Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  this kitchen table at nine o’clock in the morning

  sitting here now

  I had the satisfaction of hearing the bullish aggression leak out of him, sensing him slump at the other end of the line as he drew breath for a moment and considered whether or not he should go head-to-head with a county engineer who, for the moment at least, had him by the balls, something he obviously thought better of because the phone call ended a few moments later with a surly silence on his end after my own commitment to sort out the project immediately, give it my full attention when I got back from sick leave, that’s all I can do, but as I put the phone down I thought to myself

  you’re only codding yourself

  because I knew full well the first thing Hanley would do now would be to phone up one of his political connections and ask him about this bullshit safety legislation that was holding up a public project and jeopardising the work of twenty men with families, his way of letting the deputy know that he was

  pissed off

  the very words he would use

  severely fucking pissed off because

  if there’s much more of this fuck-acting with regulations and conditions he would fuck off the site entirely with all his men and plant and put a lock on the gate and fight the whole fucking lot of them in court for breach of contract while the site thickened with weeds and rushes so that the whole thing would have to be retreated if work was to recommence while at the same time the price of labour and materials rising so that the original estimate on which the contract was priced would be shot to hell and the whole thing would now exceed budget and there would be a further delay in trying to source extra funding, trying to scrape money away from some other project and stepping on people’s toes to do it and

  did he really want this happening on his watch

  this is what he’d ask the TD

  did he

  did he want this happening four miles away from his constituency office with people passing it day in, day out looking at this eyesore of a building-site overgrown with weeds, people going to mass on a Sunday morning looking at it – did he really want that happening in the heart of his own constituency with less than fifteen months before people went to the polls in a general election

  did he

  his very words, or

  words to that effect because

  Hanley’s sullen rage lingered in the silence after the phone call and I knew full well that this was another of those arguments I was going to lose, one of those instances which illustrated clearly how the world is built by politicians and not engineers – the engineer’s lament – a realisation I did not wonder at or lose sleep over any more, the day long gone when, as an engineer, I was worried at the certain prospect of being pressured from one side by politicians and the other by developers, both of them squeezing out all engineering and environmental considerations which was, I figured, likely to have happened when I returned to work after Mairead got better, how ever long that would take but during which

  her strength ebbed on pulsing waves of heat and sweat with her throbbing at the centre of her own fevered halo while I brought water and cool towels as if I was summoned by the fever itself for the sole purpose of witnessing its calm ferocity and relentlessness while also beginning to marvel that something which had now begun to make headlines and editorial comment as

  news

  in the way I understood political phenomena to be news, had taken up residence under my roof

  down the hall in the far bedroom, engineering and politics converging in the slight figure of my wife lying in bed, her body and soul now giving her an extension into the political arena in a way which, if she had been aware of, would have startled her, as Mairead was one of those people who saw voting and such chores of responsible citizenship as a necessary nuisance, walking into the polling booth with little or no interest in the outcome, one crowd as bad as the other, sometimes asking me beforehand in the car

  who will I vote for or

  is there any real choice here

  with her belief that all elections, local or national, were essentially trivial tweakings of a calcified, monolithic system which was not amenable to proper reform, a kind of swamping and irreversible process while

  in the following days I kept abreast of the virus story as it began to make headlines across all the national news outlets, gradually surfacing through newsprint and broadcast articles where it was cautiously spoken of as an environmental problem not a health problem, taking its place in a world vexed with those bigger and greater themes which were detailed across the five or six news bulletins I watched or listened to throughout the day, eyes and ears peeled for the slightest development in the story, realising

  that I was one of those men who had always structured his days around radio news bulletins right from the moment I got up in the morning and stood with my mug of tea in the kitchen listening to the sea area forecast with its sing-song litany of names from around the coast

  Belmullet, East, five knots, fair, nine miles, 1018 millibars, steady

  Roches Point Automatic, East-southeast, eleven knots, fair, ten miles, 1016 millibars, falling slowly

  Valentia, East-southeast, eleven knots, cloudy, seven miles, 1020 millibars, falling slowly

  falling slowly

  followed by the time signal which led in the news, the sound of which always assured me that now the day was properly started, the world up and about its business with all its stories of conflict and upheaval at home and abroad cranking into gear, its tales of commercial and political fortune convulsing across borders and time-zones with currencies and governments rising and falling, the whole global comedy rounded out by the weather which invariably promised rain or a cold spell when

  I would rinse out my cup and leave it on the draining board, then off to work where I’d do a couple of hours at my desk till eleven o’clock before reaching into the drawer and taking out my transistor radio with its silver antenna – I’ve always thought there was something plaintive about this small receiver trying to snag a signal within the heart of that concrete bunker – to listen to the headlines with a cup of coffee and a sandwich after which I’d return to work only to tune in again for the main news at one o’clock, the stiff midday fix with interviews and analysis that took me through to the six o’clock evening bulletin on the small television here in the kitchen by which time most of the day’s national news stories will have come to a head and received their fullest analysis after which the nine o’clock news is generally a summary of the day’s national events, unmissable for peace of mind at the end of the day but stale as regards new national issues which have at this hour, by and large, been put to bed for the night, so that now my attention broadens out to those global dramas which are in play across those jurisdictions that are still in daylight till finally, after midnight, by which time Mairead will have gone to bed, I’d spend a few last minutes standing here in the kitchen watching Sky News round up the day’s major headlines before going to bed, all in all

  dawn to dark

  six or seven news bulletins needing my attention

  all spaced out at regular intervals, the day structured like the monastic rule of some vigilant order synched to the world’s rhythms and all its upheavals which, as history’s vast unfolding, are part of my responsibility as a citizen to keep abreast of, attuning myself to their distant heaves because, even if such things are unlikely to touch me with the violent immediacy of bombs or bullets, who is to say that they would not lay their electric fingers on me in some other way which could push my life into some new alignment or along some other route so that

  in this way news bulletins provided another rhythm to my day, a steady pulse across its length and it was only when thought of it like this that I saw it as yet another thing

  handed down from my father who was

  a great listener to the news also, his own days set to the same tempo, sitting into his breakfast and dinner just as the time signal for news bulletins
sounded, taking his cap off to hang it on the back of the chair as he lent an ear to the old valve radio which sat on the deep window sill, and

  till those fevered days of Mairead’s illness I had never seen my own news habit as anything other than that – a habit passed down from my father – but which now in the circumstances of Mairead’s illness, it came with a sharpened sense of involvement in some broader process beyond myself which initially baffled me because while I might have some abstract recognition of myself as a citizen – a fully documented member of a democracy with a complete voting record in all elections since I had come of age – I never had any intimate sense of history’s immediate forces affecting my day-to-day life, not even, I have to admit, during those work meetings where large public facilities and budgets were being decided upon, meetings in which I would sit with politicians and developers to argue this or that point or amendment or development while all the time knowing that the odds were stacked against me as an engineer and that in all likelihood I was going to lose an engineering decision to some political consideration, a verdict which would see some public facility shifted from its optimum site towards some other part of the county where it would best benefit the politician across the table who’d take pride of place at a ribbon-cutting ceremony and the attendant photo op, not even then did I have a full sense of myself as an engaged citizen within a political horizon, so heedless of it that, if the point were pressed to me, I would have been startled or even embarrassed by the notion which

  began to weigh on me during those days when my wife lay sweating through two changes of sheets and pyjamas a day, her ordeal showing me that history and politics were now personal, no longer blithe abstractions or pallid concepts but physically present in the flesh and blood figure of Mairead whose plight inspired me to render the whole circumstance down to a manageable formula –

  history was personal and politics was personal or

  to put it another way

  history and politics were now a severe intestinal disorder, spliced into the figure of my wife who sweated along the pale length of her body with the stylised, beatific glow of an allegorical figure in an altarpiece while

  day by day, listening to the news bulletins, I developed a twitchy impatience towards those other global issues which commanded the main headlines as it became obvious that only when these grand themes had been treated and analysed would the news bulletins turn their attention to the environmental health hazard out west, a ragged postscript tagged onto the bottom of these bigger stories where it would be given a cursory review or status update, and this wait grated on my patience as I interpreted it as a sure sign that the story was failing to gain any proper hold in the nation’s consciousness even as the crisis worsened and the city’s hospital beds continued to fill up, the number of registered cases now tipping three hundred in the middle of the week so that

  I began to feel this insult keenly, anger simmering within me as I craned forward in my chair to listen to the Western correspondent – an old man with a goatee who looked more like a professor of Classics than someone reporting on an environmental health issue – give the latest update with its gradual escalation and rising numbers, his account moving from these broad strokes to the logistical and engineering options being explored by the municipal authorities and

  throughout all these accounts plus the attendant commentaries I found myself trying to hear something which fully recognised the reality of what it really meant to be someone like Mairead who was taking the brunt of it, all its sickness and wasting, but there was no such acknowledgement in those droning voices as councillors and engineers, one after another, came before mic and camera to speak in defensive assurances which leant heavily on the repetition of preprogrammed mantras that were carefully calibrated to contain nothing to which the speaker might be held accountable, spokesmen droning on as the days passed, pushing the story into some bloodless realm which left the individual human scale of the thing untouched, the human grit of the situation untold so that my anger mounted with each interview, something incredulous festering within me and well fermented by the time

  the city’s people organised the first major public protest meeting which took place in the grounds of the city offices, around two hundred people assembled in the garden and car park, some of them climbing onto the stone wall to speak to the crowd which had gathered in their coats and caps and umbrellas, standing in the rain which had fallen steadily since mid-morning, to voice at first their disbelief that this water crisis could happen in a coastal city with one of the highest mean annual rainfalls on the whole of the continent, a civic disaster which had reduced its people to the condition of third-world supplicants who were now forced to queue up for water at relief points throughout the suburbs, a shameful state of affairs which several speakers frankly admitted they were embarrassed about and

  how long was this going to go on

  they wanted to know, when would the contamination be traced so that the city might get back to its proper business

  how long more

  the question directed to a spokesman from City Hall who came out to address the crowd and assure them that the investigation of the city’s water supply was ongoing with samples from several locations showing that the contamination was general throughout the supply lake so that it did not appear to be sourced from one particular spot and that in the next few days the air force would begin conducting overflights of the whole lake and those rivers which fed into it in the hope that a detailed aerial survey would reveal dump sites or sewage spillages in or around the lake itself or in the wider area, all this to be done before the new filtration system would be installed, the new system which was, at this very moment, in the process of being shipped from Canada and which would be installed in the city’s purifying plant as soon as it arrived, within the next month or so, six weeks tops, a triple filtration system – barrier, chemical and ultraviolet light – which would exceed comfortably all EU health and safety standards so that the citizenry could be assured that once this present crisis was cleared up – as it would assuredly be – this city’s water supply would exceed the highest standards of purity but until then the investigation was ongoing and that was all he could say at the moment so no, he could not put a timeframe on how long more the city could expect to have to boil its water, it would be irresponsible of him to say whether it would be days or weeks or months, he could not say, he would only be guessing if he did give a time, days or weeks or whatever, but a lot would depend on the visual survey of the following week, that was as much as he could say, except to thank the citizens for their patience and forbearance and for having shown such community spirit in the face of adversity, a compliment which provoked sullen murmuring from the crowd which had now spread across the car park and into the municipal gardens and green space beyond, some of whom had already taken up positions on the surrounding walls with placards and banners held aloft on this wet spring day with its sifted light which lent itself perfectly to the frustrated mood of the gathering which the spokesman seemed to interpret as something else because, apparently emboldened by the sound of his own voice carrying in such a broad, public space, he went on to assure them one final time that everything possible was being done – city engineers were working around the clock to get on top of the problem and that furthermore – here, he wanted to enter a personal note – as a native of this city himself

  born and bred

  seed, breed and generation, he

  understood and felt keenly the distress this health hazard was causing its citizens, most especially those families with young children or elderly relatives in their care, he was especially mindful of these people’s plight and he could assure them that no one wanted a swifter resolution to this crisis than he did and this was all being borne in mind by the authorities and this was a masterful touch, the quiet way with which this spokesman made such soulful play of a shared history and heritage, assuring them that he knew their pain and was with them in their anxiet
y and distress, his emollient words working their charm so smoothly and effectively that, for a moment, the entire crowd was disarmed and silent, shameful almost of their protest and at a loss as to what they might do next, possibly appalled also at their own willingness to be so easily placated but unable to do anything about it until, at the precise moment when the righteous anger of the crowd might have dissipated into thin air

  a small woman raised her voice and drew attention with her observation that what angered the populace was not that this crisis was some technical or environmental failing or that it was yet another instance of incompetence or wilful disregard on the part of the authorities – no, this was not what angered her, nor indeed was it news to any of those gathered here – what angered her was that the covenant of care struck between the people and the city authorities was now broken and that a reservoir of public trust and goodwill had finally been squandered, leaving the electorate and taxpayers feeling foolish and implicated, since they themselves had placed these people in power and therefore shared some responsibility for the disaster and this woman herself – a middle-aged, well-turned-out lady who should, given the mild weather, more likely than not have been bedding in summer plants in her suburban garden – now told the story of how her seventeen-year-old son had missed so much school in the last ten days through constant bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea that if it went on much longer he was likely to be so far behind in his studies there would be no point in sitting his Leaving Cert and he would therefore, in all probability, have to repeat the entire academic year so, in a bold thrust, the lady asked rhetorically, would the city council be compensating him in some way for this wasted year which would leave him behind while he watched all his friends move on with their lives, a powerful story, overstated but deft in getting the crowd to focus its accusative energies around the image of this seventeen-year-old boy who no doubt was at home at this very hour, still in bed in the middle of the afternoon, sick or otherwise, but who would likely have been embarrassed to know how quickly his martyred circumstances had become the rallying point for such a public protest because, how ever faceless he may have been at that particular moment, it did not prevent his plight becoming the living example of how this civic hazard disrupted a person’s life and whether this crisis was sourced in incompetence or, as some suspected, a culture of appeasement within City Hall which, for the longest time, had failed to police the conduct of those sectional interests – farmers and developers, principally – who might be directly responsible and which held such powerful electoral clout, whatever the cause of this breakdown it amounted to the same thing – an important clause in the contract between the citizen and the local authority had been broken and every person standing in the car park felt this, each with their own specific sense of betrayal not to mention that feeling of ridicule which seemed to exploit something gullible in their political faith, telling them that it was misplaced, that it was badly used or that it was inevitably bound to culminate in some fiasco like this, as much as to say