Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  to a whole new set of considerations – what would this single party majority do now, this assembly with all its new faces – no less than seventeen new deputies – how would they comport themselves in terms of building a government, how would it fulfil the extravagant assurances of its election manifesto and to what degree would it fall short of all it had promised on the hustings, all of which to my mind, was slightly distant and beside the point as my own immediate attention dwelt on the fact that with my first vote I had positioned myself on the winning side, not merely in party terms, but also with regards the specific candidate I had voted for – the tall man who’d shook my hand and canvassed my vote at the gable of the house had topped the poll over the heads of the other oppositional candidate whom, early in the afternoon, he had vanquished on the third count, taking his seat with an eventual surplus of over a thousand votes to be bounced on the shoulders of party workers and volunteers who punched the air and sang

  Take me Back to Mayo

  rowdy well-wishers caught up in a dizzy moment of victory who would repeat the celebration a couple of weeks later when the 21st Dáil assembled and he, wearing a white suit and a polka-dot tie in the manner of a lounge singer, would be shouldered across the threshold of Leinster House by the same scrum of party workers, well wishers and volunteers, but not before he took a moment to remind the assembled media of the prophet who said

  the Messiah would come out of the west

  an incident which, when it found its way back across the country to our constituency would cause my father to mutter

  there will be telling on this yet

  which was true because over time it would come to light that a whole new generation of deputies would deduce from the spectacular nature of this victory with all its biblical swell and destructiveness, that the result was surely a temporal extension of God’s will, certainly nothing but such transcendental endorsement could account for the hubris and greed that entered the political arena after that election, which as yet was

  all in the future, and not yet capable of casting any shadow on the epochal victory itself nor on my own satisfaction at being on the winning side so that when, two weeks later, the victorious candidate headed an open-air rally in our town to thank the people for their work and support, I was among the large crowd gathered on the square that summer’s evening, standing with my back to the chemist window and listening to the tall man tell us in a confident voice that he was going to Leinster House with a mission to redress those decades of neglect that had turned our region into a wasteland of unemployment and forced emigration with so many families torn apart for the want of viable income, and so it would be his mission above in Dáil Éireann to rectify this beginning with a campaign for improved infrastructure across the whole area, with roads and other services needing a total upgrade if the place was to prove attractive to any kind of inward investment – roads and sewage and phone lines – these would be his immediate focus and he would be second to no one in his efforts to see this mission through to completion because he knew full well that the people of West Mayo would be the judge of whether he was as good as his word because in five years’ time he would have to stand before them once again and if he had reneged on any article of the pledge he was making here tonight to the good people of Louisburgh then he knew full well what to expect if he came looking for votes in this part of the constituency, he would be shown no mercy and would be told to step aside and make way for a better man, so this was the promise he was making here tonight and

  so on and so forth

  and

  even if we heard that speech at five-year intervals – the staple address of every electoral cycle – or a close variant of it, from this same stage in the middle of the village, neither its bludgeoning repetition nor any other aspect of that dramatic election ever, in my eyes, took the shine off my father’s feat in so accurately forecasting the outcome, his lighted intelligence running ahead of history to see something of the world before it was properly revealed, one of those moments when it was easy to suspect him of knowing his way with a sureness of step I would never possess, a sound judge of men among other things as his suspicion of the tall man would prove well-founded when, years later, several cross-party tribunals would make adverse findings against him on planning issues and party funding, his fortune made but his reputation ruined in the end, scandal and suspicion mounting so high around him that his very real political gifts and sensitivities were completely obscured, not that he gave a shite one way or another, he was well retired by then, his money made and his time taken up with a late vocation for landscape painting, sentimental watercolours depicting a Mayo landscape of rolling drumlins and single arch bridges, hedges and boreens, the same topography in which he had licensed so many gravel quarries and cement works and

  can hardly breathe now, so humid

  something dragging in my chest ever since coming into this kitchen, something to do with that overcast sky out there, pressing upon me as if the clouds themselves had dropped into my chest, lodged there and making it difficult to breathe with my lungs struggling to gain some sort of hold on the air, nothing but a vacant hole in my chest as if it had been cored to the bone and of course

  it’s that awful hour of the day, this soft hour bracketed between the Angelus bell and the time signal for the one o’clock news, the morning’s best energies spent but still too early for the dinner, no proper work getting done and nothing on the radio but songs in three-quarter time as if the whole world was exhausted or washed out the same as

  Mairead was the Friday I came home and found she’d been sick since morning, nausea and a fever for the first couple of hours but worsening to cramps and puking in the afternoon, keeping her in bed with the curtains drawn, a livid flush on her cheeks and a gloss of sweat on her face, her voice a thready rasp of itself, whispering

  it’s been like this all day, I can’t hold anything down and

  it was a shock to see her like that, lying there with all the energy twisted out of her, this woman who never took to the bed for any reason whatsoever and

  do you want me to call the doctor, you’re burning up as

  I laid my hand on her forehead which, in spite of appearances, felt cold beneath the sweaty sheen so

  no, it’s only a bug, it’ll be gone in the morning, all I need is a bit of sleep and

  you’re all right besides with

  her face narrowing into a tight grimace when

  I’ve got these cramps that come and go through my stomach, I’ve had them all afternoon and they are not getting any better – if I could just get some sleep before

  her misery came to a head later that evening when I was in the kitchen and her voice called weakly from the bedroom where I found her leaning over the side of the bed vomiting a green wash into a basin, her body purging itself in a spasm of spew, a rinse of bitter filth sluicing up out of her as if it were being pumped from deep within with such twisting force she was now almost out of the bed, resting her hand on the floor, bracing herself over the basin as she continued to disgorge, her body now almost head down on the floor and which, after another bout of puking, I finally drew up and settled back within the pillows where she lay trembling and snuffling wetly so

  that’s it, I said, I’m calling the doctor

  no, she rasped, not yet and

  the look of pain on her face sank beneath a look of shame and alarm which lifted up her chin as she said weakly

  I need to go to the bathroom and I need you to change these sheets

  ok, I’ll throw them in the washing machine

  no, not the washing machine, throw them out and the duvet cover also she said

  her voice now with an imploring under-note to its breathlessness which I did not understand till she glared meaningfully into the middle of the bed, her shame now burning under a tide of rage which drew her up with gritted teeth to say

  leave the room

  you’re not able to get up on your own

&n
bsp; for Christ’s sake leave the room or you will regret it she

  barked, an outburst which momentarily drained all her strength away, pushing her back between the pillows with a heavy gasp as I turned from the room and pulled the door behind me, returning only when I heard the shower running in the bathroom to pick up the sheets, duvet cover and nightdress which were gathered into a tight ball in the middle of the floor where the air was thick with the smell of vomit and that other filth which had been drawn from her body, now bundled up in these sheets which I pushed into the wheelie bin outside the back door and then waited with a change of nightdress for her when she stepped out of the shower, which she did after a few minutes to stand swaying on the tiled floor, heat-blushed and dizzy, with steam rising from her pale shoulders as if she was some new-born thing, so I took a towel and dried her off before slipping the nightdress over her head and then did something I had not done in the longest time – gathered her up in my arms and carried her down the hall to Agnes’s room which was already made up, to sit her on the edge of the bed where she balanced breathless and trembling, swaying to one side as I looped a towel around her head and dried her hair as gently as possible then ran a brush through it so that when she lay back into the pillows her face was opened with a fevered heat coming off her in scented waves, gasping

  thank you

  her eyes closing as she spoke, all her strength needed to draw the two words up from inside her and

  I’m ringing the doctor now, this needs to be seen to

  yes and

  her exhaustion pushed her off to sleep as I made the phone call to the clinic where the receptionist told me that Mairead’s GP was on leave but they put me on to a woman with a quiet telephone manner who requested that I detail clearly all the symptoms and how long they had been in place – all the vomiting, the cramps, the diarrhoea, the fever – after which she said she would be at the house in twenty minutes, which indeed she was and there was a pleasing difference between the calm voice on the phone and the wild-haired woman who sat on the side of Mairead’s bed taking her temperature and pulse, a young woman in an oversized mac with the cuffs rolled up over her wrists and whose face it took me a long moment to recognise, but eventually it came to me, a neighbour’s child, one of the Cosgraves of Derreen who now

  sat beside Mairead, running through the steps of her medical examination – pulse, heart, blood pressure, temperature and drawing off two phials of blood from her arm – her hand on her forehead while Mairead held a digital thermometer between her swollen lips, swimming in the ebb and flow of her own fever, the great pulsing throb of her discomfort which seemed now to envelope her and into which this young medic now placed her hand and lowered her head to ask

  when did you say you went to Agnes’s opening

  two days ago

  and you had a meal after

  yes

  as she stood up, pulling the stethoscope from around her neck and casting her hair behind her shoulders

  so was it a good night, did you have fun

  yes, we did, it was a bit of a surprise and

  it’s been a while since I’ve seen Agnes, she was a couple of years behind me in school and

  you’re one of Padraig’s girls

  yes, the oldest

  I knew the face, but I didn’t know which of the Cosgraves you were

  there’s a few of us all right

  how’s your father, I see him now and again on the bike and

  he’s great, fit and supple, still cycling into town, my mother worries about him, he’s going deaf in one ear so she worries that he can’t hear things coming behind him, but other than that he’s great … so that’s what Agnes is doing now, painting, and her brother

  Darragh

  yes Darragh,

  oh, we don’t know what that lad’s at, all we know is that he’s in Australia, travelling and growing a beard, that’s all we know about him

  Darragh was younger than me, Agnes is the one I remember most, tell her I said hello as

  she turned towards Mairead in the bed who was now lying with her eyes closed, totally oblivious to what we were talking about and the young doctor laid her hand one final time on her shoulder before getting to her feet and leaving the room with me following her out to her car on the side of the road where she threw her bag into the back seat with a startlingly swift motion, saying

  from what I can see, this is a case of food poisoning – all the symptoms add up, the fever, the vomiting and the cramps, all the classic symptoms and if that is the case then there really is nothing you can do about it but ride it out with her, give her plenty of water to keep her hydrated but that is all that can really be done for her and I’ll get those samples off to the lab first thing on Monday so

  food poisoning after two days

  yes, it can happen

  what about the diarrhoea, she would not want that and

  she shook her head because

  no, I could prescribe something for that but I don’t want to at this early stage, that might only dehydrate her and that’s not what she needs at the moment, I want to give her a few days because the symptoms should abate and she should start to feel better within a day or two, so just keep giving her cool drinks and let her rest, there really isn’t a lot more that can be done, I’ll call again tomorrow and

  she handed me her card with her home number on it and gave me a sympathetic smile once more before she got into her car and pulled away onto the road and

  that was it for the weekend

  I was now Mairead’s carer, ghosting through the house with drinks and clean sheets, mopping her brow and trying to strike the right note of care and compassion at her bedside so that she could feel my presence through her fever, hovering there, willing her to feel my attentiveness even if she was mostly oblivious to my presence, trembling as she was within a humid haze, sometimes dozing for hours so that for long periods I had little enough to do except stand beside her bed looking down on the contours of her body beneath the sheets while in those short, lucid moments, when she was able to sit up with the pillows to her back she could only lie there in disbelief, her whole being raw with the sensitivities of what she was going through, this woman who, in all our years together, had never been sick for any length of time

  now lying in bed with her pulse slackening to a distant thread in those moments before she was hauled over the side of the bed, racked with such convulsive bouts of spewing I feared she might be washed from her body completely, bone and soul gone, leaving nothing beneath the sheets save some dry, lifeless husk which would serve for kindling, so for the two days of that weekend

  I stood by the side of her bed, frequently at a loss as to what exactly I should do, her face glossed with sweat, skin glowing in the weak light of the bedroom and something deathly about the way this illness closed her eyes, leaving her face so unguarded it allowed me to stare at her and notice for the first time how her avian features – nose and cheekbones converging on some vanishing point ahead of her – had been further refined in her daughter’s sharpness, how she had held her looks and shape into middle age so that the contours of her body still held close to the figure of the serious girl I’d met over twenty years ago, the girl composed of languages and foreign travel, her body with no fat on it to hinder or weigh it down and so lightly built for the job of always teetering on the first step of the next journey, always drawing her on, but now this same body was that narrow place in which a fever had taken hold with its purgative heat scourging it from the inside out and which

  would account for the filthiness of the whole process, the sweat in which she was constantly bathed, the bile that rose out of her gut and the diarrhoea that racked through her stomach and bowels in sudden spasms, leaving her mortified as her whole being stank, no matter how carefully she washed herself after each trip to the bathroom, sometimes no sooner back in bed, showered and in clean pyjamas, than she would begin to sweat once more from every pore and crevice of her body, till in no ti
me again her bed and clothes were damp and stale, with her hair slicked over to the side of her head, the room filled with a stench beyond what was human, as if her very soul was being drawn from her body, out through the pores of her skin so that

  it was a genuine anguish to witness her shame in all this, that raging helplessness over which there was nothing I could do since this illness seemed to have taken hold of all the rhythms and pulses of her body, clinging to all its currents and shifts while

  her suffering now spread through the house like the microclimate of a different, more rarefied realm, up and down the hall and through all its rooms, that separate latitude within which the sick thrive so that whenever

  I walked down the hall towards whatever bedroom she was lying in I sometimes experienced those few steps as a long journey southwards which crossed borders and time zones, traversed deserts and mountain ranges to where I would eventually find her, my quarry, stricken under a pitiless sun, gasping and parched in some benighted jurisdiction which suffered a rapid turnover of governments, spiralling inflation rates and despicable human rights records – only such radical change of topography and circumstance could account for that gaping sense of distance she inhabited during the first couple of days

  Friday, Saturday and Sunday

  with their patient, attritional wasting which seemed to consume her down at the very smallest grains of her being, drifting from herself on clouds of her own breath, each laboured exhalation peeling away another layer of her into the ether, this illness which had settled into the most sheltered niches of her organism from where it could achieve the most finical, attentive wasting so that