Future Popes of Ireland

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

(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.’