Bad Girl Magdalene Read Online Free PDF Page B

medicine, which was a grand relief because it meant Magda’s prayers were being answered so far. This was wondrous because it meant that one or even two tablets from any of the old people’s bottles would not be missed, most probably.
    So Magda’s store in her room hidden behind her one-grill Baby Belling cooker, went up gradually.
    Lucy kept falling during the nightmare, and it was all Magda’s fault because she was to blame.
    She sometimes imagined that same questioning, with God saying, ‘Magdalene Finnan, if that’s your name, what if I, in My infinite mercy, allowed the clocks to go back to the time before Lucy fell to her death? How about it? What would you say? Yes or no?’
    And Magda knew she would answer, ‘No, thanks, Lord God. I couldn’t bear to go back among the Magdalenes, not even for that.’
    ‘You sure, Six-One?’
    ‘Yes, Lord God. I’m so ashamed. I’m so sorry, Lord God, but I’m not up to much. Forgive me, I pray.’
    ‘Then it’s down to you that Lucy, your friend, keeps falling in that old nightmare. Just you remember that, OK?’
    ‘Yes, Lord God,’ Magda in this particular dream kept saying back, kneeling and keeping her head and eyes cast down so she didn’t stare Him in the Face and see His agony at her backsliding nature.
    It was all the more piteous when she kept remembering how God had died on the Cross for her sins, and here she was adding to things and making it all worse.
    ‘Yes, Nurse Maynooth,’ she said again to something, and got down to cleaning the sluice.
    The priest came that evening to give Extreme Unction to a dead old folk, and the whole of the St Cosmo was deathly quiet. The old people were shut in and kept themselves quiet and sombre as if working out who was oldest and who was next.
    The store of tablets, by innocent planning and meticulous taking of chances, grew until finally Magda had almost plenty of little white tablets, plus a few pinkish larger ones, and a variety of small coloured oval jobs. And she knew it would soon be time to judge when she was ready. In a way it was sad. In another way, it wasn’t anything of the kind.

Chapter Four
    The first time Magda did it with Bernard the Garda was the time he saw her back to her room in the girls’ resident block the day an old man called Mr Brannigan died. He bled from his mouth and Magda had the awful task of cleaning up the mess. There was blood everywhere, and his sheets and blankets were soaked dark brown, very little of it looking like the red of her month and that the cowboys and Red Indians shed once they got shot in the chest in the westerns Magda loved on the night TV. Only once had she been to the Gem Cinema on Connaught Road down beyond the Blackrock bus stop, but it smelt musty and she was troubled by so many people.
    Mr Brannigan had been a soldier, very brave some people were saying after he passed on, in the wars when he’d gone fighting. He had scars on his chest. Mrs Borru turned lucid for an hour or two after hearing of Mr Brannigan’s death and smiled to herself and began to tell how, to Magda’s horror and the scandal of God’s ears should He be listening, which of course He would be, Mr Brannigan and she, Mrs Borru, had been kind to each other in the lantern hours when the place was asleep.
    ‘When who was asleep?’ Magda had asked.
    ‘Everybody, silly girl.’
    ‘Kind? What about?’
    ‘Solace, silly. A man needs solace, whatever his years. It’s what women are for, even in this place.’
    ‘What place, Mrs Borru?’
    ‘This place. Don’t you listen? You’ll do bad at school, cloth ears you have, never listening to a word anybody says.’
    ‘Kind, eh?’ Magda remembered saying that fateful day when Mr Brannigan died. ‘That must have been nice.’
    ‘It was,’ Mrs Borru said, dreamy and smiling distantly at the far wall where the Sacred Heart was in a coloured effigy showing His Heart to the cruel sinful world to demonstrate how hurt it was when people were