Authors: Nadine Dorries
‘Hiya, love,’ he shouted. ‘Do you live on this street?’
‘Yes, we do,’ replied Kathleen. ‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s been a second murder,’ said the man casually. ‘An old woman, apparently, who lives in that house.’ He pointed towards Molly’s. ‘She was found only a couple of hours ago. Do you know what her name was?’
Stunned into silence, neither Kathleen nor Maura could speak.
The man with the camera carried on. ‘Seems like we’ve got a madman living around the dock streets. That’s two murders. I’m from the
Echo
, queen. Anything you can tell me about the old woman?’ He took his pencil from behind his ear and his notepad out of his pocket, conveying an air of expectancy.
At that moment, Harry and Little Paddy, with Scamp at his heels, came running up the street, wearing their pyjamas.
Maura said, ‘My God, it’s nearly midnight and Harry is not in his bed,
and look at Little Paddy’s nose
.’
Kathleen slipped Maura a sideways glance. There had been a second murder on their own street and yet Maura was more worried about the fact that Harry was still awake and Little Paddy had been neglected.
Kathleen realized Maura’s reaction was odd and inappropriate. She needed to move her indoors.
‘How could any of the kids sleep?’ she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘With a spotlight rigged up outside Molly’s front door, how could anyone sleep?’
‘Mam, Mam,’ yelled Harry, throwing his arms round Maura. ‘Molly is dead, her head has been smashed in. Annie O’Prey found her. Molly had been missing all day until Annie found her in the outhouse.’
The man from the
Echo
wrote down every word.
‘Me ma says we aren’t safe in our beds tonight, Auntie Maura,’ said Little Paddy.
The end of his nose was cased in many days’ worth of hard dried snot. Maura made a mental note to take him into her kitchen and soften it overnight with Vaseline, then she would help him clean it off in the morning.
Molly was dead. The street was in chaos and yet Maura fixed her attention on the things that kept her sane and grounded. The trivia of domestic life.
In the seconds that followed, an ambulance almost knocked them over.
‘Molly might be alive,’ said Maura, nudging Kathleen.
The man from the
Echo
dispelled that notion in a flash of the light bulb on his camera. ‘Nah, that’s the body trolley,’ he said, matter-of-factly.
More adults moved out into the pool of light and joined the children, carrying cups of tea, smoking cigarettes and wearing their nightclothes. The boldest came first, with others following nervously, taking their cue.
An hour earlier, the entire street had been alerted by Annie’s screams when she had found Molly. Anyone who hadn’t heard Annie would have been woken by the sirens, not fifteen minutes later, as they fired down the street, announcing the arrival of the police. But by that time everyone already knew, on the four streets and far beyond.
A row of heads in curlers and hairnets began to line both sides of Nelson Street in a guard of honour. The lit upstairs windows filled with the faces of smaller children, not allowed out into the misty night air.
Silence fell upon the crowd as neighbours ceased talking in order to show their respect to Molly.
As the ambulance departed, a new feeling of fear descended upon the inhabitants.
Molly had been bludgeoned to death. Old fat Molly who made cakes and gossiped.
As the ambulance trundled down the Dock Road towards town and the siren faded into the distance, taking Molly further from the place where she had spent every day of her life, the women began to cry. The first and the loudest was Peggy. Then others followed suit until the air became choked with the wailing of frightened women.
Tommy and Jerry were walking up the street towards Kathleen, Maura and Nellie.
‘Two murders, Tommy,’ said Sheila to Tommy, as he passed. ‘Are any of us safe in our beds, eh?’
Tommy couldn’t answer. He touched his cap and walked steadily towards Maura, whose dark eyes radiated fear.
The only sound he could hear was that of Molly’s cat, Tiger, howling on the back-entry wall.
T
HE TACITURN NUNS
led a sobbing Kitty upstairs to a room in the eaves. The floorboards were bare and each wall was lined with a row of wooden-framed beds. Upon each lay an uncomfortable looking ticking-covered horsehair mattresses.
On one of the beds lay a dark blue pair of long shorts, a dark blue top and a white apron.
‘Put the clothes on, please, Cissy,’ said a novice.
‘I don’t want to,’ sobbed Kitty. ‘I want to see my mammy.’
‘You don’t have that choice, I’m afraid.’
Kitty noticed that Sister Celia carried her leather bag. Kitty didn’t want anyone else touching her precious belongings and so she leant down to take the bag from her.
‘Ah, not so fast, thank you,’ said Sister Celia. ‘We take this. You can have it back on the day your family collect you. You are very lucky, young lady. If it weren’t for the midwife, you might never see them again.’
Kitty was speechless. No one had ever spoken to or looked at her with such unkindness.
Sister Celia continued, ‘There are rules here. You will speak to no one, ever. Do you understand?’ Kitty could not believe what she was hearing. ‘No one. Not a soul. We don’t want the poor girls who won’t be leaving to be upset by your good fortune in having the midwife as your relative. No one here is allowed to speak. Do you understand that? We have penitents here who will have no one to collect them. They atone for their sin fully and so we don’t want them upset, now, do we?
Do we?
’
Sister Celia shouted and Kitty visibly jumped. ‘Now, get those clothes on and we will take you over to the laundry.’
The nuns stood and watched her. Kitty stared back, waiting for them to move away and allow her some privacy. They didn’t budge.
‘Hurry up. Have you something different from the rest of us, Cissy?’ Sister Celia sneered. ‘Pity you weren’t so shy when you were dropping your knickers for your five minutes of fun, eh? Not so shy then, were you? Get dressed.’
Kitty moved over to the bed. With her face burning and tears streaming, she removed her own clothes and put on the blue calico outfit that had been laid out for her.
The nun snatched Kitty’s clothes from her aggressively as Kitty held them out in her shaking arms. To Kitty’s utter horror, Sister Celia turned Kitty’s still-warm knickers inside out and, holding them almost at the end of her nose, inspected them through her thick wire spectacles, squinting as she did so. She sniffed the gusset and, looking up at Kitty with a smirk on her face, she hissed, ‘You dirty sinning whore. Not your fault, eh? Well, we’ve heard all that before and these knickers tell us differently, eh?’
She turned away with everything Kitty could call her own in her arms.
Kitty didn’t know how she survived the day.
The work in the laundry was hard and there was no food until evening. She thought she would faint.
There were girls of her own age and many much older. Not one dared speak a word. Silence reigned the entire time whilst she plunged dirty sheets into the large sinks.
The laundry was filled with the sound of hissing steam and the noise of rollers and trolleys being wheeled in and out.
The only distraction arrived in the afternoon when the nuns, seemingly on the verge of hysteria, ran round the washrooms, demanding to know where a girl called Besmina had gone. No one knew, but Kitty noticed the looks that passed from one girl to the next.
Hours after she began work, a girl who seemed to be about her own age, with short red hair and freckles, passed her a wicker basket of dirty clothes. As she did so, she whispered, ‘Don’t cry so. Ye will make yourself sick. We will have a natter tonight, after they put out the lights.’
She gave Kitty’s hand the gentlest of squeezes.
Kitty had finally lain down on the dormitory bed, having carefully watched and followed what the other girls did. Minutes after the nun had said a prayer and put the lights out, Kitty became aware of the noise of rustling sheets and feet pattering on the floorboards.
Then a kindly voice whispered, ‘Come on then, shift up so we can get under yer blanket and have a natter.’
Kitty opened her eyes to a circle of girls standing round her bed.
They told Kitty about the routine and how they survived it. She learnt about the missing Besmina, who had been in the laundry for years. Her family had never returned to collect her, but every day she used to imagine that she saw her mammy, who had died years earlier, walking up the steps and knocking on the Abbey door.
‘God knows where she is now,’ said Aideen, the girl who had spoken to Kitty in the laundry. ‘She was mad to escape and has tried so many times. She always ends up being brought back and then she gets punished so badly with the stick, poor Besmina.’
‘I know my family will come for me,’ said Kitty quietly. ‘I counted the days today when I was washing. My mammy will be back for me. I know she will. I will count them down every day.’
They talked on Kitty’s bed for over an hour.
‘Not all the nuns are scolds,’ said Aideen. ‘We have new ones every now and then. They all start out nice.’
‘Aye, but once they’ve been here a few months, they turn into fucking witches,’ said an older woman on the end of the bed who had hardly spoken until that point.
Some of the girls had already birthed their babies, but had to stay, working without pay in the Abbey until the children were three years old, because they couldn’t raise the one hundred and fifty pounds without which they couldn’t leave. Kitty could hardly believe what she was hearing.
‘I had my little lad two years ago,’ said Maria, in a quiet voice. ‘I have one more year with him and then he will be adopted and live with an American family. I pay my way here by working in the laundry and the parents in America will pay for his adoption. It’s a win all round for the nuns. They use our baby money to buy their grand silver and Persian rugs, so they do.’
‘Is Cissy yer real name?’ asked Aideen.
Kitty was shocked. How did Aideen know?
Before she could reply, Aideen elaborated. ‘We were all given different names on the day we arrived, and we can only be called by saints’ names but, sure, it doesn’t happen anyway. We are only ever called by our last names. No nun has ever called me anything other than O’Reiley since the day I arrived.’
‘My name is Maria but on the day I arrived they told me that my name is now Frances.’
‘They can’t take away your name,’ said Kitty as she sat further up in the bed. She felt enraged at the notion that someone could have their name removed. She was only hiding her name; it wasn’t being taken from her. She was still Kitty.
‘Aye, they can and they do,’ said Maria.
The older woman spoke again. Kitty thought that she looked the saddest. She later discovered that she had been in the Abbey for five years and that her baby had long since gone but that she had no home and no money. Ever since, she had remained in the Abbey, working twelve-hour days every day for no pay and at the mercy of Sister Assumpta’s whim and temper.
‘Just be sure to never speak,’ she advised Kitty. ‘Even if you are at the rollers in the laundry and ye think the noise will drown out what ye is saying, it won’t. The witches have fuckin’ good hearing, now they do. They will hear and ye will be sent to the Reverend Mother and when ye are, she will beat ye with a stick so bad… See this.’
She pointed to a thin, bright-red weal down the side of her neck.
‘And these.’
She held out her hands to Kitty, who inhaled sharply at the sight of the cuts across the older woman’s palms.
‘I got the stick because Besmina disappeared, like it was my fault. Besmina was put with me on the corridors and the bathrooms this morning. I’m just warning ye…’ She tailed off as she saw the look on Kitty’s face. Kitty was appalled at the idea of a woman, the age of her own mother, being beaten.
The light from an oil lamp at the bottom of the stairs crept under the door. In seconds, everyone had fled to their own beds.
Kitty lay awake. The footsteps, belonging to the lamp-carrying nun, clipped away into the distance.
The gentle breathing of her roommates became deeper as they succumbed to exhaustion. Kitty heard the unfamiliar creaks and groans of the building as it moaned in objection to the wind buffeting it from all sides. Her eyes adjusted to the starlight shining in through the skylight opposite her bed, illuminating the faces of the sleeping girls.
She thought about the harvest, which might almost have happened weeks ago. Could it have been only yesterday that she met Aengus? She felt for the charm bracelet Maeve had given her. It was still there. She removed the bracelet and tucked it underneath her mattress in case a nun saw her wearing it and took it away.
As the faces of Tommy, Maura and her siblings filled her mind, she thought about home. She wondered, would the baby even know who she was by the time she returned? Everyone and everything felt as though it belonged to another life, a life she had left. Was it only this morning that she had arrived?
As she closed her eyes, she heard Sister Evangelista praising her English essay and remembered her pride when she had won a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, the class prize for reading. A feeling of utter homesickness overwhelmed her. Tears ran silently down her cheeks. She had never slept in a room with so many people nor ever felt so alone.
‘Not long,’ she whispered, as she scrunched the bed sheet tightly in her hand, as though it were a rope holding her onto the edge of sanity.
After breakfast the following morning, a novice instructed Kitty to visit the Reverend Mother’s office before she began work in the laundry.
There had been no talking at breakfast. Everyone remained silent while the nuns ate their bacon and sausages, and the girls their milky gruel.
Once the ordeal was over, the girls sat straight-backed on their wooden pews, hands folded in laps, waiting to be dismissed to the toilet before work. Kitty closely watched what they did and copied them, exactly.