GOOD FRIDAY.

Sister Scholastica waited in the cloister with the others nuns. The mass in church was soon to begin. She looked briefly into the cloister garth; caught a sight of the Spring flowers in the flowerbeds; a robin was on the far off wall. Sister Gabrielle stood in front of her, her black habit neat and dark like an enormous rook. She recalled her mother baking hot cross buns; tapping the bread with a knife in the sign of the cross; smiling with the beginning of the madness just lingering behind the eyes. She sighed; looked around at the nun’s head; at the sloping shoulders; at the way the arms were tucked inside the habit out of sight. Sometimes at night she dreamed of her dead sister Margaret; dreamed of seeing her smiling face amidst the fair curls of her head like a small cherub; then the face would vanish; a skull would appear and she would cry out into the dark night of her cell and then try stop herself before the others came running as they did once before. She fingered her rosary in her inner pocket, moved her finger over the beads. The bell rang from the bell tower; the nuns moved on into the church in pairs, each placing their fingers into the stoup of holy water; making the sign of the cross over their black breasts. She smelled the incense; saw Father Gregory to her right waiting with Father Dominic; remembered his mumbling voice at mass the day before; how she understood very little of what he said. She took her place in the choirs stall; turned facing the altar with the huge Crucified hanging nailed to the dark cross His eyes closed, His lips slightly open as if calling out in a soft whimper. Christ è morto per voi, her mother would say, in the Italian she broke into when she was angry or overtly religious as she was in her days of looming madness. Christ died for you, her mother would repeat in English, as if in desperation that her daughter should understand. Father never understood; he never said he loved me; never once embraced me when I needed comforting when they took Mother off to the asylum. He would stare into space; there would be that contempt in his eyes, for me, for Mother, for God whom he said he hated even though he’d lost his faith years before. The mass began, the chanting voices rose; the church filled with the smell of incense, bodies, wood, old damp stone; voices riding up to the high windows. Good Friday. Father hanged himself on a Friday, two months after I entered the convent. Dark days. Black nights. Christ died for us, for Father with his stern temper and smacking hand and fiery eyes, for Mother and her mind undone at the seams and her eyes dark and gazing at the far off hills for some saviour amongst the crows. For Margaret whose stiff white body lay for hours in the cot smelling of urine and faeces. She sighed. Stood and watched, as the priest raised his arms and in her mind’s eye cringed, as if expecting her father’s hand to swoop down through the dark cloth of the priest, and beat and beat and cast her down into the cold dark room for hours crying into her hands; caressing her body as if it were Christ’s, and not hers, that shivered in the purgatory of her father’s cruel making. Good Friday. Here. Saved. Blessed. Amen, she whispered, behind her hands as she knelt in prayer; her mother’s ghostly image knelt beside her; giggled like a school girl tickled and tumbling in the far away clover of her grandfather’s lands in Italy.