Bad Girl Magdalene by Jonathan Gash Read Free Book Online

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 drivehome. 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, butnobody 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 trustingin you staying awake and keeping watch to keep away wolves from the fold or other dangers, or in case it woke and wanted