Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

Take me Back to Mayo

rowdy well-wishers caught up in a dizzy moment of victory who would repeat the celebration a couple of weeks later when the 21st Dáil assembled and he, wearing a white suit and a polka-dot tie in the manner of a lounge singer, would be shouldered across the threshold of Leinster House by the same scrum of party workers, well wishers and volunteers, but not before he took a moment to remind the assembled media of the prophet who said

the Messiah would come out of the west

an incident which, when it found its way back across the country to our constituency would cause my father to mutter

there will be telling on this yet

which was true because over time it would come to light that a whole new generation of deputies would deduce from the spectacular nature of this victory with all its biblical swell and destructiveness, that the result was surely a temporal extension of God’s will, certainly nothing but such transcendental endorsement could account for the hubris and greed that entered the political arena after that election, which as yet was

all in the future, and not yet capable of casting any shadow on the epochal victory itself nor on my own satisfaction at being on the winning side so that when, two weeks later, the victorious candidate headed an open-air rally in our town to thank the people for their work and support, I was among the large crowd gathered on the square that summer’s evening, standing with my back to the chemist window and listening to the tall man tell us in a confident voice that he was going to Leinster House with a mission to redress those decades of neglect that had turned our region into a wasteland of unemployment and forced emigration with so many families torn apart for the want of viable income, and so it would be his mission above in Dáil Éireann to rectify this beginning with a campaign for improved infrastructure across the whole area, with roads and other services needing a total upgrade if the place was to prove attractive to any kind of inward investment — roads and sewage and phone lines — these would be his immediate focus and he would be second to no one in his efforts to see this mission through to completion because he knew full well that the people of West Mayo would be the judge of whether he was as good as his word because in five years’ time he would have to stand before them once again and if he had reneged on any article of the pledge he was making here tonight to the good people of Louisburgh then he knew full well what to expect if he came looking for votes in this part of the constituency, he would be shown no mercy and would be told to step aside and make way for a better man, so this was the promise he was making here tonight and

so on and so forth

and

even if we heard that speech at five-year intervals — the staple address of every electoral cycle — or a close variant of it, from this same stage in the middle of the village, neither its bludgeoning repetition nor any other aspect of that dramatic election ever, in my eyes, took the shine off my father’s feat in so accurately forecasting the outcome, his lighted intelligence running ahead of history to see something of the world before it was properly revealed, one of those moments when it was easy to suspect him of knowing his way with a sureness of step I would never possess, a sound judge of men among other things as his suspicion of the tall man would prove well-founded when, years later, several cross-party tribunals would make adverse findings against him on planning issues and party funding, his fortune made but his reputation ruined in the end, scandal and suspicion mounting so high around him that his very real political gifts and sensitivities were completely obscured, not that he gave a shite one way or another, he was well retired by then, his money made and his time taken up with a late vocation for landscape painting, sentimental watercolours depicting a Mayo landscape of rolling drumlins and single arch bridges, hedges and boreens, the same topography in which he had licensed so many gravel quarries and cement works and

can hardly breathe now, so humid

something dragging in my chest ever since coming into this kitchen, something to do with that overcast sky out there, pressing upon me as if the clouds themselves had dropped into my chest, lodged there and making it difficult to breathe with my lungs struggling to gain some sort of hold on the air, nothing but a vacant hole in my chest as if it had been cored to the bone and of course

it’s that awful hour of the day, this soft hour bracketed between the Angelus bell and the time signal for the one o’clock news, the morning’s best energies spent but still too early for the dinner, no proper work getting done and nothing on the radio but songs in three-quarter time as if the whole world was exhausted or washed out the same as

Mairead was the Friday I came home and found she’d been sick since morning, nausea and a fever for the first couple of hours but worsening to cramps and puking in the afternoon, keeping her in bed with the curtains drawn, a livid flush on her cheeks and a gloss of sweat on her face, her voice a thready rasp of itself, whispering

it’s been like this all day, I can’t hold anything down and

it was a shock to see her like that, lying there with all the energy twisted out of her, this woman who never took to the bed for any reason whatsoever and

do you want me to call the doctor, you’re burning up as

I laid my hand on her forehead which, in spite of appearances, felt cold beneath the sweaty sheen so

no, it’s only a bug, it’ll be gone in the morning, all I need is a bit of sleep and

you’re all right besides with

her face narrowing into a tight grimace when

I’ve got these cramps that come and go through my stomach, I’ve had them all afternoon and they are not getting any better — if I could just get some sleep before

her misery came to a head later that evening when I was in the kitchen and her voice called weakly from the bedroom where I found her leaning over the side of the bed vomiting a green wash into a basin, her body purging itself in a spasm of spew, a rinse of bitter filth sluicing up out of her as if it were being pumped from deep within with such twisting force she was now almost out of the bed, resting her hand on the floor, bracing herself over the basin as she continued to disgorge, her body now almost head down on the floor and which, after another bout of puking, I finally drew up and settled back within the pillows where she lay trembling and snuffling wetly so

that’s it, I said, I’m calling the doctor

no, she rasped, not yet and

the look of pain on her face sank beneath a look of shame and alarm which lifted up her chin as she said weakly

I need to go to the bathroom and I need you to change these sheets

ok, I’ll throw them in the washing machine

no, not the washing machine, throw them out and the duvet cover also she said

her voice now with an imploring under-note to its breathlessness which I did not understand till she glared meaningfully into the middle of the bed, her shame now burning under a tide of rage which drew her up with gritted teeth to say

leave the room

you’re not able to get up on your own

for Christ’s sake leave the room or you will regret it she

barked, an outburst which momentarily drained all her strength away, pushing her back between the pillows with a heavy gasp as I turned from the room and pulled the door behind me, returning only when I heard the shower running in the bathroom to pick up the sheets, duvet cover and nightdress which were gathered into a tight ball in the middle of the floor where the air was thick with the smell of vomit and that other filth which had been drawn from her body, now bundled up in these sheets which I pushed into the wheelie bin outside the back door and then waited with a change of nightdress for her when she stepped out of the shower, which she did after a few minutes to stand swaying on the tiled floor, heat-blushed and dizzy, with steam rising from her pale shoulders as if she was some new-born thing, so I took a towel and dried her off before slipping the nightdress over her head and then did something I had not done in the longest time — gathered her up in my arms and carried her down the hall to Agnes’s room which was already made up, to sit her on the edge of the bed where she balanced breathless and trembling, swaying to one side as I looped a towel around her head and dried her hair as gently as possible then ran a brush through it so that when she lay back into the pillows her face was opened with a fevered heat coming off her in scented waves, gasping