Bad Girl Magdalene Read Online Free PDF

the brown bottle and stored it in a paper tissue in her pinny pocket, as if it was no more than a paper handkerchief she intended to use for hygiene around the old folks, in case she sneezed.
    She kept it wrapped for darkness in an old Bisto Gravy bottle, well washed and dried in the oven at the St Cosmo kitchen, so as not to wash out any of the poison power in the tablet. It stayed back in her bed-sit like it was simply an empty gravy bottle, and became a slowly growing store of poisonous white tablets over the weeks.
    By the time she made sure it truly was Father Doran by going to sit at the front in St Saviour’s, she had severaltablets. Now she was certain. Tomorrow, she vowed to steal another one.
    She became skilled at the art. She made sure she called Nurse Maynooth to see next time Mrs Borru spilt her tablet bottle over the side of her bed. It was during a TV Old Tyme Music Hall from Leeds in England, where they sang and all dressed up in old time clothes like in the time of Queen Victoria, bad cess to the country that was condemned to perpetual excommunication by the Holy Father himself. Magda pointed out to Nurse Maynooth that the old lady seemed to have fewer tablets than there had been this very morning.
    Magda didn’t tell it in confession, not all of it. She simply said she had been careless with the tablets of some old folk where she worked, though she made sure she hoovered everywhere ‘after having a careful look under the beds and everywhere,’ and the priest always gave her three Hail Marys and one Our Father for penance. That was as far as Magda ever got of a Saturday when she confessed about the gathering of poison tablets ready to kill Father Doran. Indeed, Magda had a sense of fair play so strong that she once went to Father Doran to confess that she had ‘tried to make sure that the old people’s tablets were always counted exactly right,’ adding she wasn’t sure for they sometimes spilt them.
    He reassured her, which was really kind. Magda was careful, however, not to push her luck by going to him for confession every Saturday, no. She went instead to Father Culkin and even Father Duddy, who scared her stiff with his black swarthy hair and his loud voice, and whose black hair even seemed to grow down to his finger nails like a gorilla’s.
    ‘You’ll turn to stone standing there, Magda,’ Sister Francesca said crossly one day after Magda had stolen another tablet,successfully, she thought, until much later after she’d done the deed, ‘when I want you to be scouring the kitchen swill out for the refuse collectors.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Sister Francesca.’
    ‘Then get on instead of being sorry and you won’t need to,’ Sister Francesca gave back, sharper than ever that day, though usually she never gave much blame around. ‘There’s one old lady worse than ever, and her husband’s come in sicker than herself tonight.’
    A grand opportunity came to take more than one poison tablet from another old folk’s bottles three days later. It was easy. Magda pretended to count out the whole bottle of white tablets (though she couldn’t be sure it was the same poison as the little white things she had a store of in the Bisto Gravy bottle back in her place) after a lady died. She counted the tablets, all three sorts, out with utmost care after Nurse Maynooth and Mrs Jenny MacLehose had been told by Sister Stephanie to clear out the bedside cupboard because they were about to perform the last offices and wash the body. She couldn’t do the counting, of course, just pretended.
    She left the small bottles, all three in a row, on the bedside locker, and Nurse Maynooth said well done and even Sister Stephanie said it was good to see one of the girls being so careful, as she took the bottles of tablets away.
    And Magda saw her later washing the tablets, and one small bottle of sticky cough medicine from the stock cupboard, down the sluice sink without even counting any or measuring the sticky cough