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.
‘Well, maybe I will so!’
2
Blarney Stone (2007)
‘Did Aunty Mary move to Dublin?’ Rosie asked, shifting in the bed.
Peg stared at the ceiling: she was almost tired enough to drift into sleep.
‘No.’
Rosie didn’t need to ask ‘why?’ or ‘what happened?’; now that the door to the past had been prised open, out stories could creep, the magical stone obliging. Besides, even if the details were blurry – in her defence, she had only been four – she had a sense of who was to blame. Aunty Mary was a dangerous topic – they hadn’t mentioned her letter – but Rosie knew what she was doing.
‘Did you know about Aunty Mary then?’
The
