Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

I let him go on in this vein for a couple of minutes or so, repeating himself and letting him run the story on towards the assurance that he could handle it himself, which was what I wanted to hear from him, this being one of the first jobs over which he was the site engineer, but I knew to listen to him that any hope of bringing the project in under time and budget was now likely to come a cropper, his frustration and sense of injustice mounting with him ranting on for another few minutes while I sat there listening, hoping he would finally hear my silence through his frustration and realise that I was not happy with the situation and sure enough his voice begin to fray and take on that burred edge of anxiety which threatened to tip over into self-pity as he blurted

there’s not much more I can do

no one is blaming you Andy

if I could cast the fucking things myself I would

calm down

I’ve only the one pair of hands, you can count them yourself so

I cut him off then for fear this running temper of his might spill over completely and then we would have a different sort of crisis on our hands so I said

look, get it sorted out as soon as you can and call me when those slabs are unloaded, I don’t want another politician coming on the phone and blindsiding me with stuff I should know and

someone’s been on the phone

I had a call from Halloran this morning

the Councillor

yes, it was him who told me about this delay — I shouldn’t have to hear it from him or

how did he know about it

you must have spoken to him yesterday

I didn’t speak to anyone

it was one of the lads on the Stop/Go signs, talked to a man who wound down the window and asked a load of questions, sometime in the afternoon, around three o’clock and

there was a long, thickening silence on the other end and I could feel Keville’s rage fizzing as he listened because

that’s how I heard about it — so be careful who you talk to and keep me abreast of things and

I hung up and the office contracted around me, grey light swel- ling up to the ceiling and the vacant hollow in my belly reminding me that I had set out that morning without any breakfast, so I checked for money in my pocket — two twenties and some loose change — before I walked out of the building and across the grassy mall towards the café deli on the street corner where I bought a chicken sandwich and a large cup of strong coffee which I took back to a bench under a large maple tree, a cool enough spot for the time of year but bearable for the length of time it would take to eat the sandwich and drink the coffee, so I sat down after I wiped the seat, finding myself facing into the low, watery sun over the columned building across the street in front of which stood a handful of people, wigged and gowned in close consultation among themselves, leaning towards each other for a long moment before they finally broke apart, two of them turned back into the building and the other two walked up the street and I remembered the court was sitting and that this building with its costumed players was the very source of Agnes’s work which had caused me so much upheaval the night before and which, till then, I had not given a thought, apparently having done a good job overnight of pushing the whole thing to the back of my mind, but now, sitting there the whole evening came back to me in a red surge, all those anguished feelings returning in paler versions of themselves to swing through me there on the bench so that for a loose, churning moment

I did not know how to react, whether to stay seething on the bench or to enter the courthouse with some ludicrous idea of holding someone to account for what I had experienced the night before, an idea which almost raised me to my feet and carried me forward on a surge of anger, already seeing myself plunging through the swing doors of the court and into the inner chamber where I would pull some defendant from the dock or judge from the bench — I would not be choosy — and give him a battering there on the floor of the court

and

and

I whiled away a few minutes with this pleasing fantasy, honing its climactic moments to an escalating scene of chaos and outrage which spilled out of the chamber and into the street, a scene which, for all its alluring comedy, left me with little proper idea of how it might resolve, what it all meant or what good it would do me, just a few more minutes sitting there savouring its dismal pleasure till it was clear then that the images of the previous night were going to vex me for the rest of the day leaving little hope that I would be able to immerse myself fully in the work which lay on my desk, but nevertheless so intense was my desire to bury those memories and the fears they drew with them that I drained off the last of the coffee and returned to the office in a purposeful mood where, for the next few hours, I ploughed grimly through the jobs lined up on my desk — settled the issue with the procurements office, despatched a two-man crew to open the penstock in Kilasser and agreed the price of granite from a quarry in Ardrahan, sixty miles away, by faxing them a cheaper quote for the same stone quarried on the other side of the world in South China then shipped to Turkey for polishing before it ended up in West Mayo at two-thirds the price — jobs I ploughed through before late afternoon when

Casey, a road engineer put his head around the door, looking for advice on how to deal with a difficult residents’ association that would not see sense and

I can’t get them to budge, he said, three meetings with them and they won’t listen to reason or

what’s the problem exactly

the problem is this mile of road running through the village, these people want a fine chip surface which is totally unsuitable in a residential area with a school and a pub in the middle of it and

you outlined the engineering reasons against it

of course I did, the engineering reasons and the safety reasons — the surface they want has a breaking distance nearly twice that of the coarse chip surface and it’s dangerous in a built-up area, plus you won’t be able to keep it gritted when the frost comes

not to mention surface water

and surface water — the least drop of rain and you’ll have cars aquaplaning all over the place

I know those people — they haven’t a good word to say about each other but when it concerns the village they pull together and

of course Halloran is egging them on

I’ll bet he is — that village can have their road surfaced with polished glass as far as he’s concerned, Halloran is harvesting fifty or sixty votes along that road

that makes sense, I can understand him keeping them sweet but you’ll never guess why they want this particular surface

why

the fucking tidy towns competition — the smooth road surface looks a lot nicer that the normal coarse chip finish which should go on it — when it’s lined and striped and with cats-eyes running along the sides and middle it will be worth ten extra points in the tidy towns competition and

ok, I said, now wanting to draw a line under the discussion, here’s what you do — call one more meeting with the association and hand each board member a letter which repeats the points you’ve made and tell them that this dated letter is going on file and

it’s going to take more than a filed letter

let me finish, give them a moment to think about it and if that doesn’t shift them tell them how you see this panning out — tell them that sometime in the near future, this year or the next — they will be presented with an accident report drawn up by the Gardaí or the NRA which lays the blame for the collision at the feet of whoever it was decided to lay that surface on a straight road going through a village with an 80km speed-limit and