The Pull of the Stars(67)

Bridie grimaced. Mary O’Rahilly’s a sweetheart, but he’s a thug.

I was knocked off balance by that matter-of-fact sentence. Her husband?

Well, he wallops her, doesn’t he?

She read my appalled face and saw that this was news to me. Oh. Couldn’t you tell?

She wasn’t triumphing at all; she was just thrown by my na?veté.

It added up. Young Mary O’Rahilly’s timidity, the many things that seemed to make her husband cross…and the old blue marks on both wrists. She’d claimed to bruise easy, and I, gullible as a probie on her first day, I’d left it at that.

Bridie, I breathed, you know things you shouldn’t. Especially not at about twenty-two.

Her half smile was rueful.

I admitted, No one’s ever lifted a hand to me in my life.

That’s good, she said.

I’m beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.

Bridie didn’t contradict me.

I moved along the flat middle of the roof. I found a pitched section and put down one of the blankets against the slope. I squatted to sit, tucking my skirts around me to keep the cold out, and leaned back on the clammy slates.

Bridie fitted herself beside me.

Button up your coat to keep warm, I advised her. And here, lean forward—

I swept a second blanket over our heads and down behind us like a cloak. No, a magician’s cloth. I shook a third out to cover our knees.

Tell me about it, I said into the silence. Your—the home. If you don’t mind?

The pause was so long, I thought Bridie probably did mind.

Then she said, What do you want to know?

Anything you remember.

I remember it all.

Her face worked as she thought about it.

She said at last, Old pee and rubber, that’s what I smell when I think of it. So many of us had accidents in the night, see, that at a certain point they said we could just sleep on the waterproof undersheets and spare the laundry.

It was in my nostrils now, that acrid reek.

There was this one teacher who’d come into class, going like this—Bridie wrinkled her nose in imitation. Every day she’d call out, Who can I smell? Who can I smell? But the thing was, Julia, we all smelled.

That’s terrible.

She shook her head. What was terrible was how every one of us would throw a hand in the air, eager to call out another girl’s name, name her as the smelly one.

Oh, Bridie.

A long minute stretched while I let all this sink in.

She said, Then there’s the beatings. I can feel them in my bones.

I cleared my throat. Beatings for what?

She shrugged. You might be made an example of for sleeping in the wrong position, or sneezing at mass. Writing with your left hand, losing a stud off your boot. Having hair that was curly, or red.

I reached out to the faint fuzz of amber escaping from her pins. Why on earth—

They said it was a mark of badness and hung me up by my bun from a coat hook.

I pulled back my hand and put it over my mouth. Couldn’t you have told someone about the mistreatment? A teacher at school, say?

Her smile was dark. Oh, Julia. Any lessons we had were in the home—it was the school too, see?

I saw.

But in fairness, they weren’t all divils there, she told me. A cook we had in my last years, she took a liking to me. She’d lay the apple skins on the very top of the scraps so I could nick them when I carried the bucket to the pigs. And one time a whole half a boiled egg.

My mouth was flooded with sour.

Bridie went on. I was no hand at knitting Aran jumpers or embroidering vestments, so I was put on novenas. We nibbled on candles those days, or paper, or glue, anything to put in our stomachs.

Novenas? I repeated. As in nine days of prayer?

Bridie nodded. People paid the convent to have them said for special intentions.

That flabbergasted me, the notion of children praying on an industrial scale, children so hungry they’d eat glue.

She added, I loved it the odd time they hired me out to farms, though. I could snatch a few berries or a turnip here and there. Cattle feed, even.

I tried to picture that, the small redhead worming her way between two cows to scrabble in their trough. When did you start work?

As soon as we were dressed in the morning.

No, but what age, roughly?

Bridie didn’t answer, so I rephrased it: Don’t you remember a time before they made you knit or weed or say prayers?

She shook her head a little impatiently. The home needed running. We had to clean and cook and mind the little ones as well as do the money jobs to earn our keep, see?

Such lies! I exploded. The government pays per head.

Bridie blinked.

From what I’ve read, the monks or nuns just run these places for the state. They get a lump sum for each child in their custody every year to pay for food and bedding and whatever else is needed.

Is that right? Bridie spoke with an eerie calm. We were never told.

I realised it was the same shameful trick used in the institution a few minutes’ walk away through these dark streets, the place where women such as Honor White were obliged to work off the costs of their own captivity for years on end.

Enough, said Bridie.

But—

Julia, please, let’s not waste any more of this fine night raking over bad times.

I tried. I gazed up at the sky and let my eyes flicker from one constellation to another to another, jumping between stepping-stones. I thought of the heavenly bodies throwing down their narrow ropes of light to hook us.