He Is Mine and I Have No Other Page 3

  She just waited.

  I used to keep it under my mattress and take it out every night to look at the rude pictures of girls with varying sizes of boobs, and boys standing on diving boards trying to hide their erections. I never said anything to her about it. But then one day she just called me into her bedroom and read through it with me, very slowly. As if I couldn’t read. She read it straight through from cover to cover, then asked me if I had any questions. I said ‘No’ and got off the bed as quick as I could and went outside in the garden to play.

  I knew that Gran had had to give Celia up because she wasn’t married. Mam and Uncle Patrick had had some kind of falling out over it. That was all I knew. If I ever asked Mam she’d just say, ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older.’ The book, which was called The Little Ones, was a black glossy hardback with a photograph on the front of a serious-looking little girl. She looked like she’d lost her mother, like I did once in the supermarket, only she’d lost her so long she’d given up bawling. It was inscribed inside ‘To Deirdre. With love from your sister, Celia’. I didn’t even know they were in touch. I couldn’t think of Celia being a grown-up. She was just this wee girl on the mantelpiece, suspended in the past. The back stated simply that Celia lived in Oxford with her two cats. I remember that making me cringe, the idea that she was one of those smelly cat women. She probably had no children. Probably treated her cats like they were human.

  The introduction was brief:

  Industrial schools were commonplace in Ireland up until the latter half of the twentieth century. Poverty-stricken families, mainly, and unmarried women were compelled to send their children to these institutions. Tens of thousands of children, only a small proportion of whom were actually orphans, ended up in detention.

  The schools were run by Catholic religious orders, and were prevalent in cities and towns throughout the country. Contrary to popular belief they were not charitable but state-run organisations. The Department of Education provided a grant for each child committed by the courts. This institutionalised method of childcare was economically more viable than providing individual families with financial support. It also appeased the Catholic Church by allowing them to maintain a level of political power within the community.

  One such school, established in 1869 and run by an enclosed order of nuns, was in operation for almost 100 years. What the girls suffered there is not unique. What is unique, however, is the way in which thirty-five of these girls so needlessly lost their lives.

  On the night of 23 February 1943 a fire started in the laundry of the convent. As the fire intensified some girls tried to jump from the second-floor windows, while others were overcome by smoke or consumed by flames. The thirty-five girls who perished were buried in an unmarked grave.

  What follows is a brief glimpse into the lives of these girls, a means of memorialising and remembering their all-too-short lives. Using what information I could glean about their backgrounds, their ages and the running of the school, through research and interviews with survivors, I have tried to give each girl a unique voice.

  We need to be reminded not only of the systematic abuse here and throughout the country, but of the fact that these girls were not simply numbers. They had names.

  She had very good English, I remember thinking, probably because she lived in Oxford. The thought of those girls used to keep me awake when I was little. I couldn’t have the curtains open, not even the tiniest bit, in case I caught sight of them at the window. And now I was afraid all over again, as if they would come for me in the night.

  Denise, 12

  I am number 17. That is not my age! It is the special number I was given when I first came here. Sometimes I forget that my name is Denise. My favourite thing is to make paper dolls and cover them in silver paper, which me and my friend Aisling get from the bin at school, from the townie girls’ sweet wrappings. We tear the wrappings into wee jumpers and skirts and boots. At night we put the dolls in matchboxes to sleep. Aisling doesn’t give hers any names even though I told her to. She says she can’t think of any so she just gives them numbers too, like us.

  When I grow up I am going to be a nun like Mother Assumpta, not like Mother Carmel. I pray every day, even when I’m not supposed to. Everyone has to line up and pray first thing in the morning, at six. I get up at five because I’m afraid of being hit and because I like to pray before everybody else. And then we wash and go to mass and have communion, and say ‘Our Father’ and sing ‘Holy, Holy’. And I pray when I’m doing the scrubbing in the morning too, mostly the Hail Mary over and over until sometimes I start to get a bit dizzy and get the words mixed up. Then I feel bad for that and have to ask forgiveness. From God and from Our Lady.

  I always bow my head when I say ‘Jesus’.

  My other favourite thing as well as my dolls is Christmas. On Christmas we get to eat meat and gravy. The ladies from the cathedral come in to serve us, the ones that don’t have their own children. They’re the same ones who stay with Father Fagan in the room behind the altar on Sundays and then come out to give us communion. They don’t say very much. They’re a bit like Aisling that way. Maybe she will be like one of those women when she grows up, and she’ll see what’s in that room at the back of the cathedral.

  My worst thing is Jeyes Fluid. It’s when the townies bring lice into class, and then we have to have our heads scrubbed with Jeyes until they’re almost bleeding. Sometimes they do bleed. It stings like when you cut onions. I don’t remember ever having lice before I came here. Mother Assumpta tells me I was six when I came. I don’t remember. I don’t have a birthday like the other girls. Mother Assumpta says we can celebrate my birthday as the day I came in here, June 21st. It’s only pretend. We don’t tell anyone else. Not even Aisling. Just me and her. She gives me sweets in the laundry, which I’m not allowed to show to anyone. I won’t tell anything. I’m a good girl.

  Green and pink and yellow wrappers. I use them to make dresses. That’s my other favourite thing! Aisling asks where did you get those and I tell her to keep her gob shut. She says the convent is a bad place but she’s lying. I’ve already said three good things.

  I must have had a father and a mother but no one seems to remember. It was like I was dropped from the sky by a stork, Mother says. But I wasn’t a baby. I was six. How do they know what age I was? And why is it I can’t remember anything?

  Mar and I talked about little else besides the disco – how we’d get there, what we’d wear, whether our hair would be up or down. No detail was too small. I stashed a couple of cans from the drinks cabinet under my bed. And Mar was going to steal some of her mother’s fags. Buying cigarettes wasn’t the easiest thing to do, as there was always a danger we wouldn’t be served, or that somehow the news would get back to our parents. You couldn’t do anything in this town.

  We decided it best not to ask our parents if we could go. That would blow our chances altogether.

  I didn’t go near the graveyard. I didn’t want to see the boy until the night of the disco. I couldn’t bear to. And anyway I didn’t want him thinking I was spying on him.

  Mam didn’t look so different then – maybe just as if she’d eaten a few too many custard creams, which she had, so most of the time I could convince myself that it was one of those phantom pregnancies, where women carry ghosts around in their bellies, or that really she was suffering from menopause, though I wasn’t sure what that was.

  I started to put things away in my new room – very slowly and reverentially to fold things into themselves. Nothing was ever so neat in my old room. My new room was bigger. It was colder too. One of the radiators was broken and the other one only half worked. Dad said he’d see to them but I knew he’d never get around to it. The walls were white rather than pink. And suddenly I seemed to have fewer things than before. They were stacked neatly against one wall in boxes. I put the few books, trinkets and cassettes I had onto the shelves above my new bed, and left the walls bare. I had all these posters rolled up, b
ut I didn’t know where to put them. Jim Morrison and Laura Palmer didn’t look right on the new walls. The wardrobe was big enough almost that you could walk into it, and my clothes hung in it like dolls’ clothes.

  The long mirror opposite the bed frightened me: I could see things moving in it in the darkness. It didn’t matter that I knew it was only my eyes playing tricks. If you looked at your own reflection by candlelight you’d see the devil looking back at you – that’s what people used to say. It didn’t have to be candlelight for me to be frightened out of my wits. Especially reading Celia’s book. I turned the mirror against the wall some nights, but even then I imagined things crawling out of it.

  Where before my only view had been of the sky and the tops of the laurel bushes through a skylight, now I had the whole of the back garden. The window was long and narrow. It was strange to be able to see the ground: it made the room feel like a greenhouse, like I could step outside if I wanted to. The birds weren’t as loud from here as they had been upstairs, but I could see more of them before it got dark. I could see the swing, too, and the light fading from the sky above the fields. I had my desk so that it was facing out onto all of this, and at first there were no curtains, only an old thin white sheet, so I was woken early every morning until I adjusted to the light, and my dreams adjusted with it. They became all bright and watery, like I was in a flotation tank or something, and I’d wake as easily as if I had just blinked, barely remembering what it was I had been dreaming about.

  I watched out for him as often as I could, though I could hardly make out his shape in the dark. It was pitch-black most afternoons, arctic. And at night I’d lie awake, wondering why he went up there, who it was he went to see, feeling peculiarly out of kilter in my new bed. Disturbed in turn by the emptiness, the lack, and then by the overwhelming abundance of things: the baby, that boy, those little girls burning. Often I had to sleep with the light on to make sure a ghost of the boy wasn’t in the room, visiting me as he visited that grave. I’d get a tight pain in my chest and find it hard to breathe. Other times I was glad of the darkness: it allowed me to wallow in unfinished thoughts of him, the half-remembered features. And sometimes I felt, sinking my head into the pillow and burning a picture of him on the inside of my eyelids, that I could float off the bed if I put my mind to it.

  Mar arrived over on the afternoon of the disco.

  ‘And how are you, Mar? We haven’t seen you in ages,’ Mam beamed, turning from the sink to look at her, her yellow Marigolds dripping muddy water onto the kitchen floor. It was like she was making a special effort to behave as if nothing had changed since Mar’s last visit.

  ‘Ah, not too bad, Mrs Devine, not too bad,’ Mar says, leaning on the counter in the kitchen all casual so as not to give Mam any idea we were up to anything.

  ‘Is your mother well? I don’t see her about much. Is she not working in Donoghue’s anymore?’

  ‘Oh, she’s in grand form. She is, yeah – just Saturday now, though.’

  Mar blushed. She didn’t usually blush but she was in a right state that day, straining to hide her nerves.

  I dragged her out of the room and into my new bedroom. Mam was smiling to herself as I turned to close the door behind me, and I could hear the slippery sound of the peeler on wet spud.

  ‘What’s happened to your old room?’

  ‘Had to move out. Mam’s having a baby and she wants to turn my room into a nursery.’

  ‘Jesus. Fuck.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Isn’t she a bit old? When’s she having it?’

  ‘Way too bloody old. May.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  The rest of the day we spent between my room and the kitchen, gorging on yoghurts, chocolate bars, biscuits, crisps – anything we could find that took our fancy. I showed Mar The Little Ones, and told her Celia was my auntie and she told me to go away to fuck. We creeped ourselves out reading bits of it aloud. She gave Gran some funny looks later that evening when we were having supper and I kicked her under the table.

  We were worried sick we’d be caught that night, or, even worse, we wouldn’t have the nerve to go through with it at all. I told Mar every move I was going to make. I was going to walk up to him after the first slow song but before the second started (a small enough window but long enough to get in there before someone else). There was no way I was going to wait for him to ask me. What if he didn’t? I mightn’t be out again for months. I’d put my arms around his neck, he his hands around my waist, dance slowly – Mar and I practised in front of the long mirror – and stroll out casually into the dark. Mar herself was going to be whisked off her feet by some dashing stranger, though only after she’d witnessed my special moment. It would probably be the second slow set for her so she wouldn’t have as much time to shift outside afterwards, but that was just the way of the world.

  We’d told our parents we were going to Mona’s to watch videos – meeting her at the chippie in town first, going to get some vids, then her dad would be picking us up. He’d drop us home later. Mona did exist. We just didn’t have, or want, anything to do with her. Mam and Dad were having some of the neighbours over for cards and sandwiches: they’d all be well jarred by eleven or so, and we’d be back shortly afterwards. We’d never done a thing wrong before that night besides steal the odd smoke, which was hardly the crime of the century, so our parents had no reason to doubt a word we said.

  Jeans, a T-shirt and a tatty old jumper was what we both had on, so that we wouldn’t look conspicuous. I had mascara and some pink lipstick I’d stolen from Gran’s room, and Mar had a blunt black eye pencil.

  Dad dropped us off at the chippie, telling us to ring him if we needed a lift home later. I had sweaty palms.

  We strolled casually in and stood motionless under the fluorescent light as we watched his car pull off. The couple sitting by the front window, tucking into chicken boxes, licked the greasy crumbs from their fingers. In between mouthfuls they’d glance out at the street, away from one another. The pimply young boy behind the counter didn’t much care if we ordered or not. We headed straight for the ladies’ loos. They smelled of stale piss and used tampons. We applied our make-up under a blinking light. Our hands were shaking. I didn’t dare put too much on. I was shy of my own reflection. Mar circled her eyes, even pencilling along the fine layer just inside the lashes. She applied mascara with that pouting concentration I thought only mothers possessed. We bought two cans of Coke and walked the mile or so back towards my house, to the boys’ school. If anyone we knew saw us we’d be in trouble, but we were willing to take the risk. We could always come up with some excuse, like Mona hadn’t shown up, and we thought we’d just walk back to my place rather than drag Dad away from the neighbours and the cards.

  We clung to one another as we walked up the dark muddy avenue, beneath the lonely cawing of crows in the trees. There was no moon that we could see. It was difficult to find our footing. We only had the faint light from the street lamps on the main road behind us, and the headlights of the passing cars. The ground was wet from a downpour earlier and we had to step lightly so we didn’t spray our jeans with mud. It was a strange sensation to be there at night, without adults. I’d only ever been up there during the day, when Dad had to collect one of the neighbour’s boys. I kept my head down on those occasions, staring at the dashboard so that none of the boys would see my face collapse into itself with embarrassment. Each time that had happened I had to lock myself in the bathroom when we got home and apply heavy eye make-up and line my lips and pout, wondering what to make of myself, and what boys would possibly make of me. The longer I looked the more uncertain I became. I’d get lost in the reflection of my own eyes. Then I’d get to thinking there was nothing behind them.

  The front of the school loomed larger than it did during the day, and only the bare bulb above the porch at the main entrance gave off any light. All the windows were black. A priest stood silhouetted in t
he doorway, arms folded, legs akimbo, nodding to passers-by. I wanted to walk up to him and confess, have my sins absolved before I’d even committed them, before I was even sure what they might be. I wanted him to touch me, lay his lukewarm hands on my shoulders.

  The older girls hanging round the front of the school looked unfazed by the smell of cheap eau de cologne. I spotted a few girls from our year arriving with boys from the town.

  ‘Shall we have a cig, Mar?’ I said.

  ‘God, yeah,’ Mar gasped. ‘Not with him looking, though,’ nodding towards the priest.

  It was good that it was dark: it made it so much easier to walk past the other girls. And once around the corner we both had our backs flat against the cool dark-grey stone of the school wall, so that we could feel the dampness slowly trickle down our necks and cool our hot skin. Mar pulled a crumpled cigarette packet from the back pocket of her jeans: there were two flat cigarettes inside. She put hers straight to her lips and lit confidently, inhaling it like a deep-sea diver taking a final breath before plunging. Her eyes looked like fish eyes in the dim light. I rolled my cigarette slowly between middle finger and thumb, moulding it back into shape. Then I put it to my lips, lit it and inhaled deeply, holding it this time between index and middle finger, fearful that I might drop it or have to cough, and then relieved to find that I could exhale; and pleased by the aftertaste of ash on my tongue, and on the roof of my mouth, and the faint smell of lighter fuel under my nails. We held our cigarettes down by our sides, burning towards the dark wall, ready to be extinguished if any of the priests should happen to walk by.

  More cars were arriving, more girls smelling of White Musk and coconut oil. The cold air tasted good after a cigarette. My limbs felt limp. The beers in the pockets of my jacket were stinging my hips. We walked to the edge of the bike shed, where the pale light from the porch stopped, and propped the cans by a tree stump. Everything went black as I rose from my hunkers. Mar’s face came blurrily back into focus.