Free Bad Girl Magdalene by Jonathan Gash Page B

legs made all chapped and red and blistered from round ruler whackings.
    ‘It was the day after mitching.’
    ‘Mitching.’
    Running away from school when you were not allowed was mitching.
    Mostly the girls who mitched were the ones who had families somewhere. They were girls to be envied, because at least they had families to run away to, but the ones that got treated worst and whacked more than most were the girls who had no families at all and who came from orphanages. And they included Magda, and were a Stigma on Holy Mother Church, being evidence of past sinfulness in their families and so deserved their fate.
    ‘Tom.’
    ‘Yes?’ Magda said, being Tom for the whilst.
    Old Mr MacIlwam beckoned like men beckoned, with a kind of tilt of the head. Magda had tried this, even in the mirror of the corridor where she had to clean the wooden things with Mansion Polish, which was a terrible sin because you looked in the mirror often enough and Satan himself would stare right back at you and that would be that. In the big rectangular mirror she tried the men’s gesture, tilting her head so as to say come here, like the old inmates of the Care Home, but it didn’t look right at all. Maybe it was something the men were all taught and maybe even born with. She wondered if Christ Himself had done it to his earthly father St Joseph, the carpenter, saying, ‘Pass that hammer, St Joseph,’ or some such, or maybe instead of saying, ‘Here, St Joseph, come and see how I’ve made this television table’ or whatever it was, simply jerking His head and saying, ‘This here table, will it do?’
    ‘I wanted to go instead with Tom when he mitched off.’
    ‘You did?’
    ‘Sure to God I did. Anything to be away from them old Christian Brothers.’
    ‘Really?’
    Magda prayed hard for Sister Claire to come back with the plastic undersheet but she could hear her clear as day down the end of the room telling somebody off (‘Yes, Sister,’ and ‘No, Sister,’ and ‘I truly repent, Sister,’) and going on and on when she should be coming back fast to save Magda the terrible responsibility of hearing all this from old Mr Liam MacIlwam.
    ‘You never did, Tom, though, did you?’
    ‘No,’ Magda answered.
    ‘I watched long after you’d gone in. I took the risk, and saw Terry fall. He was blue with cold.’
    ‘Was he?’
    ‘They stood the three lads in line, all three of them, in the cold all through the playtime.’
    ‘Playtime.’
    ‘You remember when we came out to get our dinner they were all three in a line there, lying in the cold and blue. I was frantic. I cried and those two lads from Canav started laughing and kicked me stupid.’
    ‘Kicked you.’
    ‘I bled like a stuck pig all afternoon.’
    ‘All afternoon.’
    Surely it wasn’t sinful to say the words old Mr MacIlwam was telling her when she didn’t even know what the story was about? Except she was so sad about Terry being left in the cold all morning and through the midday and then into the afternoon, stiff and blue in the cold on the floor out there.
    ‘My arm got broke that time. Callum from the Frackrelett Industrial School. He was a transfer, from fighting back with one of the Brothers there. It healed bent wrong.’
    Sure enough Mr MacIlwam’s left arm stuck out at an angle that wasn’t quite right, the elbow being at an odd shape with the wrist turned as if he was always reaching into his pocket or trying to lift something that was just that bit too heavy.
    ‘The Christian Brothers said it was the judgement of the Lord for staring at Terry on the playground floor when I should have hurried into class when the bell rang.’
    ‘It was really Callum from Frackrelett?’ Magda, helping the old man along.
    ‘You weren’t there when they set on me. The whole class got punished.’
    ‘What happened to Terry?’ she asked, drawn in.
    ‘Terry got better. The other lad, Six-Nine, was taken away.’
    ‘Taken away where?’
    ‘Taken away.’ The