Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Now you do it.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘Let me.’

  And Oonagh ran the lipstick over Magda’s lips slowly, making her stretch her mouth tight. Magda felt really strange. Her face looked so different.

  ‘See?’

  ‘I look funny. Not like me at all.’

  ‘You’d be nice if you had any colour. Jesus, but you’re a pale girl.’

  ‘I’m the same as I always was.’

  Magda didn’t know if this was true, because she’d never really had a mirror inspection before, except when the Inspectors came to the Magdalenes. Strange, but she felt something of disloyalty to the Magdalenes right now, seeing herself changing before that old mirror. Hadn’t she ought to have done this before, her getting on to her twentieth birthday this coming Twenty-Second of July next time round?

  ‘Magda Finnan, you never are. You can’t be.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  Magda didn’t know what she meant. She was becoming flustered, what with Oonagh busying herself about her little handbag she had right there with a scent bottle, a funny shape and blue as blue, a powder compact like the Whore of Babylon and a blackish pencil for her eyes.

  ‘Stay still and I’ll do your face.’

  ‘I’d feel horrid.’

  ‘No, girl. You look horrid as you are, white as an old sheet straight from Mrs MacLehose’s iron and a sight less interesting, sure y’are.’

  ‘Does everybody do this?’

  ‘Sure we do. The whole world. Keep still.’

  ‘Won’t people notice?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘It’s not…’

  ‘Who’s to say the Virgin Mary herself didn’t run a bit of lippie round her own gob the instant she knew she was going to have Baby Jesus?’

  ‘Oonagh, that’s terrible.’

  ‘Shush. Keep still or I’ll poke your eye out. You can really look and make your mind up. If you think you’ve gone over the top you can get it off in half a sec then do it again, until you look like a million.’

  ‘Will they tell me off?’

  ‘Old Sister Stephanie will, sure as God, but that’s only par for the course. Go easy at first, seeing you’re new to it all. You know they keep marks on us?’

  ‘On who?’

  ‘On us workers here. They have a tally sheet, like them old dockers used in England to keep score of how many sacks they load on them old Liverpool ships.’

  ‘Tally sheet?’ Magda sprang away from the cosmetic lesson.

  ‘Mrs MacLehose tellt me. She stows her ironed sheets in the nuns’ quarters, them being too busy being holy to carry much. She’s seen it, a table like the old men are forever talking about in the football league in the morning papers.’

  ‘Is my name on it?’

  ‘Course it is.’ Oonagh was amused at Magda’s alarm.

  ‘What’s it for?’

  Magda thought she was done with all that now she was in a place of her own. Well, nearly her own, in a block where all the other releasees lived among real other people who were getting on a bit, like the old lady along the landing she had to be wary of when Bernard her Garda man came calling to do his sad thing to Magda.

  ‘To keep count of us, what we do.’

  ‘To report us, take us in charge?’

  ‘No, silly. They can’t do that. Look, Magda.’ Oonagh shoved her down on the edge of the bath. ‘What would you do if they said they were going to send you back anywhere?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Oonagh could be impatient sometimes, and made a swipe at Magda in a pretend temper. ‘Work it out, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Then, timidly worrying about it, ‘What would I do?’

  ‘You’d collect your things from here, see, girl? Then you’d catch the DART to Dun Laoghaire and get off there, and buy a ferryboat ticket to England. That’s what you’d do.’

  ‘And then what?’ Magda stared at Oonagh, aghast.

  ‘Sail to England and go wherever you wanted. God sakes, Magda, you’re not stupid, are you, girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ Magda said, because she couldn’t read or write, and what on earth would she do when she got to England? And Oonagh was so snappy Magda was afraid to speak anything except tell the truth.

  ‘You’d never look back, Magda.’ Oonagh spoke slowly, looking straight at her. ‘What we do now is up to us, see?’

  ‘Up to us?’

  ‘Lipstick and all.’

  ‘Then what’s their tally book for?’

  She was frightened to ask, but had to because it was bad enough not sleeping from seeing Lucy falling into the stairwell all night long without having another nightmare to haunt her.

  ‘It’s for them, see?’

  Magda didn’t see at all. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s because they can’t stop making tallies, like somebody can’t keep on counting things because they’re sick inside their old heads, see? Like these old men as can’t help storing up bits.’

  ‘Like old Mr Niall?’

  Old Mr Niall had no second name, having come from an Industrial School in St Joseph’s in Latree where he was simply Seven. He was a right one for collecting bits of broken things – pens were a favourite, because he was able to snaffle them and keep them under his pullover until he could carry them out to the old shed where he helped with planting and cleaning the gardening tools. He had a sack, rescued from the dustbins and cobbled together with ordinary string from tying some trailing roses. The roses fell and looked weary once old Mr Niall stole their string, but at least he had it to mend his old sack from the dustbins. He collected useless things like paper clips, safety pins, and papers with pins in rows. If anything went missing, like old ladies’ knitting needles and bookmarks from the lounge where the oldies read of an afternoon, you could bet it was old Mr Niall away with it in his pullover. He always looked guilty, like he was going to get punished for stealing, but Magda let him say he hadn’t got whatever was lost. Once he stole Mrs Borru’s size nine knitting needle, length fifteen inches and thick as a pipe, that she had to have to make cardigans for the children in Thailand or somewhere.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘How can the nuns be like them old men, then?’

  ‘It’s the way they’ve been made to think.’

  ‘God made nuns, Oonagh,’ Magda said, full of reproach.

  ‘God made us any old how, Magda. Don’t ever forget that. How you get on is up to you.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘It’s true. The nuns can’t help it. They’re a waste of time. I think they know it deep down, because of all the fuss there’s been since the papers and the old telly got hold of them and started on the old Church. They got a right rollicking.’

  ‘About them tallies?’

  Oonagh sighed and pulled Magda to her feet.

  ‘No, Magda. Just let’s finish making you gorgeous. Forget what I’ve been saying. It just doesn’t matter any more.’

  But Magda thought over every word Oonagh had said, and ran it over and over in her head hours at a time, endless. This is how she learnt things. She was marvellous with words heard and moved mouths, but hopeless with things read or signed or shown. She might have been clever. That’s what Bernard said when he did his thing to her, and she didn’t really mind even if it made him sad.

  The evening she was to meet Kev MacIlwam, she did her face with a lipstick she had bought, and it cost a fortune. She felt so aggrieved at the price she almost fainted in the shop. It was outrageous, worse even than a loaf. And she didn’t know what to ask for or she’d have gone wild and bought one of them blue-black stick pencils to rub round her eyes. She was scared it would never rub off or that Kevin MacIlwam would laugh when he saw her, then she’d be so ashamed she would run away.

  Except she did look truly pale, but Oonagh hadn’t got any further in that lesson. Magda hadn’t gone on experimenting, just did what bit she’d learnt with the lipsti
ck. The one she’d got was not so red as Oonagh’s. Another thing was, even though she had paid a king’s ransom for the lipstick – so it must be made of stuff that was priceless anyway – the colour on her mouth seemed not quite what the colour was on the wrapping. In fact, Magda looked doubtfully at the colour of the stick itself as it came screwing its way out of the shiny gold tube.

  It was a risk. Would she look like a harlot of Sodom and Gomorrah? She wondered if she should take it back, but that was hopeless because she was due to meet this Kevin and here she was dolling herself up like one of the scarlet women who had tempted pilgrims on their way to Rome.

  She blotted the lipstick almost off, and thought she looked maybe a little better, safer, but how could you tell? She had the idea everybody would be looking at her all the way down the street outside from the St Cosmo Care Home to go meeting her young man.

  Except maybe he was married and had seventeen children and was going to arrest her for stealing those white tablets from Mrs Borru and pinching some of old Mr Gorragher’s whisky and mixing them up to poison Father Doran, which she was due to do on the stroke of four o’clock the following afternoon.

  She had to be brave. That was what girls were, wasn’t it? They had to be brave. Get through this meeting with her young man, and she would be free to stick to her plan.

  And Lucy, God save her dear friend, would stop falling, and Magda would sleep soundly for the rest of her life. It was her duty to rescue Lucy, Magda’s primary task, nothing to do with herself, no. Lucy came first, God rest her dear soul.

  Kev wore a tie, at which Magda was astonished. He went into a café with her. He simply tilted his head the way men did, and they went into the small place at the end of the Borro, where the buses turned left into the street you had to call the shopping mall now, with its grand hair salons and multiple stores – better than Powerscourt Centre, so locals held.

  ‘Tea, is it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ She sat, embarrassed to be served by him. She scanned the prices on the board behind where the ladies served as if she could read, and decided to make out she was scandalised at the prices they’d be charging. She tried to hear what Kevin, in his grand tie and clean shirt, was having to pay, but couldn’t hear for the working men talking away. This was really free and adult, here she was a common old girl who was just a Magdalene, being treated to tea in a genuine café. It was like a dream.

  Kevin came back.

  ‘There’s sugar on the table.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She didn’t know whether to offer him money for her tea but didn’t know how much it was anyway. She saw a man and a woman talking and looking at a bus timetable – she recognised it from the one hung on a string in the St Cosmo vestibule. Visitors were forever asking if she could get a new one and she had to keep pretending she’d go straight away and bring the latest one, but she only hid because she couldn’t read the dates on them.

  ‘Magda, is it?’ He knew she was Magda.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking about. People would notice if she got arrested in a minute.

  ‘I’m Kevin MacIlwam. I’m a garage man for the Gardai.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mr MacIlwam’s one of them you looks after, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Not on my own.’ Hadn’t she told him this? ‘There’s others. There’s nurses come, they have uniforms. Then there’s the nuns.’

  ‘The nuns.’

  ‘Yes. Sister Stephanie is in charge. I’m only a domestic. That’s like me and Oonagh and the others who do the cleaning and washing.’

  ‘Is that right.’

  ‘We don’t do the cooking.’

  ‘No, right.’

  She wanted desperately to keep the conversation going. It must be hard for him, wondering when he was going to have to arrest her, if that’s what he was going to do.

  ‘There’s kitchen staff to do that. They cook for the nuns as well.’

  ‘I visited Grampa.’ Magda stared at Kevin when he said this because he seemed to go longer in the face and his eyes didn’t want to look at her. He went on, avoiding her gaze, ‘I don’t usually want to come to him because…well.’ He shrugged.

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No. Well, because…’

  ‘Because what?’ Magda leant forward across the table, ignoring the puddles of old tea spilt on the Formica. ‘It’s a terrible waste, that is.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Having a grampa all your own, a relative, a real relative belonging to just you out of the rest of the world, all your own, and never coming to see him because…’ Why did he not want to come and see Mr MacIlwam? ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s old.’

  ‘I know.’ She felt somehow lame. She wondered what he had brought her here for, in her scarlet lipstick that cost a mint. ‘Some of them have tubes in.’

  ‘Tubes?’

  ‘Bottles under the bed. They have to be drained off. The nurses do that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It wasn’t the right thing to talk about, when you were meeting your young man, even if he was from the Garda Siobhana and was going to arrest you for being a poisoner, but what could she do? Kevin had started it, on about his grampa he couldn’t be bothered to come and see.

  ‘Last time I went – when I waited for you – I talked to him.’

  ‘About being arrested?’

  Kevin seemed surprised at that and stared at her. ‘Arrested? Who’s been arrested?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘No, nothing about anybody getting arrested. He talked about going.’

  ‘Going?’ Magda said dully.

  She knew it all along. This was his warning, maybe, to tell her she was under suspicion, like on late night television where somebody knew somebody was going to rob a bank and they started up with the music thumping away and the guns came out and you knew the girl wasn’t going to get away with it and her boyfriend was going to get shot.

  ‘They keep wondering who it is who’s asked to go.’

  Perhaps it wasn’t her after all, this going? Magda was lost. She kept her eyes on her tea now, wanting to be out of this. It wasn’t at all pretty or romantic or interesting, just frightening, with Kevin of the police here wanting to know things she shouldn’t even be talking about.

  ‘I want your help, Magda.’

  ‘Help? Of course. I’ll try.’

  ‘Thanks. I knew I could depend on you.’

  She nearly screamed out in excitement, ‘You did?’ but managed to keep quiet. ‘Well, if I can,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘It’s Grampa. He says somebody’s stealing medicines.’

  ‘They’re what?’ She felt her cheeks prickle and knew she’d gone ashen. Kevin was staring at her.

  ‘Somebody is taking the medicines they give to the old folk. They all talk about it. Grampa told me about it. The old folk are all scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘Of being poisoned. By whoever’s taking the medicines.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘They don’t know. Grampa said it was from one or two of the older people. Never the same twice, but the medicines and tablets keep on going.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  This was horrible news, crucial, definitely the major risk she had to avoid. Clearly a warning from her patron saint, who was St Mary Magdalene and who had engineered this meeting with her young man to give her the warning that the Gardai were on her tail. Maybe they were sent from the Dail Eireann to spy on her?

  ‘The old ones talk about it. One said it was somebody on the staff who was going to put paid to the old ones who had written to the Ministry.’

  ‘Who are they? Wrote to which Ministry?’

  Kevin looked evasive, and spoke with his eyes on the door, like expecting sadness to enter itself and sit right down.

  ‘I can’t say. Grampa was clear in his old head the day I went. He said they’d asked him to talk to me, me being of na Gardai.’

  ‘What
do they want you to do?’

  ‘To find out who’s stealing the medicines to kill the ones who have written to the Ministry.’

  ‘Why should anybody do that? Kill anyone, I mean?’

  She felt rather than heard God go ho-ho-ho, like a Father Christmas on the pictures, ringing his bell in the street outside snowy shops in New York. She had to keep up the deception, because what else could a poisoner do except keep on pretending she wasn’t going to do anyone harm?

  ‘To keep them quiet.’

  ‘From the Ministry?’ Magda had no real notion of what this Ministry was. She’d thought it part of the Church, but here was Kevin talking as if it was something to do with the Dail in Dublin.

  ‘Yes. They said they’ve seen it before.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘It isn’t, Magda.’

  She loved the way he used her name, like he’d known her such a long time. She liked him and found herself, full of sin this thought that jumped into her mind, wondering what it would be like bestriding him instead of Bernard to come and do his puffing and sweating and breathing into her neck.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No. They remember now they’re old, how it was when they were small children. It’s always the ones from the Industrial Schools and the Magdalenes that worry most.’

  ‘Is it? I was a Magdalene.’

  ‘That’s why you are safe, Magda. Why I can trust you.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, with a feeling of dread.

  ‘When they were small? Complaints always got punished. Sometimes they were so evil it isn’t right to tell. Except I believe you have to, like that Holocaust thing they keep on about, them old gypsies and Jews and homosexuals and that.’

  ‘Jews crucified Christ.’ It was the only thing she knew for certain. Gypsies now, and homosexuals?

  ‘Magda, they are long since gone. The ones around today did nothing wrong. They’re just knocking about, like you and me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she cried anxiously, to keep there being no row between them except for this old business about some old Ministry. Who cared about things like that? Writing wasn’t probably much anyway, if you really went into it. ‘You’re right, Kevin.’