Prologue
This place that was built for women, although it had nice walks and hedges, could only have been designed by a man; there was not a flower to be seen. The edifice itself was a forbidding prospect at the best of times, with its grey, featureless façade broken only by the utilitarian sash windows that had been designed into all three storeys in the most monotonous manner. On this overcast morning in 1982 it was particularly depressing. The dull grey sand-and-cement plaster was unadorned with anything that might be suspected of flamboyance, such as pebble dash. It was occupied exclusively by females, with the exception of two outdoor staff, a jack-of-all- trades and a gardener. The pupils were all girls. The teaching staff consisted of nuns, ranging in age from their early twenties to the oldest, who was in her nineties, or lay women.
There was shrubbery alright, and nicely laid out gravel paths, all well maintained by the gardener. He was skilled and had been there for many years, although all he did was follow orders.
The young woman who had come here about twenty minutes ago was somewhat preoccupied with the expectation that she was on her way to a difficult meeting. She was aged in her mid-thirties. She had a strong, emphatic presence, and she wore her black hair short. Her comportment was upright and resolute, and anyone who examined her face would be made aware of her sense of determination.
She knew there were some flowers in the chapel, and in the main hall, but even they were not for the delectation of the nuns or pupils; they were there for the Glory of God. There was certainly nothing that might be regarded by the authorities as ostentatious.
On one occasion when she was here the sun had been shining and she could not think of a more tranquil place to be, flowers or no flowers. It had been made known to her that the nuns had taken on an outside contractor to cut the grass and rake the gravel path. She became aware of a man walking along, carrying a machine of some sort. She took no notice, all the time deep in the kind of reverie that sunshine, hedges and gravel paths could engender. There were nuns there too, also taking the air at the time. Some of them were reading.
Suddenly the air was rent by the most awful noise. The man was deploying the machine he had been carrying. The sound was shocking, and very loud. Thought, never mind meditation, was impossible. There was a circular head on this machine, down near the ground. Everywhere the youth directed that part of it, she could see, blades of grass were made to fly in all directions. She heard later that this article was a new-fangled thing called a strimmer. It had a petrol engine and was designed to automate the work of clearing long grass and weeds. It did not last long. On subsequent days, when she was in a position to observe, the grass and weeds were being tended to by someone with a hand-operated hoe and trimmer.
Now the young woman had made her way to the place of her appointment, and was sitting in the hallway outside the office of the Reverend Mother. This was a dreary spot. The bare stone slabs of the floor made common cause with the distempered walls of the corridor, which looked as if they were weeping, by virtue of the droplets of condensation that glistened upon them.
The office door opened. She was beckoned in by the head nun herself. Mother Superior walked around to the other side of her desk and sat down, but there was no chair on the outside. There was one parked up against a wall to the left, but it was too far away for the young woman to fetch without betraying a sense of independence, and she did not want to do that now. It would have been seen as untoward, even insubordinate, by the habited woman opposite.
“Do you know why you were asked to come here?” Looking up.
“No, Mother.” Looking down.
“We have received information that suggests, it’s a terrible thing for me to say this, that you might be pregnant.”
“Who, why, who would have said such a thing?” said the young woman. “That’s not true.”
She would have liked to be sitting now, or even to have had something to hold on to. The front of the desk was inviting, but not an option.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you that. But you must surely know that for an unmarried teacher to become pregnant in a convent school such as this would give the gravest possible scandal to the pupils. Even to the staff.”
“I know that, Mother.”
There was a barely perceptible trembling of the young woman’s upper lip. The nun was now looking at her with the utmost intensity.
“Have you something to hide? Are you telling me the truth?”
The young woman stood up to her full height. That made her tall enough, and the fact that she was standing was probably a help.
“I’m getting upset because I cannot believe that anyone would be so wicked as to tell you something like that about me.”
“Can you assure me that you are not going to have a child?”
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t need to remind you that the fact that you were previously in holy orders places an even greater responsibility on your shoulders when it comes to matters of public morality and occasions of scandal, as a teacher in the convent.”
“No, Mother.”
There was a jarring hiatus then. The young woman knew she must not avert her gaze from that of her interlocutor, nor break the silence. Eventually it was the Reverend Mother who did both of those things.
“Alright, Helen,” she said, looking down at and closing the folder on her desk, “I’m glad we got that resolved. You can go now. Go with Christ.”
Chapter 1
2014
CONSTANCE McCARTHY
They’re talking a lot about the Magdalene laundries, after the disgrace of the mother and baby homes. They discovered hundreds of dead baby’s bodies in one of those places down in Galway.
There’s talk of compensation from the government. That’s be a good one. How do you compensate someone for taking away years of their life? One thing is for sure, though, nobody still has any real idea about what went on. A man came to interview me about my time in the laundry in Waterford. He hadn’t a clue. He said he was from a commission. That word meant nothing to me, but I learned it and made sure I’d remember it after he left me a form that had it written on it.
Well, I told him. He wrote it all down.
What a terrible country we had in those days, and it’s not fixed yet, not by any means. But at least it is coming out into the open. The Taoiseach has called the Galway place, Tuam it was, a chamber of horrors. I’m 68 now. At the time I was 16, so that’s 52 years ago that this happened to me. OK I wasn’t pregnant or anything like that. So I didn’t see the inside of a mother and baby home. I was sent to a Magdelene laundry. Down in Waterford. This was all because of two interfering busybodies who thought they had a right to tell people what to do. How to live their lives. One of them owned a chemist’s shop. The other was a priest. Was I badly treated? Of course I was. I was denied a proper education, after the priest had told my mother I’d get one in this place I was sent to. I had to work in the laundry for about ten hours a day. That was the extent of my education. Apart from religious instruction of course. We had to get up before six o’clock every morning to go to mass. And the rosary. We had to say the rosary for practically the whole day while we were working, led by a nun.
But hard as that was, it was nothing compared to what happened to one of the other girls. She was about a year older than me. I was right there, and it was extremely hard. How could women, because they happened to be nuns, inflict such cruelty on another woman, someone who was just growing up? Did it have to do with them being what they call celibate?
My father died in 1961. I know my mother found it hard to cope after that, and I know I was probably a bit of a rebel.
Before he died my father had given me a present of a camera for Christmas. Me and some of my friends went down the river in a boat that belonged to one of their fathers. There were both boys and girls on that trip. The boys did a bit of horsing around, splashing water up on us. I took some photographs. When I came back I brought them to this chemist’s shop to have them developed. The owner didn’t like what he saw in my photos so what did he do? He gave them to the priest! Then the priest arranged with my mother that I’d be sent to the Magdalene laundry in Waterford. I was there for the best part of two years.
When I was there I became friendly with another girl, who was a year older than me. She became pregnant, or she might have already been pregnant when she was sent to the laundry. We all looked out for her until she had her baby, and then we all doted on him. He was lovely. He had a beautiful head of black hair, and big, brown eyes. They were like what I’ve read about in Mills and Boon, what they call a deep, liquid brown.
But if we treasured this child, we were only in the ha’penny place compared to the love his mother gave him. He was the apple of her eye, the centre of her world. She played with him, she fed him, she changed him, and nothing was too much trouble for her to make sure he was as well looked after as she could possibly manage, given where she was. I have no doubt he was the last thing she thought about before she went to sleep, and the first thing that came into her mind when she woke up in the morning. She had him until he was over a year old. Can you imagine how close they became during that year? They have a word for it now; they call it bonding.
And then… And then. In the very early hours one morning I was woken up by terrible screaming. It was coming from the bed of my friend who had the baby. At least four nuns were around that bed. Two of them kept the baby’s mother, who was in a terrible state, a prisoner, while two more were busy taking her child out of its cot. Their black habits made them look like giant versions of the savage scald crows I’ve often seen in the fields. Me and a few others tried to help our friend, but we were beaten back by the nuns. They were using these long thin rods, they call them switches, to beat us with. The blows left welts on our skin. It probably took them no more than a few minutes to steal the baby, but while it was happening I noticed there was one who held back. She was much younger than the others. She took no part in what was going on. I know now she stopped being a nun sometime after that. She became a lay teacher, although she still works in a convent school, here in New Ross.
Then the nuns marched out of the dormitory with the baby, who was never to be seen again, at least not by its mother or by any of us. I was shaking, but my friend was ready to die. She was beside herself. I will never, ever, forget it.
1982
Ned Rocket had left his pub and turned left. He appreciated his home town, especially on a bright, fresh day like this. The extent of the quays on the other side of the street that fell down to the bridge was visible, and he could see the buildings that used to be warehouses over a hundred years ago on the left. Now they were shops and apartment blocks. There were a fair few people about. Good for his commercial neighbours, he thought, Accessories, Ladies Wear, Lingerie, the shoe shops.
As he turned into Quay Street he was wondering, once more, about the structuring. He was happy with his prose, but for it to work his new one needed to be more than well-written. People who took the trouble to read a novel, especially if they had paid for the privilege, also wanted a coherent story.
He wasn’t really aware of the woman, except as simply another occupant of the street, until she fell. It looked like she had made a misstep into a small hole in the road. Then she was recumbent, just in front of him. How terrible for her. His first instinct was to get her back on her feet as quickly as possible to end the embarrassment she must be suffering. His problem then was how to do that. What part of her body could he get hold of? She was in her late thirties, a bit more than average height for a woman, strongly built, but nothing like overweight. He settled on an elbow. Then between them both she was standing again. It had happened so fast, when all was said and done.
“Would you like to sit down?” he had said, without really knowing where this could be accomplished. There was a café a little way up the street, he knew, and he gestured towards that.
“No, no, I’m all right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. It could’ve happened to anyone. They really should maintain these roads properly.”
She had moved a little bit off, and it occurred to him that she was anxious to get away, to put this incident behind her.
“Ok,” he said, but not before her face and form had been imprinted on his brain.
ANTON
When it was all over I remembered a debate in college, years before. “Ideology wrecks people,” a speaker had said. “Your average sociopath will use it to their advantage without ever believing it, but when normal people subscribe to its principles, whatever they are, it removes from them the need to use their own judgement in individual cases. They can follow the ideology and throw everything else out the window, including their compassion.
“Especially their compassion.”
The first time I met Helen she was with some of her friends in the lounge of the hotel where I stayed. This would have been in about 1982. We got into conversation because one of the two women sitting with her, Alison, worked at the shipyard, and I knew her from there. We were all four of us sitting at a round high table, on stools, sipping our drinks. Something, I know not what, brought into my head the recollection of the time I had seen this biology lecture.
“I used to come home late in the evening and tune into the Open University,” I said.
“Were you doing a course?” said Alison.
“No, no, no course. In those days you could access an Open University broadcast on TV late at night without any trouble. The one I had hit on this time was biology or something like that. The presenter was dissecting a rat.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about this,” said the second one I didn’t know.
Helen piped up:
“I’m interested in biology. In fact, I’m interested in most things.”
“The rat had been gassed,” I said. “It was quite dead. The lecturer put it onto the dissecting table and turned it onto its back. It had its little legs sticking up in the air.”
I remember glancing up to see what effect my words were having. Was I indulging in a sly smile? I’m afraid that kind of thing might just be one of my least attractive traits in situations like this.
“The camera was in front of this table, slightly raised, and the man with the scalpel was behind it. Then he sliced into the rat from its neck down to the end of its torso. When he opened it up you could see…”
Alison shrieked. The second girl said, quietly:
“I don’t think we want you to go on. If we had joined a biology course it might be okay, but we haven’t.”
There was a pause in the general conversation. I held my counsel. Helen had said nothing up to that stage. Then she said:
“What could you see?
“There was a tapeworm inside the rat.”
As one woman the two friends of Helen decided that it was time for them to go to the toilet.
I continued with my audience of one:
“The professor explained that he had infected the rat with the tapeworm earlier. This creature took up the whole length of the rat’s abdomen. It survived by intercepting the rat’s food after it had eaten it, and used that for its own nourishment. This made it the quintessential parasite. Of course, it had to evolve a mechanism for allowing the rat to have enough food so that it wouldn’t starve, because it’s important for all parasites to make sure that their host stays alive.
