Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

Friday, Saturday and Sunday

with their patient, attritional wasting which seemed to consume her down at the very smallest grains of her being, drifting from herself on clouds of her own breath, each laboured exhalation peeling away another layer of her into the ether, this illness which had settled into the most sheltered niches of her organism from where it could achieve the most finical, attentive wasting so that

by Sunday afternoon, when she was propped up with her eyes closed and her mouth ajar, trying to hold down those few mouthfuls of water that were already stewing to bile in her stomach while the room around her was warped in her heat haze, doors and windows drifting in her ambient temperature, everything lopsided and out of shape, her head thrown back to give me a clear picture of how this illness was draining the flesh from her face, drawing out the bone structure beneath, her jaw and cheekbones jutting sharply while the radial pattern of her fingers began to show through the backs of her hands resting on the duvet cover, her extended fingers fanned out from knuckles to wrist which peaked over the plane of her narrow forearm, all her bones now poking through her flesh until

a call from Agnes on Sunday evening clarified things for me after

she had listened quietly to my account of Mairead’s illness, she told me that

the city’s local radio station was reporting that a city-wide health emergency was coming to light since a glut of people had begun presenting at GP’s surgeries and A&E with precisely the same symptoms as Mairead, so many cases that the numbers could not be ignored with the result that the city authorities had, at an extraordinary council meeting the previous day, put the whole municipal area under a boil-water notice until the proper source of what they described as a viral contamination was traced and eradicated while at the same time — with admirable speed she had to admit — lists of safety measures were already published in the local newspapers and on handbills that were pushed through letterboxes or were available on the City Hall website and in churches, supermarkets, libraries and community centres or broadcast with the hourly news bulletin on local radio — every channel of communication utilised to carry the word to homes and business places, to wherever the city’s population might gather in work or worship or entertainment, all angles covered so that

my guess is that it’s this virus thing is what Mam is suffering from, remember she was the only one of us who drank water at the table that night

yes, she insisted that I have a drink, she would stick to water, she wanted to drive but

I could come home tomorrow, it might do her good if she saw

no

the word blurted out of me before I could stop it because

there’s nothing you can do for her and I’m not sure she’d want you here right now, this is an important time for you and she would never forgive me if she knew that I had hauled you away from your work so

it might cheer her up to see me

the best thing you can do for her now is get on with your work and talk to her in a few days when she’s better and

I feel terrible, this is how my big night turns out

for god’s sake Agnes, these things happen and they’re no one’s fault, just keep in touch and don’t worry, this’ll blow over in a few days but

I could tell she was genuinely in two minds and that while, on the one hand she dearly wanted to be with her mother, on the other, she recognised also that this was precisely the time she needed to be near her work and availing of any opportunities that might arise from it, which suited me as there was something in the prospect of being alone in the house with Agnes while Mairead sickened in a room at the end of the hall that seemed to me a breach of some intimacy taboo, a complicity which made me a bit queasy, so that it was easy to turn down her offer of help and

I rounded out the discussion by asking her if there was anything else about the contamination I should know and she said

that rumour in the city was that there were upwards of three to four hundred people in hospital wards with cramps and fever and diarrhoea, sweating and shitting themselves into oblivion as she vividly put it, suffering from cryptosporidiosis, a virus derived from human waste which lodged in the digestive tract, so that, she continued, it was now the case that the citizens were consuming their own shit, the source of their own illness and there was something fatally concentric and self-generating about this, as if the virus had circled back to its source to find its proper home where it settled in for its evolutionary span, rising through degrees of refinement every time it went round the U-bend, gradually gaining on some perfection — hardiness and resistance and so on — with god-knows-what results, probably reaching such a degree of refinement that it would become totally resistant to every antidote and we would be host to this new life form and, at this point I wondered

would she ever stop

mother of Jesus

stop

because

I could understand this sort of thing coming from Darragh, this kind of apocalyptic riffing was exactly the sort of stuff he thrived on, getting carried away on those visions of destruction which I’ve always believed were the special reserve of young men, all the aggravated amplitudes and graphic imagery they are prone to but which now, coming from Agnes, I found tiresome, the same kind of reasoned hysterics which, like Darragh, she half-believed and for the other half she was happy simply to pursue to its own fulfilment, a kind of ecstasy I tired of as

she now expanded her scenario to a city in crisis, her voice lathering on all the available images of civil collapse and destruction, her voice cast in the solemn tone of someone delivering an on-the-spot report from some urban disaster area and I let her go on a while longer as I had never heard her do this kind of thing before, never lose the run of herself, ravelling on like this, words and ideas spilling from her in a lurid rush and while standing there at the gable of the house I thought, for the first time in years

a smoke

Jesus, I’d love a smoke

out of nowhere that old hankering rising up in me, that draw in the back of my throat, the urge to go through the old ritual of taking out the packet of cigarettes and lighting one up, the need to do something with my hands and the old certainty that somehow the situation would be improved if I were to light up and feel that soothing bloom of smoke filling out my lungs, it all came back to me standing there under the shelter of the eaves, a habit I thought had waned away to nothing having given them up a couple of years back after Mairead had harped on at me for so long, pointing out that a history of heart disease on both sides of my family would make it the wise move especially when I turned forty-five and I could no longer afford to be so blithe about these things and it was about time I took responsibility and

so on and so forth until

I did indeed make an effort, for whatever reason, quitting them several times, off and on, stuttering and stumbling but never managing to lower the habit below ten a day, never managing to cross that threshold into a smoke-free life, clothes and car always stinking and those mornings after a night on the beer, chain-smoking one after another, sitting on the side of the bed with that furry rasp in my lungs, passing it off to myself as phlegm, all those years when the kids were around, never able to quit but the minute

they’d grown up and left for college it was as if they drew the habit away with them because suddenly the old craving was gone, I’d had enough, something I could not explain and I just walked away from them New Year’s night, smoked my last one at two o’clock in the morning, standing on the pavement outside one of the pubs in the village, four or five years ago with never a relapse or craving