The Rosary Garden by Nicola White (best books to read now TXT) 📕

She thought Fitz would be right there, but she wasn’t. She must have gone on to their usual smoking spot. Ali walked on into the grounds. The nets sagged on the tennis courts, weeds sprouting at the bottom of the chain-link fence. Summer-holiday shutdown. Passing the junior-school windows, she could see tiny chairs stacked up on tables.

She turned down the broad path that led to the Rosary Walk and climbed the four steps up to its gravel surface. Stone slabs, like miniature tombstones, flanked either side at regular intervals, ten on the left, ten on the right. Each slab bore a tile showing a scene from the life of the Virgin. The idea was to say your rosary while you walked, and if you got the pace right, you’d reach a slab at the end of each Hail Mary, completing a ten-prayer decade by the time you’d walked the length. It depended how fast you prayed, of course. Or walked. Before you turned round for the return decade, you could contemplate a life-size statue of the Pietà at the path’s end, a whitewash-blurred tableau of the dead Christ balanced on his mother’s knees. Mary looked down so calmly at the distorted corpse, oblivious to the strain on her thighs.

Halfway along the walk, a path led off to a small gate in a thick hedge. Ali lifted the latch and entered the shade of the Rosary Garden. She remembered Sister O’Dwyer telling them that the trees around it had been planted to shelter the little garden from the winds that blew down across the fields from the Dublin Mountains. That must have been a long time ago, for nowadays the garden was shaded to the point of gloom and the fields had become housing estates. With the trees in full leaf, it had an almost underwater feel, faint dapples of light moving across ivyfilled beds. A tiny building stood in one corner, all dimpled windows and painted-on beams. It looked like something from a Grimm fairy tale, but it was just the garden shed.

Ali scanned the garden. Perhaps Fitz had got caught up with the chapel crowd after all. A twig snapped somewhere nearby, and a blackbird flew from a hedge.

She moved deeper into the garden. Another sound reached her ears, a kind of high whimpering. It was coming from the direction of the shed, and now she noticed that the door was half open.

‘Hello?’

‘Aa – li?’ The voice that came from inside the shed was Fitz’s but sounded weirdly stretched. Ali’s skin prickled.

She pushed the door open. Fitz was standing in the middle of the shed, her face as pale as milk and her fingers at her mouth. A smear of lipstick trailed across one cheek. She appeared to be standing in a nest of gardening tools – hoes, rakes and loppers meshed around her ankles. Her eyes were fixed on the floor: on a wire basket filled with smaller tools. Ali picked up a fallen rake that blocked her way, propped it against the wall. As she turned back she noticed a large mushroom or egg nestled among the tools in the basket. She wanted to go to Fitz, to free her from the tangle of handles – but she couldn’t make sense of this thing. She stepped closer, wondering at the fuzzy halo around the edge of the egg.

Downy hair on a head.

Ali’s vision blurred and wavered. She moved a little to the side and the object resolved itself – couldn’t be undone now – as the top of a baby’s head. She took another step towards Fitz and the body of the baby appeared, shoulders wrapped in white and the rest hidden by a brown paper bag. The rusting blades of pruning saws and secateurs bristled behind its head, but the baby was unmarked, and perfectly still.

‘I was looking for matches,’ said Fitz.

The baby’s eyes were closed, but its open mouth was dry and flaking around the lips, and a horrible darkness brimmed inside. She waited for it to move.

‘I was just looking for matches.’

Ali pulled her eyes towards her friend.

‘For a fag,’ said Fitz.

‘C’mon!’ Ali grabbed her arm and propelled Fitz out of the tumble of shed and into the garden.

Then they were running back to the school in a kind of dreamtime, slow and heavy, and her throat ached. Sister Bernadette appeared suddenly on the path in front of them, from nowhere, and Fitz ran ahead to her, streaming words.

The nun took control – Fitz was to go on to the school and get help, Ali was to come back with her, show her the place.

They ran shoulder-to-shoulder along the Rosary Walk and plunged into the garden. When they reached the door of the shed, Ali stood aside to let Sister Bernadette go in on her own. There was a long silence, a gap in time, before the nun reappeared, her face distraught, the features pulling themselves apart. She thrust an old china cup at Ali’s stomach.

‘Get me some water,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Go on.’

It wasn’t until Ali was at the tap that she realised what her errand was. If the nun wanted to baptise the baby, perhaps it was alive. She hurried back, holding the sloshing cup at arm’s length.

Sister Bernadette was waiting outside the shed, the child cradled in her arms. As she shifted her hold to reach for the cup, Ali was sure the baby’s head moved.

‘Is it going to be all right?’

But the nun just glared at her, then bent her head close in to the baby’s, mumbling unsteady lines of prayer under her breath. She poured the water in a thin line over the child’s face. It didn’t flinch. Sudden tears fell from Bernadette’s eyes onto the baby’s still cheek, salt water following fresh. Ali noticed the baby was now wrapped in her own paisley-print scarf, and that her overnight bag was open on the ground.

Bernadette lifted a corner of the scarf to wipe the baby’s