Colour and Liver Spots

The old Roman Catholic chapel in Carrickfergus was in its last days by the end of the 1970's, and boastful plans were already in place to build a new church, one that resembled an apple pie with a generous slice missing. The blueprint hung in the bemarbled church porch for us all to fawn over. The priests wanted this new design for the church, a design they said would take us into the twenty-first century, and, just like the Pope, they were infallible, so it was to be. Priests, we were told, always knew what was best for us, no matter what. Priests, we were told, knew us better than we knew ourselves.

The old walls of the church were failing: the failures lay hidden under thick, blistered and bubbled cream paint at least a century thick. The paint was so hard and dry that breaking a bubble with a young thumb produced a ragged circle of jagged paint thorns and a low cracking noise, and the breaking of a bubble took curious eyes back in time over a century, to the time between the laying of the stone behind the bubble and the first beautification of the church. But now, over a century later, each time a priest closed the tabernacle door a shower of plaster and dust fell from a circular enclosure high above the altar, above which, of a sunny afternoon, bloomed a beautiful and intricate stained-glass window. The heating system failed often, and the wooden floor rotted through in too many places for walking to be safe. A young, sharp fingernail could cut easily into the viscous, waxy polish on the pews, and a bit of wax sliced off and rolled continuously between a thumb and a forefinger could distract a child until the end of mass. The jagged slivers of wax turned smooth and round and malleable with heat and force before the priest invited us to declare ourselves unworthy to receive the body and blood of Christ, “ …but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Those sitting there before us had etched their names into the wax. They were almost invariably male names, or a boy name and a girl name enclosed in a rough-hewn heart, and we could see the darkness where a caretaker had applied a thicker coat of wax to rid Our Lord’s house of the aberration of graffiti.

Towering stained-glass windows adorned the failing walls, and as the sun rose above Belfast Lough on summer mornings, we could see sun-beaming images of saints, and people who should be saints sure enough, cut into the dusty inner. The deep blues, yellows, brown-reds and muffled opaque whites filled the warming air. If the roof of the chapel had ever been lifted, I fantasised, the lazy, brilliant, warm, swirling colour would surely have spilled over the tops of the walls, drenching the church and school grounds, and it would have come to rest serenely and beautifully over the town itself, a very grey town, a perfect canvas. The sun cast languidly on the far wall, and the thick melted-crayon light mingled with elaborately chiseled models of six of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, illuminating the truly devout at the foot of those Stations, the pious and all too often self-righteous women of the parish, usually. After every mass, a huddle of old women would “do the Stations,” making gallant efforts to genuflect at every captured moment of the journey from court to Calvary despite the years of rheumatism and gout they undoubtedly suffered gladly as a penance for a sin long since forgotten or never committed. Bony, liver-spotted fingers held the tops of pews - for balance, or to bring ease to a long suffering joint - and they let go only when it was time to move on or when it came time to bless themselves. A Rosary netted the other hand. Their long thick coats, their simple brown shoes and their colourful headscarves were the uniforms of holiness, and a simple sign of their continuing adherence to communion at least once every day and to confession at least once every week. The cherished Rosary beads with the vial of long-evaporated Lourdes water, and a family Bible a generation or two past sturdiness, they were the only tools necessary for holiness.

These same women kept the marble polished in the aisle and in the porch, and it may have been them that kept the pews deeply waxed and almost heart-free. They gave gladly of their time and good health to work hard for the Lord, to decorate and clean Our Lord’s home, and to buy their way into Heaven and the company of the Lord and all his angels and saints on the back of a mop and bucket, or a Hoover, or Mr. Sheen and a duster, or the brown paper and the heated iron they used to remove the candle-wax from the carpeted floors. 

Many were gentle - motherly, even - and they talked with hushed voices, through thin and hairy lips, for some a set of dentures filling their scarved heads. Others were pious, arrogant, older women, and they treated the church like it was their favourite room at home, the room to where visitors were escorted to be entertained before being rushed out for fear they might get too comfortable, the room with the nice china on show, the deepest, cleanest carpet and the furniture carved from soft, rust-coloured fallen clouds. How dare anyone change, move or otherwise spoil the good work the Lord gave the women of the parish the very breath in their bodies to do, but not the health to do it, and sure that was the very reason, wasn’t it, why they did it anyway, to suffer, to give? They gladly suffered on for His good. They smiled smiles all too brief and perfunctory, their hands too full with the tools and their heads too full with the excitement for the next cleaning job to let them stop for one polite moment. But for these women this was the highest station attainable in the church, the duty of cleaning, the duty to look after men – both earthly and heavenly - and they took it seriously. There was little room for joviality.