Sister Josephine by Joanna Traynor

Author:Joanna Traynor [Traynor, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Catholics, Nursing, Foster Care, abortion, Racism, Working class England
Publisher: Storyjug Publishing
Published: 2012-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

I didn’t like the way the landing went quiet every Friday night. The nurses waving their goodbyes with their heads to one side in pity and and a gladness sparkling in their eyes. Glad of their lives. I disappeared out of sight before they could do it to me. To the TV room. The TV room was a ghosted ballroom with a dangerous shiny parquet floor, remnantly carpeted, edged with secondhand couches. One Friday night I was joined by a male nurse from our class. Kevin. He only lived up the road, he said. He preferred staying at the nurses’ home though. His parents were a pain. We went to the pub that night and arranged to spend our Saturday together.

Kevin was a weed. Looked like a drink of water. His hair was painted thin blond across an egg shaped head and his glasses were grey and big. He didn’t look much like a Scouser and to me Scousers look like Scousers. There’s something in the lip hang, the quick eye, the ease of expression. They grab sentences out of your mouth before you’ve even said ‘em. Kevin had hardly any lip, was close to blind and blushed if he raised his voice past a whisper. He wasn’t my sort at all but he was company. We got on the bus around lunch time. I said I wanted to go to the cathedral.

‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘The cathedral.’

‘There’s two cathedrals. Didn’t yer know that?’

I remembered the words of the song, ‘If yer want a cathedral, we’ve got one to spare’. I should have known.I remembered going to the opening of Liverpool Cathedral with me mum and dad and half the church on a big long coach. We had ham butties that day. That was the big round cathedral. After the opening, we walked swamped in a crowd, for ages, in a great long line, shouting ‘No to Abortion’. I didn’t know that Liverpool already had a cathedral.

‘Why did they build two?’

‘One’s for Catholics,’ he said.

He took me to the other one. To convince me. He took me down through a door that said ‘Private’. My favourite sort of door. It led to a cellar. He told me he used to hideout in the cellar when he was bunking from school.

‘They never would have looked for me in enemy territory,’ he said.

He called his school a seminary, which made me think of sperm, and him too, I think.

‘What’s a seminary?’

‘I hated it,’ he answered, not answering, talking to himself.

We both sat on a pew with a broken leg but holding up easily on the fractured wood. They don’t make ‘em like that any more, we joked. It was leaning against a wall. The light bulb swung, Callan style. We lit up. Kevin relaxed and sat on the floor instead. He was reliving his school days, dragging hard on his fag and blowing smoke rings to the glare of the bulb. I gave that up in fourth year. I rocked the pew in boredom hoping it would break and cause a clatter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.