A new girl arrived on a Tuesday and on the Friday she escaped, exactly how nobody could say. She simply vanished from our midst without a confiding word to anyone. The bells clanged and the nuns flurried. I took heart when she never returned. The next day, working in the nuns’ graveyard, I looked through the bars to ascertain the route she’d taken. Through the fence that surrounded the graves I could see the entrance to the convent, the wrought-iron gate that opened to let in visitors. And I noticed at the corner, where the gate met the cement wall, one bar had rotted away and fallen into the high grass. The space it left was still too small for my pregnant self to slip through. But I wouldn’t be pregnant forever.
The two other girls worked in obedient silence, pulling weeds and cleaning lichen from the headstones. I kneeled and pulled the bar into place, lodging it in so the cracks wouldn’t be visible unless examined closely.
That afternoon Sister Mary Clare sat down beside me in the sewing room, where I worked alongside a group of girls, mending old uniforms. Other girls – who unlike me were handy with knitting needles – worked on the tiny matinee coats the babies would wear to keep warm. I prayed my baby would never have one of these. I’d get out of here too soon for the nuns to dress her. Whatever clothes my child wore, they would not be manufactured at this convent.
‘Dear Nan,’ Sister Mary Clare said, perched on the same backless stool the rest of us used. ‘You don’t seem yourself.’ She patted my arm. Two nuns came in carrying babies, and the girls they belonged to put their knitting aside to nurse them.
‘What would you have been,’ I asked Sister Mary Clare, as I executed a clumsy stitch, ‘if you hadn’t been a nun?’
‘Why, a mother, of course.’ She smiled over at the nursing babies then quoted Coleridge, though at the time I believed they were her own words. ‘A mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive.’
I let my work drop into my lap and covered my face with my hands, thinking of Bess. Was she still the holiest thing alive, now that her baby was dead? ‘Bess,’ I said. ‘Poor Bess.’
‘There, there. Don’t you worry about Bess. Why, she’s a wife now. She can have another baby, one that can be baptized properly. She can have ten babies, all fat and happy, gathered round her feet.’
I broke down sobbing, and Sister Mary Clare rubbed my back in gentle circles. She would have been a good mother. ‘Take heart. Bess’s young man turned up for her. Could be yours will too. He’ll have read the letter I sent him by now.’ She handed me a handkerchief and I blew my nose.
‘Here,’ she said, reaching into her sleeve. ‘I’ve brought you a treat.’ She pressed a piece of soda bread into my hand, still warm, and slathered with fresh butter, a luxury I hadn’t seen since I left home. I looked at the other girls apologetically.
‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said. ‘Your friends don’t begrudge you a treat, do you, girls?’
None of them looked up to meet her challenging gaze. I should have seen it. But I couldn’t afford to. I bit into the soda bread, butter melting on my tongue. It tasted so good I had to stop myself telling the nun I loved her.
That night I dreamed of Father Joseph’s jowly face hovering over mine. His veiny hands pawing at me. His groans and snorts.
‘No, no, no!’
I woke already siting up. My hands, covering my face, smelled like they belonged to someone else. This place was wholly foreign. Fiona sat next to me, patting my back, not asking. We all had identical dreams, good and bad. In this way and perhaps only this way, Father Joseph’s theory of our sameness was correct.
‘Tell me,’ I whispered. She recited my parents’ address in London, her voice light and cheerful as a fairy’s.
There were so many more of us than there were of them. What if we’d banded together? An uprising? A hundred girls rising up against the handful of nuns and one lecherous priest? We had more to fight for than any soldier in the IRA. We could have taken our captors down and marched back into the world, our youth and our children reclaimed.