Future Popes of Ireland

‘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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