Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  by Sunday afternoon, when she was propped up with her eyes closed and her mouth ajar, trying to hold down those few mouthfuls of water that were already stewing to bile in her stomach while the room around her was warped in her heat haze, doors and windows drifting in her ambient temperature, everything lopsided and out of shape, her head thrown back to give me a clear picture of how this illness was draining the flesh from her face, drawing out the bone structure beneath, her jaw and cheekbones jutting sharply while the radial pattern of her fingers began to show through the backs of her hands resting on the duvet cover, her extended fingers fanned out from knuckles to wrist which peaked over the plane of her narrow forearm, all her bones now poking through her flesh until

  a call from Agnes on Sunday evening clarified things for me after

  she had listened quietly to my account of Mairead’s illness, she told me that

  the city’s local radio station was reporting that a city-wide health emergency was coming to light since a glut of people had begun presenting at GP’s surgeries and A&E with precisely the same symptoms as Mairead, so many cases that the numbers could not be ignored with the result that the city authorities had, at an extraordinary council meeting the previous day, put the whole municipal area under a boil-water notice until the proper source of what they described as a viral contamination was traced and eradicated while at the same time – with admirable speed she had to admit – lists of safety measures were already published in the local newspapers and on handbills that were pushed through letterboxes or were available on the City Hall website and in churches, supermarkets, libraries and community centres or broadcast with the hourly news bulletin on local radio – every channel of communication utilised to carry the word to homes and business places, to wherever the city’s population might gather in work or worship or entertainment, all angles covered so that

  my guess is that it’s this virus thing is what Mam is suffering from, remember she was the only one of us who drank water at the table that night

  yes, she insisted that I have a drink, she would stick to water, she wanted to drive but

  I could come home tomorrow, it might do her good if she saw

  no

  the word blurted out of me before I could stop it because

  there’s nothing you can do for her and I’m not sure she’d want you here right now, this is an important time for you and she would never forgive me if she knew that I had hauled you away from your work so

  it might cheer her up to see me

  the best thing you can do for her now is get on with your work and talk to her in a few days when she’s better and

  I feel terrible, this is how my big night turns out

  for god’s sake Agnes, these things happen and they’re no one’s fault, just keep in touch and don’t worry, this’ll blow over in a few days but

  I could tell she was genuinely in two minds and that while, on the one hand she dearly wanted to be with her mother, on the other, she recognised also that this was precisely the time she needed to be near her work and availing of any opportunities that might arise from it, which suited me as there was something in the prospect of being alone in the house with Agnes while Mairead sickened in a room at the end of the hall that seemed to me a breach of some intimacy taboo, a complicity which made me a bit queasy, so that it was easy to turn down her offer of help and

  I rounded out the discussion by asking her if there was anything else about the contamination I should know and she said

  that rumour in the city was that there were upwards of three to four hundred people in hospital wards with cramps and fever and diarrhoea, sweating and shitting themselves into oblivion as she vividly put it, suffering from cryptosporidiosis, a virus derived from human waste which lodged in the digestive tract, so that, she continued, it was now the case that the citizens were consuming their own shit, the source of their own illness and there was something fatally concentric and self-generating about this, as if the virus had circled back to its source to find its proper home where it settled in for its evolutionary span, rising through degrees of refinement every time it went round the U-bend, gradually gaining on some perfection – hardiness and resistance and so on – with god-knows-what results, probably reaching such a degree of refinement that it would become totally resistant to every antidote and we would be host to this new life form and, at this point I wondered

  would she ever stop

  mother of Jesus

  stop

  because

  I could understand this sort of thing coming from Darragh, this kind of apocalyptic riffing was exactly the sort of stuff he thrived on, getting carried away on those visions of destruction which I’ve always believed were the special reserve of young men, all the aggravated amplitudes and graphic imagery they are prone to but which now, coming from Agnes, I found tiresome, the same kind of reasoned hysterics which, like Darragh, she half-believed and for the other half she was happy simply to pursue to its own fulfilment, a kind of ecstasy I tired of as

  she now expanded her scenario to a city in crisis, her voice lathering on all the available images of civil collapse and destruction, her voice cast in the solemn tone of someone delivering an on-the-spot report from some urban disaster area and I let her go on a while longer as I had never heard her do this kind of thing before, never lose the run of herself, ravelling on like this, words and ideas spilling from her in a lurid rush and while standing there at the gable of the house I thought, for the first time in years

  a smoke

  Jesus, I’d love a smoke

  out of nowhere that old hankering rising up in me, that draw in the back of my throat, the urge to go through the old ritual of taking out the packet of cigarettes and lighting one up, the need to do something with my hands and the old certainty that somehow the situation would be improved if I were to light up and feel that soothing bloom of smoke filling out my lungs, it all came back to me standing there under the shelter of the eaves, a habit I thought had waned away to nothing having given them up a couple of years back after Mairead had harped on at me for so long, pointing out that a history of heart disease on both sides of my family would make it the wise move especially when I turned forty-five and I could no longer afford to be so blithe about these things and it was about time I took responsibility and

  so on and so forth until

  I did indeed make an effort, for whatever reason, quitting them several times, off and on, stuttering and stumbling but never managing to lower the habit below ten a day, never managing to cross that threshold into a smoke-free life, clothes and car always stinking and those mornings after a night on the beer, chain-smoking one after another, sitting on the side of the bed with that furry rasp in my lungs, passing it off to myself as phlegm, all those years when the kids were around, never able to quit but the minute

  they’d grown up and left for college it was as if they drew the habit away with them because suddenly the old craving was gone, I’d had enough, something I could not explain and I just walked away from them New Year’s night, smoked my last one at two o’clock in the morning, standing on the pavement outside one of the pubs in the village, four or five years ago with never a relapse or craving

  until now

  standing at the gable of the house, looking out over the fields towards the Westport road in the distance and the side of Croagh Patrick fading into the evening light, Agnes still speaking away on the other end of the line as a light shower of rain drifted over the house, thickening to a heavy mist which moved on to pile up in swathes against the slopes of Mweelrea, another wet evening as promised, nothing but solid rain from the beginning of March with no let up so you couldn’t walk the land for fear of going up to your ankles in it and there was still another three weeks before the clocks would turn to summer time when darkness would not settle in till after seven o’clock and even if there was no assurance as yet that the weather would take up any time soon it was good to think of summer only a few weeks away
with the sun higher in the sky and the first blackthorn around the house coming into flower while later on the woodbine, which Mairead had tended in the wild hedge, would scent up the whole back garden close to the house, this side of the sheds and the haggard beyond before

  Agnes’s voice tapered off, her apocalypse complete – the city’s civil defence plans overwhelmed, riots in the streets, council chambers overrun and trashed by protestors – Agnes exhausted now, like the scenario itself, so she finished up telling me that she would let me know if she learned anything else and to give Mam her love before she

  rung off, her voice suddenly gone as if it had snagged on the mist and was carried off into the failing light, leaving the phone dead in my hand, a warm sliver with the screen fading like some luminous shard from outer space which had travelled across stellar distances at great speed to arrive here in my hand where its glow was now losing its heat, gone, before I pocketed it and turned back into the house to check on Mairead and tell her that Agnes had just called but that I had told her not to come home as I figured she had other more pressing things to do – her work and everything – and Mairead nodded heavily, yes, that was the right thing to say, and it was good to have confirmed that I’d done the right thing so I could rest easy in myself for the rest of the evening, make something to eat and

  later that night I sat alone in the sitting room, feeling the whole house strange around me with Mairead tossing in a fevered sleep among the soft toys, posters and CDs – all the detritus of Agnes’s adolescence – Mairead now washed up there by the swell of her fever and drifting through the damp currents of her sleep as if she inhabited some separate medium in which everything was given over to a drift and fade, space and time warped so that those hours ahead of me appeared completely unmappable and unpredictable even if it was likely they would pass in the same inescapable boredom as the previous couple of days, a prospect which made me gloomy as there appeared no way out of it now – Mairead was too ill to sneak away from for a few pints – so that when the idea of Skyping Darragh came to me it took me a long moment to set it aside, because even if a chat with him was a pleasing prospect – I knew full well that any conversation now ran the risk of having to tell him of his mother’s illness and, from what I could see, there was no good reason to mention it to him as it would probably do nothing but make him anxious about something that would run its course in a few days, something neither of us could do much about, so I forgot about it and

  got a beer from the fridge and settled down to scan through the TV channels, all thirty of them – sport, drama, docs, cartoons, the whole lot – only to inevitably lock onto Sky News where I learned that the actor Paul Scofield had passed away from leukaemia while the surge of troops into Iraq was ongoing and the weather for the following week would continue with more of the rain that had been blowing in from a cyclone in the mid-Atlantic for the past three weeks with no let-up till Thursday at the earliest which might bring a dry spell but with a sharp drop in temperature, at which point I got fed up and flicked on through the channels once more, films, comedy, sci-fi, more news, until I chanced upon a documentary which showed

  a grown man lying on a floor covered with large sheets of paper, A2 sheets on which there were some very complex and detailed line drawings, page after page covered, and this narrow shouldered man in a white shirt stretched out in the middle of them, drawing away with pencil and rule, adding yet another detailed sheet to all those around him and I must have recognised the sort of drawings they were because I found myself sitting forward in the armchair, prodding the zapper in my hand to turn up the volume so that I could hear the voiceover tell me that this man – some French man whose name I can’t remember – suffered from a sort of high-level autism that left him socially inept and completely without any sense of humour or irony but who was nevertheless designing out of thin air the most complete and complex urban plan history had ever known, a project which had come to light when a few of the drawings were used to illustrate a Sunday Times Magazine article on autism, which brought him to the attention of an urban planner at London City Council who marvelled at the precise beauty of its streets and thoroughfares but who was a lot more intrigued by the sprawling harmony hinted at beyond the margins of the cropped fragments and so took himself off to France to investigate this gifted planner whom no one in the urban design community had ever heard of, finding him eventually in a little village in the Vosges where he lived with his partner, a mathematician and herself autistic, and who, after he’d spent a couple of days there, convinced the planner that he had encountered a fully fledged genius – a visionary who had not only a coherent sense of the vast megalopolis which, after fifteen years, was still metastasising, day by day over pages and pages, an astonishing achievement in itself but more impressive from the point of view of a city planner was this man’s ability to hold in his mind’s eye a sense of the city as an enormous, dynamic organism which was continually morphing through the vast tides of those circadian rhythms that governed all its streets and infrastructure and which this seer outlined with sweeping gestures over the sheets of paper spread across the sitting-room floor, speaking in a toneless voice which swept through the city with a running commentary on how it was performing at any specific time of the day, how and where all its crowds and traffic were flowing and what routes they took to what points of convergence in the early morning rush hour, and what exactly the drain on utilities would be – how all its vertical and horizontal circuitry was functioning when water and electricity followed in the wake of crowds converging for work or entertainment in various parts and times of the city while disgorging a flow of sewage, hydrocarbons and CO2 emissions from those same points, this savant holding in mind all the flows and shifts through the city’s streets and conduit, vast rhythms he could gauge to any hour of the day, any day of the week or any holiday, a phenomenal feat which had the urban planner at a loss to find some comparative image or simile – he talked about a 3D chess game and a multi-tiered symphony of people and environment – all vivid and suggestive but each one falling some way short of the city’s majestic, multi-harmonic sprawl – while all the time speaking to camera the seer himself was down on the floor behind him with his pencil and square, adding yet another precinct to the city’s expanse – a working-class suburban enclave with housing grouped around schools and shopping facilities, parking and leisure amenities, the concrete substratum of a fully realised community – while the city now stood, after fifteen years’ solid work but with no end yet in sight, as by far the biggest and most complex urban plan ever conceived by man or committee and which I could not help thinking, as I sipped my beer and watched, would, if he stuck at it and lived long enough, eclipse the whole fucking world, this map of a kingdom that existed nowhere on this earth but in his head, this masterpiece with its clueless overlord, a mad king who knew nothing of the real world but was nevertheless on such intimate terms with the infinite intricacies of his own mind that he needed nothing more than a rule and pencil to draw them forth and lay them on the paper, this city as a kind of neural maze, a cognitive map which would reach out, street by street, to cover the whole world and possibly for this reason or for some other I could not fathom, the programme filled me with a sour bloom of resentment the focus of which I could not clearly discern but which quickly had me feeling so foolish I was embarrassed to be alone with myself in the sitting room, feeling that someone invisible outside of myself was standing judge and jury over me, pointing a finger at me, saying

  have you nothing better for doing at this time of night than getting pissed off at the television

  seriously

  so I tipped back the beer and ran a final check on Mairead who was turned on her side, eyes open, the whites like crescent chips in the dark light, her whole body throbbing sluggishly beneath the duvet, warm when I laid my hand on her forehead to sweep her hair back and make sure she had a glass of water on the bed-stand, these little considerations carried out in the light spilling through th
e open door from the hallway, moistened her face once more with a baby wipe and then kissed her on the forehead as she said

  leave the hall light on and the door open a little

  which I did, her lying there in the half-light as I made my way back to our bedroom where I fell into a deep sleep which was unwarped by any dreams, seven or eight good hours and

  in the following days

  I settled into the task of being Mairead’s full-time carer but not before I had to ring in and take emergency sick leave from work, clearing it with my line manager, Fallon, who hemmed and hawed for a few moments before he came round eventually, as I knew he would, after reassuring him that we could reassign all those projects on my desk which were time-sensitive – a couple of site surveys, one map redraw and the terms of a safety cert which

  I discussed directly over the phone with the main contractor, a man named Hanley from North Mayo, Pullathomas to be exact, a man who was politically well connected and a blunt fucker who bristled with frustration when I spoke to him that morning, his heavy bulk gasping down the line towards me, not happy to hear that he would have to put his project back a couple of days while I sorted things out at home, listening to him for a few minutes as

  he began to moan and bitch about deadlines and budgets and tradesmen lined up outside the site waiting to start the next phase, grousing on like this for ten minutes before I cut across him and told him that the whole project was now coming under a total review because of new safety regulations which were being signed into law and which it now appeared might have a retroactive aspect to them so that all public contracts currently waiting to be signed off on would have to meet these new measures and it was all up in the air at the moment, all public works contracts anyway and

  that quietened the fucker

  as I knew it would because

  there’s nothing like the threat of new health and safety regulations to sicken a builder’s hole, more paperwork and form-filling, new work practices to be negotiated and insurance clauses to be sorted out and sitting at