About Matilda (15 page)

The priest makes the sign of the cross over us and says he'll pray for us. We turn our faces away and mumble, Thank you, Father. The priest closes the doors behind us and slams the bolts across, leaving the old man in the pew to find his own way out.

He's what?

Pentecostal, Mother.

Oh my.

Gabriel is sitting at the kitchen table embroidering one of those pocket-handkerchiefs and says she'd better send for Reverend Mother. She can handle the drunks falling in here but she's never heard of a Pentecostal. What is it exactly, Sheamie?

Sheamie straightens his glasses. I don't know, Mother.

Reverend Mother doesn't know either but she's certain it's some class of a heathen and what would you expect from a man who doesn't show his face for four years even to visit his poor mother. She says one thing is for certain, while we're under her roof we'll do as she says and that's all there is to it.

My father stays for the summer and each day he calls to the convent there's an argument with Gabriel over God and our education. We're backward and stupid. We know nothing about the outside world. He wants us to have office jobs when we're older so we can support him in his old age and for that we need education. He makes us sit in a circle in the playground and Mona has to ask us our spellings, but I don't want
to think about that now because some days he is good to us. He brings us to town and buys clothes and sweets and gives us money. He even bought us black jumpers with a big red letter G on the front. Reverend Mother had a fit because she thought we were taking God's name in vain till we told her the G was for Gilbert O'Sullivan who is from the Cork Road. I knew she still wanted to take them but she's having enough trouble with my father without fighting over jumpers.

Gabriel never knows what to say to my father. She just stands as far back from him as she can. Some days she sends for Father Devlin but Father Devlin can't handle him. By the time my father goes back to London in September I'm so pissed off with penguins screaming in one ear and my father screaming in the other and making a show of us in chapels I don't know what to think anymore. It seems like everyone is trying to save us. Father Devlin wants to save us from sin. The nuns want to save us from my father. My father wants to save us from the nuns. And all the time we're stuck in the convent.

Sometimes I sit on my own in the green shed and wonder if any of my life is real or is God just testing me. I wonder if the people around me exist when I don't see them and where do they go? Do they just vanish like my mother? Are my brothers and sisters really my brothers and sisters? Do they feel like I feel? Hurt like I hurt? Cry like I cry? When they laugh, do they feel the same way I do when I laugh?

Thinking about it gives me a headache. It's too big for me. It's like trying to think about algebra. Sometimes I think God is like Santa Claus. There's a different one in every shop and none of them ever comes to the convent.

Halloween night, my belly is stuffed with apples and nuts and Pippa gives my shoulder a shake in the bed. Come on, Matilda.
We'll sneak over to Trinity Park to play spin the bottle. You can see her blue eyes twinkle in the moonlight and I know she's excited.

Since when did you start kissin', Pippa?

Never mind.

Come on tell us.

I went with Mona a few times.

Why don't you go with her now, then?

I don't know where she is.

Well, tough. You're not usin' me just 'cos Mona isn't here.

Pippa doesn't answer. She ties her blonde hair in a ponytail and pulls the blankets off me but I tell her I'm asleep and I don't want to go spinning stupid bottles and kissing stupid youngfellas with spotty faces tryin' to put their hands up me jumper.

They won't try puttin' their hands up your jumper, Matilda, 'cos there's fuck all up there. Ah, come on girl, it's only kissin'. Just don't let 'em put their tongue in your mouth. 'Cos I told you already, that's how you get babies.

Don't be so stupid, Pippa. I seen the girls down in the toilets bent over the toilet bowl with their knickers around the ankles and the workmen queuing up outside the door.

Liar.

Suit yourself.

Pippa doesn't want to hear anymore. She just wants to go over to Trinity Park. I pull the blankets over my head again but she still torments me. Come on, Matilda. Don't be a scaredy cat. You have to do it sometime.

I'm not going.

Scaredy cat.

Don't care, I'm not going.

Scaredy cat.

All right. I'll go.

I climb out of bed, get dressed and we creep down the corridor. From the bathroom window we can see bonfires lit all over the city. We climb out the window. A few windows further on the girls from the group next door are swinging from bed sheets tied to the heating pipes. We shin down the drainpipe and climb out over the wall just as the fire truck roars past with its blue light flashing and bells ringing. Across the street, under the yellow light of a lamp pole, a gang of boys and girls from the estate are puffing cheap Albanys they bought in Kennedy's shop after one of them asked a passing grown-up, Hey, Mister, will yeh get us five fags? Some do, others say, Piss off, yeh little bollox.

A boy in a tartan jacket offers me a drag. Pippa says, Go on, Matilda, but I won't because of the running and Pippa doesn't push it. She knows it's a waste of time.

Young kids in masks and costumes go from door to door collecting money and slowly our group moves from the lamp pole and heads for the field behind the houses. There're about ten of us. We strike matches till we get to the top of the lane. The iron gate is cold and rattles under us when we climb and once we're in the field we stand and wait for the light of the moon to come from behind the clouds to show the way to the chapel ruin where the grown-ups can't see us. A dog howls.

I'm goin' back, Pippa.

It's only a dog, Matilda.

I know it's a dog. I'm not deaf. You're mixin' me up with Mona.

Very funny, says Pippa.

Yeah, well you asked for it.

Would you two ever shut the fuck up!

Mind your own business.

The damp from the grass seeps through our sandals and
when we get to the ruin we sit in a circle around a small fire we light from bits of twigs and papers we find.

The empty milk bottle spins and clinks on the concrete floor and I want to go home again but the bottle is slowing. It passes Pippa, her blue eyes glowing in the firelight. Slower again, passing the girl with the ponytail. It rattles a bit, then stops, pointing to me.

I have to kiss George O'Brien. His mother scalps him to save money on haircuts so he wears a wool hat with a pom-pom and he's the spottiest youngfella in Trinity Park. No, the world. He's thirteen and I wonder if you can kiss a boy who's thirteen when you're only ten.

Pippa is laughing her head off telling me, Go on, Matilda.

I'm not kissin' him, Pippa. Fuck that. Take that mask off a your head, boy.

I'm not wearin' a mask, Matilda.

Could a fooled me.

Everyone shouts, Go on, Matilda. My face is on fire. I lean forward and a tongue rushes at me from the firelight.

Put that tongue back in your head, boy. I'm warnin' yeh.

Scaredy cat, scaredy cat.

Pippa says, Thought you said nothing could happen to you over tongues, Matilda.

Something'll happen to him if he doesn't put it back in his gob.

The tongue goes back in his mouth and I lean forward. I close my eyes and my mouth. I feel him close. I hear him breathe. His lips touch mine. They're soft, warm, minty. It only lasts a second. I'd a done it for longer.

We've just got back from Christmas in our grandmother's house when a black car with white tyres, a real oldie like you see in gangster films, parks in the green shed beside the nuns' blue mini-bus. A purple-faced man carrying a brown leather briefcase steps out and looks down, checking his shoes haven't been dirtied. He's dressed in a blue suit and blue tie over a yellow shirt and he's wearing gold glasses. Nobody runs over. He doesn't look like the kind of man you run over to. He stands there for a minute watching us play ball, then walks past us and goes inside to the convent. I see him again in the evening walking around the playground with Reverend Mother and Reverend Mother doesn't come to the playground unless there's something big going on.

We're all trying to find out who he is but Gabriel won't say and you'd never know where you'd meet him. At the back of the chapel in mass, walking down a corridor, peeking out a window at us in the playground and then writing stuff into a notebook. I'm certain he's a spy only I don't know who'd be spying on us. The big girls say he's from the lunatic asylum. I don't know what's going on. Every night at bedtime we gather round Gabriel in the corridor and it takes days for her to give in. She's not getting out of here until she does. Even the toddlers are pulling at her black skirts, though they haven't a clue what's going on, but if it's something we want to know then it's something they want to know too, because you can't have secrets in here, even from toddlers. Gabriel tells us the
Purple-Faced man will be here for a week and each of us will see him in her office, separately.

We complain. No way, Mother, you're not puttin' us in a room with a looneytoon.

Stop that silly talk. Mister O'Donovan is a respectable man. Saturday morning, leave your clothes in the kitchen and be ready when you're called.

You mean all our clothes, Mother?

Down to your underwear.

I am scared. I don't want to be in a room alone with a stranger, even if he's not a lunatic.

Saturday morning, I'm sitting at the kitchen table with Lucy, Pippa and Holly Green from the group next door. My jeans are fired over the back of the chair I'm sitting on. There's a pound note in the back pocket that Uncle Philip slipped me getting out of the car when nobody was looking. I wasn't going to take it.

The room smells of washing-up liquid from Doyler clanking cups in the sink. We're wearing knickers and vests, except Pippa, who's wearing a trainer bra and a smile, but she loses the smile when four big girls shout in the window that he's a dirty bastard and he'll make us take our knickers off. Doyler fires her tea towel at the glass.

I hear yee over there. I know what yee're up to.

Pippa asks, Will he Doyler?

Doyler bends to pick her tea towel off the floor. What's that, Pippa?

Make us?

Make you? Make you what? If those girls try making you do anything you tell me.

Not them, Doyler.
Him
.

Yes, Pippa, it would be a sin.

Pippa coughs. The pink going from her cheeks and that
grey look she gets when her asthma comes on. Gabriel glides in from the corridor clapping her hands and tells us to wait outside her office. I don't know what to do with the pound. I can't leave it in my pocket or it'll be robbed, or, worse, Gabriel might find it and ask how I got it and why didn't your brothers and sisters get a pound too? Are you doing something you shouldn't be doing? Can you answer me that, Matilda?

Lucy is first in and I lean against the wall with Pippa and Holly Green. Holly is about twelve. I don't really know her that much apart from the playground. She's small and wide and when she walks her knees don't bend. Her arms don't bend much either. She always reminds me of Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
. I had a fight with her once but I can't remember why. I think it was just because she was in the group next door and we had nothing better to do. She's making faces at me and if she doesn't stop she'll be in another fight. Gabriel comes out from her office and sits in the chair in the bay window clacking her rosary beads and mumbling her prayers. The watery sunlight comes through the glass and it's like she's sitting in a grotto. The big girls at the window behind her make faces, trying to worry us over knickers. Pippa is behind me snapping her bra straps and there's a worried look on her face. I'd ask Gabriel if we really have to take our knickers off but she'd box me on the head for interrupting the Sacred Mysteries. There's nothing to do but wait and worry until Lucy comes out and Gabriel brings Holly Green into her office. Pippa and me gather round Lucy.

What'd he do to you, Lucy? Pippa asks.

I had to put somethin' in a hole.

That finishes Pippa. She collapses against the wall, clasping her throat and trying to breathe. Lucy runs away down the hall. I want to run for help but Gabriel comes out of her office with Holly Green and the Purple-Faced man. He takes one
look at Pippa and tells Gabriel that Pippa is to go straight to the Infirmary. Gabriel brings Pippa down the corridor to find a nun to take Pippa to the Infirmary in the mini-bus and the Purple-Faced man goes back into the office and closes the door. I grab Holly by the arm.

What'd he do to you?

She sticks her tongue out and tells me to mind my own business.

Make me.

She tries to pull her arm away and I tell her I'm not messing.

So?

She knows I won't fight in here. You'd never know who'd turn up when there's nobody to do look-out.

Your father's an alco, Holly Green.

You can't be talking about fathers. At least you don't see my father in here killin' us over spellin's and shit.

He would if he could get up offa the footpath.

It doesn't matter what I say. She has it over me. I let her go because I don't want her to know how scared I am of the Purple-Faced man. She pulls her arm away like she made me leave her go. People are fuckers when they have it over you.

Gabriel comes back and sends Holly down to the kitchen to get dressed and go back to her own group and sends me inside.

The Purple-Faced man is sitting at the polished table reading one of my school copybooks. He has a thing around his neck for listening to my heart but I'm certain he can hear it hammering away in my chest.