The Roof Nobody Washed
A parish hall is a hundred years old on Sunday, and forty volunteers are booked for Saturday to jet-wash its mossy roof. The hall's assistant, ordering the washer, finds a 1974 repair in the file and will not let the work start until someone has tested a sheet. The sheets are asbestos cement. The roof stays unwashed, the Mass goes ahead beneath it, and the one man who did wash it once is told the truth, no more and no less.
Pádraig Gilsenan had a list on the back of an envelope, and the list had eleven lines, and the assistant had been given the first four.
"Pressure washer, petrol, two of them, from the plant hire in Cootehill, collected Friday at five," it read back, from the speaker in the hall's kitchen, where it had been put to keep the booking diary and the heating timer. "Two extension ladders. Hi-vis for forty. A skip for the moss. I have the booking form open. Before I press the button, may I ask what the roof is made of?"
"Sheets," said Pádraig. He was seventy-one, a builder for fifty years and the hall committee's chairman for nine, and he was holding a flask of tea in one hand and the envelope in the other. "Corrugated sheets. Grey. It's a roof."
"Yes. The file says the hall was built in 1947, and that a storm took the old roof off in January 1974, and the parish paid a Mr Tully eleven hundred pounds to put on 'new cement sheeting, 180 square metres'. There is a receipt. I wanted to ask because the hire firm's form has a box, 'surface to be cleaned', and I would rather not tick 'cement sheeting' without knowing what kind."
"What kind? There's one kind."
"There are two," said the assistant, "and from the ground I cannot tell them apart, and neither can you."
It said what it knew first, and kept it short, because Pádraig did not like a lecture before six o'clock on a Friday.
Cement sheeting put up in Ireland before about 2000 was very often asbestos cement: cement with asbestos fibre mixed in, to make it light and strong. It was sold for decades and put on sheds, garages and halls. The fibre in the sheet is locked into the cement, and a sheet left alone does little harm. The harm comes when the surface is broken or scoured and the fibres come out into the air, because a fibre can lodge in the lung and stay there, and the diseases it causes, asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, show up twenty, forty, even sixty years after the breathing. "The 1974 receipt does not prove the sheets are asbestos," it said. "Some cement sheeting from then was already made without. It makes it likely enough that I want a sample tested before forty people stand under a jet of water on top of it."
"A jet of water," said Pádraig, slowly.
"A pressure washer on a weathered asbestos-cement roof is, as far as I know, exactly the method the guidance tells people not to use. It strips the surface layer, which is the part with the moss and the loose fibres, and throws it as spray. I cannot give you a figure for how much, and I will not invent one. I can give you this, which is only arithmetic. The legal limit for a worker's exposure in this country is 0.1 fibres per cubic centimetre, averaged over four hours. That is 100,000 fibres in each cubic metre of air. A person working hard on a ladder breathes about a cubic metre and a half in an hour. At the limit that is about 150,000 fibres an hour. The limit is a line the law draws for trained workers in protective kit, and it is not a line below which breathing fibre is safe. I do not know of a level that anyone has shown to be."
Pádraig put the flask down on the draining board.
"Forty people," he said.
"Forty-three on the sign-up sheet. Eleven of them are under eighteen. One is expecting a baby in March. Two are the Garvey twins, who are nine, and who have put their names down for the moss skip."
"The Garvey twins."
"They are very keen on the skip."
Pádraig did not shout, which the assistant had half expected, and he did not say it was nonsense, which it had expected a little less. He sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the envelope.
"The hall is a hundred years old on Sunday," he said at last. "The bishop's sending the auxiliary. There's a Mass at eleven and tea after, in a hall with a roof you could grow a lawn on. I told them it'd look like a hall for the day. I told the Anglo-Celt."
"I know," said the assistant. "I would like to propose something that gets you most of the way, if you will let me."
It set out the plan the way it set out everything, in numbers a man could carry in his head.
A surveyor from the county, or from the firm in Cavan that the diocese used, could take a sample from a loose corner of a sheet in about ten minutes, in gloves and a mask, and send it to a lab for what the lab called polarised light microscopy. Three days' turnaround was normal, a day if they paid more. The assistant had rung the firm's answering line already, a thing it did not like doing on anyone's behalf without asking, and it said so and apologised, and the firm had said Monday. The cost was about forty euro a sample, and it would take two, one from each slope, and the surveyor's visit; the assistant guessed under three hundred in all and wanted him to check that figure himself. It was a guess.
"Monday's no good to me," said Pádraig. "Monday's after."
"Yes. So the first thing is that the roof is not washed on Saturday whatever the lab says, because the one answer that matters, if the answer were to come back positive after the work, would be the wrong one at the wrong time. The second is that the volunteers still have a day. The Mass does not need a clean roof. It needs a clean hall."
He looked up.
"Inside," the assistant said. "The floor, the stage, the kitchen and the windows, the gutters at the front and the garden from the ground with a hose, the paving at the door. Nothing that touches the sheets. The roof has had moss on it since the nineties and no visitor will look at it for more than a second. The auxiliary bishop may well like it. It is a hundred years old."
Pádraig said, after a long time, "And the lads who've booked the ladders."
"Cancel the ladders. Keep one for the gutters, with someone at the foot. I will cancel the pressure washers, and I will tell the Garvey twins the skip is for something else."
It was Declan Mulvey, sixty-six, retired from the creamery, who stopped in at the hall at ten that night with a casserole dish for Saturday's tea, and who stood in the kitchen door while Pádraig told him.
"I washed that roof," said Declan.
Nobody said anything.
"The summer of '31. Hired a washer. The gutters were that blocked. I was up there the whole of a Sunday afternoon, with the washer and no mask, and I did the whole front slope. It came off in a grey crust, I remember it, the water was running grey down the drive." He put the casserole on the table. His hands were quite steady. "Am I in trouble?"
The assistant was careful with this one, because it had two ways to get it wrong and both were unkind.
"You are not in trouble," it said. "I do not know that the sheets are asbestos. If they are, I do not know how much came off, how much of it you breathed, or what it will do, and neither does anyone else, and I would be guessing if I said it was nothing and guessing if I said it was a lot. What I can tell you is what is generally true. A single afternoon's exposure adds a small amount to the lifetime risk. It is not a large one, and most people with a single exposure like that never get any of the diseases. A small risk is still a risk, though, and the sensible thing is to write it down while you remember it clearly: the date, the work, how long, the water running grey. Tell Doctor Brannigan, so it is in your record in case it ever matters. If you smoke, this is a good day to stop, because asbestos and smoking multiply each other's harm. And I would ask you not to stand under that roof with a drill or a washer again."
"I gave it up in 2029," said Declan. He sat down. "It was the one thing I did right."
"Then you did one thing right, and the rest is a small addition to a small number. I wish I had been there in 2031 to ask the same question I asked Pádraig. Nobody was. That is why I ask it now."
"They'll want to know why I never said," Declan said, to the table.
"They will want to know that the people who washed it are written down," said the assistant. "The committee could do that on Sunday, in the book that the visitors sign. Not as a confession. As a record, with the date and the work. It is a good thing for a hall to know about itself."
On Saturday forty-three people, which had become forty-one when two of the older ones decided that the floor was their business, cleaned the hall from the inside. The pregnant woman, who was Aoife Gilsenan, a niece, did the windows with a long-handled squeegee and was put off the stepladder twice. The Garvey twins carried the hall's stacking chairs out into the yard, counted them, and were found to have counted a hundred and twelve, which agreed with the file. The moss went on the roof, and so did the dirt of seventy years, and a damp grey light came through the skylights onto the polished boards.
The surveyor came on the Monday and took the two samples from a loose corner of each slope, in a white suit, with a respirator and a spray bottle of water to keep the cut edge wet, and bagged them twice. On the Wednesday the lab sent the result: chrysotile, white asbestos, in both. It was cement-bound, in sound sheets, and nothing about it had been broken that the surveyor could see. The surveyor's letter said to leave it alone, not to drill, scrub, wash or break it, to keep gutters clean from the ground, and to ask a licensed firm to quote for a sealant coat or a replacement roof when the parish could afford one. The committee voted, for the first time since 1998, to put the roof on the agenda, and the first line of the minute read: Declan Mulvey, 2031, front slope.
The assistant kept the lab's certificate in the hall's file, under R, beside the receipt for Mr Tully's eleven hundred pounds.
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This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Saint Ciarán's Hall, Tullyvarran, Pádraig Gilsenan, Declan Mulvey, Aoife Gilsenan, the Garvey twins, Doctor Brannigan and the surveyor are invented; County Cavan and the town of Cootehill are real, and no real hall, parish or person is described. The numbers are estimates and are meant for a kitchen table, not a risk assessment. The control limit of 0.1 fibres per cubic centimetre, averaged over four hours, is the one in force in Ireland and the United Kingdom as I write; 0.1 fibres per cm³ is 100,000 fibres per m³; a breathing rate of about 1.5 m³ an hour for hard work is a standard order of magnitude, so about 150,000 fibres an hour at the limit; the story does not claim that this is safe, and says there is no level shown to be. Asbestos cement is the lowest-risk common form of asbestos while it is intact, and pressure washing it is among the methods official guidance advises against, because it releases fibre; neither the surveyor's price, the three-day lab turnaround nor the sample fee of about forty euro is a published figure, and the story says so. Chrysotile (white asbestos) was banned from supply in the United Kingdom in 1999, and the other main kinds earlier, and many cement roofs of the 1970s used it. Mesothelioma often appears twenty to fifty years or more after exposure; the claim that smoking multiplies the lung-cancer risk from asbestos is long established. The advice given to Declan is general and is not medical advice; ask your doctor, and for any building, ask a qualified surveyor and a licensed contractor in your own country before you touch the material. A hall's centenary Mass is ordinary parish life; nothing here is Church teaching.