Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

Mairead, for god’s sake

as her father shifted his body into the centre of the door and I saw reflected in his face my own terror that I would plough through him, this man in his late sixties, and leave him sprawling on the floor as the shadows behind him lurched to a choked sob and she was gone so I stood back, to her father’s relief and my own, both of us heaving with fright till he raised his hand once more and said

give her time

before closing the door in my face, as gentle a rejection as you could have wished for, comfortable almost, so that for the next few minutes I stood there, fixed on looking at the door-knocker which was suspended at eye level before me and knowing that I could have stayed there comfortably, dried out with rejection, for as long as it took me to turn to stone or longer before I eventually managed to uproot myself from the spot and move off, got into the car and

drove back the sixty miles or so to this house here, one of those pale car journeys of which I have no memory whatsoever, a journey that took me through several small towns and villages, over narrow roads cutting through wide bogland areas and windy roads that clung to a shelved pass around a sea inlet and only that I eventually found myself standing in this kitchen two hours later I could easily have believed that I had dematerialised on Mairead’s doorstep and rematerialised here, sixty miles away in the kitchen of my own house without the trouble of physically travelling the intervening distance, since only such a complete dissolve of the self could account for the total absence of detailed memory of that complex journey, it being something of a miracle to have arrived here safe and sound at all but yet, knowing that this

was not the first time this had happened to me, driving halfway across the county to arrive safely at my destination, every mile sucked away in a vortex of absent-mindedness, a complete vacancy of spirit overcoming me so often that I would not care to number the times I have been recalled to startled attention behind the wheel of the car with no immediate knowledge of where I am before that shocked realisation that I have driven ten or fifteen miles of a busy road, into oncoming traffic, negotiated all sorts of bends and hazards, put towns and villages behind me but, somehow the whole thing having occurred in some adjacent dreamtime with my mind elsewhere while my hands and feet went through that empty sequences of moves and adjustments which kept the car on the road and pointed in the right direction

gears, brakes, accelerator and indicator left or right and

without stutter or stammer, sixty miles or more driven by some un-minded ghost of myself, a shadow-man

who now stood in this kitchen which

in Mairead’s absence, had succumbed to the dirt and disarray of the single man’s existence, that type of filth and dishevelment which gathers to shame and self-abandonment, the sort of grime that coats everything with a veil of grease and which draws books and papers across the floor to pile up in corners and on seats or under cushions, that gathering disorder where everything in the room begins to lie at an angle and a distance from their proper place, that slight degree of imprecision which gives the impression that the whole place is beginning to uproot itself, piece by piece and move away from me altogether, papers and cups and knives and forks moving along the shelves and worktops while the pictures themselves drifted also, leaving their angled smoke shadows on the wall, everything migrating across the room towards some vanishing point into which everything would disappear, such gathering filth and chaos that the place had begun to resemble the lair of some creature who eats and sleeps in close proximity to itself, a place littered with fur and gnawed bones amid a scum of deepening filth so that I stood at the sink hardly able to believe I was capable of such desolation, willing to ascribe it to someone else, not me, because surely this was the work of some malignant household spirit who went about its malicious work in the dead of night, and it says something about my state of mind that I stood here

in this kitchen

elaborating and embellishing this fantasy for some time instead of taking responsibility for what was happening around me because in truth what really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and proper alignment, everything gathering towards some point of chaos beyond which it would be impossible to restore the place to its proper order and yet I stood looking at it, locked into a silent battle with the house itself and all the things which were slowly vacating their proper place, furniture and dishes and cutlery all over the place, curtains hanging awry and chairs and tables strewn about while books and papers slid across the floor, everything slowly shifting through the house as if they had a meeting to keep somewhere else, possibly in some higher realm where all this chaos would resolve into a refined harmony which had no need of my hand or intervention so

I stood back and let the place run to wrack and ruin around me for another two weeks before

Mairead eventually brought the stand-off to an end the day I turned from the sink to find her standing in the middle of the floor, twitchy and etiolated, like one of those apparitions who materialise at times of crisis, standing there with her bags beside her on the floor as if the past nine weeks had never happened and we were now at that juncture in our lives where we had to find those options which would enable us to fix whatever it was that led us to this point where we now stood eyeing each other across the kitchen floor with an abyss between us, fully recognising that our next words would define how we would manage the rest of our days together and as we stood there it became obvious that, with the autumn light closing in around us, we were now becalmed in a marriage which had lost direction but which we could not turn our backs on as the child she was carrying now complicated the situation with something more serious — these were the thoughts running through me as I stepped towards her with my right hand raised, swearing

never again, as God is my judge and

those weeks of separation had given Mairead a resolve which she did not have to put words to so that

her silence said everything she had to say and

eighteen months later, when our family was rounded out by Darragh’s arrival we drew on the strength of the oath sworn over her belly that day and even if I could not explain its exact terms or conditions, which remained vague but stringent, it served to draw the focus of our lives away from ourselves and towards our children, so that even if it was not the ideal way to begin family life together, it is safe to say that a lot of good marriages have been built on a lot less as we settled into a love of each other for the sake of our two kids, securing them within the embrace of a loving family life, adamant they would not want for anything and that if, in any way, they sensed the desperation which sometimes swelled up between Mairead and myself they would have experienced it as nothing but a kind of distant grating on the margins of their lives, hardly anything at all, just the slightest dissonance, nothing to worry themselves about or keep them awake at night, listening in the dark to our strangled voices and stifled recriminations, so that in this way

they may have suffered our love for them as a desperate load, especially Agnes, an attentive child who was acutely sensitive to the slightest vibe between her parents and who, when very young, quickly developed a protective aura of airy distance around her which sometimes baffled and hurt both myself and Mairead at the time, but which we also suspected she used as a ploy to find her way out from under that love she was so relentlessly subject to, bearing down upon her so heavily, and beneath which she might have found herself so full of childish anxiety that, young and all as she was, she could not settle in the world and was wholly intolerant of its shortcomings, things never perfect, always needing correction or amendment of some sort or another — the sleeves of her coat too long, her food too hot or too cold or too lumpy — forever working herself up into a ball of frustration whenever she found herself unable to accommodate that smidgen of mess or chaos which is necessary to keep the world turning and human so that sometimes, as a toddler, she was overtaken with one of those pale, blue-lipped rages which threatened to strangle her and which she took off to her room where she would smoulder and grind face-down in her pillow, those tantrums before she perfected the fits of breath holding which she would draw down with her eyes closed and her throat locked, all raging concentration as her face turned puce and then blue before she would faint to the floor in a crumpled heap, Mairead in panicked sobs over her prone body, certain those first few times that she had lost her and slow to believe the GP who assured her that you cannot hold your breath unto death and that it was nothing, it was something which she would grow out of, which she did, a couple of years passing after which she eventually came through a thorny growth phase that was