Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

that may be so but I don’t have time to read every report that piles up on this desk — I wouldn’t see the outside of this office if I did — but the long and the short of it is that I gather you have some worries about the foundation

no, not strictly the foundation but the concrete going into the foundation

it’s concrete, what’s the problem with it — it’s not strong enough or what

no, there’s nothing wrong with the concrete

it’s strong enough

it’s not that but

now I saw he was trying to get me to say something which would undermine my position, namely admit that the concrete was defective and he continued with a honed edge to his voice

I’m confused Marcus, either the concrete is strong enough or it’s not strong enough, what else can be wrong with it, I can’t see the difficulty

the difficulty, as I’ve outlined in my report, is that the foundation is made up of three separate but interlocking rafts which exert all sorts of pressures on each other so as such they should all be poured from the same batch of concrete but, and this is where the problem lies, the on-site slump tests show that this was not the case — what we have in this case is three separate rafts from three separate pours of concrete, different aggregates, different composition ratios and

what the hell does it matter so long as it sets and it’s strong enough — I’ve a bad feeling I’m wasting my time here Marcus, that I could be doing something a lot wiser and

by now I had the school plans spread out on the desk in front of me so I could see from the drawings the size and orientation of the whole school building relative to the site and the main road which ran outside its front gate and also, within its pencilled walls, the classrooms and bathrooms opening onto a main corridor which ran inside the front door connecting the full length of the building to the staff room at its furthest end and the emergency exits at the other so that looking down at it from my god’s eye perspective with the roof peeled back, it was easy to see how desks and classes would be orientated in such a way as to have afternoon sunlight streaming in from the side windows on the bowed heads of the pupils as they worked at their sums or spellings till the bell went at two o’clock when they would pack up their bags before streaming out into the hallway, three classrooms opening out into the hallway, so that from this height, with a top-down view over them, it was easy to imagine their little heads bobbing around like a mass of footballs in a river current, all streaming into the hall, through the front door and out onto the forecourt beyond where the buses were safely parked in the recessed area outside the front gate and all things considered it truly was something to marvel at — how this schematic on white paper could translate so easily from an architect’s and engineer’s mind into a smoothly functioning public facility — this small rural national school which

would draw together the children of four townlands and which, as it stood now on this sheet of A2, was by any measure, a credit to everyone involved in it, the planners and architects and whoever had handed down the guidelines from the Department of Education and even Moylette himself who had, no doubt, worked hard trying to convince all sides that this new school was in everyone’s best interest and that to relinquish their attachment to their own smaller but older and less efficient schools would enable their children to come together in that wider spirit of modern community which this school signified and then

I remembered the concrete foundation beneath the whole structure and without conscious prompting on my part the engineer in me was already speaking to say that

the problem comes from the fact that there are three different foundation slabs locked into each other, three different pours of concrete and the danger comes in the next hot or cold spell when they have to expand and contract which, because of their different compositions, they will do so at different speeds and different pressures, that’s where the difficulty lies so

for the love of Jesus, Marcus, Moylette broke in, you’re a conscientious man and it does you credit but this is a national school we’re talking about here, not a fucking nuclear reactor, what’s the worst that can happen — the foundation expands and contracts and a few doors go askew on their hinges, cracks in the plaster and that’s about it — you should remember that Curran has bricklayers and plumbers and electricians lined up outside the gate to work on this so

my voice cut across him, streaking ahead of my own wish to keep my tone reasonable and moderate, telling him bluntly that

when that foundation begins to crack — as it surely will — doors hanging off their hinges will be the least of your problems because any building raised on those slabs will tear itself apart in three different directions whenever the temperature goes through a sudden change and as far as bricklayers and plasterers are concerned I have to say that I am out of sympathy with them as

a long, sudden silence stretched out between us during which the phone warmed in my hand, becoming slick with sweat till the moment was broken from the other end, Moylette picking up the conversation once more in a tone hardly tempered with any consideration of what I had just outlined, saying

I’ll tell you a story Marcus and after you’ve listened to it you can then weigh your conscience as an engineer against what I have to try and do to please people of this community, what I’m up against — are you with me

I’m not against you John

you have a funny way of showing it — this story begins two years ago when I lost a very public battle with the Department of Education to keep three small national schools open in the heart of my constituency, an issue which affected a significant section of my core vote, men and women I had to stand in front of and tell that their schools were to be closed down, their boards of management dissolved and that from now on those of them with kids would have to drive four or five miles to school each morning — that was the story I needed them to forget so that they could focus on the fact that they now had a shiny new school at the centre of the parish with three new teachers, recreation rooms, basketball courts, cloakrooms, the whole lot — this was the promise I sold them in exchange for them having lost their little schools, getting them to sit down with various mediation services so that I could get the members of the disbanded boards of management to agree to the new school with a new amalgamated governing body and finally, when I have all this in place — months and months of work, meetings and presentations and calling in favours from all over the place and the whole thing ready to go, what happens — I get a call from Curran telling me that two months on he is still waiting for a clearance cert for the completed foundation, that he has block-layers and plasterers lined up outside the gate ready to work and

I ran those slump tests myself and

who the hell runs on-site slump tests, Moylette roared, his patience finally exhausted as

any engineer who sees two concrete trucks with different markings coming onto a site, that’s who runs slump tests so

don’t talk to me about concrete

Moylette cut in

I served my time with concrete, you know that well and just so you have no doubts, I still have my hawk and trowel and spirit level in the boot of the car in case the day comes when the returning officer gets up on the podium and announces to the world that the people of this constituency have rejected me — when that day comes I won’t have to walk far to pick up my tools and start again so don’t talk to me about concrete or mortar and