About Matilda (34 page)

Fifteen, Reverend Mother.

She stares right at me and I turn my eyes down to the table.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, surely. The most important vow, Matilda, is the vow of obedience.

You mean do what I'm told?

At all times.

Even if I think something is wrong?

Especially if you think something is wrong. That's why it's called obedience. Don't worry about it now, it will all become clear in time. But, tell me, did you find yourself being drawn, Matilda?

Drawn, Reverend Mother?

Like a thirsty man crawling through the desert is drawn to water?

All the time she's talking, she's closing her open palm, slowly, carefully making a fist. It's as if she's crushing a flower.

That's it, Reverend Mother. I was drawn.

Towards God, Matilda?

Towards the wardrobe, Reverend Mother.

Reverend Mother bangs her fist on the table so hard the typewriter clacks. She moves books, papers, pens, rosary beads around her desk and finally lifts the Bible, ready to throw at me, till she realizes what she has in her hand. Now she's screaming at me to leave that habit and veil on her desk. She never saw such a sacrilegious act. Now, here I am standing in
bra and girdle and pink bloomers and that's more than she can take. She tells Gabriel she wants my case packed. That girl will be on her way to Cork within the hour. I'll make the arrangements personally.

Gabriel's face is redder than I've ever seen it. Her mouth tightens and her eyes narrow and she stares hard at Reverend Mother. She puts her arm around my shoulder and walks me to the door and tells me to wait outside.

What about the bloomers, Mother?

Later, Matilda.

I'm out in the corridor in the pink bloomers, where passing nuns lift their eyebrows and cup their hands over their mouths before slipping into a side room each one telling the other, Wait till I tell you what I'm after seeing outside in the corridor, Sister. Every time the door opens I see them rocking back and forth on the sofa, tears running from their eyes. Helpless with the laughter.

Through the window I see Sister Rose in the garden burning weeds and twigs. Raised voices come from behind Reverend Mother's closed door, but I don't know what they're saying. I don't even have time to worry. Gabriel comes out and closes the door gently. She stands in front of me like a woman who's just gotten something off her mind.

What's happening, Mother?

Nothing, Matilda. Nothing at all.

Will I come back in the morning, Mother?

Do. But for God's sake, Matilda, try leaving things alone.

I look up at her and smile. All right, Mother.

There's a smile on Gabriel's lips because, this time when I called her Mother, she knows I meant it.

She cradles my face in her warm hands and kisses my forehead. She puts her arms around me and hugs me tight. I hug her back and it feels right. I feel like I imagine any girl
with a mother would feel. I know Gabriel isn't my real mother but right now that doesn't matter. She's the only mother I've known, and for that I love her.

Later, I go to my room and take the blue poncho from my locker and walk over to the nuns' garden. The garden is like a Christmas card, snow on the tree branches and the windowsills. Sister Rose has gone inside but the bonfire is going strong and the heat dries the tears on my cheeks.

I leave the poncho burning on the flames, and walk away.

I've never been this scared walking through the wicket gate. I'm in a world I know nothing about. Cars seem to pass quicker than before. They honk their horns and screech their tyres when I cross the road with my empty suitcase. People on the pavement hurry past with their umbrellas up. They stare at me, walking along with the suitcase over my head, trying to keep dry. Their eyes say it all. You don't belong out here. Go back where you belong.

Sister Kathleen is the matron in St Mary's Hospital. My hands tremble knocking on her office door, while an old man with a walking frame shuffles down the corridor. The nurse beside him tries to hurry him.

Come along, Brendan. We don't have all day.

The old man shuffles over to me. Where's your ticket? Who left you in here?

The nurse tells me to take no notice and rolls her eyeballs under her eyelids as she leads the old man away by the elbow.

That girl should have a ticket. This place is gone to rack and ruin.

It is, Brendan. Now come along, there's a good man.

Matron calls me into her office. It's a strange office, but then it's a strange hospital. It's small and gloomy with just a crack of light through the yellow Venetian blinds and smells of old leather shoes. I expect to see Humphrey Bogart sitting there in a hat, smoking a cigarette and calling me Punk. There's a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall, his heart pumping red and his head tilted to the side so you pity his sad face. Sister
Kathleen is sitting behind the desk in a navy uniform. Her eyes dart from me to the empty suitcase.

I hope you appreciate the opportunity we've given you. I've told Sister Gabriel I'll take you for the summer. On trial, so to speak. If you work out I'll consider making you permanent.

Yes, Sister. Sorry, Sister. I mean Matron, Sister.

You are sixteen, I take it?

I am, Matron.

I don't know what to do with the suitcase. Leave it down or hold on to it. If I leave it down she'll know it's empty and think I'm a right oddball walking around with an empty suitcase and send me back to the convent for being demented.

I hang on to it and lean a little to one side and put on a painful face as if the thing weighs a ton and hope she doesn't ask me to leave it down or say, Oh, that suitcase looks terribly heavy, give it to me. Then what would I do?

You start at seven and finish at four. Under no circumstance bring anything from outside to any patient. It's a rule.

Yes, Matron. Already there're rules. I should have known.

Wages are paid on Thursday. Fifty pounds a week, less ten for your keep.

Thank you, Matron.

What size are you?

Five feet seven.

I meant your clothes.

Sorry, Matron. Size eight.

She hands me a blue smock from the drawer under her desk that she tells me belonged to the girl had the job before me. Another hand-me-down.

Change it in the laundry for a clean one every Tuesday.

Yes, Matron.

You're a religious girl. You say your rosary every day, do you?

I did in the convent, Matron.

Just because you're out here with the rest of us is no reason to change. Now come with me.

I follow her flat white shoes moving quickly up the corridor. Her arse is wide in the navy uniform and the cheeks sway from side to side but she walks straight and swings her arms like a soldier and moves as silently as the tick of the silver watch pinned to her breast pocket. She leads me to an old dormitory in the attic. Another dormitory. I should have known that too.

The room smells of stale cigarettes. It has five iron beds along the wall and it's just bright enough to see mine in the far corner, where the roof slopes to meet the wall. There's a girl sleeping in the first bed but the others are all made, white, neat and tidy. Matron tells me to unpack; I can have the rest of the day to myself. Start in the morning.

The mattress is thin and the bed squawks when I sit down and I get such a fright I jump up, so the sleeping girl won't wake up roaring abuse and what the hell do I think I'm doing causing a racket at this hour?

I don't know what to do with myself. There's a small locker on one side of my bed and on the other side a wooden press with three drawers. The bottom drawer is mine and even on my own I'm embarrassed I have nothing to put in it. A window above the bed is big enough for my head to fit through. I can reach out and touch the red-brick wall in front of me and look down to the narrow alley from where the smell of cooking drifts up from the kitchen below. Cigarette butts parade the sill like toy soldiers. I find out later, Mags Riley, who sleeps in the next bed, never uses an ashtray. She doesn't even put them out and I spend half my night jumping up to check if the bed's on fire. But I'm frightened to say anything. Not because she's older and bigger and has arms like a man. Not because she's
rough or tough. I was reared with the roughest and toughest. It's because she's from the outside and everything out here is new and frightening. Even the old patients are new.

I wonder if I've made a mistake.

There are four wards in the hospital, two for old women and two for old men, with twenty iron beds, all numbered, in each ward. I have a mop, a bucket and a bottle of lemon cleanser and every morning I mop and clean. Polish the wooden lockers and shine the windows. I change the sheets with Nurse Agnew. She has a shiny round face and wears a blue plastic apron so the shit won't stick to her bright white uniform.

The old woman groans when we turn her over in the bed and Nurse Agnew roars at me, Don't let that pan drop.

But it drops with a clatter on the tiled floor, sending piss and shit hopping off the walls.

Nurse Agnew calls after me. Come back here. Come back this instant. Matron!

Matron chases me into the bathroom and yells to the back of my head I'll have to get used to it. I'm stuck to the floor of the cubicle and she tells me there's no room here for weak stomachs. Up out of it. She pulls the chain and the spray goes in my eyes, up my nose, and I'm puking in the bowl again.

Then I help with the breakfast and medication.

The medicine is on the trays in clear plastic thimbles. The trays are numbered and there's a number for every bed. I found out after I gave number seventeen to number twenty-seven and had the old woman in seventeen asleep all day and the old man in twenty-seven singing, ‘I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen' to Matron and wouldn't stop for two days.

I pity the old people, like the bald Missus Sutton in number thirteen. I know how broken-hearted she is over her wonderful daughter and son-in-law who came to take care of her. She
boasts how they never missed a day taking her to hospital after she broke her hip, and how they wheeled her to chapel every Sunday. She insisted they wheel her to the solicitor, so she could sign over the red-brick house, and how the very next week they sold up and moved to London and left her here to die. She begs God to take her so she can be with her dead husband who stands at the end of the bed each night, telling her it won't be long.

Mister Phelan in bed twenty has a purple nose full of holes like a sponge and tells everyone he's going to marry me. I turn red every morning when he almost tumbles out of bed trying to peer down the front of my blue smock when I polish his locker. He laughs, Christ, if I was twenty years younger, we'd make a fine couple. What would you think yourself?

Mister Stacey with the white hair in the next bed says, You should have been dead twenty years ago.

Let me outa this bed. By Jasus, Stacey, I don't need to be twenty years younger for you, yeh aul bollox.

Walking sticks rattle the iron beds and wheezy chests laugh and croak till Matron with her navy uniform and Sergeant-Major walk barges in.

What's this ruckus?

The old men lie back and rest, their eyes blind, their ears deaf, while she parades up and down looking for someone to pick on. She stops at Brendan, sucking an orange in number seven. The other old men say he worked in the Coliseum picture house that's closed now, which is why he's tied to the bed at night. Sometimes he escapes and goes around the wards with a toilet roll for a flashlight, waking everyone, looking for tickets.

Matron pokes him in the ribs with her bony finger. What's this? We have a bin for orange peel. Haven't we?

Brendan jumps up in the bed.

Tickets, please. He glares at Matron. Who left you in here? Then whimpers when Matron takes his bag of oranges away.

You can have them back in the morning, if you behave.

She fixes Brendan's sheets. Checks the green tubes coming from his nose and tells him, Sleep now till we call you for the late show.

Two days later, Brendan is dead. Matron closes his eyelids and bends over him with her rosary beads in her hands whispering an Act of Contrition in his ear, and I look around the ward, wondering who'll be dropping off next. I'll miss Brendan and hope he's in a place where cinemas never close and batteries never die.

I know Matron said not to bring anything for the patients, but it's hard to refuse after Brendan is carried out white and stiff and Mister Phelan with the purple nose leans out of his bed. Matilda, would you do an old man a kindness?

I will if I can, Mister Phelan.

Don't mind that Mister Phelan. Call me, Frank.

I will, Mister Phelan.

Do you ever go to town, Matilda?

I do on my day off.

He whispers behind his hand. Can you get me Jack Daniels, Matilda?

What bed is he in, Mister Phelan?

Oh, Holy Jesus. He rolls back on the bed with the tears and laughter coming so hard he has to beat his hand on his chest but that only sets him coughing. He rolls to the other side of the bed and churns up ropes of green phlegm into a hankie he keeps under his pillow. He wipes his mouth on the bed sheet, rests back on the pillows and you can hear his chest wheeze every time it goes up and down. Wait till I draw breath. Christ, you're a tonic. Better than any doctor.

He reaches under the mattress for a ten-pound note and
tells me call to the off-licence on the Quay. Tell them it's for me and you'll have no bother. There's two pounds change. Keep it.

I couldn't, Mister Phelan.

Take it and don't have me to get out a this bed to you.

Thanks, Mister Phelan.

I'm delighted with the two pounds. I'll give it to Danny for pocket money so I can get him away from stealing. After all, it's my fault he's doing it.

Next pay day, Matron wants me in her office. I feel like I'm back in the convent with Gabriel taking money for curses and broken cups, the way she dangles my wage packet between finger and thumb because she knows I need it. She wouldn't do it to Maggie Riley or any of the other helpers, but I'm a Shep and I have to be grateful when she tells me I'm to do the night shift. Without a job she knows I have no place to go but back to the convent. All I need do, she says, is sit in the aisle between the beds and call the night nurse if a patient tries to escape.