Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

yes I was

hoping that the subject would be buried quickly once and for all

I was frightened, both for me and for her, are you saying I overreacted

no, but I was surprised you reacted as you did — what was it exactly that got you so upset

there was blood

yes, it’s different to oils, a big swerve away from her previous work, but I still find it odd that you could be so shocked by it

I would have thought it would be shocking not to be shocked by it — when did we become so blasé about such things — and she was so poorly as a child

she wasn’t poorly, she was a bit anemic, low in iron so she had to take a supplement which stained her teeth — did you notice how she had them polished tonight, it gave her that shine –

I wasn’t looking at her teeth — all that blood — I had an image of her sitting on the side of a bed with a syringe in her arm, that’s the picture that came to me

for god’s sake Marcus, you’ve no worries about her

I’m her father, it’s my job to worry, do you know how she harvested it

harvested it — you’d swear we were talking about one of her organs

you have a better word

no, but if she said she was careful then I believe her — look, you need have no worries about a woman who wears a coat like that, they are not likely to put themselves in harm’s way

that’s nonsense

no it’s not, so now

I worried that some new sensitivity to shock and fear had opened up in me, some defect or weakness that might expose me to some unanticipated shame with which I would have no ability to cope, something that would have to be met with definite refutation if the grinding anguish which now churned inside me were to be prevented from growing into something more corrosive and

not to worry, Mairead continued, it was only blood, it could have been a lot worse

how could it have been worse

you could have walked into the gallery and found her standing naked

why would she be naked

oh you know, some of these performance artists are pretty out there, she could have been cuddling a pig

a pig

yes, or naked and peeing into a

ok Mairead, I get the picture

I groaned as she

drove on through the wet night, passing through those small towns and villages which slept with their empty streets under a sodium shroud, moving on into the narrow bog roads that were unlit but that had a precarious sense of being raised over the sea of heather and scutch grass stretching out on both sides, driving on through the ragged moonlight in which we seemed to be the only car on the road, Mairead taking it easy because

I’ve never driven these roads at night

she said, her gaze focused as she kept a steady speed into the bends and sudden turns which

you never realise how narrow they are till you have to drive them at night, so narrow and twisty

there’s no rush, just take your time

I thought you engineers would have straightened all these roads during the boom years

we were told we had better things for doing with our money — most of the boom money went into bypassing or linking major urban centres — there wasn’t a whole lot spent on bog roads, certainly not a few miles of blue road like this

blue road

yes

what does blue road mean

blue road means that it is not green road

blue road and green road

yes

let me guess, blue and green politics

that’s it

and this road got ignored

it did

because green was in power

yes

because, let me guess again — the ballot boxes in this townland keep coughing up blue votes

that’s right

and as long as they do these roads will stay narrow and windy and the pot-holes will deepen

certainly not much will be spent on straightening them out — slow down here, this is a temporary surface stretch, these chippings could slide out from under you on a bend like this and

she drove on, keeping a steady speed in the middle of the road, through more bogland stretching away into the darkness, the lights of scattered homesteads winking in the level distance like ships out to sea, miles of bog before stone walls and sod fences began to rise on both sides of the road to close in around the car and

that’s odd, she said

what’s odd

we just passed a single street light in the corner of that field, one street light all on its own in the middle of nowhere and

I know, did you see what was under the streetlight in the corner of that field

a few cows

there was a half ring feeder

so

so why would you need a street-light over a half ring feeder

how would I know

think about it

it’s the light

yes, shining on

feeding cattle

exactly

so someone got a streetlight put in the corner of his field so he can see his way at night to feed them, is that right

yes, that light has been there for years, one engineer tried to get rid of it but word came down from on high that the light was to stay where it was

so now we’re stuck with it

we are

that’s ridiculous

it’s not as ridiculous as trying to remove it now, when our engineer tried to do that he was told fairly sharpish that he could forget about making a budget submission the following year if he moved it

a friggin streetlight, Mairead murmured, in the middle of nowhere

yes, a streetlight and

we finally arrived home just as it was coming up to one o’clock in the morning and when we got inside Mairead went straight to bed as she had to be up for her first class at nine but I stayed up for another forty minutes, took a bottle of beer from the fridge and turned on the telly to watch one last news bulletin before turning in for the night, Sky News inevitably, from which I learned that avian flu was threatening to cross the species barrier in Southeast Asia and that the surge of troops in Iraq was likely to continue for the rest of the year, while the search for a serial killer was now underway in some city after the bodies of two prostitutes had been discovered on waste ground — the same old stories at that hour of the night but still somehow new, after which I turned off the television and set aside the urge to check my email and see if Darragh had dropped me a line, because I knew that if I sat down to the computer so late at night I was likely to get swept away for another hour or so on other news sites or on Amazon or something, sliding sideways into one search after another and all of a sudden it would be three in the morning and I’d have wasted two hours better spent asleep, for which I would have to pay the following day in sluggishness and fatigue, so I checked that my keys were on the stand inside the front door and switched off the lights in the hall and the bathroom before turning into bed behind Mairead with my arm around her and her arse tucked into my belly, drifting off on the warmth of her body, asleep within moments, deep and untroubled and so completely free of dreams that

I got to work shortly after eight o’clock the following morning feeling fresh and sharp, arriving in the council offices just as the two girls at reception, Miriam and Eimear were sorting through the morning mail and pulling on their headsets to answer the phones and there was already a few people in the foyer filling out motor tax forms, trying to get ahead of the queue which would form in half an hour when the counter opened, so I waved to the girls and

took the stairs up to my office at the end of the hall, the small narrow office with its twelve-foot-high ceilings, where I screwed open the blinds on the window which is high up on the wall behind my desk so that light pours down on me from a great height, often giving me the feeling that I am trapped at the bottom of a well and forever unable to see the sky save for this lighted sliver above, an impression which never fails to colour my mood every morning I step into this room so, with my