Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  which already governed the entire mood of the house, drawing us together into an intimacy of heat and fever, so pervasive that it charged the air with a prickly ammonial smell that hung through the hall and rooms like a fog, the whole house now suffused with the smell of sickness, a sourness which snagged in my pores and dragged me through the house several times a day swinging a pink aerosol as if it were a censer, launching a feathery floral spray into the middle of each room, a kind of purifying ritual which bathed the house for a brief time in the cloying stench of roses or lily-of-the-valley before it was burned off by the smell of sickness which emanated from this slight woman who was now so disbelieving of her own condition that her voice threaded to a whisper of rage whenever she gathered herself to protest

  I’ve never felt like this before, never

  enraged that her body at this stage of her life could betray her in such a way, turning on her like this with such venom after so many years of sound service – this was what offended her most and gave her suffering such a grating edge of incredulity – having finally arrived at a time in her life which was exclusively her own and without the care of kids to compromise it – that it should be spoiled like this – this, more than the illness itself, was what angered her most and gave her that rancorous edge which carried with it a warning that I shouldn’t meddle with her frustration, nor try to reconcile her to it in any way since

  I was uncertain how to feel, as part of me was convinced that this illness was drawing us closer together in a way that was decisive, as if this new life with all its caring and cleaning, all its fetching and carrying, was some new kind of courtship dance we were doing towards each other, a dance through filth and fever which took me by surprise in so far as I had thought our lives together up to this had brought us as close as we were ever likely to be and that such new intimacy was, frankly, improbable at this age of our lives – too set in our ways, too long in the tooth – this closeness which breached so many delicate laws of personal privacy, something neither of us could have anticipated nor predicted how we would react to as

  we were now carried towards each other on the tidal rhythm of her fever, rising and falling on those swells specific to the illness itself, every moment pushing our marriage beyond its usual, mannered intimacies and into a new knowing of each other which was beyond embarrassment and this was something which no news article or analysis could hope to capture, this flesh and filth intimacy was the very thing which leaked away in the telling of this news story as it came through the news bulletins and headlines to wash through

  the house

  this same house

  in which I’ve lived the best part of three decades and put together all those habits and rituals which have made up my marriage and family life and where now, for some reason, this day has given me pause to dwell on these things

  sitting here at the kitchen table with my sandwich and paper where

  those memories of Mairead in her flushed and fevered wasting come as reverse echoes of

  that time during her first pregnancy when she carried Agnes and I saw her come into the fullness of herself as her belly grew and her skin and hair took on that aura of radiant well-being which I found irresistible and was so drawn towards, those first months passing in a liquid surge of desire which drove me headlong into the new lushness of her body, an intimacy which may well have had a slight twist of something kinky to it as if being watched by the growing child inside her added some illicit tincture to what we got up to during that period when the weight and lushness of her pregnancy was so alluring it was as if the new being within her was lending her a sheen that went deeper than her skin or her hair and was in itself pure goodness and virtue shining forth, something truly radiant about it which for a while sparked our love life with a thrilling, elevating element, charging our lovemaking with a grittier sensitivity towards each other’s touch, an awareness which, I began to interpret as an appeal that

  I should meet it with an improved version of myself or at least work to make myself worthy of this new, pristine version of my young wife, a demand I took so seriously that I sat down and gave myself over to it with sober concentration, surveying my soul in the light of Mairead’s pregnancy which showed on her as if she were illumined from within and which I read now as nothing less than a sacred injunction that I should look to my own soul and rid it of all those slurs and injuries which had accrued to it over my lifetime, all this in preparation for our child, Mairead so radiant that

  something petty in me felt sorely jilted by her elevated condition which, day by day, appeared like a higher, more refined evolutionary stage and which inspired so little in me save this wish to turn inward and inventory my own soul, a self-defeating instinct, the end purpose of which was never clear to me except that it would definitely take precious time and energy and probably bring little more than a deeper sense of unworthiness, not merely in relation to Mairead, this numinous being with whom I now shared my life, but also in relation to the child growing inside her, already exercising such a governing influence on us so

  while all this was easy to understand and make amends for in the abstract it was a much more vexing proposition in real life where it became clear to me that I was not so generous or flexible as I might have thought, finding it difficult to make that space within me which would have fully allowed that other being into our lives and, something even more difficult to acknowledge, the sorry fact that this lack of generosity on my part harkened back to

  the beginning of our marriage when, it appears, I had some difficulty taking the whole thing seriously and grasped the very first opportunity to lapse so catastrophically, an event that brought with it a measure of bleak comedy which did nothing to soothe Mairead’s pain and disbelief the day she stood here

  in the middle of this kitchen floor, whispering to herself

  bridge building, fucking bridge building with

  her face fixed in that vacant expression the world recognises in stroke sufferers while I stood opposite her, completely undone by the evidence at her disposal – all of it circumstantial yes, but all of it adding up to a conviction beyond reasonable doubt or any plea of mitigating circumstances or diminished responsibility – the names and dates all correct, the witnesses accounts all corroborated, all the holes and contradictions in my own version wholly damming and, most telling of all – the part which had the clinching ring of truth to it – the complete absence of any clear motive on my account other than a soft opportunity from which I had neither the wit nor courage to back away from and which now had me standing before her, knowing full well that any defence I might offer would be totally undermined by that sheepish expression to which I lapse in such moments as Mairead stood

  here in this same kitchen

  with her alone to decide whether our short marriage had already run its course or if it was still something she wanted to go on with and when she recovered something of her poise – that is to say, when her face unfroze to an expression of total shock – she realised that this was what she truly hated me for, for having levied this decision on her alone, whether or not to continue with the marriage, a decision which gave the initial appearance of offering a choice but which, after a moment’s consideration, revealed itself to her to be no choice at all since Mairead now discovered

  here on this kitchen floor

  that – for all her intuitions and sprightly enthusiasms, all her books and her travel, her convent education and her languages – her upbringing as an only child of devout parents had made her conservative, with a deep inner conviction that would not allow her believe that her marriage was something that could be so easily set aside or walked away from, so that now she was effectively left with no choice at all and this was my deceitful manoeuvre – to have steered her into that narrow arena where her beliefs and instincts were set to war with each other, so that good and liberal as her feelings were at the time, and willing as they may have been to end the marriage, they could not override those age-
old principles which were by now hardwired in her soul, leaving her completely stricken, standing there

  on this kitchen floor

  not four feet from this table

  gathering herself to curse me from the bottom of her heart

  fucking bridge building she repeated – in fucking Prague of all places and

  with all the evidence which nailed me – names, dates and times – in her possession, Mairead standing there with that centre parting in her hair which always looked so severe to me, as if it threatened to pull the two sides of her head apart, so that when she left the house half an hour later, with her bags packed and her hair down around her shoulders, I too was stricken but with shock of a different sort, rooted to the kitchen floor with my back to the sink, appalled that my life had been so completely dismantled by the very person to whom it had been pledged not so long ago and that I was seeing it all swept aside because of a series of faltering stupidities, the sort any man might hope they are exempt from but which

  in the seven weeks following her leaving me alone in the house I had plenty of time to acknowledge that, in all truth, these were exactly the kind of soft stupidities to which I was prone and that I was indeed the type of man who, for want of that wit which would have prophesied my marriage in ruins, found myself alone in this house after she took herself away in stony removal to her parents’ home in North Mayo which I bombarded with all those phone calls and letters which exhausted every tone of pleading I was capable of, phone calls and letters which after a week, I sent off with as little hope of reply as if I had rolled up a length of paper and corked it into a bottle before flinging it overhand into the sea and watching it drift away on an outgoing tide – that was as much hope I had of a reply during that period, alone in this house so that

  after seven weeks my nerve failed and I got into the car to drive north, up through Newport and Mulranny and up through the badlands of North Mayo, crossing the terra incognita of Ballycroy with its sweeping bogland which levels away to the horizon in an unbroken swathe beneath a sky of such gaping distance that Agnes would always claim the hazy blue washes out of which so many of her images surfaced was her ongoing memory of what she had seen from the back seat of the car during those summer journeys we took up to the grandparents’ place, driving through this bog terrain with nothing around us but rolling waves of heather and hills lost in a haze of distance, Comanche country according to Darragh, who at that time was well into his cowboy phase, ploughing his way through those old paperbacks my father gave him

  JT Edson, Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey while

  deep in the bog, a chimney stack stood naked out of a concrete floor – all the stone walls carted away to some other project – a lonely sentinel now gazing into the distance across a sea of blue heather with stacks of turf along the road and the odd car lying on its side in a sheugh or up on a wall, these being the years before the breathalyser put paid to drink-driving and made redundant a generation of panel-beaters, crashed cars and vans which Darragh, in the back seat saw as most likely the work of Comanche raiding parties which ranged across these plains, coming from as far south as the Mojave Desert on the Galway border and riding north-west up onto the Erris panhandle, savage war parties who rode great distances by moonlight across these boglands, ranging far from their southern lodges, into the homelands of the great northern tribes, the

  Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho

  or as they were know locally

  Mitchells, Davitts and Stephenites

  or so Darragh said from the back seat as

  I drove north that day to win back my wife, turning up on her doorstep with a low sun at my back to be met by her father, a quiet man, newly retired from a long career in the bank and a Commissioner for Oaths who now stood before me wearing the same wounded air as his daughter, an expression of distaste on his face as if he could hardly believe anyone would bring such cheap melodrama to his home, with all its attendant crudity and antics, this man who was now looking out over my shoulder, up and down the road as if I alone, standing there in front of him, were hardly sufficient in myself to have knocked on his door and drawn him from the depths of the house to where he now stood blinking in the midday light and breathing heavily from the emphysema that would kill him three years down the road, wheezing as if he had come a long distance over hazardous terrain and not, as was really the case, the full twenty yards from the back of the house to where he now stood listening to my plea with that expression of sorrowful fatigue loosening his features, an expression he had no doubt practised over the years dealing with various petitioners and supplicants who had come before him for loans or overdrafts or mortgages for one thing or another, this practised expression of regret on which there was now etched a sorrowful inevitability while I, seven weeks into our separation and still feeling my way in the role of the abandoned husband stood before this reluctant inquisitor, bleary-eyed and unshaven, anxious to show I was making a poor job of my new circumstances, stood there pleading my case, a hopeless task in that I was completely in the wrong and we both knew it, this man who had been so well disposed to me during the years I had courted his daughter, now stood on his doorstep with this sorrowful expression on his face, telling me in that practised way that I had no friends here and that I would be as well to turn around and go back the way I had come and that I needed to give her time – this was the expression he used

  give her time

  as if it were mine to give, as if somehow I had set aside a reservoir of time for just this purpose and could now draw on it before handing it over to her to do with as she pleased, something which would alleviate her pain, something which would salve her shame, something, anything which would bring her back to me, this time that her father seemed to think was mine to give even as Mairead herself was coming towards her due-date which was three months distant, taking on the curves and lines of a pod and that paleness of complexion which was near luminous and how I glimpsed her over her father’s shoulder that day, glowing behind him in the shadows of the hallway, her face adrift in the gloom, the whites of her eyes like two jittery moons of some minor constellation as I heard myself calling to her

  Mairead, for god’s sake

  as her father shifted his body into the centre of the door and I saw reflected in his face my own terror that I would plough through him, this man in his late sixties, and leave him sprawling on the floor as the shadows behind him lurched to a choked sob and she was gone so I stood back, to her father’s relief and my own, both of us heaving with fright till he raised his hand once more and said

  give her time

  before closing the door in my face, as gentle a rejection as you could have wished for, comfortable almost, so that for the next few minutes I stood there, fixed on looking at the door-knocker which was suspended at eye level before me and knowing that I could have stayed there comfortably, dried out with rejection, for as long as it took me to turn to stone or longer before I eventually managed to uproot myself from the spot and move off, got into the car and

  drove back the sixty miles or so to this house here, one of those pale car journeys of which I have no memory whatsoever, a journey that took me through several small towns and villages, over narrow roads cutting through wide bogland areas and windy roads that clung to a shelved pass around a sea inlet and only that I eventually found myself standing in this kitchen two hours later I could easily have believed that I had dematerialised on Mairead’s doorstep and rematerialised here, sixty miles away in the kitchen of my own house without the trouble of physically travelling the intervening distance, since only such a complete dissolve of the self could account for the total absence of detailed memory of that complex journey, it being something of a miracle to have arrived here safe and sound at all but yet, knowing that this

  was not the first time this had happened to me, driving halfway across the county to arrive safely at my destination, every mile sucked away in a vortex of absent-mindedness, a complete vacancy of spirit overcoming me
so often that I would not care to number the times I have been recalled to startled attention behind the wheel of the car with no immediate knowledge of where I am before that shocked realisation that I have driven ten or fifteen miles of a busy road, into oncoming traffic, negotiated all sorts of bends and hazards, put towns and villages behind me but, somehow the whole thing having occurred in some adjacent dreamtime with my mind elsewhere while my hands and feet went through that empty sequences of moves and adjustments which kept the car on the road and pointed in the right direction

  gears, brakes, accelerator and indicator left or right and

  without stutter or stammer, sixty miles or more driven by some un-minded ghost of myself, a shadow-man

  who now stood in this kitchen which

  in Mairead’s absence, had succumbed to the dirt and disarray of the single man’s existence, that type of filth and dishevelment which gathers to shame and self-abandonment, the sort of grime that coats everything with a veil of grease and which draws books and papers across the floor to pile up in corners and on seats or under cushions, that gathering disorder where everything in the room begins to lie at an angle and a distance from their proper place, that slight degree of imprecision which gives the impression that the whole place is beginning to uproot itself, piece by piece and move away from me altogether, papers and cups and knives and forks moving along the shelves and worktops while the pictures themselves drifted also, leaving their angled smoke shadows on the wall, everything migrating across the room towards some vanishing point into which everything would disappear, such gathering filth and chaos that the place had begun to resemble the lair of some creature who eats and sleeps in close proximity to itself, a place littered with fur and gnawed bones amid a scum of deepening filth so that I stood at the sink hardly able to believe I was capable of such desolation, willing to ascribe it to someone else, not me, because surely this was the work of some malignant household spirit who went about its malicious work in the dead of night, and it says something about my state of mind that I stood here