There is a couple here who are holier than thou, attending more Masses than a politician at election time. Their nicknames are Adam and Eve. I don’t know what their real names are, but I do know their teenage children are actually called Mary and Joseph.
They even have a holy-looking car – one of those tall multi-vans with big windows that looks like the popemobile. Always motoring, Mary and Joseph usually in the back, heading to a service somewhere.
Once you are made aware of them, you cannot unsee them. I had sort of noticed this strange family driving about, but one Sunday at Mass I nudged Fionnuala and pointed at them.
“Adam and Eve,” she whispered. “And Mary and Joseph.”
I was intrigued and a smile crept across my face. But Fionnuala stared straight ahead, ignoring all further queries.
‘Do they even work? I mean they go to Mass twice every day? Unbelievable.”
“More like 10 times every day.” I was having a coffee with Kieran, my dentist and soccer manager – a man with plenty of info.
“They’re nutjobs. They truck young Mary and Joseph around and I don’t know if that’s why they are deranged, or if they were deranged before that. The lot of them are deranged, that’s the bottom line.”
He suggested there was a wee want in the bloodline. “I mean, imagine lifting the lid on that house and peering inside. Apparently, they even have a pew in the living room.”
I laughed and right on cue the multi-van drove past with its strange, sacred cargo. “Speak of the devil,” Kieran said as we watched as though on safari.
I was reading at Mass one day when I spied them in the congregation and had to really concentrate on the task in hand. They were so distracting. Mary and Joseph weren’t there but Adam and Eve, I noticed, didn’t seem to follow the ceremony, gleeking about and fidgeting and staring at me. Eve even got up at one stage and ostentatiously left the chapel, returning moments later to huff and puff her way back to her seat.
I couldn’t hold back afterwards.
“Oh, they are very devout.” Fr Austin was thanking me for my contribution; he and I good chums by now. “But we musn’t judge others. Even when they are a little different. God created us all from the same pair of hands.”
While I wasn’t exactly chastised, I decided to lay off on my obsession.
“Good.” Fionnuala was in the passenger seat. “You never know when to let something lie.”
But one evening as I was at a different chapel car park, waiting on the girls to finish Irish dancing in the hall, I saw the popemobile creep slowly round the corner. It was getting dark and I had no lights on and as I watched unseen, Eve got out, opened the boot, and slipped in through the sacristy door.
I could see Adam in the driver’s seat juking around, then Eve darted out, her arms full of toilet rolls. She put them in the car and went back in two more times. Then they left as secretly as they had arrived.
“I’m going to have to tell Fr Austin,” Fionnuala sighed. “Keep your nose out of anything that isn’t your business, Fabien.”
A few days later I saw Fr Austin coming out of the graveyard and I pulled the car over and told him myself. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, Father. Surely not stealing toilet rolls?” I smiled.
“They were doing me a favour actually. Because they travel between the chapels, they like to help in any way. And there had been a delivery mistakenly dropped off with us, and we needed it brought over here. It was an act of kindness, Fabien.”
As the Bible says: ‘Don’t be too quick to go to court about something you have seen. If another witness later proves you wrong, what will you do then?’ Guilty, M’Lud.
“I mean, imagine lifting the lid on that house and peering inside. Apparently, they even have a pew in the living room.”