Future Popes of Ireland

‘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: