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Future Popes of Ireland
Darragh Martin


A big-hearted, funny and sad novel about the messiness of love, family and belief‘Hilarious and timely, a dazzling debut’ John Boyne‘Bustling, bubbly, bittersweet fun’Daily Mail‘Bulging, big-hearted, a pleasure to read’Irish Times‘Think Zadie Smith. But much funnier’Sunday Independent‘Very moving, highly entertaining, clever and funny’Sunday Times (Ireland)‘Funny, warm and full of heart’ Image MagazineIn 1979 Bridget Doyle has one goal left in life: for her family to produce the very first Irish pope. Fired up by John Paul II’s appearance in Phoenix Park, she sprinkles Papal-blessed holy water on the marital bed of her son and daughter-in-law, and leaves them to get on with things. But nine months later her daughter-in-law dies in childbirth and Granny Doyle is left bringing up four grandchildren: five-year-old Peg, and baby triplets Damien, Rosie and John Paul.Thirty years later, it seems unlikely any of Granny Doyle’s grandchildren are going to fulfil her hopes. Damien is trying to work up the courage to tell her that he’s gay. Rosie is a dreamy blue-haired rebel who wants to save the planet and has little time for popes. And irrepressible John Paul is a chancer and a charmer and the undisputed apple of his Granny’s eye – but he’s not exactly what you’d call Pontiff material.None of the triplets have much contact with their big sister Peg, who lives over 3,000 miles away in New York City, and has been a forbidden topic of conversation ever since she ran away from home as a teenager. But that’s about to change.










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Copyright (#ua7f65e4a-e754-5b6c-abf8-3078013cdb95)


4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Darragh Martin 2018

Photograph of girl on cover © Plainpicture

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Darragh Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008295394

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008295417

Version: 2018-08-31




Dedication (#ua7f65e4a-e754-5b6c-abf8-3078013cdb95)


For Aoife, Gillian, Caroline and Brendan




Contents


Cover (#u88cc9087-1993-5fc2-98f7-e43259ea4e71)

Title Page (#u38d6070d-9fd4-5691-a472-b9a1bac532fc)

Copyright (#u87c2f27f-881c-5a23-9c5c-e0aba0f5cc12)

Dedication (#u284fb3dc-bf75-55fb-b06e-ee89c5a7130a)

I. Baptism (#u8c34fb33-f60a-59f9-854e-127deedf1a9c)

II. Beatification (#u3c261a57-dcca-5e31-95e8-a3bc4c3670aa)

III. Communion (#uf322e6d1-470e-58c7-8d3a-c75fb88ab6e4)

IV. Confirmation (#litres_trial_promo)

V. The Revolutions of Rosie Doyle (#litres_trial_promo)

VI. The Pride of Damien Doyle (#litres_trial_promo)

VII. The Tricks of John Paul Doyle (#litres_trial_promo)

VIII. Boom (#litres_trial_promo)

IX. Bust (#litres_trial_promo)

X. Last Rites (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)



Series I:




Baptism (#ua7f65e4a-e754-5b6c-abf8-3078013cdb95)


(1979–1980)



1




Holy Water Bottle (1979)


It was September 1979 when Pope John Paul II brought sex to Ireland. Granny Doyle understood his secret message immediately. An unholy trinity of evils knocked on Ireland’s door (divorce! abortion! contraception!) so an army of bright-eyed young things with Miraculous Medals was required. Phoenix Park was already crammed with kids listening to the Pope’s speech – chubby legs dangling around the necks of daddys; tired heads drooping against mammys – but Granny Doyle knew that none of these sticky-handed Séans or yawning Eamons would be up for the task. No, the lad who would rise from the ranks of priests and bishops to assume the ultimate position in the Vatican would have to come from a new generation; the Popemobile had scarcely shut its doors before the race was on to conceive the first Irish Pope.

First in line was Granny Doyle, armed with a tiny bottle of papal-blessed holy water. The distance between Granny Doyle’s upheld bottle and the drops flying from the Pope’s aspergillum was no obstacle; this was not a day for doubt. Helicopters whirred above. The Popemobile cruised through the streets. A new papal cross stretched towards the sky, confident as any skyscraper, brilliantly white in the sun’s surprise rays. All of Dublin packed into Phoenix Park in the early hours, equipped with folding chairs and flasks of tea. Joy fizzed through the air before the Pope even spoke. When he did, it was a wonder half a million people didn’t levitate immediately from the pride. The Pope loved Ireland, the Pope loved the Irish, the Irish loved the Pope; this was a day when a drop of precious holy water could catapult across a million unworthy heads and plop into its destined receptacle.

Granny Doyle replaced the pale blue lid on the bottle and turned to her daughter-in-law.

‘Sprinkle a bit of this on the bed tonight, there’s a good girl.’

A version of this sentence had been delivered to Granny Doyle on her wedding night, by some fool of a priest who was walking proof of why Ireland had yet to produce a pope. Father Whatever had given her defective goods, clearly, for no miracle emerged from the tangled sheets of 7 Dunluce Crescent that night or for a good year after, despite all the staying still and praying she did on that mattress. Then, all she had for her troubles was Danny Doyle, an insult of an only child, when all the other houses on Dunluce Crescent bulged with buggies. Ah, but she loved him. Even if he wasn’t the type of son destined for greatness, the reserves of Shamrock Rovers as far as his ambitions roamed, he was good to her, especially since his father had passed. Nor was he the curious sort, so much the better for papal propagation; he didn’t bat an eyelid as Granny Doyle transferred the bottle of water to her daughter-in-law’s handbag. His wife was equally placid, offering Granny Doyle a benign smile, any questions about logistical challenges or theological precedent suppressed. Only Peg seemed to recognize the importance of the moment, that divil of a four-year-old with alert eyes that took in everything: Peg Doyle would need glasses soon, for all the staring she did, and Granny Doyle could summon few greater disappointments than a bespectacled grandchild.

In truth, it was her mother’s handbag that had Peg’s attention, not the bottle of holy water. After a long day of disappointment, when it became clearer that the Pope would not be throwing out free Lucky Dips into the crowd, Catherine Doyle’s handbag was Peg’s only hope. It might have a Curly Wurly hidden in its folds. Or Lego. Perhaps, if Peg was lucky, there might be a book with bright pictures, which her mother would read to her, squatted down on the grass while meaner mammys kept their kids focused on the tiny man on the tiny stage. Peg knew it definitely wouldn’t contain her copybook, which was the one treasure she really desired. Since she’d started school a few weeks ago, Peg had come to love her slim copybook, with its blank pages waiting for Peg’s precise illustrations to match her teacher’s instructions. My Home and My Mother and the gold star worthy My Street were lovingly rendered in crayon, letters carefully transcribed from the blackboard – Very Good, according to Peg’s teacher. It would be weird to take homework on a day out, Peg’s mother said, as if squishing into a field to squint at a man with a strange hat wasn’t weird at all.

Peg sighed: the holy water bottle disappeared into the handbag, one quick zip cruelly thwarting Peg’s happiness. Her mother didn’t notice her gaze, looking instead in the direction of the stage, like all the other grown-ups. That was the way of Peg’s parents: they looked where they were supposed to, straight ahead, at the green man, at the telly. Granny Doyle had different kinds of eyes, ones that explored all the angles of a room, eyes that glinted at her now. Peg avoided that gaze and focused on her new leather shoes, both consolation and source of deeper disappointment. On the one hand, the bright black school shoes were the nicest Peg had ever owned. She had endured multiple fittings in Clarks before they found a pair that were shiny enough to impress a pope and sensible enough not to suggest a toddler Jezebel. They were perfect. Except they would be better in the box. They looked so pretty there, Peg thought mournfully, remembering how nicely the tissue paper filled them, how brightly the shoes had shone, before the trek across tarmac and the muck of Phoenix Park had got to them. The morning had contained more walking than Peg could remember and not a bit of it had been pleasant: a blur of torsos that Peg was dragged through, the grass an obstacle course of dew and dirt. Only the thought of the shoebox – the smell of newness still clinging to the tissue, waiting for Peg’s nose once she ever got home – kept Peg’s spirits up; soon, she would be back in 4 Baldoyle Grove, in her room with its doll’s house and shoebox and soft carpet.

‘Come on, you come with me. We’ve a long drive ahead of us.’

The shoebox would have to wait; Granny Doyle had other plans for Peg. The grown-ups had been negotiating while Peg had been daydreaming and it suddenly became clear that Peg’s feet would not be taking her back to 4 Baldoyle Grove that night. Peg looked forlornly up at Granny Doyle’s handbag. She knew exactly what it contained: wooden rosary beads and bus timetables and certainly not a Curly Wurly; some musty old Macaroon bar, perhaps, which Peg would have to eat to prove she wasn’t a brat or some divil sent to break Granny Doyle’s heart, an organ that Peg had difficulty imagining. It’ll be a great adventure, Peg heard Granny Doyle say, the slightest touch of honey in her voice before briskness took over with Come on, now and Ah, don’t be acting strange. Acting strange was a popular pastime of Peg’s, never mind that most of the grown-ups paraded in front of her deserved such treatment. Peg looked up at her parents. They were useless, of course; they couldn’t refuse Granny Doyle anything.

‘Come on, now,’ Granny Doyle said, in a softer voice, feeling a stab of affection for her odd little grandchild. A calculating creature with far more brains than were good for her, perhaps, but Peg could be shaped into some Jane the Baptist for a future Pope. There was no doubt that such a child was coming – 29 September 1979 was not a day for doubt! – and Granny Doyle felt a similarly surprising wave of love for the crowds that only a few hours ago had been intolerable. Euphoria trailed in the air and Granny Doyle clung on, sure that this was the date when all the petty slights of her life could be shirked off, the superiority of Mrs Donnelly’s rockery nothing to the woman who would grandmother Ireland’s first Pope. Even the plod of the brainless crowd could be handled with tremendous patience, especially when she had her elbows at the ready.

‘We’re going to have a great weekend,’ Granny Doyle said, cheeks flushed.

Peg had no choice but to follow, a long line of grown-ups to be pulled through as her shoes sighed at the injustices of outside.

Later, when Peg scoured photos of the Pope’s visit to Phoenix Park, she found it difficult to remember the crowds or the stage or even the man. She had a nagging uncertainty about whether she could remember this moment at all; perhaps she had come to realize the significance of the event for her life and had furnished a memory shaped from fancy and photographs. Later, there would be the jolt that here was perhaps her first mistake; in her darker moments, Peg Doyle would wonder if everything might have uncoiled differently had she never taken her grandmother’s hand.

But Granny Doyle’s grip was not one to be resisted and Peg found herself pulled into the crowds before she could wish her parents goodbye. Something else that Peg would always wonder about: did she remember her parents extending their arms at the same time before she was whisked off? A gesture hard to read, halfway between a wave and an attempted grab, nothing that was strong enough to counteract the pull of Granny Doyle or the tug of the future.

2




Handbag (1979)


There is no record of what happened to the contents of the holy water bottle. As with many of the items in this history – the Blessed Shells of Erris; the Miraculous Condom; the Scarlet Communion Dress – no material evidence has remained.

Given the personalities involved, it seems likely that Catherine Doyle sprinkled the holy water on the bed-sheets as instructed. Both the angle of the holy water as it fell from the bottle and the arc of Catherine Doyle’s eyebrows as she poured it have been lost to history. Did she do it with great ceremony, like a woman from the Bible pouring water from a jar? Was there instead a rueful roll of the eyes, an ironic dance routine? Can a more erotic encounter be discounted? Elbows propped on strong shoulders, legs curved around a supple frame, a conspiratorial glance between the two. Fingers dipped into a bottle, tracing the contours of a body, travelling across thighs, honing in on the source, the pump of future Popes …

This history refrains from comment. It is enough to report that when Granny Doyle emptied her daughter-in-law’s handbag nine months later and donated all of Catherine Doyle’s things to the St Vincent de Paul, no bottle of holy water was found inside, empty or otherwise.

3




Folding Chairs (1979)


She could almost walk to Galway, Granny Doyle felt, still buzzing from seeing the Pope that morning. Even Dunluce Crescent felt fresh as she turned the corner, as if the glow from Phoenix Park was contagious, no part of Dublin untouched. The quiet cul-de-sac tingled with life, its unassuming brick houses suddenly resplendent in this papal-endorsed sunlight. Her house was the finest, Granny Doyle knew that: 7 Dunluce Crescent had a grand garden and a large porch extension that gleamed in the sharp sun. Granny Doyle felt a surge of pride for her son, for this was Danny’s greatest achievement. He could build things, had built the finest porch in Killester; who cared if that upstart Mrs Donnelly had added a water feature to her rockery?

The only emotion Peg felt at seeing Dunluce Crescent was relief – which was misplaced, as her little legs had barely flopped onto one of the porch’s folding chairs before Granny Doyle was making grand plans to leave again. ‘We’ll have to beat the traffic,’ she called out from the kitchen, as if any other Dubliners would be mad enough to chase the Pope around the country. ‘He’ll be well on his way,’ Granny Doyle added, keen to share her radio updates with her friends gathered in the porch. Glass was the great friend of gossip and the porch served as the de facto community centre for the other old biddies on the street. They had all moved into the crescent within a few years of each other in the late Fifties and here they were, families raised and husbands buried, their lives moving in synch, morning Masses in Killester Church and the excitement of Saturday’s Late Late Show and Sunday roasts shared with disappointing children and glowing grandchildren and every event unpicked in Granny Doyle’s porch, which contained a folding chair for each of the auld ones on Dublin’s own Widows’ Way.

Peg imagined Granny Doyle’s neighbours as the fairies from Sleeping Beauty. Mrs McGinty was the tall, stern one and she mostly ignored Peg, which was far from the worst thing an adult could do. The McGintys had never had children and with her husband long gone, Mrs McGinty’s life revolved around the Legion of Mary, the youth branch of which she chaired with zeal. Mrs McGinty stood poker-still in the porch, eager to get going, the boot of her car packed the night before.

Mrs Nugent was her opposite in almost every way. A tiny woman, full to the brim with mischief and gossip, Mrs Nugent had enough energy to power the road through a blackout. Hearing that Peg was joining them, Mrs Nugent unleashed a stream of chat – isn’t that brilliant, pet? and won’t we have a great adventure, love? – gabbling onwards as if she’d never met a silence she couldn’t fill. Worse, she’d decided to bring one of her many grandchildren along for the trip, some ball of fury and flying limbs whose name Peg declined to remember, but who might as well have been called Stop That! for the number of times Mrs Nugent directed the sentence towards her.

Mrs Fay was the only one of Granny Doyle’s neighbours who had the temperament of a Disney fairy. A large woman with a kind face and impeccably coiffed white hair, Mrs Fay’s shoulders could easily have accommodated wings. Mrs Fay kept a basket of proper chocolate bars by her door for Halloween, not cheap penny sweets like Mrs Nugent or hard nuts and apples like Mrs McGinty. All sorts of other delights awaited beyond the threshold of 1 Dunluce Crescent, Peg imagined: freshly baked biscuits, shelves filled with books, curtains with tassels she could spend an afternoon admiring. Mrs Fay still had a Mr around, so she wouldn’t be joining them – a shame, because Mrs Fay was the only one of them who had noticed her new shoes and Peg was sure she’d stash decent treats in her handbag.

‘He’s left Drogheda,’ Granny Doyle shouted from the kitchen, information that seemed to add urgency to her clattering, even though the Youth Mass they were planning to catch in Galway wasn’t until the next morning.

‘He’ll be lunching with the priests in Clonmacnoise next,’ Mrs McGinty said.

‘Isn’t it a crying shame that Father Shaughnessy gets to meet him,’ Mrs Nugent fumed. ‘And him a slave to the drink.’

Mrs McGinty tutted, a sophisticated sound that conveyed both that she would never criticize the clergy so openly and that Father Shaughnessy was not the sort who should be lunching with the Pope.

‘Oh dear!’ Mrs Fay said.

Long ago, Mrs Fay had decided that most events could be met with an oh dear! or a lovely! and thus she was always ready to temper the world’s delights or iniquities.

Meanwhile, Mrs Nugent had found a new topic to animate her.

‘Did I tell you that Anita’s Darren is going to be one of the altar boys at the Mass tomorrow?’

‘So you said,’ Mrs McGinty said in a thin tone.

‘Lovely!’ Mrs Fay offered.

Darren Nugent’s proximity to a pope was enough to summon Granny Doyle from the kitchen. Before her brilliant holy water idea, she’d been tired of Dunluce Crescent’s many connections to the Pope. Mrs McGinty had a fourth cousin who was concelebrating the Mass in Knock. Not only was Mrs Brennan’s brother-in-law due to sing at the choir in Galway, but didn’t he get his big break at her Fiona’s christening, so she was basically responsible for his career. Even pagan Mrs O’Shea who could only be glimpsed at the church at Christmas, Easter at a pinch, had a shafter of a son who had helped clean the Popemobile. Now Granny Doyle could bear it all with fortitude, convinced that no Darren would ever develop a posterior suitable for a papal chair.

‘I can get you all Darren’s autograph tomorrow if you want,’ Mrs Nugent offered.

‘He’ll have to learn how to write first,’ Mrs McGinty tutted.

Granny Doyle was more magnanimous.

‘That would be an honour,’ she said, locking the inside door and scooping Peg up off her chair. ‘And you’ll have to get me yours as well: didn’t you say that the Pope winked at you?’

This was a well-placed grenade, Mrs McGinty’s fury at the blasphemy involved in a winking Pope strong enough to get them all out of the porch before it shattered. ‘He did, looked at me right in the eye and winked,’ Mrs Nugent insisted, chortling all the way down the footpath, displeasure the lubricant that kept them all together because Mrs McGinty lived to judge and Mrs Nugent lived to incite judgement. Granny Doyle beamed, loving the chat and her neighbours and her street and her granddaughter and even Stop That!, who at least had the wisdom to raid Mrs Donnelly’s rockery when she was after missiles to launch at passing traffic.

Peg clambered into the back of Mrs McGinty’s battered Fiat, beside Stop That!, who had abandoned her rocks to investigate the weaponry potential of seat belts. Mrs Nugent shuffled in beside them, stop that! and are you all right, pet? and it was not a bit of dirt in his eye! launched between the last few precious puffs of a cigarette. Peg wriggled away from Stop That’s seat-belt attack to look out the back window. Mr Fay had joined his wife on the side of the road, the better to properly see off their car. Both Fays thought that attending the Pope’s Youth Mass would be lovely, so there was slim chance they’d rush forward to rescue Peg. They stood there, smiling and waving, on the side of the quiet street in the afternoon sun. Peg gazed at the porch behind them, enticingly empty, the perfect place to spend the day, if Mrs McGinty hadn’t pressed her shoe against the accelerator.

Dunluce Crescent was only a scrap of a street, so by the time Peg’s head bobbed up again, they had already turned the corner and the kind smiles and waves of the Fays had disappeared from view, replaced with rows of other red-brick houses, indifferent to the motion of their car, waiting instead for fresh coats of paint and attic conversions and tarmac paving over gardens, the fortunes of the Doyles nothing to them.

4




Roll of Film (1979)


The next morning, something of a holiday spirit remained. They slept in, skipped the Sunday Mass, left the sheets in a tangle around their limbs. Danny Doyle still had some film left in the camera from the day before, so of course he clicked.

‘You dirty pervert,’ she called.

He smiled and wound the film again.

‘You’ll never be able to develop this.’

She fixed her hair, posing now, legs twined around each other in the air, no hand outstretched. Lying naked on their bed. Something between a smile and a smirk. It was the last shot. The film started to rewind as he pressed down, making him worry that it might not come out.

5




Plastic Spade (1979)


Peg woke up to the Pope’s nose brushing her forehead.

‘Isn’t this brilliant? They were selling them two for a pound at Guineys.’

Mrs Nugent continued to wave the commemorative tea towel in her face while Mrs McGinty’s expression conveyed the blasphemy involved in drying dishes with the Pope’s face.

‘You’re not going to use that, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ Mrs Nugent said.

Granny Doyle snorted to show her displeasure with the ornamental display of a potentially useful object. Mrs Nugent ignored the pair of them.

‘I’m going to get it autographed!’

‘By your Darren?’ Mrs McGinty asked slyly.

‘By her winking boyfriend,’ Granny Doyle said.

The titters that followed were too much for Mrs McGinty, who rounded on the slumbering Peg and Stop That!

‘We’ll never get anywhere if this lot don’t get a move on,’ she said.

Peg groaned. She’d hardly had a wink of sleep in the small folding bed she’d shared with Stop That!, who spent her dreams battling supernatural foes, limbs jagging towards Peg as she vanquished monsters. They’d arrived in Mayo late last night, the lot of them bundling into Granny Doyle’s childhood home in Clougheally, at the edge of the Atlantic. It wasn’t at all on the way to the Pope’s Mass in Galway but it was a place to rest their heads and a chance to pick up further flock for their mad pilgrimage. A clatter of second cousins were coming with them, as well as Nanny Nelligan, Granny Doyle’s mother. Peg couldn’t help staring at her great-grandmother, whose many wrinkles announced that she’d been born in the nineteenth century and whose constant sour expression suggested that she might have been happier staying there. It was a shock to Peg that anybody could be older than Granny Doyle, yet here was this ancient creature, clad in dark shawls and muttering in Irish, roaming around her creaky house at the edge of the sea.

The house was haunted, Peg was sure of it, another reason she had hardly slept. They could definitely hear ghosts, Stop That! had agreed, in a rare moment of interest in something Peg said. ‘That’s just the wind,’ Granny Doyle scolded, but Peg was sure she was lying; Peg caught the fear in Granny Doyle’s eyes too. Even if it was the wind, it wasn’t an earthly gust; Peg’s window at home never rattled like this. It was the house, with its black-and-white photographs of people who had died, and its doors, which creaked with the ache of being opened, and its air, thick with secrets and sadness. Besides, Clougheally would be glad of the ghost, there wasn’t much to the village otherwise: a few other houses, with scraps of farm; one newsagent’s; two pubs.

‘Will we have a quick trip to the strand before we head off?’

Aunty Mary, at least, knew that the only sensible thing to do in that house was to escape. Aunty Mary was Granny Doyle’s younger sister, though Peg called her Aunty, because she seemed to belong to a different generation to the hair-curling ladies of Dunluce Crescent. Aunty Mary kept her hair grey and styled into a severe bob. The trousers she wore matched the seen-it-all stride of her legs and say-what-you-like set of her chin. Peg was sure that the students in the Galway secondary school where she taught were terrified of Mary Nelligan. Not Peg, though: Peg never saw a trace of this Scary Mary. Aunty Mary was the one to show Peg the spider plant where scraps from Nanny Nelligan’s bone soup could be hidden, sure that thing’ll be glad of them, or the rock on the strand where notes could be left for fairies, we’ll see what they say, never a trace of harshness about her voice when she spoke to Peg.

Granny Doyle had gone off to get Nanny Nelligan ready for the day, so Aunty Mary seized her advantage.

‘It’d be a crime not to say hello to the sun on a day like this.’

She had Peg and Stop That! dressed and marching down the path to the beach before Mrs McGinty could object; Aunty Mary had a way of getting what she wanted.

Seeing the dawn on Clougheally strand was something that everybody should want, Peg was sure of it. The Atlantic rushed towards them, bringing the news from New York, went the saying – not that anybody in Clougheally paid any mind to the sea’s gossip, enough goings-on in Mayo to be busy with. Peg stared at the horizon, amazed at the sight of sky and sea for ever. A cluster of small fishing boats braved Broadhaven Bay and some bird swooped this way and that but otherwise the place was tremendously empty, a delight after all the bustle of Phoenix Park. Peg could easily imagine the Children of Lir soaring through a similar sky and settling on Clougheally’s boulder, its claim to fame and name: Cloch na n-ealaí, the Stone of the Swans (an English error, Aunty Mary tutted, for carraig would have been the appropriate word for a boulder, though Peg liked the smallness of stone, as if the place was sized for her).

Peg made Aunty Mary tell her the story of the Children of Lir every time they visited. King Lir had four children, Fionnuala and her three brothers, who were as good as could be. Too good for their wicked stepmother, in fact: she had them turned into swans and sentenced the poor creatures to nine hundred years of exile around the loneliest places of Ireland. They cried and suffered and huddled in each other’s wings but after nine hundred years they turned into wrinkly grown-ups, met Saint Patrick, and got baptized before they died. Clougheally appeared in the part with the suffering: three hundred of the Children of Lir’s years of exile were spent in Erris, the borough in County Mayo where Clougheally was located. Local legend had it that they huddled together on a special stone and looked out at the Atlantic. It still stood there, so the story went, the Stone of the Swans, a boulder on the other edge of the beach, treacherously perched on a mound of rocks: a scary place to spend centuries.

‘Stop that!’

Stop That! had a different interest in the Children of Lir’s boulder: it was the most dangerous item to climb on the beach, so she made a beeline towards it.

‘Would you not play a nice game or something?’ Mrs Nugent huffed, her feet finally on the beach.

Stop That!’s idea of a game was scouring the sand for the ideal missile to fling at whatever poor bird was flapping its wings in the distance. Peg left her to it, guarding the treasures on her own corner of the beach. Aunty Mary had given her a plastic spade and the beach was hers to explore. There were all sorts of brilliant things to find: pennies that might come from different countries and brightly coloured pieces of glass and so many shells that Peg could have spent the day cataloguing them. Peg didn’t rush, supremely content sifting sand from shells, arranging her little collection in order of size. She’d pick the prettiest to bring back to her windowsill in Dublin and she might even draw one in her copybook. Aunty Mary stood to the side, helping Peg spot a gem occasionally, mostly just watching her, quietly. Even Mrs Nugent kept her chat inside, enjoying her morning cigarette and cup of tea on the empty beach, that spectacular stretch of sand, where the flap of wings from across the bay could be heard on the right day. Organizing her collection of shells on the sand in the morning sun, Peg felt a surge of happiness.

But there was Granny Doyle, a cloud across the sky.

‘What are the lot of ye doing? Mammy’s waiting in the car and we’d want to get going if we’re to miss the crowds.’

Aunty Mary braced herself and shot Peg a such are the trials of life glance.

Mrs Nugent stubbed out her cigarette on one of Peg’s shells and turned towards her granddaughter.

‘For the love of God, stop that, would you: you have your dress wet through! We had better get going: I’d say the Pope is only dying to get my autograph!’

6




Toast Rack (1979)


Catherine was the one to venture downstairs, eventually. She’d have to check the clock and phone Peg and deal with the day, though not yet. First, breakfast. She smiled as she caught a glimpse of her body in the kitchen window. Her bare toes drummed against the lino as she eyed the steel toast rack suspiciously; she wished the toast would pop faster, afraid the spell would break if she stayed away too long.

They’d eat the toast in bed, she decided, not waiting until it cooled to butter it.

7




Vatican Flag (1979)


Even the rain couldn’t break the buzz in the air. Granny Doyle didn’t even bother with her brolly. Nobody in Galway racecourse would have their spirits broken by a bit of drizzle. Pope John Paul II wasn’t going to be dampened. If anything, he had more energy, as if Ireland had recharged him, not a problem for him to burst into song upon request. The crowd started it, tens of thousands of voices roaring out the song that had become his anthem.

He’s got the whole world in his hands,

He’s got the whole wide world in his hands.

Granny Doyle looked around the crowd and beamed. Galway racecourse was a sea of Vatican yellow flags, like an All Ireland where everybody was on the same team. Everybody was singing along: Mrs Nugent waving her tea towel and belting out the tune; Mrs McGinty thrilling in her best Church Lady voice designed to test stained glass; her mother bobbing her beshawled head in time with the beat; the Clougheally crowd of second cousins joining in, joyfully out of key.

The Pope stayed on the stage after the Mass, joy widening his face. When he spoke it was with the heart-heave of a teenage Romeo, a fallible and unscripted pronouncement, one all the more charming for it: ‘Young People of Ireland: I Love You.’

The crowd erupted into a cheer that travelled like a Mexican wave.

Mrs Nugent chuckled.

‘Didn’t I tell you he’s always talking to me?’

Even Mrs McGinty managed a laugh at this; it was impossible to frown. If she’d had a bottle large enough, Granny Doyle would have captured the happiness in the field and been a rich woman for years.

‘Quick now, we’ll take a photograph.’

Granny Doyle passed the camera to Mrs Nugent, scooped up Peg and marched over to her mother. Aunty Mary was left to the side; no harm, she’d only spoil it.

‘Big smile for the camera, like a good girl,’ Granny Doyle said to Peg.

Mrs Nugent fumbled for the button.

‘All right now, one … two … three … cheese and onion!’

The photograph was a remarkable coup, heralding never-again-seen skills from Mrs Nugent. Peg, Granny Doyle, and Nanny Nelligan squinted at the camera in the foreground, Pope John Paul II was flanked by Bishop Casey and Father Cleary in the background, heroes all three. A special effect of the morning sun gave the appearance of halos, the smiles of all three women stretching to meet the light.

Months later, Peg clutched the photograph, thrilled at a memento she was allowed to keep. Granny Doyle had given it to her for Christmas, pleased that her plan had worked and that it was only a matter of months before some John Paul Doyle arrived into the world. Peg loved the photograph, even though her shoes were outside the frame. It was evidence that she was somebody who mattered, somebody who had once shared the sunlight with a pope. For years she clung to the sanctity of this snapshot, even when she might better have torn it in two. It captured the moment precisely: an island united, crowds of the devoted, everybody as happy as Heaven.

8




Bloody Tea Towel (1980)


The first miracle of John Paul Doyle was survival.

In other circumstances, the tea towel might have been kept for posterity, a version of Veronica’s sweat-soaked shroud. A former nurse, Granny Doyle cleaned up the kitchen her son couldn’t face. She picked up the chair that had fallen and scrubbed it down. She returned the phone to its table on the hall. She mopped the blood from the floor, decided it was best not to keep the mop. She scooped out the half-eaten breakfast cereal into the bin, washed and dried the bowl, returned it to the cupboard.

The tea towel was put in its own plastic bag and sealed in another bin-bag before it was thrown away.

9




Catherine Doyle Memorial Card (1980)


Danny Doyle lit another cigarette. He’d had to blow the smoke out the window, back when he was a teenager. Now it didn’t matter if the little room filled with smoke, with his Da dead and Granny Doyle too worn out to shout at him. She was busy with the babbies, leaving Danny to his old box room and its sad yellow aura, the source of which it was hard to locate. It couldn’t be the amber on the window from his smoking; the curtains were always drawn, especially in the day. The yellow of the curtains had faded to a pale primrose, hardly enough to explain the aura. So, it might just be the jaundice about his heart; what else was sad and yellow?

Another fag. Something to keep his hands busy. He wished there were cigarettes for the brain, something that his thoughts could wrap around and find distraction in. Brain cigarettes? He was going mad, he had to be. Sure you’re not high? That’s what she would have said, with an arch of her eyebrow – he could hear her voice clear as anything in the room – and Danny Doyle felt a sharp pain in his chest at the thought that the only place Catherine Doyle was in the room was trapped in a tiny rectangle.

There she was, smiling at him from a plastic memorial card. Her name (Catherine Doyle), her dates (1951–1979), some prayers and platitudes (May She Rest in Peace; Oh My Jesus, Forgive Us Our Sins and Save Us From the Fires of Hell). He’d let Granny Doyle pick the photo for the memorial card, and the sensible photo she’d chosen would not have been out of place in a Legion of Mary newsletter: this was not a Catherine Doyle he recognized. Surrounded by prayers and a pastel background, this woman was not the type to let toast crumbs fall onto a bed or push her face into silly shapes when Peg was taking a bath; this was not a woman who could quack. Staring at the memorial card, it was hard to remember the tone that she had used to tell the stories that put Peg to sleep or to admonish him when he’d forgotten to pick up milk, harder to imagine how ‘Danny’ might have sounded from her mouth, what shades of affection and exasperation might have coloured it.

Danny picked up the roll of film instead of another cigarette. Where could you take it? Not Brennan’s chemist. Nowhere on the Northside. Maybe some shop in town, some alley off O’Connell Street. But then, the thought of it, a stranger staring at her naked body, looking at him like he was some sort of pervert: he couldn’t do it.

Danny Doyle turned the capsule over and over in his hand, the single bed in his old box room already sagging with sadness underneath him.

10




Statue of the Sacred Heart (1980)


Peg stared at the holy water font in the hallway. It was one of the many features of 7 Dunluce Crescent that did not appear in her doll’s house. It was a small ceramic thing, hanging precariously by a nail, a picture of the Virgin Mary on the front. Much too high for Peg to dip her finger into, which meant she relied upon Granny Doyle or her father to bless her as she passed the threshold. Neither was particularly diligent. Peg felt that she’d lost two parents for the price of one. Danny Doyle spent all his days in the box room with the curtains shut, all the Lego castles that they were going to build forgotten in Baldoyle, along with everything Peg had ever cared about (her doll’s house; her shoebox; her life!). Granny Doyle was too busy charging about the house after the triplets to worry about the fate of Peg’s soul. Peg almost felt as if she were becoming invisible.

‘In or out, child, are you coming in or out?’

Granny Doyle still had eyes for Peg when she got in the way. Peg retreated down the dark hallway and left Granny Doyle to her chorus of old ladies. The triplets were asleep at the same time, so the chance to tell everybody just how busy she was could not be missed by Granny Doyle. Peg heard Mrs Fay’s warm voice and suppressed the desire to rush into the porch and see if she’d brought any sweets in her handbag. It wasn’t worth the fuss. Peg couldn’t face Mrs Nugent telling her that you’re a brave girl, aren’t you, love? or Mrs McGinty trying to find some softness in her face or Granny Doyle losing patience and banishing her outside, where she hadn’t a single friend to hopscotch beside. Besides, it wasn’t sweets Peg was after; she’d lost her whole life, even a Curly Wurly wouldn’t cut it.

Peg made her way into the empty sitting room, an eerie space with the telly turned off. The room had rules, invisible lines that demarcated territory as sharply as barbed wire. Granny Doyle sat in the armchair by the window, its cushions shaping themselves around her body, even in her absence. Danny Doyle took his father’s spot in the armchair by the television, dinner tray propped on his knees when he watched the football. Guests took their pick of the chairs by the wall. Peg might have switched on the telly or clambered onto one of the forbidden armchairs but what would be the point? How could she care about cartoons? There hadn’t been a television in her stately doll’s house, only a library with walls of miniature books that Peg had arranged carefully. Peg squeezed her eyes shut and longed for some magic to make her small and safe and transported inside the doll’s house but no, she was stuck in her stupid-sized body, too small to escape and too big to disappear.

Peg ambled past the dining room, with its mantelpiece filled with forbidden figurines, photos of people who Granny Doyle never saw, and postcards from places she had never been to. It was the nicest room in 7 Dunluce Crescent: sun streaming through the curtains and catching the dust in the afternoon. People hardly ever went inside, much less dined there.

Peg meandered towards the kitchen, the heart of the house. But what was here for her? No bright gingham tablecloth like in her doll’s house, for starters, only some grubby thing splattered with stains. The smell of bone soup and burnt rashers clinging to the curtains. More pictures of the Virgin Mary than Peg could count, as if she were a family member. And Granny Doyle’s wireless, the radio she kept on all day, so the patter of indignant listeners and reassuring men filled the room, no space for any thoughts.

If Aunty Mary had been visiting, Peg might have been able to escape to the back garden. Here at least was some quiet, the hedge nice and big to hide behind, a large stone where fairies could leave presents, so Aunty Mary said, her face gleeful when they overturned the slab and uncovered an old sixpence beside the scurrying woodlice. Aunty Mary had the key to the shed, too, and here, beside the reek of petrol from the lawnmower and the jumble of abandoned possessions, were piles of books in cardboard boxes. Peg longed to put them on a shelf and move them about until they were arranged by colour or size or whatever took her fancy. She couldn’t read them yet, but Aunty Mary left her be. No aren’t you a brave girl? or you’ll be a good girl and help your gran, won’t you? Aunty Mary even gave Peg some books with pictures, to be getting on with, while Peg took ‘a little break’ from school to help out her granny with the triplets. But Aunty Mary was in Galway, teaching other children. The back door was locked and Peg didn’t have the key, even if she could have reached the handle.

Aunty Mary might have understood why Peg was so upset at the loss of her copybook, another victim of the move. Peg had cried for a solid day when she realized her copybook was gone, her tears intensifying when Granny Doyle came home with a new one, its lines all the wrong size and none of Peg’s pictures or attempts at the alphabet preserved inside.

‘I want my copybook,’ Peg dared to say, face red with the rage, fists clenched at such an unjust world.

‘Ah love,’ Danny Doyle sighed, patting her on the head and shuffling up the stairs, no use, as usual.

‘I went to Nolans special for that,’ Granny Doyle said, in a voice that was trying to be nice, even as she opened up the impostor copybook.

‘I want my copybook,’ Peg repeated, wishing that Aunty Mary or her mother or somebody sensible were there, but she only had Granny Doyle, who turned to the counter and started to chop onions. Granny Doyle had a formidable back, which tensed to show just how much she wasn’t listening, but Peg wouldn’t let her win this fight. ‘I want my copybook,’ she howled, hoping that the words might smash windows or send the house tumbling down or right the ways of this wrong world. But all they did was send Granny Doyle’s hands to her brow, onions abandoned as she turned around.

‘Be quiet or you’ll wake the triplets.’

This could not stop Peg, whose words had turned into wails.

‘I want my copybook!’

‘Listen, Missy, I won’t tolerate this carry-on …’

Peg would carry on crying until she exploded, I want my copybook and I want my old house and I want my mammy clear in every scream and sob.

‘Just shut up!’

‘I want my copybook! I want—’

The slap pulled the air from Peg’s lungs. A quick tap across the face, it only stung for a second, but Peg felt the air in the room shift in that instant. Granny Doyle’s face reddened. She turned back to her onions as if nothing had happened, leaving Peg stock-still in the middle of the kitchen, her face turning white from the shock of it. Something her mother had never done. A violation. Peg knew then that her tears would be of no use here. She swallowed them inside, thinking that this was revenge of sorts. Fury filled her instead, a colder kind that kept her face pale. Her composure remained, even as Granny Doyle turned around in frustration – ‘see, you’re after waking the triplets’ – Peg’s mask fixed as Granny Doyle made a great show of taking away the new copybook and bringing it to ‘somebody who’ll appreciate all I do for them’. Lines had been drawn that day: there would be no more need for slaps or tears. Peg understood there was no out-wailing a baby; if she wanted her way in 7 Dunluce Crescent, she’d have to be inventive.

‘Are you all right, love? Would you not want to go outside and get some fresh air?’

It was Mrs Nugent, in to heat up the kettle for a fresh round of tea. This was all grown-ups did: made tea and smoked and offered Peg things she didn’t want.

‘I can see if my Clare’s ones are about? Tracey might even let you play with her new Barbie, though you’re not allowed to give it a perm, the cheek of her, trying to make it out like me! Though, I says, you’d be paying a lot more for a doll with this quality hair, wouldn’t you!’

Peg looked longingly out at the back garden, where the books Aunty Mary had brought were locked up in the shed. There wasn’t a hope that Mrs Nugent would read her mind.

‘Staying here to look after the young ones, are you, pet? Aren’t you a brilliant help to your gran? Janey, I wish some of my lot were more like you!’

Peg left Mrs Nugent, who continued to chat to the radio, and trudged upstairs. She would look in on her siblings, cosied up in their cots in the biggest room in the house. They weren’t even cute, like Peg’s doll. All they did was sleep and cry and stare, the last action being apparently a great achievement. ‘Isn’t he a great one for looking at you?’ the ladies in the porch said. ‘Oh, he’s a sharp one,’ Granny Doyle agreed. He was John Paul Doyle, the only one of the triplets who warranted such attention. Granny Doyle had recognized her future Pope immediately in the runt of the litter, the one who had struggled to stay alive. Granny Doyle knew that cunning trumped primogeniture and here was the Jacob to Esau, a battler who could cut the queue to the head of the Vatican: Ireland’s first Pope, John Paul Doyle!

A great one for his poos: that was how Peg saw John Paul. Helping Granny Doyle with the endless parade of cloth nappies through the house, Peg had excellent insight into the triplets’ characters. While Damien produced nice little nuggets of poo that could be easily cleaned up, John Paul’s explosive shits were messy and unpredictable. A testament to the luxury of riches that Granny Doyle piled upon him – for he would be the first to have a scoop of mashed potato; the baby who’d get the extra bit of bottle – but Peg knew that there was more to it than nurture: it was John Paul’s nature to cause trouble, something he excelled at.

Any sensible person would have placed their bets for papal stardom on the other two babies, docile creatures who were happier sleeping than staring. Damien had the capacity to sit quietly in his high chair; unlike John Paul, he did not need to play ‘food or missile?’ with every object that crossed his path. He was as placid as could be; he was doomed from the get-go.

Rosie was a trickier character to get a handle on. The only one named by her father, Rosie somehow managed to wriggle away from the moniker of ‘Catherine Rose Doyle’ before she could talk. Even as a baby there was something vague and dreamy about Rosie Doyle; she had none of the solidity of a ‘Rose’ or a ‘Catherine’. Against the perversity of John Paul and the purity of Damien, Rosie was a perpetual hoverer, a swirl of characteristics, none of them fussed enough to dominate. For the record, her poos, those reliable auguries of the future, were hard to classify, trickles that were neither solid nor liquid, not quite committing themselves to any shade of the spectrum.

One thing Peg was sure of: they were all united against her. If there were any magic to be found in 7 Dunluce Crescent, it was all concentrated in the triplets’ room; eerie the ways in which they seemed to be connected, as if some elastic band that Peg could never see looped them together. How else to explain how they could all wake up at the same instant or wail as one? Or not quite as one, Peg realized, as she creaked open the door innocently and peered at her slumbering siblings. John Paul woke the second she looked at him; she was sure of it. His little face looked up at Peg, cunning glinting in his eyes before he opened his mouth. The elastic band snapped into place and there the three of them were, miraculously awake and immediately furious at the world. That was the way of the triplets: John Paul set the tune and the other two followed. ‘Ssssh,’ Peg tried but it was hopeless. She could hear the commotion in the porch below; she’d be murdered.

Peg had a second to decide: try and placate the triplets or run and hide? Her legs made the choice immediately; in 7 Dunluce Crescent, escape was always the answer. She shot past her father’s closed door (as if he’d be any use) and dashed into her room. Well, Granny Doyle’s room with a camp bed in the corner and a chest of drawers for Peg, no space even for a shoebox. Peg’s heart raced as she heard Granny Doyle heave her way up the stairs. The triplets had only been down for the length of one cup of tea: she’d be mad. Peg examined the room for hiding places. There was the dusty wardrobe, no hope of Narnia behind Granny Doyle’s rain macs and dry-cleaned skirts. The covers of Granny Doyle’s big bed were an option, though the smell of Granny Doyle was enough to keep her away. Under the camp bed it was, a space Peg could just about crawl into. The walls were thin enough that Peg could hear Granny Doyle shush the triplets, John Paul cradled as she launched into some country lullaby.

Peg didn’t dare move, as much as she hated the room and its statue of the Sacred Heart. It wasn’t possible to switch it off, so Granny Doyle said, so Peg had to stare at the odd statue of Jesus, with his huge red heart, throbbing brightly in the dark. For some reason, it was the statue that made it hard for Peg to find sleep, not the restless triplets in the next room. Every night, she’d lie on the small camp bed, her body tight as a tin soldier, eyes fixed on the pulsating red candle. Granny Doyle had shared the room with the Sacred Heart since her wedding night. If the statue’s light had bothered her once, it didn’t now, and her snores always filled the room before Peg’s sobs.

At least he wouldn’t tell on her, Peg thought, peeping out from under the bed to stare at Jesus. He was too busy with his heart that never stopped beating, even after death: he wasn’t bothered with the misdeeds of Peg Doyle. Nor were any of the statues or pictures of the Virgin Mary, when she thought of it. Whatever Peg did – spitting out Granny Doyle’s soup or stealing a glimpse into the dining room – had no impact on the serene smiles of the Virgin Marys dotted throughout the house. She could become invisible, Peg decided; a thought to chew on. He’d keep her secret, this statue of the Sacred Heart, not a word out of him, even as Peg heard Granny Doyle cart the triplets downstairs, the hope of rocking them to sleep surrendered.

Peg would stay here until she was caught, she decided, settling into the carpet. She dug in her elbows, ready to wait Granny Doyle out. An hour passed. Two. Peg smelled the whiff of cabbage and pork chops from the kitchen: surely Granny Doyle would fetch her now. But no, Peg heard Granny Doyle’s footsteps up and down the stairs as she delivered a tray to her father’s room, no thought to check in on Peg. Tears welled up in Peg’s eyes, their provenance unclear, as she probably wouldn’t be in trouble now. Yet to be invisible had its own hardships, the statue of the Sacred Heart’s expression unmoved by her tears, its heart continuing to flicker as night crept into the room.

It was as if the statue knew, Peg thought, years later: the statue understood that 7 Dunluce Crescent was impossibly small for all the people and feelings it was suddenly asked to contain. From the beginning, the house had been impatient to expel some of its new inhabitants, unable to contain the miracles that would push against its walls. The statue intuited this: perhaps it even anticipated the trouble that would come, the sights it would be forced to witness. Yet it kept beating on, even as dark filled every corner of the room, while Peg sobbed herself to sleep.

The statue saw what Peg didn’t: the heave of relief when Granny Doyle found her, the sign of the cross, the kiss. Granny Doyle managed to shift Peg’s floppy limbs into the camp bed. She pulled the covers around her, bewildered at the devilment that such a quiet thing could get up to.

Little do you know, the statue might have said, for surely it intuited everything that Granny Doyle and Peg would do and say to each other before their histories ran out. It kept quiet, its scarlet candle throbbing away, its lips frozen in a solemn smile, its hands outstretched in a gesture of compassion, though they were made of stone, and limited, ultimately, in their ability to provide aid.



Series II:




Beatification (#ua7f65e4a-e754-5b6c-abf8-3078013cdb95)


(2007)



1




Rosemary and Mint Hotel Shampoo (2007)


Kiss to say, honey, I’m home.

‘Hello, Mrs Sabharwal.’

Peg rolled her eyes.

‘I’ve told you, I’m not changing my name.’

‘I know, but today—’

‘That’s not how it works, you don’t own me because a year has passed, I’m not a washing machine that you bought in Walmart.’

A smile from Devansh.

‘You remembered!’

Kiss to say, of course you remembered.

Pause to savour the scent of New York City on an April evening: young love and fast food and the promise of heat.

Pause to detect something else.

‘You smell nice!’

‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

‘What is that smell?’

‘I showered after swimming. Borrowed some lady’s fancy shampoo.’

Kiss to avoid questions about rosemary and mint hotel shampoo.

Kiss to avoid questions about what Peg was doing in a hotel on a Tuesday afternoon.

Peg removed the wine and take-out containers and brandished a brown paper bag.

‘One year: paper!’

Kiss to reward ingenuity.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were going to cook.’

‘We can have a feast.’

‘We can’t have Chinese with pasta.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ll put some of this in the fridge …’

‘Come here.’

Kiss to stop motion.

‘You are looking sexy today!’

Peg opened the wine.

‘Today?’

Kiss to demonstrate love in the face of provocation.

‘You know I’d never be down on the librarian chic.’

‘I know.’

Peg found a way to take a sip of wine.

‘I had a meeting in the morning with a potential dissertation supervisor.’

‘And you thought you’d seduce them into accepting you.’

‘Exactly.’

A gulp of wine to wash down a lie.

‘Let me know if you need a reference. I’m happy to vouch for your many attributes.’

‘Generous.’

‘I’ll write a letter about your exceptional fingers which are excellent at typing …’

Kiss to demonstrate a relationship between word and thing.

‘… and I can recommend your ears which can listen to lots of lectures …’

Kiss to tickle.

‘… and these eyes …’

Kiss to touch.

‘I’m starting to feel like Red Riding Hood.’

‘Does that make me the wolf?’

‘Mmmm, you’re more of a bear.’

Kiss to say, fuck you, my love.

Kiss to say, Happy Wedding Anniversary.

Kiss to say, let’s fuck across the counter amid knives and chopped peppers.

Kiss to say, yes.

Kiss to say, let’s go.

Kiss to say, but not now, first, the dinner.

Pause to chop basil and let feelings settle.

‘So, Ashima asked me to be Sara’s godfather.’

‘What?’

‘They’re having her baptized. You know what Gabriel’s like and Ashima doesn’t care but she thinks she can get Sara into some fancy-ass Catholic school, like she can’t think of a worse fate for her child than public school.’

Shoulder-rub to comfort an underpaid, overworked public high school teacher.

‘You think I’m godfather material?’

‘Keep up that belly you’ll be fat enough.’

‘Whata ar’ya talkin’ about?’

Kiss to stop impersonations.

‘I couldn’t go to the gym today; I was doing important research about this godfathering business.’

Peg walked over to Dev’s laptop, knowing, before she looked, the site that would be open.

‘Wikipedia is gymnastics of the mind.’

‘Ha.’

‘And I’ve been getting this sauce ready.’

Kiss to display gratitude.

Kiss to atone for judgement of Wikipedia reading and editing as an appropriate pastime.

Kiss to atone.

Pause to acknowledge the difficulty of approaching the topic of Peg Doyle’s family.

‘What were your godparents like?’

Peg’s godmother was Aunty Mary.

‘I’m not really in touch with them.’

But what was there to say about Aunty Mary?

‘Were they relatives?’

Irish women disappeared from time to time and that was how it went.

‘My godparents weren’t really that important.’

And then they died and upturned your life in exile, but Dev couldn’t possibly know about that; Peg had been careful not to show him the letter.

‘Thanks.’

Kiss to acknowledge the appeal of pretend-hurt Devansh Sabharwal.

Kiss to avoid further questions.

‘The main requirements are enough money to stuff a card, the ability to remember the kid’s name, and, as far as I’m aware, being a Catholic.’

‘Two out of three ain’t bad? Ashima says they’re being flexible about it. I guess it’s silly. It’s not like I’m going to start believing that dead dudes can make miracles.’

Tiny pause to tense at where the conversation was headed and search for any way to stop it.

‘Did you see the news? Pope John Paul II is on his way to becoming a saint.’

A gulp of wine to wash down a lie.

‘No.’

‘Yeah! Mad isn’t it, only two years since he’s dead and already they’ve found some evidence of a miracle so he’s halfway to being …’

She had the word in her head, despite everything.

‘Beatified.’

‘Right! I guess some guy in France claims that praying to the Pope cured his Parkinson’s so now the Pope just needs one more miracle and he’s Mr Beatified. Record time: it can take decades.’

‘I guess men are working out their minds on Wikipedia across the world.’

‘Ha! Yeah, I guess I got a bit distracted this afternoon … you know who else has a Wikipedia page?’

Pause to banish all conversation about the past.

‘Pope John Paul III!’

Wine to wash away lies.

‘I hadn’t seen.’

‘More than just a stub too, lots of links to YouTube and some interviews and …’

Move to the counter to banish all possibility of conversation about John Paul Doyle.

Pause to drain pasta and bitterness.

‘So you’re going to become a godfather?’

‘I know, it’s silly … I definitely can’t provide spiritual guidance …’

Bite of lip to suppress knowledge of upcoming joke.

‘Or any guidance, ha! And I don’t want to be in the middle of one of Ashima’s and Gabriel’s fights. It’s just, Sara is a great kid, you know? And it’s nice to have that kind of official connection to a kid, especially if we’re not …’

Pause to imagine children in subjunctive tenses.

Kiss to acknowledge vulnerability.

‘You’d be a brilliant godparent.’

Tiny pause to say farewell to children in subjunctive tenses.

‘Well, it’s not like I have to do it: you don’t even remember yours.’

Wine to wash down a lie.

‘No.’

What was there to say about Aunty Mary? Fairy godmothers were for children, you couldn’t ask them to stick around.

‘I’m still her uncle.’

Irish women disappeared from time to time and that was how it went.

‘I’ll still be part of her life.’

That was the path of the Doyle women (Aunty Mary; her mother; Rosie; Peg): the only way to survive exile was to forget.

‘Peg?’

Wine to wash away the past.

‘You okay?’

Kiss to wash away lies.

‘Yeah.’

2




Box of Memorial Cards (2007)


Would the Pope be getting one too? Surely, he would, with the millions who’d want to be remembering him, and who could keep track of everybody who’d passed without the handy rectangles that memorialized people? Not Granny Doyle. The balance had tilted, so that she knew more who were dead than alive; she’d be lost without her little box of laminated lives. She sat in her porch and flicked through her box of memorial cards and wondered if the Vatican had ever made a memorial card for Pope John Paul II: he was two years gone, after all, they’d plenty of time. There might even be a special memorial card now that he was bound to be beatified: some poor crater cured of Parkinson’s, already. She might have to start a new box; maybe she’d set up a special one for celebrities. Daft thoughts, she didn’t know any celebrities and, in any case, there wouldn’t be a special memorial card for the Pope – she had just checked, she hadn’t any for poor John Paul I – and Granny Doyle would have to wait for somebody else to die before she’d start a new box.

‘Daft,’ Granny Doyle said, though the radio on the chair opposite her didn’t respond. Some new yoke that John Paul had got her: Granny Doyle could swear that the news had got worse because of it. No mention of the Pope’s miracle, never any good news, only some eejit jingling on about the upcoming election (as if she’d ever betray Fianna Fáil) and the nurses on strike (never in her day) and people killing each other from Mogadishu to Kabul while ads jittered on about things she didn’t want: it was enough to send her to bed.

‘It’s a terrible world we live in,’ Granny Doyle said, although the folding chairs were silent. Poor Mrs Nugent had settled into her box of memorial cards a long time ago and her daughters hadn’t picked well at all; Mrs Nugent would have died a second death at the sight of the blotches and wrinkles in the photo. Mrs Fay hadn’t been the same since Mr Fay passed a year ago, though she at least had done well enough to pick a picture where he still had a healthy batch of hair. Mrs McGinty was still going (she’d live to a hundred; indignation would power her that far) but they weren’t talking to each other after the Pope John Paul III business. A shame, because the car outside Irene Hunter’s had been parked there all night and the Polish crowd renting Mr Kehoe’s house had received three packages in the space of an hour and all of that would have been enough to sustain the conversation for the morning.

‘Daft,’ Granny Doyle said, but the only occupants of her folding chairs were bits of plastic. Some new phone that John Paul had got her, with a camera on it, as if she wanted to be documenting her wrinkles. The new radio. And the Furby he’d got her, years ago, when she wanted company in the house but didn’t want some yappy dog or cat conning her out of cream. A daft thing it was, gibberish spouting out of its beak most days, but she had let John Paul keep it stocked on batteries, had bought them herself when he forgot. It was nice to have a voice in the house, even if all it said was ‘weeeeeee!’ or ‘me dance’ or ‘Furby sleep’. Nice to have some intelligent conversation, Granny Doyle would say, a joke between her and John Paul, something to be treasured, the thought that he was worried about her being lonely. And yet, if he were really worried about her being lonely, wouldn’t he stay over some nights like she asked?

‘Ah, well,’ Granny Doyle said, looking over at the blob of purple and yellow plastic.

You can teach it to talk, John Paul had said, back when he visited.

That thing looks like a demon, Mrs McGinty said, back when they were still talking.

Isn’t it lovely? Mrs Fay said, back when she still had some semblance of wits about her.

The Furby sat on the chair and slept. It spent most of the day sleeping, a sign of its intelligence. Granny Doyle stroked its fur but its eyes didn’t open; probably for the best – it could scare the wits out of you with its laugh. She might have forgotten to put the batteries in. She could ask John Paul to get her some, but he’d just get them delivered, along with all her messages, which was a shame when the truth of it was she didn’t mind about the milk – most of it ended up down the sink – it was her family she was starved of. Her fingers found her son’s memorial card: a fine man he looked, there. Funny how photographs couldn’t capture the size of a person. Mrs Nugent was diminished; no rectangle could capture the gossipy-eyed glory of the woman. Danny Doyle, on the other hand, looked bigger. A man who could build an empire, you might have thought. Well. She moved to the next one and there was Catherine Doyle, the dutiful daughter-in-law who’d left Granny Doyle three squalling terrors to rear instead of the one. And where were they now? Not in her box, thanks be to God, but the triplets had left her in an empty house, again. Not to mention Peg, a name like a paper-cut. Granny Doyle stiffened in her chair: no need to be remembering any of them. People made their beds; they lay in them. Except people never did make their beds properly any more, not the way her mother had taught her, not the way she had when she was a nurse, and this was a strange thing to be missing, to feel a pang for the house with all its perfectly made beds and nobody to lie in them.

‘Daft thoughts,’ Granny Doyle said, though the Furby stayed asleep.

She put the box of memorial cards under her folding chair; she couldn’t remember why she’d picked it up in the first place. A dangerous thing to be doing, the past waiting to ambush you with each turn of the card, and the threat of tears too, daft, when Granny Doyle had never been a crier. Still, now she was, tears surprising her at strange times; it struck her that there might be a medical solution, some sort of hip replacement for the heart, or at least the eyes. In the meantime, she had banned onions from the kitchen.

The Pope! That was why she had fished out the box. Two years dead, the poor man, and her knees couldn’t make it to the church to light a candle for him. She could have asked John Paul to drive her to the church, in a different life, where he hadn’t torn the heart out of her. Would Pope John Paul II be getting a card? She couldn’t remember what she had decided and she couldn’t ask Mrs McGinty. She decided instead to root out the old photos from Phoenix Park; she’d battle the stairs if she had to.

Or, she could ask John Paul to bring down a box of old photos for her; he couldn’t hire a company to do that. He was a good lad, despite everything that he’d done. He’d come if she called, if she could ever figure out which buttons on the phone to press. John Paul Doyle at least had turned out … well caught in her mind, impossible to add, because whatever successes John Paul Doyle had achieved, she couldn’t say that any of it had turned out as she’d planned, that giddy day when she’d practically conjured him into being. He might visit that weekend, yet, and the intensity of this desire – that John Paul sit beside her in the church for everybody to see – bowled her over, and she felt a hot liquid prick her eyes, and then somehow she was thinking about her other grandchildren, Damien and Rosie and Peg, taboo subjects, all of them.

The Furby opened its bright yellow eyes. Sometimes Granny Doyle wondered if Mrs McGinty was right: perhaps the creature was diabolical. Some dark nights, Granny Doyle wondered if the contraption had the voices of the disappeared trapped inside: perhaps it was on this earth to judge her. Daft thoughts – John Paul had only bought it as a joke. Still, she kept the batteries in it. Still, she was glad of its gabble, happy to have any sound in the house. Still, she chanced the name.

‘Peg?’

The sly old thing went back to sleep; if it had the voices of the disappeared inside, it wasn’t sharing them.

3




Clerys Clock (2007)


You’re a dirty pervert, Damien Doyle imagined Mark saying, once he arrived, feeling flushed at the thought of just how excited this sentence made him feel. He covered his blush with the Irish Times, sure that the O’Connell Street crowds were judging him, though they kept on walking. Damien stole another glance up at Clerys Clock, that grand structure that jutted out from the side of the department store and portioned out the city’s time. The minute hand was closer to a quarter past; Mark was late. Mark was always late but Damien couldn’t help his own punctuality; even the thought of turning up a few minutes late caused him distress. Besides, he didn’t mind the wait; this was still novel, having somebody to wait for. A lover. Only lovers met under Clerys Clock, so the story went. Damien conjured visions of smartly dressed men waiting outside the grand department store, their hearts lifting at the sight of some pretty girl in a smock, rushing from some country train, stopping her step to a stroll, as Clerys’ clockwork took over, sweethearts confidently tick-tocking towards each other for decades. Sweethearts who probably didn’t call each other dirty perverts, Damien imagined, blushing again at this subversive meeting place: it was just possible that Clerys Clock might crash to the ground in protest.

Damien flicked through the Irish Times for distraction. He was the only eejit waiting under the clock – everybody had mobiles now, sure – and he wanted to project the impression of an upright citizen and not the kind of man waiting for the touch of his boyfriend’s tongue in his ear. So, the news. More of the same: trouble in hospitals and protests against Shell in Mayo and the election in the air. The Greens had managed to nab a small piece about their education manifesto on page 4 but it was dwarfed by a story about the government’s new climate change strategy, irritating when the Greens could use better coverage if they were going to gain seats, which they were: they had to! Damien skimmed the rest of the paper, only stopping once he found a picture of Brangelina, which sent his brain on a worried spiral about whether ‘Marmien’ was a worse couple name than ‘Dark’ until—

‘Look at you, ogling Brad Pitt in broad daylight, you big pervert.’

Mark, surprising him as always, bounding up out of nowhere.

A quick kiss, the Irish Times and Brad Pitt quickly folded into Damien’s satchel.

‘You know only grannies and boggers meet under Clerys Clock?’ Mark said.

And lovers, Damien almost said, though he held the words inside.

‘I’m just appeasing your inner bogger—’

‘I’m from half an hour out of Belfast!’

‘“Bogger” just means “not from Dublin”.’

‘Sounds right. You, my love, are definitely an auld granny.’

‘Feck off, you stupid bogger.’

Another kiss, right in the middle of O’Connell Street, grannies and boggers be damned.

This was new for Damien, all these actions that Mark could do so unconsciously – kissing a man in the street or holding hands with a man in town, not wondering whether Mrs McGinty or Jason Donnelly or who knew who would be turning off Talbot Street. Damien looked up at Clerys Clock ticking away; perhaps it had seen worse. Damien felt more self-conscious on the Northside, especially O’Connell Street; this, after all, was the home of religious nuts, where Damien himself, in his Legion of Mary days, had held up placards and bellowed chants against abortion alongside Mrs McGinty. Though the fanatics had been moved along, exiled with the Floozy in the Jacuzzi, no sign of Granny Doyle, more space on the path for more types of people, and of course –

‘That fucking yoke,’ Mark said, weaving around the Spire and the circle of tourists. Mark couldn’t walk past the Spire without a mini-rant; Damien could have set his watch by it.

‘Wasn’t Nelson’s Phallic Pillar enough? Why did they need to build another giant penis? We keep shunting shite towards the sky, all part of the same problem – instead of making space to talk to each other we keep blocking the view.’

They had reached The Oval (Damien would have preferred the Front Lounge, but Mark only drank in old-man bars), Damien getting in the Guinness while Mark continued talking. ‘The same problem’ was the subject of the dissertation that Mark sometimes worked on: ‘The Celtic Tiger Eats the Commons, 1973–2002’.

‘It’s the same shite as shopping centres. We used to have squares to discuss ideas in, now we have The Square. A great name, sounds like a place you’d want to visit and then it turns out to be an air-conditioned tomb full of stereos and shite. It’s a smart trick, usurp the language of the thing you displaced: gouge out a valley and then call the monstrosity you plonk there Liffey Valley, brilliant really. But what we need is a square where we can share ideas instead of buy shite, you know?’

Damien did know; he’d heard this part of the dissertation before. Now that he was sure the bartender couldn’t, in fact, be somebody from Dunluce Crescent, Damien relaxed and basked in Mark’s monologue. Too many words, too many ideas to implement, but wasn’t the Green Party the space for that and Mark was one of their best volunteers. Damien took another sup and admired everything about Mark: the frayed Aran jumper that he’d worn since the last millennium; the big hands that moved too much when he talked; the blue eyes that didn’t move at all, lasered in on you, so that you could see every fleck of brown or grey in them, eyes that never seemed to need a blink or a break. Meanwhile, brightly coloured insects pirouetted in the region of Damien’s diaphragm, the words fresh, even after a year: my boyfriend.

‘… and this is why we need a space to freely debate ideas!’

Damien refocused. Mark had fished out the Irish Times to mop up some spilt beer and this was an article that Damien had missed: something about Pope John Paul II being beatified, not an election issue in Damien’s opinion, though there was no telling what would get Mark going.

A thing to love about Mark: he could be so single-minded, wouldn’t be swayed by any trivial distractions once he got going.

‘Fuck all this hagiography shite! Nobody has the balls to say anything genuine when a famous person dies.’

‘I suppose people need a period of mourning,’ Damien dared.

‘No,’ Mark almost shouted. ‘All this respect the dead stuff is just a way for the right wing to solidify their myths. It was the same with Reagan: the years after a public figure dies are the critical moment when their legacy is sculpted. You have to scrawl your graffiti before the concrete sets. Nobody has the balls to call the Pope out for some of his shite: preaching that condoms are a sin in Tanzania while people are dying of AIDS. It’s fucked up that this is what makes saint material …’

Damien took a sup of Guinness and nodded; it would be a while before Mark reached his pint or his point. He had to divert conversation from the Pope, away from any talk of Pope John Paul III. It had been years since he’d talked to his brother properly, not since that business, plenty of periods in Damien’s past that he skipped over euphemistically. That other business, with Peg, who Damien definitely didn’t want to think about. Damn the lot of the Doyles, Damien thought, nothing like family to stuck-in-the-mud you in the past, when Damien aspired to be all future. This focus on the future was what he loved about working for the Green Party, a political organization for the twenty-first century, not one rooted in the bogs of some civil war best forgotten, and here was the thing to steer them away from popes.

‘Don’t worry, babe, once I’ve got a new office in Leinster House, I’ll keep you a section of wall to graffiti whatever you want.’

A thing to love about Mark: his eyes were only gorgeous, even mid-roll.

‘Right,’ Mark said. ‘The whole country’s going to change with this election.’

It was, though; Damien knew it.

‘You won’t be able to move with the paradigms shifting each other when the Greens get seven seats—’

‘When we get ten seats,’ Damien corrected him. ‘And yes, it’ll be all change. Catholic Ireland is dead and gone: it’s with Pope J.P. in the grave!’

A thing to love about Mark: he was a great at impersonating radio talk-show hosts.

‘The question is, how can we as a nation come up with ethical values that aren’t tied to religion or nationalism? The question is, how do we become a people defined by the future rather than the past? Catholicism has been swept clear away, the question is how can we fill that gaping hole?’

‘What was that you said about filling a hole?’

Mark laughed.

‘Are you pissed already?’

‘I am!’ Damien announced, fizzy with the feeling; he felt drunk all the time now, even when he hadn’t touched a drop.

4




Mitre (2007)


John Paul Doyle smiled. Smiling was his speciality: popes needed as many grins in their repertoire as politicians. A smile can take you further than a sentence, John Paul thought, something he’d write down, once he was reunited with his BlackBerry. It could be material for his biography. Or for a stand-alone stocking filler. Or, better, a self-help tome, paired with an exclusive seminar on smile-coaching. John Paul’s fingers twitched; he was lost without his BlackBerry to record the thousand and one ideas that pinballed about his brain and he was on form that morning, odd as coke wasn’t even involved: it must be the fresh air. Another idea: find something to bottle the fresh air here – a net? A bottle? – and ship it out to Dublin. Atlantic Air! John Paul was sure some eejits would drop a tenner for a sniff. He gulped in a lungful and let out a huge nowhere I’d rather be than on the edge of the Atlantic in a pair of boxers and a pope hat! beam.

In his few hours in Clougheally, John Paul had already trotted out several different smiles.

A Pope John Paul III has arrived in Clougheally! megawatt grin unleashed that morning.

A secret yeah, this kip is Clougheally, nice eh? smile flashed to the camera-guy.

A so nothing’s changed and here I am, back half-smile all for himself.

A fuck this fresh air! grin and yelp for the benefit of the camera-guy, as he stripped to his boxers.

And a let’s get to work smile and nod: he had to keep some of the smile power on reserve for the cameras.

John Paul couldn’t help a grin at the thought of the video: it was going to be a good one. The Official Miracles of Pope John Paul III followed a certain formula. A familiar biblical reference (loaves and fishes; healing the sick) was revitalized with a contemporary twist (famine in Ethiopia solved; an escalator opened so no poor soul would have to miss five floors of shopping). Often, the video required that John Paul stripped to his boxers, useful for the controversy and the clicks. Today, Pope John Paul III would walk on water, miraculously buoyed by the powers of natural gas. He’d fall in, of course – that was how Pope John Paul III rolled, no gag too cheap – but he’d be back on his feet for the finale: standing on the gas rig and pulling out nets of money from the water. Nobody had hired him to perform this particular miracle, but as a cultural figure of some importance, Pope John Paul III had the obligation to wade into controversial topics and provide clarity. Some people didn’t think that Erris was the right place for Shell’s gas pipe; typical, for bedrudgers followed progress like flies to fresh shite. Pope John Paul III would banish the protesters. Ignore the naysayers, his smile would radiate. Didn’t the Bishop of Kilcommon himself bless the gas rig a few years back? Believe in me and we’ll walk on water; he’d write that one down too.

First, the video! John Paul made his way over to the fellas by the currachs and gave them Pope John Paul III’s best I’m freezing my bollix off here, let’s get going lads, man among men grin. Then, John Paul couldn’t help it, even though the cameras weren’t rolling yet: he made a show of searching for a sail, kerfuffling about for a second before he unleashed his catchphrase.

Ah now, I wouldn’t know anything about that!

Coupled with one of Pope John Paul III’s gormless smiles, of course, the one that suggested that the poor holy fool had got himself into another mess again. Together, the smile and the catchphrase had helped launch him towards YouTube stardom (well, in Ireland at least). He’d secured an upcoming feature on Xposé on TV3 and a mention in the Sunday Independent. He even had enough money to throw a few bob towards a camera-guy, an essential expense as his routine became more polished; he’d get an intern next! All tax-deductible, and if any prying eyes had questions about irregularities in his accounts, he had his catchphrase at the ready: Ah now, I wouldn’t know anything about that!

The sentence proved reliably robust, especially when it was sheathed in irony. Most sentences these days had irony wrapped around them like a condom and so this one was a treat: an expression of not knowing that conveyed just how much you knew. He might keep it when he launched his political career, John Paul decided. Election season was on its way and he had a hunger to grace telegraph poles with his grin. Next time. Pope John Paul III was practically already a mascot for the government; he’d met half the Cabinet at the Galway Races. His grin at the end of the videos radiated optimism. Haven’t we all done well, it said. Onwards and upwards. Don’t let the begrudgers into government. Vote Fianna Fáil for five more bright years of prosperity. Vote John Paul Doyle for the best handshakes in town. He’d have to write some of this down, once he found his BlackBerry, and he’d have a real think about running in the next election, suss out some seat he could cruise easily through, a coy smirk and ah now, I wouldn’t know anything about that! at the ready if some reporter got wind of his ambitions.

‘Do I know you?’

John Paul turned. It was some auld one, weaving over to them before he could get in the currach. He shot the camera-guy a private smile: here we go …

It was hard to tell what views the auld one opposite might have about Pope John Paul III. If she were one of the ‘it’s a holy disgrace’ brigade, he’d have a sober smile at the ready, one that communicated respect and contrition and had ‘May he rest in peace’ hidden in its dimples. He even had an earnest, delighted, yes I did hear about his miracle, isn’t it great? smile ready if she talked about the latest news, a well, I have to be getting on crisp grin to be unleashed if she suggested that his antics were demeaning the very concept of miracles. But she might only be after an autograph, so he had a bigger grin in reserve too, one that announced that it was the only dream of Pope John Paul III to pose with her and that he was delighted to sign a photograph for her granddaughter.

‘You’re Bridget Doyle’s young one, aren’t you?’

That wiped the smile clean from his face.

‘Mary Nelligan’s sister’s grandson, isn’t that yourself?’

A central part of being John Paul Doyle was learning to live with the black hole inside of him. He had strategies to keep the vortex under control. It was surprisingly easy, most of the time. The trick was to keep moving. The trick was to avoid the Doyles. The trick was to keep conversation light. Certain proper nouns were taboo (Peg; Damien; Rosie). Certain periods of time were to be avoided, large pockets of the 1990s not to be thought of. Smiles to be stretched; to breaking point, if it came to it. Don’t dwell: that was a key one. The black hole liked nothing more than for you to stay still and dwell: that was when it grew, gulping away inside of you, reaching for internal organs.

The worst thing was that the black hole could surprise you. It could stay hidden away for a long while, hanging out beside an appendix or a gall bladder or whatever other useless things whiled time away inside a body. But then some small thing would activate it – some auld one asking if you were anything to the Nelligans – and there it was, pulling the heart and lungs towards it, swallowing everything, including whatever neurons sent messages to the mouth because even as John Paul searched for a smile he couldn’t find the shape of one.

He should have seen it coming. Once he got Aunty Mary’s letter, he should have realized: no avoiding the other Doyles now. Competing maxims had tumbled about in his head – Don’t Dwell wrestling with Seize Every Opportunity! – until here he was, dipping his toe back in Clougheally after ten years; he should have known he’d be recognized. There was the shop where he’d pinched penny sweets and there was the boulder he’d climbed and there were the shells on the strand that he’d seen the Virgin Mary inside and here was the past, a rush of feelings twisting away inside, the murder of John Paul Doyle their only aim.

Relax, he tried to say, willing his knees to stay still. It had been ten years since he’d been to Clougheally. The auld one didn’t know a thing. No need to get into the past. If he could stare down the sea without flinching, he could see her off too. After a moment, a smile found its way to his face: bemused, kind, you must be mistaken. He held out his hand, the master of all occasions.

‘Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Pope John Paul III!’

The auld one looked suspicious.

‘You’re sure you’re not Bridget Doyle’s grandson?’

John Paul flashed his best smile, the one in tune with his catchphrase.

Ah now, I wouldn’t know anything about that!

5




Rucksack (2007)


Of course, Rosie got onto the wrong subway and of course she ended up in the worst place in New York. Rosie wasn’t prepared for the intensity of Times Square. That comforting pocket of Irish accents by the Aer Lingus bag carousel had disappeared and she was surrounded by American voices. Heat charged through the streets without bends and promised to knock her horizontal. Cheerful chains sold donuts that could blind you and coffee that was mostly whipped cream, and M&Ms in so many flavours and colours that you might die before you decided what to eat. Huge billboards flashed confidence and sold clothes and Broadway shows and screamed Here You Are at the Centre of the Universe! making Rosie want to lasso the first plane she saw and hitch her way back to Clougheally.

Breathe, Rosie reminded herself. She was on a mission. She had travelled an ocean to find a long-lost sister; she would not be deterred by a few flashing billboards. Tourists barged into her rucksack and cursed at her in a variety of languages but Rosie wasn’t going to budge until she’d figured out how to get back inside the subway. She gazed up at the billboards, hoping that one of them might morph into a giant neon arrow; it was not too much to hope that the universe might be on her side. No space for directions in Times Square, though, only ads for H&M and news flickering across in an excited loop. Rosie felt even tinier. It was incredible that Peg lived in this city, which had no news about the election in Ireland or the protests in Clougheally. Not a peep about John Paul Doyle. Just a stream of figures, stocks and shares going up and down, and whatever things Bush was ruining (the climate and Iraq, today) and then, a sentence to shock: POPE JOHN PAUL II TAKES FIRST STEP TOWARDS SAINTHOOD.

The sentence whizzed past before she could question it, not that Rosie cared about the details. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, practising radiating love towards her enemies. She did this, every morning, as part of her yoga routine, imagining turquoise rays of love that matched her hair emanating from her body and rippling towards her enemies. Usually she focused on the living – her family provided ample material – but if Pope John Paul II could be counted as a nemesis, then she should try to overcome her anger and send him love. Her eyes opened quickly: she couldn’t picture it. And was nowhere safe from popes? Surely, here was a square that was safe from his reach, the home of Saturday Night Live – or its general vicinity, Rosie didn’t care about the details. Hadn’t Sinéad O’Connor stood in one of these buildings – or somewhere close; her aura remained, that was the important thing – and held up a photograph of the future saint, only to rip the picture into fragments. ‘Fight the real enemy,’ Sinéad O’Connor had said and twelve-year-old Rosie had known that the words were for her. This is the man who stole away your sister, Sinéad O’Connor might have said, as she ripped the photo into bits, while Rosie, curiously, had felt the opposite process, the formation of a solid identity, a core of steel inside the dreamy girl with her head in the clouds; in the aftermath of catastrophe, watching the Pope ripped to nothing on television, Rosie Doyle became a fighter.

Rosie stood mesmerized by the news ticking across the side of some building, but there was nothing more about the Pope. No sign of Sinéad O’Connor in Times Square: nobody to get upset about the news at all. The crowds around her showed no signs of perturbation: necks continued to crane upwards, fingers snapped at disposable cameras, voices squealed at the sight of women dressed as candy or cowboys wearing nothing. She had to leave, Rosie realized. It had been a mistake to come, foolish to knock on Peg’s door after all these years. Rosie started to walk. She didn’t care which direction, abandoning her desire to descend underground, charging past tourists and Sesame Street characters and a military recruitment centre that made her want to spew a kaleidoscope of vomit.

After a couple of minutes, she realized where her legs were taking her. She was walking uptown on Broadway, billboards disappearing as the streets hit the fifties. As if her legs had their own agenda, Rosie thought with a rueful smile. Manhattan was difficult to get lost in, another general point against it for Rosie, who was a great meanderer, but a feature that was useful at this current moment in her life, with sweat on her brow and turmoil in her chest and a giant rucksack on her back. The friend she was staying with lived uptown off Broadway so she could probably walk it and then she wouldn’t have to worry about taking an express train to the Bronx by accident. She was on a mission, after all; she couldn’t forget Aunty Mary’s letter.

Would Peg want to discuss Aunty Mary’s letter? Would she even talk to her? These were questions that Rosie might better have asked before her flight across the Atlantic, ones to be brushed away now. They’d find the words, Rosie was sure of it. She imagined her aura: turquoise, loving, strong. She’d get the best of this city and her family. Rosie Doyle was a fighter (wasn’t she?).

A breeze arrived as she reached Columbus Circle, some magic wind sent to ease her travels. Things would only get better from here. Soon the bodegas would outnumber offices and people would smile on stoops and the smell of green would rush across from parks and at the end of the path, waiting, would be Peg. They’d find the words, Rosie resolved, the soothing wind on her face a sign from the universe that everything might work out grand. The word sounded odd in her head – it had a different meaning on Broadway – but Rosie clung to it, anyway, appreciating its solidity, the smell of Ireland off it. Yes, Rosie thought, marching down Broadway towards a long-lost sister, everything might turn out grand.

6




Rosemary and Mint Shampoo (2007)


‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

Peg added a giggle as punctuation; Gina, she figured, was a giggler. Nate pretended to take the matter into serious consideration, his head rattling from side to side.

‘The worst thing I’ve ever done?’ Nate repeated.

His name was not Nate though, no more than he was actually forty-nine. Peg did not mind. He knew what he was doing, something Peg loved about older men: he didn’t require reassurance or cheerleading, could swipe a credit card or roll his tongue across a buttock with the certainty that nothing would ever be found insufficient. If he wanted to be called Nate, so be it. This was how she liked things: names as temporary as hotel bed-sheets.

‘Yeah,’ Peg said, draping herself across the length of the bed.

It was a question she liked to ask in hotel rooms, where white walls were blank enough to absorb all sorts of misdeeds.

Nate knelt over Peg, knees knuckling into her sides, large hands firm on her chest.

‘Worst thing I’ve ever done?’

His hands moved towards Peg’s throat.

‘Yeah.’

He started to squeeze.

‘Haven’t done it yet, babe.’

*

After, Nate turned to Peg and smiled:

‘How ’bout you, babe? What’s the worst thing you’ve done?’

Killed a man, Gina should have said, perhaps a giggle afterwards.

Wait till you see, Gina should have said, flipping him over roughly: your turn now.

Wouldn’t you like to know, Gina should have said, turning onto her side.

Peg said nothing, tensed on the bed, the question ricocheting back to her, demanding to be answered.

She’d leave it be. Plenty of other things to entertain in hotels. Gina, Peg was sure, was a fan of miniature things. Little bottles of vodka, clear and fiery and amazing. Adorable bottles of shampoo with ridiculous ingredients. Rosemary and mint, a scent to banish all trace of the past. Ironic, when rosemary signified remembrance, Peg thought, though Gina kept her mouth shut. Each bottle to be replaced within the hour once they’d left, all part of the deal in hotels, which were brilliant at acting as if nothing had ever happened there before, every day a new start, anonymity the aim and amnesia the game; brilliant, really, that a whole industry could be built on the importance of forgetting.

Bored, Nate switched on the TV.

Gina was not married to Nate so she would not, Peg decided, object to the turning on of the television; Gina was not a nagger.

‘Wow!’

Peg rolled over and looked at the images of Pope John Paul II.

Nate sat up, suddenly alert. The kind of kink he was into, he could certainly be Catholic.

‘Holy shit, he’s already performed a miracle – that was fast!’

Peg watched Rome reel by, starting when she noticed the date on the screen.

‘Fuck!’

Nate turned around.

Peg could have asked Nate about the logistics of forgetting wedding anniversaries – he had a well-worn groove on his finger – but Gina was more of a giggler than a talker.

Nate put his arm around her.

‘You okay, darl?’

‘I’m fine,’ Peg said, certain that Gina was not a Catholic.

7




Archival Box (2007)


Peg removed the lid slowly. No surprises inside: sheets of loose correspondence, waiting to be sorted. Nothing that could be construed as an emergency. Nonetheless, the urge to dive in and escape into work overwhelmed her; she had to steady her hands against the box.

In the archive, at least, things were simple. Collections arrived smelling of garages and neglect, objects perilously stored in regular boxes. A survey was commissioned. Items were rehoused. Staples and paper clips, those perfidious collaborators with rust, were replaced with plasticlips. Carefully labelled acid-free folders were organized in archival boxes. Finding aids were written. Series were designed to guide the intrepid researchers of the future. Eventually, rows of archival boxes were lined up, awaiting transferral to an off-site warehouse in New Jersey, neat labels announcing the triumph of order over entropy.

‘What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found?’

But here was Rosie, meandering through the stacks and haphazardly inspecting boxes, chaos trailing after her, as usual.

Dev answered, when Peg didn’t.

‘You’ve found lots of mad stuff here, right? One time, you found a bloody glove, right?’

Wrong, Peg thought, though she nodded. She sometimes worried that she had outsourced affability to Dev, but now, with a long-lost sister to be dealt with, she was glad of his chatter. If Rosie insisted on barging back into her life, then she would keep things on her terms, conversation kept on a leash, how did you like downtown? and what are you up to tomorrow? and this is where I work! enough for the evening, no need for why did you come back? or how is John Paul? or and Damien? or what on earth can you want from me?

‘You found a colony of cockroaches once too, yeah?’ Dev prompted.

He had quizzed her about her work too, early on, when question marks curved at the prospect of unexplored histories. Every archivist had a story. Strange hairs, found at the bottom of a box. A poem scribbled on the back of an envelope. An unsent love letter.

‘It’s mostly files,’ Peg said, pointing to the row of records she was working on.

Rosie nodded, clearly doing her best to feign interest. They might leave, yet.

‘Do you have any government documents?’

But here was Rosie, poking around as if she might find the folder to topple the Bush administration.

‘You’d have to go to DC for that,’ Peg said, half hoping she would.

‘Or Guantanamo,’ Dev said. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve installed some room to bury documents there.’

Peg was about to say something about archival standards but then Rosie made a dark joke about the slender space required to hold the government’s proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and then they were off, the pair of them congratulating each other’s condemnations, while Peg stood by her desk, like some fool of a child eager to show her parents her homework. Rosie and Dev had only known each other a week, but they were already fast friends, protesting against Iraq that afternoon and sharing spliffs and debating whether Obama had any hope of beating Clinton. Of course they got on: the two of them were like dogs, so eager and affectionate, so ready to please, while Peg was some mean old cat, sleeking away from their weed-fuzzed observations and longing to do a line of coke in a hotel room with some man who’d never be vulgar enough to disclose who he voted for.

It had been a mistake to bring them to her workplace, an illusion that she could retain control. Or, the mistake had been having Rosie for dinner and introducing her to Dev. Or, perhaps, answering the phone at all. They were too different. Rosie liked tea, pot after pot, while Peg craved espresso. Peg was a Libra while Rosie was ‘technically a Gemini, but really I’m more of a cuckoo Aquarius’. Peg was doing a Master’s; Rosie couldn’t even decide what to order for lunch. Such a sister! Who else would come to New York unannounced after twelve years apart? Peg stared at her mess of a sister, with her bright blue hair and her indifference to nail polish remover – twenty shades visible on each nail, like some primary-coloured palimpsest! – and her insistence upon earnest conversation about the state of the world. Peg felt the need to shake her – such a sister – and yet shouldn’t she hug her, because she was looking back at her so sweetly, the way she always had.

‘Dev is showing me his dissertation materials,’ Rosie called across, tenderness softening her amusement.

‘The History of Mathematical Notation!’ Dev proclaimed, in the voice he used now to discuss academic matters. ‘You can see why I dropped out!’

Peg resisted the urge to stop Dev opening drawers.

‘Where are the stones, Peg? Cuneiform is the oldest form of writing here: thousand-year-old etchings on stones! And you know the best part, it’s not even poetry or the names of kings that gets recorded, just transactions of debt. As if thousands of years from now, all that remains of our lives is a receipt from Walmart!’

‘Here,’ Peg said, finding the box on her cart.

Dev removed the stone from its box and glowed with gratitude.

‘Amazing, isn’t it? How old are they again?’ he asked, already taking his phone out to check Wikipedia. ‘Peg introduced these to me, back when we were eyeing each other up across a crowded reading room …’

Dev left space for her scoff; Peg bristled at complying so reliably.

‘My dissertation was about the history of parentheticals, even more tedious, but Peg suggested I look at these too, dropped them on my desk, like roses that were … three thousand and twenty or so years old!’

‘Romantic,’ Rosie managed.

(It was romantic, though, that first night when they’d crammed onto a fire escape, drunk on tequila and ideas. Peg had listened to Dev’s theories about the kind of reading that mathematical parentheses created, the information in the brackets to be read first, until Dev was proclaiming that parentheses explained the universe and demanded an eye that did not track things from left to right so linearly. Exactly, Peg had said, that first drunken night, when her thoughts were anything but exact; this was a kind of history she was interested in, she explained, one where linear progress might be disrupted and the marginalized privileged: a history where losing did not require silence. That first night, drunk on tequila and infatuation, sex sparkling in the air, there was no problem that they couldn’t solve.)

‘It definitely has an aura,’ Rosie said, mercifully replacing the stone in the box before Peg snatched it; she’d bolt the doors when they left.

‘Properly pagan,’ Dev said, approvingly.

‘I hope so,’ Rosie said and they were off again, lost in some conversation about Celtic rituals and Hinduism, Peg tuning out until she heard Rosie pronounce: ‘I mean, nobody in Ireland is really Catholic any more.’

Peg dealt with this sentence of Rosie’s, stated as if it were a fact, though Peg knew that Rosie would not have any sociological data at her disposal.

‘I mean, no young people,’ Rosie continued, unabashed. ‘I mean, not after everything the Church has done. I can’t think of anybody who’d go to Mass voluntarily. I don’t think it’s even a consideration any more.’

The ease with which Rosie could shrug off Catholicism astonished Peg, as if the years between them meant they had sprung from different soil.

‘Things have changed,’ Rosie said, looking across at Peg, since you left dangling in the pause. ‘Things that happened before wouldn’t happen now.’

Rosie might have meant this as an olive branch but Peg only felt the poke of a stick.

This is my Master’s thesis topic. Examining the educational practices of nineteenth-century religious institutions helps us understand the ways in which religion seeps into current secular pedagogical theory. Ideology has long tentacles. It seems premature to dismiss the effect of Catholicism on my – our? – generation. Catholicism is there, a pea at the bottom of a stack of mattresses, shaping our thoughts, even as we claim not to feel its presence.

These were the sentences that arranged themselves in Peg’s brain as another sentence – don’t you see me? – jagged across. The conversation had drifted on before she had any hope of assembling them into a coherent point and Rosie was on to the time that she had dared to put My Little Ponys into Granny Doyle’s crib and Dev was wondering if unicorns had ever been worshipped and then he was checking a Wikipedia article he’d read on that very topic and Peg drifted off again until, getting ready to leave, Rosie looked around the dark corridors and asked, ‘Don’t you get lonely working here?’

They were too different. Rosie found the archive intimidating, while Peg loved the place. Rosie didn’t think much of Manhattan while Peg loved its anonymity, its surprising pockets of quiet, its websites where you could order anything from sushi to sex, its hotel rooms, where you could lie naked on white sheets and say your name was Katie, Gloria, Gail, whatever, knowing that the stranger shutting the door behind him had not used his real name either and that the chances of him being friends with your cousin or cousins with your neighbour were next to nil.

‘No,’ Peg said, staying put by her desk. ‘I don’t.’

8




Rubik’s Cube (2007)


‘Howda ya rate my godfathering so far?’

Rosie laughed at Dev’s terrible accent and joined him by the skylight window, an array of Sabharwals and neighbours below, in the New Jersey back garden of his childhood home.

‘Well, you didn’t drop the baby.’

There was Sara, happily gurgling away, as old ladies passed out food she couldn’t eat.

‘Phew.’

‘And you did some excellent uncle-work.’

The children who could talk were already asking ‘Where’s Dev?’, ready for another spirited dodgeball game.

‘Helps that my mental age got stuck at seven.’

Rosie took a drag of her spliff.

‘Though I’m not sure that sneaking up to your bedroom to find an old stash of weed is the best godfathering.’

‘You’re right,’ Dev said. ‘I should have invited Sara.’

Rosie laughed.

‘I won’t tell Gabriel if you don’t.’

‘Deal.’

At the mention of his name, the dreaded brother-in-law looked up; Dev ducked and pulled Rosie down with him.

‘Smooth.’

‘What can I say, I’ve had practice.’

Rosie settled into the floor and took in the room, bewilderingly stuck in time, with its games console and high school textbooks and posters of The Matrix and a periodic table.

‘I was cool,’ Dev said, following Rosie’s eyes.

‘Your parents didn’t want to use this room.’

‘No, they kept it like this in case I moved back,’ Dev said, with an eye-roll, every parental gesture of affection taken as an insult.

‘Right.’

Rosie hadn’t been inside 7 Dunluce Crescent since she ran away. She doubted that Granny Doyle had left the walls painted purple. Or carefully stored her crystals and dreamcatchers. For the best, no good getting bogged down with material things.

‘So, wanna play Mario Kart?’

Dev used a tone that suggested a joke, though he seemed amenable to staying longer, picking up a Rubik’s Cube and playing with it.

Rosie was in no hurry to return to the christening either. She’d agreed to come because she’d thought that Peg might appreciate an ally. But then Peg had felt sick after the ceremony and hadn’t wanted any company on the train back, quite the contrary, and Dev had seemed so sad that Rosie agreed to stay, even though she felt an eejit, with her blue hair and Peg’s dress too tight on her and the thin smile from Mrs Sabharwal, which assured her that she was used to disappointment from the Doyles.

Rosie needed a glass of water; she took another drag. It had been a mistake to come; she should never have left Clougheally. Apart from Peg, New York had nothing for her and suburban New Jersey was just as bad, if not worse. She had been a fool to think she could cross the Atlantic on a mission. She hadn’t mentioned Pope John Paul III, let alone Aunty Mary’s letter. It was as if Peg had some invisible force field which deflected any mention of the past and kept all talk small. She had nearly exhausted the generosity of the comrade whose couch she was crashing on; it was time to cut her losses.

‘We should probably go back down,’ Rosie said.

‘Probably,’ Dev agreed, rolling another joint.

Time stretched, the sun too.

When Rosie finished her joint, Dev was still playing with the Rubik’s Cube.

‘You’re pretty quick.’

‘Not bad,’ he said, scrambling the puzzle again. ‘My record was fifty-five point four seconds.’

Rosie let out an impressed sound.

‘It’s nothing: the record is twenty-two point nine five seconds. Or used to be, anyway.’

He didn’t check Wikipedia, tossed the cube up and down instead.

‘Dad entered me into a bunch of tournaments when I was younger. Like if I won, I could make it to the moon or Mensa.’

‘You were a cool kid.’

‘Oh yeah, I’ve got the medals to prove it.’

They were probably in the room somewhere, though Dev didn’t search; he put on the voice he used to make fun of academia instead.

‘Of course, it’s really the unscrambling that’s important. You know, there are approximately forty-three quintillion incorrect permutations but what if beauty lurks in truth? What if the Rubik’s Cube is really a type of mandala, a portal to enlightenment, the gateway to nirvana!’

‘Was that your pick-up line? No wonder you’ve got a poster of the periodic table.’

Dev pretended to be hurt.

‘I’ll have you know, your sister was very impressed by that speech. She made me a miniature paper Rubik’s Cube for our first anniversary, little notes written on every surface!’

The smile on Dev’s face faded.

‘Well, our first month anniversary. For our wedding anniversary, she got me a brown paper bag …’

Peg was the problem that brought them together but neither of them knew how to talk about her. Rosie stood and joined him, no sign of the baby below.

‘I should give it to Sara,’ Dev said, looking out the window, where the dusk was clearing the garden.

‘Yeah, she’s bound to solve it in under twenty seconds,’ Rosie said.

‘Or, she has, what, forty-three million—’

‘Quintillion.’

‘She’s got forty-three quintillion ways to fuck it up; I’m sure she’ll find the one that works for her.’

Dev laughed but his eyes remained sad. Rosie followed his gaze down the length of the garden, where he looked at sundry nieces and nephews attempting to climb the cherry tree. She saw them, she imagined, the phantom offspring that Dev watched, the boy and girl who joked at their dad’s jokes and their mam’s food and smashed every record the Guinness Book had. Or perhaps his eyes tracked those alternative histories, the ones where he didn’t give up on everything – Rubik’s Cube tournaments, dissertations, marriage. Or perhaps he was looking at the young woman standing by the tree, some neighbour probably, Rosie hadn’t been introduced, but perhaps if they’d shared the right sentences when they were teenagers, she could have been the person to make Dev happy.

‘Perfection is overrated,’ Rosie said, taking the cube from Dev. ‘I think it looks better when all the colours are mixed up.’

Dev let out a laugh.

‘Right! The completed Rubik’s Cube is so big on colour divisions it’s practically racist.’

Rosie laughed, relaxing into the conversation, as they ran off on absurdist tangents and composed imaginary letters to whoever Rubik was about the dearth of brown and black coloured squares. Perhaps it had not been a mistake to come, after all, Rosie thought, finding the scrambling of the cube strangely soothing – possible, even, to imagine some universe where she and Peg might talk. Granny Doyle might have stuffed all of Peg’s possessions into St Vincent de Paul bags, but they had history together; the Blessed Shells of Erris and Miraculous Fish Fingers could be summoned, still. Standing in Dev’s childhood bedroom, high on weed and vicarious nostalgia, Rosie resolved that she wouldn’t abandon her mission yet.

9




Blarney Stone (2007)


‘Do you remember my christening?’

Rosie shifted in the bed, pulling the sheet towards her. Dev was away for spring break so Rosie was staying in their apartment for a bit, no questions asked about why Dev preferred his friends for camping company. The fan in the living room was broken, so here Rosie was, in the same double bed as her older sister, who hadn’t lost her knack for pretending to be asleep.

Rosie focused on the stones arranged on Peg’s windowsill, summoning their auras. She couldn’t tell if they came from American beaches. It was certainly fanciful to imagine that Peg had carried one from Clougheally across the Atlantic (and yet, hadn’t she loved to collect trinkets on the beach, their old bedroom filled with them until the St Vincent de Paul bags swept in?). Nonetheless, in the absence of Rubik’s Cubes or carefully preserved rooms, the stones would have to do. Rosie focused on their aura, not minding about the detail – the feeling was important, not the fact! – and imagining magical properties contained therein. Why not? If stones could contain the oldest writing in the world or support the webbed feet of mythological swans, then couldn’t they have the power to induce speech?

Rosie focused on one of the small stones; in the dark of Peg’s room, it could have been the Blarney Stone, or at least a replica. It didn’t matter that nobody in Ireland had ever kissed the thing. It was a coincidence that the Blarney Stone had been the site of one of John Paul’s terrible Pope videos, where the Irish Pope puckered up alongside an elderly American tourist, who was induced to test his gift of the gab, shouting ‘Póg mo thóin!’ and beaming as he mispronounced everything, even the spaces between words. It didn’t matter that the stone on Peg’s windowsill might well have been purchased at Pottery Barn. Rosie had a mission to complete and so she plucked a stone from the mist of myth; it would have to do.

‘Did we really get christened in coats?’

This broke Peg.

‘No!’

‘I remember being hot in that coat.’

‘How could you remember? You weren’t even one.’

‘Babies have brains.’

‘Not ones that can store long-term memories.’

‘Well, not according to Western medicine—’

‘You all had your own robes. There’s no way you and Damien were christened in a coat.’

‘That’s what Dad told me.’

Peg sighed.

‘They didn’t have enough money for three christening robes, so John Paul got the nice one and Damien and I were shoved into some old white coat or a blanket, I can’t remember—’

‘My old robe, you wore my old robe—’

‘And then Father Shaughnessy screamed when he saw the two of us in the same coat, like a two-headed demon. We were shocked so we started to cry—’

‘All babies cry when they’re christened.’

‘And we were screaming and screaming until they took us away from the font and John Paul was christened and then we stopped like magic and the nuns started singing—’

‘It wasn’t The Sound of Music.’

‘The nuns burst into song, all sorts of impossible harmonies, that’s what I heard.’

Rosie followed scripture to the end.

‘Some of them couldn’t even sing. But they had beautiful voices that day, like angels.’

Peg stared at the ceiling, knowing what was coming.

‘It was a miracle.’

Here they were, at the edge of Rosie’s mission, the reason she had returned to New York, against her better judgement: the Unofficial Miracles of Pope John Paul III. Rosie stared at her imagined Blarney Stone; she could just make it out in the dark. Peg would take the bait, Rosie knew she would, letting the silence stretch, a task that years of sharing a bedroom had prepared her for.

‘That’s not what happened,’ Peg said eventually.

Rosie waited a moment.

‘What did happen, then?’

Peg sighed; it was too late to feign sleep. Part of her longed to, wishing she could kick Rosie and her sheet-hogging back into the living room. Another part of her liked this, though, the two of them in the same room, talking in the dark, they way they’d used to back in 7 Dunluce Crescent, Peg’s snores never fooling Rosie, even then.

Peg shifted around. She could just make out Rosie’s eyes in the dark. Here they were, at the edge of the Unofficial Miracles of John Paul Doyle. Peg had them all in her head.

Remember the Scarlet Communion Dress?

Remember the Blessed Shells of Erris?

Remember the Fish Fingers that Fed the Fifty?

Other historians might have picked a different miraculous origin (the bloody tea towel; the singing nuns at the christening) but Peg knew enough about alternative histories to select a miracle where she had a central role.

‘Do you remember The Chronicle of the Children of Lir?’



Series III:




Communion (#ua7f65e4a-e754-5b6c-abf8-3078013cdb95)


(1985–1991)



1




The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle (1985)


Rosie chewed on her colouring pencil and looked out the window at Clougheally’s blustery beach.

‘I think when I grow up I want to be a swan.’

Peg gave the Rosie! sigh she’d been practising for several years. Even though she was almost five, it was clear that the boundaries of the world weren’t certain for Rosie Doyle. Happily, Peg, nine years old and a fount of wisdom, was always there to clarify matters.

‘Humans can’t turn into swans in real life.’

‘I’ll be like the Children of Lir,’ Rosie said, adding extra feathers to her doodle, as if this might help her point.

‘That’s just a story,’ Peg explained.

‘When I grow up I’m going to be a fireman!’ John Paul shouted, not listening. ‘Or … or Imma going to be a Transformer! And-and you can be a Transformer too, Dam’en, one of the bad ones, but-but then Imma save you and we’ll fight Optimus Prime together, yeah yeah!’

Colouring on a rainy day was not John Paul’s strong suit, so he was already hopping about the kitchen to demonstrate his firefighting and robotic abilities.

‘And-and we’ll have a BIG hose and we’ll point it at the bad guys and then-then they’ll be DOOMED!’

Damien nodded, content to play whatever role John Paul’s narrative required, as long as he ended up a Good Boy when he grew up, his primary ambition.

‘I think I’ll be a swan. Like the Children of Lir,’ Rosie said, as if Peg hadn’t spoken.

‘You want to be stuck here for hundreds of years?’ Peg said, in a less understanding voice.

‘Maybe,’ Rosie said, finishing her picture. ‘Then I won’t have to be dead like Nanny and when I’m tired I’ll just flap flap flap up to the sky.’

Peg shot Aunty Mary an adults among adults look: Nanny Nelligan’s death was at the heart of Rosie’s nonsense. Nanny Nelligan’s wake had left quite an impression on them all, especially the sight of the withered old woman in the coffin. Nanny Nelligan had a great fear of being trapped underground, so she’d been cremated, a shock to the village, mutterings that you wouldn’t want to be trapped inside a small urn either. The urn sat by the rattling window, the breeze coming in through the gap as if it was trying to upturn the lid and release a spirit. Peg felt a shiver down her spine, then remembered that she was practically a grown-up.

‘You don’t have to be scared of dying, Rosie.’

‘I’m not. I just want to fly.’

‘Fly’ was the spell that roused John Paul: he’d been quiet for a full minute, possibly a record.

‘Imma gonna FLY like a PILOT!’ John Paul shouted, accelerating around the room and tugging at Damien’s jumper. ‘Dam’en, you be Chewie and I’ll-I’ll be HAN SOLO! I’m so fast you’ll never catch me!’

‘We haven’t finished the story,’ Peg said, as Damien threatened to stand up.

John Paul was so frustrated that he stopped moving.

‘But-but I want to go OUTSIDE! C’mon DAM’EN! ROSIE!’

‘Ciúnas!’

For the first time, Peg heard the schoolteacher in Aunty Mary’s voice.

‘Sit down and draw, would you? We have to stay inside while it’s raining.’

‘But-but it’s ALWAYS raining HERE.’

John Paul had a point, Clougheally no threat to the Costa del Sol, but Peg shot Aunty Mary a pious this is what I have to deal with look. Granny Doyle and her dad were in Ballina for the day, so the balance had shifted. There was nobody there to praise John Paul’s every step with the fervent belief that one day such legs might walk on the moon; Damien and Rosie were up for grabs. This was the dance that Peg and John Paul performed, daily. I am a leader, they said, devising games or schemes, waiting for their docile siblings to follow. Usually, John Paul won the battle, Damien and Rosie happy to follow him on some inane dash up and down Dunluce Crescent, leaving Peg with disappointment jigsawed in front of her. Today, Peg might have a chance.

‘You can be Ardán,’ Peg said to John Paul.

‘I don’t want to be a swan, I want to be a PILOT!’

‘You can pretend to be a pilot tomorrow. Today, we’re performing my book!’

‘Book’ was a grand title for the few pieces of paper that Peg had bound together but she couldn’t have been prouder of her achievement. There had been lots of drizzly days while Granny Doyle and Aunty Mary had been busy with the stream of guests and the cleaning of the dusty old house, leaving Peg with plenty of time to work on her magnum opus. The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle was its full title, chronicle a word that had leapt off the sides of one of the old books and danced inside Peg’s head. After a few patchy years, when she missed large chunks of school, Peg was back on track. She’d been selected for the accelerated reading programme, so she could read about tractors that were crimson rather than plain red, allowing her to pick up the books from Nanny Nelligan’s mahogany bookshelf with great authority. Most of them held little interest for her – a good deal were in Irish and Peg had no grá for Gaeilge – but Peg loved the old bookshelf, with its mottled grain and friendly clumps of dust. There would be space for The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle on it, pride of place if she had her way: stories were for babbies, but chronicles demanded respect.

‘This is STUPID!’ John Paul said, rejecting the squiggles that Peg had placed in front of him.

Peg gave him a look of infinite patience; she could have played a saint in a school play.

‘Damien and Rosie can help you to read if you want. It’s very simple.’

John Paul’s cheeks flushed.

‘I-I don’t want to READ.’

John Paul hadn’t the patience for Peg’s generous tutoring sessions. A tornado of a boy, he couldn’t sit still long enough for Peg’s patient lectures, copybooks best transformed into paper aeroplanes. Damien and Rosie were more promising pupils. Rosie had the alarming attitude that the alphabet was arbitrary, but she at least sat still and listened. Damien actually showed signs of progress, concentrating hard on the puzzle of letters in front of him, ever eager to please. And both of them loved when Peg read to them, lapping up the voices she put on and her embellishments. Peg felt she had greatly improved upon the Children of Lir’s story in her chronicle, adding several storms and adventures to the swan’s three hundred years around Erris, with the eldest, Fionnuala, reliably capable of rescuing her siblings from whatever peril they found themselves in. Savvy about her audience, Peg added a section where one swan befriended a crab (for Rosie loved all animals) and another where one of the swans found a nice, warm cave (for Damien loved being cosy) and she even threw in a battle with pirates and Vikings, history’s rigour compromised by the need to keep John Paul still. Even John Paul had gobbled up the tale the night before, the triplets squished into the one bed, eyes agog until Peg storied them towards sleep. However, listening to a bedtime tale was different from wasting valuable daylight hours reading, a position that John Paul continued to make clear.

‘I don’t wanna read, I don’t wanna read!’ John Paul recited, scrunching up his lines.

‘Stop messing!’ Peg shouted, her saint-like composure somewhat compromised as she tugged the paper from his hands.

‘How about you lot have a look for some cardboard in the back bedroom? I need some children who might be brave enough to fight any monsters in the boxes …’

Aunty Mary had John Paul at ‘brave’ and once he had signed on to the mission, it was only a matter of time before the other triplets bounded upstairs after him.

Initially furious, Peg was mollified when Aunty Mary returned and sat down at the table beside her. Alone time with Aunty Mary was precious for its rarity, like chocolate released from its tin after Lent.

‘This is looking very professional.’

Peg beamed, the adjective better than any gold star.

‘Aunty Mary?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did the Children of Lir make their Holy Communions before they turned into swans?’

Aunty Mary considered this.

‘I’d say not. The world they grew up in was very different.’

‘And then when they turned back into adults after nine hundred years, Saint Patrick gave them their Communion?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘But how were they allowed to take it if they hadn’t made their Communions?’

The rules regarding First Holy Communions were at the forefront of Peg’s brain as her own ceremony loomed. Peg’s patchy attendance at school meant that she had missed her Communion, which meant that she had to take it at a mortifying age when she had clearly already acquired reason. The problem was that reason did not help Peg solve the puzzle of what Communion might taste like. Somewhere between her friends’ helpful ‘It’s like dry paper, disgusting!’ and Granny Doyle’s ‘Like the pure love of our divine Lord Jesus Christ, now would you get away from under my feet’, lived various theological problems that Peg had no idea how to resolve. Peg seized her moment with Aunty Mary to push the matter further. What did baby Jesus’ body taste like? How did he have so much body to eat that churches never ran out? If Jesus was made of bread how had he ever been killed? Peg presented these problems very seriously, so Aunty Mary, who always treated Peg as an intellectual equal, suppressed a smile and asked ‘Do you know what a metaphor is?’

Peg turned her nod into a shake of the head, admitting ignorance as the price of knowledge.

‘Sometimes the truth of stories isn’t necessarily in the facts,’ Aunty Mary said, searching for inspiration. ‘We might think of the world starting with Adam and Eve eating an apple, because a story is easier to understand than science. Or we might say we are eating the body of Christ, but really it’s a special loaf of bread that’s been blessed. The metaphor helps us understand an important truth: that we should share with one another.’

Peg struggled with metaphor but nodded gamely nonetheless.

‘So is the story not really true?’

Aunty Mary checked for the bustle of Granny Doyle’s coat through the door.

‘I wouldn’t say that the story is not true,’ she said slowly. ‘But sometimes you have to be careful about what parts of stories you believe. You have to think about who is telling them and why they would want you to believe them.’

A door edged open in Peg’s brain.

‘Are the swans in this story a metaphor too?’

Aunty Mary smiled and tilted her head to the side, chewing on the thought.

‘Hmmm … you could say they represented the transition between a pagan and a Christian era and also the shift between childhood and adulthood and yes, it’s a good question …’

Peg focused on Aunty Mary’s mutterings intently, keen to display that she was not some child who believed in fairy tales; no, Peg Doyle poked at stories until they revealed their secrets. In fact, she’d just had a brainwave regarding the ending of The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle, an idea she kept folded up for herself, the better to be unveiled that evening.

*

The performance of The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle was an exclusive event. Chairs were set up for Granny Doyle, Aunty Mary, and Danny Doyle. Nanny Nelligan remained in her urn by the window, an eerie wind keeping her company. The triplets sported cardboard wings. Peg held her little book proudly, one eye on the bookshelf, where she had already cleared a space. Aunty Mary even arranged some popcorn and mood lighting, ignoring Granny Doyle’s cries of ‘what is all this cod-acting about?’; this was to be a special occasion.

It started well enough. Peg’s speaking voice shook the spiders from the ceiling. Aunty Mary smiled at Peg’s liberal use of the house’s dictionary, which helped hyperbolize the prologue, so that the children’s stepmother was vicious and their time in exile was horrendous. Peg had the triplets standing on a line of chairs in an arrangement as adorable as any Von Trapp chorus. Damien read his sentence perfectly (‘My Name is Fiachra’) and whispered Rosie’s sentence into her ear. The problem was, predictably, John Paul. All he had to do was say ‘My name is Ardán’ and flap his cardboard wings. He didn’t even have to read the sentence: both Damien and Rosie were whispering it to him. His mouth stayed shut, his eyes fixed on the swirl of symbols in front of him. Panic opened a hole in his chest. Red rushed to his cheeks. The blobs of ink remained resolutely unhelpful, YOU’RE STUPID spelt out in their taunting squiggle.

‘And one of the swans wasn’t good at reading and he was called Ardán,’ Peg said smoothly, eager to rush the story towards her exciting ending.

She flipped the page, ready to plunge into the narrative proper. She had learnt her lesson: never work with children was a maxim she was happy to adopt as an honorary adult. John Paul, however, had other plans.

‘My name is HAN SOLO SWAN and I can FLY!’

He didn’t look at Peg, only at his audience. Out went his wings, up went his feet and he was off, in his element, paper tossed to the ground as he whirled into the air in a death-defying leap. He was aiming for the windowsill, an impossible target to reach. Yet he did, his fingers at least, clinging to triumph, as the rest of his body clunked to the ground, his arms flailing and following, sweeping across the windowsill and crashing into—

Peg saw it happen: John Paul bashing into the urn on the windowsill, the urn tumbling over, the remains of Nanny Nelligan falling through the gap into the winds. Nothing she could do to stop it: her feet not fast enough, arms not long enough, brain not sharp enough. Disaster! Nanny Nelligan gone out the window, lost into the gulp of the wind.

Except that wasn’t what happened. The urn, mid-wobble, decided to fall the other way, onto John Paul, who caught it before the lid came off, and held it in the air like a trophy.

It was Granny Doyle who broke the silence.

‘A miracle!’

Gravity and stupidity were the forces at work, Peg knew, but Granny Doyle’s gall stole the voice from her: how could John Paul be praised for averting a catastrophe he created? Lavishly, that was how.

‘My little angel!’

Granny Doyle swooped over and picked up her beaming hero, who had just completed his First Unofficial Miracle: The Salvation of Nanny Nelligan’s Ashes. Jesus might have brought the dead to life but John Paul Doyle made sure the dead stayed in place. Granny Doyle was clear where the blame lay.

‘I don’t know what you’re thinking, keeping Mammy by the window.’

Aunty Mary didn’t stop her sister as the urn was whisked off to a safer location.

‘Thanks be to God John Paul has some wits about him,’ Granny Doyle continued. ‘Well, that’s enough theatrics for one evening! I don’t know what nonsense you’ve got them up to today but I’ve had a long one and it’s bedtime!’

‘Bedtime’ was not a negotiable noun for Granny Doyle; Peg knew resistance was futile. John Paul bounded upstairs, not a bother on him. Rosie drifted over to show their dad her swan drawings. Damien stood smiling, relieved that he had said his sentence correctly: the house might have tumbled around them and he’d still have been content.

‘Not to worry,’ Aunty Mary said, proof that she was an ordinary adult after all, well able to disappoint when she wanted to.

Peg threw her book to the ground and stomped up the stairs. She hadn’t even got close to her brilliant ending, where the swans decided not to turn back into sad withered humans and get Communion from St Patrick but stayed flapping about the bay, their wings light and lovely and probably metaphorical, Peg reckoned. Peg launched herself onto her bed. She hadn’t made her Communion yet so filling a pillow with bitter tears wasn’t a sin, an opportunity that Peg was ready to make the most of.

*

Some consolation came the next morning. Aunty Mary had given The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle pride of place on the mahogany bookshelf. Peg couldn’t help but gasp at how good it looked beside all the proper books. Then she remembered she was angry and tried to twist her face into a frown.

‘We’ll have to do another reading.’

This wasn’t good enough.

‘I had a look through last night: excellent work! I love what you did with the end. You’re a real chronicler, aren’t you?’

This was better.

‘And I wanted to ask you something. Do you think you might have space in your room for the bookshelf? I haven’t found a job or an apartment in Dublin yet, but I’m not sure if I’ll have space for everything from this house and … well, it’d be a terrible shame to get rid of this bookshelf, wouldn’t it?’

And this was enough for an ear-to-ear grin.

‘You’re moving to Dublin?’

Aunty Mary smiled, delighted that her move was the part that gave Peg the most pleasure.

‘Well, I’m not sure yet, but I’ve been here with Mammy for a while and –’ a sigh as she looked around the dusty old house: it had been a long year – ‘well, there’s not much for me here and instead of going back to Galway, well, I was thinking about moving back to Dublin. What do you think?’

‘Move to Dublin!’ Peg said immediately, the night’s disappointments forgotten, because she was to have a bookshelf and her book displayed and, most importantly, an ally.

Aunty Mary smiled, the future appearing in front of her brick by brick.

‘Well, maybe I will so!’

2




Blarney Stone (2007)


‘Did Aunty Mary move to Dublin?’ Rosie asked, shifting in the bed.

Peg stared at the ceiling: she was almost tired enough to drift into sleep.

‘No.’

Rosie didn’t need to ask ‘why?’ or ‘what happened?’; now that the door to the past had been prised open, out stories could creep, the magical stone obliging. Besides, even if the details were blurry – in her defence, she had only been four – she had a sense of who was to blame. Aunty Mary was a dangerous topic – they hadn’t mentioned her letter – but Rosie knew what she was doing.

‘Did you know about Aunty Mary then?’

The truth lived somewhere between yes and no. Hard to believe that Aunty Mary had been so important to Peg’s development – her fairy godmother! – yet at the time, Peg had never considered Aunty Mary’s life outside of her own. Peg made a noncommittal sound, something she hoped bore a resemblance to a yawn, not that that would be any use: Rosie showed no signs of ever needing sleep. She could stay up for hours when they were younger, demanding more and more stories from Peg, who obliged usually, even when there were slim chances of happy endings.

3




Condom (1971–1985)


(1971)

Could something so small cause so much fuss?

Mary Nelligan looked down at the condoms in her handbag and suppressed a giggle; it was hard to imagine the men on the train slipping on something so like a balloon. Forty-one and she was as bad as the children in her class! Mary gathered her composure. This was a serious matter. All the meetings in Bewley’s and the dinners in Mrs Gaj’s restaurant on Baggot Street led to this direct action, a kind so direct that Mary wondered if she might explode with the tension. They – the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement – had decided to protest against the ban on contraception by smuggling in condoms from Belfast, some of which sat innocently in Mary’s bag as the train jostled along.

Were the other women as nervous? If they had any nerves they were hiding them well, chatting to each other or reading the newspaper. Mary looked out at the dreary towns passing by. She felt as if she had a bomb in her handbag. What if the customs guards arrested them on the train and carted them off to jail before they’d made their point? Mary’s shoulders tensed in imagined resistance; she was prepared to fight beside these women, most of whom were younger than her, but had already figured out that the only real way to change the world was to grab it by the scruff of its neck. She might have died for them if it came to it. A foolish thought, absurd in its intensity, yet that was what Mary felt, the train hurtling towards Dublin, her heart hammering along with it, condoms jostling on her lap.




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