Future Popes of Ireland

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.