Future Popes of Ireland

by Darragh Martin

  Rosie chanced a glance; Peg was looking at her.

  ‘It was easy. I mean, comparatively. It hurt a lot that night, like a really bad period, but I didn’t have too much bleeding. And he was with her, so I was alone, which wasn’t brilliant, but I was okay, I really was, and I thought how mad it was, how glad I was to have it happen in a strange country where I could barely speak the language because …’

  Here was the catch. Rosie thought she must have an extra chamber in her lungs, to house the pauses before she talked to Peg about the past.

  ‘… And I thought of what it would have been like, if I’d been back home and had to figure out a way to get to England, what it would have been like if I’d been younger …’

  Rosie looked across; Peg’s eyes were still there.

  ‘Peg …’

  Peg couldn’t look away now; she could just make out Rosie’s tears in the dark.

  ‘It’s okay …’

  Peg started to cry too.

  ‘I’m sorry about everything that happened …’

  ‘You don’t have anything to be sorry about.’

  Peg allowed her hand to touch Rosie’s shoulder, the smallest of gestures, but it was enough to pull Rosie over, sobbing into her skin, so that one arm of Peg’s had to wrap around Rosie’s shoulder, and the other wiped tears from their eyes, as Rosie lay on Peg’s chest, so that they would sleep in each other’s arms that night, like sisters.

  Later, when Rosie wasn’t sure if Peg was asleep, she said:

  ‘It makes me so angry.’

  Peg stared at the ceiling and then she said:

  ‘Me too. I get angry too.’

  They looked at the ceiling together.

  Later, when Peg wasn’t sure if Rosie was asleep, she said:

  ‘You know what Catherine is the patron saint of?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t know when I picked it for my Confirmation name, I did that because …’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But then I came across it a few years ago. It turned out that there’s a Catherine who is the patron saint of librarians, which seemed apt, but then it turns out that there are lots of St Catherines …’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘And there’s one Catherine of Sweden who’s the patron saint of protection against abortion.’

  They thought about this until one of them laughed and then the other did too.

  ‘Not very fucking good, is she?’ Rosie said and when Peg laughed she did too, the sheet rising and falling in time with the howls.

  Later, when Peg wasn’t sure if Rosie was asleep, she said:

  ‘You know, I love you Rosie, you know that.’

  Later, when Rosie was sure Peg was asleep, she twisted her head to look at Peg, so she’d remember.

  Series V:

  The Revolutions of Rosie Doyle

  (1992–2007)

  1

  Tattoo Gun (2007)

  ‘If you’re going to buy the juice with the pulp, at least be sure to rinse the glass properly.’

  Could such a sentence be possible? Not after they had cried and held each other. An alternative alphabet had been found, that night; it was impossible that Peg could waste words on something so trivial.

  There Peg was, though, holding up a glass to the morning light, the kitchen too small for the three of them now that Dev was back.

  Dev took the fall.

  ‘My bad! I’ll lick every piece of pulp next time.’

  The vigour of Peg’s drying indicated that this was not a laughing matter.

  ‘Actually, I think that was me,’ Rosie hazarded. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Peg said swiftly.

  But …

  ‘I think it’s good to rinse things after you wash; the coffee I had the other morning was very sudsy.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rosie said.

  ‘The American way,’ Dev said with a smile. ‘Use as much water as possible!’

  ‘Just a small thing,’ Peg said, attempting a smile.

  ‘Sure.’

  Oh, but nothing was small with Peg! Every action reverberated with feelings, the opening of the cupboard or the careful examination of a bowl alive with deeper meaning. And where to put the feelings of Peg Doyle? Rosie wished bodies had a more sophisticated emotional infrastructure. Food and fluids came in, got processed, and out they went again. Air too, there was some order to that: oxygen in; carbon dioxide out. But what sort of internal plumbing was there for feelings? What use were the oesophagus or the kidneys when it came to digesting emotions? Rosie absorbed people’s stories and emotions, but then there was no method to expel them and she ended up bloated with the problems of others. She needed some sort of chimney on her head to let feelings out but she only had her hair, which, Peg had reminded her, she should remember to remove from the shower-drain.

  Was Rosie any better, though? They had talked, yes, but she’d only completed the first part of her mission: confront the past. This had been done, more or less, a little too successfully (Rosie squirmed at what hadn’t been said) and now the second step loomed: address the present; talk about Aunty Mary’s letter. How, though? They had only just begun to accept who they were as children; how could they see each other as adults?

  ‘Did you manage to make the Obama equation for your students?’

  It was easier to talk to Dev, who revealed all his feelings on his face; he didn’t ask anybody else to store them.

  ‘It’s not really an equation, more exploring probability and statistics in relation to the election.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ordinarily, maths bored Rosie to tears but Dev got so excited talking about it that it was hard not to be charmed.

  ‘I should get them to take the latest funding figures into account,’ Dev said, remembering the New York Times article he’d just glanced at. ‘Obama’s catching up! And so I guess I’ll get them to take the current amount of funding into account, and the number of months left before the primaries, and maybe the number of counties they’ve visited in Iowa – that’s always key – and then …’

  Rosie didn’t follow the maths and she didn’t exactly see its relevance to probability theory, but she nodded; Dev was so passionate, it was difficult not to. Obama was sure to win the nomination and his students were certain to ace statistics and everything was possible, including, perhaps, plotting the outcome of the Irish election.

  This aroused Peg’s interest.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘The odds of change happening are nil.’

  ‘It is a more complex system,’ Dev said, Wikipedia already open. ‘I wouldn’t say Fianna Fáil – is that the name? – have it in the bag. They’re like the Irish Republican party, right?’

  Rosie said ‘more or less’ as Peg said ‘no’.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Rosie said. ‘Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are the two major parties and they’re both centre-right, more or less, and basically indistinguishable, except for their opinions about the civil war.’

  Rosie saw Peg flinch at her more or less, the type of imprecise talk that Peg loathed, but this only gave Rosie more courage; she was the one living in Ireland, wasn’t she?

  ‘But yeah, Fianna Fáil have been in power for ten years and they’re pretty evil, but this is our chance to kick them out.’

  ‘Yes, Ireland can!’ Dev said.

  ‘Exactly!’ Rosie said, forgetting her reservations about Obama and the whole process of electoral politics, and clinging instead to the electricity of agreement, the possibility that they were on revolution’s cusp and the world really might be changing for the better.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peg said, with a clang of the cupboard. ‘They’re all the same.’

  Rosie wondered if Peg was following the Irish news. Another anonymous girl had made the headlines, Miss D, a seventeen-year-old in state care who’d been stopped by the health services when she wanted to travel to England for an abortion. The High Court had let her go, eventually, but
not before the case had been dragged through the papers, every detail examined. Fifteen years and nothing had changed, not really, an alphabet of women (Misses A, B, C, X) waiting for the men in power to figure out how to spell ‘justice’. Peg had to have heard the news, but in the light of day, Rosie wasn’t sure how they could talk about it.

  ‘The Greens have a chance of getting into a coalition,’ Rosie said. ‘That would be something different.’

  A cop-out of a sentence, but one that steered her closer to Aunty Mary’s letter.

  Peg shrugged, absorbed in the turmeric stains on a spatula.

  ‘They have six seats and an outside chance of ten,’ Dev said, finding a blog to consult. ‘Five to one odds of getting into a coalition. Says they might stop warplanes fuelling up in Ireland. I’d love to see Bush’s face if that happened!’

  ‘No Irish government will turn away warplanes,’ Peg said, certain. ‘There’s an equation for neutrality and American dollars are always greater than principles. And there wouldn’t be any point in turning planes away from Shannon; they’d only find somewhere else to fuel.’

  Another cupboard was shut with finality: case closed.

  Oh, but if only Rosie could open the doors in Peg’s mind, because another world was possible – it had to be! – and Rosie had friends who had locked on to runways in Shannon to stop the planes and Rosie and Dev had both marched in different cities holding cardboard signs against the war, along with millions of others, while Peg fiddled with folders in a library. It was especially frustrating, because Peg had once taken Rosie to see Mary Robinson and brought her to quiz Aunty Mary about Women’s Lib and this was the sister Rosie longed to find, a comrade against a cruel world.

  ‘What does that say?’

  Dev leant forward to examine Rosie’s tattoo. It was too hot for anything other than a tank top so the words were exposed.

  Rosie tensed. This was something, a key that Peg might use to unlock Rosie Doyle, the adult waiting behind the door.

  ‘Fight the real enemy,’ Rosie said slowly, waiting for a reaction from Peg, whose back remained immobile, no sense that the words meant anything at all.

  ‘Huh!’ Dev said. ‘When did you get that?’

  ‘Goth phase.’

  ‘No way! Did you have the Elvira hair and everything?’

  ‘You got it. Henna all over the bathtub.’

  Nothing from Peg, not a twitch of curiosity; if she turned, she’d have the key.

  ‘You didn’t want a Chinese character?’

  Rosie stared at Peg’s back.

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  2

  Picture of the Pope, Ripped (1992)

  Years before she got the words tattooed on her arm, Rosie clutched them to her heart.

  Sinéad O’Connor seemed to speak directly to Rosie Doyle, staring through the camera as she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Catching a glimpse of it on the news before Granny Doyle shooed her out of the room, Rosie knew the words were for her, one rebel to another.

  Fight the real enemy, Rosie wrote in Tipp-Ex across her school-books, the nuns oblivious.

  Fight the real enemy, Rosie wrote in marker on the faded yellow walls of the box room, her new home at 7 Dunluce Crescent.

  Fight the real enemy, Rosie doodled in pen at the bottom of the petition; it was doubtful that the government would listen to the message, or the petition, but she had to try.

  ‘Here we go,’ Aunty Mary said, placing two cups of coffee onto the table.

  ‘Thanks,’ Rosie said, although she had asked for tea.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Aunty Mary said, ignoring the extra chair at the table, where only a year ago Peg had sat and quizzed her about Mary Robinson.

  ‘Is that your petition?’ she asked, peering at the page that Rosie was doodling across.

  ‘Yep.’

  Schoolchildren didn’t have a vote in the upcoming abortion referendum but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have a voice.

  ‘You might want to clean it up a little,’ Aunty Mary said, something of the schoolteacher in her voice.

  She smiled.

  ‘You’ll learn that it’s vital to present as respectable a case as possible. You don’t want to give the government any ammunition to dismiss your point.’

  Rosie wasn’t sure she agreed, but she took out the Tipp-Ex from her bag.

  ‘It’s very impressive though,’ Aunty Mary said, rallying.

  ‘Thanks.’

  It was amazing the difference that starting secondary school made. Some girls still called Rosie weirdo, of course. Slut too, that hung in the air, because word of why Peg had gone to England had spread across the yard and Rosie was as bad, so the whispers went. Rosie didn’t give a shit. She had found an older crew of Nirvana fans, allies who would mosh in pits and sign indignant petitions, the organization of which might be enough to get Rosie expelled, not that she gave a shit about that either.

  Who could care about school when the world was opening up? Rosie couldn’t feel any remorse, not when the times demanded action, not when the protest had been so … fun was the word that entered Rosie’s head, although it seemed inappropriate. The energy on O’Connell Street, though, Rosie had never felt anything like it! Women were furious at the government, but there was something exhilarating about the afternoon, the sense that Rosie had found kindred spirits, adults who admitted that the world was broken from multiple angles.

  ‘Are protests always this … big?’ Rosie asked, fun something she shouldn’t be thinking about while the chair beside her remained empty.

  ‘I wish!’ Aunty Mary said. ‘Plenty I’ve been to where there were almost as many guards. But, on we go.’

  Aunty Mary fished in her handbag.

  ‘I found these pamphlets from the IWLM when I was rooting through stuff at home, I thought you might be interested in them, for a project or something …’

  ‘Thanks,’ Rosie said, taking the faded leaflets, though they seemed more of a gift for Peg, who would have pored over any materials from the early days of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.

  Rosie noticed Aunty Mary’s eyes on her and felt a familiar pressure to fill the shoes of the departed. She was named after a dead woman who she was the spit of, apparently, so she recognized the gaze and felt her cheeks burn with the knowledge that she could never have just the right questions to ask about feminist history or fill the chair that Aunty Mary wanted her to.

  When Aunty Mary spoke, it wasn’t to admonish her, though, but to ask ‘And how are things at home?’

  What to say? Granny Doyle acted as if nothing had happened, a spell cast at her cauldron, probably, for the walls of 7 Dunluce Crescent would crumble before anybody dared to say ‘Peg’. Not that Rosie was talking to anybody in the house. As far as she was concerned, her brothers were equally to blame for Peg’s disappearance; the elastic band had snapped, leaving her all alone in a sad box room where nobody even noticed her graffiti.

  ‘Okay,’ Rosie said.

  Aunty Mary stared at her coffee, though it wouldn’t speak for her.

  ‘No news?’ she asked, eventually.

  Rosie stared at the coffee she wished were tea.

  ‘No.’

  Aunty Mary inhaled sharply, ageing with the word.

  (It passed, like a wind across the room, the chance to talk about Peg, the opportunity to say ‘do you think she’s okay?’ and ‘how can we find her?’ and ‘I miss her.’)

  *

  ‘And how’s school?’

  The kind of sentence Aunty Mary never would have asked Peg.

  ‘Fine,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Good.’

  Peg might have known a way to fill the silence but Rosie hadn’t the words. She focused on her petition instead, carefully Tipp-Exing across her doodles, thinking privately that she might add another Fight the real enemy before she posted it, even if it was written in invisible ink.

  3

  Ordnance Survey Map (1993)r />
  New possibilities continued to push against Rosie’s brain. She hadn’t found anything of use in Peg’s books in the shed (old Greek things without a single picture) but revelation came, surprisingly, in geography class.

  ‘Sister, why does the Church have a special symbol?’

  Sister Margaret adopted her briskest tone.

  ‘Churches have great cultural and social significance and are often placed at the heart of a settlement. Now, perhaps we can move on to questions that are likely to appear on your Junior Certificate …’

  Rosie continued to examine her geography book, crosses puncturing the contours of the ordnance map. She could feel her brain stretching towards a new thought: maps were lies. If she asked a rabbit or a seagull to draw a map, they wouldn’t put a special symbol for a church. And when she thought about it, half of the words on the map were about humans owning space, like dogs pissing their territorial boundaries with an alphabet instead of urine. Cill Easra, St Esra’s Church. Rath Eanaigh, Enda’s fort. Half of the names on the map in front of her began with cill or rath, churches or forts. Or they did for the moment, Rosie’s bottle of Tipp-Ex out, a small smile crossing her face.

  4

  Moonstone (1994)

  Other names bristled with pagan mischief, holding histories before forts and churches (Erris would not be Cilled by Catholicism!) including Clougheally’s name itself, the Stone of the Swans.

  The Children of Lir’s boulder became Rosie’s favourite space in Clougheally. Aunty Mary had something of Peg’s whirr about her – her brain was always moving towards the next task to tackle or book to read – so Rosie liked to slip away and climb up the cliff. Despite Aunty Mary’s protestations, she did do things there occasionally, from sketches to song-writing to spliffs. Mostly, though, the boulder was a place to be away from the clutter of the world, Rosie’s birthstone placed on top of the rock, as the stones shared energies. The birthstone she’d bought in Temple Bar was a ‘sodium potassium compound, not actually from the moon’, Damien helpfully informed her, but Rosie didn’t care; the moon understood.