The Testament of Mary.

I was laying in bed the other night, the night of the shooting stars – the meteor showers, reading a book by one of my favourite authors, Colm Tóibín, called The Testament of Mary. This is a book about the mother of Christ but it is a fiction – a novel. It's only about one hundred and ten pages or so but I felt I had to read it because of the standard of writing.

It's not a subject I read about much but I am always interested in various religions.

The novel is written in a first person narrative, supposedly from Mary, and she talks of her son; never mentioning him by name – well not yet anyway.

She is speaking some time after the crucifixion from some 'other' place and she is going through her thoughts about what happened in her son's life. I reached the part in the novel where she reminisces about him bringing Lazarus back to life. You will remember Lazarus as the man that Jesus 'revived' from the dead. He is supposed to have said 'Lazarus come forth' and, as the saying goes in Dublin, he came fifth and won an orange.

But I digress.

It seems that Lazarus had been dead for four days and was buried in the ground and when Jesus came upon the scene his two sisters, helped by a few others, cleared the dirt away for the Lazarus miracle. After the miracle people treated Mary – and Lazarus in fact – very suspiciously and as I read this, tucked comfortably in my bed, a big fly buzzed around the room. Now this has happened before and because of the darkness of the room, being lit only by my bed side lamp, I have never bothered to swat the fly, but because the book is only about one hundred and ten pages long, I took a swipe; bingo!

I heard the slight thud of the book to fly impact and saw it careering across the room and landing on the white chest of drawers where he lay motionless; possibly waiting for our spider to take him away.

He has to be 'our' spider as he lives with us.

And so – on with the book.

There were lots of people who didn't believe that Lazarus had died at all and the thought occurred to me that he would find it rather uncomfortable with a mouth full of dirt for four days; the narrative goes on to say his sisters, his beautiful sisters, would put wet cloths into his mouth and I didn't wonder why.

Mary was taken to a wedding and at the wedding people seemed to be interested in her instead of the happy couple and she felt uncomfortable about it. She is warned that a man at the door is a spy and if her son comes she should sneak him out of the house as the Romans did not like the fact that her son was leading some kind of revolution and breaking certain traditions – one of them being death!

As I read this I noticed that the fly, as with Lazarus, was moving on the white chest of drawers; it was that tiny bit too far away from me to swat again without getting out of bed and in any case I wasn't about to run around the room after it, with my wife neatly napping next to me; but I watched.

Up he rose and started to fly around the room – not making the same buzzing noise as before but, nonetheless, being a nuisance. I know all creatures have their place on this earth and if we take one species away we will be plagued by whatever they eat, but I was reading and didn't want his company.

After a few minutes he settled on to the ceiling; the ceiling in my bedroom is very high so I would have had to jump up and smack him with something so I lay there and watched him walk to the corner where I know there is a spider's web made, some time ago, by our spider. After a few seconds I could see he was tangled up.

So back to the book and back to where Jesus enters to the wedding party. His mother said he had a glow about him, was wearing rich clothes; he seemed to have grown and that his followers, the people he had come with, didn't dress the way he did and didn't have a glow about them, and that he was the centre of attention as soon as he came in. 

Well he would be wouldn't he? He had just brought a man back to life but . . . . . when people looked at Lazarus he looked dead; he was being watered by his beautiful sisters with a wet cloth and he looked as if he was about to collapse.

It gave Mary the chance to go to her son and tell him that he must get out of there that he is in danger and that they must leave right away but he looked at her as is she were not his own, that he didn't know her and went and spoke to others.

His mother thought she heard him say that he was the son of God and this disturbed her so she went to him and tried to reason with him again and as she did this - the fly escaped from the spider's web.

The captivity must have frustrated him so much that he was flying around, buzzing, bumping and nearly hitting me so I had to take the decision and get out of bed.

As he flew across the width of the bed I took the book and, using it like a table tennis bat, I backed handed it into the wall by the window where it perished.

I made sure of this by gently tapping him with the spine of the book and moving him, with the book, to the skirting board.

Usually I read heavier books which cannot be used as a swatter so this book has more uses than it was meant to have and I recommend it in any case as a good read.

The next morning I looked to see if the fly was still where I had left him but he was gone; taken away by our spider I suppose.