Steal My Sunshine (13 page)

I know Aunt Caro is still talking but I can't make out anything she says.

 

She walks me briskly towards a mansion that seems to swallow us into its long shadows, with grey outbuildings reaching out on the right and high fences all around. The main building has gabled roofs and a spire, roughcast walls with red brick around the tall windows. It looks like my old school. I blink, thinking I can see faces in those windows, but Aunt Caro won't let me stop to have a proper look. She holds my arm and pulls me along.

‘Aunt Caro, how long do I have to stay here?'

‘Sshh, come on, Essie. The Sisters will help us. The good Lord is our only hope.'

A woman on the front steps stops sweeping and stands back for us. I wonder if there are other servants here, or schoolmistresses. If I work hard and give them the baby, I could be out of this place and back home in a few months, and nobody even needs to know. I can do this.

Aunt Caro asks for Sister Ignatius and the girl nods and shows us through the front door. It's cooler inside, and dark. We pass a giant crucifix and a number of statues and paintings. There's hardly a sound in here but in the distance I think I can hear a grinding sound, machinery of some sort.

Aunt Caro and I sit opposite Sister Ignatius in an office with high ceilings and tall narrow windows that let in so much glare I have to shield my eyes, while they talk about me as if I'm not in the room.

When Sister says the word ‘fallen' Aunt Caro nods vigorously, relieved to have someone put into words how she feels about me. But that's not what I am. I'm Essie Carver, I'm just a girl.

‘Hard work is the way back to the Lord,' says Sister. She presses one finger after another as she tells Aunt Caro about the work I'll be doing: sheets, pillowslips, tablecloths, bedspreads, blankets, serviettes. ‘The Sacred Heart provides clean laundry for every business in this town,' she says.

‘But I'm still at school.'

‘What school would have you?' says Sister, barking every word. The slackness of her face, crammed into a tight-fitting habit, is like raw chicken skin.

They mean for me to work here every day. I know I've done wrong but, for heaven's sake, I'm not the only one – I didn't do it alone! Isn't it bad enough that I've been sent so far away from home? I don't understand how all of this happened. And dear God, it's so hot in here. My blood is pulsing heavily all over, up into my face where it seems to make everything blur. I can't stop looking at the horrible fat mole on the side of Sister's nose. I want to laugh and cry and scream. I think I'm going mad.

‘. . . rejected and scorned by all decent members of society,' Sister says. They go on and on about me, but it can't be true. I was in love and James is decent. If I can just write to him, I know he'll come. Sister smiles at Aunt Caro, who seems to be shaking with excitement. It's such a strange sight, as if she's possessed. ‘She isn't fit to look at heaven now. You're not to blame yourself, Caroline. We'll show her the way back from sin.'

Aunt Caro cries into her handkerchief. She leaves without even looking at me.

Sister makes me stand and talks right up close to my face for what feels like hours. My back aches and I'm so hungry I could faint. She walks around me, inspecting me, and I'm to stare straight ahead and not look at her.

‘The child will not pay for your sins,' she says. ‘You will. Through the powers of cleanliness and hard work, you will work towards salvation.'

‘Sister, there's been a mistake.'

‘You will not speak unless you are spoken to.' The two plump lines of loose skin that form her cheeks are shivering with her disgust for me. She has dark whiskers and sour-milk breath. ‘You've been given a chance, girl. We'll give you shelter when nobody else will have you, guidance when the world has turned its back on you because of your sins, hope when hope is the thinnest of threads that still connects you to the Kingdom of Heaven. You will live and work here and obey our rules. You will remember at all times that you are a penitent.'

Penitent. I try to push the word from my head when she hands me a rough grey dress and a blue apron and tells me to follow her. Down a dark corridor, we enter a room with bare concrete walls and a small window so high up it's just filled with blue. There's a bath, and Sister tells me to take off my dress and stand in it.

‘Sister, please, I'll wash in private.'

She yanks my hair so hard it feels like she's ripping my head apart, and the word penitent creeps back in. ‘Stand in the bath in your slip. You need to be cleansed.' The water she pours on me is so cold it makes my whole body shudder, and each cupful is laced with disinfectant so strong it feels like it's in my eyes and throat, choking me.

I cry in short bursts, but when Sister roughly dries my hair the fear turns into anger and there's such strength in my rage that it scares me. I could push these thick walls down, pull my way up to that tiny window and smash it with my bare hands, fall out to the ground below and run like a wild thing into the wide expanse that surrounds this place.

Sister pushes the grey dress and blue apron into my arms again, and even while I'm putting them on I'm telling her, ‘You can't touch me. I'm not from here. You can't keep me. I'm not a prisoner.' Not a single muscle in her face moves as I carry on. ‘Someone is coming for me,' I cry.

She's like a statue, staring me down until I feel as powerful as the puddle of clothes at my feet. ‘You've fallen,' she says. ‘And we are the only ones who will pick you up.'

She's right, I've fallen into the bottom of the world. ‘Someone has to come for me,' I whisper.

‘No one is coming for you, Essie Carver,' she says. Her eyes narrow. ‘Essie – it's short for Estelle, isn't it?'

I look down at the blue apron, and at my old clothes which I don't dare touch. ‘I'm just Essie. My father named me. It means star.'

‘You're a proud, vain girl and there's no place for that here. From now on you'll be called Audrey.'

Never. I am Essie.

Sister makes me take off my necklace and put it into a box full of trinkets. She tells me the story of Saint Audrey, who got an ugly growth on her neck as punishment for showing off her jewels.

She stands over me as I scrub off my nail polish. I'd painted them the last night on the ship. It was Mrs Weldon's polish. I never thought I'd miss her but I'd give anything to see a familiar face, or to be anywhere else but here.

I hold my breath as Sister looks at my hair, and then right into my eyes as if to say:
I can take that as well. Be warned.

 

They call me Audrey.

On the first night, a girl called Theresa kneels by my bed and holds my hand as I cry.

‘Why are you here?' I say.

‘I had a baby,' she says. ‘He's in another building but he'll go soon.'

‘Then why can't you go, too?'

She squeezes my hand.

 

They call me Audrey.

I sleep next to Josephine, who wants me to call her Jo. The Sisters call her Bernadette. She says she'll call me Essie in secret if I want. She says God won't mind. Jo is eighteen.

We sleep in a room with thirty others. Behind a screen is a bed for the Sister on duty. Some of us have round bellies and others do not, but Jo says we're all treated the same in here – that is, if we've got enough wits about us to avoid punishment or we're lucky enough not to have been born coloured. Agnes and Irene are the natives and take the most beatings.

The Virgin and Child hang at one end of the dorm and at the other end is a door. But it's just a door to nowhere, it doesn't lead to a place you'd want to go. There's no hope on either side of that door.

Jo helps me work out when my baby's going to come – nearly the same time as hers. She gives me some of her contraband: torn-out pages of a library book to write a letter on. My hand shakes as I write to James. Jo says I'll have to beg a delivery boy to post it for me. I know what she means by begging. She says to beg double because of how far it's got to go. That's how it works here: you give what you can to get what you want.

 

They call me Audrey. It's been two weeks.

Everyone's up at five and we dress in the darkness. Somehow, every morning we find our way back into this waking nightmare from whatever dream we had that night. We sit huddled at tables of six, arms grazing, no talking. We eat the food in front of us but sneak glimpses of what they eat at the other end of the room, on the raised platform. Sister Phillipa walks up and down each aisle reading psalms, and when the bell rings we stop eating – or else.

At Mass we kneel in long pews, palms together, eyes down. There's a part of the chapel that's just for us. We say the right words at the right time, over and over. Some mornings I wonder if we've gone up in God's estimation. Other mornings I'll hear a girl quietly weeping or someone who can't stomach the smell of incense and suddenly there's nothing spiritual about where we are or what we're saying.

We work in the laundry, pulling steaming hot sheets off a mangle. Others work the flat irons that hang from long hoses. The Sisters walk in twos with their hands clasped serenely over their hearts – but watch those hands fly out when a girl steps out of line. See the look of disgust on their faces as bad apples are removed and peace is restored.

Lunch is at twelve with a reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, 23:2:
A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

‘Eyes down, Audrey. Keep your eyes down.'

We work again, eat dinner, make rosary beads. We pray. We silently climb the steps to the dorm, watching the heels of the girl in front who is you but one step ahead. In rows of eight we wash our faces until a bell rings and the row behind us takes our place.

The Sister who turns out the light at eight says she'll pray for us.