Читать книгу He Is Mine and I Have No Other - Rebecca O'Connor - Страница 16

Denise, 12

I am number 17. That is not my age! It is the special number I was given when I first came here. Sometimes I forget that my name is Denise. My favourite thing is to make paper dolls and cover them in silver paper, which me and my friend Aisling get from the bin at school, from the townie girls’ sweet wrappings. We tear the wrappings into wee jumpers and skirts and boots. At night we put the dolls in matchboxes to sleep. Aisling doesn’t give hers any names even though I told her to. She says she can’t think of any so she just gives them numbers too, like us.

When I grow up I am going to be a nun like Mother Assumpta, not like Mother Carmel. I pray every day, even when I’m not supposed to. Everyone has to line up and pray first thing in the morning, at six. I get up at five because I’m afraid of being hit and because I like to pray before everybody else. And then we wash and go to mass and have communion, and say ‘Our Father’ and sing ‘Holy, Holy’. And I pray when I’m doing the scrubbing in the morning too, mostly the Hail Mary over and over until sometimes I start to get a bit dizzy and get the words mixed up. Then I feel bad for that and have to ask forgiveness. From God and from Our Lady.

I always bow my head when I say ‘Jesus’.

My other favourite thing as well as my dolls is Christmas. On Christmas we get to eat meat and gravy. The ladies from the cathedral come in to serve us, the ones that don’t have their own children. They’re the same ones who stay with Father Fagan in the room behind the altar on Sundays and then come out to give us communion. They don’t say very much. They’re a bit like Aisling that way. Maybe she will be like one of those women when she grows up, and she’ll see what’s in that room at the back of the cathedral.

My worst thing is Jeyes Fluid. It’s when the townies bring lice into class, and then we have to have our heads scrubbed with Jeyes until they’re almost bleeding. Sometimes they do bleed. It stings like when you cut onions. I don’t remember ever having lice before I came here. Mother Assumpta tells me I was six when I came. I don’t remember. I don’t have a birthday like the other girls. Mother Assumpta says we can celebrate my birthday as the day I came in here, June 21st. It’s only pretend. We don’t tell anyone else. Not even Aisling. Just me and her. She gives me sweets in the laundry, which I’m not allowed to show to anyone. I won’t tell anything. I’m a good girl.

Green and pink and yellow wrappers. I use them to make dresses. That’s my other favourite thing! Aisling asks where did you get those and I tell her to keep her gob shut. She says the convent is a bad place but she’s lying. I’ve already said three good things.

I must have had a father and a mother but no one seems to remember. It was like I was dropped from the sky by a stork, Mother says. But I wasn’t a baby. I was six. How do they know what age I was? And why is it I can’t remember anything?