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sinful. ‘He liked my knickers off and on the floor by the draining board in the kitchen.’
    Magda thought she misunderstood. ‘Your what?’
    ‘He was a one for breasts. He loved bosoms, did old Jim Brannigan. He was a gay old stick.’
    ‘What?’
    Magda finally began to understand and was struck with alarm hearing this.
    ‘He was slow – being on them tablets they give old men whose blood pressure goes up. That and being old.’ Mrs Borru frowned at the far wall and the holy effigy. ‘Or is it down? Do you know?’
    ‘Know what?’ Magda said, almost shouting out the question, desperate for the next query from the old dear to be something innocent, like what was for tea and could she have Earl Grey or maybe the impossible Lady Grey tea instead. Or maybe asked for a buttered crumpet for a change, instead of the Battenberg they had on Thursdays.
    ‘Them tablets. Though I heard Mrs O’Brien in that end ward, with the leg, has the same coloured tablet as Mr Brannigan, so maybe it doesn’t count whether you are man or woman.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Magda yelped, frantic at what was coming out.
    She had been sent to make sure Mrs Borru had been to the loo so she had to stay and find out. The commode hadn’t even been moved since the morning, so there was no way to tell unless Magda went round the entire place – somebody said all sixty-five of them inmates, but Magda couldn’t count so didn’t know – asking if Mrs Borru had been to the loo today and been cleaned afterwards. She had to do her job right, or she might get sent back to kneeling and scrubbing and getting walloped at the Magdalenes amid those girls with the white faces where Lucy had done her first fall. Magda had only been a little girl back then, not nineteen.
    ‘Mr Brannigan was a right lad.’ Mrs Borru went back into her dreamy mode. ‘The first time we did it, we did it right here in this bed. He said I was brilliant.’
    ‘He said…’ Magda tried faintly.
    ‘He said my arse was sweet as a nut.’
    ‘Your…’
    ‘I think there’s two sorts of men, don’t you?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You’ll learn, girl.’
    ‘Two sorts?’
    Magda tried not to ask the question but was drawn in despite herself. For some reason she thought of Chaucer, which she’d heard of when, unlettered as she was, she’d listened to the lettered girls in the Magdalenes talking after collecting the papers for the girls’ exam. One girl had said, ‘Just our luck, eh?’and told Magda the notices said On No Account Is Chaucer To Be Allowed. Magda forever associated Chaucer, whoever or whatever he or it was, with evil thoughts, the sort you let in if you weren’t determined when you woke suddenly in the nights. Sometimes, she couldn’t sleep and wondered why she was this shape, and what God in His infinite wisdom thought He was playing at.
    ‘There’s the man who’s mesmerised by bosoms. And there’s the man who can’t stop being mesmerised by legs and bottoms. Mr Brannigan was fascinated by breasts. You know what I think, girl?’
    ‘No,’ Magda said, thinking, but Mr Brannigan’s barely yet cold with pennies on his eyes in the next room’s third alcove with his dinner going cold on the bed table.
    It was sinful to talk like this. In fact, Magda knew it was dire sin to even think these things, and probably even worse in the scale of everything to listen to this old bat rabbiting on about how she and Mr Brannigan, requiescat in pace, had done shameful and shameless things to each other in the candle hours right here in the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly.
    ‘It’s only the way men start off with you that’s the main point.’
    ‘Start off?’
    ‘Start you off, I mean.’
    ‘Start me ?’ Magda almost ran but felt transfixed.
    ‘They all have to start by getting in you, is the truth. It’s the way they are. Can’t help themselves. You know what my Auntie Winnie used to tell me?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘She said, more than once, “It’s for