The handle on the bathroom window was still broken. Not a coincidence: nothing parish-owned had been repaired for decades, also Fran always chose this cubicle, and had noticed the window at the Christmas fete.
She used her credit card to lever it open and dived in, not worrying about her stomach. She didn’t mind that it was pitch-black, because she knew exactly where she was going: twelve steps to the door, right for seven, feel the wall on the left of the dance floor until reaching the door, and push.
She was in the corridor linking the hall to the convent. She brushed her hand along the wall as she walked, and when her fingers fell she took a breath. The inner hall was just as imposing when you couldn’t see the Madonna and Ned Kelly eyeballing each other from opposite walls.
Subway tiles led her to the kitchen until she saw that the light was on. She couldn’t hear anything, anyone. She pushed on the glass at the top of the kitchen door and entered the room.
The light above the sink was on, and the adjoining door to the sick bay ajar. She headed into the sick room, a wave of nausea hitting her. The same bed, the same bare space, the same blinds covering the window to the office next door.
She went into the office and opened the blinds above the desk, the same metal slats making the same clicking sound when separated, then boinging back into place. 170
If she didn’t sit for a moment, she would faint. Perched on the orange tweed chair, she put her head between her legs and took two long breaths, returning upright when she was ready.
A large cabinet had been moved into the centre of the room. The hatch to the wine cellar was visible and open, and there was a light on down there.
The cellar was around ten by ten feet; three of its walls lined with at least ten shelves, on which there were dozens, and dozens, of treasure boxes. Most of the boxes on the right wall had been removed already, their varied shapes and sizes obvious from the dust that had once surrounded them.
Fran reached for the first one, a hatbox on the top left. It was covered in Barbie pictures. On the top was written Adrienne, 3. It was stuffed with photos of little Adrienne, in the sick bay with a bruised arm, dressed only in her pants. Fran put the box back, and took the next: Allyn, 12, who barracked for the Bombers and had broken his finger. She slammed the box shut when she saw a photo of little Allyn naked.
The boxes were in alphabetical order. She held her hand up as she looked at the photos, covering the things she did not want to see. There was Bernie, thirteen, a swimmer with shoulder issues, and there was diabetic Fiona and her big green eyes. She remembered Johnny, seven, whose ribs stuck out as he wheezed, his tongue between his teeth as he cut his precious insects. She lowered her hand. His ribs were sticking out in the photographs too, although she could not look at all of them. ‘I don’t like getting my photograph taken,’ he had whispered to her.
K to Z had been moved already. Fran traced back from K slowly, from Kathy who liked chocolate, to Greg and his 171planes, to a shoebox that was too small to fit into its predecessor’s dusty outline and which had no pictures on it.
Francesca, 15, was written on the top in green.
She slid to the floor with the box in her hand. After seeing the first picture, she covered the photos with her hand again, and looked only at the face of Francesca, fifteen, features ripe and with fear in her eyes.
The click of the blinds. She remembered the click of the blinds.
She was holding the last photograph in the pile, her palm covering the body, her finger stroking the face that was Francesca, aged fifteen.
‘Francesca,’ Fran said, crying. ‘It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.’
Her mobile rang: The Captain. She pressed End.
A door opened somewhere in the convent. She could hear the television – women yelling at each other, American women, screaming, Housewives of New York.
Footsteps. Fran put the photos back in the shoebox, and the box back on the shelf. She raced up the cellar stairs, into the kitchen, and out the back door, shutting it quietly behind her.
As she made her way across the oval, she saw headlights and heard gravel crunching on the convent’s driveway. Father Frank was returning for the next load.
She didn’t stop to recover at the top of the hill, and her legs were lead as she made her way down the monument track, the huge trees dark and deadly silent, her tears streaming, and her thoughts so loud as she sprinted along Ryan’s Lane that they may have been coming out of her mouth: Fuck you, fuck you,
FUCK YOU. 172