Free Bad Girl Magdalene by Jonathan Gash

condemning harlots about lipstick and putting powder on your face and hanging out of windows looking at street lads and soldiers but who was the cleverest saint in the whole of God’s Church Militant, even counting St Augustine who had been a bad child and a worse lad and who wrote it all down to warn sinners.
    ‘You go to Hellfire if you don’t tell everything,’ Grace warned.
    She was a saint herself, with all the stinky stuff she had to sluice from the old people in the Care Home. One was especially foul – not his fault of course because he too was made in the image of God Almighty, but he was old as the hills and shat his bed. It was a lucky day when old Mr Liam MacIlwam didn’t shit his bed and need the whole bedclothes changing.
    Magda didn’t mind helping in this terrible chore because it was like when Christ was crucified. The women and them saints who put Christ into His shroud and then put him into that old tomb of His, well, they must have polished Him up because that’s what is the ineffable duty of women. So Magda said a prayer to Christ when she helped Grace to wash Mr MacIlwam’s bedclothes, and it was the one that Sister St Union said was meant to tell you how to keep your soul clean andpure for the time when you and God would become one in Heaven, so you had to stay clean all the time, in thought, word and deed. And it was this:
    Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas, et circumdabo aktare tuum, Domine, ut audiam vocem laudis.
    Which meant, Magda had learnt by heart from listening to Lucy, who read the English out to her when they were allowed to share a Small Roman Missal at Holy Mass:
    ‘With the pure in heart I will wash my hands clean, and take my place among them at thy altar, Lord.’
    This was as far as she could get, because Magda could never get the hang of reading, which was the reason she still had something of a limp on her left leg, from nuns giving her a right whack with that old round ruler they often carried, though some were rounder and longer than the ones other nuns carried.
    She dreamt of the time when, with maybe some friend from outside if ever she found one, she would get learnt her letters, but there they stood on that old page and never jumped into her brain like they did for Lucy. It was unfair, Magda would have thought, if she’d dared to think like that, that Lucy hadn’t had the power to leave a will in writing, so the courts would see it through for her to get Lucy’s great gift of reading. Then Magda would be able to read away like any old priest and any old nun and wouldn’t be slow and simple, because that’s how she learnt she was too stupid to read.
    ‘There is a place in Heaven,’ Sister Annuncion told her more than once, which was really kind.
    ‘For me, Sister?’
    ‘Of course for you, stupid girl. Who else?’
    ‘Because I can’t read like the others.’
    Magda had just guessed she was rising nine, and had marked the day down as her birthday, so naturally she was interested. But this was when Lucy was still alive and hadn’t been carried off by the White Spit, that the nuns called TB. It was strange that, because Lucy’s spit was rusty, then bright red and even full of blood and nothing in it of grolly – as the girls called the phlegm that was thick and pussy yellow when you got a bad cough – and it should be called Red Spit, though what did a girl rising nine know if she couldn’t even read? God rest Lucy, though.
    Anyway, she was cleaning up old Mr Liam MacIlwam, who had shat himself again, when she saw he was wide awake. And looking at her. She was embarrassed, because the old man was always fast asleep when the nun – this particular day it was Sister Claire – did his last wash, which included his lower regions where nobody was allowed to see because there were men’s things that women hadn’t to see.
    ‘What?’ she said.
    Sister Claire was gone down the ward to bring the clean sheet and the plastic under-sheet that was always put under