Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

here in this same kitchen

with her alone to decide whether our short marriage had already run its course or if it was still something she wanted to go on with and when she recovered something of her poise — that is to say, when her face unfroze to an expression of total shock — she realised that this was what she truly hated me for, for having levied this decision on her alone, whether or not to continue with the marriage, a decision which gave the initial appearance of offering a choice but which, after a moment’s consideration, revealed itself to her to be no choice at all since Mairead now discovered

here on this kitchen floor

that — for all her intuitions and sprightly enthusiasms, all her books and her travel, her convent education and her languages — her upbringing as an only child of devout parents had made her conservative, with a deep inner conviction that would not allow her believe that her marriage was something that could be so easily set aside or walked away from, so that now she was effectively left with no choice at all and this was my deceitful manoeuvre — to have steered her into that narrow arena where her beliefs and instincts were set to war with each other, so that good and liberal as her feelings were at the time, and willing as they may have been to end the marriage, they could not override those age-old principles which were by now hardwired in her soul, leaving her completely stricken, standing there

on this kitchen floor

not four feet from this table

gathering herself to curse me from the bottom of her heart

fucking bridge building she repeated — in fucking Prague of all places and

with all the evidence which nailed me — names, dates and times — in her possession, Mairead standing there with that centre parting in her hair which always looked so severe to me, as if it threatened to pull the two sides of her head apart, so that when she left the house half an hour later, with her bags packed and her hair down around her shoulders, I too was stricken but with shock of a different sort, rooted to the kitchen floor with my back to the sink, appalled that my life had been so completely dismantled by the very person to whom it had been pledged not so long ago and that I was seeing it all swept aside because of a series of faltering stupidities, the sort any man might hope they are exempt from but which

in the seven weeks following her leaving me alone in the house I had plenty of time to acknowledge that, in all truth, these were exactly the kind of soft stupidities to which I was prone and that I was indeed the type of man who, for want of that wit which would have prophesied my marriage in ruins, found myself alone in this house after she took herself away in stony removal to her parents’ home in North Mayo which I bombarded with all those phone calls and letters which exhausted every tone of pleading I was capable of, phone calls and letters which after a week, I sent off with as little hope of reply as if I had rolled up a length of paper and corked it into a bottle before flinging it overhand into the sea and watching it drift away on an outgoing tide — that was as much hope I had of a reply during that period, alone in this house so that

after seven weeks my nerve failed and I got into the car to drive north, up through Newport and Mulranny and up through the badlands of North Mayo, crossing the terra incognita of Ballycroy with its sweeping bogland which levels away to the horizon in an unbroken swathe beneath a sky of such gaping distance that Agnes would always claim the hazy blue washes out of which so many of her images surfaced was her ongoing memory of what she had seen from the back seat of the car during those summer journeys we took up to the grandparents’ place, driving through this bog terrain with nothing around us but rolling waves of heather and hills lost in a haze of distance, Comanche country according to Darragh, who at that time was well into his cowboy phase, ploughing his way through those old paperbacks my father gave him

JT Edson, Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey while

deep in the bog, a chimney stack stood naked out of a concrete floor — all the stone walls carted away to some other project — a lonely sentinel now gazing into the distance across a sea of blue heather with stacks of turf along the road and the odd car lying on its side in a sheugh or up on a wall, these being the years before the breathalyser put paid to drink-driving and made redundant a generation of panel-beaters, crashed cars and vans which Darragh, in the back seat saw as most likely the work of Comanche raiding parties which ranged across these plains, coming from as far south as the Mojave Desert on the Galway border and riding north-west up onto the Erris panhandle, savage war parties who rode great distances by moonlight across these boglands, ranging far from their southern lodges, into the homelands of the great northern tribes, the

Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho

or as they were know locally

Mitchells, Davitts and Stephenites

or so Darragh said from the back seat as

I drove north that day to win back my wife, turning up on her doorstep with a low sun at my back to be met by her father, a quiet man, newly retired from a long career in the bank and a Commissioner for Oaths who now stood before me wearing the same wounded air as his daughter, an expression of distaste on his face as if he could hardly believe anyone would bring such cheap melodrama to his home, with all its attendant crudity and antics, this man who was now looking out over my shoulder, up and down the road as if I alone, standing there in front of him, were hardly sufficient in myself to have knocked on his door and drawn him from the depths of the house to where he now stood blinking in the midday light and breathing heavily from the emphysema that would kill him three years down the road, wheezing as if he had come a long distance over hazardous terrain and not, as was really the case, the full twenty yards from the back of the house to where he now stood listening to my plea with that expression of sorrowful fatigue loosening his features, an expression he had no doubt practised over the years dealing with various petitioners and supplicants who had come before him for loans or overdrafts or mortgages for one thing or another, this practised expression of regret on which there was now etched a sorrowful inevitability while I, seven weeks into our separation and still feeling my way in the role of the abandoned husband stood before this reluctant inquisitor, bleary-eyed and unshaven, anxious to show I was making a poor job of my new circumstances, stood there pleading my case, a hopeless task in that I was completely in the wrong and we both knew it, this man who had been so well disposed to me during the years I had courted his daughter, now stood on his doorstep with this sorrowful expression on his face, telling me in that practised way that I had no friends here and that I would be as well to turn around and go back the way I had come and that I needed to give her time — this was the expression he used

give her time

as if it were mine to give, as if somehow I had set aside a reservoir of time for just this purpose and could now draw on it before handing it over to her to do with as she pleased, something which would alleviate her pain, something which would salve her shame, something, anything which would bring her back to me, this time that her father seemed to think was mine to give even as Mairead herself was coming towards her due-date which was three months distant, taking on the curves and lines of a pod and that paleness of complexion which was near luminous and how I glimpsed her over her father’s shoulder that day, glowing behind him in the shadows of the hallway, her face adrift in the gloom, the whites of her eyes like two jittery moons of some minor constellation as I heard myself calling to her