Future Popes of Ireland

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.