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

mouth. Ali stared back at her. It had never occurred to her that her mother didn’t love the place she came from.

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – lots of things. The baby, of course. Other bad associations. Do you remember your granddad at all?’

‘Sort of.’ What Ali remembered was an old red-faced man propped in an easy chair in Una’s front room. His stillness and silence were frightening.

‘He was fairly diminished when you knew him. When I was a girl, he was a bit of a brute, to be frank. No affection. Thought a father’s role was to toughen you up.’

Her mother pushed her half-eaten plate of soup away to one side.

‘I remember once – I’ll never forget it – he had this notion that being able to deliver a good death to a beast was an essential skill. He thought the whole family should know how to do it, even his children.’

Ali put her spoon down. She wanted to tell her mother to stop talking, but no words came.

‘One of the cats brought a bird into the kitchen, maimed. It was a little wren, hopping around under the table with it wing sticking out. I was only five or six. My father fetches a bucket from the scullery, fills it with water. Then he bends down and catches the bird, calls me to him. I thought he was going to mend it somehow, so I wasn’t scared until he presses the little thing into my hand, tells me to hold it under the water. I wouldn’t do it, no matter how he argued that it’s the right thing.

‘So he puts his hand around mine and forces them both into the bucket, and I can feel the little thing fluttering, panicking, inside my fingers, but I can’t open my hand. Finally it stops moving, and I look at my father. He takes our hands out of the bucket, pulls my fingers apart and the bird is stretching out in my hand, its little claws uncurling. You know, I don’t think I ever felt the same about him after.’

‘Did he make the others do that?’

‘Oh yes. He made Una kill a lamb that was ailing, but she would have done anything for her daddy. Davy went trapping rabbits with him from the time he could walk, learned how to dispatch them. But it was different for him.’

‘How different?

‘Ach, he’s a boy, it doesn’t seem to go so hard with them. Anyway, it was enough to give me a stomach full. I never miss the place at all. But if you want to go back, I won’t stop you.’

Ali went upstairs to pack. As she changed her clothes, she spotted the little Lourdes medal on the floor. She picked it up it and put it in her shirt pocket, happy to take any protection that was going. From somewhere in the chest of drawers she found a black skirt to wear for the funeral.

‘There’s a train in an hour.’

Her mother was standing at the phone. She put the receiver down and turned to take Ali into her arms for the first time in years. Ali hugged back.

‘Be careful,’ said Ma. The phone started to ring again. Neither moved to answer it.

‘If my Leaving results come,’ said Ali, ‘don’t open them. Wait till I get back and we can open them together.’

26

Swan took his badge from his inside pocket and held it out towards the pregnant girl. She squinted and shook her head. It was too far away. Swan went down to her, could hardly ask her to climb the steps up to him.

‘Someone was supposed to meet me here,’ he lied. ‘I need to take a quick look round. Are any staff about?’

‘One of the nuns’ll be coming to make the dinner, but there’s nobody here now. Never is on a Sunday.’ Her accent wasn’t Dublin, more southerly – Corkish. She inspected his ID diligently and smiled a cheeky smile.

‘I’m not in trouble, am I?’ Flirty, despite her condition. Swan didn’t respond.

He stepped towards the open basement door, peered in – he could see a washing machine and a chest freezer.

‘Can I just have a look?’

‘I suppose it’s all right – but don’t go into any of the girls’ rooms, they’re private.’

‘How many?’

‘Many what?’

‘Girls are staying at the moment?’

‘There’s three of us.’

Swan followed her into the basement of the house, through a large, functional-looking kitchen. Beyond that there was a big sitting room, with a hatch through to the kitchen. The curtains had been drawn to block the light from the TV screen, but even in the blue-washed gloom, the pregnant state of the two young women slumped on the sofa was the first thing he noticed. They were planted deep in the cushions, as if their distended bellies had fallen on them and rooted them there. The girls stirred at his entrance, and one drew a hand up over her stomach in a protective gesture.

‘He’s just having a look round,’ said the crop-haired girl and shot Swan a grin as though his motives were slightly suspect. She went over to an armchair and descended into it slowly, taking the strain on her arms. It seemed he was free to wander. Through the next doorway a staircase led up to the rest of the house.

On the floor above, next to the main entrance, he found two nicely proportioned rooms, furnished for the most part with bland desks and filing cabinets and those low easy chairs with no arms – perhaps this was the drop-in centre that Sister Bernadette had mentioned, but the two floors above that looked like an upmarket B&B: nice carpet, another living room or parlour and a series of gleaming doors with numbers on them and tiny brass frames below. A few of the frames held yellow cards with names inked on them in cramped Gothic calligraphy – Jenny Mooney, Esther McDaid, Sharon O’Higgins – just like the writing on the Reverend Mother’s door back at the