ‘Does she know?’ Cecilia asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Cecilia nodded. Well, that was something. She stood up, her face hot now with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, you must think that I’m …’ But she didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She would go now before things got worse. Breda was right – if she wanted to contact her daughter, then she had to do it through the right channels and be patient.

  ‘Why did you give her away?’ the girl asked coldly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m interested.’ The girl pointed at her belly. ‘I need to hear something apart from This will be the happiest event of your life,’ she laughed dryly.

  Cecilia nodded and sat down again.

  ‘Well … I’d been a nun,’ she said and then immediately regretted it. What did that have to do with anything?

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  The pregnant girl nodded and Cecilia laughed to hide her utter dismay.

  ‘So, no man?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What do you mean, not really?’ the girl barked.

  Cecilia would have got up again right there and walked off if it had been anyone else. But the girl was her daughter’s friend and her sharp tone was weirdly hypnotic.

  ‘No man I could count on,’ she managed at last, wishing she smoked too so she’d have something to do. ‘I’m sorry, but … even after all this time it’s very difficult to talk about.’

  The girl nodded slowly.

  ‘What about family?’

  Cecilia bit her lip. ‘I had a family.’

  ‘But not close?’

  Cecilia sighed and closed her eyes and wished that she could be somewhere, anywhere, else.

  ‘I could have kept her if I’d wanted to,’ she whispered. ‘My family would have helped. I just couldn’t …’ ‘You didn’t want her?’

  ‘I … couldn’t see myself with a child.’

  The strange girl nodded and looked away, and there was probably a full minute of silence between them where Cecilia felt herself teetering on the edge of some kind of emotional precipice. Do I jump now?

  ‘So now you think I’m a monster?’ she ventured softly, trying to keep her voice light.

  ‘I don’t think you’re a monster,’ the girl said coolly before taking another sip of tea.‘But she might.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Of course she would. Cecilia was filled with despair, coupled with a sudden need to explain herself. ‘I first fell in love with him, her father, when I was still a nun, but of course nothing happened between us until I’d left.’

  ‘Of course not,’ the girl mocked.

  ‘Please understand the whole business of falling in love with him wasn’t what made me want to leave the convent. I know it will sound so ridiculous to someone your age, but I fully intended to stay a nun after meeting him.’ The words sounded ridiculous even to herself, but they were true and they’d rushed out of her before she’d had time to think. ‘We’d never been lovers. I would have got over it … him.’

  ‘Oh you don’t need to convince me of that!’ The girl smiled for the first time. ‘We excel at that kind of stuff.’

  ‘We? What do you mean?’ Cecilia asked weakly.

  ‘Catholics. Sacrifice and misery and not having what we want.’ The strange girl was chuckling now as she sipped her tea, her long dirty fingers circling the cup. ‘Both of my parents were full of that shit and look where it got them!’

  Cecilia sat back in stunned silence. So what did happen to your parents? was what she wanted to ask but didn’t dare. This girl was too sharp, too blunt and too much in control for her liking.

  ‘So you didn’t get pregnant while you were a nun, but you met him then?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought it was an enclosed order.’

  ‘Yes … it was.’

  ‘So how did you meet him?’

  ‘I was in France. I was studying over there.’

  ‘They sent you to France?’

  ‘There was a big international Church conference.’ Cecilia smiled as she remembered her own excitement just to be there.

  ‘So who was he?’ the girl said, staring her down through narrowed eyes.

  ‘I … can’t say,’ Cecilia stammered. She knew she’d said way too much already.

  ‘Whatever.’ The girl shrugged.

  How odd this girl was with her grimy hair and world-weary manner. She couldn’t be more than early twenties. Cecilia was reminded of some
of the laundry girls she’d dealt with over the years; belligerent, gutsy and tough, they had no use for niceties. Dealing with them was often a battle and in the end, as much as she tried, it was not one she was particularly well cut out for.

  ‘Are you still a Catholic?’ Cecilia asked shyly.

  ‘No, I’m a visual artist, which is worse.’

  ‘Ah … what kind of stuff do you do?’

  ‘Painting. Montage with some photo work.’

  ‘You work here?’

  ‘I have a studio up there.’ She pointed to the west wing of the convent. ‘Which reminds me that I’d better get back to it. I’ve got an exhibition happening in a couple of months and there is a lot of work to get done.’

  Cecilia watched her stand up, collect her shoulder bag and check her pens. She was frowning as she did up her coat.

  ‘I … I worked as a photographer for years.’ Cecilia was suddenly desperate to keep this girl talking to her. ‘I had an exhibition once in London.’

  ‘Really?’ The girl stopped to look at her again. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Most of it sold,’ Cecilia said proudly. ‘It was such a good time in my life …’ She hesitated.

  ‘So you still working?’

  ‘No. But I’d love to see your stuff.’

  The girl’s pale face suddenly tightened into a scowl. ‘Do your own dirty work,’ she said sharply.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t think for a minute you can get to her through me. I’m not going to play the go-between.’

  Cecilia took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. ‘I’d still like to see your work.’

  ‘I’m on the second floor of the west wing, room 207.’

  ‘Right.’ Cecilia tried to smile.

  ‘And let’s get something else clear,’ the girl continued sourly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, parents who bail out on their kids and then turn up twenty years later have to cop whatever happens, okay?’

  Cecilia nodded, numb with humiliation. ‘I understand what you’re saying,’ she managed.

  ‘Good.’ The girl gave her a brusque nod. About to walk off with her bag over her shoulder, she stopped. ‘I’m Det, by the way.’

  Cecilia stood up and held out her hand. ‘Cecilia. Pleased to meet you, Det.’

  Peach

  I forgot to shut the blind properly and a shaft of golden light in my face wakes me early. I push off the bedclothes, get up and walk across the hall to my parents’ room. Their neat, empty bed sends a shiver down my spine. Dad rang last night to say that his mother is back in hospital.

  I push open the doors onto their little balcony and go out and stand there, breathing in the cool early-morning air. A sharp gust of wind sends a smattering of last night’s summer shower from the leaves of the big peppermint gum straight into my face. I look over at the white moon resting in folds of mauve early-morning light above the trees and think of Stella.

  She has been at her new school now for a few weeks. She doesn’t say a lot about it, but I know I’d be hearing about it if things were really bad.

  I look down and catch sight of her in her white nightdress moving about in the garden below, mucking around with the hose. It’s six-thirty on Sunday morning. Why the hell would she be up?

  I resist the tempatation to spy on her, and call down,‘Hey, Stella?’

  ‘Wondered when you’d see me,’ she yells back. ‘I’ve been up for ages. Want to go for a ride?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I pull on my jeans and runners and a T-shirt, gladness filling the empty spaces inside me.

  We unlock our bikes and pull them out of the shed.

  ‘So where to?’ I ask.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Instead of turning right at Dights Falls we go straight ahead across the bridge and along a dirt path to the vast green expanse of the Yarra Bend golf course. We pass a couple of speed walkers and then another bike rider going really fast, head down and dressed in bright green lycra. After that, apart from a stray white dog, we have the track to ourselves. Stella takes the lead and once we’re over a rough patch she picks up speed. I have to pedal hard to keep a few yards behind. Her broad back is encased in a long red shirt, and her black hair blowing out behind her in the wind makes her look like a pirate ship in full sail.

  ‘Where do witches keep their magic?’ she yells back at me.

  ‘Under their toenails, of course!’ I reply without hesitation.

  ‘Do spiders go to school?’

  ‘Of course,’ I reply. This was a game we used to play when we were younger. She’d come to me with these crazy questions and I’d have to try to answer them.

  ‘Where?’

  But I am drinking in the early sunlight falling on the grass. The way it rolls away over the hills and between the trees like new carpet. I love the sharp breeze in my face. My feet push hard against the pedals and my fingers grip the handlebars tightly.

  ‘Peach?’

  ‘Under leaves?’ I say hopefully.

  ‘No!’ she yells. ‘How could you have forgotten?’

  ‘So where?’

  ‘In little girls’ shoes at night!’

  ‘Oh yeah, of course. How could I have forgotten that?’

  She snorts with laughter. ‘And what do kids do before they get born?’

  ‘Play on top of the clouds.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She stops suddenly next to a huge gum, it’s branches splayed out against the sky like an arterial roadmap. We drop our bikes, and beckons me over to the river.

  ‘This is a special place,’ she whispers.

  She is right. At this time in the morning the high cliff face opposite looks ancient against the sky. Rocks jut out and recede, making a moonscape surface, full of cracks and crevices and smooth patches of oranges and rust red and yellow. At the top a tracery of black trees stand like lonely skeletons waiting for their chance to jump. All of it, the trees, the rocks and crevices, are reflected in the still brown river below.

  She crouches down as near as she is able to the river and dips her hand in dreamily.

  ‘I come here sometimes,’ she says as though reading my mind.

  ‘When I’m at work?’

  She nods and my gladness intensifies. We sit together, the morning sun on our backs, and when I catch a whiff of her hair I feel giddy with hope.

  ‘Cecilia would have seen this.’

  ‘They weren’t allowed out,’ I say quickly.

  ‘By the seventies they were,’ she counters. ‘Groups of them sometimes went for walks along the river.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve been reading about them. I know all kinds of stuff.’

  I look at her bent head, and her plump hand drawing in the dirt with a stick, knowing she is dying to tell me more. But I can’t bring myself to ask what else she knows. I stand up and throw a stone into the water, trying to imagine a group of nuns walking along the path. The soft plopping sound of the stone is full and final in the silence. Already the cliff face opposite us is changing as the sun rises higher in the sky.

  ‘Have to get going,’ I say. ‘Work.’

  We ride back along the beautiful river track. At Hoddle Street we stand together waiting for the lights to change.

  ‘Do you think that one soul is worth the whole world?’ Stella asks seriously.

  What a stupid question, I am about to say. What does it even mean? But I close my mouth and search around my brain for the answer I know she wants. ‘Yes,’ I manage to say firmly, ‘definitely.’

  She turns around and gives me one of her dazzling smiles, making me feel as if I’ve just passed a very difficult exam.

  The lights change and we cross the road together.

  Cecilia 1970

  ‘Sister, may I please be excused?’

  Cecilia turned around and sighed. It was Margaret Hurley again, the poor, skinny, snivelling little thing. She’d come to them at fifteen, was twenty-three now and still looked about twelve. She had some
kind of trouble with her periods that had her running to the lavatory all day for the best part of two weeks of every month. Only the night before Cecilia had suggested to Mother Bernard that the girl be shifted to the sorting room because she wasn’t strong enough for the mangle, and neither of them wanted a replay of the fainting scene of earlier in the year.

  But Mother seemed to have forgotten that drama. She told Cecilia firmly that the sorting room was full to bursting and that the girl couldn’t be trusted to keep the baskets from the different hotels separate, and that if she really couldn’t manage then she could be given a try in the ironing room.

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  Why Mother Bernard had been put in charge of the laundry was a mystery to everyone. She hadn’t the first idea how to deal with troublesome girls.

  It was summer, and sometimes the temperature in the ironing room got to forty degrees. Poor little dithering Margaret wouldn’t have the concentration to stand at an ironing board for eight hours a day.

  ‘Are you still taking the iron tablets, Margaret?’ Cecilia asked cautiously, knowing that any such question was likely to bring on a barrage of information from the girl about the blood clots that were the size of plums, and cramps that felt like ‘claws in her belly’.

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Same, Sister,’ she said, eyes swivelling this way and that. ‘Got to go now or there will be a … flood.’

  Oh, if only you could look whoever you’re speaking to in the face, girl! Your life would become so much easier. ‘Yes, of course, dear. Off you go then.’

  The girl reminded Cecilia of a badly treated dog they’d had at home on the farm. Old Gunner would cringe and crawl on his belly as soon as her father came anywhere near. It always upset her to see it, further proof that her father was a bully.

  The Angelus bell went for lunch, and the noise of the machines gradually died away as the girls slipped off their aprons and knelt down where they were, in front of the machines. Cecilia sighed her relief as she began the prayer. There would be lunch and an hour-long break from the noise.

  There were four big ships in dock, and along with their usual hotels there was a lot of work on. The laundry had been operating since eight-thirty that morning. The girls had been working in the heat for a four-hour stretch with only a fifteen-minute midmorning break. They all looked exhausted, with slumped shoulders and sweat patches under the arms of their dresses.