Margaret1

When I got there light was fading on the Old Kiilpatrick Hills and the russet and rusting school gates had become the same brown colour of despair. Everything was changed, and the same, only smaller; shrunk with time. In memory, the school bell still rung Angelus at 6am, noon and 6pm to the drumbeat of little feet running out of the dorms like a cold-water tap. Sister Mary with calculating eyes, like brown fingered ha’pennies, was still misering out life times, like God without a stopwatch, and stood guard on the creaking third stair, to give her long nose elevation, in case a soul should slip away. But there was nowhere to go. The grounds were a desert of trees and grass hidden in a pocket of hills. Successful, rich men’s houses, granite faced sepulchres, silently circled and stood adrift, left and right, never to be disturbed.

The crab apple tree stood in solitary splendour, still dispensing its bitter face sucking favours. There was a shoe beneath one of the windswept bushes, a strange bud, the shoe’s tongue a black dog-ear umbel that had turned Alice blue in the rain. The foot that fitted into it long gone, only the mildew scent of stockinet stitches and drab olive past remained. The Sisters, even fat jolly Sister Joyce, were gone. They had left their charity to God, or His neighbour. Something of them, however, remained enclosed in the house. They curled up like smoke grey unread parchments in the back rooms, in the desk less school library so as not to encourage loitering, or particular friendships, and the damp darkness of the laundry rooms; all over the house, the smell of their waxy yellow remains lingered like bees in a forgotten honeycomb that had fallen apart.

The past hung heaviest on the walls of the kitchen area. The sweet waft of animal fats broiling and bubbling and the sharp tasting high notes of potatoes frying like billy-o, stood to attention on my child’s tongue. The tang of fish, fresh from the freezer, waited to be devoured by gangly armed boys, hands buried deep in grey lint pockets, ashamed to lick their pink lips in case someone was watching and could see the snow light of innocence and hope for something more than food in their eyes.

Winter was days of shortened necks and bowed bowl-cut shaved heads; a depot injection of darkness. Dusk came well before we had cleaved out with our tongue any scraps of sweetness in our supper, which tasted of Old Testament sifted rye and was never enough, but was good for the soul. The sky came down bringing with it the buried smells of cesspits and the house creaked and groaned; a wayward ship, in a sea of po-faced orphans wearing their unwanted tag of shame like a hat. An antediluvian generator in the basement that surged and wheezed, like a drunk accordionist balanced on a stool, powered the feeble electric lights. It frequently shorted and failed, in a traffic light spectrum of consistency, more camouflage green than amber, but not before it attracted a gaggle of circling boys, like Processionary moths. On th landings darkness freed us and we played childish games of Dares and gauntlets of kicking arms and legs, like a giant rough millipede on the stairs -no man could hope to survive, or so it seemed then- to keep the shooting- shouting glow of home in their chest and sword sting of cold and hunger at bay.

Sister Penelope took visitors, such as Old Father Monan, directly into the drawing room whose light filled the house and held off the arsenic grey smell of the ash pit and old stables, long gone but still somehow bleeding through in the sound of a clip of the Fitch curry-comb, or the bristle and bell of a buckled harness. She could smile quite happily and chatter aimlessly without the strain showing in the small lines of her mouth. This, and Earl Grey Tea, was her great skill. We stayed silent and merged with the shadows of half open doors, our faces tinged with the Prussian Blue fade of regimented apparitions. Our mouths filled with salvia and dropped open in unison, like a gallows-door, when the silver teaspoon hit the bone china cup. Battenberg cake was our nemesis. It was taken up like a checkerboard pink and yellow communion Host and we watched it dissolve in the Old Father Monan’s mouth, with not a crumb of comfort to show on the gold gilding of the saucer. Only then could we breath and wait to see what he’d do next. When we returned to the hallway it was always darker there and we took the job of playing more seriously than any prayer and it was there that I found my first love.

Margaret was waiting for her brother Donald. She was a full head bigger than him and three years older, more mother than sister, with that strange lilting seagull sounding Gallic accent of the North. He galloped away towards the toilets his mouth clippy-clopping out the rhythm his little legs should take, teasing her. She had her hand out, waiting to take his and take him up the stairs, with all the patience of eternity. Her modest calico dress swung as they went up the stairs, this way and that, like notes on a scale, with one white sock slightly lower than the other. I wanted to pull it up and touch her bare leg above the knee. She cooed at Donald calming him with her Island words as they disappeared into the darkness. Her figure shaped by the light, the soft rope of golden poppy hair tossed with abandon from side to side was captured like a colour photograph on the half shuttered lens of my eyes.

‘Are you goin’ into town later?’ Those were not her first words to me, but so it seemed, before I’d seen her glory. My body was as taut as any piano wire as she fiddled with her cuffs. ‘Because if you are can you look after our Donald?’ The nuns separated boys and girls into separated communities of sheep and goats. The boys, of course, being the latter grouping. She patted me on the hand and the shock made my face melt with redness. ‘For he’s only wee.’ She looked over my head and away, contriving with her kindness to not look at me and moved quickly away from me when Sister Mary appeared at the drawing room door where old Gudgie had killed himself and haunted the house.