Future Popes of Ireland. Darragh Martin
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from Sleeping Beauty. Mrs McGinty was the tall, stern one and she mostly ignored Peg, which was far from the worst thing an adult could do. The McGintys had never had children and with her husband long gone, Mrs McGinty’s life revolved around the Legion of Mary, the youth branch of which she chaired with zeal. Mrs McGinty stood poker-still in the porch, eager to get going, the boot of her car packed the night before.
Mrs Nugent was her opposite in almost every way. A tiny woman, full to the brim with mischief and gossip, Mrs Nugent had enough energy to power the road through a blackout. Hearing that Peg was joining them, Mrs Nugent unleashed a stream of chat – isn’t that brilliant, pet? and won’t we have a great adventure, love? – gabbling onwards as if she’d never met a silence she couldn’t fill. Worse, she’d decided to bring one of her many grandchildren along for the trip, some ball of fury and flying limbs whose name Peg declined to remember, but who might as well have been called Stop That! for the number of times Mrs Nugent directed the sentence towards her.
Mrs Fay was the only one of Granny Doyle’s neighbours who had the temperament of a Disney fairy. A large woman with a kind face and impeccably coiffed white hair, Mrs Fay’s shoulders could easily have accommodated wings. Mrs Fay kept a basket of proper chocolate bars by her door for Halloween, not cheap penny sweets like Mrs Nugent or hard nuts and apples like Mrs McGinty. All sorts of other delights awaited beyond the threshold of 1 Dunluce Crescent, Peg imagined: freshly baked biscuits, shelves filled with books, curtains with tassels she could spend an afternoon admiring. Mrs Fay still had a Mr around, so she wouldn’t be joining them – a shame, because Mrs Fay was the only one of them who had noticed her new shoes and Peg was sure she’d stash decent treats in her handbag.
‘He’s left Drogheda,’ Granny Doyle shouted from the kitchen, information that seemed to add urgency to her clattering, even though the Youth Mass they were planning to catch in Galway wasn’t until the next morning.
‘He’ll be lunching with the priests in Clonmacnoise next,’ Mrs McGinty said.
‘Isn’t it a crying shame that Father Shaughnessy gets to meet him,’ Mrs Nugent fumed. ‘And him a slave to the drink.’
Mrs McGinty tutted, a sophisticated sound that conveyed both that she would never criticize the clergy so openly and that Father Shaughnessy was not the sort who should be lunching with the Pope.
‘Oh dear!’ Mrs Fay said.
Long ago, Mrs Fay had decided that most events could be met with an oh dear! or a lovely! and thus she was always ready to temper the world’s delights or iniquities.
Meanwhile, Mrs Nugent had found a new topic to animate her.
‘Did I tell you that Anita’s Darren is going to be one of the altar boys at the Mass tomorrow?’
‘So you said,’ Mrs McGinty said in a thin tone.
‘Lovely!’ Mrs Fay offered.
Darren Nugent’s proximity to a pope was enough to summon Granny Doyle from the kitchen. Before her brilliant holy water idea, she’d been tired of Dunluce Crescent’s many connections to the Pope. Mrs McGinty had a fourth cousin who was concelebrating the Mass in Knock. Not only was Mrs Brennan’s brother-in-law due to sing at the choir in Galway, but didn’t he get his big break at her Fiona’s christening, so she was basically responsible for his career. Even pagan Mrs O’Shea who could only be glimpsed at the church at Christmas, Easter at a pinch, had a shafter of a son who had helped clean the Popemobile. Now Granny Doyle could bear it all with fortitude, convinced that no Darren would ever develop a posterior suitable for a papal chair.
‘I can get you all Darren’s autograph tomorrow if you want,’ Mrs Nugent offered.
‘He’ll have to learn how to write first,’ Mrs McGinty tutted.
Granny Doyle was more magnanimous.
‘That would be an honour,’ she said, locking the inside door and scooping Peg up off her chair. ‘And you’ll have to get me yours as well: didn’t you say that the Pope winked at you?’
This was a well-placed grenade, Mrs McGinty’s fury at the blasphemy involved in a winking Pope strong enough to get them all out of the porch before it shattered. ‘He did, looked at me right in the eye and winked,’ Mrs Nugent insisted, chortling all the way down the footpath, displeasure the lubricant that kept them all together because Mrs McGinty lived to judge and Mrs Nugent lived to incite judgement. Granny Doyle beamed, loving the chat and her neighbours and her street and her granddaughter and even Stop That!, who at least had the wisdom to raid Mrs Donnelly’s rockery when she was after missiles to launch at passing traffic.
Peg clambered into the back of Mrs McGinty’s battered Fiat, beside Stop That!, who had abandoned her rocks to investigate the weaponry potential of seat belts. Mrs Nugent shuffled in beside them, stop that! and are you all right, pet? and it was not a bit of dirt in his eye! launched between the last few precious puffs of a cigarette. Peg wriggled away from Stop That’s seat-belt attack to look out the back window. Mr Fay had joined his wife on the side of the road, the better to properly see off their car. Both Fays thought that attending the Pope’s Youth Mass would be lovely, so there was slim chance they’d rush forward to rescue Peg. They stood there, smiling and waving, on the side of the quiet street in the afternoon sun. Peg gazed at the porch behind them, enticingly empty, the perfect place to spend the day, if Mrs McGinty hadn’t pressed her shoe against the accelerator.
Dunluce Crescent was only a scrap of a street, so by the time Peg’s head bobbed up again, they had already turned the corner and the kind smiles and waves of the Fays had disappeared from view, replaced with rows of other red-brick houses, indifferent to the motion of their car, waiting instead for fresh coats of paint and attic conversions and tarmac paving over gardens, the fortunes of the Doyles nothing to them.
4
Roll of Film (1979)
The next morning, something of a holiday spirit remained. They slept in, skipped the Sunday Mass, left the sheets in a tangle around their limbs. Danny Doyle still had some film left in the camera from the day before, so of course he clicked.
‘You dirty pervert,’ she called.
He smiled and wound the film again.
‘You’ll never be able to develop this.’
She fixed her hair, posing now, legs twined around each other in the air, no hand outstretched. Lying naked on their bed. Something between a smile and a smirk. It was the last shot. The film started to rewind as he pressed down, making him worry that it might not come out.
5
Plastic Spade (1979)
Peg woke up to the Pope’s nose brushing her forehead.
‘Isn’t this brilliant? They were selling them two for a pound at Guineys.’
Mrs Nugent continued to wave the commemorative tea towel in her face while Mrs McGinty’s expression conveyed the blasphemy involved in drying dishes with the Pope’s face.
‘You’re not going to use that, are you?’
‘Of course not,’ Mrs Nugent said.
Granny Doyle snorted to show her displeasure with the ornamental display of a potentially useful object. Mrs Nugent ignored the pair of them.
‘I’m going to get it autographed!’
‘By your Darren?’ Mrs McGinty asked slyly.
‘By her winking boyfriend,’ Granny Doyle said.
The titters that followed were too much for Mrs McGinty, who rounded on the slumbering Peg and Stop That!
‘We’ll never get anywhere if this lot don’t get a move on,’ she said.
Peg