She remembered everything about her first day at the Home. From the street, the place had looked impressive, a grand red brick and sandstone edifice surrounded by lawns and rose gardens. Impressive but not the kind of place a frightened sixteen-year-old schoolgirl would wish to call home. With her mother silent beside her they had passed the stone grotto on their way up to the oak doors, a Madonna and Child statue amid a bubbling water fountain. From the corner of her eye, she had seen her mother bless herself.
It was only when they reached the huge, intimidating oak doors at the end of the path, at the top of the grand steps, that the full horror of the day hit her. This was an institution, one for bad girls like her who needed locking up and taught a lesson. There would be no escape until her baby was born. And then what?
They were greeted and shown around the building by an elderly nun who introduced herself as Sister Mary-Xavier and who looked as if she were the oldest living creature on the planet, a mummified specimen dressed up to look real. The ancient one’s appearance reminded her of the Guinness Book of Records which she still had out from the school library. Should she ask her mother to return it or was her reputation so trashed now that St Brendan’s had written both her and the book off, anyway?
At the back of the Home they were shown a muddy playground area. Other inmates were pushing toddlers on swings and chasing after them on the lawn. Overblown bodies, girls in trouble like her. She was one of them. It was as if this Sister Mary-Xavier person were shoving her future in her face. Everything that had seemed so impossible to imagine up till this point was there in front of her.
The toddlers on the swings were babies no one wanted to adopt, Sister Mary-Xavier explained to her mother. They were either too old, not healthy enough or they were the wrong colour and so they were orphans who lived at the Home and were mothered by the pregnant inmates. From what was implied, it appeared that some of the pregnant girls had no homes to go to, either. She recalled leaning over at this point and brushing a fly off a little boy’s face marred by long candles of snot and yellow crust.
There was a kitchen garden at the back near the swings. She had left her mother and the old nun talking, and walked up and down between the vegetable rows, taking her time, aware her mother was impatient to be gone but taking a malicious delight in her mother’s discomfort.
It was the hardening towards her mother that was new and it worried her because she recognized it as yet one more kind of ending. The end of childish trust. A thing that had once been, but never would be again. This woman who had always been the closest human being in her world, the one supposed to love her forever and ever, had turned on her and was a stranger to her now.
She plucked a lettuce leaf and held it, noting that these lettuce were like the ones she and her father had sown last year. Royal Oakleaf was the name her father gave them. She passed under an old lemon tree heavy with ripe yellow fruit, guessing it was a Bearss variety. From Persia. Her Dad knew all about gardens and plant varieties. Their Bearss at home was probably older even than this one. She rubbed the skin of one of the lemons and relished the smell of the citrus oil on her hands, the way she and Jude liked to smell the citronella oil from the trees on the way to school. She guessed those trees would still be there when she got out but she doubted she would ever walk past them again. Or bother to rub the leaves on her hands if she did.
Her room, when the nun ushered her and her mother into it and stood back, was no more than a cell with a single iron-framed bed, a cupboard and small set of draws. And a holy picture above the bed, the one of Jesus with his hands out, showing his bleeding heart.
Although smaller than the bedroom she shared at home with her younger sisters, her cell was fine by her. She saw its possibilities. Her books could be stacked on top of the draws and that would give it a lived-in feeling. And at least it would be all hers. She had been expecting crowded dormitories full of strangers.
‘It’s small,’ said her mother that day, plopping herself down on the bed and looking around at the white plaster walls and the polished linoleum floor as if she had to decide whether or not to purchase the place rather than simply dump her eldest child in it.
Her mother was a plump woman with a scone face her father reckoned was typical of the Belfast breed, claiming the people from Belfast had facial features all squashed up together. He teased her mother about it, comparing Belfast girls to the girls from Galway who had Spanish and German blood in them. According to her father, all the Galway people were like him and her; tall with fine features, dark hair and blue eyes.
The loud crossover floral dress her mother had made for a niece’s wedding several years ago and kept for going-out occasions looked out of place in St Anthony's Home for Unmarried Mothers. Dulcie May Patrick had dressed to kill for the event, even though she would probably have preferred a trip to a leper colony. Her mother, considering the day to be a going-out occasion had teamed the pink of the floral dress with a set of long, knotted plastic beads from McWhirter’s department store, from where she had also purchased the flock nylon to sew the dress. Her mother must have decided the cork wedgies were also appropriate, she had thought as the nun ushered them both out of the room and down the corridor for further inspections.
She remembered how her mother had swooped on those horrid shoes in a little shop in Burleigh Heads. A souvenir from a summer’s camping trip on the Gold Coast. A lousy family holiday because it had rained for two weeks solid and her mother, before the ugly sandals purchase, had eaten a poisoned oyster and been rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped.
And, thought Miki as she continued to lay back in the bath and relive the event, she had also hated those ugly thirty denier stockings. Reinforced heels and toes did not go with open-toed sandals. In fact, as she had stood by the door that day, assessing the woman perched on the edge of the single iron bed in that unforgettable cell, she had realized that she actually hated everything about Dulcie May Patrick.
‘Are the toilets clean, sister?’ her mother asked the elderly nun.
The communal bathroom facilities, when they were shown them, proved to be spotlessly clean and passed even her mother’s detailed inspection.
The common room where she was informed she could meet with no more than two visitors at a time on every second Saturday afternoon was pleasant enough with its big windows reaching all the way from the ceiling to the floor. The room had two old brown velveteen lounges and two other single seats, all with crocheted lace cloths to protect the arms. A large holy picture of mother and child dominated the wall opposite the windows and a statue of Mary and Baby Jesus also sat on the table in the centre of the room.
She recalled thinking that, along with these icons, and the grotto, it was proof of the irony of the Home––icons of an unmarried mother and her beloved child. Obviously the hypocrisy had escaped the good nuns who ran St Anthony's. And the mothers like Dulcie, who committed their daughters to their institution.
It was the piano across the other side of the large room which brought her some joy that day. The place that was to be her new home couldn’t be all bad if there were vegetable gardens, somewhere to rest her books, and Steinways.
She recalled she might even have been smiling as they left the common-room and were ushered past the amber glass hallway and into a big office to fill in the admission forms. Her prayers, of late, had been all about asking Mother Mary to help her accept what had happened and guide her through her troubles so that she wasn’t too different when she came out on the other side from the person she was when she went in. Veggie gardens, books and pianos were a start.
With the paperwork filled in and signed, she had accepted what passed for a kiss goodbye from her mother. It did not escape her that her mother was leaving without saying anything about when she would return. Was that because her mother was too embarrassed and wanted to get away as fast as possible? Who could say? They had hardly spoken at home these days.
Every word her mother uttered as she left her with Sister Mary-Xavier in the big office that day was a lie, and she'd hoped her mother would level with God on the way home on the train.
‘Royal Prince Alfred, sister,’ her mother announced from