Bad Girl Magdalene by Jonathan Gash Read Free Book Online Page A

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 theidea 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 tocome at a run when the delivery 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