Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

have you nothing better for doing at this time of night than getting pissed off at the television

seriously

so I tipped back the beer and ran a final check on Mairead who was turned on her side, eyes open, the whites like crescent chips in the dark light, her whole body throbbing sluggishly beneath the duvet, warm when I laid my hand on her forehead to sweep her hair back and make sure she had a glass of water on the bed-stand, these little considerations carried out in the light spilling through the open door from the hallway, moistened her face once more with a baby wipe and then kissed her on the forehead as she said

leave the hall light on and the door open a little

which I did, her lying there in the half-light as I made my way back to our bedroom where I fell into a deep sleep which was unwarped by any dreams, seven or eight good hours and

in the following days

I settled into the task of being Mairead’s full-time carer but not before I had to ring in and take emergency sick leave from work, clearing it with my line manager, Fallon, who hemmed and hawed for a few moments before he came round eventually, as I knew he would, after reassuring him that we could reassign all those projects on my desk which were time-sensitive — a couple of site surveys, one map redraw and the terms of a safety cert which

I discussed directly over the phone with the main contractor, a man named Hanley from North Mayo, Pullathomas to be exact, a man who was politically well connected and a blunt fucker who bristled with frustration when I spoke to him that morning, his heavy bulk gasping down the line towards me, not happy to hear that he would have to put his project back a couple of days while I sorted things out at home, listening to him for a few minutes as

he began to moan and bitch about deadlines and budgets and tradesmen lined up outside the site waiting to start the next phase, grousing on like this for ten minutes before I cut across him and told him that the whole project was now coming under a total review because of new safety regulations which were being signed into law and which it now appeared might have a retroactive aspect to them so that all public contracts currently waiting to be signed off on would have to meet these new measures and it was all up in the air at the moment, all public works contracts anyway and

that quietened the fucker

as I knew it would because

there’s nothing like the threat of new health and safety regulations to sicken a builder’s hole, more paperwork and form-filling, new work practices to be negotiated and insurance clauses to be sorted out and sitting at

this kitchen table at nine o’clock in the morning

sitting here now

I had the satisfaction of hearing the bullish aggression leak out of him, sensing him slump at the other end of the line as he drew breath for a moment and considered whether or not he should go head-to-head with a county engineer who, for the moment at least, had him by the balls, something he obviously thought better of because the phone call ended a few moments later with a surly silence on his end after my own commitment to sort out the project immediately, give it my full attention when I got back from sick leave, that’s all I can do, but as I put the phone down I thought to myself

you’re only codding yourself

because I knew full well the first thing Hanley would do now would be to phone up one of his political connections and ask him about this bullshit safety legislation that was holding up a public project and jeopardising the work of twenty men with families, his way of letting the deputy know that he was

pissed off

the very words he would use

severely fucking pissed off because

if there’s much more of this fuck-acting with regulations and conditions he would fuck off the site entirely with all his men and plant and put a lock on the gate and fight the whole fucking lot of them in court for breach of contract while the site thickened with weeds and rushes so that the whole thing would have to be retreated if work was to recommence while at the same time the price of labour and materials rising so that the original estimate on which the contract was priced would be shot to hell and the whole thing would now exceed budget and there would be a further delay in trying to source extra funding, trying to scrape money away from some other project and stepping on people’s toes to do it and

did he really want this happening on his watch

this is what he’d ask the TD

did he

did he want this happening four miles away from his constituency office with people passing it day in, day out looking at this eyesore of a building-site overgrown with weeds, people going to mass on a Sunday morning looking at it — did he really want that happening in the heart of his own constituency with less than fifteen months before people went to the polls in a general election

did he

his very words, or

words to that effect because

Hanley’s sullen rage lingered in the silence after the phone call and I knew full well that this was another of those arguments I was going to lose, one of those instances which illustrated clearly how the world is built by politicians and not engineers — the engineer’s lament — a realisation I did not wonder at or lose sleep over any more, the day long gone when, as an engineer, I was worried at the certain prospect of being pressured from one side by politicians and the other by developers, both of them squeezing out all engineering and environmental considerations which was, I figured, likely to have happened when I returned to work after Mairead got better, how ever long that would take but during which

her strength ebbed on pulsing waves of heat and sweat with her throbbing at the centre of her own fevered halo while I brought water and cool towels as if I was summoned by the fever itself for the sole purpose of witnessing its calm ferocity and relentlessness while also beginning to marvel that something which had now begun to make headlines and editorial comment as

news

in the way I understood political phenomena to be news, had taken up residence under my roof

down the hall in the far bedroom, engineering and politics converging in the slight figure of my wife lying in bed, her body and soul now giving her an extension into the political arena in a way which, if she had been aware of, would have startled her, as Mairead was one of those people who saw voting and such chores of responsible citizenship as a necessary nuisance, walking into the polling booth with little or no interest in the outcome, one crowd as bad as the other, sometimes asking me beforehand in the car

who will I vote for or

is there any real choice here

with her belief that all elections, local or national, were essentially trivial tweakings of a calcified, monolithic system which was not amenable to proper reform, a kind of swamping and irreversible process while

in the following days I kept abreast of the virus story as it began to make headlines across all the national news outlets, gradually surfacing through newsprint and broadcast articles where it was cautiously spoken of as an environmental problem not a health problem, taking its place in a world vexed with those bigger and greater themes which were detailed across the five or six news bulletins I watched or listened to throughout the day, eyes and ears peeled for the slightest development in the story, realising

that I was one of those men who had always structured his days around radio news bulletins right from the moment I got up in the morning and stood with my mug of tea in the kitchen listening to the sea area forecast with its sing-song litany of names from around the coast

Belmullet, East, five knots, fair, nine miles, 1018 millibars, steady