Bad Girl Magdalene Read Online Free PDF Page A

the old beds that kept falling through. Mrs Borru thought one of the men was her husband and tried telling him off to bring his van round to the side door and take the bed out through the kitchen, though of course the poor man didn’t have a van at all and wasn’t her husband.
    ‘Will the tablets be all right still, Mrs Borru?’
    ‘Leave off your worry, dear. It doesn’t do, a girl young as you.’
    Which was really kind of Mrs Borru. And maybe secretly she too was scared of the nurses or the nuns raising a fuss and telling her off. So that day Magda let the matter go, yet anxiously waited for the nurses or the nuns to come round counting everybody’s tablets and, finding one or two missing, blame Magda saying she’d spilt them and had left Mrs Borru to take the blame.
    She later told Sheilagh, who was almost as casual as Faith, because Sheilagh truly was going to be a nurse, trained and registered, when she got her exams, her father (a real live father) being an accountant with a head full of the numbers. And Sheilagh laughed.
    ‘You are a hoot, Magda,’ she said. ‘Dear God in Heaven. Who has time to go counting tablets already in bottles with thepharmacy stamp already there on the side with all them initials and letters after their name?’
    ‘What if there’s one lost, though, Sheilagh?’
    ‘Then it gets sucked up in your hoover machine, and gets thrown into the Pit of Despond.’
    Magda didn’t know what the Pit of Despond was, and wondered if she ought to search in the mounds of dust and rubbish to look for Mrs Borru’s tablet. She learnt, asking Sister Stephanie as casual as you like about it, that it was a place like Hell that an English Protestant called Bunyan once wrote about and not to bother her head. Sister Stephanie was displeased with Sheilagh for mentioning that to Magda because many girls were impressionable. The upshot was, Magda was mighty relieved and thankful there would be no counting of tablets or speculating what if one tablet got itself missing.
    Which set Magda wondering, because on the bottle there was said to be a stark warning that nobody, nobody, was to take the tablets except as prescribed by a doctor. They were poison. Sheilagh said warnings were on every medicine bottle, and that was what the letters meant.
    Now, poison set Magda thinking of Lucy, and the murder she had to be doing fairly soon.
    The one thing Magda remembered was, there was a time when Lucy hadn’t fallen at all. They were both back there in St Joseph’s at Sandyhills, in the Magdalenes, and it hadn’t yet happened.
    Part of Magda’s sorrow and determination to kill Father Doran came from the feeling that, if God Almighty Himself, or maybe some fairy, like in those pantomimes at Christmas that Magda had seen on RTE TV (men actors dressed as old women and girls dressed as young men and swaggering and talking likethey were saying poetry and everybody laughing and shouting back from the audience) offered Magda the chance of saving Lucy from falling by putting the clock back to those times when Magda and everybody was still back there in the Magdalenes, Magda knew she would kneel and say, ‘Thanks, God, for the offer, but I could never go back there in a million years ever again, so ta, but no. I accept that Lucy would stop falling if You put the clock back, but I couldn’t bear it. In fact, I’d be the one to start myself falling down the centre of a massive stairwell to certain death and burning for ever in Hellfire, sure as You made apples.’
    So Magda was a murderess in her heart even before she recognised Father Doran saying Mass that day in St Saviour’s Church, for she would never live her horrible childhood over again, not even in order to save Lucy dying over and over the long nights through. So it was right that she, Magdalene Finnan, if that was her name, should be punished by them terrible dreams.
    And in the next spell of afternoon shift of duty at the St Cosmo, Magda pinched a tablet from