Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

within days

I developed a sharp eye for every change in Mairead’s condition and what each signified, all the peaks and troughs of her moods speaking clearly to me so that whenever she lay back in the pillow with her mouth open I knew her to be momentarily becalmed in one of those shallow respites that punctuated the long periods of cramp twisting through her stomach, lying there luminous in the aftermath of such spasms, drawing febrile breath into the shallow depths of her lungs with her arms by her side as if she were laid out to be waked among a watching congregation of Agnes’s dolls and soft toys before she would eventually move and swing her shins out over the side of the bed to sit for another moment, bracing herself with both hands planted down beside her before propelling herself out the door and down the hall in a desperate lunge to the shower in which I had placed one of the plastic chairs from the garden so that she could sit with her head bowed, soaping her crotch and underarms beneath the warm cascade for ten minutes or so, the water pounding down on her as she sat there like a ruined princess before she would stand up, swaying in the steaming heat with her towel gathering around her so that I could carry her back to the bedroom to dry her and put her into fresh pyjamas, then angling her back under the sheets where she would lie breathless, every pulse trip-hammering through her body till it levelled out to where she could drift off to sleep once more, all this happening without any word passing between us, a job done in silence and not clouded with speech because I knew these lucid moments were so precious to her that she would not want to waste them in talk, and when I had her in bed I would lie in beside her, resting my hand on her, feeling her hip-bone poking through the flesh as she linked her arm in mine, the two of us lying there, arm in arm in the shaded room and drifting in this heated intimacy, I with nothing to give save the assurance that I was there beside her, nothing but my warm bulk and that silence which we gradually filled out together so that

fuck me

Mother of Jesus

a picture looking up at me

this picture in the local paper showing four men in suits standing in front of a new national school, all smiling at the camera and holding a length of ribbon between them, the one in the middle preparing to cut it with a shiny new scissors, their faces open to the camera in a broad expression of civic satisfaction, the man with the scissors looking especially pleased, standing with his chin up-tilted and his chest out

Deputy John Francis Moylette

or The Legislator as Halloran refers to him

his presence so vivid now that the sight of him in this picture

closes the walls around me, same as

hearing his voice on the phone did that day in the office, the breathless rasp of a man under pressure, wheezing and puffing as I sat back in the chair and checked the time on my watch — ten past twelve — and braced myself because it’s never a good thing when an engineer gets a call from a politician in the middle of the day, you know well that two different world views are likely to clash and how ever it starts off there is only ever going to be one result and I knew straight off from his tone that this was going to be the case today also and that his patience was gone before he started, the way he launched straight into it with no hello or goodbye or any greeting whatsoever, just a torrent of words, beginning with

Marcus, do you read the papers

yes John, I read the Irish Times every day

I’m not talking about the Irish Times , I’m talking about The Mayo News and the Western People , do you read them

not always, not every week

I thought as much, so I’m going to spell it out for you, paint you a picture so to speak — a picture should be a lot clearer to an engineer, clearer than words anyway since

Moylette was cut from the same cloth as Halloran, the same ready way with populist appeal and gesture — the photo of him putting his hawk and trowel into the boot of his car when he drove to Dublin to take up his seat in Leinster House is often reproduced — but more belligerent and long winded, his phone calls to council offices especially dreaded because — bulked out as they always were with anecdotal pleading and exceptional cases — they could go on for anything up to an hour leaving the hearer worn down and likely to make all sorts of concessions just to be shut of him so that when the phone was hung up you were sometimes confused about what you may or may not have agreed to and

are you with me Marcus

I’m still here

good, now, you may or may not have noticed but I’ve spent the last three years trying to build an electoral base in the south-west corner of this county, the largest and most far-flung constituency in the whole country — leaflets, clinics, church gate collections — the whole lot, anything to harvest a quota of first preferences in an area with no major urban centre, just a few scattered villages, an area which is, by and large covered with some of the widest bogs and the highest mountains in the whole province, an area populated in the main by black-faced sheep, none of whom, to the best of my knowledge has the vote, because if they did I would be sitting on a nice fat surplus, all those hoggets and rams and ewes voting for me, but that day isn’t today or tomorrow so till then I have to take to the highways and the byways of this county for funerals and festivals and football matches and god knows what else to get my name and face in the paper as often as possible so that I can be seen to be doing the type of work that benefits the community and is remembered by the electorate whenever the next election is called, so that when the good people of this constituency are standing alone in the privacy of the polling booth and they see the name of John Francis Moylette on their ballot paper they will hopefully remember that I’m the man whose face they saw in the paper at some launch or some opening or some social event or other, John Francis Moylette, the man who was there at those crucial moments and they’ll remember that and be moved to put a tick after my name so that I can be re-elected and continue to do good work for the people of this county and are you with me so far Marcus

I’m still here John

I said weakly, slumped at my desk, this torrent of words washing through me and knowing full well from his relentless tone what was coming and he knew that I knew because this was an old dance we were doing now, we both knew the moves and we both knew that he was just winding himself up to the full measure of his temper because what had passed up to now was only the preamble, the introduction to his major theme which he now took up, saying

good, I’m glad I have your attention because this is where it gets a small bit awkward — I got a call from a mutual friend yesterday, Shamie Curran the building contractor, I gather you know him

I know Shamie

good, well Shamie expressed a large degree of dissatisfaction with you on account of what he claims is your unwarranted reluctance as an engineer to sign off on a public works project to which he is the sole contractor — namely the new national school in Derragarramh — is he right or is he pulling my leg and

I sighed and tried to keep my voice level because even though I had been waiting for this phone call for the last couple of weeks nothing apparently, in all that waiting, had prepared me for the wash of fatigue it was now bringing with it, that warm surge of hopelessness which now coursed through my whole being as I leaned back in my chair and said

you know well he’s right John — I refused to sign off on the foundation for sound engineering reasons, there’s a report outlining those same reasons which I’m pretty sure has made its way to your desk by now