Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

John, it’s easy to come on the phone here and

that’s where you’re wrong Marcus, it’s not easy, it’s not a bit easy, I have better things for doing with my time than pestering you or anyone else with this sort of thing but if it has to be done I’ll do it and while I have you I’m going to paint another picture, something that will be clear to an engineer like you, this is how I see it — about eighteen months from now I see myself wearing my best suit and my sunniest smile and I’m standing between a few other local dignitaries holding a big shiny scissors to cut the ribbon which opens the lovely new school behind me, I’m there with a big smile on my face for the camera, shaking hands with everyone around me and speaking to mothers and fathers so that in future, every time they come to pick up little Chloe or Keelin they’ll pause for a moment and remember me, thinking to themselves

fair play to Moylette, he sorted it out, he was as good as his word because

mark my words, that is the only way this whole thing is going to pan out and the sooner you set aside your engineer’s scruples and put your name to the clearance cert the sooner we can get on with it and

no engineer can sign off on

fuck engineers, Moylette roared, his temper now routed

engineers don’t make the world, you should know that more than anyone, politics and politicians make the world and I’m telling you now I do not give one fuck whose name appears on that cert but

that’s the difference between you and me John

what difference

the difference between a politician and an engineer, your decisions have only to hold up for four or five years — one electoral cycle and you are acclaimed a hero — but my decisions need a longer lifespan than that or my reputation is in shreds so

my temper was burning away now and I was afraid I was going to lose the head and start fucking him down the phone so I just closed my eyes and sat back in the chair, reigning in my horses a bit and lowering my voice to thank him for calling and telling him that his concerns were noted, goodbye and we’ll talk again, before

I put the phone down with a bad, sour feeling simmering in the bottom of my belly because I knew full well what was happening, I could physically feel it, the clamping pressure with that thickening of the air which always comes as

the squeeze

the fucking squeeze

with everything tightening around me, the air and light con- tracting between the walls, except this time there was something choking about the way it stiffened around me in that fucking bunker of an office, a place I could never stick for more than a couple of hours at a stretch before it drove me out into the bright corridor which runs the length of the building, as it did when I left the phone down that day, surged from my desk, driven by a fit of temper and this swelling pressure closing around me, out into the corridor and down the stairs where I pushed through the revolving doors into the grey light of a March afternoon to stand on the sidewalk with a few other office workers who were having an afternoon smoke, their backs to the wall when I joined them, glad of the fresh air and the cold way it went down into my chest with that wet smell in the air after a day’s rain, trying to calm down and put some order on my thoughts, this

happening shortly before Mairead got sick, an incident I spoke to her about because the whole thing began preying on my mind so I gave her a general outline of the situation which both myself and Moylette found ourselves in, specifically how my name on a clearance cert would release both of us from our bind, except I too had a clear vision of how this whole thing would pan out in four or five years’ time if I did, when

the building had fully settled into itself, by which time it would have come through a handful of summers and winters and been subject to the first radical temperature changes which would have expanded and contracted the foundation raft underneath it, creating those shearing pressures along its length which would draw it apart to three different points of the compass, the cracks starting in the floor and moving up the walls millimetre by millimetre, day by day, shifting the corners and the lintels over the doors, cross ties and floor joists rupturing the under-floor heating so that when it is closed down after the first leaks start coming up through the floor and the insurance company sends in their assessors he will only have to take one look at the cracks starting up from ground level and then peel back the floorboards to uncover those joints clearly marking those divisions where three separate pours of concrete were laid, he will see immediately what’s happened and will stand there wondering

who the fuck signed off on this

whoever it was, he should be shot with a ball of his own shit and

that’s how I explained it to Mairead while

we sat at this table

a couple of days after Moylette’s phone call, by which time the whole thing had clarified for me a little so that even if for the moment I could not see any way out of the impasse — the tension between politics and engineering — I was grateful to her for the patient way she listened, grateful also for the clarity of her confusion when she said

I don’t understand, I can see how both of you are being pressured on this but I can’t understand what leverage he has to make you sign — you’re not directly accountable to him, there is no direct chain of authority in all this as far as I can see

that’s true but when it comes down to it politics will trump engineering in a case like this — electoral pressure will ensure that this gets built sooner or later with or without my name on it

how does that work out — if your name is not on it whose name will be signed to it

the whole thing will get smudged, the cert could go missing or the county manager will probably take it out of my hands and the whole thing will go through on a nod and a wink

so that’s how it’s done

I’m not saying that’s how it will be done but Moylette won’t let it sit on my desk forever and sooner or later it will have to move elsewhere and I’m just telling you one way it might be solved so

I understood it was the Department of Education who has responsibility for schools, not county councils

it usually is but sometimes there are joint ventures when there are issues with roads and utilities and

politics

exactly

so now you need a plan

yes

and do you have one

I don’t have one, I’m going to sit on it until a written demand that I put my name on it lands on my desk, when it does I’ll have to give it more thought — that’s the best I can come up with at the moment and all of which

was taken out of my hands a few days later when Mairead became ill and I had to take sick leave so the project was still on my desk when I left that Friday evening and I thought no more about it during the time I spent nursing her, my mind completely taken up with other things so that it was only towards the end, when she started getting that bit stronger and I drove to town to get that tonic for her that I passed by the site on the Westport road which was now closed up behind sheets of blue plywood and Curran Construction signs nailed up so

tell me what happened the day they put in the foundation

Mairead asked as

she set two mugs of tea on the table and cut a large slice of cake, using the old, ash-handled bread knife that someone had gifted us as a wedding present over twenty years ago, a beautiful knife which down the years had become an old friend and was by now invested with a totemic significance — for me especially when, a couple of years into our marriage, Mairead held it up one day to examine it, turning it in the light to show me how it had become rounded and worn with the bevelled edges of the ash handle faintly bleached from continual washing and the blade itself showing signs of all the times it had been sharpened against the steel, those fine lines angled back from the edge as she held it up by the blade, the moment gleaming in the sort of light that offered a clear view of the knife’s descent from its first consideration in the murk of prehistory as a blunt river cobble or a shard of flint, through all its brittle bronze and ferric variants, step by step down the causal line of descent till it arrived safely in her hand, honed and fully evolved through balanced alloys, all its clumsiness pared away but carrying the marks of frequent use which prompted her to say