Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

Casey’s face opened in a broad smile

shift responsibility onto them

exactly, they won’t be half as anxious to press for that surface if they think there’s a possibility of their name being brought into adverse legal proceedings

it would give them something to think about right enough

and the letter puts you in the clear should there be an accident

that might do it all right, Casey said, opening the door and nodding his head as if he could see the problem solved already, I’ll give it a try anyway, thanks Marcus

no bother, let me know how you get on

I will, mind yourself

and he pulled the door and was gone, leaving me to savour the assurance that I had done a decent job of playing the older, wiser head, passing on the tricks of the trade, a good feeling that held till the end of the day when I dropped a load of invoices into the accounts department across the hall on my way out onto the mall where

a few walkers were crossing the grass and two young lads in school uniforms were kicking a ball to each other, the whole evening having that end of winter feel to it without it being properly spring and for some reason I decided to take a quick spin up to Keeva to see how the bridge site was going, it was a nice drive and it would be no harm to have a look at it, bring myself up to speed on how things stood, so I sat into the car and turned on the radio, tuning into

hearing it now

Midwest Radio

the lonesome lilt of country music coming across the airwaves, something odd and misplaced about the teary melodies and lyrics swirling around the kitchen at this time of day, the mood of the song better suited to late at night when darkness and that lonesome distance proper to country music takes hold but of course

it’s me and not the music that’s misplaced, being so seldom at home on a weekday like this, it’s difficult to say what’s normally played at this time while

sitting at the table and

letting the song wash through me like a steady tide from a world of manageable heartache, a world where bad feelings come with melody and are capable of being rendered down into verse, bridge and chorus, which can be sung away to your heart’s content with that just measure of regret which allows you to feel that, for all your loneliness, you are still part of the wider human drama and that this is a genuine kinship, more valuable and heartfelt than hearing the news or reading the paper, listening to

Hank or Waylon or George and

knowing that we are all part of the world’s heartache, its loss and disappointment mapped out in the songs of

Hank and Waylon and George so

it was shortly after half four when I got into the car and drove to Keeva, the evening closing in and the distant hills beneath the clouds drawing near in the rain which began to fall, steady at first for the first couple of miles, but pelting down in great blue swathes by the time I arrived at the bridge, the clock in the dash telling me that it was ten to five, twenty minutes past knocking-off time and sure enough the men had tidied up and gone home, which was a good thing as I preferred to inspect the site on my own, so I pulled over to the side of the road, just outside the bollards and caution tape that cordoned off the bridge site and rolled down the window to have a look as it was now too wet to step out and walk around, the rain drumming down on the roof of the car and the wipers swinging across the windscreen, but I could see enough to know that the whole project was back on track as Keville had promised, with the concrete slabs now set in place, laid across the span between the piers, resting on the steel beams, all the structural work completed so that if the weather held, it would take less than two weeks to finish it properly, pave and face it and surface the approach roads from both sides, two weeks all going well, the whole thing completed for the bank holiday weekend and Halloran and Lavelle happy and not ringing me up and annoying my hole and just as I was thinking this

I saw a shape coming towards me through the rain, a yellow blur at first across the windscreen before it tightened into a man in oilskins and wellingtons with the rain hopping off him, the last thing I wanted to see at that time of day but nevertheless, I wound down the window and he put his hand on the roof and leaned in with the raw face of a man used to being out in all sorts of weather, now looming in the window towards me to say

that’s wet

that is wet

it had to come sometime

what has you out in it

I saw the car, I knew it was you

you don’t miss a thing

no, not a thing

the forecast isn’t great, there’ll be no let-up till the middle of next week

isn’t that a bastard he says, with the rain still running off him

so long as we get it now and not in summertime

it’s a bit early to say that

I suppose

and with that my patience was at an end so I thought it was time to cut to the chase and put it up to him

you didn’t come over here in this rain to talk to me about the weather

you noticed that

I’d notice less

I’ll bet

what’s on your mind

I was thinking

what were you thinking

I was just thinking that you nearly have the bridge finished, another week or two and you’ll be out of it and

it’s going well all right, what’s your interest in it

I was just thinking that all that stone from the old bridge, you’re going to have to dump it somewhere

I suppose

well, it would save you time and money if you were to tip it there in the bottom of that field, it’s only across from the site and you could just pull in and leave it inside the gate and

I knew straight away what was on his mind, cut granite at one- fifty a ton, a couple of loads of it tipped into his field would be a tidy asset and

you’d make sure it wouldn’t go to waste

I was only thinking like

you were

and him grinning in at me now, knowing full well that his offer was indeed to our advantage but that it would also be a considerable boost to himself, fifty to sixty tons of cut granite tipped into his field so that he could be working away with it however he pleased or sell it on at a tidy profit, both of us knowing that it would be a lot cheaper to tip it on his land less than fifty yards from where it now lay, instead of loading it up and hauling it the twenty miles to the landfill site the far side of Castlebar, but still, I was not willing to give in, something about his naked opportunism had riled me, some part of me bristling so that I knew straight off that I would not relent today, not this evening at any rate, which was not to say that I wouldn’t sometime in the future because I knew that what he’d said made sense, but even still, this was one of the things that sickened me about this job — every cunt wanting something — and even if I could make the whole thing legitimately difficult for him, citing all sorts of insurance clauses about vehicles under public contract entering on private land and all those by-laws covering fly dumping, I just finished up saying

leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do

sound he said, and smacked the roof of the car as if the matter was settled

how is your neighbour, I didn’t spot him when I pulled up

Thomas

Thomas, the curtains were drawn

you wouldn’t know with that man, he mightn’t have surfaced yet, he keeps his own hours

is he still dancing

he is, he’ll be in Digger Jay’s tonight

no sign of him bringing a woman into the house

no

he’ll do nothing foolish, the same Thomas

you can be sure of that, I’ll let you go

we’ll talk again

sound

mind yourself

and he headed off, not a bother on him, the rain still pissing down as he faded away in the rearview mirror, the yellow oilskin becoming a smudge of light as I turned the car and headed back the way I’d come, the road taking me past his house, which was all cluttered up outside with sand and blocks, and a mixer with a shovel leaning against it and I saw that he was putting an extension onto the left gable, a substantial addition which was already tiled and plastered, the scaffolding still up and the blue tape on the window frames while off to one side a large pile of topsoil showed where he had dug into the slope behind the house to find space for the extension so that now there was a low, sheer-faced ledge where the slope ended sharply and it was easy now to see what he planned to do with the stone — he’d use it to face off that bit of a ledge so that the soil wouldn’t subside onto the house if it took water, the heavy stone would buttress the slope all the way around the back of the house and whatever was left over could be used to landscape the garden that fell away from the front to the road and I could see what was in his head now, how