Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

Curran stiffened as if he had run up against a glass wall and now I was truly frightened because this was the end of our argument, there was no other place for either of us to go, short and all as it was we had run each other out of options and now we stood locked in position with no ready escape on either side, eyeballing each other across ten feet of hard-core, both of us too angry and frightened to back down in front of the other men, as the moment lengthened to breaking point before Curran finally had the inspiration to reach into his anorak and take out his mobile which he starts prodding with his thumb and eyeing me, saying

I’ll put an end to this fuck-acting as

he lowered his head onto the mobile to start shouting

hello, hello

while I stood there listening because even though I should have taken the chance to fuck off the site while he was talking I was anxious to hear what would happen so I stood looking at his broad back but couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the truck, while his mouth was buried in the mobile and he had everyone’s attention now, the men standing around looking at him, nervous at this new turn of events and the driver beside the pump with his hand on the pressure lever, ready to drop it at a second’s notice but still watching the big man in the anorak who was pacing back and forth in the grey light, looking down at the ground where the tops of his rigger boots kicked along the hard-core surface before he turned around and his voice carried towards me

sound, that’ll do so

as he snapped the phone shut and waved his arm up into the grey light

pour it out to fuck, he roared, pour it out and

he strode towards the cement truck before he pulled up, remembering that I was still standing there so he turns back to me, still roaring

you can stand there all you like, but that concrete is going to be poured today and there’s fuck all you can do about it and I don’t know what the fuck a county engineer is doing on my site anyway so

it’s county jurisdiction Curran, our responsibility, that’s what I’m doing here and

with that, the driver’s hand fell on the lever and the engine-pitch rose as the concrete poured out the hose and onto the steel mesh, the three men standing over it with shovels waiting for it to rise up under their boots and that was the last thing I saw before I walked out to the road and got into the car and drove off so

you’re saying that whoever was on the end of that phone call with Curran had some sort of influence

I’m saying that generally it’s easy to tell when the political pressure is being put on you, you develop an antenna for it, you learn to hear the voice behind whoever it is you’re dealing with — you learn that x will front for y but not for z and so on, it’s a kind of coded referral and after a while there is no mistaking it

Christ, it sounds like it’s a freemasonry, all nod and wink and

the vast majority of decisions are above board and go through without a hitch, but now and again, there are considerations which have nothing to do with engineering and that’s when you feel your arm being twisted so that

why would two different yards supply concrete to the same job

that’s the question, my belief is that the contract was split between two suppliers because that school is the last public works project of this size slated for the next two years, it’s an open secret in the building trade there’s no more money in the public purse for anything like this in the foreseeable future so they sat down and came in at the same price so there was political pressure to split the contract and

that sounds like collusion

that’s exactly what it is — there’s only a handful of cement works in this county — four or five and they are all going after the same number of dwindling public contracts so they probably sat down and talked it out among themselves, possibly three of them said something like they have enough work for the next eighteen months or so and two of them said that they have all their orders filled so they need the work and once they have that decided the two who are looking for the contract decide on the price they will go in at so that the others will overbid them or not bid at all

but you still have two bidders coming in at the same price, you could toss a coin and award it to one of them

you could but before the contract goes through the full tender- ing process you enlist your local public representative and drop hints about the thirty or forty jobs which depend on winning this contract, the thirty or forty households which will be badly affected coming up to election time

a friend at court

something like that, the two councillors now sit down and see that it is in both their interest to have the contract split between the two yards in their parts of the county

but it’s only a couple of loads of concrete

it’s a lot more than that — there’s all the block-work, all the aggregate and maintenance, lintels, kerbing, hardcore and surfacing — this contract will keep these two yards tipping over for another twelve months — who knows what might have happened by then and

Mairead shook her head in wonderment, a smile opening out all her features and I was glad of this lightness in her response, it lifted something from me and did me good so that

her face before me now

Mairead across the table from me as

clearly as if she really was in front of me, her face as it was in the days before she took ill, its winter paleness fading with those fresh spring days, her spirits brightened from bedding in the first plants in her flowerbeds at the front of the house, a task she always said never failed to quicken something in her soul and which I had come to see as the sign that marked the true passing of winter no matter what the calendar might say so that when I came around the corner of the house that day

she was sitting in the garden

wearing her quilted jacket and tracksuit bottoms with both hands clasped around a mug of coffee — appearing exactly as the woman she was — an attractive middle-aged school teacher who was taking time out after a few hours gardening and who, even in these relaxed, unguarded moments was never far from that school-marmish neatness which she carried from her classroom and which, in the early years of our marriage, we made good use of when she would play the role of the prim schoolteacher taking it from the rough-hewn but sensitive laggard at the back of the class, bent over the table, in the hallway, wherever — neither of us claiming there was anything original about the fantasy but both of us stepping into our roles with such gusto that our energies carried us into a place where we found ourselves overtaken with a greedy appetite for each other, sometimes so intense that Mairead said she thought there was something cosmic about it and that she felt capable of fucking the world into redemption

her own words

fucking our way past the pettiness and desperation which sometimes overcame us in our day-to-day lives, so that twisted together in the act of love we found our way towards that one molten moment in which only that which was true and unsullied in us would survive, everything else burned away, leaving us truly naked with all our senses open to giving the best of ourselves to each other and to the world we had created around us, something which thankfully, happened often enough back then to allow us now, in middle age

to sit across the table from each other and reflect that we’d had our proper share of such passion, we had not short-changed that part of ourselves while

all this comes to me now in such an unbroken torrent

sitting here at this table

faces and words and all sorts of fragments falling through me in staggered, interleaved depths with nothing behind them except some dark oblivion which threatens to suck me down into it, some black gravity which pulls at me, dragging at the tips of my fingers so that to dwell on it any longer might cause me to slip from myself completely for the want of something solid to focus on like