Blood Sisters (18 page)

She took one step towards the window, and then another. The last three steps she took in a hurry and clutched at the window frame to stop herself from falling over. She had only been drunk once in her life, when she was seventeen years old, at her Uncle Bernard’s birthday party, but that was what she felt like now, as if she were drunk.

She looked out of the window and saw that there was an asphalt yard below, with a row of stables on the right-hand side with white-painted doors. Directly below, a black-haired woman in a brown tweed jacket was talking to a grizzled-looking man who was holding the reins of a large bay horse. Sister Barbara couldn’t make out what the woman was saying but it sounded as if she were giving the man down the banks for something. Her voice was harsh and barking, and she kept prodding at him with her finger.

On the far side of the yard there was an asphalt road, with a row of lime trees on one side of it, with their leaves turned yellow, and a fenced-in field on the other, where five or six horses were grazing. Beyond the field there were rusty-coloured woods and beyond the woods rose hazy green hills. If there was one thing of which Sister Barbara was absolutely certain, it was that she had never been here before in her life.

She stood staring out of the window for a while, unsure if she could manage to walk safely back to the bed. Her head still thumped and her mouth felt dry. After a while the black-haired woman in the brown tweed jacket gave the grizzled-looking man a dismissive wave and he led the horse away. The woman turned around and as she did so she looked up and saw Sister Barbara. She didn’t acknowledge her, but walked quickly to the left and disappeared out of sight.

Sister Barbara took three deep breaths and then released her grip on the side of the window frame. Very slowly, she started to stagger back towards the bed, her arms outstretched as if she were a zombie. She was only two steps away from the bed when the room seemed to slope and she pitched over sideways, hitting her left cheek and her shoulder hard against the floor.

She lay there, half stunned, unable to climb back on to her feet, twitching with pain and helplessness.

‘
Saint Anastasia, please protect me
,’ she whispered. ‘
You who suffered so terribly because you refused to deny your belief, please relieve my suffering
.’

She wasn’t lying there long, however, before she heard footsteps climbing the stairs. It sounded like more than one person, and she heard a woman’s voice, although it was very deep for a woman.

The bedroom door opened and the black-haired woman she had seen down in the yard walked in. Sister Barbara saw her tan-coloured high-heeled boots first of all. Then, when she managed to raise her head a little and look up, she saw that she had taken off her brown tweed jacket and was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater, with a silver oval medallion around her neck, and a dark-chocolate skirt.

She was closely followed into the room by a short bald man in a tight black T-shirt and jeans. He had a squashed-looking face, like a Hallowe’en turnip lantern, and protruding ears with silver earrings in both of them. He was broad-chested but his legs were bandy, as if he had been riding horses all his life. He was carrying a soiled canvas bag which looked as if it contained a number of heavy objects and clanked when he set it down on the floor.

‘Why, Sister Barbara,’ said the black-haired woman. ‘What are you doing down there, girl, when you have a perfectly good bed to have a nap on?’

She crouched down beside her and tilted her head to one side so that she was looking directly into Sister Barbara’s face. Close up, Sister Barbara could see that she was the same woman who had come to visit her at the Greendale Rest Home dressed as a nun and claiming to be Sister Margaret from the Bon Sauveur Convent.

Now, though, Sister Barbara could smell a strong jasmine perfume on her, so strong that she could taste it, and from where was she was lying she couldn’t avoid seeing up her skirt and her white satin knickers.

‘Dermot,’ said the woman, standing up, ‘help me to lift this old wan on to her feet, would you?’

‘Who are you?’ asked Sister Barbara tremulously. ‘You’re not genuinely a sister from the Bon Sauveur, are you?’

‘Oh, there’s no pulling the wool over your eyes, is there, Sister Barbara?’ said the woman. ‘You were always the cute one.’

She grasped Sister Barbara’s right arm and although Sister Barbara tried to flap her away she kept a tight grip on it, so tight that it hurt. The man called Dermot took hold of her left arm, tugging it out from under her, and between them they hauled her upright. She swayed and staggered, but they heaved her over to the bed and dropped her flat on her back. She tried to sit up but the woman pushed her back down.

‘You just stay lying there. You could do with the rest.’

‘Who are you?’ said Sister Barbara. ‘Where is this place? What do you want with me?’

‘Don’t you recognize me?’ the woman asked her. ‘Well, no, I don’t suppose you would after forty-one years. That’s how long it’s been, Sister Barbara. Forty-one years.’

‘I still don’t know who you are.’

‘Then let me refresh your memory, sister. Riona Nolan. Skinny little Riona Nolan, fifteen and a half years old, dragged around to the convent by her own mother because she was pregnant and had consequently brought everlasting shame on the Nolan family. I’m Riona Mulliken these days, but skinny little Riona Nolan is still here inside me, just as scared as she was that day, and skinny little Riona Nolan will never forget what you gave her all that time ago when all she needed was Christian kindness.’

Sister Barbara tried again to sit up, but again Riona pushed her back down.

‘The way you treated me, you heartless sanctimonious witches, all of you. The way you treated my Sorley.’

‘So you were one of the fallen girls we took in?’ said Sister Barbara.

‘Fallen! Fallen! You made us sound like horses dropped dead in the field! The only thing I’d ever fallen was pregnant and that wouldn’t have happened if my mother had better educated me, and if the church hadn’t forbidden the use of condoms, or abortion.’

‘I confess that I don’t remember you,’ said Sister Barbara. ‘However... if you believe that I failed to give you the comfort that you needed, or if I inadvertently mistreated you in any way, then I am truly sorry and beg your forgiveness.’

‘Forgiveness!’ said Riona. She turned around to Dermot, who was standing by the window with his arms folded, as if he were waiting. ‘Did you hear that, Dermot, she begs my forgiveness!’

Dermot shrugged and sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand, as if he couldn’t give a continental. Riona turned back to Sister Barbara.

‘There’s all kinds of things that you can beg forgiveness for and a person will forgive you. But if you ruin a person’s whole life, then I don’t think you can expect forgiveness for that, do you? If you take everything away from them – their self-respect, and their confidence, and their family, and their friends, and on top of that you take away the child they gave birth to, which is the only one thing they have left to love, the only one thing that makes them feel that they have any worth in this world – if you take that away, too, do you really think for a single moment that you can expect forgiveness, or deserve it?’

‘I’m sorry, that’s all I can say to you,’ said Sister Barbara. ‘Was your child sent off for adoption?’

Riona puckered her lips and nodded, and there were tears sparkling in her eyes.

‘Then I
am
sorry,’ Sister Barbara told her. ‘But you have to remember that times were very different then. People were nowhere near as liberal-minded as they are today. We would have considered very carefully before putting your child up for adoption. You say you were only fifteen. I’m sure you can understand that we thought it would be best for your child, and for you, too. My goodness, you were only a child yourself.’

‘Oh, that’s what you thought, is it? You never asked me. You never said, “Riona, do you think it might be better for you and Sorley if we separate you and you never see each other again?” You never said that, did you? I just went to his cot that morning with his bottle all warm and he was gone. I never even had the chance to kiss him goodbye.’

Sister Barbara closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them and licked her lips. ‘Do you think that I might have a drink of water?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Riona.

‘My mouth is fierce dry. Did you drug me? I can’t seem to remember us leaving Greendale.’

‘You don’t seem to remember anything very much, do you? You don’t even remember giving my little boy away to total strangers. How can you not remember that? Well, no, I suppose I can understand it. Sorley wasn’t the only child you gave away, was he? Not by a long chalk. My friend Clodagh – twin girls she had and you gave those away, too. Do you know what happened to Clodagh? Do you?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember her, either.’

‘She hanged herself, Clodagh, on her seventeenth birthday. Her twins were taken away but her parents still wouldn’t have her back home and it was her birthday and nobody gave her so much as a birthday card and so she hanged herself. I went to her funeral and I was the only one there.’

‘Life can be very cruel sometimes,’ said Sister Barbara.

‘No, Sister,’ Riona retorted. ‘Life isn’t cruel.
People
are cruel. You used to tell me over and over all about your precious Saint Anastasia, how cruelly she was treated by the Romans. What you never understood was that you and your sisters at the Bon Sauveur were just as cruel to us as the Romans were to Saint Anastasia. You didn’t torture us, like the Romans tortured Anastasia. You didn’t cut off our hands and our feet and our breasts and burn us at the stake, but you might just as well have done. Clodagh ended up dead, and she wasn’t the only girl to take her own life, and most of the rest of us suffered mental torture that will last until
we’re
dead and buried, too.’

‘I don’t know what I can say to you,’ said Sister Barbara. ‘I never realized. I always thought that the discipline we imposed on you girls would correct your morals and bring you back to Jesus, and that by sending your children for adoption we were relieving you of a burden that you were far too young to bear, as well as being a lifelong reminder of your shame.’

‘Shame? What shame? I had sex with Tony O’Riordan in the back of my brother’s van!
Once
! I wasn’t ashamed! I would have done it again if he hadn’t copped off with that Bernadette Gibney!’

She leaned over Sister Barbara, breathing deeply, as if she had just run upstairs. Sister Barbara looked up at her and said, ‘Why did you bring me here? Just to tell me how badly we all treated you? I’m an old woman now, Riona. That was all a long time ago, as you so rightly say, and to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve forgotten most of it.’

‘Just because you’ve forgotten it doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. Just because you’ve forgotten it doesn’t mean you no longer deserve to be punished for it.’

‘How can you punish me more than time has punished me already? I pray all day every day for Saint Anastasia to take me away.’

Riona stood up straight. ‘How would you like your prayers to be granted?’

There was a moment of utter silence in the bedroom and none of the three of them moved. Then Dermot opened his mouth and started to worry a fragment of food from between his two front teeth with his thumbnail, and the window rattled softly, and from outside came the echoing clatter of a horse’s hooves.

Sister Barbara crossed herself. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, so quietly that her voice was barely audible. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

As Katie parked outside the courthouse in Washington Street, already five minutes late, her iPhone rang. It was Dr O’Brien calling from the hospital and she was tempted not to answer, but he kept on ringing. She climbed out of her car and hurried up the courthouse steps in between the tall Corinthian pilasters. A small crowd of reporters had gathered outside the front doors, as well as lawyers and relatives and members of the public, including a red-bearded young man with a handwritten placard reading FREE THE WATER METER THREE!

‘Yes?’ said Katie, pausing before she entered the building. ‘Listen, Ailbe – I’m just about to go into court. Can I call you back later?’

‘Phew!’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘I was worried I wouldn’t catch you in time.’

‘Why? What is it?’

‘You’re going in for the Michael Gerrety hearing, right?’

‘That’s right. But I’m really pushed for time.’

‘Please, listen. You know when you visited the mortuary to see the flying nun, there were two floaters under wraps, waiting for me to issue death certificates?’

‘Go on. But do hurry. The court usher’s waving for me to go in.’

‘You won’t need to go in.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘The young female floater. One of your gardaí came in about twenty minutes ago with another body that was found in a ditch beside the N71. He saw the girl lying there on the table and he recognized her immediately. We checked on PULSE and there’s no doubt about it. It’s Roisin Begley.’

Katie felt as if she had been punched hard in the midriff. She leaned back against the nearest pilaster and said, ‘I can’t believe this. Roisin Begley? Is it really her?’

‘Sorry. Absolutely no question at all. She even has the same small mole on her left upper lip.’

Katie took a deep breath, and then another. Her abdominal muscles were rock-hard and she rubbed her stomach slowly to try and relax.

‘All right, Ailbe,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m glad you caught me when you did. God Almighty, though, I’m not looking forward to seeing the smug look on Michael Gerrety’s face when he finds out that the only witness against him is deceased. There are no signs of foul play, I suppose?’

‘She could have been pushed into the river, but there’s no suspicious bruising on her body and she definitely died of drowning. There’s no alcohol or drugs in her system and only some partially digested pizza in her stomach.’

‘What a tragedy. That silly young girl. And so pretty, too. I’ll have Detective Dooley call round to see her parents, so they’ll probably be coming over to the hospital later to make a formal ID. I’ll sort things out here at the courthouse and then I’ll get back to you.’