what did you expect
electing such clowns to public office
so that there was now a feeling among all those standing in the car park that, as the electorate, they were somehow complicit in this disaster whereby water, the very stuff of life itself, was now contaminated by way of whatever electoral foolishness they had wittingly or otherwise participated in, a consideration that had a sapping effect on the crowd which now stood bewildered by its own feelings and responsibilities, all its energy gone and vehemence drained, standing there in that rainy car park so that, after a few moments when it became obvious that no one had anything else to add, the crowd began to break up and drift away, but not before some photographs were taken which were used the following day to illustrate those front page articles which covered the event in all the city’s papers, articles illustrated with pictures of
these people wrapped up in caps and coats beneath placards held in gloved hands, this civic drama which had at its core a bland aggregate of ordinary people who felt themselves anxious and embarrassed by their circumstances and the political choices they had made and
it was difficult watching all this on the television to feel any proper involvement in this drama, voices droning on while Mairead’s illness pervaded the house like a malignant mist, a psychic fog that seeped into my own being and blurred the margins of my body so that I was glad to hear Darragh’s voice that evening, Skyping me to ask
what’s the story with the water contamination, things seem to have ratcheted up a bit over the last few days
it hasn’t got any better, that’s true and
transporting water to the suburbs in bulk carriers, people queueing up with plastic containers like it was a third-world country
it doesn’t look good so
I gave him a swift account of what I knew, the ongoing investigation and the town hall politics and the military over-flights which so far had failed to identify the exact source of the contamination and the new filtration system which as yet was still on a drawing board in some engineering facility in Ottawa and the protests so
a city on the brink of civil insurrection, that’s what you’re saying – people marching in the streets calling for regime change, quarantine flags flying over City Hall, military over-flights and
not this shite with you as well Darragh, I said irritably, I’ve heard Agnes going on with this kind of nonsense and
Darragh held up his hand
woah, I agree, there’s nothing as tiresome as the apocalypse but take it from me, there’s something very worrying going on here
there is
yes
and what’s that
it’s City Hall and how they’re misunderstanding the people’s fear – you mark my words, as long as City Hall continues to interpret this as a simple matter of service disruption they will never understand why the populace have reacted with such vehemence since
it’s no big secret Darragh, people are fed up, this is another example of municipal incompetence and
it’s more than that
is it
yes, there’ll never be a shortage of administrative incompetence in that city and over the years the people have shown themselves to be more patient than most, but this is different, this is a disturbance of a different order entirely and
Darragh was leaning forward now, a close-up of his face filling the screen and even from the other side of the world I could feel the electric energy of his thinking, see it flaring in his eyes as he said
these people marching in the streets are protesting against what they see as a contamination of the very stuff of life itself – what angers them is that life itself has been fouled at source by some ontopolitical virus which is hosted by water so that
whoa – I have to stop you there, clean water in taps for tea and coffee and running gallons of it down the plughole when you’re washing your teeth – that’s what people understand and that’s what the city authorities understand it as also
I know that
so you should know better than using a word like ontopolitical with an engineer – much less a politician, you could hardly expect to make much headway with it in any of the debates that’ll decide how this pans out this because as sure as anything
Darragh’s face opened in a wide grin as he slumped back from the screen with a nod
yes, I got ahead of myself there for a moment – that thesis will have to be revisited if it is to have any traction in City Hall
yes, I would advise that
still though, it’s interesting to see people on the march, a city full of students and artists, they’re not often roused to protest like that, it’ll be interesting to see where it leads
it will
so long as it doesn’t turn out to be the smoking ban all over again
how do you mean
I remember the cigarette ban coming in and all the bitching and grousing people did about it – and you were louder than most – no one would tell you where to smoke because you came from a long line of men who smoked in the ancient way, the heroic way – standing at the bar with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other – the way your forefathers had done it, but the night the ban came in you and everyone else turned over like kittens and were out on the street smoking their fags in the rain so
you’re saying this could be all bluster
I don’t know, it would be great to think it’s the real thing but we’ll have to see, how’s mam
mam’s fine, she’s lying down now
there’s nothing wrong with her
no, of course not
I lied, without missing a beat, the decision to keep him in the dark apparently made within me without any conscious deliberation on my part because
it’s just that I haven’t heard from her in a while, it’s not like her
she’s very busy at the moment, mock exams and all that
give her my love, I’ll Skype her sometime later this week
ok, take care of yourself – and do me a favour
yes
don’t come online to her looking like that, shave and tidy yourself up or she’ll have a conniption
it’s a tough station dad, this Waltzing Matilda thing
so I see, look after yourself
will do – oh, one last thing
what
a joke
a joke
yeah, a great joke, you’ll like it
it’s two o’clock in the morning Darragh
this won’t take a minute – four men, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer and a politician are discussing which of their trades was the oldest, and the lawyer starts by saying that surely it was his because right back at the dawn of mankind Cain killed Abel – the first murder – and that was surely followed by some sort of judicial process which obviously called for lawyers and therefore lawyering had to be the oldest profession but, the doctor shook his head and said that before Cain and Abel, God created Eve from Adam’s rib and this obviously involved some sort of surgery and post-operative care, all of which proved that medicine was the oldest trade but at this point the engineer stepped in and said you’re both wrong because right back at the dawn of creation there was nothing but chaos until God brought heaven and earth out of the chaos and this monumental act of creation was the first piece of engineering and what more proof did they need to see that engineering was the oldest of all the professions to which the politician, who had been listening quietly all this time, turned to the engineer, he asked if he understood him correctly – heaven and earth engineered out of chaos – to which the engineer said yes and which the politician in turn replied to by saying
who do you think made the chaos
and Darragh grinned
I thought it was a good one, you’d like it
it is good, I’ll try it out at work tomorrow, I’m going to say good night now, so take care
bye
bye
and the screen clouded to a fizzy interference before
it blanked to darkness, the laptop closed on the desk with the room silent and my eyes with that scalded feel to them which would not be soothed away by anything but a couple of hours’ sleep so I did a final check on Mairead before going to our own bedroom and lying under the covers with my eyes closed for a long time, drifting in that black sea behind my eyes which spread into the darkness around me, bounded around by walls floors and ceilings, the house itself, which
like a child
I’ve always believed gets up to some foolishness during the night, whenever I fall asleep or turn my back on it, that’s when the ghost house beneath the paint and fittings asserts itself, flickering like an X-ray with that neurological twitch and spasm which is imbedded in the concrete, in the vertical and horizontal run of all its plumbing and wiring, those systems which make the house a living thing with all its walls and the floors pulsing with oil and water and electricity, all the pressures and imbalances in these systems pushing and drawing their freight towards that equilibrium which stabilises the structure in a warm balance, this web of utilities a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid of services which draws the world into community, pinching it up into villages, towns and cities so that
whenever I close my eyes or let my attention drift I’m convinced that the whole house reverts to this kind of under-structure which supports the whole building, the roof over the exterior walls and loadbearing partitions, the weight distributed down into the foundation, the ghost neurology which upholds and haunts it, flickering just a scintilla away from pure abstraction or those originary lines lying on an architect’s drawings, the pale sheets of engineering paper on which it was conceived so that when
drifting in that state between sleep and waking it is easy to believe I inhabit a monochrome x-ray world from which I might have evaporated, flesh and bone gone, eaten up, not by any physical rot or wasting but by some metaphysical virus which devours and leaves nothing of me behind but my own heartbeat suspended in mid-air, nothing but a fat systolic contraction of the light, waiting for the dawn and the sun to shine upon it so that I might coalesce around it once more, flesh and bone and
time and again
my world come round once more so that
it took a while after Agnes and Darragh went to college for Mairead and myself to experience the house’s emptiness as a positive thing, as something other than that deserted space around us which so dismayed us in the immediate aftermath of their going away, those days in which the house hummed with such ringing vacancy we feared we might never throw off the sense of loss it brought with it, an absence which at first
Mairead felt more keenly than I, the loneliness of their empty bedrooms which were still crowded with all their teenage stuff – clothes and books and posters and CDs – things no longer needed in the new lives they had gone on to, all their bits and pieces, some of which went back to their childhood, all shelved and stacked, neat as never before but now frozen in place and there were many times in those first years after they left, when we would have welcomed again the chaos that comes with children in a house, the glad ruckus of a growing family around us, because
I know that Mairead would have welcomed a return of such chaos – the noise, their coming and going, music blaring behind bedroom doors, Darragh wandering through the house with bowls of cereal at all hours of the night – especially in the beginning when the house rang with absence, no stereos blaring, books and clothes neatly put away, a long period of adjustment needed before she eventually found herself happy in the house’s ordered space, this four-bedroom dormer, the smallest of which we shared as an office together, where I did those bits and pieces of work I brought home with me some evenings and where
Mairead prepared her classes and did whatever corrections she needed to do, sitting with her feet up on the desk and letting page after page drift to the ground around her, never tidy, something which irritated me because to walk into a room where she was working was to walk into a sort of blizzard that covered desks and floors with a clutter of paper and mugs and pens of various sorts, the floor treacherous with stray sheets of paper and those plastic sleeves that fade onto the varnished floor and are so difficult to see but which, more than once, have slid out from under my feet and nearly thrown me on the flat of my back, the whole mess grating on my nerves so that I just have to reign in my temper and tidy it all away onto the armchair and leave it there for her to sort through, make some space for myself before I can do any work and it was on one of these days, glancing up
I saw how Mairead was stalking her son’s progress across the penal colony by way of a map on the wall behind the door, a political map of all the towns and cities on the east coast from Sydney up to Brisbane, with a series of coloured pins – reds, blues and yellows – marking out Darragh’s straight-line progress as far as Brisbane where he took a hard left into the interior of Queensland, towns with names like Dalby and Toowoomba marked off – places which, for all I knew, might be nothing more than a sheep station in the middle of the desert – matter-a-dam, these were the places from where Mairead had received some sort of communication from her son so that was good enough reason for her to stab the map through the heart with one of her coloured pins, a conceit she had obviously borrowed from one of those late-night cop shows she liked to watch where world-weary detectives with broken marriages and drink problems tracked the progress of serial killers across a landscape with these same coloured pins marking out newly discovered corpses, some behavioural pattern encoded in their random distribution if only the cop stares at it long enough, a strange conceit neatly repurposed to her son’s wanderings in the outback, from hostel to campfire, sleeping under the southern cross, his period in the wilderness as he put it, his dreamtime as Agnes called it and there
on the wall beside the door, one of Agnes’s pieces, the tiny painting she gave me a couple of years ago, twenty-by-fifteen centimetres, oil on board, a little boy in short trousers and sweater standing beside a tar-barrel with a galvanised bucket on the ground beside him, the image sourced from one of my sister Eithne’s old Polaroids, hundreds of which she had lying around in boxes since her childhood, the whole stash turned over to Agnes shortly after she went to art college, the photo dating from around the same time as the disassembled tractor in the hayshed, me looking straight into the lens with an urchin’s curiosity, the image drawn up from the depths of the canvas by a flurry of brush strokes in blues and greys which centre not on the child’s eyes but on the black head of hair helmeted over the almost blank face, so much vacant space in the background and around the tar-barrel itself that the whole effect is of a plaque of light prised out of the air, its edges squared but not framed, as close as dammit to an embodied memory, because I can never look at it without feeling the weight of the galvanised bucket in my hand or hearing that sound they made whenever they were set on the ground, that scraping crash of the bottom hitting the concrete, the handle settling onto the metal rim with that clanging rattle in
this spare bedroom where one of us would work while
the other would take up the kitchen table so that the house expanded room by room around the two of us and in this new emptiness we gradually, over a period of time, learned to expand and fill it once more, returning to our proper size after the years of childrearing, gaining a clearer view of each other also and pleased to find that the house, with all its denuded spaces, shelves and cupboards, was a companionable place where a lot less needed to be said now that our children’s lives did not need to be reckoned with or organised so that we gradually arrived at a renewed closeness to each other, something of the light tenderness of our early years returning to us with a gladdening of both our spirits and
which spilled over in the kitchen a couple of times – often enough to be proud of – both of us overtaken by a passion which threw us across the room into a breathless heap, and after which we looked at each other in a blush of embarrassment, glad but uncertain at what we had just done, panting over the clothes that no
w lay strewn across the kitchen floor, my legs still trembling from the sudden, unaccustomed effort while Mairead laughed to find the pattern of the tablecloth imprinted on her belly, something in us revived beneath the light of the kitchen lamp but both of us wise enough to grasp the cliché of the moment and laugh at it, a moment of erotic comedy which marked what we saw in retrospect as the beginning of the second part of our marriage with its quiet renewal of our love for each other, a brightening of our new lives together which was
cut across by a long moan from the end of the hall, my cue to
rush to her side just in time to hold her by the shoulders over the edge of the bed while she discharged a rush of bitter gall into the basin, her body buckling at the hips with the effort while I spoke some hopeless words of comfort
it’s ok, it’s ok, get it all up
while she purged herself, half out of the bed with her head down over the basin till she was spent and spitting and then that delicate manoeuvre to straighten her back under the duvet where she would lie limp and pale, all puked out, drifting in a fervid realm beyond words, near lost to the world when, without turning, she would lay her hand on mine so that I was assured she was aware of me and recognised my efforts and in this way, through such small gestures we quickly built up a language of cues and responses through which we managed, and I found myself sharper to them than I would have thought, this new language or choreography which we were now assembling on the fly but
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