Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

cut across by a long moan from the end of the hall, my cue to

rush to her side just in time to hold her by the shoulders over the edge of the bed while she discharged a rush of bitter gall into the basin, her body buckling at the hips with the effort while I spoke some hopeless words of comfort

it’s ok, it’s ok, get it all up

while she purged herself, half out of the bed with her head down over the basin till she was spent and spitting and then that delicate manoeuvre to straighten her back under the duvet where she would lie limp and pale, all puked out, drifting in a fervid realm beyond words, near lost to the world when, without turning, she would lay her hand on mine so that I was assured she was aware of me and recognised my efforts and in this way, through such small gestures we quickly built up a language of cues and responses through which we managed, and I found myself sharper to them than I would have thought, this new language or choreography which we were now assembling on the fly but

which already governed the entire mood of the house, drawing us together into an intimacy of heat and fever, so pervasive that it charged the air with a prickly ammonial smell that hung through the hall and rooms like a fog, the whole house now suffused with the smell of sickness, a sourness which snagged in my pores and dragged me through the house several times a day swinging a pink aerosol as if it were a censer, launching a feathery floral spray into the middle of each room, a kind of purifying ritual which bathed the house for a brief time in the cloying stench of roses or lily-of-the-valley before it was burned off by the smell of sickness which emanated from this slight woman who was now so disbelieving of her own condition that her voice threaded to a whisper of rage whenever she gathered herself to protest

I’ve never felt like this before, never

enraged that her body at this stage of her life could betray her in such a way, turning on her like this with such venom after so many years of sound service — this was what offended her most and gave her suffering such a grating edge of incredulity — having finally arrived at a time in her life which was exclusively her own and without the care of kids to compromise it — that it should be spoiled like this — this, more than the illness itself, was what angered her most and gave her that rancorous edge which carried with it a warning that I shouldn’t meddle with her frustration, nor try to reconcile her to it in any way since

I was uncertain how to feel, as part of me was convinced that this illness was drawing us closer together in a way that was decisive, as if this new life with all its caring and cleaning, all its fetching and carrying, was some new kind of courtship dance we were doing towards each other, a dance through filth and fever which took me by surprise in so far as I had thought our lives together up to this had brought us as close as we were ever likely to be and that such new intimacy was, frankly, improbable at this age of our lives — too set in our ways, too long in the tooth — this closeness which breached so many delicate laws of personal privacy, something neither of us could have anticipated nor predicted how we would react to as

we were now carried towards each other on the tidal rhythm of her fever, rising and falling on those swells specific to the illness itself, every moment pushing our marriage beyond its usual, mannered intimacies and into a new knowing of each other which was beyond embarrassment and this was something which no news article or analysis could hope to capture, this flesh and filth intimacy was the very thing which leaked away in the telling of this news story as it came through the news bulletins and headlines to wash through

the house

this same house

in which I’ve lived the best part of three decades and put together all those habits and rituals which have made up my marriage and family life and where now, for some reason, this day has given me pause to dwell on these things

sitting here at the kitchen table with my sandwich and paper where

those memories of Mairead in her flushed and fevered wasting come as reverse echoes of

that time during her first pregnancy when she carried Agnes and I saw her come into the fullness of herself as her belly grew and her skin and hair took on that aura of radiant well-being which I found irresistible and was so drawn towards, those first months passing in a liquid surge of desire which drove me headlong into the new lushness of her body, an intimacy which may well have had a slight twist of something kinky to it as if being watched by the growing child inside her added some illicit tincture to what we got up to during that period when the weight and lushness of her pregnancy was so alluring it was as if the new being within her was lending her a sheen that went deeper than her skin or her hair and was in itself pure goodness and virtue shining forth, something truly radiant about it which for a while sparked our love life with a thrilling, elevating element, charging our lovemaking with a grittier sensitivity towards each other’s touch, an awareness which, I began to interpret as an appeal that

I should meet it with an improved version of myself or at least work to make myself worthy of this new, pristine version of my young wife, a demand I took so seriously that I sat down and gave myself over to it with sober concentration, surveying my soul in the light of Mairead’s pregnancy which showed on her as if she were illumined from within and which I read now as nothing less than a sacred injunction that I should look to my own soul and rid it of all those slurs and injuries which had accrued to it over my lifetime, all this in preparation for our child, Mairead so radiant that

something petty in me felt sorely jilted by her elevated condition which, day by day, appeared like a higher, more refined evolutionary stage and which inspired so little in me save this wish to turn inward and inventory my own soul, a self-defeating instinct, the end purpose of which was never clear to me except that it would definitely take precious time and energy and probably bring little more than a deeper sense of unworthiness, not merely in relation to Mairead, this numinous being with whom I now shared my life, but also in relation to the child growing inside her, already exercising such a governing influence on us so

while all this was easy to understand and make amends for in the abstract it was a much more vexing proposition in real life where it became clear to me that I was not so generous or flexible as I might have thought, finding it difficult to make that space within me which would have fully allowed that other being into our lives and, something even more difficult to acknowledge, the sorry fact that this lack of generosity on my part harkened back to

the beginning of our marriage when, it appears, I had some difficulty taking the whole thing seriously and grasped the very first opportunity to lapse so catastrophically, an event that brought with it a measure of bleak comedy which did nothing to soothe Mairead’s pain and disbelief the day she stood here

in the middle of this kitchen floor, whispering to herself

bridge building, fucking bridge building with

her face fixed in that vacant expression the world recognises in stroke sufferers while I stood opposite her, completely undone by the evidence at her disposal — all of it circumstantial yes, but all of it adding up to a conviction beyond reasonable doubt or any plea of mitigating circumstances or diminished responsibility — the names and dates all correct, the witnesses accounts all corroborated, all the holes and contradictions in my own version wholly damming and, most telling of all — the part which had the clinching ring of truth to it — the complete absence of any clear motive on my account other than a soft opportunity from which I had neither the wit nor courage to back away from and which now had me standing before her, knowing full well that any defence I might offer would be totally undermined by that sheepish expression to which I lapse in such moments as Mairead stood