Margaret3

Winter frost brought short day sniffles, a metallic dull muffling of the mind and signposted the starting point of our owl-eyed nocturnal world. The girl’s shrieks and shouts, like the high-pitched squeals of Pipistrelle, echoed longer notes during the dark nights, and battled with the sounds of wind and rain seizing the windows and testing them for an entry point.

Boys were regarded as an acidic element in the girl’s spiritual and moral development. I I skulked at the bottom of the main stairs that divided the house with the patience of a Saint. I wasn’t sure which one. There was sure to be one. There were thousands. They were good at being good and waiting was part of their training. I wasn’t much good at either waiting or being good. Concealment was more due to luck than skill. I stuck myself, slug-like, against the balustrade, immersed in the hullabaloo of the girl’s twittering, scattering and gathering in the hallway.

Supper, beforehand, had set the tone of our nights. In the shadow-light it consisted of the cook’s finger scrapings of the bottom of worn out pots, which gave our food a burnt taste, transformed by blind alchemy into a kind of broth. Rab Maxwell rolled his spoon around his mouth and joked it was the kind of oily food seagulls routinely regurgitated for their chicks. ‘Not to be sniffed at,’ was also one of our many ways of talking and thinking about food. Salvation lay in the fact it was served on a wide brimmed soup plate. A slice of white bread, which we called scrag, for some reason, was sometimes toasted, or ‘browned,’ as Sister Mary called it. This was to hide the ‘blue’ as in ‘mould’. As light faded into darkness, toast, however, in any form was one of the bright spots of our day. A crack of light in my life was Margaret. Any free time felt wasted when not in her presence.

After supper, Sister Rosemary and Sister Mary donned their dull camouflage get-up of outside grey cloaks. They were taking the older girls on some kind of retreat and herded them together, like grebes, with the military order of clacking tongues. The sense of going anywhere was all in the setting off. They still took the same thin veined path at the side of the house out to the chapel, but it just meant they prayed more and offered themselves up to Jesus more. Sister Rosemary, when she clapped her long fingered hands, demanded the same kind of silence as God. In a strange kind of nunnish mind-control, which never worked with us boys, the girls began to arrange themselves into groups of twos, as if Noah’s ark had a gangplank outside the main doors.

My hand was on the bottom railing of the stairs. My toe poking impudently through, like a black tipped tongue. ‘How’s your brother Donald keeping?’ I had to whisper.

‘Fine.’ Margaret snatched an answer; her face was turned towards me. Her unhappiness restrained by better manners. She picked at her cuffs, but she was already looking away, dismissing me with a skid mark smile that fell off her face. ‘I’ve got to go.’

I’d nothing to keep her with, only the shadow thin sheath of my presence. My stubby white fingers grabbed at Margaret’s olive-green blazer, stalling her. Everything was awkward. My feet and limbs flailing like they were made of Plasticine and stuck onto another child at play. The strange onion adolescent smells of my body. My heart. Held in place by the mysteries of her. My world reflected in her sombre eyes, in the nape of her neck, in the gentle bud and swell of breast under her white blouse that corked-up my breath. Her heart beating. There was panic in her eyes. I’d broken cover with my flapping and Sister Mary bustled across. In the red cheeked crucible of silence strange words bloomed. The bulb of my voice, its rhythms of speech that rose and fell and faded: ‘Will you meet me later outside the library after tea?’

‘Why?’ She pulled away from me so suddenly and completely the flock of other girls swallowed her whole.

The house grew a shell of silence without girls. I clattered in the empty space of the common rooms and bedrooms, running here and there, clashing and braying with the Jones’ boys. But my mind was above them, carrying her image like a flickering candle before a holy relic. Soon time shortened its grasp enough to pull me towards the stairs behind the library.

None of the other boys came to that part of the house. There were mutterings and rife rumours about old Gudgie, who hanged himself, and was meant to whisper his earthly sorrows in the space between the dark warped corner beam of the attic roof and the eaves. The whip of ice cold Northerly wind, coming off the Old Kilpatrick Hills, also made it creak and groan like a ship at sea. It was out of bounds to all but the most hardy of souls. My eyes were the only light in the eyrie of the roof space in which shadows multiplied and knocked knees. My hands shook, not only because of Gudgie, but also because it was a place I could wait to spy-out Margaret and see if she went towards the library.

She came up the stairs with the delicate toe-picking of a ballet dancer or thief; for she was not alone. I’d nowhere to go. My feet had to take the backward steps of a horse mounting a rope ladder, up towards the attic of old Gudgie, and the cold stars sitting framed in the rectangle of the skylight. My head pointed in one direction; my heart in another. I had to know who was with her.

His laugh, the kind of noise I’d imagined a doll would make if it was throwing up, told me who it was, in the same way that an ornithologist didn’t need to see the tail feathers. In the short line of 18 beds, he shared the bed next to mine. And I heard that laugh every night of my waking world. My fingers curled into fists and tears appeared unbidden and stung my eyes. I knew, but some part of me still needed confirmation. The floorboards creaked my pain as I crept back down the way I’d come. A piece of blue-grey carpet marked the entry point into the main part of the house and held my feet.

They exchanged no more than a paper-cut kiss, lips stuck together and a leaning away. But it tore me.

Sister Mary’s voice, coming from the threaded light of the sewing room, was a breech- gun, shattering silence and spitting out the words I’d dared not utter. ‘How dare you.’

Giles and Margaret fled, taking the stairs two at a time, bouncing off each other, his kooky laugh unfurling like a banner into the darkness of the hall below, which was unlit to save on electricity.

In her rush to catch the culprits Sister Mary stumbled and the crack of her knees hitting the floor seemed to play out like a double-decade of the Rosary.

I rushed over to help.

‘May God forgive you. You dirty little pig.’

Her blue eyes looked at me, but were focussed inwards, restless with a kind of super-charged wattage, crackling with hurt and anger, ready to spit out violence.

I wanted to mouth a childish alibi of ‘it wasn’t me’, but her pothole eyes sunk into mine and claimed them for her own; and her white hag face, whittled out of a birch handle, was thrust into my face, like a punch, so that all I could smell was her sour-burp breath. Blood fled from my face. There was no escape.

A great white bird of silence took up residence in my throat and spread its wings like an albatross. The first hit corrugated my left ear. Sweat ran down my armpits and back pooling on my grey school shorts. I thought of running, but my clothes seemed to tie my legs like a drowned man’s. Only the annoying soft tuft of babyish hair remained unbowed.

The bare bulb light behind Sister Mary seemed to sway in sympathy and made her big as an ogre. Stretchered out on the ground, my limbs mustered a fetal like shelter of arms and legs, protecting my head from the worst of the blows. The tawse appeared from her armoury and whistled down like the hand of God. There was no room for decorum. Her ploughman’s feet made a sharp crease in the raven black Sister’s of the Immaculate Conception robe, and like a dark horse that had been wilfully spooked, she kicked whatever white limb that moved. I banished her voice, her dull Irish brogue, to somewhere in the back of my mind. It was not the sound of Sister Mary hitting me that stretched my ears, but the screech of her breathing, throwing her weight behind every blow and reeling in my pain.

I whimpered. In a glutinous black sea the excitement of Sister Mary’s actions seemed to stand up and apart from her. She took a step back and the whoosh of her shadow stepped forward, needing no encouragement. Sparks of pain made my body a conduit for existence; bruised skin adapted to the convenient flag colours of different nations. A new kind of neutrality was established in the far off call of the other children, in the dust drifting down from the ceiling, and the syrup of silence in my head.

That night my body slept long and hard. Dreams were clothed in the sky- grey cloth of shame, the raw ammonia smell of fear and ghost white marble chills. My body stretched away from me, doing its job, a knock out blow of breathing, moving skilfully between the crisp cool grey hospital cornered blankets, bouncing from one hurt side to the other; all without waking.

Sliding out of bed like a gingerbread man before anybody had woken I stumbled and tottered to the toilets, sure that my bruised willy would turn the lavvy-pan water an unnatural blood colour of violet red. I didn’t know what hurt the most and didn’t want to find out. I just wanted to die.