Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

very different to Darragh’s way in the world which, as a child, was to give us as wide a berth as possible, as if he had come into the world with a clear sense of how things stood between Mairead and myself and had decided from the beginning that he wanted to go his own way and have very little to do with us so that if he ever felt our genuine love he did nothing to acknowledge it, laying it aside as gently as he could, as if it had never been offered, becoming another distant child, eternally preoccupied with various building projects spread throughout the house, constructs which seemed carefully conceived to involve no one but himself, the boy-builder who even at that young age had an independence of spirit about him that was easy to admire, something stubborn in his childish insistence on going his own way, labouring with bricks and construction kits in shadowed corners of the house where he raised so many besieged castles and cities and forts, harassed settlements and stockades, small parables of beleaguerment everywhere we turned, room after room, the whole house expanding to some fragmented vision of adversity which seemed to consume his whole childhood, making him an overly solemn kid for such long periods that we were resigned to seeing him being eternally preoccupied and slightly old before his time, that was till sometime in his early teens when he confused us further by rousing himself and coming towards us with open arms, a ready smile and a smart-assed turn of phrase like someone who had been gone on a long journey but who was now greeting us on his return with a relaxed willingness to participate in family life, becoming suddenly the more sociable of our two children since Agnes had by now almost withdrawn herself completely

to her bedroom which she had turned into an artist’s studio of sorts, the whole place cluttered with jars and brushes and rolls of paper along the work bench I had installed for her against one wall, this room in which Mairead worried she might poison herself with all its vapours of oils and turpentine, a dizzying haze swelling through the house whenever her bedroom door opened but which Agnes assured us had no effect whatsoever on her, and which she often eulogised in poetic terms whenever we voiced our concern about it, telling us not to worry, the windows were open, the room was well aired and besides, paint was now her element and if she drifted away on a cloud of its vapours then that was fine by her, she would be one with her medium and that would be the fulfilment of her deepest wish, one of those speeches that Darragh would later refer to as

the ecstasy of Agnes

Agnes the Unhinged

those several names he called her in that way of prodding and poking which became their way of relating to each other during their teen years when Agnes took up the studied role of the scholar-artist while Darragh set aside his sharper mind to caper around and tease her, not exactly trying to highjack her efforts but driven daft in himself by his own abilities which were real and glittering but were cut through with a fatal measure of laziness which to this day has short-circuited so many of those projects he has started — the PhD he registered for but which, to the best of my knowledge, he never wrote a line of, or the year he intended working in Africa with some NGO, digging aquifers on the edge of the Sahara, two full months going around getting vetted by the guards, medical clearances, jabs and shots, getting visas sorted out, papers and application forms piling up around him and then

nothing

not a thing

the whole project evaporating into thin air and all the forms and documents on the desk drowning in a rising swell of more paper, this time his notes on the 1981 Republican hunger strike as a strategy video game, an idea he was going to pitch to one of those game development companies that had set up in Galway with the hope of tapping into a steady stream of IT graduates, all his nights spent poring over accounts of the hunger strike till he had amassed a broad and detailed comprehension of the background material and the complex political context in which the strike occurred with all its ebbs and flows, all its moves and countermoves till, for whatever reason, this idea too just seemed to fade away into oblivion as

he gradually stopped talking about it and did not care to be questioned or reminded about it so we just marked it down as another of his enterprises which had come to nothing, neither Mairead nor myself really surprised now — worried yes, but not surprised — because this seemed to be that time in his life when he could suck the life out of any project no matter how promising it appeared, all Darragh had to do was lay his hand on it and somehow it wilted and died, the good gone from it before it was ever fully conceived, things half started before being fully abandoned, aborted projects building up all around him, his life a breakers yard of such things, till the day

he pulled the round-the-world ticket out of his jacket and stood here on this kitchen floor gazing at it as if it had materialised from on high with no effort on his part whatsoever, a ticket with an itinerary which would circumnavigate the globe by way of Thailand, Sydney, Perth, Hawaii, Boston and back home to Dublin, this permit that would take him to the ends of the earth where he would spend a season wandering in the wilderness trying to find whatever it was he had lost, but with Mairead looking at him from where I’m sitting now, in two minds about the whole thing, glad to see him doing something, anything, but sorry that this something was taking him away from her, putting the whole world between him and

do you have money for this trip — the question blurted from me before I realised

yes, I do

how

I’ve been working

what sort of work

making medical components

he looked up from the ticket in his hand, the bemused expression still on his face

medical components, I thought you were studying

I am — I was — it’s complicated

I’ll bet, so what were you doing with these medical components

this company — AbMed — they needed extra hands to fulfil an emergency contract for the American army, the coalition forces in Iraq

there was an emergency so they sent for you

yes Dad, others recognise my worth even if my family do not, anyway, I spent three months sweeping stents and catheters with UV light for flaws, I got well paid for it, that’s where the money came from and

did you know about this, I said to Mairead

I think it’s great, she waved the question aside, he has a ticket to the world and his own money and

Christ

I weary of my son sometimes

even from the other side of the world he has this psychic ability to reach across latitudes and time zones and lay his twitchy hand on my heart and squeeze it which sets me to worrying about him all over again, the thought of him enough to dampen any mood and

a change in the light now

all radiance washed from it as if it is worn out, residual of light which has passed on to elsewhere and

how strange this day is

something about it which, sitting here and looking out on the back garden, gives the impression that it has already turned through the best part of itself, nothing left that is not pallid or faded beneath a sun too bright for this time of year, stalled over the world at too high a declension, bleaching the proper tones from everything while

sitting here at this table

waiting for my wife and kids to return to this kitchen with this anxious feeling that everything around me has settled into places and patterns unknown to me, things no different or mysterious in themselves but everything off a degree or two, this slight imprecision all around me as if things have shifted out of position just enough to make my hand hover over them for an instant before picking them up or moving them back to where they should be, some things wholly out of place, like this tablecloth in front of me, a white tablecloth which, if memory serves, is normally never used except at Christmas but which now, on the second of November, is spread out before me like a snow field with all the vast extension of a tundra, white and unblemished and rolling onto its own frozen horizons, my hands outspread over it as if I were extending some sort of blessing upon it from on high, or trying to steady it against some instability in the table beneath or the house itself, panicked by the idea that