Solar Bones

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Solar Bones Page 19

by Mike McCormack


  happening shortly before Mairead got sick, an incident I spoke to her about because the whole thing began preying on my mind so I gave her a general outline of the situation which both myself and Moylette found ourselves in, specifically how my name on a clearance cert would release both of us from our bind, except I too had a clear vision of how this whole thing would pan out in four or five years’ time if I did, when

  the building had fully settled into itself, by which time it would have come through a handful of summers and winters and been subject to the first radical temperature changes which would have expanded and contracted the foundation raft underneath it, creating those shearing pressures along its length which would draw it apart to three different points of the compass, the cracks starting in the floor and moving up the walls millimetre by millimetre, day by day, shifting the corners and the lintels over the doors, cross ties and floor joists rupturing the under-floor heating so that when it is closed down after the first leaks start coming up through the floor and the insurance company sends in their assessors he will only have to take one look at the cracks starting up from ground level and then peel back the floorboards to uncover those joints clearly marking those divisions where three separate pours of concrete were laid, he will see immediately what’s happened and will stand there wondering

  who the fuck signed off on this

  whoever it was, he should be shot with a ball of his own shit and

  that’s how I explained it to Mairead while

  we sat at this table

  a couple of days after Moylette’s phone call, by which time the whole thing had clarified for me a little so that even if for the moment I could not see any way out of the impasse – the tension between politics and engineering – I was grateful to her for the patient way she listened, grateful also for the clarity of her confusion when she said

  I don’t understand, I can see how both of you are being pressured on this but I can’t understand what leverage he has to make you sign – you’re not directly accountable to him, there is no direct chain of authority in all this as far as I can see

  that’s true but when it comes down to it politics will trump engineering in a case like this – electoral pressure will ensure that this gets built sooner or later with or without my name on it

  how does that work out – if your name is not on it whose name will be signed to it

  the whole thing will get smudged, the cert could go missing or the county manager will probably take it out of my hands and the whole thing will go through on a nod and a wink

  so that’s how it’s done

  I’m not saying that’s how it will be done but Moylette won’t let it sit on my desk forever and sooner or later it will have to move elsewhere and I’m just telling you one way it might be solved so

  I understood it was the Department of Education who has responsibility for schools, not county councils

  it usually is but sometimes there are joint ventures when there are issues with roads and utilities and

  politics

  exactly

  so now you need a plan

  yes

  and do you have one

  I don’t have one, I’m going to sit on it until a written demand that I put my name on it lands on my desk, when it does I’ll have to give it more thought – that’s the best I can come up with at the moment and all of which

  was taken out of my hands a few days later when Mairead became ill and I had to take sick leave so the project was still on my desk when I left that Friday evening and I thought no more about it during the time I spent nursing her, my mind completely taken up with other things so that it was only towards the end, when she started getting that bit stronger and I drove to town to get that tonic for her that I passed by the site on the Westport road which was now closed up behind sheets of blue plywood and Curran Construction signs nailed up so

  tell me what happened the day they put in the foundation

  Mairead asked as

  she set two mugs of tea on the table and cut a large slice of cake, using the old, ash-handled bread knife that someone had gifted us as a wedding present over twenty years ago, a beautiful knife which down the years had become an old friend and was by now invested with a totemic significance – for me especially when, a couple of years into our marriage, Mairead held it up one day to examine it, turning it in the light to show me how it had become rounded and worn with the bevelled edges of the ash handle faintly bleached from continual washing and the blade itself showing signs of all the times it had been sharpened against the steel, those fine lines angled back from the edge as she held it up by the blade, the moment gleaming in the sort of light that offered a clear view of the knife’s descent from its first consideration in the murk of prehistory as a blunt river cobble or a shard of flint, through all its brittle bronze and ferric variants, step by step down the causal line of descent till it arrived safely in her hand, honed and fully evolved through balanced alloys, all its clumsiness pared away but carrying the marks of frequent use which prompted her to say

  I love that we’re living the kind of life where things are wearing down around us

  her blessing on our lives together and all the stuff which had gathered to it, knives, furniture, appliances and utensils, all the things which crossed the grain of our days, losing some of their gloss and sheen in their contact with us but their rounded edges and corners now fitting our hands more easily, leaning to their purpose with greater ease and balance and if I loved all that – which I did – I was even more grateful to be sharing a life with someone who could draw attention to such things and think them worthy of comment and at that moment the prospect of a life with Mairead stretched out ahead of me with

  you’re daydreaming

  what

  I said tell me about the day the foundation went in

  yes, I was, my mind elsewhere

  same as it was the morning I pulled into the construction site, just as it was coming up to nine o’clock so I sat in the car listening to the news on the radio before I got out into one of those dry March mornings which, even at that early hour, with a cold blue sky overhead, promised to be perfect for pouring concrete and there

  were five or six men already on-site, a couple of them in high- visibility vests, one of them sitting in the back of the van pulling on his boots, two others already inside the timbered shuttering, walking carefully over the steel mesh underfoot, checking the wire ties beneath, hunkering down over it for a closer look, men killing time for a few minutes because as yet there was no sign of the concrete trucks so I pulled on the high-vis jacket as Curran himself, the contractor, came towards me, folding his phone away into the jacket and calling to me in a loud voice as if I were a lot further away than the ten feet separating us, yelling

  two minutes, they’re just out the road

  and we shook hands and walked over to the timbered frame and I saw straight away that the steel mesh over the radon barrier was a tidy piece of work, all the excess wire on the ties neatly snipped away and fastened at every intersection so there was no danger of it moving when the concrete was poured or when it hardened and it was clear that there were good tradesmen at work here and as ever it was a pleasure to stand and admire neat work and notice all those small finishing details which reveal just how much a man respects his own trade even if his work, like these neatly clipped ties, would ultimately be buried under concrete for the rest of eternity, it was still easy to admire such care and attention and Curran must have seen my approval because he added that

  the two Crayns are putting up the blocks

  Walter and Frank

  Walter and Frank, they’ll be here in a couple of weeks and

  you could see he was pleased to have contracted the two brothers who were generally acknowledged to be the best block-layers in the area, block-layers whom roofers and plasterers loved following after because they knew that the walls would be smooth and swept and their own work would look tidy also, roofers espec
ially appreciated them, they knew that the walls would not need any building up or levelling, the whole thing would be neat and tidy or, as one carpenter said about following their work

  you just lay your roof down on the walls like you were putting on your cap as

  the first of the concrete trucks turned in at the site entrance, the driver gearing down and braking to a halt at the entrance to hail Curran, leaning out to take directions onto the site before slowly rolling on again, the lorry making its way down the path and the driver steering with one hand and leaning out the side window to get a sense of how solid the temporary surface was because there was a slight give under the wheels as he kept her going steady with the ground compacting under the great weight, rolling on slowly until it pulled up beside the concrete pump which rose from the back of its truck and angled up over the site like a praying mantis and by now the two men had stepped outside the shuttering and were standing by with shovels and floats ready as the driver jumped down from the cab to have a few words with Curran as he set about coupling the pump to the truck and

  every man scanned the sky and there was general agreement that the day would keep fine, there might be a few showers all right later on but there would be no harm in it as long as this cold spell held, the driver saying thoughtfully

  a great day for cooling soup or pouring a foundation, whichever job was in front of you before

  the concrete sluiced from the pressurised hose over the middle of the shuttering, pouring out in a thick slurry over the radon barrier, pooling and then spreading under its own weight before eventually rising over the steel mesh when the men moved in with floats to spread it out evenly to the corners, by which time I had performed the first slump test, upending a cone of concrete on the spot-board and measuring the slump after the cone had been removed from around it, to find that the fall was well within tolerance so that was ok, and I swept the concrete off the board and stood back to watch the men level out the screed, one of them stepping through it with the vibrator under his arm, pokering it into the concrete which immediately lost all its resistance and liquefied to settle into its natural level between the shuttered sides so that the two men coming behind him could smooth it over with a screeding board, drawing it over the wet surface to leave it glossed and smooth behind them and even though

  I’ve seen it done umpteen times before, there is still something to wonder at in the pouring of a concrete foundation, the way it draws so many skills and strengths together, the timing and cooperation needed and the way the rising and spreading tide of concrete itself demarks, as no other stage in the building process can, the actual from the theoretical, makes the whole thing real in a way that site-clearing or the digging out of the foundation itself can never do, all these are definite staging posts in any structure’s transition from the abstract but none of them separate so clearly the ideal realm of plans and paperwork from the physical world than the pouring of concrete, the building at last beginning its rise out of the ground and seeing it for so many years on so many public buildings – libraries, water-purifying plants and so on – twenty years of this still had not taken the excitement out of it for me, that uncanny sense of a building beginning to take on mass and shape in the blue light of the world where so many things can go wrong between this first pour and that ceremonial occasion when

  the building is finally dedicated to its civic purpose with some official event to mark its opening which will of course be attended by all the local bigwigs – the local priest, members of the GAA, the parish council – all those local organisations which organise the life of any small town or village in this part of the world and since

  I have attended so many of these ribbon-cutting ceremonies, stood out of shot with my hands folded across my chest, I sometimes allow myself the belief that I have given my life to something which has been on the side of human betterment, an idea which takes hold of me with such insistence that the part of me which needs to have faith in things starts seeing it as a religious vocation with its own rituals and articles of faith not to mention a reckoning in some vaulted and girdered hereafter where engineer’s souls are weighed and evaluated after a lifetime’s wear and tear in the friction of this world, standing before some tribunal where you point to your works and say

  these are the things I have signed my name to, these are the things to which I have given my best energies and inspiration

  these hospitals and libraries

  these water treatment plants

  these sewage works

  these public lighting schemes

  these primary and secondary roads

  these public water schemes

  these supply reservoirs

  these miles of walk and cycle paths

  these bridges

  these private dwellings scattered the length and breadth of the county

  the work of a civil engineer

  amen

  and the work of one man’s quarter century, all I’ve done since I signed up to this job in my mid-twenties and which, year by year, I have lent my name to, projects which if taken all together, would amount to a fully serviced metropolis with adequate housing for a hundred-thousand souls, give or take, plus facilities for health and education and recreation with complete infrastructure, a sizeable city, the scale of the whole thing startling when it is drawn together like that since year after year I have never given much thought to what it might all amount to, just turning up in the office day after day where my desk and computer and drawing instruments wait for me or arriving on a site to make sure that things are running to plan and that there are not too many differences between what is on paper and what is coming into being as timber and concrete and stone because

  this is my work

  this is what I have believed in

  something Darragh has harped on since hearing of my time in the seminary, chiding me that I have traded one faith for another

  have I

  so it appears, he said, turned your back on the cross to take up the theodolite

  Jesus

  it’s well known that engineers picked up where God left off

  that passed me by

  He worked six days flat out, separating heaven from earth, light from darkness, on the seventh He took a step back and handed over His square and dividers to you and your kind, you’ll manage from here lads He said, or words to that effect

  so that’s where we take our authority from

  yes, the ancient of days, down on one knee on the edge of heaven, setting His square and dividers to the void, hair and beard streaming in the cosmic wind, the Creator, not to be confused or equated with the enfeebled version who snookered Himself down the road and had to take out a contract on His own son

  I thought they were one and the same

  you’d be surprised how many believe that

  and this was at a time when he was deep in his bedroom boffin phase, living his life by the light of a computer monitor, wholly immersed in a strategic world building game called Civilization in which he had built up a heavily garrisoned city from a tiny river valley settlement in the space of two months, a citadel which, when he had it secured and provisioned became the seat of a despot who gradually began deploying armies farther and farther from the city walls to lay waste to outlying homesteads and settlements, expansionist ambitions which Darragh seemed keen to nurture – a strong leader, that’s what he told me – so when he explained the mechanics of the game to me I sat down in his darkened bedroom to try my hand at it with the clear lines of a neoclassical city already unfurling across my imagination, a place of sunlit plazas and public fountains, libraries, municipal baths and childcare facilities alongside public thoroughfares which achieved that happy ratio of retail and residential space, balancing the competing demands of business and residential communities in an urban space, all this embracing a broad central park which would throng in the summer months with picnicking families and tourists listening to free concerts and outdoor theatrical events �
� a vision of urban planning in the service of its happy citizenry and

  all of which was a massive evolutionary leap up from the primaeval forests and marshy barrens I found myself in when the game opened and my avatar – a querulous, muscled bloke in animal skins and horned helmet who looked like he would have been handy rustling and pillaging but who did not inspire confidence as the founder of city states – stood looking around him on a marshy plain with no steed or implement to hand but whom, in a simple point and click game, I could not cajole into digging a well or erecting a crude bush shelter, leaving him exposed to the cruel night temperatures which did for him in my first couple of attempts and which proved a more prolonged agony than the pack of dogs which tore him apart also or the marshy depths which swallowed him under a clear sky with no one to hear his cries for help, all the ways in which my civilisations failed to take hold and faltered, the game freezing as my avatar drowned, froze or got torn apart, the screen closing to black with the definitive annulment

  Game Over

  coming up black on white, like the end of the world itself

  Game Over

  and Darragh behind me, bursting his hole laughing, crowing

  typical engineer, too proud to bend the back while

  I protested that

  I’d bend it if there was something to work with

  Darragh chuckling away to himself, enjoying me making a hames of things

 

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