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

he knew was that he couldn’t bear it to happen again. She wanted to try – argued that they didn’t have the luxury of waiting – but he couldn’t go near her, for fear of it. They hadn’t been intimate for so long now, he wasn’t sure it could be mended.

He wiped a hand over his eyes and turned the ignition, driving without focus until he was away from Ranelagh, waking again to the world beyond the windscreen only as he turned down by the canal.

He noticed a woman sitting on a bench in a short skirt and boots, her hair dyed a chemical auburn, her mouth clasped passionately around a cigarette. It reminded him of Sister Bernadette and her good work with the working girls of this area. The ice-queen moving among them. Community projects, the old nun had said. Not so very far away from the convent, really. He wondered if anyone from the team had had time to check it out.

Percy Place was where she said St Jude’s, the drop-in centre, was – just nearby. He took a left fork out of the main traffic flow and cruised slowly to where the handsome Georgian terrace faced onto the canal. Halfway down he spotted a round plaque on the wall – a famous writer remembered.

Swan parked. It was a lovely street, especially in the quiet of a late Sunday morning, like a film set, the way the whispering trees watched over the little stone bridge. The start of a Kavanagh poem learned at school came to him:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal

Pouring redemption for me …

Ah, redemption. A pint of that would be welcome.

The house was tall and wide, and a little brass sign at the top of the steps said Order of the Annunciation, in letters you would have to be closer than two feet away to read. Very discreet. He knocked. Nothing happened. He knocked again.

A door opened somewhere below and Swan looked down over the railing into the paved basement area. A young woman with very short hair walked out and put something in a bin. Even from above, he could see how her stomach domed out.

‘Excuse me? Do you know if there’s anyone in up here?’

She looked up, shading her eyes with a hand. She was much younger than he had first thought.

‘It’s all the one. Who are you looking for?’

‘Sister Bernadette?’

‘She’s had to go away.’

‘Do you work here?’

‘Naw. I’m a resident.’ She didn’t look like a prostitute, not at all. She looked more like a schoolgirl.

An awful thought struck him.

25

After the police detectives left, Ali collected up their mugs and put the tray outside the door. She turned back to the mess of her room, a mess she’d become newly aware of through strangers’ eyes. Clothes spewed from the rucksack she had brought with her from Buleen. That was a good place to start.

When she shook out her jeans, the little medal that Joan’s mother had given her fell out of the pocket, followed by the flutter of Mary O’Shea’s business card. Ali picked up the white rectangle and stared at it.

She sat back down on the bed, all energy fled. She rubbed the edge of the card back and forth against her lips. Mary would be very interested in what Beasley had subjected her to. But what would Mary do with that? How could she control where that story went? How could she be sure she wouldn’t come out of it looking suspicious, stupid – both? She shouldn’t trust Mary, and she couldn’t trust the police. The police thought she might have had a baby. Beasley had looked inside her and thought so too. Swan was talking about poltergeists and dark forces. All of it was awful – everything that had happened since she stepped into the garden, or was it the night before that when things started to fall apart?

She should have told the police about being at St Brigid’s that night; it just never occurred to her. The awful sight of that baby had put everything else out of her head. Fitz and she had met up with Bobby and Ronan outside the Berry-bush pub while Davy had been inside buying a naggin of vodka for them. The boys had beer, and it was their idea to go to the school grounds, not hers. Ronan had been paying her a lot of attention, slagging her, pretending to be interested in her bangles, that kind of thing. Usually boys paid more attention to Fitz.

He stole one of her bracelets and she had chased after him, running over the grass in her bare feet, leaving Bobby and Fitz behind at the hockey pitch, drinking beer. When she caught up with Ronan, he grabbed her, pressed her into the bark of one of the big cedars. They were only messing about, nothing serious. He was kissing her neck, and she was starting to feel kind of floaty with it, watching the branches above her moving against the darkening sky – that deep, deep blue that comes before black. One of Ronan’s hands was at her chest, twisting the buttons of her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Ronan laughed and stepped back from her. She looked down and saw with a shock that one breast was exposed, lolling out, almost luminous in the dusk.

It was then that they heard the footsteps on the path, a soft gritty rhythm coming towards them. Ali turned quickly and crouched into the tree, signalled to Ronan to hide too. She didn’t dare move until the sound had faded well beyond them. Ronan claimed it was a nun who passed – perhaps the ghost of a nun – but that wasn’t what she had seen. The half-glimpsed figure looked more like a man to her.

She couldn’t tell Swan she had gone off with Ronan – he thought she was a right tramp already. She’d caught him staring at that damn love-bite on her