Читать книгу Future Popes of Ireland - Darragh Martin - Страница 28

‘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?’