What Are You Like Read online

  ‘Bernadette.’

  ‘That’s a horrible name.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Who called me that?’ she said. ‘It’s a horrible name!’

  Maura closed the door before the woman got excited. What she had really wanted to go for was tropical medicine, all those fevers and romance. She opened the door again.

  ‘What would you like to be called?’

  ‘Get out!’

  ‘Good girl.’

  She had chosen her own name outside the Mater Hospital, when her father was dying. Facing the gathering arms of the steps, she looked up and saw the words written on the portico – MATER MISERICORDIÆ. What she liked best was the way the A and the E stuck together. She was ten at the time.

  Of course, when it came to it, she had to lose the ‘e’ – it wasn’t grammatical, apparently. Her first act of humility, when humility was all the rage.

  Now, when she thought about what it was that kept her going it was nothing she could mention. The veils were gone, the skirts shortened, all those big names lost or thrown away. Maura stayed in her room in the Stella Maris, with forty lay people and ten dying nuns all in a row. Someday, she would take her own place in one of the beds. In the meantime, she did her job and said her prayers, and who could say it was not enough?

  Maybe she had taken the easy way out. Maura had seven brothers, had loved them all too much ever to choose between them. She was a general sort of girl. And death had made her pious, of course, like it was some great secret.

  She tried to decide whether to go up the steps on the right or those on the left. She looked up at the portico and, as she spelt out the letters along the base of the triangle, she knew what she was going to be. She knew what a nun was.

  Mater Misericordiæ. Mother of Mercy.

  ‘And how are you, Mrs Doyle?’

  ‘Oh yes. Oh certainly.’

  Maura pressed the forearm of the woman who was sitting in a chair by the bed, waiting for her mother to die.

  ‘Mrs Doyle?’

  ‘I’m just fine.’ The morphine was shining between the surface of her eyes and the faded pigment of her irises, like she was wearing contact lenses that made everything ecstatically clear.

  ‘And how are you?’ she said.

  Maura looked at the daughter and nodded her sympathy. Mrs Doyle should have gone last night or the night before, but her dying was too much of a revelation to her. It was too much fun.

  ‘I’m fine too, Mrs Doyle.’ Maura leant over her with a serious face, watching the fear fall into the pupils of her eyes. ‘Will you try to relax now?’ She found the place where Mrs Doyle was entirely herself, and terrified.

  ‘Will you do your best? For me?’

  ‘Oh.’

  Then the fear was gone and the joke was back – something hilarious was just around the corner, which Mrs Doyle could not wait to see.

  Maura wound down the morphine to bring back the pain – just a little. Then she changed her mind and racked it back up again. Let the old woman dream.

  The parquet was loose and the skirting board needed a coat of paint. Maura made her matron’s list as she walked the main corridor, gathering and losing staff as she went. It was a surprise round, at the wrong time of day. The few flowers that found their way into the Stella Maris were set on the windowsills along the corridor, in case they smothered the patients in the night. She passed them in the dusk and caught their scent and found herself flinching before a thing she could not see.

  When she looked in on Agatha, the old nun was telling her beads and just nodded to her; the white down of her face glowing golden in the evening light.

  ‘Goodnight, my dear.’

  For the first time in a long time, Maura wanted to pray. She went back to her room, scrubbed out her underwear and draped it over the radiator. Then she went through a few files, unwilling to face the task in front of her, which was: to take off her uniform and hang it up and put on her nightie and get down on her knees, stretch her arms across the bedspread and say nothing, in English, Latin, or Irish, but wait for the knowledge that God was there, if she could just reach out to him.

  The words on the page were a blur so she closed the file and began to undress, dreading the moment, knowing that when it came she would give a quick Hail Holy Queen and jump in between the sheets. God was just there, if she could reach out to him. But she would not. It would break her in two.

  ‘O clement O loving O sweet,’ she finished in jig time, got into bed and pedalled her legs along the sheets to warm them up. She settled herself on her back and, deliberately, started to fall asleep, starting at the tips of her toes. She was all the way up to her neck when she jolted awake, catching herself from falling down a flight of steps that was not there.

  At five o’clock Maura was awake again, without knowing how. She was fighting with Agatha about washing. Agatha telling her not to walk so fast, for a hundred reasons. from modesty to dignity and back by way of the suffering Christ. When the whole convent could hear the laundry sister shouting about sweat. The laundry sister was from Gardiner Street and suffered from winter nerves when the drying was bad, and that was the whole fact of it – never mind the suffering Christ. So was Agatha lying? Who could tell? Agatha was a saint. A woman who said three novenas before breakfast and had various disgusting ways with the contents of her nose. She would outlive them all.

  Maura groaned as she got out of bed and started the night walk. Five paces to the far wall, which was cool to the touch, then five paces back to the door. In recent years this circling just made it worse, so she sat down at her desk again, and tried to bore herself to sleep.

  The file was one of Agatha’s. The bishop’s secretary had brought them to her room, in an unhygenic heap, because Agatha was old now, because she (of course) would be discreet.

  She flicked through and made notes. Hogan, Byrne, O’Brien. She stopped at one name. Albert Delahunty – what Catholic in their right mind would call a child Albert? There were Delahuntys in Mayo but she doubted he was one of them. She looked for his signature – Berts. A Dublin address. She checked for the Birth Cert, found it and stopped. Then she stared for a moment at the wall.

  Maura pulled off the rusted paper-clip, spread all the scraps of paper across the table. She felt sleep, and the longing for sleep, come for her in a wave.

  She remembered him.

  He sat there, twenty-four years old, perhaps. Her own age, or younger. There was something about him that annoyed her and it took Misericordia a moment before she figured it out. The man’s wife had just died in very painful circumstances but he still kept his hat on, even in here, in the heat of the hospital. He was tall and thin, with a stoop that made you want to slap him between the shoulder blades, in a friendly sort of way. She went over to him and lifted him gently by the elbow.

  ‘Come and see.’ She led him down to the baby unit where the children were placed in their rows of incubators – that looked like a graveyard under his stupid dreadful gaze.

  He walked slowly towards her, his eyes fixed on hers, refusing to look in the box.

  It’s just a baby. She wanted to reassure him. Just a lovely little baby. Or in this case – thank God – two. As he stopped, she reached out and pulled over the other little mite, so that their incubators were side by side.

  He looked from one to the other. There was something very slow about his grief. All babies look the same, but even a man could see that these two looked more the same than most.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Twins,’ and she thought she might bring a bit of decency back into the room.

  ‘We baptised them as soon as they came,’ she said.

  ‘With no name?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There was no need.’

  ‘How can you baptise them without a name?’

  ‘You just can.’ But he seemed annoyed by it. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of cigarettes, then realised where he was and stuffed them back in again.

&n
bsp; ‘So what do you want to call them?’ she dipped her hand into the first incubator, as if to teach him that babies can be touched.

  ‘Maria,’ he said, abruptly.

  ‘Maria,’ she said with a rub of her tummy. ‘Lovely. And this one?’

  ‘I said “Maria”.’ Her hand pulled away from the second child he had blasphemously named, not named at all.

  ‘Well, I can’t take them both.’

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Later.’

  ‘What’s later? There’s no later about it.’

  She left him then, trying to switch the name from one to the other to see which one it fitted, and which to leave behind. She walked back along the rows of children: the hundreds of tiny feet, the thousands of tiny toes. By the time she had reached the swing doors he was behind her, grabbing her like she wasn’t a nun at all.

  ‘Sister,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  The next day she met him in the same waiting room, lifted him again with a touch on his elbow and led him, down corridors and around corners, into a small courtyard where the spatchcocked building had forgotten a roof They walked across the broken concrete, in through an old green door and into the secret part of the hospital, the nuns’ part. It wasn’t used to men. He lumbered along behind her, following the squeak of her shoes.

  At Agatha’s door, she looked at him long and hard, trying to get him to take off his hat. He didn’t want to understand, just took hold of the knob and pushed on through.

  Agatha sat surrounded by her files in stacks, a crucifix in front of her and one behind. There was a cupboard with soft drinks and some sherry.

  ‘Some brandy perhaps?’ A whiskey. Agatha was one of those Sisters who always gave men drink – in case they might explode maybe, or hit them. Poured it in like lemonade.

  ‘You are right, to do it soon,’ said Agatha. ‘If you are to do it at all.’ She bent her head and Misericordia followed suit. Delahunty lifted his glass, then blushed to see that they were praying. He set the glass back on the desk and did not touch it again.

  Agatha lifted her head.

  ‘We will take them both,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It is God’s will, Mr Delahunty. It’s not something we can slice up, just to suit ourselves.’

  ‘But I could manage one, Sister.’ He wanted her to undo it, this joke. He wanted her to make the world simple again. Just like a man.

  But Agatha knew her stuff. By the time he signed the form Delahunty looked like he had been given a child, for which he should be grateful, not like he had just handed one away. Agatha tipped the wink as Misericordia opened the door. She walked ahead of him, chatting about weights and feeds until they were back in the main building and the first Exit sign.

  The twins cried all night. Misericordia finally dumped them together in the same incubator, to see if that would quiet them down. She thought about their father, the feel of him at her back, his stupid hat. His first daughter slept with her face to the ceiling, and his second daughter slept with her face to the first. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  Misericordia found herself pausing beside these children through the long shift, breaking her heart with the need to tell between them. She stood in the hospital dark, her two good hands placed on the corners of the incubator. She looked at them, a scrunch of features, a little mess, and all of it twice. And suddenly she doubted the God who made this symmetry – too lazy, suddenly, for difference. He has counted the hairs on our head, she thought, but now and then, he just couldn’t be bothered.

  Agatha was good with mothers, firm and kind. But there was no one to cry for these mites, or plead for them. No girl who would be grateful, in the long run, that her baby was gone. Because they had no mother.

  No mother. It was like a gash on your soul, and Misericordia prayed for the Virgin to protect them, and the whole, motherless world. She prayed until she could see her, standing with her hands placed, as her own hands were placed, on the other end of the little glass box.

  The blue veil, the slender wrists, the tear that stayed on her smooth cheek and did not fall. Misericordia closed her eyes and the Virgin was imprinted like a negative on her eyelids. It was not a true vision, she knew that – it did not move, did not amaze, or relieve her. And she knew it was for herself she prayed and not for the children at all.

  So when Delahunty came to get a baby she looked away, so as not to see which he took and which he left behind. She doubted whether he could tell between them, anyway – which he had marked, and which left blank. And when she registered the remaining child, the word she went to write was ‘Maria’ because, quite simply, she did not care. Either or, she thought. Either or.

  When she registered the child, the word she went to write was ‘Maria’, but her heart failed at the last letter. Because one slept facing the ceiling and the other slept facing the first, and this was all the goodness that God allowed, a difference between one breath and the next, a lapse of the heart. When she registered the child the word she finished writing was ‘Marie’. Knowing that A for E and E for A, she had named them for the hopes she used to have, and not to honour the Virgin at all.

  Mater Misericordiæ.

  Maura Reynolds looked at the file spread over her desk. It was all there in front of her: a set of adoption papers; a birth cert; a faded request from a girl living in England. She looked at the child’s handwriting, all grown up: she looked at her own handwriting, from when she was still a child.

  Innocent days. Six months later they had moved her into geriatric care, and no wonder. E for A. It was an act of the imagination, more pragmatic than real. It was the kind of thing she had lived for, in those days.

  Maura slipped the paper-clip back into its U of rust and felt something welling inside her. What was it? She twisted in her chair and appealed to the room, to the knickers on the radiator, to the freesias and the crucifix and the four bare walls. What was it? It was a sort of silent roar. It was herself. It was what she had turned out to be – a fifty-year-old, God-hating nun, patient and raucous and hungering for mankind.

  Maura Reynolds was running down the corridor – an impossible thing. The matron in her nightie. Of course she never got ahead; she took risks like this and didn’t care. She slipped through the rectangular pools of light, ducking the shadows as they came up to hit her. She was on her way to Agatha’s room, the words she would say rushing through her head. If it weren’t for you Agatha, that’s what she wanted to say. If it weren’t for you I could be matron of somewhere like the Mater by now, down to the portico, down to the words over the door. Every day you thwarted me. Every day. You old saint. You nose-picker. Every day you told me that this was what God wanted. And I stayed down while you rose up – all the way.

  She reached Agatha’s door and caught her breath. When she opened it, she saw something she had never imagined possible. The old bitch was asleep. The moonlight shimmered in the white down that covered her face, even to the tip of her nose. Maura placed her hand flat on her chest. She dipped her head and was turning to leave when she saw Agatha’s eyes open, and a wide-awake voice slip from her face.

  ‘Yes, my darling. What is it this time?’

  4

  Rose

  Leatherhead, Surrey, 1977

  ROSE FLOATED UP from the bottom of the pool, face first. She broke the surface, then rolled back in again. She swam underwater all the way to the rail, before hauling herself out into the shouting and the noise. Then she stood on the edge, while everyone looked at her huge bottom and her stupid breasts. She knew they were looking by the way her nipples tingled and bruised in the moment she took to straighten, and draw breath, and dive again.

  Did she close her eyes as she hit the water? There she was, back in the thick blue, pulling herself all the way down to the floor. She tipped her fingers along the tiles, until she saw the deep central plug, matted with hair and hung with a spiralling, spent elastoplast. Slowly she stopped, curled in on herself and stretched out, already
rising.

  She looked at the view.

  The surface of the pool was hung with legs. She loved the way they dangled and opened, the white heels jabbing down. She loved the secret, flat space boys had, under there.

  The new one was over by the wall; she caught sight of his trunks that were underpants really, even though they had pictures of mermaids on them in purple and green. She thought about yanking them down, but she was rising faster now, and lighter. She was pulled up mouth first, her lips swelling, a space opening in her head.

  The break was gentle. Rose let the water suck away from her face, pulled in the chemical air and rolled over on her side. She lay there a second, then bobbed into a duck-dive and swam underwater to where the new boy’s legs hung by the rail.

  He was breathing hard. She could see his stomach bulge and suck. One arm circled just under the surface, grabbing the water. His legs were skinny and white. His head was gone.

  The underpants were too thin, really, for getting wet. Rose looked at the mermaids and laughed, a clutch of bubbles loosening from her mouth. She found the floor with her feet, shot out in front of his face, took the top of his head and pushed down. The boy’s body loosened in the water below her and she wrapped her legs around his neck, wedging her shoulders under the rail. She could feel his thin little face panicking into her stomach, then he went still and punched up close, between her legs. Rose didn’t hear the whistle. The lifeguard pushed her down from the rail, grabbed her under the arms and lifted her out clear; her legs still clamped around the boy’s neck. He dumped her back from the pool and the boy’s head bounced on her stomach, belching water. Then it clunked against the tiles between her thighs, and did not move.

  She looked at him.

  This was the new boy. This was the one who would not give up.

  You would think he was simple, but Rose knew that he was not, because he would not touch the cats. All her life there had been boys who came and went, but first and last, there were the cats. They filled the back kitchen, rubbing against things, hoiking their horrible pink holes into the air. Her mother fed and petted them, talking low and silly. She had a weakness for strays: toms with broken tails, boys who chewed their lips so their mouth was just a rash. Her mother fed everything and everybody. She smelt of cat’s piss and Camay and it was sometimes hard to love her.