September Starlings (20 page)

They sang another hymn and Sister joined in. It was a beautiful song about the Lord being a shepherd and about not being afraid of death. Then Mr Evans’s box was lifted high by the men and they carried him out. As the sad procession passed us, I turned to look at the door. Father Murphy was holding one side open, and Sister St Thomas held the other handle. Katherine was there, with that tiny black veil perched on the back of her carrotty frizz, and our headmistress stood with the priest, her head bowed in prayer. Sometimes, people’s goodness gets in your eyes and makes them so full that the tears come silently.

Those lovely sisters gathered round me, and Father Murphy gave me a sixpence and a big hug, said what a brave girl I was. A man arrived by my side and spoke to me. ‘Are you Laura?’

I nodded, too full for words. They had come, my sisters, my priest, my friends, and they had defied a piece of church folklore by attending Mr Evans’s service.

‘He said you’d to have this,’ said the black-clad man. He had red-rimmed eyes and a big nose. ‘Thank you for looking after him, love. He was a good dad to me.’ For the rest of my life, I was to keep that sovereign. Even when the dark days came, I managed to hide it, managed not to sell it for food, for clothes.

The cats found homes, settled and thrived. Henry was spoiled rotten by the sisters, sat in French classes, English lessons, was never impressed by any of our syllabus. Solomon assumed a new importance, because he was a living piece of Mr Evans’s legacy. In my garden, I played with him, fussed over him, bought fish with my spending money. And Mother continued to fret because next door’s feline was on her property. So my love for her, if there
ever was a seed of affection, did not grow. Like Mr Evans’s last dahlias, it failed to flourish. But my guilt thrived in all weathers, because disliking my mother was a grievous sin.

I didn’t do it. To my dying day, I would carry the scar in my heart, because I was innocent. The worst thing was that they sent for my father. They seemed to know things about my mother, seemed to understand that she should not be summoned. So they phoned Dad at the shop and he came to school, looked smaller there than he did at home, a bit lost in Sister Agatha’s office.

Sister Agatha was the headmistress. Her heart was full of love, but she never let her face know about it. Sometimes, her face was like an empty house, no movement, no expression, just blank and absent. Perhaps she was praying or meditating when she looked distant, or perhaps she had learned how to appear noncommittal and unprejudiced. ‘Mr McNally,’ she said gravely. ‘We found these in your daughter’s desk.’

‘These’ were a pearl rosary and a white missal with the price tags still attached. My father picked them up, weighed them in his hands, returned them to the desk. ‘My daughter is not a thief,’ he said.

Sister Agatha leaned back in her chair, swept her eyes over me, then over my poor father. ‘Every other girl in the class has her own rosary and missal. Laura is fascinated by the faith, so she must have taken these from the repository.’

‘I’ve never been near the repository,’ I said, my temper beginning to simmer. ‘And if I did go, I’d pay for what I wanted. And,’ I mumbled heatedly, ‘Norma Wallace hasn’t got these things either, because she’s not a Catholic.’

Sister Agatha rattled her beads, then clicked her tongue. ‘Norma Wallace would not steal things and put them in your desk, Laura.’

I was getting really worked up by this time. ‘Neither
would I, Sister. If I was going to steal something, I’d make sure I hid it well away from my desk.’

‘Ah.’ The cold grey eyes flickered momentarily. ‘So you’ve it all worked out, have you?’

‘No.’

Dad stepped nearer to the desk. ‘Sister, I would bet my life that Laura didn’t do it. If she’d done it, she’d say so. She has a rosary at home – mine. There’s a missal too, in Latin and in English.’

She put her head on one side. ‘So you are Catholic and your daughter isn’t?’ She made this sound like a charge being read out in a court of law.

He straightened his shoulders in preparation for an argument. ‘My parents were Catholic, but my wife isn’t.’

‘You married out?’

He nodded, seemed cowed.

‘She hates Catholics,’ I shouted. ‘It’s not my dad’s fault. Mother says that Catholics are only any good when it comes to educating people.’

Sister Agatha ignored me. ‘Mr McNally, you must excuse my digression, as we are not gathered here to discuss your faith or your lack of it. Laura has taken these things from the repository during recess. We keep our stock on display so that the children may choose freely when they want a holy picture or a missal. Laura took the items without attempting to pay for them.’

‘I did not! Why won’t you listen to me? Why do you keep talking about me as if I’m not here? I did not take the bloody stupid things!’

Dad’s complexion paled when the swear word fell so easily from my lips.

‘She’s a handful, Mr McNally. A very strong-willed girl with a good brain that she fails to use much of the time. Laura has shouted before, has been disobedient, but we never bothered you till now. Stealing is not a thing I can deal with in isolation. If we have a thief in our school, then you have the same thief in your house.’

He stepped closer to the desk, and I noticed that a
muscle in his cheek was twitching, as if the anger in his mouth wanted to jump out and spit itself all over Sister Agatha’s office. ‘I shall tell you just one more time that my daughter has not stolen, that she would not, under any circumstances, steal from you or from anyone else. Her language may have been a little … adventurous just now, but Laura did not take these.’ He picked up the missal and slapped it on the blotter. ‘I suggest you look elsewhere for your criminal.’

The door burst open and Confetti fell in, her cheeks red and the veil a little off-centre. ‘Sister?’

‘Yes?’ Agatha shook her head slightly at the sight of her dishevelled colleague.

‘May I speak with you in private?’

In response to Sister Agatha’s nod, Dad and I stepped into the corridor. He stared at a red light that flickered at the feet of a Sacred Heart statue. ‘You mustn’t swear,’ he said softly. ‘But I know that I don’t need to lecture you about stealing. A soul as generous as yours would not choose to offend itself by such lowly behaviour.’

Well, my father believed in me, or so it seemed.

The office was growing noisy. ‘I tell you here and now that the child did not do it!’

‘Goretti, are you questioning my wisdom?’

‘In this case, yes. Yes, I am.’

A chair scraped along the floor, then a drawer seemed to slam shut. ‘I am your superior in this matter, in all matters connected with your work here. Did you not learn humility on your way to the altar, Goretti Hourigan? Are you still running with the wind like you did when I tried to teach you some sense back at home?’

‘You are no longer my teacher. I am not a barefoot seven-year-old now, Sister Agatha. I’m a teacher, and I work closely with that child out there. There’s trouble in that house, trouble you’ve talked about to me. Even if she had taken those trinkets, then who would blame her when her mother—’

‘Whisht.’ That was a noise the Irish nuns often made
when they were impatient and wanted quiet. ‘Leave the girl’s mother out of it and don’t be calling a missal and a rosary trinkets.’

There was a short pause. ‘They’re trinkets till they’re blessed.’

Confetti’s remark did not go down well. Agatha was probably mad because the girl she had taught in Ireland was bright and clever, was determined to have the last word too. ‘Then we shall let the matter lie. As you say, your contact with Laura McNally is a daily occurrence. Perhaps I have been hasty. But what am I supposed to think when the goods are found in her desk?’

‘That there is jealousy.’

‘Oh. And why?’

‘Because I … I try to take an interest in the child.’

My father pulled me away from the door. ‘Best not listen to any more of it, Laurie. The young one’s on your side, so you’ll be all right.’

I stamped a foot. ‘I want to leave. I want to go to a proper school with real teachers in real clothes instead of blackout curtains. I’m fed up with everything, specially the dinners and being called a thief.’

He smiled sadly. ‘Life’s unfair. Growing up is just learning to accept the unfairness.’

I turned on him, my frustration making me unreasonable. ‘You’re never there. I’m stuck in that house on my own or with her when she comes back from wherever she goes. And you don’t talk to me as much as you did and I can’t go next door and … and everything is horrible.’ I breathed rapidly, puffed myself up for the big drama. ‘I wish I was dead.’

A hand touched my shoulder. ‘You’re a bit young for those words, Laura.’ It was Confetti. ‘Usually a girl is twelve or thirteen when her parents hear that sort of noise. And then it’s all “I should never have been born” and “It’s your fault that I’m here.” But then, you are advanced in some ways, Laura McNally.’

‘I’m not a thief.’

‘And you’re no mathematician either, so don’t brag about the good points.’ She looked kindly at my dad. ‘You shouldn’t have been dragged all the way up here, Mr McNally.’

He pulled at his collar, appeared to be embarrassed by the whole episode, as if he were unused to witnessing real emotion. ‘Send for me, Sister. If you’ve any problems at all, don’t tell my er … don’t hesitate to call on me.’

Ignored for the moment, I searched for my place at centre-stage. ‘I still wish I was dead. And if I can’t be dead, I want to be at Anne’s school.’

‘Shut up, Laurie.’ He did not raise his voice. ‘There’s trouble enough in the world without you turning all contrary.’ He shook Sister Maria Goretti’s hand. ‘Thank you. She’s a good girl, you know. Spirited, but good.’

‘I know.’

He walked away and left me standing in a dark corridor with the Sacred Heart and a nun who loved me. I knew that she loved me when she said, ‘Come along of me, Miss Imp. There’ll be no dying done, for the planet needs folk like you to keep the rest of us on our toes. It’s me you’ll be the death of, so get back and do some work. And stop copying your English homework out of other books.’

This was going too far! I heaved up my spine until I achieved a height well in excess of my usual standing. ‘I don’t copy,’ I snapped. ‘That’s another lie about me.’

She chortled quietly, adjusted her veil and stuck a black-headed pin into the front. ‘Just testing, Laura McNally. It’ll be English for you at the university, then.’

‘But you said I copied.’

Her face positively beamed. ‘Well, it worked, didn’t it? Now you have to stay alive to prove me wrong. One day, we’ll see your name in print. And comb your hair, you look like an angry hedgehog.’

This was one of my more daring moments. ‘And you look like a big penguin, Sister Maria Goretti.’

She giggled like a five-year-old. ‘You still call me Confetti, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And your other good friend is old Tommy-gun.’

‘I didn’t invent that name. She already had it when I came, so don’t blame me.’ We wandered down the corridor. ‘Sister?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you never want a little girl of your own?’

She thought for a moment or two. ‘Oh yes. And I wanted a pony of my own, long hair, a big house, a handsome husband. Oh and I wanted to be a film star.’

We both stood still and stared at one another. I asked her, ‘Do you have to find the most important thing and give up all the others? Is that what grown-ups do? Like you being a nun and looking after us – is that more important than all the other things you wanted?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know. See, we had on our farm horses for field work and horses for breeding. The breeding stock were good Irish Arabs for the racing. The same thing happens with people, it’s how we’re built. It sort of comes to you when you get to a certain age. And you realize that you’re just a work horse, not a brood mare. Whatever, horses for courses.’

‘What will I be?’

She steered me towards the classroom. ‘A terrible torment. But not a thief, Laura McNally. You are never a thief.’

We never discovered who put the beads and the missal in my desk, but then we didn’t hire Mother as a detective. She found out everything, always. She found out about me and Anne meeting after school. One predictable thing was that my mother would always catch you unawares, would discover where you had been, even what you were thinking. Sometimes, she would scour me with her eyes, and I would glance quickly over my shoulder, as if I expected to see a hole burnt into the wall behind my head.

Every time I have looked back on my childhood, I have seen the same thing. Mother and me standing near some furniture, always with at least one piece between us. It might have been a table, a chair, a piano, but it was always there. She never touched me except in anger. For most of us, infancy is something we seem to view through the wrong end of a telescope, little pictures that are slightly distorted, misty round the frames. And I have always had the one endless scene, small, tinged with sepia, but a definite portrait inside my head. It is as if most of my formative years were spent in this single circumstance.

Brown is the chief colour of my early life, because the furniture was usually brown, while most walls in our house were of a dull beige or mushroom. Mother strayed only once from her ‘tasteful’ theme, allowed a decorator to paint my room yellow. For three days, she fretted and fumed about the gaudiness, then she hauled the workman back and reduced my happy room to a miserable fawn. Miserable fawn was ‘tasteful’.

In my dreams, which have often been in colour, a red light has usually surrounded my mother. Red is the colour
of anger, of lipstick, of nail varnish, so I suppose that my young brown days were edged with scarlet. Mother towered over me, is the one big thing I remember. Memories of her are not all reduced by the passage of time. Even now, her essence hovers over me, makes my spirit shrink and cower. When I was a child, she plainly needed me to look up to her both physically and mentally. Respect was what she craved and never got. Because my mother is and was a bad angel.