Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  sitting here with my hands placed flat on the table in front of me or

  going through the rooms, up and down the hall, one moment to the next, fading and pulsing, overwhelmed in light one moment, shadow the next, visible as a flame in sunlight so that anyone who looks upon me would have to angle their gaze to see me clearly because

  within days

  I developed a sharp eye for every change in Mairead’s condition and what each signified, all the peaks and troughs of her moods speaking clearly to me so that whenever she lay back in the pillow with her mouth open I knew her to be momentarily becalmed in one of those shallow respites that punctuated the long periods of cramp twisting through her stomach, lying there luminous in the aftermath of such spasms, drawing febrile breath into the shallow depths of her lungs with her arms by her side as if she were laid out to be waked among a watching congregation of Agnes’s dolls and soft toys before she would eventually move and swing her shins out over the side of the bed to sit for another moment, bracing herself with both hands planted down beside her before propelling herself out the door and down the hall in a desperate lunge to the shower in which I had placed one of the plastic chairs from the garden so that she could sit with her head bowed, soaping her crotch and underarms beneath the warm cascade for ten minutes or so, the water pounding down on her as she sat there like a ruined princess before she would stand up, swaying in the steaming heat with her towel gathering around her so that I could carry her back to the bedroom to dry her and put her into fresh pyjamas, then angling her back under the sheets where she would lie breathless, every pulse trip-hammering through her body till it levelled out to where she could drift off to sleep once more, all this happening without any word passing between us, a job done in silence and not clouded with speech because I knew these lucid moments were so precious to her that she would not want to waste them in talk, and when I had her in bed I would lie in beside her, resting my hand on her, feeling her hip-bone poking through the flesh as she linked her arm in mine, the two of us lying there, arm in arm in the shaded room and drifting in this heated intimacy, I with nothing to give save the assurance that I was there beside her, nothing but my warm bulk and that silence which we gradually filled out together so that

  fuck me

  Mother of Jesus

  a picture looking up at me

  this picture in the local paper showing four men in suits standing in front of a new national school, all smiling at the camera and holding a length of ribbon between them, the one in the middle preparing to cut it with a shiny new scissors, their faces open to the camera in a broad expression of civic satisfaction, the man with the scissors looking especially pleased, standing with his chin up-tilted and his chest out

  Deputy John Francis Moylette

  or The Legislator as Halloran refers to him

  his presence so vivid now that the sight of him in this picture

  closes the walls around me, same as

  hearing his voice on the phone did that day in the office, the breathless rasp of a man under pressure, wheezing and puffing as I sat back in the chair and checked the time on my watch – ten past twelve – and braced myself because it’s never a good thing when an engineer gets a call from a politician in the middle of the day, you know well that two different world views are likely to clash and how ever it starts off there is only ever going to be one result and I knew straight off from his tone that this was going to be the case today also and that his patience was gone before he started, the way he launched straight into it with no hello or goodbye or any greeting whatsoever, just a torrent of words, beginning with

  Marcus, do you read the papers

  yes John, I read the Irish Times every day

  I’m not talking about the Irish Times, I’m talking about The Mayo News and the Western People, do you read them

  not always, not every week

  I thought as much, so I’m going to spell it out for you, paint you a picture so to speak – a picture should be a lot clearer to an engineer, clearer than words anyway since

  Moylette was cut from the same cloth as Halloran, the same ready way with populist appeal and gesture – the photo of him putting his hawk and trowel into the boot of his car when he drove to Dublin to take up his seat in Leinster House is often reproduced – but more belligerent and long winded, his phone calls to council offices especially dreaded because – bulked out as they always were with anecdotal pleading and exceptional cases – they could go on for anything up to an hour leaving the hearer worn down and likely to make all sorts of concessions just to be shut of him so that when the phone was hung up you were sometimes confused about what you may or may not have agreed to and

  are you with me Marcus

  I’m still here

  good, now, you may or may not have noticed but I’ve spent the last three years trying to build an electoral base in the south-west corner of this county, the largest and most far-flung constituency in the whole country – leaflets, clinics, church gate collections – the whole lot, anything to harvest a quota of first preferences in an area with no major urban centre, just a few scattered villages, an area which is, by and large covered with some of the widest bogs and the highest mountains in the whole province, an area populated in the main by black-faced sheep, none of whom, to the best of my knowledge has the vote, because if they did I would be sitting on a nice fat surplus, all those hoggets and rams and ewes voting for me, but that day isn’t today or tomorrow so till then I have to take to the highways and the byways of this county for funerals and festivals and football matches and god knows what else to get my name and face in the paper as often as possible so that I can be seen to be doing the type of work that benefits the community and is remembered by the electorate whenever the next election is called, so that when the good people of this constituency are standing alone in the privacy of the polling booth and they see the name of John Francis Moylette on their ballot paper they will hopefully remember that I’m the man whose face they saw in the paper at some launch or some opening or some social event or other, John Francis Moylette, the man who was there at those crucial moments and they’ll remember that and be moved to put a tick after my name so that I can be re-elected and continue to do good work for the people of this county and are you with me so far Marcus

  I’m still here John

  I said weakly, slumped at my desk, this torrent of words washing through me and knowing full well from his relentless tone what was coming and he knew that I knew because this was an old dance we were doing now, we both knew the moves and we both knew that he was just winding himself up to the full measure of his temper because what had passed up to now was only the preamble, the introduction to his major theme which he now took up, saying

  good, I’m glad I have your attention because this is where it gets a small bit awkward – I got a call from a mutual friend yesterday, Shamie Curran the building contractor, I gather you know him

  I know Shamie

  good, well Shamie expressed a large degree of dissatisfaction with you on account of what he claims is your unwarranted reluctance as an engineer to sign off on a public works project to which he is the sole contractor – namely the new national school in Derragarramh – is he right or is he pulling my leg and

  I sighed and tried to keep my voice level because even though I had been waiting for this phone call for the last couple of weeks nothing apparently, in all that waiting, had prepared me for the wash of fatigue it was now bringing with it, that warm surge of hopelessness which now coursed through my whole being as I leaned back in my chair and said

  you know well he’s right John – I refused to sign off on the foundation for sound engineering reasons, there’s a report outlining those same reasons which I’m pretty sure has made its way to your desk by now

  that may be so but I don’t have time to read every report that piles up on this desk – I wouldn’t see the outside of this office if I did – but the long and the short of it is that I gat
her you have some worries about the foundation

  no, not strictly the foundation but the concrete going into the foundation

  it’s concrete, what’s the problem with it – it’s not strong enough or what

  no, there’s nothing wrong with the concrete

  it’s strong enough

  it’s not that but

  now I saw he was trying to get me to say something which would undermine my position, namely admit that the concrete was defective and he continued with a honed edge to his voice

  I’m confused Marcus, either the concrete is strong enough or it’s not strong enough, what else can be wrong with it, I can’t see the difficulty

  the difficulty, as I’ve outlined in my report, is that the foundation is made up of three separate but interlocking rafts which exert all sorts of pressures on each other so as such they should all be poured from the same batch of concrete but, and this is where the problem lies, the on-site slump tests show that this was not the case – what we have in this case is three separate rafts from three separate pours of concrete, different aggregates, different composition ratios and

  what the hell does it matter so long as it sets and it’s strong enough – I’ve a bad feeling I’m wasting my time here Marcus, that I could be doing something a lot wiser and

  by now I had the school plans spread out on the desk in front of me so I could see from the drawings the size and orientation of the whole school building relative to the site and the main road which ran outside its front gate and also, within its pencilled walls, the classrooms and bathrooms opening onto a main corridor which ran inside the front door connecting the full length of the building to the staff room at its furthest end and the emergency exits at the other so that looking down at it from my god’s eye perspective with the roof peeled back, it was easy to see how desks and classes would be orientated in such a way as to have afternoon sunlight streaming in from the side windows on the bowed heads of the pupils as they worked at their sums or spellings till the bell went at two o’clock when they would pack up their bags before streaming out into the hallway, three classrooms opening out into the hallway, so that from this height, with a top-down view over them, it was easy to imagine their little heads bobbing around like a mass of footballs in a river current, all streaming into the hall, through the front door and out onto the forecourt beyond where the buses were safely parked in the recessed area outside the front gate and all things considered it truly was something to marvel at – how this schematic on white paper could translate so easily from an architect’s and engineer’s mind into a smoothly functioning public facility – this small rural national school which

  would draw together the children of four townlands and which, as it stood now on this sheet of A2, was by any measure, a credit to everyone involved in it, the planners and architects and whoever had handed down the guidelines from the Department of Education and even Moylette himself who had, no doubt, worked hard trying to convince all sides that this new school was in everyone’s best interest and that to relinquish their attachment to their own smaller but older and less efficient schools would enable their children to come together in that wider spirit of modern community which this school signified and then

  I remembered the concrete foundation beneath the whole structure and without conscious prompting on my part the engineer in me was already speaking to say that

  the problem comes from the fact that there are three different foundation slabs locked into each other, three different pours of concrete and the danger comes in the next hot or cold spell when they have to expand and contract which, because of their different compositions, they will do so at different speeds and different pressures, that’s where the difficulty lies so

  for the love of Jesus, Marcus, Moylette broke in, you’re a conscientious man and it does you credit but this is a national school we’re talking about here, not a fucking nuclear reactor, what’s the worst that can happen – the foundation expands and contracts and a few doors go askew on their hinges, cracks in the plaster and that’s about it – you should remember that Curran has bricklayers and plumbers and electricians lined up outside the gate to work on this so

  my voice cut across him, streaking ahead of my own wish to keep my tone reasonable and moderate, telling him bluntly that

  when that foundation begins to crack – as it surely will – doors hanging off their hinges will be the least of your problems because any building raised on those slabs will tear itself apart in three different directions whenever the temperature goes through a sudden change and as far as bricklayers and plasterers are concerned I have to say that I am out of sympathy with them as

  a long, sudden silence stretched out between us during which the phone warmed in my hand, becoming slick with sweat till the moment was broken from the other end, Moylette picking up the conversation once more in a tone hardly tempered with any consideration of what I had just outlined, saying

  I’ll tell you a story Marcus and after you’ve listened to it you can then weigh your conscience as an engineer against what I have to try and do to please people of this community, what I’m up against – are you with me

  I’m not against you John

  you have a funny way of showing it – this story begins two years ago when I lost a very public battle with the Department of Education to keep three small national schools open in the heart of my constituency, an issue which affected a significant section of my core vote, men and women I had to stand in front of and tell that their schools were to be closed down, their boards of management dissolved and that from now on those of them with kids would have to drive four or five miles to school each morning – that was the story I needed them to forget so that they could focus on the fact that they now had a shiny new school at the centre of the parish with three new teachers, recreation rooms, basketball courts, cloakrooms, the whole lot – this was the promise I sold them in exchange for them having lost their little schools, getting them to sit down with various mediation services so that I could get the members of the disbanded boards of management to agree to the new school with a new amalgamated governing body and finally, when I have all this in place – months and months of work, meetings and presentations and calling in favours from all over the place and the whole thing ready to go, what happens – I get a call from Curran telling me that two months on he is still waiting for a clearance cert for the completed foundation, that he has block-layers and plasterers lined up outside the gate ready to work and

  I ran those slump tests myself and

  who the hell runs on-site slump tests, Moylette roared, his patience finally exhausted as

  any engineer who sees two concrete trucks with different markings coming onto a site, that’s who runs slump tests so

  don’t talk to me about concrete

  Moylette cut in

  I served my time with concrete, you know that well and just so you have no doubts, I still have my hawk and trowel and spirit level in the boot of the car in case the day comes when the returning officer gets up on the podium and announces to the world that the people of this constituency have rejected me – when that day comes I won’t have to walk far to pick up my tools and start again so don’t talk to me about concrete or mortar and

  John, it’s easy to come on the phone here and

  that’s where you’re wrong Marcus, it’s not easy, it’s not a bit easy, I have better things for doing with my time than pestering you or anyone else with this sort of thing but if it has to be done I’ll do it and while I have you I’m going to paint another picture, something that will be clear to an engineer like you, this is how I see it – about eighteen months from now I see myself wearing my best suit and my sunniest smile and I’m standing between a few other local dignitaries holding a big shiny scissors to cut the ribbon which opens the lovely new school behind me, I’m there with a big smile on my face for the camera, shaking hands with everyone around me and speaking to mothers and fathers so that in future, eve
ry time they come to pick up little Chloe or Keelin they’ll pause for a moment and remember me, thinking to themselves

  fair play to Moylette, he sorted it out, he was as good as his word because

  mark my words, that is the only way this whole thing is going to pan out and the sooner you set aside your engineer’s scruples and put your name to the clearance cert the sooner we can get on with it and

  no engineer can sign off on

  fuck engineers, Moylette roared, his temper now routed

  engineers don’t make the world, you should know that more than anyone, politics and politicians make the world and I’m telling you now I do not give one fuck whose name appears on that cert but

  that’s the difference between you and me John

  what difference

  the difference between a politician and an engineer, your decisions have only to hold up for four or five years – one electoral cycle and you are acclaimed a hero – but my decisions need a longer lifespan than that or my reputation is in shreds so

  my temper was burning away now and I was afraid I was going to lose the head and start fucking him down the phone so I just closed my eyes and sat back in the chair, reigning in my horses a bit and lowering my voice to thank him for calling and telling him that his concerns were noted, goodbye and we’ll talk again, before

  I put the phone down with a bad, sour feeling simmering in the bottom of my belly because I knew full well what was happening, I could physically feel it, the clamping pressure with that thickening of the air which always comes as

  the squeeze

  the fucking squeeze

  with everything tightening around me, the air and light con- tracting between the walls, except this time there was something choking about the way it stiffened around me in that fucking bunker of an office, a place I could never stick for more than a couple of hours at a stretch before it drove me out into the bright corridor which runs the length of the building, as it did when I left the phone down that day, surged from my desk, driven by a fit of temper and this swelling pressure closing around me, out into the corridor and down the stairs where I pushed through the revolving doors into the grey light of a March afternoon to stand on the sidewalk with a few other office workers who were having an afternoon smoke, their backs to the wall when I joined them, glad of the fresh air and the cold way it went down into my chest with that wet smell in the air after a day’s rain, trying to calm down and put some order on my thoughts, this