Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

thank you

her eyes closing as she spoke, all her strength needed to draw the two words up from inside her and

I’m ringing the doctor now, this needs to be seen to

yes and

her exhaustion pushed her off to sleep as I made the phone call to the clinic where the receptionist told me that Mairead’s GP was on leave but they put me on to a woman with a quiet telephone manner who requested that I detail clearly all the symptoms and how long they had been in place — all the vomiting, the cramps, the diarrhoea, the fever — after which she said she would be at the house in twenty minutes, which indeed she was and there was a pleasing difference between the calm voice on the phone and the wild-haired woman who sat on the side of Mairead’s bed taking her temperature and pulse, a young woman in an oversized mac with the cuffs rolled up over her wrists and whose face it took me a long moment to recognise, but eventually it came to me, a neighbour’s child, one of the Cosgraves of Derreen who now

sat beside Mairead, running through the steps of her medical examination — pulse, heart, blood pressure, temperature and drawing off two phials of blood from her arm — her hand on her forehead while Mairead held a digital thermometer between her swollen lips, swimming in the ebb and flow of her own fever, the great pulsing throb of her discomfort which seemed now to envelope her and into which this young medic now placed her hand and lowered her head to ask

when did you say you went to Agnes’s opening

two days ago

and you had a meal after

yes

as she stood up, pulling the stethoscope from around her neck and casting her hair behind her shoulders

so was it a good night, did you have fun

yes, we did, it was a bit of a surprise and

it’s been a while since I’ve seen Agnes, she was a couple of years behind me in school and

you’re one of Padraig’s girls

yes, the oldest

I knew the face, but I didn’t know which of the Cosgraves you were

there’s a few of us all right

how’s your father, I see him now and again on the bike and

he’s great, fit and supple, still cycling into town, my mother worries about him, he’s going deaf in one ear so she worries that he can’t hear things coming behind him, but other than that he’s great … so that’s what Agnes is doing now, painting, and her brother

Darragh

yes Darragh,

oh, we don’t know what that lad’s at, all we know is that he’s in Australia, travelling and growing a beard, that’s all we know about him

Darragh was younger than me, Agnes is the one I remember most, tell her I said hello as

she turned towards Mairead in the bed who was now lying with her eyes closed, totally oblivious to what we were talking about and the young doctor laid her hand one final time on her shoulder before getting to her feet and leaving the room with me following her out to her car on the side of the road where she threw her bag into the back seat with a startlingly swift motion, saying

from what I can see, this is a case of food poisoning — all the symptoms add up, the fever, the vomiting and the cramps, all the classic symptoms and if that is the case then there really is nothing you can do about it but ride it out with her, give her plenty of water to keep her hydrated but that is all that can really be done for her and I’ll get those samples off to the lab first thing on Monday so

food poisoning after two days

yes, it can happen

what about the diarrhoea, she would not want that and

she shook her head because

no, I could prescribe something for that but I don’t want to at this early stage, that might only dehydrate her and that’s not what she needs at the moment, I want to give her a few days because the symptoms should abate and she should start to feel better within a day or two, so just keep giving her cool drinks and let her rest, there really isn’t a lot more that can be done, I’ll call again tomorrow and

she handed me her card with her home number on it and gave me a sympathetic smile once more before she got into her car and pulled away onto the road and

that was it for the weekend

I was now Mairead’s carer, ghosting through the house with drinks and clean sheets, mopping her brow and trying to strike the right note of care and compassion at her bedside so that she could feel my presence through her fever, hovering there, willing her to feel my attentiveness even if she was mostly oblivious to my presence, trembling as she was within a humid haze, sometimes dozing for hours so that for long periods I had little enough to do except stand beside her bed looking down on the contours of her body beneath the sheets while in those short, lucid moments, when she was able to sit up with the pillows to her back she could only lie there in disbelief, her whole being raw with the sensitivities of what she was going through, this woman who, in all our years together, had never been sick for any length of time

now lying in bed with her pulse slackening to a distant thread in those moments before she was hauled over the side of the bed, racked with such convulsive bouts of spewing I feared she might be washed from her body completely, bone and soul gone, leaving nothing beneath the sheets save some dry, lifeless husk which would serve for kindling, so for the two days of that weekend

I stood by the side of her bed, frequently at a loss as to what exactly I should do, her face glossed with sweat, skin glowing in the weak light of the bedroom and something deathly about the way this illness closed her eyes, leaving her face so unguarded it allowed me to stare at her and notice for the first time how her avian features — nose and cheekbones converging on some vanishing point ahead of her — had been further refined in her daughter’s sharpness, how she had held her looks and shape into middle age so that the contours of her body still held close to the figure of the serious girl I’d met over twenty years ago, the girl composed of languages and foreign travel, her body with no fat on it to hinder or weigh it down and so lightly built for the job of always teetering on the first step of the next journey, always drawing her on, but now this same body was that narrow place in which a fever had taken hold with its purgative heat scourging it from the inside out and which

would account for the filthiness of the whole process, the sweat in which she was constantly bathed, the bile that rose out of her gut and the diarrhoea that racked through her stomach and bowels in sudden spasms, leaving her mortified as her whole being stank, no matter how carefully she washed herself after each trip to the bathroom, sometimes no sooner back in bed, showered and in clean pyjamas, than she would begin to sweat once more from every pore and crevice of her body, till in no time again her bed and clothes were damp and stale, with her hair slicked over to the side of her head, the room filled with a stench beyond what was human, as if her very soul was being drawn from her body, out through the pores of her skin so that

it was a genuine anguish to witness her shame in all this, that raging helplessness over which there was nothing I could do since this illness seemed to have taken hold of all the rhythms and pulses of her body, clinging to all its currents and shifts while

her suffering now spread through the house like the microclimate of a different, more rarefied realm, up and down the hall and through all its rooms, that separate latitude within which the sick thrive so that whenever

I walked down the hall towards whatever bedroom she was lying in I sometimes experienced those few steps as a long journey southwards which crossed borders and time zones, traversed deserts and mountain ranges to where I would eventually find her, my quarry, stricken under a pitiless sun, gasping and parched in some benighted jurisdiction which suffered a rapid turnover of governments, spiralling inflation rates and despicable human rights records — only such radical change of topography and circumstance could account for that gaping sense of distance she inhabited during the first couple of days