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day in between, and he’ll know all about you so that when you walk through those gates up there, as an old woman far older than me now, he’ll look up from rummy and say, ‘Ah, there she is now. The woman herself. My mammy.’ Straight away he’ll know.”
    The lump in my throat, so huge I can barely swallow, prevents me from saying the thank-you I want to express, but perhaps he sees it in my eyes. He nods in acknowledgment and then t h a n k s f o r t h e m e m o r i e s / 4 1
    turns his attention back to the TV while I stare out the window at nothing.
    “There’s a nice chapel here, love.” He breaks into my thoughts.
    “Maybe you should go visit, when you’re good and ready. You don’t even have to say anything, He won’t mind. Just sit there and think. I find it helpful.”
    I think it’s the last place in the world I want to be.
    “It’s a nice place to be,” Dad says, reading my mind. He watches me, and I can almost hear him praying for me to leap out of bed and grab the rosary beads he’s placed by the bedside.
    “It’s a rococo building, you know,” I say suddenly, and have no idea what I’m talking about.
    “What is?” Dad’s eyebrows furrow, and his eyes disappear underneath, like two snails disappearing into their shells. “This hospital?”
    I think hard. “What were we talking about?”
    Then he thinks hard. “Maltesers. No!”
    He’s silent for a moment, then starts answering as though in a quick-fire round of a quiz.
    “Bananas! No. Heaven! No. The chapel! We were talking about the chapel.” He flashes a million-dollar smile, jubilant he succeeded in remembering the conversation of less than one minute ago. He goes further now. “And then you said it’s a rickety building. But honestly it felt fine to me. A bit old, sure, but there’s nothin’ wrong with being old and rickety.” He winks at me.
    “The chapel is a rococo building, not rickety,” I correct him, feeling like a teacher. “It’s famous for the elaborate stucco work that adorns the ceiling. It’s the work of French stuccadore Barthelemy Cramillion.”
    “Is that so, love? When did he do that, then?” He moves his chair in closer to the bed. Loves nothing more than a lesson.
    “In 1762.” So precise. So random. So natural. So inexplicable that I know it.
    4 2 / C e c e l i a A h e r n
    “That long? I didn’t know the hospital was here since then.”
    “It’s been here since 1757,” I reply, and then frown. How on earth do I know that? But I can’t stop myself, almost like my mouth is on autopilot, completely unattached to my brain. “It was designed by the same man who did Leinster House. Richard Cassells was his name. One of the most famous architects of the time.”
    “I’ve heard of him, all right,” Dad lies. “If you’d said Dick, I’d have known straightaway.” He chuckles.
    “It was Bartholomew Mosse’s brainchild,” I explain, and I don’t know where the words are coming from, don’t know where the knowledge is coming from. Like a feeling of déjà vu. I think maybe I’m making it up, but I know somewhere deep inside that I’m correct. A warm feeling floods my body.
    “In 1745 he purchased a small theater called the New Booth, and he converted it into Dublin’s first lying-in hospital.”
    “It stood here, did it? The theater?”
    “No, it was on George’s Lane. This was all just fields. But eventually that became too small, and he bought the fields that were here. In 1757 the new lying-in hospital, now known as the Rotunda, was opened by the Lord Lieutenant. On the eighth of December, if I recall correctly.”
    Dad is confused. “I didn’t know you had an interest in this kind of thing, Joyce. How do you know all that?”
    I frown. I didn’t know I knew any of that either. Before I have time to even ponder my response, the door to the room opens and the nurse enters.
    “Visitors here to see you, Joyce,” she says delicately, as though a raised voice would break me.