Margaret2

Breakfast coloured my days. It was easy for me to fall in with Margaret’s plans for me to keep an eye out for her brother Donald, as it meant that I could keep two eyes out for her. In the half light of the dorm stairs where the girls dorms flowed into boys, the stalks of my eyes grew adept at different ways of sneaking a look at her as she gave Donald final-final instructions of how to get through the day. Sometimes she would pat him on on the head, or sometimes she'd throw in a bold hug. I was a scavenger for any kind of acknowledgement and when she included me in her parting smile that was payment enough.

‘Bye,’ she would say in that strange lilting language. My skin was empty, waiting to be filled with her voice.

The refectory had a simplicity only money could buy, a large room with high windows, looking out to woods and a silver stretch of the Old Kilpatrick stream reflecting the sky. The air in the room, unlike the rest of the house, was fresh as cold winter dew. Girls where placed on the right hand side of the room and boys on the side of the devil, on the left. Whether Sister Charlotte was 40 or 90 we had no real way of telling because everybody was equally old, but her slow concise movements, rusty with age as she spooned her porridge, seemed to place her outside time in the way that a tree or a swamp was. She led us in a stampede of prayers before meals and in a more desultory fashion afterwards, but really should have been said for the meals. Milk turned in transit from a sour liquid to a bitter solid and laid face down on lumpy porridge puddles. The shallow ceramic pond of breakfast plates laid in equidistant straight lines along the Victorian oak tables gave the whole process some semblance of normality. My nose was plugged by pieces of shiny toilet roll paper, crumpled up like an ink blot and pushed up into my nostrils so that it didn’t smell of anything, a trick that one of the other boys, Giles Carruthers had taught me. He was classified as incorrigible by Sister Mary for never shrinking in her presence the way that the rest of us did and always smiling. So he was a good friend to have. Donald’s different sized legs swung from his hardback chair, like a partially attached hook. I’d pulled him in close to the table to rest his infant’s chin and lever a spoon, for no concession was made to body size. I’d whispered in his ear that it was my birthday, hoping that it would transmute somehow by being spoken into something, anything, any kind of fool’s gold. But he’d been feverish the night before and didn’t seem to hear. His neck sagged then his head wilted and rested cheek down on the table. His eyes looked at me, big as clocks, as he spewed. I didn’t know what to do, cupping it in my hands before it overflowed. My chair scraped back like flint on the quarry grey floor tiles and, in my stomach’s haste not to empty itself in the dash for the toilet, the refectory door was left swinging like a saloon bar’s.

Sister Charlotte’s mournful eulogium, with the voice of a grey dimmer switch, travelled with me; ‘hunger is a good kitchen, in which nothing goes to waste.’

The ache in my lungs from hurrying back was matched by something I’d never noticed before the dull pitter-patter of my heart. My body was training itself; feeding itself up with scraps of loneliness. Margaret had broken ranks. She was crouched on the floor, with her brother pulled onto her lap like a broken puppet, while she stroked his head and spoke to him the same few words in sing-song Island language that sounded like the sea, again and again, an incantation to get better.

The first bell went signalling that breakfast was finished. Girls better drilled than the boys pushed up against the whitewash of the wall and left in the regulation two by twos, while the boys drifted like smoke behind them.

‘You better use all that excess energy to go and get Sister Joyce.’ Sister Charlotte dabbed at her thin lips with a pristine napkin.

Words were stapled to my tongue. I wanted to say something, anything to Margaret so that I could have a ghost of life in her eyes. Her mouth curved into a snowdrop of a smile and bled into her lips as her voice caressed Donald, carried him to a place far away from me. His eyes were closed and his breathing stertorous as if he was sleeping. Faint traces of anguish like fading copperplate, briefly flickered on her face and a single tear crept down her cheeks.

Some words destroy you without trying. ‘Please Donald,’ she said in English. She looked up at me, imploring me to do something more than stare like a fool.

‘Go.’ Sister Charlotte slapped at the desk.

She jolted me into moving, into running, the bulb of my voice ready to sound out like a klaxon. But even as I took the stairs two at a time to Sister Joyce’s rooms that were used for convalescing I felt the shadow of dusty regret that I hadn’t done enough and it was somehow my fault and it tasted bitter on my tongue. I prayed to God that Donald would get better and I promised Him if he did I’d never bother Margaret again.