Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

  There. She had said his name right out, just like he said hers. She’d heard a word ‘proprietorial’, and couldn’t find out what it meant and didn’t like to ask, but in the fillum they’d said it meant you owned a house all of your own. She felt proprietorial.

  ‘Now they’re old, they wrote complaints about them old schools and convents, from when they were children.’

  ‘They did?’

  ‘Four of them. They got up a letter and have been signing it all round the St Cosmo Care Home. It had twenty-one signatures. They sent it off. Nobody’s answered yet, but now they’re worrying lest somebody’s stealing their medicines intending…’

  ‘To kill them for it?’

  ‘Yes, Magda. That’s where you come in.’

  ‘Where I come where?’

  Her voice went into a strange high whimper. She did not want to do this terrible thing he was going to ask her. It was exactly like the night Lucy called to her – after the priest went away – in the darkness, and said she was bleeding and asked Magda to save her by doing that terrible, really horrible thing that she would go to Hell for all eternity for.

  Magda had gone and done it that night.

  And here was Kevin, that she thought was maybe going to be somebody she could pretend was her very own young man, Kevin sitting across from her in this café at the wet Formica table, saying he wanted Magda to do something really sinful, so sinful it would set maybe the whole wide world falling like Lucy. How could you ever get rid of that? It must be just like Christ felt.

  ‘I want you to do some detective work for me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  She only knew of detective work like George Raft or James Cagney in them old reruns late at night when she couldn’t sleep and she stayed up awake.

  ‘Find something out.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘In the St Cosmo Home.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘Who is stealing the medicines. Grampa said he had got it down to maybe five or six.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘On the staff of the St Cosmo. He and the others have worked it out. It can only be a few people.’

  ‘People stealing? You’d get told off something terrible for that.’

  ‘I know. They’re doing it secret.’

  ‘How does Mr MacIlwam know?’

  ‘The old ones talk when everybody’s gone to sleep. They stay awake more than young people. They last longer. Maybe they keep watch. I don’t know. But they have worked it out.’

  Magda felt herself go even more pale. Had they put her name down too? Old Mrs Borru knew for sure because she’d asked Magda outright – was it her who stole tablets? – and Magda had said no, she maybe dropped one or two. And that had been that.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I just can’t have Grampa MacIlwam getting killed by somebody mad on the staff doing it. You read of cases like that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Magda lied, not being able to read.

  ‘Some old nurses got done in America, and one in England, for killing old folk in care homes, didn’t they?’

  ‘I read of it,’ Magda lied, second time, same lie. Wondering as she spoke if some old cockerel was working up to crowing on the third time, thinking here goes again. ‘Who does Mr MacIlwam say it is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  ‘I was going to, but Sister Stephanie came in just then and he couldn’t say. He can’t write any more, so he can’t tell me who. Mrs Borru – d’you nurse her too? – knows who three of them might be, and old Mr Gorragher and his mate in the opposite alcove know of two more. There’s a sixth but they were unsure of her.’

  ‘Her?’ Magda bleated.

  ‘It’s one of the domestics.’

  ‘I’m a domestic,’ Magda said, escaping that old cockrel’s crow by a whisker.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ Truth, truth.

  ‘You have to find out fast, because the letter might get replied to any day, see?’ He meant the letter the old folk had sent to the Ministry.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, though she didn’t.

  ‘Better move fast instead of slow, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was really upset, Magda, I don’t mind telling you. I haven’t told Mam or Dad or my sisters.’

  He has no wife, then, Magda registered. Only sisters and a mam and dad. Maybe that was less complicated? She wasn’t sure, because women could have mortal scunners against anybody they wanted to all of a moment, and unasked too. But would he have mentioned a wife? She might be a harridan with talons and fangs and Magda would never be allowed to be his friend.

  ‘Will you meet me soon?’

  ‘Again? Here?’

  ‘Maybe, yes. Here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long before you find something out?’

  ‘Maybe at the weekend?’

  ‘Do you work Saturdays?’

  ‘This one, yes.’

  ‘Then here, about this time, Saturday? Be careful, in case they get suspicious.’

  ‘I promise, Kevin.’ She went red as she said it, and was glad of that because Oonagh said she was white as a sheet at the best of times. She felt better now she was the detective for the Gardai and not the suspect.

  Anyhow, she had to kill that old Father Doran tomorrow teatime, so the whole problem of Kevin’s grampa and the others worrying themselves sick about writing to the Ministry would be over and done with. And she could sleep the sleep of the just, and Lucy, rescued, would float away up to Heaven and stop having to fall anywhere at all for ever and ever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That evening, coming off duty, Bernard knocked on Magda’s door, giving a greeting to Mrs Shaughnessy. Magda made him a tea though she had none for herself. He was downhearted, there being trouble in the station.

  ‘I hate domestics,’ he told Magda.

  She sat opposite. ‘Domestics? I’m a domestic.’

  ‘Don’t joke.’

  She hadn’t been joking, though smiling came natural now she knew the ins and outs of this stout and rather florid policeman in his fine uniform. She had learnt confidence from, with, because of him and his getting on so matter-of-fact with her when she’d given him his tea.

  Today, though, he declined anything except a bit of the cake she had left. More as an after-thought than anything, Bernard ate it through, sipped tea to down it, and kept speaking about trouble in some flats near Connolly Station where a woman and a man shrieked their heads off and two children cowered in a corner.

  ‘What happened?’ Magda was so frightened by the story of the cowering children and the screaming adults that she almost asked him to stop telling her these things.

  ‘Sent for the social services.’

  ‘The children, though?’

  ‘That’s it, Magda.’ He seemed more tubby than smart this evening. Maybe it was the image of Kevin that was doing it, or maybe he was just tired out having to listen to all that yelling and abuse and seeing those poor mites trembling in fear. ‘It’s the children.’

  ‘Were they the parents, then?’

  ‘Yes. Married, but to different people. They took up with each other a year or two before.’

  ‘Where were their families?’

  ‘The children’s grandparents? I never found out.’

  ‘What will happen?’

  Please don’t say it, Magda prayed inwardly, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, please don’t let them get taken into care, please, please.

  ‘They’re taken into care.’

  ‘Them old Sisters of Mercy?’

  ‘The Church representative was Father Doran, and one of the Sisters of Mercy.’

  Magda almost exclaimed in horror. She said nothing until, ‘The barns have done nothing bad.’

  ‘I know, Magda.’

  ‘Can you go and see to them, see they’re not hurt?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Your
wife, then? I know you have a wife, and barns.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘One seemed about five, the other six.’

  They sat in silence, then Bernard reached for her. She let him open her blouse as usual, and she helped him by taking off her top so her breasts showed while he held them and nuzzled. She could scent the sweat on his head, the Garda cap tang still there though the cap was on the table.

  He put the contraceptive sheath on, casting the small envelope into the fireplace, and drew her astride him, just like he was the motorbike and she the rider. She grunted slightly as he entered. He took only a short time, shuddering abruptly, and she felt a doubt come into her mind that maybe he hadn’t really wanted to do it at all tonight.

  Still he behaved as usual after, and she sat comfortably on him, him still giving them old last jerks and sweating like a pig in his clothes. She wondered why he never undressed. Still, truth to tell, she didn’t either, not all the way, just there with her skirt lifted and her knickers on the floor, though not at all carelessly, just beneath the chair on which Bernard sat, for the sake of decency, out of sight.

  ‘See, Magda, it’s the children.’

  ‘It is the children,’ she said.

  They remained with their arms round each other, she for support so she didn’t fall backwards, him because he was that shape and his arms naturally came round her. It was designed like that, she supposed, then grew a little horrified because what on earth was God up to?

  ‘I did wrong so many times.’

  ‘You?’

  She drew back to stare into him, and found his face so sad and fractured with grief, disturbingly close. He was softening inside her and she could feel him starting to slide out. She always liked to keep him in just that little bit longer, and was trying to learn to do it by adroit working of herself to make things tighter. Usually he smiled at those attempts, and she often smiled back like in a secret joke – though what could be secret between a man and a woman when he had just spilt so?

  ‘You knew them before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How doing wrong, then?’

  ‘Children I’ve sent into the care.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the past, cases that I had to take in charge and hand to the courts.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  Magda kept looking into him. He looked beyond her, at the wall by the fireplace as she remembered the man he’d passed in the street he’d told her about the previous time.

  ‘Children around Dublin. Everywhere.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘From the courts? Sent to the Industrial Schools, and the Magdalenes.’

  ‘I was a Magdalene.’

  ‘I know, Magda. They hadn’t done anything wrong. I was sent to be liaison because I was new in those days. One lad…’

  He began to talk slowly, reflective, not really giving an account so much as a list of children who had had to be taken to be handed over. Children orphaned, disowned, of broken homes.

  Twice he shivered, this bulky man with the shock of black hair and the grand uniform gaping at his middle where she sat astride. It had seemed a year before, what they had done today, how they moved, lepping like fish tied in the one invisible net together until climax took them shuddering to silence and stillness.

  Now this.

  He talked on. He told her nothing new. She knew orphans like herself. And the lads, to hear the old men and the punishments they had endured, in an even worse plight, if that could be.

  ‘It’s like that thing in the war the old people talk of but nobody listens or cares this side of the Pond.’

  ‘What thing?’ She thought, Dear God, not another set of miseries. She couldn’t cope with the last set. Look what had happened the one night she tried to do something good for some poor girl, her friend. She was still trying to mend Lucy’s fate that she had made so much worse.

  ‘Holocaust.’

  Magda remembered that word, from grainy old pictures that were on the TV screen sometimes, arms and legs flying and thin people walking towards the camera, gaunt and full of sores with their heads shaved.

  ‘Holocaust.’ She knew it was some kind of thing to do with Jacob – was that right? – or maybe them old prophets whose names came so thick and fast they made your head spin in the Old Testament.

  ‘It’s like a children’s holocaust, only for them, with all the rest of us adults staying out of it while it goes on and on. And me sending more in, again and again.’

  She was the one who withdrew. He continued talking. She went into the little loo and cleaned herself, listening to his droning. When she emerged she could hear the contraceptive sizzling on the fire and Bernard was standing reaching for his uniform cap. He was still speaking, so flat and even as if this was a court room itself, that Magda could only stand and look at the man.

  ‘It’s only four years since the Dail said its sorries to all the children of Eire. Do you think the poor barns are not still tortured and abused? I handed over boys who got sentenced just for throwing a stone at a canal. Whose parents had died. Who were separated for nothing from their siblings.’

  ‘Yes, all of them,’ was what Magda wanted to say, but not a single sound came from her head.

  ‘Sent to roam round the streets of the Maltebior Fishing School like lepers begging food…’

  Magda watched the man’s mouth move. She could only think of being astride this man while he finished his rummaging and then, smiling, take his leave of her until next time. She even thought to herself, for what was this, for what all that? It was incomprehensible – a man doing that to a woman, and a woman doing things for the man, even if it was designed by God, His wonders to perform. She was sticky.

  There was one question, and she would get round to it soon, about what a priest should do if he felt something like this man felt when coming to call on her. It was what the whole business was, but she would work that out later when she got a moment’s peace.

  This children’s holocaust thing, though. It meant she would close the door on Bernard in his grand Garda Siobhana uniform right now and never let him in again. He was the one who still – still, after all these years of handing poor little mites over to the Holy Mother Church to be tortured and worse – was still throwing the poor mites to… She said goodbye and was alone, with God’s work to do. She and Bernard never kissed.

  Yet punishment was left in the hands of God, while you prayed for sinners and hoped God would get it right in the Hereafter. Who could prevent the holocaust of children?

  For the whilst, though, she would kill Father Doran in the morning, even if they caught and hanged her or whatever they did. Her poison might save one whole child. And if her whisky didn’t work, and by some miracle, or God’s kind intervention, she got away, she would try again maybe with some old gun or maybe some hammer, anything that might work. She was determined now, and would not give up. Holocaust.

  On the other hand, she might be lucky in the morning, and set them a-yirding Father Doran in the cemetery out beyond Parnell Square, which would be great. She had time before she went to bed to make sure her plan was exactly right.

  One of the bottles from out of the bins in the backyards of the Borro was the right shape and size, and had that English frock-coated gentleman smiling away in his great round hat and monocle and shiny boots, and it smelt just like old Mr Gorragher’s horrid fluid. In fact, there was still a trace of the stuff at the bottom when she got it home to her little flat, and she washed it carefully and wiped it clean so no fingerprints showed, because that’s what detectives searched for. You couldn’t see fingerprints unless you’d dusted them with a special brush, but you couldn’t be too careful.

  She rinsed it out one last time and poured in her tablets. Into the bottle she poured the golden fluid she had taken from Mr Gorragher’s bottle while he was being taken to the bathroom by the nurses. It was simple. In fact, so shocked was she by
her success that she knelt right down while the tablets started to dissolve and immediately said a mystery of the Rosary, praying for forgiveness. She would have used St Anthony, but he was Patron Saint of Lost Causes and that would never do. He might get her arrested, and she would become the Lost Cause and there she’d be in gaol among the lunatics and have to be thanking St Anthony for her hanging when really she’d just got hold of the wrong saint.

  She stuck to the Virgin Mary, who’d be on her side, please God.

  Before going to bed she worried whether to decant the fluid or simply leave the traces of tablet powder like greyish sand in the bottom of the bottle, and decided yes, leave it there. She would pour it out into a clean jar, wash the greyish residue away, dry it as best she could, then pour the poisoned whisky back into the bottle. Father Doran – she’d seen him take his illicit swig before – took a fair old blooter at Mr Gorragher’s secret whisky, that he did, so maybe it would all be down before he tasted something wrong. Or might there be no change in the taste at all? If God was on her side…

  Kneeling, she did her prayers for Lucy, then the children left behind in the Magdalenes, all the little boys still in the clutches of the Christian Brothers, and asked the Almighty to give the other seven Orders of persecutors a good old seeing to, if it was His holy wish, and went to bed.

  She wished she could read because then she could sit up with a cup of tea like ladies did in them late night fillums in posh hotels, but she couldn’t, so that was that. Instead, she switched her old TV set on, saw the sound was well down, and put the light out. She kept her eyes on the screen, saw it was about some old football, the lads moving so smoothly and with such grace, and tried not to see anybody who looked as though they might fall down.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Father Doran enjoyed, actually enjoyed, the talks with the nuns. Of course, if they were Sisters of Mercy there was a kind of constitutional difference. Not all Orders were the same. Sisters of the Sacred Heart were different from the Mercy, and the nuns up at Rosmonorc must be vastly removed from the Irish Sisters of Charity.