The Rage (19 page)

‘Innocent until proven guilty?’

‘Something like that.’

She sat there, like she was working something out in her head. Then she said, ‘I’m guilty.’

The sound of boots on the stairs, coming up from the third floor. Vincent Naylor finished making a cup of instant coffee. He reached for another mug, ladled a spoonful of coffee, poured again, and by the time the security man came into the flat Vincent had his morning cuppa ready.

‘Bit chilly,’ the security man said.

Vincent handed him the mug, sat down near the window, looked out towards the Edwardstown estate. When he’d woken there was no confusion in his mind, he knew Noel was dead, he knew he was waking to a whole new world. He hadn’t had anything to drink last night, but this morning he felt hung-over.

‘Biscuit?’

The security man held out an opened packet of custard creams, taken from a pocket of his anorak. Vincent took a couple, bit off half a biscuit and it tasted as good as anything he’d ever eaten. He remembered that he’d thrown last night’s Marks & Spencer meal into the waste bin.

The security man was in his fifties, tubby, unshaven. Part of his minimum-wage job required him to look in on the MacClenaghan building each morning, the rest of his day was spent visiting similar withered development projects on the Northside of the city. The first time he arrived, he’d asked for a backhander and Vincent offered him a fiver and a cup of coffee.

‘Fiver a night?’

‘A week.’

The security man had nodded. He looked at Vincent now, his head tilted to one side, one eyebrow raised.

‘You OK? You look a bit fucked, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘Yeah,’ Vincent said. ‘Didn’t get much sleep.’

The security man said, ‘Bit of a smell of petrol.’

Vincent pointed at the jerrycan, standing in a corner. He’d kicked it over during his bad time, threshing about. He’d cleaned up, but the smell lingered.

‘Had to get that yesterday – need to fill my car, first thing,’ he said. ‘Must have spilled some.’

The security man sat in silence until he finished his coffee, then he said, ‘I’ll be off, then.’

‘Right.’

‘Hang onto the biscuits,’ the security man said.

Vincent’s nod acknowledged the generosity. ‘Mind how you go.’

Maura Coady came back from the kitchen with a glass of water. She sat down across from Bob Tidey and took a sip. Her voice was still close to a whisper. ‘You’ve seen the Ryan Report?’

‘I read the newspapers when it came out,’ Tidey said. ‘I decided I already knew more than I wanted to know about all that.’

‘I’m in there, Volume Two – there’s a chapter on the Sisters of the Merciful Heart. It’s not much, just one short chapter in five whole volumes – it’s between the chapter on the orphanage at Goldenbridge and the chapter on St Michael’s at Cappoquin. Compared with some of the evidence, we were far from the worst. But we’re there – and I’m there. Three witnesses gave evidence against me.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Some of what they said, I remember those things happening. Some of it – it was like they were talking about someone else. A lawyer came to see me, put the allegations to me. I told him what I remembered, and I said I knew they were telling the truth. Even if I didn’t remember all the details, I know it all happened, I know, I—’

‘You don’t have to talk about this.’

She shook her head. ‘When you do something terrible, after a while – the daily routine, the people around you, the work, the worries – after a while all that takes over. So many layers of time settling on the memories – and the big things, even the awful things, they end up buried under all the other stuff. Sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else.’

She stared out the window, at the street beyond the net curtain. ‘It was a different country, when I took the veil. The way people thought, it was normal that a young woman should go off behind a wall. Cover herself from head to toe in black, never once do anything that wasn’t ordained by someone else. Never touch a man, or let herself long for a child.’

‘Maura—’

‘Looking at it now, I’m on the last lap, an old woman from a different age – and I can see how strange it must seem. Unnatural, even. But it was normal back then, when the Church was so powerful. It was more than normal, it was something that made everyone proud – to have a priest or a nun in the family. It was a blessing.’

‘It was a simpler world back then.’

‘Not really. Different things mattered, but the world was always complicated. There were a lot of unwanted babies. Sometimes they were taken from mothers who weren’t married, sometimes a parent died and families broke up. Sometimes parents couldn’t look after their children – there were a whole lot of babies with no one to look after them.’

‘And you got the job, whether you wanted it or not.’

‘Oh, we wanted it. It suited everyone. The bishops got to run the schools and the hospitals – the politicians liked not having to worry about the bothersome kids.’

Tidey leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees, his head close to Maura Coady. He waited while she swallowed some more water. ‘What age were you?’

‘When I went into the convent – seventeen. I had a calling, a vocation. I was earning my place in heaven. When I was twenty-three I was in charge of more than thirty very loud, very troubled kids. Feed them, teach them, mother them. Nourish their bodies and protect their souls. I filled their heads with prayer and when they got awkward I hit them with a leather strap. There were Department of Education guidelines that told me when I was allowed to do that.’

She took another sip of water. She held the glass with both hands. ‘One girl – I don’t remember her name, but I can see her face even now. She did something wrong, something petty, and instead of saying sorry she shrugged. That was all. She looked me in the eye when she did it. Stubborn girl, rebellious – out there in front of all the others. So, I hit her. Open hand across the cheek. A big step. It wasn’t just about impudence any more, I had to show her – and the rest of them – who was in charge.’ There was a silence. Her eyes were seeing something not in the room. ‘It should have worked. She should have shown fear, she should have lowered her eyes. Instead, she just looked straight at me, like she hadn’t felt a thing, and she called me
rabbit face
. So, I hit her again. And again she pretended it was nothing and again I hit her. I don’t remember how many times I hit her before she cried.’

Maura sounded strained, as though the words themselves were heavy.

‘When I was a child, the priests told us how to recognise the dividing line between a venial sin and the mortal sin that put your soul in danger.
Did you take pleasure in it?
– that was the measure of things back then. Your instincts could lead you astray, but you were in real trouble if you took pleasure in it. I think it’s that kind of thinking that let some of the priests do the things they did. They told themselves it was something they couldn’t help, a curse of the flesh. They were struggling with the Devil, and as long as they could convince themselves they weren’t taking pleasure in it—’

‘There was no pleasure to take from what you did.’

‘Oh, there was.’ Maura shook her head. ‘I remember the feeling of achievement when that girl cried. There’d been a challenge to the natural order of things, and I faced it down. It was a great feeling. Looking back, I think maybe I felt shame even then – but maybe that’s me remembering things the way I want to remember them. The girl’s a middle-aged woman now – and if she’s still alive I know she still remembers what happened that day and I know she still hates me, and she’s right.’

‘Did she give evidence?’

‘No – and I don’t know why. Maybe she’s buried it inside. Maybe she left the country. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she was one of the ones who never said anything to anyone about it, the quiet, defeated ones.’ She took a long breath. ‘She wasn’t the last. When you find yourself with power, you use it to solve problems – and you never know where that’s going to lead. It wasn’t just the physical hurt – there were the ones who vanished into themselves. The ones who couldn’t fight back, the ones who – I’ve heard some of them talk, on the radio these past couple of years, people crying, all these decades later, people who lived thwarted lives, people so hurt they let whole parts of themselves wither and die. That’s the worst part of what we did.’

‘You were young, in an impossible situation – we all do what we think is right at the time.’

‘Beating a child into submission – and there were worse things than that. Things I can’t think about. Day after day, year after year, until it became so routine we didn’t even notice. Most of them took it as normal, and those that didn’t – we broke them. It wasn’t just the violence, it was the humiliation. Back then it was called chastisement. We chastised them. We were guiding them through the valley of temptation – from birth to death – keeping them pure for the life eternal. We made them afraid of us, and we didn’t mind that a lot of them hated us. We were saving their souls.’

After a few moments of silence, Tidey said, ‘You’ve done your penance, Maura. We can’t go back and do things again, the way we know they should have been done.’

‘There were times when I was feeling bad. Locked into that life – I know now I wasn’t OK with that and I wonder. Any chance of another life slipped away – maybe there was disappointment, unhappiness, frustration, things I didn’t recognise in myself back then. Maybe that kind of unhappiness is where the cruelty comes from. Or maybe there were times when I just enjoyed having the control.’

‘What about – you said – what the priests did?’

Maura stared at the table. ‘The first time – there was a priest used to visit the school, a very nice man, very jolly. One of the girls – I thought she was lying. Leave it with me, I told her. And I did nothing. She never said anything more. It was – you couldn’t be sure. There were times he’d spend a lot of time with a child, all smiles and joking, and the child wouldn’t seem all that happy about it. Children can be like that, they—’

‘You never said anything to him?’

‘Once, I tried. I asked him if he was perhaps spending too much time – I put it delicately, like he might be overloading his schedule.’

‘And?’

‘It was awful. He smiled at me, just looked me in the eye and smiled at me. Said nothing. I stood there and he smiled and smiled and I stood there and I knew. It was like he was challenging me – did I dare confront him straight on, and question the natural order of things? Of course I didn’t. After a moment I turned and left and that was that.’

‘He was the first, you said?’

Her voice was bare, raw. ‘I never saw it happen, that’s what I tell myself. So I couldn’t be certain it did. And the truth is I didn’t want to know. There were signs – looking back it’s clear as day – but I was afraid, so—’

Tidey let the silence draw out, then he said, ‘It was a long time ago.’

Maura gave him her empty smile. ‘Tell that to the kids.’

‘I know. But it’s a fact – decades have passed, you gave evidence, you admitted what you did, what you failed to do. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to believe? It’s a long time since I was a believer, but I remember the prayers.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
.’

She nodded. ‘Sometimes I tell myself things like that.’

When Bob Tidey left Maura Coady’s house it was after seven o’clock. The sun was out but it hadn’t yet had time to take the chill out of the air. He’d gone several yards when a voice said, ‘You live there?’

He turned and saw a small young man with a grey suit and over-gelled black hair. The man poked his chin up at Tidey. ‘You see the shooting?’

‘Who are you?’

The young guy flashed a card from his breast pocket. ‘Anthony Prendergast,
Daily Record
.’

‘Nice suit, Anthony.’ Tidey turned and walked towards the North Strand Road.

‘You’re a Garda, right?’

‘A bit baggy about the knees.’

Walking a little faster to catch up, the reporter couldn’t resist glancing down at his legs, checking that his suit was hanging right. ‘That old lady in there, is she a witness?’

‘Fierce ambitious, you are, Anthony – to be asking so many questions this early in the morning.’

The reporter held out a small white rectangle. ‘My card.’

‘Thank you, Anthony, I’ll treasure it.’

A few yards on, Tidey looked back and saw Anthony writing something in a notebook.

Vincent Naylor walked away from the MacClenaghan building, across the open ground towards a back road skirting the M50. Once he got there he’d have no bother picking up a taxi. Behind him, the dawn was creeping up the sky.

Noel dead, Liam keeping radio silence. Vincent was walking away from a world of debris, a possible future forming in his mind.

Pick a goal and go for it
.

After the security man buggered off, Vincent knew he needed to get out of there, get started on what he had to do. There was always the chance that the security man would put a couple of things together, ring the cops just to be on the safe side.