Sitting beneath the looming darkness of the unfinished ceiling of Westminster Cathedral, I found myself praying.
I didn’t even know why, but I was walking past during a trip to London and I decided to go in, and I sat down, and then a priest came and began to say mass so I stayed, not knowing what was about to happen back in Ireland to the builder boyfriend, and not having any real feeling that you could call premonition – unless you count an overwhelming urge to be sitting in a cathedral praying, when I have passed there many times on similar trips and never once gone in.
It was a lovely experience, except it seemed to me that it was shameful that we Catholics were allowing Jesus to hang on the cross in the dark. Where the upper interiors are still waiting to be finished in marble and mosaics, as they have been for so many years, it gives the impression that above us is a void of darkness, which creates, of course, entirely the wrong impression symbolically.
I am not sure how Rome or the wealthy Catholics of England can allow this to be. The ceiling ought to be made golden or at least light, or covered in some sort of finish that gives the correct theological impression.
We ought not to have Jesus hanging in the darkness of soot-blackened ceilings and we ought not to have the faithful sitting there praying and looking upwards to a seemingly everlasting darkness. What is the Roman Catholic church thinking?
I started looking on my phone to find campaigns to finish the cathedral and could find no mention of any effort since 2008. I have not been in here since 9/11, when I was working at the House of Commons as a political correspondent and went to the cathedral that day to pray.
Now I was sitting there apologising to Jesus for us leaving him in the dark, and wondering how I could join a campaign to finish the intended mosaics for the upper interiors of the Byzantine design, when it all happened back in West Cork.
I came out of the cathedral after mass and began walking to my friend’s apartment in Pimlico. I got as far as a café where I intended to stop for a latte when the BB’s number came up on my phone.
On the train to Gatwick, I did the admin calls as the BB guzzled painkillers and crawled into bed
He usually texts and only ever phones when it is something very urgent. He was breathless, unable to string a sentence together. Someone had just ploughed into him head on, he managed to say eventually. He was on the Skibbereen road and he wasn’t sure what shape he was in. He sounded dazed and was apparently standing in the road amid the wreckage.
His Mitsubishi L200 pick-up truck was almost entirely crushed on the driver’s side, the wheel smashed off and the undercarriage caved, but he was out, and the boy who had hit him at some speed driving down the wrong side of the road was also walking out of his small car, which was a write-off. To have destroyed a pick-up truck with a small Seat hatchback, he had to have been going it some.
As the boy got out, he was on his phone talking. In front of him was a car with a woman and two babies in car seats in the back. It seems what happened is that this car slowed to look at a sign warning of a flooded road ahead and was correctly going very slowly when the boy came behind it and couldn’t stop, swerving across a solid white line into the BB’s pick-up truck coming the other way.
Later, the BB would reflect that if the boy had not swerved into him he would have rear-ended the smaller car containing the two babies in the back.
As it was, he hit the BB’s massive truck, which absorbed an enormous amount of force, and which was going very slowly because – here I burst into tears as he told me – he was on his way back from an antiques store where he had bought me a hall stand I liked as a present for me to come back to when I returned from London.
He had been going at about 30mph, he recalled, because the hall stand and a chandelier were in the back.
I rang a neighbour and she went to help. He was limping badly, it seemed, aching all over, something wrong with his knee, but otherwise in one piece. The Guards were called. The boy was beside himself with regret, repeatedly apologising.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the joys of motoring,’ he said, then waved me away and said he hadn’t got time
Statements were taken and insurances exchanged. Our neighbour took the BB home, and then a nearby farmer came and towed the truck out of the road. The boy turned out to be the lad from our local garage, driving a trade car on a trade plate, apparently, and his boss sent a low-loader to recover both vehicles.
All then descended into confusion. On the phone on the train to Gatwick, I did the admin calls as the BB guzzled painkillers and crawled into bed. But the insurance policy the boy had given turned out not to be valid. I rang him and he rescinded it and gave me another one, then rescinded that by calling me back a few minutes later, sounding like he wanted to cry.
When I landed in Cork, my car was at the long stay at the airport, so I drove home via the recovery yard, where the horribly mangled truck was still on a low-loader, and demanded it be delivered back to us. The guy was suspiciously unpleasant to me, tried to persuade me to leave it there, then demanded €200 for its release.
I paid, then drove straight to the garage in our village, not two minutes from where we live, where the boy’s boss came at me as I parked and made a gesture that I was in the way.
I got out and stood my ground, telling him we needed their correct insurance details. I told him what it had cost me to get the truck back from where he had sent it.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the joys of motoring,’ he said, then waved me away and said he hadn’t got time. ‘We’ll see about that,’ I said, getting back into my car.
I ran into the BB’s arms when I got home as he limped towards me. Nothing but the fact he was alive mattered.
Even if the boy wasn’t insured, the overwhelming feeling I have can best be described by the image that keeps coming to me: a golden shining ceiling of protection arching to eternity above us.
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