Read Online About Matilda by Bill Walsh - Free Book Online Page B

from the bottom of the spiral stair and I’m sure she’d give me a clatter if we were anywhere but mass.
    The chapel is small and has windows with coloured glass high up under the roof. Above the altar angels spread their white wings, and there’s a clean holy smell of flowers and polish. The girls in their green pixies sit on the left, big girls at the front. The nuns sit in the middle and on the other side of the nuns, by the confession box, are four rows of older girls and old women in navy scarves. They keep their faces down and Gabriel warns us we are never to look at them, or speakto them. They live in another part of the convent. I wonder are they like me, just older, and will I live here till I’m an old woman in a navy scarf that nobody can talk to. I wonder until the priest with the gold cross on his white robes walks on to the altar and we stand and sing Hallelujah.
    After mass, it’s breakfast in a big room Lucy calls the refectory. The walls are green. The windowsills are higher than my head but I can still see the iron bars. The girls sit at long wooden tables with benches down both sides. The nuns’ table is on a raised platform behind a frosted glass screen. There’s a gap under the screen so I can only see their shoulders or the glimpse of a hand moving to pick something from the table, but they can see everything we do.
    Mona is sitting at the other side of the room with girls her own age. Pippa is at the same table as me but she’s at the other end between two hungry-looking girls. I’m put beside Lucy Flynn and some of the girls I saw cleaning the stairs. We stand and pray when Sister Gabriel stands in the middle of the room and rings the bell for grace before meals.
    Bless us O Lord
    And these thy gifts
    Which of thy bounty
    We are about to receive
    Amen.
    The bell rings again and we sit. The nuns use wooden spoons to fill our tin plates on the table with porridge from great silver saucepans. The room is filled with the smell of rashers, eggs, sausages and toast from the nuns’ table but all we have is porridge and lukewarm cocoa. The porridge is cold and I can feel the lumps in my mouth and the back of my throat. I want to be sick but I swallow because I don’t wantto be in trouble. A girl with foxy hair and a flat nose leans across and asks why I’m here. Is your mother dead?
    She’s in Australia.
    What does she look like?
    The other girls around me stop eating and leave their spoons on the table to listen.
    She has black hair.
    Is it long?
    Yes.
    Does she look like you, only older?
    I think so.
    I seen her.
    I look at her and she nods. She smiles. She’s serious. She looks around at Lucy Flynn and the other girls and they nod their heads and get excited. They’ve all seen her. They’re certain. She was in the hallway a minute ago looking for me!
    I leap from the seat and run for the door, but Sister Gabriel catches my arm. I pull at her to get away, but she’s big and strong and drags me back to my seat. I tell her my Mum is here and she tells me sit down and finish that porridge and don’t move off that seat again until I’m told.
    Lucy Flynn and the other girls are laughing and someone has emptied their porridge in my bowl. I want to cry. I want to go home. Lucy Flynn says it’s no big deal. We do that to everyone.
    I can’t eat any more porridge. The clock above the kitchen door shows eight o’clock. I don’t know what to do so I just turn my face to the plastic tablecloth and say nothing. Daddy will be here soon. He has to be.
    After breakfast we wash the dishes and scrub the floors. Pippa and Mona are ahead of me leaving the room but when I get to the door leading to the playground they’re lost in a crowd of girls. Lucy Flynn is standing by the door, her hairdamp from drizzle. She says sorry for what happened but that’s the way it is. You gets used of it, and don’t be standing there, it’s