Beautiful Child (3 page)

‘Thanks’ said Carol, putting it on and fastening it.

Joe reached out and pulled her to him. She wrapped her arms round his waist and kissed him. Then Joe began to finger her hair away from her face.

‘Have you got time to stay for a drink?’ Joe asked.

‘I’d better not,’ said Carol, ‘Richard will be expecting me and I’m already late.’

‘That’s a shame. I hate it when you have to rush off just after… you know?’

‘Well it’s your fault, tiger,’ said Carol, lightly, ‘I wasn’t expecting it twice.’

‘You bring out the stud in me.’

‘I think I must do.’

‘Carol, about the bruise underneath your arm … ‘

‘…don’t Joe,’ said Carol as she pulled away from him.

‘You didn’t fall over, did you?’

She looked at him helplessly and then she sat down on the end of his bed. ‘ What am I doing, Joe? I stay married to one man when I’ve got another who’s a hundred times better.’

‘So he did hit you?’

Carol looked up at him and nodded her head. Then he sat down beside her. She’d confirmed what Joe had suspected about her husband for a while.

‘It all started after his accident,’ Carol began, ‘he’s always been a proud man and not being able to go out to work just really gets to him, you know?’

‘And that’s an excuse to use you as a punch bag?’

‘No, but… it doesn’t happen every day. Just when he gets really down about everything and Joe, he was a fit, active man who ended up in a wheelchair at the age of thirty-seven. I can understand how frustrated he gets at not being able to do the things he used to and provide for his family.’

‘Carol, I understand all of that but there’s absolutely no excuse,’ said Joe, ‘and I’ll never put any pressure on you, you know that. But if you lived here I’d cherish you, look after you, treat you like the lady that you are. The kids would have a good home here.’

‘But how can I leave him when he’s like he is?’ she pleaded, desperately. ‘He’d have nothing if he didn’t have me and the kids.’

‘Well I know how that feels.’

‘Joe, don’t say that.’

‘Why not? It’s the truth.’

‘You deserve much better than me.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ smiled Joe, ‘and I’m going to hold on until you come to your senses.’

Carol kissed him passionately.

‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

‘You’re not asking me,’ said Joe who’d realised lately just how much he was in love with Carol and how much he depended on her coming round. ‘I’m saying that I will.’

Carol looked into Joe’s blue-grey eyes. ‘I don’t want you to waste your time. You ought to be out there finding someone.’

‘I have found someone.’

‘Oh Joe,’ she said. Then she kissed him again and picked up her handbag. ‘I’ll go out the back way as usual’

‘Okay.’ said Joe, ‘Saturday afternoon?’

‘I’ll be here about one,’ said Carol who could’ve just burst into tears but she had to stay composed. It only took half a minute to walk from Joe’s house at the top of the hill down to her own house further down. A difference of about ten houses. She touched his face. ‘I’ll be thinking of you.’

‘And I’ll be thinking of you,’ said Joe.

‘Stay safe on those streets,’ said Carol.   

‘I will for you’ said Joe.

She gave him her biggest smile and then she was gone.

*

Ann had prepared dinner and left it for Brendan and Phillip. All they had to do was heat it up but because there was so much of it Phillip was having to use every available means of heat source to do it. She’d done them a chicken pie made with short crust pastry just how Brendan liked it and there were so many different kinds of vegetables that Phillip got bored counting at five.

‘Irish women are such big feeders,’ muttered Brendan as they were finally able to sit down at the table and serve themselves up. ‘It’s in their DNA.’

‘It would seem that way, Brendan,’ said Phillip as he looked out across the table at the feast before them. He hadn’t opened any wine because he knew that Brendan didn’t partake and anyway, he had work to do himself later that evening. So instead he just poured them each a glass of orange juice.

‘The English put the kettle on at the first sign of trouble while the Irish peel some more spuds.’ chuckled Brendan, ‘They think that if they pile a plate high with overcooked meat and vegetables then the boy they serve up this mothers meal to will forget he’s being shagged to hell by some paedophile priest.’

Phillip almost choked on his piece of cauliflower. ‘Jesus, Brendan, will you warn me before saying such things.’

‘They’d think that would be enough for him not to say anymore about it. Then by the time his plate is clean the priest will have been moved to a parish on the other side of the country and no more would be said about that.’

‘We can’t be proud of the way we deal with such things, Brendan.’

‘No, we can’t,’ said Brendan, ‘now don’t get me wrong. This is a marvellous meal and Ann Schofield is a fantastic cook who simply wanted to show us her kindness. All I’m saying is that it is firmly in the Irish female tradition to use food as an avoidance tactic.’

‘Comfort food.’

‘In it’s most basic sense, yes.’ said Brendan.

‘And is this really how you see the average Irish woman, Brendan?’

‘It’s how I see the average Irish anything, Phillip.’ said Brendan, ‘Still wrapped up in the values of a church that can do no wrong. It was my blinding faith in God that led me to the priesthood but it was also the recognition that I could use my status as a Priest to right some wrongs. What a bloody fool I was! What an idiot! And so bloody naïve. I couldn’t change anything. You see, when I first became a priest back in Ireland we used to send young girls who got themselves into trouble to laundries where they were slave labour for sadistic nuns who used to beat the hell out of them if they didn’t do as they were told. The church would decide when these girls would be set free but in the meantime none of the boys involved were ever sanctioned in any way. It was as if the girls had done it all to themselves and the injustice of it all made me so angry.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘We were a young democratic nation, we were the Irish Republic, we’d broken away from the yoke of British colonialism and yet we were imprisoning young girls just for being unable to stand up to boys who were determined to get inside their knickers.’

‘That’s not too far away from stoning women in Iran for adultery whilst letting their lovers get away with it.’

‘It’s no distance at all, Phillip!’ Brendan replied, ‘And at least in Iran there’s some kind of a trial. Our girls didn’t go before any court, we just sent them away. We didn’t stone them but we committed them to a living death inside those blasted laundries. It was wrong, Phillip. It was very, very wrong. But it was part of the church being so entangled with the new Irish state. I was warned not to rock the boat and that if I wanted to get anywhere as a young priest I’d keep my mouth shut. I’ll forever be ashamed for taking the advice and putting my career before justice for those girls. The laundries closed down eventually but not until after many more souls had suffered in them.’

‘You’re a rebel, Brendan,’ said Phillip, ‘but in the right way.’

‘Oh I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting old.’

‘They warned me you were a character, Brendan.’

Brendan smiled between mouthfuls of roast potato. ‘Did they now?.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Phillip, ‘and they were right.’

‘Well I’m not always proud of the ways of the church, Phillip.’

‘So between the laundries and the issue of paedophile priests, nothing much went on?’ said Phillip, his tongue very firmly in his cheek. ‘It was all a breeze, wasn’t it?’

‘Well not exactly.’ said Brendan as they both laughed. ‘There was the little detail of the whole world blaming us for not helping the issue of poverty in developing countries by being opposed to contraception. Then there was the issue of the forced migration of children to Australia. That was a shameful business too, Phillip. It was an evil, shameful business.’

‘Wasn’t this very parish involved in all that, Brendan? ‘

‘It was indeed, Philip.’

Phillip pointed out the kitchen window with his knife. ‘Wasn’t the children’s home out the back there?’

‘Yes,’ said Brendan, ‘before we sold the land and they built those lovely flats you see now. Scores of them went from here, Phillip, and again it’s a shameful part of our history for which we should be on our knees every night praying for the Lord’s forgiveness. We lied to them, Phillip. We lied to little children whose hearts were already shattered into pieces. We sent them into some horrible situations and some of them weren’t even orphans. There was a trade gong on with hard cash involved. It was nothing less than people trafficking, Phillip. Thank the Lord it was stopped eventually but long after it was too late for many.’

‘Too late?’

‘They’d already gone,’ said Brendan, ‘and there was no getting them back.’

‘Well now,’ said Angela as she sat down once again across the plastic table from Paddy, ‘two weeks ago you ended up telling me you didn’t want to talk about it. Then I got your message yesterday saying otherwise. What’s changed your mind?’

‘Well you look like the kind of Sheila who doesn’t give up and I’m not in the mood for being pestered,’ quipped the inmate, ‘and I’ve nowhere to bloody run!’

Angela laughed. ‘Oh Paddy, I’m so flattered. So what’s the real reason?’

Paddy rubbed his stubble covered chin and looked thoughtfully at this good-looking woman with a kind heart and a ferocious brain who’d been sent to help him understand himself. He silently wished her the very best of luck. ‘I think it’s time, doc,’ he said, ‘what you said before made a lot of sense but I’m not used to it.’

‘Not used to what, Paddy?’

‘People making sense to me.’

‘Alright.’ said Angela, keen to hold the momentum, ‘So where do you want to start?’

Paddy lifted up a carrier bag that had been lying at his feet and handed it to Angela.

‘There must be half a dozen folders in here,’ said Angela as she pulled one of them out. They were full of pages and pages of hand written notes. ‘What’s in them?’

‘The story, doc,’ said Paddy, ‘the whole story, everything that’s happened to me since that day in 1962.’

‘I can read it all?’

‘That’s why I’ve given it to you,’ said Paddy.

‘I never knew you’d have something like this, Paddy’ said Angela who was overwhelmed by Paddy’s meticulousness. She had a quick look through the files and they were all in incredible order, detailing year on year every bit of Paddy’s painful story. Except that they weren’t written like a diary.

‘I’m full of surprises, doc.’

‘Paddy, you’ve styled all this like a novel. It’s all in the third person. Why have you done that?’

‘I thought it might be less painful to…’  Paddy folded his arms across his chest and stretched out his legs, ‘…well to think of all the shit happening to someone else. Does that make sense to you?’

‘It does,’ said Angela, ‘but what do you intend to do with this? I mean, it’s a manuscript. Do you want to get it published?’

‘I guess it wouldn’t be worth it otherwise.’

‘Some would say you shouldn’t profit out of anything in your situation.’

‘They’re the ones who haven’t had the bloody life I’ve had,’ said Paddy.

Angela raised her head slightly at Paddy’s deepening, firmer voice and the look of sheer anger shooting through his eyes. She’d obviously touched a nerve. ‘You’ll have to be prepared for it though, Paddy,’ she said, ‘you do realise that?’

‘Yeah, I do, doc’ said Paddy.

‘Okay,’ said Angela who put down the file she’d been looking through and raised her eyes to take in once more the shadows all across his prematurely aged face.

‘So you want to start in 1962?’

‘Yes, doc.’ said Paddy. ‘Like I said, the day before my fifth birthday. And what I should point out first of all is that I was called Sean back then. The name of Paddy came later.’   

‘Alright.’ said Angela. ‘ Just a point before we start, though. Is there anything here that talks about the time before that day in 1962?’

‘No.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because I thought I was happy before then,’ said Paddy.

‘Thought you were?’

‘Yes,’ said Paddy, ‘like I thought I had a mother who loved me.’ 

1962

‘…he’d hit his little hand against the glass of the window so many times that the whole of his arm was aching. His Mummy had told him they were going to have tea with the Nuns. She’d told him there’d be cakes and jelly and ice cream. One of the Nuns had taken him out into the garden to play with some of the other kids and when he’d gone back to the room his Mummy had gone. The Nun told him that his Mummy was very sorry but she couldn’t cope with him anymore and was trusting him to the care of the Children’s Home. He told them they were lying and one of them had slapped his face. He’d made for the door and they’d grabbed him. They held on to him as tight as they could whilst he screamed and cried and tried to kick his way to freedom. His Mummy couldn’t have left him. Why had she left him? He’d been a good boy. He’d done everything she wanted. He hadn’t been naughty. He’d eaten everything on his plate. Why would she want to do this to him? He’d just started school. The other kids had a Daddy but he’d never asked her where his Daddy was. The big man who’d started to come round hadn’t talked to him. He’d tried to talk to the big man but the big man wasn’t interested.  ‘Mummy!’ he wailed. ‘Mummy!’ Why had she just left him there? He wanted to run all the way home but he didn’t know the way. Maybe he could’ve got round to his Grandma’s house but he couldn’t remember how. His Mummy only took him there once in a while but his Grandma cuddled him and made him feel nice.

‘I want to go home to my Mummy’ he said.

‘You can’t, sweetheart,’ said Rita, her heart breaking for him. When she’d got to work that morning she was asked by one of the Nuns if she could do something with the new boy. She knew what that meant. If he didn’t shake himself out of it soon the Nuns would beat the shit out of him until he couldn’t cry anymore.

‘Your Mummy left you with us. We’re going to take care of you now.’

‘But I want to go home to my Mummy!’

‘This is your home now, Sean,’ said Rita. She was running out of time. Once the Nuns got hold of him he’d know about it. They could be cruel. They could be sadistic. Rita had witnessed them break the spirit of many a child. They always said that children born out of wedlock were an offence to God but Rita didn’t buy any of that. The offence was made by the stupid parents who dumped their kids here and didn’t seem to give a flaming damn. She remembered Sean’s mother. She’d seemed respectable enough. Nice coat, nice shoes, leather handbag. Hair had obviously only recently been done. What the hell was she doing walking into a children’s home with her son and walking out without him?

‘This is not my home,’ said Sean, ‘and where’s my Daddy?’

Rita held his hand. ‘Sweetheart, you’ve got to get used to it. You’ve got to accept that your Mummy isn’t coming back and you’ve got to start fitting in and behaving yourself. I know you can’t make sense of any of it, love, but you’ve got to try. And I’ll be here to help you. I promise. I’ll be here to help you get through it.’

Sean was sobbing his heart out. ‘Will I be able to see my Mummy?’

‘ No, sweetheart,’ said Rita who then cuddled him close, ‘but I’ll be here. I’ll be here always but you’ve got to promise me to be a good boy otherwise the Nuns will get cross with you and you don’t want that. So promise me to do as you’re told and try not to wet the bed.’

Whenever the nuns were getting a child ready for shipment they never gave a hint to the child as to what was about to happen to them. Packing their clothes, what little of them that some of them had, took place whilst the child wasn’t near enough to notice. Rita hated doing this. She hated looking into the eyes of a child who’d already been rejected by their family and who was about to be sent to the other side of the world without them knowing anything about it or being part of the decision. They were already bewildered by what had happened to them so far but the nuns didn’t have any thought for that. They could make some money for their association from trading children with other Catholic societies, even in a far off land. These children were mostly born from immoral acts as far as the nuns were concerned. That made them unworthy of the same consideration that was given to children born into normal families. Normal families? Rita herself had been lucky that George had wanted to marry her after she became pregnant with Michelle. If he hadn’t then her child might’ve ended up in a loveless hole like this one. It sent a shiver down her spine to think that she’d come that close. 

Rita had developed a special bond with little Sean. She’d love to get hold of his mother and demand of her how she could’ve been so cruel to just leave him there but her actual identity was a secret locked away in a filing cabinet in the Mother Superior’s office. Rita had even put it to her husband that they might think about adopting Sean but her husband was dead against it. He didn’t want to ‘bring somebody else’s bastard into our home’ and he wouldn’t hear anymore of it. But Rita worried about little Sean. There was just something about him that made her worry about his future. Call it a premonition or an instinct. But it was there.

It broke her heart to have to get his things together and pack them in the little suitcase. She was going to miss him and she knew that he was going to miss her. She could take the cowards way out and swap her shift so that she wasn’t on duty when all the children left. But she couldn’t do that to Sean. His own mother had kicked him in the teeth and she was about to do the same. Except she couldn’t offer him her home and her family in which to nurture him and make sure he grew up feeling loved and wanted. She had to play her part in sending him off as if he’d done something so wrong and so terrible when the only thing he’d done was to be born.

She was about to take his little suitcase downstairs when she turned and saw him standing watching her at the door. It was written all over his face. He knew. 

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

Rita sat down on his bed and tapped the space beside her. ‘Come and sit with me, love. I need to talk to you about something.’

Sean didn’t move. ‘What about?’

Rita held out her hand. ‘ Come on, Sean, love. Come and sit with me?’

Sean started to cry. Rita went over to him but he cowered away from her. She’d never felt more awful in her life.

She knelt down and held his shoulders. ‘Sean, you’ve got to be a very brave boy for me. Do you understand? You’re going away to a far away place and … ‘

‘…why can’t you come with me?’ he pleaded, trying to untangle himself.

‘I can’t, sweetheart, I just can’t. I’m sorry.’

As she tried to calm him down one of the nuns, Sister Philomena, a particularly nasty bitch who liked using a ruler on kids’ knuckles, came storming down the corridor.

‘Mrs. Makin!’ she raged. ‘ I warned you about getting too attached to these urchins!’

‘They’re not urchins!’ Rita retorted. ‘They’re in pain and they need love.’

‘Oh I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous,’ snapped Sister Philomena. ‘ We, the sisters, give them a good home and you criticise us for it? Collect your cards from the Mother Superiors’ office!’

Sister Philomena grabbed Sean so violently that the fear inside him made him wet his pants. She didn’t like that one bit. She pulled his trousers and underpants down and rubbed his face in them before thrashing the living daylights out of him. Rita tried to intervene but Sister Philomena was stronger and she pushed her away. Sean disappeared, screaming in agony and hurt, his eyes full of fear, looking back and appealing to Rita as Sister Philomena dragged him along the floor by his hair. But Rita knew she was helpless.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rita as she sobbed, her hands reaching out to him but not being able to go as far as he needed them to. ‘I’m sorry, Sean. God bless you, sweetheart.’

‘Rita! …Rita! …Ree – ta!‘

*

‘But how did you interpret what Rita Makin was thinking?’ asked Angela. ‘How did you work that out?’

‘I didn’t have to,’ said Paddy, who was feeling tired after his great disclosures. He wasn’t used to going down so deep into talking about himself. ‘Rita used to talk to me a lot. I knew what she was thinking.’

‘But you were so young.’

‘But I remembered it, I soaked it all up because she was the only one who cared about me then. I didn’t know what it all meant at the time. It was only later that it all started to make sense. Then when I was older I was able to work a lot of the other stuff out like when they were preparing a child for shipment for instance.’

‘Even at the age you were then you still remember her words in such great detail?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Paddy.

‘Do you still think of Rita Makin, Paddy?’

‘Oh yes, doc,’ said Paddy, ‘quite often.’

‘But it was such a long time ago and you were so young.’

‘Doc, you never forget those who show you love even if it was a lifetime ago,’ said Paddy, ‘you just never forget them.’

‘I can understand that’ said Angela. 

‘Especially when you’ve been shown as little as I have.’ 

‘Is it sympathy you’re after, Paddy?’

‘No, doc.’ said Paddy. ‘It’s a recognition that I was done wrong against by the very person who should’ve protected me from any harm and that her actions sent me down a path to disaster.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Exactly, my mother. A crime is never simply a crime, doc, despite what all the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade try and bullshit. A crime is just the end of the story.’