‘What the fuck are you staring at?’
I don’t know how she took that, seeing as she had a Darth Vadar helmet on. She stared at me a little longer and I waited for her to tell me that I was Luke and she was my father.
‘Well, now,’ she said brightly, as if snapping out of a trance, ‘I knew I had a little visitor.’ She took her entire head attire off, revealing herself to be far older than I expected. She must have been in her seventies.
She came towards me and I half expected her to jump from one foot to the other as though there was no gravity. She was wrinkled, very wrinkled, her skin falling downward as though time had melted her. Her blue eyes sparkled like the Aegean Sea, reminding me of a day out on Dad’s yacht where when you looked down, the sea was so clear you could see the sand and hundreds of multicoloured fish beneath. But there was nothing beneath her eyes, so translucent they practically reflected back all of the light. Then she took off her gauntlets and held her hands out.
‘I’m Sister Ignatius,’ she smiled, not shaking my hand, but holding it in both of hers. Despite the hot day and the heavy gloves, they were as smooth and as cool as marble.
‘You’re a nun,’ I blurted out.
‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘I am a nun. I was there when it happened.’
It was my turn to smile, and I laughed, everything making sense then. The cabinet of honey jars, the dozens of boxes
around the walled garden, the ridiculous spacesuit on an old woman.
‘You know my aunt.’
‘Ah.’
I didn’t know quite how to take that response. She didn’t register surprise but nor did she question me. She was still holding my hand. I didn’t want to move my hand, seeing as she was a nun, but it was freaking me out. I kept talking.
‘My aunt is Rosaleen, and my uncle is Arthur. He’s the groundskeeper here. They live in the gatehouse. We’re staying with them for…a little while.’
‘We?’
‘Me and my mum.’
‘Oh.’ Her eyebrows lifted so high I thought they were caterpillars about to become butterflies and flutter away.
‘Didn’t Rosaleen tell you?’ I was a little insulted, though quite thankful for Rosaleen’s respect for our privacy. At least the whole one-horse town with no horse wouldn’t be talking about the new folk.
‘No,’ she replied. And then without a smile and with an air of finality she repeated, ‘No.’
She seemed a little cross and so I jumped in to defend Rosaleen and save whatever friendship they did or didn’t have. ‘I’m sure she was just protecting our privacy, giving us a little time to deal with…it…before she told people.’
‘Deal with…’
‘The move here,’ I said slowly. Was it bad to lie to a nun? Well I wasn’t exactly lying…I kind of panicked then. I felt my body heat up and go clammy. Sister Ignatius was saying something, her mouth was opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear a word of it. I just kept thinking about lying to her and of those Ten Commandments and hell and everything, but not just that, I thought about how nice it would be to say
the words aloud to her. She was a nun, I could probably trust her.
‘My dad died,’ I blurted out quickly interrupting whatever nice thing she’d been saying. I heard the terrible tremble in my voice as I said that sentence and then all of a sudden, from absolutely nowhere, just as it had happened with Cabáiste, tears were gushing down my cheeks.
‘Oh, child,’ she said, immediately opening her arms and embracing me. The book separated us as I still clung to it, but even though she was a total stranger, she was a nun, and I rested my head on her shoulder and didn’t hold back, making snotty and throaty noises and all, while she rocked me a little and rubbed my back. I was in the middle of a really embarrassing wail of, ‘Why did he do it?
Whyyyyy
…?’ when a bee flew directly into my face and bounced off my lip. I screamed and pushed myself out of Sister Ignatius’ arms.
‘Bee!’ I shrieked, hopping about and trying to dodge it as it followed me. ‘Oh my God, get it off me.’
She watched me, her eyes lighting up.
‘Oh my God, Sister, please, get it off me. Shoo, shoo!’ I waved my arms around. ‘They must listen to you. They’re your bloody bees.’
Sister Ignatius pointed her finger and shouted in a deep voice, ‘Sebastian, no!’
I stopped jerking around to stare at her, my tears gone now. ‘You are not serious. You do not name your bees.’
‘Ah, there’s Jemima on the rose, and Benjamin on the geranium,’ she said perkily, eyes bright.
‘No way,’ I said, wiping my face, embarrassed by my breakdown. ‘I thought
I
had mental problems.’
‘Of course I’m not serious,’ and then she started laughing, a wonderful clear throaty childish laugh that instantly made me smile.
I think that’s when I knew I loved Sister Ignatius.
‘My name is Tamara.’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking at me and studying me as if she already knew.
I smiled again. She had a face that made me do that.
‘Are you allowed to, like, talk? Shouldn’t you be quiet?’ I looked around. ‘Don’t worry I won’t tell.’
‘Many of the sisters would agree with you,’ she chuckled, ‘but yes, I’m allowed to talk. I haven’t taken a vow of silence.’
‘Oh. Do other nuns look down on you for that?’
She laughed again, a sweet, clear, singsong laugh.
‘So have you not seen people for ages? Is this against the rules? Don’t worry, I won’t tell. Though Obama’s the US President now,’ I joked. When she didn’t respond, my smile faded. ‘Shit. Are you not supposed to know stuff like that? Stuff from the “outside world”? It must be a bit like being in Big Brother, being a nun.’
She snapped out of her trance and laughed again, her face seeming so childlike in a Benjamin Button way when she did that.
‘Aren’t you a peculiar thing?’ She’d said it with a smile and so I tried hard not to be insulted.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ she asked looking at the book that I was still hugging.
‘Oh, this.’ I finally stopped squeezing it. ‘I found it yesterday on the…oh, actually, I owe you a book.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘No, really I do. Marcus, I mean, the travelling library came by the day before yesterday looking for you and I didn’t know who you were.’
‘Then you owe me a book,’ she said, a twinkle in her eye. ‘Let me see, who’s it by?’
‘I don’t know who or what it is. It’s not the Bible or anything,
you might not like it,’ I said, reluctant to hand it over. ‘There could be sex scenes in it, swear words, gay people, divorced people, things like that.’
She looked at me and pursed her lips, trying not to smile.
‘I can’t open it,’ I said finally, giving it to her. ‘It’s locked.’
‘Well, I’ll see to that. Follow me.’
She immediately set off out the other entrance of the walled garden with the book in her hand.
‘Where are you going?’ I called after her.
‘Where are
we
going,’ she corrected me. ‘Come and see the sisters. They’ll be delighted to meet you. And I’ll open the book while you do so.’
‘Uh. No, it’s okay.’ I ran to catch up with her and take the book back.
‘There’s just the four of us. We don’t bite. Particularly when eating Sister Mary’s apple pie, but don’t tell her I said,’ she added under her breath and chuckled again.
‘But, Sister, I’m not very good with holy people. I don’t really know what to say.’
She laughed that laugh again and waddled in her funny-looking suit towards the orchard.
‘What’s the deal with the tree with all the engravings on it?’ I asked, skipping alongside her to keep up.
‘Ah, you’ve seen our apple orchard? You know, some people say the apple tree is the tree of love,’ she said, her eyes widening, and when she smiled dimples pierced her cheeks. ‘Many of the young ones around here have declared their love to one another on that tree.’ She power-walked on, snapping out of her magical love story. ‘Plus, it’s great for the bees. And the bees are great for the trees. Oh, that rhymes,’ she chuckled. ‘Arthur does a wonderful job of keeping it. We get the most delicious Granny Smith apples.’
‘Oh, so that’s why Rosaleen makes three thousand apple
tarts a day. I’ve eaten so many apples they’re literally coming out of my…’
She looked at me.
‘Ears.’
She laughed and it sounded like a song.
‘So,’ I panted, trying to keep up with her pacy strides, ‘how come there’s only four of you?’
‘Not so many people want to be nuns these days. It’s not, what you’d say, cool?’
‘Well, it’s not just that it’s not cool, which it totally isn’t by the way but, no offence to God or anything, it’s probably just a sex thing. If you were allowed to have sex I’d say loads of girls would want to be nuns. Though the rate I’m going, I’ll be joining you,’ I rolled my eyes.
Sister Ignatius laughed. ‘All in good time, my child, all in good time. You’re only seventeen. Almost eighteen, my word.’
‘I’m sixteen.’
She stopped walking then and examined me, a curious expression on her face. ‘Seventeen.’
‘Seventeen in a few weeks.’ I caught my breath.
‘Eighteen in a few weeks,’ she frowned.
‘I wish, but seriously I’m sixteen, but people always think I’m older.’
She stared at me as though I were a foreign object then, thinking so hard I could almost smell her brain frying. Then she took off on her heel again. Five minutes’ power-walk away, I was panting but Sister Ignatius had barely broken a sweat and we came across some more buildings, more like outhouses, and old stables. First, there was a church.
‘There’s the chapel there,’ Sister Ignatius explained. ‘It was built by the Kilsaneys in the late eighteenth century.’
Remembering that part from my school project I couldn’t take my eyes off it, unable to believe that what I’d stolen from
the internet essay wasn’t just homework, it was actually real. It was a small chapel, grey stone, two pillars in the front as cracked as a desert earth that hasn’t seen water for decades. On the top was a bell tower. Beside it was an old graveyard protected by three thin rusty iron railings. Whether it was to keep the buried in or the wanderers out, it wasn’t clear, but it made me shudder just looking at it. I realised I’d stopped walking and was staring at it—and Sister Ignatius was staring at me.
‘Great. I live on the grounds of a graveyard. Just swell.’
‘All generations of the Kilsaneys are buried there,’ she said softly. ‘Or as many as possible. For the bodies they couldn’t find they planted headstones.’
‘What do you mean, “for the bodies they couldn’t find”?’ I asked, horrified.
‘Generations of war, Tamara. Some of the Kilsaneys were sent off to Dublin Castle to be imprisoned, others left through travel or revolution.’
There was a silence while I took in the old headstones, some green and covered in moss, others black and lopsided, the inscriptions so faded you couldn’t read the letters.
‘That’s fucking creepy. You have to live beside that?’
‘I still pray in there.’
‘Pray for what? For the walls not to cave in on your head? It looks like it’s about to fall apart any second.’
She laughed. ‘It’s still a consecrated church.’
‘No way. Are there weekly masses in there?’
‘No,’ she smiled again. ‘The last time it was used was…’ she pinched her eyes shut and her lips moved open and closed as though she was doing decades of the rosary. Then her eyes popped open wide. ‘Do you know what, Tamara, you should check the records to get the exact date. The names of everybody are included too. We have them in the house. Come in and have a look, why don’t you?’
‘Eh. No. You’re grand, thanks.’
‘You will when you’re ready, I suppose,’ she said and moved along again. I rushed to keep up with her.
‘So how long have you lived here?’ I asked, following her into an outhouse, which was used as a tool shed.
‘Thirty years.’
‘Thirty years here? Must have been so lonely here all that time.’
‘Oh, no, it was far busier back then when I arrived, believe it or not. The three sisters were a lot more mobile then. I’m the youngest, the baby,’ she said, and laughed that little-girl laugh again. ‘There was the castle, and the gatehouse…they were indeed busier times. But I like the quiet now too. The peace. The nature. The simplicity. The time to be still.’
‘But I thought the castle was burned down in the twenties.’
‘Oh, it was burned out many times in its history. But it was only partly burned on that occasion. The family worked hard to refurbish it. And they did a wonderful job. It was truly beautiful.’
‘You’ve been inside it?’
‘Oh, indeed.’ She looked surprised by my question. ‘Lots of times.’
‘So what happened to it?’
‘A fire,’ she said, and looked away, located her toolbox on the cluttered work table and opened it. Five drawers slid out, each filled with nuts and bolts. She was like a little DIY magpie.
‘Another one?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Honestly, that’s ridiculous. Our smoke alarms were connected to the local fire station. Want to know how I found out? I was smoking in my room and I didn’t open the window because it was absolutely freezing out and whenever I opened my doors they used to just slam shut, which was a total head wreck. So I’d
turned my music up really loud and next minute my bedroom door was being bashed down by this hot fireman, pardon the pun, who thought my room was totally on fire.’
There was silence, while Sister Ignatius listened and looked through the toolbox.
‘By the way, he thought I was seventeen too,’ I laughed. ‘He called the house afterwards looking for me but Dad answered the phone and threatened to have him put in gaol. Talk about dramatic.’
Silence.
‘Anyway, was everybody okay?
‘No,’ she said, and when she looked at me briefly I realised that her eyes filled with tears. ‘Unfortunately not.’ She blinked them away furiously while she noisily rooted through the drawers, her wrinkled but sturdy-looking hands pushing through nails and screwdrivers. On her right hand was a gold ring that looked like a wedding ring, so firmly on her finger, her flesh growing around it, I doubt she could ever take it off even if she wanted to. I would have liked to ask more questions about the castle but I didn’t want to upset her further and she was making such a racket as she rooted through her tool box for the correct screwdriver I wouldn’t possibly be heard.