Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

these sewage works

these public lighting schemes

these primary and secondary roads

these public water schemes

these supply reservoirs

these miles of walk and cycle paths

these bridges

these private dwellings scattered the length and breadth of the county

the work of a civil engineer

amen

and the work of one man’s quarter century, all I’ve done since I signed up to this job in my mid-twenties and which, year by year, I have lent my name to, projects which if taken all together, would amount to a fully serviced metropolis with adequate housing for a hundred-thousand souls, give or take, plus facilities for health and education and recreation with complete infrastructure, a sizeable city, the scale of the whole thing startling when it is drawn together like that since year after year I have never given much thought to what it might all amount to, just turning up in the office day after day where my desk and computer and drawing instruments wait for me or arriving on a site to make sure that things are running to plan and that there are not too many differences between what is on paper and what is coming into being as timber and concrete and stone because

this is my work

this is what I have believed in

something Darragh has harped on since hearing of my time in the seminary, chiding me that I have traded one faith for another

have I

so it appears, he said, turned your back on the cross to take up the theodolite

Jesus

it’s well known that engineers picked up where God left off

that passed me by

He worked six days flat out, separating heaven from earth, light from darkness, on the seventh He took a step back and handed over His square and dividers to you and your kind, you’ll manage from here lads He said, or words to that effect

so that’s where we take our authority from

yes, the ancient of days, down on one knee on the edge of heaven, setting His square and dividers to the void, hair and beard streaming in the cosmic wind, the Creator, not to be confused or equated with the enfeebled version who snookered Himself down the road and had to take out a contract on His own son

I thought they were one and the same

you’d be surprised how many believe that

and this was at a time when he was deep in his bedroom boffin phase, living his life by the light of a computer monitor, wholly immersed in a strategic world building game called Civilization in which he had built up a heavily garrisoned city from a tiny river valley settlement in the space of two months, a citadel which, when he had it secured and provisioned became the seat of a despot who gradually began deploying armies farther and farther from the city walls to lay waste to outlying homesteads and settlements, expansionist ambitions which Darragh seemed keen to nurture — a strong leader, that’s what he told me — so when he explained the mechanics of the game to me I sat down in his darkened bedroom to try my hand at it with the clear lines of a neoclassical city already unfurling across my imagination, a place of sunlit plazas and public fountains, libraries, municipal baths and childcare facilities alongside public thoroughfares which achieved that happy ratio of retail and residential space, balancing the competing demands of business and residential communities in an urban space, all this embracing a broad central park which would throng in the summer months with picnicking families and tourists listening to free concerts and outdoor theatrical events — a vision of urban planning in the service of its happy citizenry and

all of which was a massive evolutionary leap up from the primaeval forests and marshy barrens I found myself in when the game opened and my avatar — a querulous, muscled bloke in animal skins and horned helmet who looked like he would have been handy rustling and pillaging but who did not inspire confidence as the founder of city states — stood looking around him on a marshy plain with no steed or implement to hand but whom, in a simple point and click game, I could not cajole into digging a well or erecting a crude bush shelter, leaving him exposed to the cruel night temperatures which did for him in my first couple of attempts and which proved a more prolonged agony than the pack of dogs which tore him apart also or the marshy depths which swallowed him under a clear sky with no one to hear his cries for help, all the ways in which my civilisations failed to take hold and faltered, the game freezing as my avatar drowned, froze or got torn apart, the screen closing to black with the definitive annulment

Game Over

coming up black on white, like the end of the world itself

Game Over

and Darragh behind me, bursting his hole laughing, crowing

typical engineer, too proud to bend the back while

I protested that

I’d bend it if there was something to work with

Darragh chuckling away to himself, enjoying me making a hames of things

it’s a good job we weren’t depending on you to found the first settlement, we’d still be knapping flints on the margins of history — I suppose that’s why there’s no record of Adam being an engineer and

you’ve fallen asleep again

what

you were telling me what happened when the second load of concrete was poured — Christ, are you always drifting off like this

sorry, I was thinking about something else there

same as when that second concrete truck pulled onto the site and I saw straight away that there was something odd about this one truck because the first had come from Corcoran’s — the yellow and purple markings on the side — but this was blue, from Ward’s and that was strange — two separate suppliers of concrete to the same site but as yet it didn’t matter so long as the compositional makeup of both batches were the same, which of course

they weren’t

were they fuck

and I had only to look at the results of the slump tests to see how different they were, different aggregates, different mix ratios, plain to see there on the spot board, the two cones of concrete with their different slumps and disintegration before I put up my hand and shouted at Curran

hold on a minute, I yelled over the noise of the truck, hold on and

he came towards me with no expression on his big face but knowing full well what was going to happen, I could see it in his fucking gait, the shoulders pulled up around the ears, the jaw already clenched

what, he says, what

you know damn well what, you can’t pour that concrete into that foundation

what do you mean, that concrete

you can’t pour this concrete because it’s a different batch and it will set differently against what’s already poured — you’re long enough at this game to know, you shouldn’t have to be told

so what do you want me to do with it

I don’t care what you do with it but you can’t pour it here so

Curran raised his arm towards the truck

there’s nine cubic metres of concrete there and if you think I’m turning it around and sending it back to the yard you can think again and

he was looking at me now fit to kill, the two feet planted apart like he was going to draw out on me and it was very exposed standing there in the cold facing him and the five men who stood behind him with shovels and screeding boards, men wanting to get on with their work but who now saw me as nothing but an obstacle, a fucking paper-pusher with some technical objection or piece of red tape, citing some new piece of EU legislation, typical civil service shite which holds up real work so

you tell me so what the fuck I’m going to pour into that shuttering, Curran shouted as

I can’t tell you what to pour into it but I can tell you that if you pour that load of concrete I won’t sign off on it and it will be a long day before you lay a block on that foundation raft — I can guarantee you that and