Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  remember when Agnes and Darragh were children

  and it was part of their whole Christmas thing to leave food and drink on the kitchen table for Santa Claus and Rudolph, something to keep them fed on their big night’s work, usually cake or a sandwich and a carrot, and it was my job, before going to bed to eat some of it – or at very least to leave teeth marks in it – to show that Santa had indeed sampled our hospitality so that, the following morning, when they had got over the initial delight of their presents they would stand beside the table to examine the remains of the food and the whiskey glass lying sideways on the table because obviously, with a drop taken in so many houses along the way, Santa must have been well slewed by the time he got to our door and it was a wonder at all he managed to leave the right presents in the right houses and there was Agnes standing by the table in her pyjamas listening to me saying all this, weighing it up, while Darragh was already surging ahead, examining the carrot and cake but still not saying anything so that I began to wonder if I had slipped up somewhere in my story and given something away that would spoil the whole thing and I was about to open my mouth again but Mairead was looking at me from across the table, shaking her head, wearing that expression, both fearful and dismayed, which was telling me without words to

  stop now, before you go too far

  stop now

  so I stopped

  because every echo of that expression brings me back to that morning when we were just four months married and Mairead stood at this same breakfast table waving a small blue wand over my head and wearing that imploring look I had never seen on her face before, so compromised and uncertain of itself, startling in a woman who, till then, had conducted her life with all the confidence of one who had trusted her first instincts, her way of going about a life which had led her across Europe and through various teaching and cultural posts in Madrid, Berlin, Prague and all the way to the banks of the Danube in Budapest where, after two years working in a language school, she had suddenly turned for home – happily enough, as she admitted herself – but this time taking the scenic route through Northern Europe – Warsaw, Oslo and Copenhagen – before finally fetching up in our local secondary school covering maternity leave for the vice principal, which was when I met her, shortly after I took up work with the County Council and we started a courtship which saw us married a few years later and buying this house which we were settled in only a few months the morning she stood over me

  at this same table

  waving the stick that was telling us, by way of an unbroken line through its tiny window, that she was pregnant, that we were going to have a child and furthermore that this was something she was so totally unprepared for that she tried to stifle a giggle of fright in an effort to grasp the consequences of what it all might mean – this wand she was holding up between thumb and forefinger as if she were about to cast a spell in the room and draw down a cloud of glittering fairy dust over

  this very table here

  which at the time, stood in a house that was little more than a concrete shell, an old house going through a radical refurbishment, no doors or windows in some of the rooms, walls and ceilings stripped while the hallway was strewn with timber offcuts and copper piping, a house beginning to evolve around us, a wall-by-wall gain on structure and order, a space in the world we could call our own even if that morning it was in fact little more than a bedroom and a kitchen with the whole place smelling of sawdust and wet cement as she stood over the kitchen table

  this same table

  with that blue pregnancy indicator in her hand which was telling us with ninety-eight percent accuracy that she was indeed pregnant, because that’s what the clear line through its little window was saying, definite as any line drawn in the sand or any surveyor’s contour or any of those global parallels

  longitude and latitude

  which demark those national borders that are drawn up in the wake of long, complex negotiations – the 45th parallel which separates Alaska from Canada or, more accurately, the 38th parallel which separates North from South Korea – a definitive boundary or threshold over which you can venture only if you accept that you are leaving your old life behind with all its habits and customs, a life that has served you well enough up to this but which will not suffice in the new circumstances when

  we were both faced with this threshold which most likely had its origins in one of those sudden, joyful fucks on the stack of doors in the bedroom at the end of the hall or on one of the carpenter’s trestles in the kitchen, one of those sudden coming-to-grips with each other to which we were given in those days, waylaying each other before moving on to whatever it was we had originally set out to do, an airy ignoring of each other which suited us both, smug and heedless but all demolished by the small baton which Mairead waved over my head with its news of how our lives had taken such a radical swerve away from all the old habits and rhythms we had so easily inhabited up to this but which now, surprisingly, I would relinquish without too much regret because

  marriage to Mairead had brought with it a settling of my whole spirit into a kind of banal contentment I was comfortable with, a contentment which had drawn from me some nameless yearning the moment I wedded this spirited woman who stood over me as I sat

  with my breakfast and newspaper in front of me

  a man in the process of having his life overturned by news his young wife found so disabling but which

  I seemed to be taking in my stride, having readily interpreted it as another extension of that ordinary contentment which had come to me in marrying Mairead, so much so that now I found myself marvelling, not at the dullness of my response, but at the realisation that if she had stood there telling me she was not pregnant this indeed would have been shocking news, this would have stopped me in my tracks and caused me something deeper than that mild surprise which kept me sitting there at the kitchen table with my wife repeating desperately that yes, she was pregnant and with that settled there should have been a finality to the moment which would have allowed us to acknowledge it with a tearful embrace and congratulations before setting the whole thing aside for the time being – fuller discussion later that evening – as I was anxious to return to my breakfast and squeeze the last drop of peace and quiet from those few remaining minutes before going to work – all of which was my normal way of going about the morning but

  which I now saw, from the look on Mairead’s face, that the normal way of doing things would not suffice anymore as a new set of circumstances had just supervened and that I would have to dig deeper within myself to find something which would soothe the startled expression from her pale face beneath the severe centre parting which gave Mairead that ascetic look which so became her as the traveller who had crossed so many time-zones and borders but which spoke nothing of her bright spirit or the generous way her face opened so completely in laughter with such broad disclosure of all her features that it was sometimes impossible to refer back to the pale woman who now

  stood there with that blue twig in her hand as

  the moment lengthened to a dangerous silence in which it became obvious to both of us that even though we may have had four years of a relationship behind us, we were not yet as skilled as we might wish in coping with news like this, not yet capable of assigning it its proper place and dimension or seeing it in context, because right then we seemed to be incapable of getting past this moment or of putting it to rest for the time being so that we might get on with our day and why

  sitting here

  at this kitchen table

  this particular incident should come to me now it’s hard to say, except to confirm that the blue line in that tiny window was

  Agnes

  or as Darragh would sometimes have it

  Agnes Dei

  Agnes the Unhinged

  the Abbess of the Abyss

  Agnosia

  Anagnorisis

  Agnes, our first born and that threshold in our lives which brought with it all t
hose demands and responsibilities which pushed myself and Mairead into our older selves, our very own need-bearer whose presence in the world was promised in that blue line and confirmed nine months later when she clocked in shortly before noon, tipping the scales at seven pounds four ounces, slightly jaundiced but otherwise fine with fingers and toes all present and correct, latched onto her mother’s breast within forty minutes of seeing the light of day and who was fully authorised a couple of days later by her birth certificate which

  I saw drawn up before my eyes in a little office down the hall from the maternity ward of the county hospital, a single-page document which told me that now my child was completely realised and that

  the seal had been set on her identity as an Irish citizen, who, although less than four days old, was nevertheless the point of all the massive overarching state apparatus within which she could live out her life as a free and self-determining individual, the protective structure of a democracy which she in turn would uphold as a voter, a consumer, a patient, a student, a banking customer, a taxpayer and so on while gathering to herself all those ID cards and certificates that would enable her draw down all the benefits of being born a free child of a republic, accessing education and medicine and bank accounts and library books, all of these rights devolving from

  her birth certificate, the source document, which was drawn up for her in a small office at the end of the hall, the cramped space shelved to the roof with files and records and lit by a single fluorescent strip which cast down a hard light on the head of the smiling lady with large arms who took down my details and Mairead’s details and then entered them carefully in a newly opened file before she went to a cupboard and took out a blank certificate which we both signed before she entered some final details on it and then, reading it through one last time to ensure it was complete to her satisfaction, took a stamp and pressed the state seal onto it before handing it to me with a smile, where I, affected with a deep sense of occasion, found myself reaching out to shake her hand because this surely was how the moment should be marked and

  ten minutes later, sitting in the car with Mairead in the back and Agnes in her arms, I continued to stare at this document

  the document scarcely less miraculous than the child in the way

  it fixed her within a political structure which undertook to spend a percentage of its GDP on her health and her education and her defence among other things and over twenty years later I can still feel something of that mysterious pride which swept through me as I sat there behind the steering wheel, the uncanny feeling that my child was elevated into something above being my daughter or my own flesh and blood – there was a metaphysical reality to her now – she had stepped into that political index which held a space for her in the state’s mindfulness, a place that was hers alone and could not be occupied by anyone else nor infringed on in any way which might blur her identity or smudge her destiny, this document which did not tag or enumerate her but freed her into her own political space, our citizen daughter who

  are we ever going to leave this car park or are you going to sit all day gawping at that certificate

  Mairead called from the back seat and

  of course all these high ideas passed into oblivion very quickly or, more accurately, were swept away in the messy flesh and blood circumstance of having a child in our lives, the whole drama of night feeds and nappy changes, the terrors of vaccinations and all those developmental markers which infants have to hit, my heart in my mouth every time the district nurse pulled up outside the house and all that was, hard to believe

  the last millennium

  ancient history

  and of course

  none of it on my mind twenty-two years later, the first week of March, when Mairead and I attended the opening of Agnes’s first solo exhibition in the Dominic St Gallery in Galway, that exhibition which was her prize for having graduated top of her class in paint two years previously, a gifted artist Mairead assured me whose work in oil had been praised by her tutors as

  a sustained attempt to marry the vatic gaze of a hallowed tradition with a technique which strove to find some way out of the redundancy it was so often accused of in a world awash with electronic imagery

  or so Mairead told me, as we drove along

  recalling the essential feedback points Agnes had received for the degree show which had secured this exhibition while Mairead stressed for me also that this was an important occasion for Agnes not just because it was her first solo show but because it was her first new work since her graduation and as such it would be interesting to see how her themes and technique had progressed in that period of independent experiment, what new paths she had explored and at this point something in me should have been alert to the note of warning in her voice but I ignored it as a coded appeal that I should make a special effort on Agnes’s behalf tonight, that I should be especially convivial or at least shed some of my social awkwardness to do her proud and be supportive but, of course, neither of us should have worried on her account because when we walked into the gallery I saw immediately that this was that occasion when

  Agnes was never so essentially herself or so self-contained as she was that evening, and that this was yet another of those times when I’ve looked at her and thought that had Mairead and myself never come together as husband and wife Agnes would still have contrived to exist and be exactly who she was in some other way because she did not appear contingent on anything or anyone and while we might be her parents she was essentially irreducible in the way she was completely at one with herself when I walked into the gallery and saw how, among a fashionable crowd of well-wishers and friends, she still managed to stand alone in the middle of the room with a composite air of being both jilted and the belle-of-the-ball at one and the same time, standing there in the centre of the gallery, hovering above the ground in a black shift, her whole being as Darragh would clarify for me later, an amalgam of witness and pale accuser, exemplary sufferer and Cruella de Vil, a fully achieved study in western gothic, commanding her space with such an impressive aura of quiet disdain that for a moment I was cautious of approaching her for fear of shattering something essential in the exhibition itself, a hesitancy Mairead did not share as she strode across the floor towards her and stood off her at arm’s length for a moment before they moved fully into each other’s embrace from which Agnes eventually unwrapped herself to welcome and kiss me and draw me into the circle of her friends and well-wishers, men and women in their early twenties, all the young women called Emma or Emily, and all the lads Naoise or Oisin or something like that and of course it took me a while to get my bearings as I found myself caught up in a blur of handshakes and introductions with various snatches of conversation and observations whizzing by which acknowledged, among other things, that

  yes, it was an important night and

  no, we were only up for the night and

  yes, I was proud of her and

  no, not too bad, we missed the worst of it and

  so on and

  so forth

  till someone handed me a glass of red wine and I took it with the hope that it might grow in my hand to the size of something I might hide behind while I could see already that Mairead was enjoying herself immensely, moving easily among Agnes’s friends, picking up the mood of the evening without having to adjust anything in herself so I took this opportunity to take a step back, literally, to find myself on the edge of the gathering where it was less crowded and a relief to have space and time in which to gather myself before moving away to take a look at the exhibition itself, my eyes needing a long moment to adjust to the light in the room which seemed to be suffused with some sort of ochre mist, something grainy and falling, an effect of the low evening rays reflecting off the walls, or more explicitly off the red script which covered the entire gallery from ceiling to floor along its length, handwriting in various types and sizes, a continuous swathe of text which closer examination revealed to be snippets of news sto
ries lifted from the provincial papers – The Telegraph, The Sentinel, The Herald, the Western People – all recently dated and all dealing with court cases which covered the full gamut from theft and domestic violence to child abuse, public order offences, illegal grazing on protected lands, petty theft, false number plates, public affray, burglary, assault and drink-driving offences – in short, all those cases that came within the remit of the district and circuit courts, all detailed in descriptive passages crossed with contextualising pieces and direct quotes from court transcripts in which voices of victims and the accused, plaintiff and defendant, sang clear off the walls

  when I got him to the ground, Your Honour, I administered

  we have stood by him even though he has caused us untold grief

  a series of consecutive slaps, Your Honour

  I hope he rots in hell, no right father would have done what he did to this family

  a strong smell of soot and petrol from her, Your Honour

  four types of psychotropic drugs in his system

  woke up three weeks later with quarter of my skull gone and fitted with a titanium plate

  you will have no luck for this you bastard

  and so on and so on, a surge of red script flowing across the gallery, ceiling to floor, rising and falling in swells and eddies through various sizes and spacings, congested in the tight rhythms of certain examples only to swell out in crashing typographical waves in others, a maelstrom of voices and colour and it was quite something to stand there and have your gaze drawn across the walls, swept along in the full surge of the piece while resisting the temptation to rest and decipher one case or another, wanting instead to experience the full flow and wash of the entire piece, my gaze swept on in the relentless, surging indictment of the whole thing, its swells and depths, until I was startled from my reverie by Mairead who appeared by my side to press the exhibition catalogue into my hands with an anxious expression, positioning herself at my elbow where she looked fretful, not a mood I would have associated with her on such an occasion but one which became clear to me when I turned the catalogue over in my hands and read the cover title as