Rant In D Minor: Nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound

Sunday morning. The smell of shoe polish. Hair fluffy as goose-down from the Saturday night bath. You had to eat breakfast as soon as you’d been rooted out of bed in order to fast for Holy Communion.

We gathered at the cathedral in the centre of Enniscorthy, a great looming neo-gothic edifice designed by Augustus Welby Pugin and completed during the Famine. St Aidan’s spoiled me for Mass anywhere else in the country. Other places of worship looked dingy by comparison. 
My father stayed at the back of the church with the betting men and the horseshoe throwers and the Woodbine puffers who congregated by the holy water font, all the better to bail out at half time when the Eucharistic bell sounded the signal for an early escape.
I accompanied my mother to her usual pew about halfway up the aisle. I always got the impression it was considered unseemly to hug the altar railings: that was for people who wanted to be seen to be seen, merchants and moneychangers who’d say their prayers to the high rafters of a Sunday, then rob you blind during the week. So we kept a healthy distance from the tabernacle until it was time to queue for Communion, rows of us kneeling like blindfolded prisoners of war or gangster’s marks awaiting execution.
This was when you got to see the cut of the town’s tongues.
Fellow Enniscorthy man Colm Toibin served as an altar boy in St Aidan’s and once described to me the Francis Bacon-esque panorama of oral protuberances that assaulted his eyes every Sunday morning as he helped the priest dispense Holy Communion. “Little ones with glasses and knitted caps with these big muscular tongues!” he said. “You got to know people gynaecologically, without understanding that it was gynaecology you were looking at.”
As I write, I think of ‘Sunday Morning’, the first track on the Velvet Underground and Nico, a song that seems light as a feather, with its prettified melodies, wispy voice and celeste sounds, but the lyric is freighted with a terrible weight. “Watch out, the world’s behind you,” Lou Reed sighed. Or ‘Sunday Morning, Coming Down’ by Kris Kristofferson, perhaps the saddest song ever written, the words and melody enlaced with the ache of the drunk who is exiled from the paradise of family, his heart caught by the smell of frying chicken and the sight of a father swinging his child in the park. Long before I came to know the sickly guilt of the Sunday morning hangover, Kris Kristofferson’s words allowed a small boy’s mind to apprehend the awful sorrow of the lost soul, the cast out, the addict, the social leper, the irredeemable.
I started skipping Mass about the same time I began to go to rock concerts. Different forms of worship. Same impulse.