Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

it would seem

exempt from physical pain myself as the heartburn in my chest flared up there on the sunlit pavement and I had to take another of those lozenges to ease the sour pain when

this is all coming back to me with

this tightness drawing together bone and sinew across my chest — that cup of coffee, which was no doubt good but strong, just the sort to give you the jitters I had now, twitchy like some sort of gritty interference running across my nerves which propelled me down the street and across the intersection at the bottom where I’d left the car, sat into her and threw the newspapers into the back seat and drawing the seatbelt across my chest I felt the bulk of the prescription package in my jacket pocket so I pulled it out and left it onto the passenger seat before starting her up and pulling out into the street and straight away

I forgot myself

forgot myself completely in a

long stretch of pure absent-mindedness which lasted as long as it took to drive from one side of the town to the other, all the time manoeuvring carefully in slow traffic, stopping to let pedestrians cross and other cars move out into the street, moving up and down through the gears, so many complex and thoughtless manoeuvres but somehow arriving safely on the other side of town with no memory whatsoever of having passed slowly through the streets, another of those long, vacant intervals during which the soul goes walkabout, comes unmoored and drifts away on its own when

I came to and remembered myself

on the other side of the town to find that I had decided to turn right at the top of the hill and take the Rosbeg road for home, that stretch of road called the golden mile which turns around by the coast with the sea on the right hand side and where, at high tide it comes in from a long way out over sand into the shallow quays, the tide full in at this hour while the burning in my chest had not been eased one bit by those lozenges I’d taken because if anything it seemed to have got worse, tightened in such a way as to draw all my energy towards it and

Mother of Jesus

I drove around the coast road, passing those large mansions on the left side of the road which belonged to lawyers and doctors and business folk, those houses with oversized windows which look out over the sea and reflect the rhythms of the light and the glare of the sun back onto the road so that it seems as if the sea is on both sides of the road and that you are journeying through some place privileged with an overabundance of light before the road turned a corner and the trees on both sides closed in over the car and the light pushed back to admit just that proper degree of darkness in which things are seen in their true colour and shadow — stone walls looming over the road on both sides and the trees arching overhead with the sun winking down through the leaves, a mile, two miles before it turned out into the fullness of the sun once more for another mile or so, leading into an open bend where I slowed down to take the right hand turn at the T-junction, where the road broadens out to a wide corner with

the Imperial Hotel standing there on the left behind its high, blistered walls, filthy and eyeless in its broken grounds, derelict for two decades now inside those scrolled iron gates, a sorry sight, the more so because no one knows properly how or why it came to such dilapidation at the precise moment when its tennis courts and swimming pool made it the most glamorous spot in the whole region, my mother remembering especially the ballroom with its maple floor and how she had danced there so many times, recalling that

you could just float across it and we did, your father and I, several times when we were courting and the crowds that used come there in those days, they’d come from all over and

that was before the place was suddenly closed back in the eighties, all the staff let go and the electricity cut after Easter eighty-three or eighty-four, the blinds closed, the curtains pulled, and the scroll gates padlocked, the whole place shut down with no one knowing the reason why or no one getting any explanation which of course led to lots of speculation and stories — there were debts, the numbers were not coming anymore, there was a waster of a son in London who had made off with the title deeds and so on and so on, either way the owners were never seen again so the hotel just sat there and settled

block by block

room by room

into its own gathering dilapidation with paint peeling and dust gathering throughout its rooms and weeds breaking up through the hard surface of the tennis courts, and the tarmac in the car park also coming up in blistering slabs as the timber fence at the back began to disintegrate which gave access to all the kids from around who came to explore its rooms and corridors and take the opportunity to peg stones up at the small windows, knocking them out one by one as the cattle from the neighbouring fields began to drift through the gaps in the fence where the slats had rotted away completely to wander through the grounds, black and red Angus cows with their calves in tow, loping quietly through the gardens and along by the swimming pool on summer’s evenings, lying down on the tiled patio beside plaster balustrades which were now green with the moss of neglect until the owner of the herd — a man by the name of Fallon — whose grazing land ran from the shoreline to the back of the hotel — raised up the sloping floor of the swimming pool with a couple of tons of hard-core and gravel and put in a metal barrier at the deep end from where, when winter set in, he would feed the cattle each evening, hay and silage tipped in over the edge, this herd of cattle feeding at one end of a tiled swimming pool, after which they would move on with their heads dipped till they found their way to the broken emergency exit with its door swung open which allowed them enter the ballroom to the left side of the stage, this herd of cattle coming through in single file to find themselves in the open expanse of the maple dance floor, between walls hung with satin drapes now black with rot and the mirror ball on its chain over the centre of the floor, the finest dance hall in West Mayo full of Angus cattle, and there they would lie down and close their eyes, chewing the cud until they were turned out in the morning and this had been going on for so long now that Fallon had acquired some sort of squatter’s rights to the place and was now the principal in the ongoing court-case that had yet to decide the fate of the hotel which on days like this, with the sun slanting through its broken windows and across its balustrades, always

appeared to me like the sacked palace of some tyrant, some ruthless overlord of a Caribbean island kingdom which was favoured with a temperate climate and substantial mineral wealth but which was nonetheless dogged by civil incompetence and corruption, by spiralling inflation rates and a despicable human rights record, the whole place evocative of some extraordinary dispensation which must have reigned in these parts without us ever recognising it or seeing it for what it really was before the broader drama of the world’s distant circumstances swept it aside for something else so that now it stood

eyeless and decrepit, all its arches and colonnades peeling away to reveal the grey concrete underneath, the place rotting and crumbling away to some patient schedule of its own, all its rooms and recesses, all its stairs and corridors quietly swarming with every type of rot and decay and dilapidation, every possible variant on the wider creep of collapse which was now drawing it apart block by block, lath by lath, tile by tile, the whole place having gathered to itself the attentiveness of very possible ruin, that which is native to concrete and that which is native to timber and that which is native to metal, each of them in their own way and at their own pace gradually levelling the whole structure to the ground even as it