Margaret5

There was strangeness in my head as if something foreign and foolish had found its way into my blood. Late nights tossing and turning turned days upside down and the half-light of frosty mornings in my bones, felt like a haunting, in the way I reclaimed my body. My eyes, crusted over like clamshells, cracked open. A creeping fog of inertia filled me more fully than a fistful of Dandy, Beano, The Broons and Oor Wullie comics. Time dragged my lumbering, plodding, tortoise body through into the safe berth of night again. The furry chalk speckled patina on the hidden edges of a tongue, too big for any human mouth, tasted of another defeat by hypodermic needle.

Sister Rosemary was positioned near the door. There was a reason for it and a reason for her, but I just couldn’t work either out. The hard round crystal black rosary-beads were scuffed hemi- hexagonal by the soft sighs, hushes and scented secret musings of her tender fingers. Prayer-beads parcelled off her body into holy terrain in a tight noose around her neck and seemed, when my eyelids flickered and eyes rested on them, like a chain-link trophy, a throw back to primitive pelts, God conquered and domesticated, and I remembered my father Seamus, already a broken man, crucified by sadness, trying to be brave; Capstan Full strength and guilt his only pleasure. The ironclad rota of routine church life ticked off souls. My recalcitrant youthful bloom that had lapsed under the cover of sickness was a mere appendage, to be worn down by death on a cross, one more body to be untouched and forgotten, locked into another cycle, in the decades of Sister Rosemary’s life. Routine kept her as securely locked into the sick room as me. She too had lost her childhood to the self same orphanage and her virginity to a God she wasn’t sure existed. Mother Church kept her as she kept me.

Sister Rosemary and the kitchen staff put me on nun’s rations. First thing, she sat diagonally across, by the edge of my bed, with the head of an egg spooned warm, an invitation for toasted soldiers laid out like a prowl of kings on my plate ready to be scoffed down. Maybe it was her nun’s training in thrift, or maybe she was just big-boned, because when I turned my back on her to find sleep, she didn’t seem to mind breaking rank and I heard the crunch of her teeth as she chewed all in front of her like a donkey finding fresh pasture.

Little by little, my body adjusted and brought me back from the dead world of sleep without dreams. Little things like the heaviness and scratch of the blankets against my big toes and the way the boils in my mouth started to burst when I chewed began to poke my body into awareness. My eyes watered as if adjusting to dry land and the world tasted of pus, or the dilute of TCP lotion, I was made to swill, like the prayer for Grace, before and after meals

As suddenly as a cloud forest rolling over the Old Kilpatrick Hills outside the far away window, my clothes were laid out in a neat little pack on the folding chair at the side of my bed. As I scrambled to put them on I realized they no longer felt right. My grey school shorts were too tight and blue school shirt seemed to have shrunk. Only my black-toed shiny shoes fitted the same. But there were no mirrors and although my feet felt funny, as if they were in blocks instead of shoes, I’d have danced all the way back down the stairs to be with my pals in the communal dormitory.

‘Go on then. Scoot.’ Sister Rosemary almost hopped as she pushed me towards the door. For one horrible moment I thought she was going to kiss me on the cheek. But she stopped short and just patted me on the head like a rough Collie dog.

When I looked back she was just standing with the light of the doorway behind her, like a fat shadow, I’d left behind. Her hand moved and index finger began to curl into a wave, before tightening in disapproval and disappearing into a fist.

‘Thanks Rosie,’ that was the name we called her among ourselves because of her florid cheeks.

‘Cheeky,’ she said and then was lost.

Part of me missed her before she was gone, but my feet took the stairs two at a time, my legs trembling like an old maid’s with lack of bounce at the knees. On the third floor landing I heard some voices and my face began to redden because it was the high pitch of girl’s. My breath shortened as my eyes scanned them hungry for a sighting of Margaret, but it was only Cheryl Woods and her daft pals, giggling and fluttering in my face like Brown Argos butterflies as I sped past, leaving me disappointed and relieved.

I was glad to be back on the second landing and a home that smelt of pee and the fester of Athlete feet. On the far side of the room Stevie Gallacher was sitting on his bed angling a book from the library and trying to read using the rough light of a Gibbous moon. He looked up as I entered and then tried adjusting his book and his neck. Giles Carrthers, Libby and Sammy Shirley were crawling under the row of beds nearest the door, playing some sort of game, which seemed to have no rules other than they slither and laugh as they tried to grab at each other’s ankles. Sammy reached me first and, like a blind man, he used my leg as a pole to help himself up.

‘Fuck. You’ve got fat.’ Sammy poked me in the belly.

Libby found his feet and pinched my cheeks. ‘Porker,’ he said and made grunting noises, laughing at his own jokes, as he was prone to do, slapping his legs with high pitched squeals.

Carruthers stood behind and slightly apart from the others, leaning against one of the solid oak wardrobes that marked off a quarter of one room, as if he was shy and said nothing, which was something, since he’d never shut up since I’d known him. A slight twisted smile played on his lower lip and hung there, undecided.

‘You’ve got a big,’ he waved his index finger about as if letting it decide how the description should go, ‘spot.’ His finger played upwards, ‘on your forehead.’

My left hand fingered the furrows on my forehead and found it.

‘Blackheads,’ an impish smile crept into Carruther’s face, ‘and a bigger set of nips than Mattie Holland.’ He laughed outright and in three steps had closed the distance between us and squeezed my arm.

‘I’ve kept everything the way it was,’ he pulled at my arm and led me towards my bed next to his.

‘What did you get to eat up there?’ Stevie Gallacher rubbed at his eyes and yawned. ‘Did you get mince and potatoes with real mince?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, turning his book towards the crooked light of the window and yawning again, mumbling, ‘mum used to give me that.’