Hilary Fannin: Stumbling into the grim old Good Friday vortex

Good Friday, eh? All the pubs and restaurants shut, and the shops empty, and the long shadows of sleeping buildings spilling out on to hushed city streets. And the only thing to look forward to at the end of the livelong silent day is a sliver of rainbow-skinned mackerel, swimming around on your nigh-on-empty plate.

(Sounds like a regular old Covid-19 Friday night to me, mate, especially for those of us gamely trying to cut the carbs in anticipation of having to zip up the thigh-highs and get back in the societal saddle.)

At home, the radio is playing dirges and the budgie is looking glum and you can't let yourself have a Marietta biscuit or a glass of MiWadi because that's just more salt in poor Jesus's wounds

Yep, it’s grim old Good Friday yet again and still, after all these years, there’s something about a cloudy afternoon on this day of mourning that makes me feels like I’ve stumbled headlong into a vortex that lies beyond time and space. Like a misdirected Dr Who, I find myself catapulted back to 1969 and our parish church, a big triangulated concrete monolith, reaching up to the heavens like a stalled spaceship.

I rejoin myself and my reverent playmates in a solemn, knee-socked procession around the stations of the cross and their terrifyingly vivid narrative. And there is poor bearded Jesus, crying and falling and dragging his heavy cross, doomed to forever repeat his actions so that we children will remember to be good. And there they are, all the mean soldiers in pretty frocks and espadrilles, hissing and taunting and pouring vinegar into his thirsty mouth.

Just remind yourself: ‘I’m a covetous cretin, but my generosity with gin is legendary!’

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And his poor wounded hands, the hands of a carpenter – how could his palms take all his weight? (Once, your very own brother had slid down the pole that held up the washing line in the back garden, and a nail embedded in the metal had cut right through his leg, and his skin had opened up like a petal. And you think about all his blood on the crazy paving, spilling out underneath the pegged-up Bri-nylon sheets.)

And you’ve forgotten which bit of the agony you’re supposed to be remembering, and now Jesus is looking down from the cross and wondering where his friends have gone. And you know now for definite that the Thunderbirds aren’t real because if they were, Lady Penelope would surely have sent them to save him.

And you walk home along the silent road, past the closed-up sweet shop where you can get Long John chewing gum with a transfer in the packet to lick and then stick on your arm. But not today; today is for death, not decoration, and even the birds are quiet.

At home, the radio is playing dirges and the budgie is looking glum and you can’t let yourself have a Marietta biscuit or a glass of MiWadi because that’s just more salt in poor Jesus’s wounds. So you sit under the kitchen table and search your own little-girl palms for stigmata, and you find a freckle, which is a sign that you’ve got to be good and not lie or curse or steal or murder or forget your mantilla when you go to Mass.

It's Good Friday, and at some stage during the day many of us might wonder where it all went, all the childhood anxiety and imaginings, all the fear and awe and fervour from all those monumental stories that burrowed deep into our tiny minds

It’s a sign that you must keep praying for your heathen parents, who stay sleeping in bed on Sunday mornings, your mother’s false eyelashes stuck to the pillowcase, your father’s aromatic exhalations getting mixed up with the fading scent of her Tweed perfume.

But the biggest problem to contemplate, sitting up now at the Formica-topped table (having decided that eating a bowl of cereal is probably not a sin, although listening to its snap, crackle and pop disturb the weighty silence might well be), is that Jesus died for you.

He died for you, even though you’d much rather he’d just, you know, stayed alive, healing the sick and curing the blind and making wooden pencil cases with slidy rulers and being very good friends with lepers.

It’s Good Friday, and at some stage during the day many of us might wonder where it all went, all the childhood anxiety and imaginings, all the fear and awe and fervour from all those monumental stories that burrowed deep into our tiny minds.

And as we’re wondering, we’ll notice that the off-licence is open and the fish shop buzzing, and that young lovers are kissing on the sea wall and brisk old ladies are taking in the salty air through the gauze of their flowery face masks. And we’ll know, too, that there are little girls in springtime gardens whispering secrets and hugging cats and making magical potions out of washing-up liquid and cinnamon and turning muddy frog-spawn water into miraculously imagined wine.