You went bathing?

She shook her head. It was just for exercise. We had to turn around and walk right back. We weren’t allowed to link arms or we’d get the strap, but we could chat without moving our mouths.

I didn’t know what to say.

Face tipped up to the sky, Bridie swayed.

I took her elbow. Don’t topple over the edge, now.

The stars are so bright, I’m dazzled!

I looked up and found the Great Bear. I told her, In Italy, they used to blame the influence of the constellations for making them sick—that’s where influenza comes from.

Bridie took that notion in stride. As if, when it’s your time, your star gives you a yank—

And she tugged as if reeling in a fish.

It’s hardly scientific thinking, I admitted.

She said, Maybe not. But I have heard it’s all set down up there.

What is?

The day each of us is going to die.

That’s pure nonsense, Bridie.

She lifted and then dropped her bony shoulders. I don’t have to be scientific; I’m not the nurse.

You’ve the makings of one, though. If you wanted.

Bridie stared, then laughed that off.

I did realise that this job was too grim for most people, all the stinking and leaking and dying. Mine was a peculiar vocation.

You know, Bridie, I mark down every patient I lose.

Where? In a book?

I think you saw me doing it.

I pulled out my watch now, without looking at the time, and dropped it in her palm, facedown.

Bridie weighed it in her hand. Would this be solid silver?

I suppose so. It was my mother’s.

(I added that so she wouldn’t think I’d earned enough to buy myself such a thing.)

She murmured, It’s still warm from you.

The chain between the two of us was a taut umbilicus.

I put my finger to one of the bockedy scratched circles on the watch back. Every full moon means a patient of mine who’s died.

But not through your fault.

I hope not. It’s hard to be absolutely sure. In this job, one has to learn to live with that.

She asked, And the little curved pieces?

They’re crescent moons instead of full ones.

The babies?

She never missed a trick, this one. I nodded.

Bridie peered more closely now. Some are only little scratches.

Those ones were stillborn. Or miscarried, if far enough on that I could tell whether it was a girl or a boy.

So you scar your precious watch for all of them because you feel bad?

I shook my head. I just…

Bridie suggested, Want to remember them?

Oh, I remember them anyway. Often I wish I didn’t.

Do they haunt you, like?

I struggled to find the words. I have a sense that they want to be recorded somewhere. Need to be. Demand to be, even.

Bridie stroked the silver curve. It’s a sort of map of the dead, then. A sky full of moons.

I took the watch back and tucked it into my pocket. I told her, I’m often just as haunted by the ones who live. Mrs. White’s boy, for instance.

Bridie nodded.

I keep thinking, instead of him going into the pipe, if some nice young couple—like the O’Rahillys, say—if they didn’t mind his lip, and adopted him…

Bridie grimaced. Mary O’Rahilly’s a sweetheart, but he’s a thug.

I was knocked off balance by that matter-of-fact sentence. Her husband?

Well, he wallops her, doesn’t he?

She read my appalled face and saw that this was news to me. Oh. Couldn’t you tell?

She wasn’t triumphing at all; she was just thrown by my naïveté.

It added up. Young Mary O’Rahilly’s timidity, the many things that seemed to make her husband cross…and the old blue marks on both wrists. She’d claimed to bruise easy, and I, gullible as a probie on her first day, I’d left it at that.

Bridie, I breathed, you know things you shouldn’t. Especially not at about twenty-two.

Her half smile was rueful.

I admitted, No one’s ever lifted a hand to me in my life.

That’s good, she said.

I’m beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.

Bridie didn’t contradict me.

I moved along the flat middle of the roof. I found a pitched section and put down one of the blankets against the slope. I squatted to sit, tucking my skirts around me to keep the cold out, and leaned back on the clammy slates.

Bridie fitted herself beside me.

Button up your coat to keep warm, I advised her. And here, lean forward—

I swept a second blanket over our heads and down behind us like a cloak. No, a magician’s cloth. I shook a third out to cover our knees.

Tell me about it, I said into the silence. Your—the home. If you don’t mind?

The pause was so long, I thought Bridie probably did mind.

Then she said, What do you want to know?

Anything you remember.

I remember it all.

Her face worked as she thought about it.

She said at last, Old pee and rubber, that’s what I smell when I think of it. So many of us had accidents in the night, see, that at a certain point they said we could just sleep on the waterproof undersheets and spare the laundry.

It was in my nostrils now, that acrid reek.

There was this one teacher who’d come into class, going like this—Bridie wrinkled her nose in imitation. Every day she’d call out, Who can I smell? Who can I smell? But the thing was, Julia, we all smelled.

That’s terrible.

She shook her head. What was terrible was how every one of us would throw a hand in the air, eager to call out another girl’s name, name her as the smelly one.

Oh, Bridie.

A long minute stretched while I let all this sink in.

She said, Then there’s the beatings. I can feel them in my bones.

I cleared my throat. Beatings for what?

She shrugged. You might be made an example of for sleeping in the wrong position, or sneezing at mass. Writing with your left hand, losing a stud off your boot. Having hair that was curly, or red.

I reached out to the faint fuzz of amber escaping from her pins. Why on earth—

They said it was a mark of badness and hung me up by my bun from a coat hook.

I pulled back my hand and put it over my mouth. Couldn’t you have told someone about the mistreatment? A teacher at school, say?

Her smile was dark. Oh, Julia. Any lessons we had were in the home—it was the school too, see?

I saw.

But in fairness, they weren’t all divils there, she told me. A cook we had in my last years, she took a liking to me. She’d lay the apple skins on the very top of the scraps so I could nick them when I carried the bucket to the pigs. And one time a whole half a boiled egg.

My mouth was flooded with sour.

Bridie went on. I was no hand at knitting Aran jumpers or embroidering vestments, so I was put on novenas. We nibbled on candles those days, or paper, or glue, anything to put in our stomachs.

Novenas? I repeated. As in nine days of prayer?

Bridie nodded. People paid the convent to have them said for special intentions.

That flabbergasted me, the notion of children praying on an industrial scale, children so hungry they’d eat glue.

She added, I loved it the odd time they hired me out to farms, though. I could snatch a few berries or a turnip here and there. Cattle feed, even.