The Funny Thing About Death by Jo Caulfield

Author:Jo Caulfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

18

A Fierce Girl

‘Fuck me, it’s Sister Theresa!’ Luckily I didn’t say that out loud when I saw her sitting by Annie’s bed, large as life. Sister Theresa had taught history at the convent, and I hadn’t seen her for forty years. Like most adults you knew as a child she wasn’t as old as I’d thought she was. She seemed to be in her late sixties now and she’d seemed in her late sixties forty years ago. She and Annie had had a real connection and kept in touch, so I understood why she was there, but it was so weird to see her sitting in what Annie and I called ‘off-duty nun clothes’. Nuns don’t wear habits any more, but you can still spot them. They favour browns and navies, an M&S button-up cardie, a certain type of sensible sandal worn with tan tights and the classic seventies lesbian short haircut.

When I first went to school she was called Mother Theresa, but something happened in the late seventies and the nuns went all hippie-ish and egalitarian. ‘Hey, no hierarchy here, man. We’re all just sisters – everyone’s equal.’ It seemed a shame for some of the really old nuns, especially the ‘kitchen nuns’ like Mother Veronica. Mother Veronica wasn’t a trained teacher; she was probably someone whose family had decided they’d have one less mouth to feed if they sent her off to England to become a nun. She was always kind and gave us toffees from her Tardis-like apron pocket. She did all the hard work in the kitchen and the laundry, and then when she finally got a bit of status and a title, after all those years of grunt work, they took it away from her.

Back to Sister Theresa, though. At first I didn’t understand the surge of love that I was suddenly feeling for this nun (she had terrified me at school). Then I realised: she loved Annie and she had come to see her. She was here when it mattered.

Annie and Sister Theresa had had stand-up rows at school (you really didn’t do that then – argue with a nun). One night Annie had shouted at her in the chapel corridor. People talked about it for months. It was very dramatic. My best friend Sally was expelled from school. She hadn’t done anything particularly wrong; we were just ‘naughty’. There was so little scope for being bad that we did stupid things, usually involving climbing (trees, sides of buildings and flat roofs were favourites) or sneaking into the nuns’ side of the convent. Innocent things, really. But Sally had a sort of confidence about her that nuns didn’t like; she didn’t play the game. The game was that you did something bad and then you repented; you bowed your head and felt ashamed. That’s what I did. Own up, be sorry and then do it again – that’s Catholicism in a nutshell. But Sally never appeared to be suitably sorry.

It was a Sunday night, the free time before we went to bed.

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