Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘There’s the man who’s mesmerised by bosoms. And there’s the man who can’t stop being mesmerised by legs and bottoms. Mr Brannigan was fascinated by breasts. You know what I think, girl?’

  ‘No,’ Magda said, thinking, but Mr Brannigan’s barely yet cold with pennies on his eyes in the next room’s third alcove with his dinner going cold on the bed table.

  It was sinful to talk like this. In fact, Magda knew it was dire sin to even think these things, and probably even worse in the scale of everything to listen to this old bat rabbiting on about how she and Mr Brannigan, requiescat in pace, had done shameful and shameless things to each other in the candle hours right here in the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly.

  ‘It’s only the way men start off with you that’s the main point.’

  ‘Start off?’

  ‘Start you off, I mean.’

  ‘Start me?’ Magda almost ran but felt transfixed.

  ‘They all have to start by getting in you, is the truth. It’s the way they are. Can’t help themselves. You know what my Auntie Winnie used to tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She said, more than once, “It’s for men to try, and women to deny.” What d’you think of that?’

  Magda almost repeated it but caught herself in time.

  ‘She was a daft old biddie who knew no better. She had an unhappy life, did Auntie Winnie. Her husband ran off with a girl who worked the boats. I don’t know what it means to this day.’

  The old lady smiled at the Sacred Heart bold as brass, straight at the figure of Our Lord doing His suffering and everything on the wall.

  ‘What what means?’

  ‘You’re not listening. Worked the boats. I’ve told you twice, her husband ran off with a girl who worked the boats.’ And old Mrs Borru gave Magda an absolutely beatific smile. ‘Doesn’t it sound romantic? She worked the boats. It makes me think of the Far East in hot climes, like in those sailing poems we used to learn at school. We were made to stand up and recite Masefield and Wordsworth and Coleridge.’

  ‘Poems?’

  The old lady was rambling now, so perhaps it was becoming less sinful with each passing minute. Magda decided to stay, but was disappointed the talk had come down to poems when it had been horrid but fascinating.

  ‘Coleridge.’ Mrs Borru smiled. ‘I loved the ones about romance. Coleridge was a strange stick, right enough, with more strings to his bow than a man ought.’

  ‘Was he?’ Magda knew nobody by that name in the St Cosmo.

  ‘How does it go? The red leaf, last of its clan, dances as often as dance it can. Isn’t that lovely?’

  ‘Lovely,’ Magda said guardedly, ready to say a swift Glory Be in case it wasn’t lovely at all but something truly foul.

  ‘I thought of a red leaf trying to dance when it was going to fall, just like all the rest.’

  ‘I see,’ Magda said, who didn’t.

  ‘Red was the colour you were forbidden when I was a girl,’ Mrs Borru said. ‘You got your legs smacked good and hard if you were seen in red knickers, or petticoats, or a dress. I always longed for red shoes, after reading that Coleridge poem.’

  ‘Did you get some?’ Magda asked, drawn in deep now despite the wicked side to the talk.

  ‘No, bless you. Different when I was married. It didn’t matter then because my husband bought me some. We’d gone to England. We lived over a shop and I got cast-offs and seconds from their stock, and one was a red woollen dress that hugged my shape. I went mad in that. I danced as often as dance I could.’ She giggled, a marvellously happy sound to Magda. She loved people to laugh, even old Mr Vennoshay whose teeth clacked when he had a good laugh if he’d forgotten his sticky stuff for his false plate.

  ‘You danced?’

  ‘I just told you. I danced for my husband in our flat and in our bedroom. Women forget they have a duty to their man, to please. That’s how you stay together. They forget that these days. It’s the way they get divorced.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Don’t you read the papers?’

  ‘No,’ Magda said truthfully, because she hadn’t the lettering. Also, it seemed a tragic waste of money to go spending on newspapers with racing results and what the Taoiseach was on about in the Dail when everybody else talked of it all the time anyway.

  ‘I’ll miss Jim.’ The old lady’s eyes filled, to Magda’s consternation.

  ‘We all shall, Mrs Borru.’

  ‘I’ll miss him more than anybody, God’s truth. It’s comforting to have a man nearby, even though we’re too old to even see each other. I always kept an ear out to listen after Jim, how he was getting on, even after he went to sleep for good.’

  ‘A shame, God rest him.’

  ‘Don’t you just go saying that, girl. You mean it or don’t go saying it at all, d’you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Borru.’

  ‘He wore me out sometimes. He would take his time getting to the spillage. We never made a mess in the beds, did we? You didn’t notice any mess, did you, after we’d done it during the night?’

  ‘No,’ Magda said faintly. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘We did it once in the summer house. It was mortal hot. Jim was like a mad thing. I was frightened, like being a girl again, scared some nun would come along and send us out to St Andrew’s where the lunatic people all get sent when they’ve been up to no good.’

  ‘A dreadful risk.’ Magda imagined being sent to the mad house of St Andrew’s.

  ‘He had his thing out and I started on it like a crazy woman. It went everywhere, all over my clothes. You know what we did?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I said I’d stumbled against the fountain, y’know, where the birds splash, that bird bath? It wasn’t even filled, so I had to get a watering can from the gardener’s and fill it in the little pool and carry water to the bird bath then we could pretend I’d stumbled and got myself wet.’

  ‘I remember washing your dress, Mrs Borru.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’m telling you.’

  ‘I’d best get on, Mrs Borru.’

  Suddenly the old dear’s eyes took on a wicked glint.

  ‘Here,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘Are you the girl who pinches my tablets?’

  ‘What?’ Magda paled.

  ‘You’re the girl who pinches my tablets.’

  ‘No. I mean…’

  ‘Shhhhh,’ Mrs Borru said, and closed her eyes smiling.

  That was the day Magda cleaned up after poor Mr Brannigan, and got took home by Bernard after a new old man was brought in. Magda let Bernard do the thing to her. She was being compassionate to a kind man, which was what God intended, same as Mrs Borru to old Mr Brannigan. It was how Bernard began it regular, usually twice a week but sometimes more often unless he had duty when there was racing at the Fairyhouse or Leopardstown.

  She was shaking, so shocked was she, when the new man, who was seventy-two and riddled with lice and fleas and Heaven-knows-what, had to be cleaned by the two-blanket method and sundry lotions poured on the festering sores that blotched his skin. The Garda Siobhana brought him because he was going for trial after a fight in Connelly Station.

  That was how Sister Stephanie said the Gardai were to take Magda home afterwards, as a kindness, seeing she’d worked six hours extra without overtime money, because there was never that at the St Cosmo. And the Gardai were three hours over their own time, so Bernard said he’d come back on his way after signing off in the police station, which he did. And he ran Magda to her girls’ resident block, and saw her up to her door, and when Mrs Shaughnessy saw it was the Gardai she sank back into her doorway further along the landing. Magda explained to the old toot that there had been things going on at the Home today which made it all right.

  Then she made some tea and Bernard sat down, and Magda said she’d scramble some eggs and would Bernard be wanting some. He said yes that would be grand. And she was pleased because she had cleaned up in the sluice at the Home, so she was
able to let him see her wash her hands before she buttered some bread while the eggs were doing. The bread was soda bread that was too friable for making sandwiches, like most of the old men wanted to eat their scrambled eggs, but she was glad when Bernard said it didn’t matter one bit, and made thick sandwiches with two slices of soda bread on each side, larded with Kerry Gold and hang the cost.

  She was glad too he liked brown sauce instead of the red tomato sauce, and that reminded her of the red dress that Mrs Borru said she’d worn while dancing for her husband and spouting the poetry about the red leaf dancing, the last of its clan. That made Magda feel she too had rights in certain things and smiled across at the eating man.

  He was stout and thick, head and neck like a bull’s, with hands that seemed too soft for most men. She felt embarrassed letting him see her bold as brass and natural as anything eating away, quite like they were man and wife, which was something beyond normal how-de-do. But still she had her eggs but didn’t of course make butties from it, which wasn’t quite proper. Ladies in the old TV pictures they showed during the night didn’t eat like that.

  And then he took hold of her waist when she passed to get fresh hot water for the teapot, it being sensible to offer the starving hard-worked man another cup before his long drive home. It wasn’t as far as all that, though Howth seemed quite a distance if you thought, not quite as far as Killiney where she’d always hoped one day to live close by the little railway. She’d been there once, too far back ever to remember why and who with.

  She was astonished to feel him underneath her – underneath, which was a terrible word when you thought about it, under where everything was, though designed by God in His infinite wisdom, and neath meaning right there where it all happened.

  And he put his hands, which seemed larger by the minute, on her leg and felt the skin quite roughly through her skirt which made her dizzy. Then he pushed his hand beneath her skirt onto her legs and felt that she had no stockings on or tights – she hated tights because they were so expensive. Stockings were more of a problem in the morning to get them straight with all that twisting, and especially difficult when there was only a small mirror on the mantelshelf to see yourself in.

  And he said, ‘Is this all right?’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ because why wasn’t it if Mrs Borru and old Mr Jim Brannigan did it, the last time six weeks before when Mr Jim still had a few weeks to go before meeting his Maker? And she let Bernard do it, and was pleased feeling she had got away with something like murder.

  And the girl Lucy fell, not just once but twice, while Magda was under Bernard’s colossal weight. She groaned ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ and tried to inhale. It was all right because he shifted just slightly enough for her to get her breathing going by one long inhalation, so she managed.

  He took his time about finishing, and she waited like a dutiful wife should while he worked away and she thought, I’ll have fine sets of bruises in the morning, that’s for sure, but nobody will see them down there on the inside of my thighs. And they must be what Mrs MacLehose called her medals, when Magda had exclaimed once about the bruises on her upper arms, several blotched blue dabs, and Mrs MacLehose smiled while she said it and another girl laughed further along with the tea trolley when she overheard the exchange. And Magda had asked, what did that mean, what sort of medals? Both laughed and another girl, who was forty if she was a day, had giggled all the way through dishing out tea to the old folks. Everybody, whatever age, were girls to nuns, like the whole world was made up of Magdalenes to them.

  So this is where the medals came from, which was a truly shocking thought, that everybody was doing it and getting the giggles when it was talked of.

  Magda wondered, when Bernard began to snore, still his weight crushing her almost flat, why it was that all the females were called girls. Everywhere in Dublin it was girls, girls, never women or ladies. The girls in the Magdalenes were as old as forty-six, one was, and still she was a girl who did the clearing up in the commercial laundry they ran, steaming night and day between the great vats. And the little children, five and upwards, were also girls. And girls it stayed, even at the old folks home, all the helpers and workers called girls. Except for the nuns, and the nurses like Nurse Maynooth and Nurse Tully.

  And how come Mrs Borru said nothing but ‘Shhhh’ when she’d asked Magda about stealing the poison tablets from her? And then the old lady had slept peaceful like a babe.

  Magda didn’t know how babes slept, never having seen one sleeping, not even when she was at the Magdalenes or after, but then she’d never had the chance. It must be brilliant, so lovely, to see one sleeping and know it was there just trusting in you staying awake and keeping watch to keep away wolves from the fold or other dangers, or in case it woke and wanted something.

  She nursed Bernard then, and gave him a breast just as he started to wake up, which made him like her own bab, and that was how their pattern began, and she hoped it would stay for ever and ever Amen, even unto the consummation of the world. She now knew it wouldn’t. A murder had to be got on with, or Lucy never would be able to stop falling to her death in that stairwell.

  And Magda knew it would be her murdering of Father Doran that would give poor dead Lucy eternal rest, so it was a sworn Christian duty.

  Chapter Five

  Magda’s first remembrance in Sandyhills, County Dublin, was suddenly being there and frightened. She learnt she was just coming up to five. From other girls who knew their birthdays, Magda knew she too must have a birthday, but didn’t know when it was. She had cried, because everybody else had one. What hers was, she had no notion. Counting birthdays was a problem from then on, especially as they all laughed at her because she couldn’t count or even learn her letters.

  ‘I once weighed four stone two pounds,’ a girl called Isabel said when Magda had been there so long that the snows had come round again.

  Magda longed to weigh four stone two pounds too, but how did you get to know?

  For a long time she asked other children how you found out, so badly wanting to weigh four stone two pounds that she prayed to Baby Jesus to make her that and not be different, and cried herself to sleep. She knew that, whatever her numbers turned out to be, they would never be four stone two because that would be too good to be true. After getting used to the idea that everyone in the whole place was different, her wish would be simply silly. There were good things, and there were bad things. Being four stone two would be a privilege, and not for her.

  More than once, she got into trouble looking about for stones that might be the ones that decided who weighed what. She tried working out this stone thing. At first she thought, being small, that it was something to do with the way you breathed. Good breathing, as near to Jesus’s method that you could manage, must give you this four-two mark. It was only when she started working in the kitchen for Mrs Rooney, scouring and fetching, that she learnt, and it gave her profound hope, that everything – every single thing – had a weight in it, so kind was God and so generous was Baby Jesus who’d heard her prayers and decided everything and everyone should weigh something. Maybe God’s kindness would mean she’d be four stone two?

  Magda lived in hopes. She no longer needed to cry herself to sleep at night because her weight was out there somewhere just waiting. It was nothing to do with breathing, because vegetables didn’t breathe at all and they had weight, so good was Almighty God. Magda finally tried to do a deal with the Almighty. She would pray an extra prayer each night, a Hail Mary, because Mother Mary could wheedle when saints might not get very far. She would even settle for just four stone without the two.

  Carrots didn’t breathe. Magda, with an older girl called Lucy, learnt this and other essential facts of life by carrying in vegetables from the delivery at the postern gate at the end of the walled yard. A man, big and whistling and slamming things and yelling at other people unseen out there in the street – all doubtless as terrified as Magda, who waited in the doorway to come at a run when the deliv
ery man had gone after knocking with his five thumps and starting up his motor and driving off – well he was the delivery man, same every Monday and Thursday. He had no name, and no nun ever came to check things because it was too early for nuns.

  Magda and Lucy had to be there, waiting outside the kitchen door, by six o’clock when the nuns were being all holy and praying for the sins of the girls and other hard-line sinners – Sister Annuncion’s words for the girls in Magda’s class – in Holy Mass and the delivery man was due and Mrs Rooney hadn’t yet come to open the kitchen door. Their job, sworn to ‘loyal and holy duty’ (Sister St Paul’s oath they had to take when put on kitchen work) was to leave the baskets of vegetables and other provisions untouched (‘unsullied’ in Sister St Paul’s punishing oath) but bring them under the shelter of the doorway. At six-fifteen Mrs Rooney would open it from inside and stand there with the same bark, ‘Get them in here, then off with you.’

  They would carry the baskets in, and then go back fast as legs could go, back to the toilets, trying to get chapped thighs and bottoms clean before hurrying to the gruel that was breakfast.

  Each Monday and Thursday Magda and Lucy had a hard time telling the girls in whispers only and punishment by smacked legs to make you limp all day if you got caught talking, what they’d carried in when the little hatch by the postern gate was filled with heavy baskets and the delivery man’s engine had taken him, whistling and shouting about racehorses, off up the road to wherever it was.

  The other girls didn’t believe them when they said they hadn’t eaten any of the provisions.

  In vain Lucy and Magda swore they hadn’t stolen a single mouthful, and didn’t even know what was inside the baskets, and in any case there was no chance of looking because the baskets were tacked with heavy canvas all the way round so nothing could go in or out. And Mrs Rooney saw the baskets lifted inside then sent them both off and didn’t even let them stay and see what food had arrived or, to Magda’s burning loss, what they weighed, because Mrs Rooney had a scales with big black weights marked in Imperial Pounds and Imperial Ounces, with crowns over those standy-out letters in the coal-black metal. So the weights were from English times, which meant maybe it was sinful to even want a weight of your own, possibly four stone two pounds if God was specially kind.