Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

I know and he’s not worried, he’s angry, he’s very upset, you’ll hear this when you talk to him, I’m sorry but it was my big mouth and

don’t worry about it, he had to find out sometime and better you than me — you said there was something else

yes, there’s a big demonstration planned for next week, the artistic community is getting together to protest the whole contamination thing and I’ve been asked to participate in some sort of street pageant

why you

I don’t know, it must have something to do with my new celebrity

what sort of pageant

I don’t know yet, dressing up and stuff I’d imagine, but I’m looking forward to it so that’s it, I’ll let you know how it goes

ok, look after yourself

I will, love to yourself and Mam

ok

bye

bye

which brought the call to an end, killing the phone in my hand in such a delicate way — light draining from the screen — that I placed it gently on the table for fear any sudden movements might disturb some lingering element of Agnes’s love and farewell, the phone on the table hopelessly inert in

the raw silence which always washed through me after these calls, always leaving me feeling lightened, not in the sense of being unburdened but more in the way of one who has undergone some trial and come through it not wholly unscathed, bruised in a way which left me tentative and anxious in some way beyond what the call itself was responsible for so that I spent the rest of the evening going through the house with the hoover and cleaning the bathroom just to take my mind off whatever it was now grating with such an anxious itch, something which made me wary of Darragh’s call later that night, his face

looming out of the screen towards me with his hair longer and his anger still stoked from what Agnes had told him, the distant sense of Mairead’s suffering clearly aggravating his hopeless frustration at being unable to do anything other than ranting and heaping curses on the heads of those engineers and politicians he now lit upon, a scalding tirade that I listened to for a few minutes, a venomous cascade of fucks which confirmed for me that there had always been this sudden rage lurking beneath all his crowing and cackling and I was glad Mairead was not witnessing this anger on her account because while it was easy to predict that Darragh would feel deeply on her behalf and would need little prompting to cast himself in the role of her defender I was not so sure that she would have admired the mixture of snarling rage and frustration which spilled from him now, his face receding into the dark shadows of his cheeks and his hair wild around his head in that mad way which sure enough brought to mind his grandfather in the last bewildered months of his life, a memory which frightened me and caused me to cut across him, barking

I have better things for doing Darragh than listening to this guff at this time of the night

you could have told me

and what could you have done

I should have known

your mother and I made the decision to keep quiet about it because we didn’t want to be putting worry on you

yah

and because we knew that this was how you’d react

and how is that

this brainless ranting

how am I supposed to react

with a bit more cop-on than this effing and blinding you’re going on with, if you think this kind of thing is going to make her any better you’d better think again

so what am I supposed to do

nothing Darragh, because there is nothing to be done, your mother is over the worst of it, the doctor was in at her and she’s weak but that’s all that’s wrong with her and she’ll be back on her feet soon — words to douse his anger and put his mind at rest which they seemed to do after

he blew off steam for another few minutes, heaping more curses on the heads of engineers and politicians alike before he turned to another theme, his anger lending a caustic edge to his usual clowning tone when he said

I believe Agnes is gathering her own coven about her — any day soon she’ll be minting her own religion

English Darragh, for God’s sake

I’m talking about Agnes Dei, she tells me that she’s become a totemic figure for a sensitive emo crowd

you’re speaking in tongues again Darragh — that went over my head, emo what

it would have been called goth in your day, Dad — emo is a more virulent strain of that old disorder, it’s that worldview in which black is the new white and life is the new death

you can’t put it any plainer than that

no

and what has this to do with Agnes

she tells me that she’s being stopped in the street by these emo girls who want to touch the hem of her garment, it’s all about her work of course, they recognise a kindred sufferer, and in fairness it’s easy to see how that installation could become a sacred spot for a small church of self-harmers, a little congregation of cutters and anorexics and dysmorphs, all with their own stigmata of tats and piercings

you’re losing me again Darragh

these are the last days Dad, the signs are everywhere, the writing’s on the wall and the people on the march, pestilence washing through the city — mark my words any day now they’re going to raise a yellow flag over the town hall and place the whole metropolitan area under quarantine and behind razor wire — that’s the kind of shambles in which a secular saint like Agnes would flourish

this sort of guff wears me out, Darragh

oh don’t worry Dad, you’ll have your own part to play in all this fairly soon, any day now the four of us will all be sitting around in a circle, the holy family, each of us in turn raising a vein so that the New Testament can be written afresh there’s good reason why this sort of thing is called the cutting edge

and you believe we have some responsibility for all of this

in fairness you have only yourself to blame Dad, yourself and Mam — what were you thinking when you named her Agnes, didn’t you know that name is destiny, you should look it up some time and see what was laid out for her

this is all very tiring, Darragh

you’re a tough audience Dad, I have to say

I’m tired, that’s all

well I suppose we won’t solve it all tonight

hardly

ok, keep checking your email, I’ll let you know when I’m likely to be online, and give all my love to Mam, let me know when she is ready to take a call from me

I will, ok

bye

bye

after which he seemed to reach towards me with his palm outstretched, fingers filling the screen for a darkening moment before it switched off and the line which connected us across the globe dissolved to a black portal, leaving me adrift for a moment, my mind still locked into the conversation we’d just had before I closed down the laptop, the sound of which drew the sitting room with its walls and pictures in around me in the darkness with

Mairead down the hall in Agnes’s room, among the teddies and soft toys, sleeping easier now with her face turned onto the pillow, her breath levelled out and drawing gently, her body now almost purged of the virus, the wracking days of vomiting and sweating behind her just as

the contamination finally rose to the top of the news agenda, climbing over the headlines of all those other stories, surmounting those larger brooding issues which were stacking up on the political horizon like some catastrophic high-pressure weather system, darkening the sky to promise of all sorts of devastation — stories of wage agreements, unemployment crises and so on, all of them inhabiting the most abstract realm of figures and geopolitics, none of them as yet achieving that immediate heft of bodily and civic catastrophe which gave the contamination story its gathering allure, as it still showed no sign of going away, if anything its persistence in the boil-water notice and the still escalating number of patients marked it out as a story with genuine resilience, an obstinacy one could easily associate with a viral event that would give it endurance, with a note of irony which ran through every report, the reminder that