Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  it’s a good job we weren’t depending on you to found the first settlement, we’d still be knapping flints on the margins of history – I suppose that’s why there’s no record of Adam being an engineer and

  you’ve fallen asleep again

  what

  you were telling me what happened when the second load of concrete was poured – Christ, are you always drifting off like this

  sorry, I was thinking about something else there

  same as when that second concrete truck pulled onto the site and I saw straight away that there was something odd about this one truck because the first had come from Corcoran’s – the yellow and purple markings on the side – but this was blue, from Ward’s and that was strange – two separate suppliers of concrete to the same site but as yet it didn’t matter so long as the compositional makeup of both batches were the same, which of course

  they weren’t

  were they fuck

  and I had only to look at the results of the slump tests to see how different they were, different aggregates, different mix ratios, plain to see there on the spot board, the two cones of concrete with their different slumps and disintegration before I put up my hand and shouted at Curran

  hold on a minute, I yelled over the noise of the truck, hold on and

  he came towards me with no expression on his big face but knowing full well what was going to happen, I could see it in his fucking gait, the shoulders pulled up around the ears, the jaw already clenched

  what, he says, what

  you know damn well what, you can’t pour that concrete into that foundation

  what do you mean, that concrete

  you can’t pour this concrete because it’s a different batch and it will set differently against what’s already poured – you’re long enough at this game to know, you shouldn’t have to be told

  so what do you want me to do with it

  I don’t care what you do with it but you can’t pour it here so

  Curran raised his arm towards the truck

  there’s nine cubic metres of concrete there and if you think I’m turning it around and sending it back to the yard you can think again and

  he was looking at me now fit to kill, the two feet planted apart like he was going to draw out on me and it was very exposed standing there in the cold facing him and the five men who stood behind him with shovels and screeding boards, men wanting to get on with their work but who now saw me as nothing but an obstacle, a fucking paper-pusher with some technical objection or piece of red tape, citing some new piece of EU legislation, typical civil service shite which holds up real work so

  you tell me so what the fuck I’m going to pour into that shuttering, Curran shouted as

  I can’t tell you what to pour into it but I can tell you that if you pour that load of concrete I won’t sign off on it and it will be a long day before you lay a block on that foundation raft – I can guarantee you that and

  Curran stiffened as if he had run up against a glass wall and now I was truly frightened because this was the end of our argument, there was no other place for either of us to go, short and all as it was we had run each other out of options and now we stood locked in position with no ready escape on either side, eyeballing each other across ten feet of hard-core, both of us too angry and frightened to back down in front of the other men, as the moment lengthened to breaking point before Curran finally had the inspiration to reach into his anorak and take out his mobile which he starts prodding with his thumb and eyeing me, saying

  I’ll put an end to this fuck-acting as

  he lowered his head onto the mobile to start shouting

  hello, hello

  while I stood there listening because even though I should have taken the chance to fuck off the site while he was talking I was anxious to hear what would happen so I stood looking at his broad back but couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the truck, while his mouth was buried in the mobile and he had everyone’s attention now, the men standing around looking at him, nervous at this new turn of events and the driver beside the pump with his hand on the pressure lever, ready to drop it at a second’s notice but still watching the big man in the anorak who was pacing back and forth in the grey light, looking down at the ground where the tops of his rigger boots kicked along the hard-core surface before he turned around and his voice carried towards me

  sound, that’ll do so

  as he snapped the phone shut and waved his arm up into the grey light

  pour it out to fuck, he roared, pour it out and

  he strode towards the cement truck before he pulled up, remembering that I was still standing there so he turns back to me, still roaring

  you can stand there all you like, but that concrete is going to be poured today and there’s fuck all you can do about it and I don’t know what the fuck a county engineer is doing on my site anyway so

  it’s county jurisdiction Curran, our responsibility, that’s what I’m doing here and

  with that, the driver’s hand fell on the lever and the engine-pitch rose as the concrete poured out the hose and onto the steel mesh, the three men standing over it with shovels waiting for it to rise up under their boots and that was the last thing I saw before I walked out to the road and got into the car and drove off so

  you’re saying that whoever was on the end of that phone call with Curran had some sort of influence

  I’m saying that generally it’s easy to tell when the political pressure is being put on you, you develop an antenna for it, you learn to hear the voice behind whoever it is you’re dealing with – you learn that x will front for y but not for z and so on, it’s a kind of coded referral and after a while there is no mistaking it

  Christ, it sounds like it’s a freemasonry, all nod and wink and

  the vast majority of decisions are above board and go through without a hitch, but now and again, there are considerations which have nothing to do with engineering and that’s when you feel your arm being twisted so that

  why would two different yards supply concrete to the same job

  that’s the question, my belief is that the contract was split between two suppliers because that school is the last public works project of this size slated for the next two years, it’s an open secret in the building trade there’s no more money in the public purse for anything like this in the foreseeable future so they sat down and came in at the same price so there was political pressure to split the contract and

  that sounds like collusion

  that’s exactly what it is – there’s only a handful of cement works in this county – four or five and they are all going after the same number of dwindling public contracts so they probably sat down and talked it out among themselves, possibly three of them said something like they have enough work for the next eighteen months or so and two of them said that they have all their orders filled so they need the work and once they have that decided the two who are looking for the contract decide on the price they will go in at so that the others will overbid them or not bid at all

  but you still have two bidders coming in at the same price, you could toss a coin and award it to one of them

  you could but before the contract goes through the full tender- ing process you enlist your local public representative and drop hints about the thirty or forty jobs which depend on winning this contract, the thirty or forty households which will be badly affected coming up to election time

  a friend at court

  something like that, the two councillors now sit down and see that it is in both their interest to have the contract split between the two yards in their parts of the county

  but it’s only a couple of loads of concrete

  it’s a lot more than that – there’s all the block-work, all the aggregate and maintenance, lintels, kerbing, hardcore and surfacing – this contract will keep these two yards tipping over for another twelve months – who knows what might have happened by then and

  Mairea
d shook her head in wonderment, a smile opening out all her features and I was glad of this lightness in her response, it lifted something from me and did me good so that

  her face before me now

  Mairead across the table from me as

  clearly as if she really was in front of me, her face as it was in the days before she took ill, its winter paleness fading with those fresh spring days, her spirits brightened from bedding in the first plants in her flowerbeds at the front of the house, a task she always said never failed to quicken something in her soul and which I had come to see as the sign that marked the true passing of winter no matter what the calendar might say so that when I came around the corner of the house that day

  she was sitting in the garden

  wearing her quilted jacket and tracksuit bottoms with both hands clasped around a mug of coffee – appearing exactly as the woman she was – an attractive middle-aged school teacher who was taking time out after a few hours gardening and who, even in these relaxed, unguarded moments was never far from that school-marmish neatness which she carried from her classroom and which, in the early years of our marriage, we made good use of when she would play the role of the prim schoolteacher taking it from the rough-hewn but sensitive laggard at the back of the class, bent over the table, in the hallway, wherever – neither of us claiming there was anything original about the fantasy but both of us stepping into our roles with such gusto that our energies carried us into a place where we found ourselves overtaken with a greedy appetite for each other, sometimes so intense that Mairead said she thought there was something cosmic about it and that she felt capable of fucking the world into redemption

  her own words

  fucking our way past the pettiness and desperation which sometimes overcame us in our day-to-day lives, so that twisted together in the act of love we found our way towards that one molten moment in which only that which was true and unsullied in us would survive, everything else burned away, leaving us truly naked with all our senses open to giving the best of ourselves to each other and to the world we had created around us, something which thankfully, happened often enough back then to allow us now, in middle age

  to sit across the table from each other and reflect that we’d had our proper share of such passion, we had not short-changed that part of ourselves while

  all this comes to me now in such an unbroken torrent

  sitting here at this table

  faces and words and all sorts of fragments falling through me in staggered, interleaved depths with nothing behind them except some dark oblivion which threatens to suck me down into it, some black gravity which pulls at me, dragging at the tips of my fingers so that to dwell on it any longer might cause me to slip from myself completely for the want of something solid to focus on like

  the spring bloom which visited Mairead’s cheeks in those days before she became ill

  this blush which I have always seen as another sign of winter’s passing, bringing with it the glad news that our world had turned into a warmer and differently lighted place where we could stand easier in our flesh and bones without the winter cold to bind us and indeed Mairead, as always after the first of March, had already moved the garden furniture from the shed into the back garden so it was no surprise to see her sitting there when I came around by the gable that day, sitting in her quilted jacket with a mug of coffee and a book, the day nowhere near warm enough with its stone-coloured sky overhead but Mairead as always holding to her belief that the sun had to be coaxed up into the sky and that it was her job to show it the way by sitting at the garden table in the middle of a grey March afternoon with cold-roses in her cheeks

  mistress of her own domain

  which was of course was the very feature that tipped Mairead in favour of this particular house when she first saw it so many years ago, the house itself ordinary enough but the unusually big garden held out the promise of trapped sunlight so that during those summer weeks when we were scouting for a place to buy she visited this particular one on three separate occasions, each time returning an hour later to stand in the middle of the garden with her face turned upwards like a pale sunflower till the third evening, around nine o’clock at night with the shadow of the house itself halfway to the sod fence which marked the site’s mearing, she lowered her face and said

  yes, this is what we’re looking for

  and it was only then it dawned on me that she had been checking out the angle of the sun at high summer and was happy to find that the greater part of the garden did not pass into shadow till after half nine at night so that

  when I saw her that spring afternoon, with the sun slanting into it at a low angle and honed with a chill edge, she was sitting at the table in the middle of the lawn, all tucked up in a padded jacket and a mug of coffee in her hand, wired up to her iPod and reading away, and the

  strangest thing

  so strange

  coming upon her unawares like that, my wife of twenty-five years sitting in profile with her hair swept to her shoulder and her crooked way of holding her head whenever she was listening intently or concentrating, I saw that

  a whole person and their life

  cohered clearly around these few details and how, if ever this woman had to be remade, the world could start with the light and line of this pose which was so characteristic of her whole being, drawing down out of the ether her configuration, her structure and alignment, all the lines and contours which make her up as the woman she was on that day, with her health and spirit intact and content, this moment in which she was lost to herself in books and music, heedless to the whole world in a way that allowed something true and unguarded of herself to present so clearly that I found myself standing at the corner of the house, gazing at her from a distance, hardly able to believe that I had shared a quarter of a century with this woman who, in a few days would have her health taken from her by

  a viral event which would not only spread to a citywide scale but would also prove attentive enough to fasten into the narrow crevice of this woman’s ordinary life where its filth and virulence would prove so difficult to remove while all the time

  Agnes’s despatches from the disaster area

  continued to keep me abreast of things, her calls coming every evening around seven o’clock when I was sitting at the kitchen table looking out over the garden to the mountains in the distance which rose up into the grey dusk of spring, her voice on the other end telling me in a tone of cautious excitement that word had got out in the city about her installation and that it was drawing a steady flow of foot traffic through the gallery,

  people who appeared to genuinely engage with the work over and above the usual well-wishers with the invigilators and the gallery owner showing her the visitor’s book which was steadily filling up with enthusiastic comments and observations which, by and large, read the exhibition as a welcome artistic engagement with some of the more difficult social issues that for too long had been ignored by a visual arts culture which seemed only too willing to withdraw into a private rhetoric at a time when it might be expected to engage with its wider social environment, plus the fact that there had also been one favourable print review in a Sunday broadsheet – an unusual enough happening Agnes assured me – which had picked up on her theme of the body as a rhetorical field, a fitting conjunction for a time when the city itself was in the national news for reasons to do with the sovereignty and integrity of the body within a democracy, a positive review she said which stressed the relevance of the piece beyond the narrow precinct of this city, such a thoughtful essay that Agnes was hopeful the two-page spread with its colour illustration might draw the attention of some curator from one of the more adventurous galleries in Dublin – there was a chance it might happen but she wasn’t holding her breath, she knew how difficult it was to break out of the provincial art scene but, for the moment

  she was enjoying that glow of well-being which comes after a prolonged bout of concentrated work, very tired now and ge
tting lots of sleep but feeling good and in fact it was only today that she had been back to her studio for the first time since the installation went up, spending the morning sorting through all her stuff, all the notes and newspaper clippings along with the sketches and templates she had worked from and there was a lot more tidying to be done than she had thought so it would probably need another day at least before the job would be complete, but never mind, it was a good feeling to have old work cleared from the studio and to have created that open space ahead of her now in which new experiments were possible, she was looking forward to that exploration and no, she wasn’t sure what she would do next but she had a feeling she might

  return to oils, she felt them drawing her once more and she missed their slow application, the way they cured to their proper resolution over weeks before finally fixing themselves, she missed the way time measured itself to a slower beat whenever she worked with them, it would be relaxing to be back among the smell and feel of it, oils mixed with linseed, a welcome change at least from the intimate relationship she had struck lately with her own blood – speaking of which

  something odd

  she was now getting used to being drawn up in the streets by those fringe members of the visual arts community who were eager to make known their admiration for the brave – their word – work she had completed, artists her own age with tattoos and piercings and too much mascara and

  it’s weird Dad, she said, I’ve been showing oil on canvas all this time and was able to pass unmolested on the street but the moment I leave down my brush and take up a syringe, people are anxious to see me as some sort of Jeanne d’Arc or someone like that, someone bent on self-sacrifice, the exemplary sufferer who’s supposed to stand against I don’t know what and

  I was happy to listen to Agnes going on in this mode for a while because it was assuring to know that one of us at least was out there having a good time, engaging with the world in a way that did not sicken or frighten her and as a father it was good to hear in her voice the sound of someone coming into their own, my daughter taking a decisive step towards herself, a curious feeling which had me in two minds, as if I were welcoming and saying goodbye to her in the same moment, all the anxious feelings a father has for a daughter as