was there not something I could get her
did she want anything to eat
I could put something on for her
an omelette or a bowl of soup
tea
anything
this ceaseless clucking around her till it became obvious, even to myself that her welfare was not the point of it at all but that it was all symptomatic of my own need to reassure myself that I was doing a good job, proving myself to be a good husband and carer, a man who was not so stale or far gone in his most calcified habits that he could not find something new within himself, namely these caring skills and soothing gestures which were, till this, undreamt of and unlikely less than a month ago but now flowering to such light and soothing touches that I had begun to move through the house like a ghost myself, all misted light and billowing gauze, leached of so much colour and muscle I could barely leave the impress of a finger on my wife, but not
it would seem
exempt from physical pain myself as the heartburn in my chest flared up there on the sunlit pavement and I had to take another of those lozenges to ease the sour pain when
this is all coming back to me with
this tightness drawing together bone and sinew across my chest – that cup of coffee, which was no doubt good but strong, just the sort to give you the jitters I had now, twitchy like some sort of gritty interference running across my nerves which propelled me down the street and across the intersection at the bottom where I’d left the car, sat into her and threw the newspapers into the back seat and drawing the seatbelt across my chest I felt the bulk of the prescription package in my jacket pocket so I pulled it out and left it onto the passenger seat before starting her up and pulling out into the street and straight away
I forgot myself
forgot myself completely in a
long stretch of pure absent-mindedness which lasted as long as it took to drive from one side of the town to the other, all the time manoeuvring carefully in slow traffic, stopping to let pedestrians cross and other cars move out into the street, moving up and down through the gears, so many complex and thoughtless manoeuvres but somehow arriving safely on the other side of town with no memory whatsoever of having passed slowly through the streets, another of those long, vacant intervals during which the soul goes walkabout, comes unmoored and drifts away on its own when
I came to and remembered myself
on the other side of the town to find that I had decided to turn right at the top of the hill and take the Rosbeg road for home, that stretch of road called the golden mile which turns around by the coast with the sea on the right hand side and where, at high tide it comes in from a long way out over sand into the shallow quays, the tide full in at this hour while the burning in my chest had not been eased one bit by those lozenges I’d taken because if anything it seemed to have got worse, tightened in such a way as to draw all my energy towards it and
Mother of Jesus
I drove around the coast road, passing those large mansions on the left side of the road which belonged to lawyers and doctors and business folk, those houses with oversized windows which look out over the sea and reflect the rhythms of the light and the glare of the sun back onto the road so that it seems as if the sea is on both sides of the road and that you are journeying through some place privileged with an overabundance of light before the road turned a corner and the trees on both sides closed in over the car and the light pushed back to admit just that proper degree of darkness in which things are seen in their true colour and shadow – stone walls looming over the road on both sides and the trees arching overhead with the sun winking down through the leaves, a mile, two miles before it turned out into the fullness of the sun once more for another mile or so, leading into an open bend where I slowed down to take the right hand turn at the T-junction, where the road broadens out to a wide corner with
the Imperial Hotel standing there on the left behind its high, blistered walls, filthy and eyeless in its broken grounds, derelict for two decades now inside those scrolled iron gates, a sorry sight, the more so because no one knows properly how or why it came to such dilapidation at the precise moment when its tennis courts and swimming pool made it the most glamorous spot in the whole region, my mother remembering especially the ballroom with its maple floor and how she had danced there so many times, recalling that
you could just float across it and we did, your father and I, several times when we were courting and the crowds that used come there in those days, they’d come from all over and
that was before the place was suddenly closed back in the eighties, all the staff let go and the electricity cut after Easter eighty-three or eighty-four, the blinds closed, the curtains pulled, and the scroll gates padlocked, the whole place shut down with no one knowing the reason why or no one getting any explanation which of course led to lots of speculation and stories – there were debts, the numbers were not coming anymore, there was a waster of a son in London who had made off with the title deeds and so on and so on, either way the owners were never seen again so the hotel just sat there and settled
block by block
room by room
into its own gathering dilapidation with paint peeling and dust gathering throughout its rooms and weeds breaking up through the hard surface of the tennis courts, and the tarmac in the car park also coming up in blistering slabs as the timber fence at the back began to disintegrate which gave access to all the kids from around who came to explore its rooms and corridors and take the opportunity to peg stones up at the small windows, knocking them out one by one as the cattle from the neighbouring fields began to drift through the gaps in the fence where the slats had rotted away completely to wander through the grounds, black and red Angus cows with their calves in tow, loping quietly through the gardens and along by the swimming pool on summer’s evenings, lying down on the tiled patio beside plaster balustrades which were now green with the moss of neglect until the owner of the herd – a man by the name of Fallon – whose grazing land ran from the shoreline to the back of the hotel – raised up the sloping floor of the swimming pool with a couple of tons of hard-core and gravel and put in a metal barrier at the deep end from where, when winter set in, he would feed the cattle each evening, hay and silage tipped in over the edge, this herd of cattle feeding at one end of a tiled swimming pool, after which they would move on with their heads dipped till they found their way to the broken emergency exit with its door swung open which allowed them enter the ballroom to the left side of the stage, this herd of cattle coming through in single file to find themselves in the open expanse of the maple dance floor, between walls hung with satin drapes now black with rot and the mirror ball on its chain over the centre of the floor, the finest dance hall in West Mayo full of Angus cattle, and there they would lie down and close their eyes, chewing the cud until they were turned out in the morning and this had been going on for so long now that Fallon had acquired some sort of squatter’s rights to the place and was now the principal in the ongoing court-case that had yet to decide the fate of the hotel which on days like this, with the sun slanting through its broken windows and across its balustrades, always
appeared to me like the sacked palace of some tyrant, some ruthless overlord of a Caribbean island kingdom which was favoured with a temperate climate and substantial mineral wealth but which was nonetheless dogged by civil incompetence and corruption, by spiralling inflation rates and a despicable human rights record, the whole place evocative of some extraordinary dispensation which must have reigned in these parts without us ever recognising it or seeing it for what it really was before the broader drama of the world’s distant circumstances swept it aside for something else so that now it stood
eyeless and decrepit, all its arches and colonnades peeling away to reveal the grey concrete underneath, the place rotting and crumbling away to some patient schedule of its own, all its rooms and recesses, all its stairs and corridors quietly swarming with every type of rot and
decay and dilapidation, every possible variant on the wider creep of collapse which was now drawing it apart block by block, lath by lath, tile by tile, the whole place having gathered to itself the attentiveness of very possible ruin, that which is native to concrete and that which is native to timber and that which is native to metal, each of them in their own way and at their own pace gradually levelling the whole structure to the ground even as it
got smaller and smaller in my rear-view mirror, disappearing completely as
I rounded the bend for home at Belclare, following the sea road once more along the coast, slowing down a little, no hurry now that I was nearly there so that my gaze settled on those bright pockets of glare which winked and shifted in a dappled morph on the water’s surface, a mosaic of light and texture from the tide mark all the way across what at this point is the narrowest span of Clew Bay with all its islands crowded so close to the shoreline, the sight of which always brought to mind one of those facts I still remember from my Inter Cert Geography all those years ago – that detail about how
this whole area is a glaciated valley dating back to the pre-Cambrian era, that time in the world’s youth when the light was clearer and this whole region lay under a glacier six miles deep which scoured the land east to west, depositing drumlins of sand and gravel along the length of this bay, these little egg-shaped island humps in the water which taper off in whatever direction the glacier was moving, a piece of knowledge from my early teens still lodged in my head thirty-five years later when no doubt other, more valuable things, have long been forgotten and
I slowed down because
I needed to pull into the side of the road for a minute, into that layby near the Deerpark which the council have used for years to dump gravel and hard-core for road surfacing because
now I remember
I remember this pain
fucking Jesus
this pain in my chest spreading through my arms and down the backs of my legs, causing me to brace both hands on the steering wheel and close my eyes for a moment, as if either of these reactions would drive it away, pulling into the lay-by and parking between two mounds of gravel, knocking her out of gear but leaving the engine running because this pain, which was now clawing its way through me, would surely pass in a minute and then I would be on my way home to Mairead who by now would be starting to worry about me as
the pain worsened
clamping across my chest so
I wound down the window to let a gust of fresh air in and opened my shirt, pulled open the collar, a few buttons, to get some cold air on my chest, that might do the trick, ease the pain a little because it was seriously fucking bad now, rooted like a black sun in my chest from where it flowed out to the furthest parts of me, down the hands and feet and into the small of my back, like some electric foliage firing its way through me, wrapping itself around my whole nervous system and choking me right up to the top of my skull with steel claws, my breath rising in jagged heaves from my chest with my body rigid in the seat as
I caught sight of the clock in the dash and saw that it was coming up to one o’clock
the one o’clock news, so I
reached out and turned on the radio and sure enough the last ads were leading into the time signal for the bulletin – the pips – and something frantic in me scrambled to focus on them as though they were solid things to which I might hang onto with both hands and steady myself, a hopeless idea even as I formed it but in desperation seemed to be my only option – setting the time-signal pips against this savage pain in my chest and
Jesus, this fucking pain
this world of pain as
my body burned, head to toe with a molten current which flared in the smallest molecule of my being, pain like nothing I had ever felt before, chest and arms engulfed and my vision warped in blue depths of electrical waves as the light darkened and
I remember thinking in panicked despair that
I’ll just hang on to the pips and then the news headlines will come on so I’ll listen to them for a few minutes, that’s all I have to do, just listen to the newsreader tell me what’s happening in the wider world which lies outside this pain in my chest, tell me the world is filled with strikes and pay disputes … that economic indicators continue to fall all over the place … that there are road deaths and stabbings … that there are car bombings in Baghdad and stalled offensives in Helmand … that a child is missing or that a body has been found … that accident and emergency wards are inundated and that patients are lying on trolleys in hospital corridors … that the polls indicate … that the courts have recognised and warrants have been issued … that there are disputed election results but that someone has already declared themselves president for life … that legislation has finally been passed or has been referred to the supreme court … that the whole warp and weft of the world is ongoing, circumstances rising up and falling down
rising up and falling down because
if I knew that these things were still happening, still ongoing, how ever awful or distant they may be, then I would be happy to know that the world was about its proper business and that I, as a citizen and engineer was still part of it all, and that no matter how far away these things may be I would still have some stake in them simply by dint of drawing breath and raising a pulse and hearing about it on this car radio, I would have an involvement in these affairs no matter how tenuous or tangential because that was part of my circumstance as a man who took these things seriously
pain or no pain
fucking Jesus
so that it was essential now that I pay attention, pay attention to kill this fire in my chest and give myself over to whatever I was now going to hear when sure enough, thank Christ
I heard the pips
pip, pip, pip
the time signal for the one o’clock news pulsing across the air- waves, calling the whole nation to attention, the time signal followed by the fanfare theme music just as the pain embedded itself deeper through my chest, burning across every rhythm which upheld my body, searing through every pulse which measured me, smudging them under a scalding red tide which scorched within me to drive my shoe deep into the foot-well, slamming hard on the accelerator so that the engine screamed out over the radio and I strained to hear the newscaster greet the nation with
good afternoon, this is Friday, March the 21st, here are the headlines, as
I was thrust up out of myself on a wash of pain, a spar breaking in my chest, crying out as my head was thrown back against the seat, mouth agape and my spine rigid to slam my shoe down into the foot-well once more, ramming the accelerator to the floor again and now the car was screaming over a hundred thousand revs, a throaty roar with a metallic whine at its centre, so loud it would surely draw someone’s attention, some man or woman out walking the road would hear it and come to the car where they would see me with my head thrown back and my mouth open, my hand reaching across towards Mairead’s prescription in the passenger seat, clawing towards that package which seemed to lie at such an infinite distance from me with pain lacing through my chest as if some essential structural component, some load-bearing lintel, had come asunder in my chest and I was engulfed in pain to hear again
Friday, March 21st
the day on which my wife was widowed and my two children lost their father, the day my name was unhinged from the man who owned it, such a clear and detailed memory of my own death at the precise moment I said to myself through blinding pain
I’ll just listen to these news headlines when
at that precise moment
the vast harmonic of my whole being was undone and I came apart in sheets and waves, torrential and ever falling, my grip on all those markers which gathered and held me to this world completely gone as the light around me blackened and for a split moment I saw the world in negative as all its colours bled to a narrow palette of black and grey with a complex melding of all shapes and outlines into each other, the mountains and sea converging onto
the windscreen in front of me and
somewhere above the earth the sun failed
burned out from within, exhausted now and nothing but a massive cinder drifting through the chasm of space, collapsing in on its own warm core before that too collapsed on itself so that all light was now residual, ashen and dragging its own darkness down the void as all around me every colour waned to its specific darkness, all things slackening and run down while
time itself began to contract so tightly
it would surely freeze at any moment and
any moment now, there will be no now and
there may be these things but
none of these things
will be now
to see myself
lying in that car, stretched out behind the steering wheel with my body locked in its final throes, my left arm thrown across the passenger seat, clutching Mairead’s prescription in my hand, my whole upper body twisted towards it with
my foot rammed on the accelerator and the engine gunned to the last, the car screaming at a hundred thousand revs, screaming
this is how an engineer loses himself
no accuracy anymore, all my angles tilted to infinity
finally unbound from myself into
a vast oblivion and
what was needed at this moment was not prayer or song but one final moment of desperate strength-gathering so that I might utter some bawling, annihilating curse, some anathema drawn up from the depths of the world’s being where all inverse prayers are rooted in the first gasp of the world’s existence, the first twitch of the void, something I could draw from these depths and lay on the world only because
man and boy, father and son, husband and engineer
I have known it to be a sacred and beautiful place, hallowed by human endeavour and energies, crossed with love and the continual weave of human circumstance, and since
this is my wit’s end
my post mortem aria
Solar Bones Page 24
