By the time I staggered out of Cork City Gaol I was completely depressed, so I stepped into a church, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I’M ALWAYS amazed at how one thought leads to another. For example, I was eating a fish in Cork last week, in the Farmgate Cafe, which is upstairs in the English Market. The fish was delicious, and for no particular reason I began thinking about it on the weather vane on top of the steeple of St Anne’s Church in Shandon; and that in turn awakened in me a nostalgia for Jesus.
Then I noticed two elderly ladies at the table beside me counting money; a small lady in a red scarf, and a tall woman with long grey hair, and bony fingers. Copper coins were scattered on the table.
“You have enough there,” Scarf said.
“I haven’t,” Bony Fingers replied. “I’ve only €14.”
Scarf said, “I told you to skip the dessert; now you will need a bail out.”
They both laughed, which I thought was a good moment to intervene.
“Excuse me ladies,” I said, “I wonder could you give me directions to Cork City Gaol.”
“Are you on holidays?” Bony Fingers asked. I said, “Yes, I am. And I believe the City Gaol Museum is worth a visit.”
They gave me directions and off I went, down Pope’s Quay and up towards Sunday’s Well. The old prison is a grim monument to hard times, and it is haunted by the ghosts of the poor who were incarcerated there: people like Mary Sullivan, who got seven years for robbing calico cloth, and Mary McDonnell who had six children in her early 20s and ended up in prison just because she “accosted a gentleman”. And Mary Twohig, a teenager who stole a cloth cap and a few utensils from a kitchen because she wanted to get some money for her impending childbirth. When the baby was born in the prison, she was allowed 48 hours rest in the infirmary, before being returned to the canvas mattress on the floor of her cell, to nurse the fragile infant.
By the time I staggered out of the cold stone building I was completely depressed, so on my way back into town I stepped into a church. There was a shop inside the door, selling holy ornaments. I asked the girl behind the counter did she have any night lights. She pointed to a shelf of little red lamps that work on batteries.
“I’ll take four of them,” I said.
“Do you want them for the grave or for Christmas?” she wondered, but I didn’t reply. There are some days when I find it difficult to maintain a rational view of the universe; I become overwhelmed by a desire to fall back on prayer, for consolation, especially in hard times, but I didn’t want to bother her with my anxieties.
Instead I paid for the lamps, and fled into the church where an old white-haired man was moving slowly down the aisle, and women on the altar were quenching the candles, because a Mass had just ended. Another old woman was standing before Saint Anthony, her face covered with her two prayerful hands, and from her elbow dangled an eco shopping bag, on which were written the words “I am not a plastic bag”.
I knelt down, but I wasn’t thinking of Jesus. I was thinking of a young woman I met the previous night who told me that during her Transition Year in secondary school, all she wanted to do was learn how to embalm the dead, so she got work- experience in a morgue. After her Leaving Cert, she went to art college, and qualified as a teacher but couldn’t find a job, so she did an MA in phenomenology, and developed a philosophical mind. But finally she returned to her first love: the prep room of a funeral parlour, where, among other things, she now drains the blood out of dead people and fills them with chemicals, as she reflects on the ultimate nature of reality. She had black hair, and mascara, and black clothes, and she was holding a mug of coffee as we spoke, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her fingers.
That night I was still thinking of her as I clicked my battery candle on and watched the little red light flicker in the dark, and the thought occurred to me that Christianity wouldn’t have got off the ground if it weren’t for women, who went out to the grave on that famous morning, with their spices, to treat the body of Jesus.