Anne Bennett - Love Me Tender

Lizzie decided she’d better not say she’d been too bad, for if it was Father Flaherty on the other side, she might spend the rest of her life on her knees. She’d say she’d been disobedient and cheeky and sometimes forgot her prayers; it would be better not to say she couldn’t be bothered sometimes. Anyway, three sins would do for now, Lizzie thought, as she curled sleepily in the bed. She had a mind it would take quite a few confessions to account for seven years of sins.

In the event it wasn’t so bad at all. They sat in the pews in the dimly lit church that was almost as familiar to them as their classroom, and shuffled down the rows, one by one, towards the confessional box in their turn. Strain as the children might, they could hear not a word spoken, just a tantalising mumble, and Lizzie was glad no one could hear the bold things she would tell to the priest.

Lizzie’s friend Maura Mahon told her that priests went blind into the confessional – it was well known, she said – and when you’d confessed, as soon as you left the box, anything you told them was wiped from their memory. Lizzie thought that very comforting, even if it was only Father Cunningham hearing the first confessions of the children.

Lizzie was given three Hail Marys and a Glory Be as a penance for the list of sins she told to the priest and Maura had the same, but Mairead Cleary had to say a whole decade of the rosary! Ask as they might, none of the children could get her to tell them what she’d said to be given such a heavy penance. Maura whispered to Lizzie she thought you’d get little more if you murdered someone and Lizzie was inclined to agree.

Certainly Mairead looked sorry enough as she knelt at the rails of the side altar with the statue of the Virgin Mary before her. She had her head bowed for a long time, but then one Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be can’t be said in a couple of minutes. When Lizzie saw Mairead make the sign of the cross and then drop a coin in the box and light a candle, her eyes nearly popped out of her head; she’d never had money for candles.

‘She’s just making sure,’ Maura whispered. ‘She’s lit a candle so that Our Lady will put in a good word for her with God.’

‘She must have done something desperate, all right,’ Lizzie said with awe.

Her mammy had always said the Clearys were a funny bunch. She said it was strange these days to have the money they seemed to have to splash about when never a one of them appeared to be in work to earn it.

But all the same – a whole decade of the rosary…

The Saturday night before Lizzie’s first communion was the same as every other Saturday night as far back as she could remember. Her mammy would fill the boiler in the cellar early in the evening, and later her daddy would lift the large tin bath from the hook on the back of the cellar door and fill it with buckets of water from the boiler and cold from the tap so that Kathy could bath the children and wash their hair. Lizzie loved her bath, though in the winter the cellar was freezing. Now that her daddy had got a job, he’d bought an old oil stove which stank like mad but at least made the place warmer.

Lizzie was particularly glad to have her hair washed if she’d had stuff put on it to kill the nits. Every Friday night she had to sit over a newspaper while her mother attacked her with the nit comb, and if any were found, smelly lotion had to be put on her hair, and on Danny’s too, and left all the next day, and it stank worse than the oil stove.

That Friday night, nothing had been found in Lizzie’s hair, but her mammy gave it a good washing anyway to make it shiny. Then she carried Danny upstairs, and Lizzie’s daddy came for her with a towel he’d been warming by the fire while her nightclothes were draped over the guard to air.

Lizzie glanced over at the communion dress hanging from the picture rail. She knew her mother had washed it and starched it before ironing it to take some of the limpness out, and it looked quite pretty really. Kathy knew something of her daughter’s feelings; she’d been the eldest in her family and had had a new communion dress that later had to do for both her sisters – Maggie, who was six years younger than her, and Carmel, the baby of the family – and the same with the confirmation dress a few years later. It would have been nice to get Lizzie a new one, but such a waste with Sheelagh’s just lying there. It wasn’t as if they had another girl in the family to pass it on to either, though there would be one more O’Malley before Christmas, for since her sex life with Barry had resumed in February, she’d not had a period.

‘Do you like it, pet?’ she asked Lizzie.

‘Yes, yes, I do, I just wish it hadn’t been our Sheelagh’s.’

‘Now, Lizzie.’ But Kathy, though she rebuked her daughter, knew what she meant for, God forgive her, she didn’t like the child either, and was less than keen on her mother, Bridie.

She often wished Pat wasn’t quite so easy-going, for he’d allowed himself to be led down the aisle by that Bridie Mulligan, and everyone knew what she was. Sheelagh was one in the same mould, and yet Pat was the gentlest, most considerate and pleasant man you could wish to meet.

There would be no more children in that family, if you could go by what Bridie had told her. After Matthew was born, three years after Sheelagh, she’d said Pat would have to tie a knot in it, for he was not getting near her again. Kathy had been shocked, because even though she and Barry were having their own problems, those were connected with Barry having no job. Yet Pat had been steadily employed, and Kathy was sure it was wrong to be cold-bloodedly planning your family that way; it might even be a sin. Still, Bridie could well look after her own immortal soul; Kathy had enough worries of her own.

Lizzie felt like a princess, and as she glanced along the row, she knew her dress was just as nice as all the other communicants’. She’d discovered that most girls with older sisters or cousins had handed-down dresses like hers, and not all the mothers had done such a good job as Kathy at making them look like new. And it was far better than having a dress loaned to you by the school, as some did if their families were really poor. Lizzie would have hated that.

Really, she thought, no one would have known her whole outfit wasn’t new, for the dress and veil were sparkling white and her daddy had put white stuff on the sandals to cover any scuff marks. Her mammy had bought new white socks in the end, for she said Sheelagh’s had gone a bit grey, and that morning she’d given Lizzie a missal with a white leather cover that was so beautiful to look at it was almost a shame to use it. Her grandma had given her a new rosary as she entered the church, and now she played it through her fingers and attempted to pray.

But she was too excited to concentrate and couldn’t help feeling sorry for the boys sitting the other side of the church, for all they had were the white sashes loaned to them by the school. Their shirts were white, of course, and she guessed a fair few were new, but they looked very drab next to the girls in all their finery.

Lizzie’s tummy rumbled as she’d known it would, for she’d not been able to have anything to eat or drink that morning as she was taking communion. It was only right, for she knew the little round tablet was not bread but the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It was a miracle, the priests said, that happened in the mass. It always made her feel a bit sick, that thought, but she never told anyone, they’d think her awful. She felt sick now too, waiting to take communion for the first time. Probably, she thought, it was because she was hungry, and she’d feel better when she had her breakfast in the school afterwards.