Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  she recounted these things, lending proper weight to all the detail but careful not to linger too much and have her story bogged down while at the same time trying to rein in her enthusiasm because the tremor of excitement in her voice was obvious as was the strain it put on her trying to dampen it down, a young woman not yet so far gone in adulthood that she could not be gusted away on a sudden burst of excitement, and for the first time – out of nowhere – I found myself wondering why she never seemed to have a boyfriend or suitor of any sort, had no one ever breached that standoffishness which was her front to the world or was that just a polished shell behind which there was a lonely and uncertain young woman in her prime and despite my troubles, sitting there at the table, there was space enough within me for a wave of anxiety to course through my entire body at the very idea that my daughter might be lonely in some way unknown to herself, that so early in her life she might have mistaken her own aloneness as a type of serenity, a destiny of her own choosing which she had successfully passed off to herself as an heroic isolation while of course there was

  about her also the awareness that all this stuff about her exhibition was merely background noise, a preamble to our main theme which was of course the current status of the crypto outbreak, the latest news, which in spite of my fatherly solicitude was what I really wanted to know and this was where I gave my full attention because even if her reports changed little with the passing days my own need-to-know required daily updates which confirmed that

  with its engineers still unable to identify the source of the contamination, the boil-water notice would hold throughout the city for the foreseeable future so instead, much was being made by City Hall of the new treatment facility which was under construction, an ultra-modern installation adjacent to the existing plant comprised of an infrared filtration system which would supplement the existing barrier-membrane in zapping those biological particles and organic matter which managed to pass through it and all of which would ensure that the city’s water supply would far exceed existing standards of purity for years into the future, but when pressed the spokesman admitted that the commissioning and construction of such a facility presented very real engineering difficulties and the projected completion date lay at least some months into the future, a snag which took much of the gloss off the news and caused the citizenry to throw up their hands in dismay, shaking their heads in disbelief and exercising once more a wholly expanded lexicon of frustration, while the tourist and hospitality sector ground its teeth and prophesied untold damage to the city’s economy, not to mention lasting damage to the city’s global reputation as a cultural destination and

  there appears to be no end to the incompetence of the city authorities

  Agnes affirmed with a tired sarcasm which was new to her and not pleasant to hear in someone who till so recently had never voiced any political opinion whatsoever as far as I could remember, her having viewed with indifference every news programme that happened to be on television or radio as if the wider upheavals of the world had nothing to do with her whatsoever, which in truth they may not have because she was of that generation born to a world of plenty, never knowing what it was to do without or what it was to be frugal and thereby never having developed the coping skills to deal with any reversal, economic or political or civic like this one which must have baffled her, come as some shock to her, this dramatic instance of civil incompetence which had caused the illness of so many people and listening to her it was difficult not to feel glad on the one hand that she had finally woken up to the world in one of its less capable moods while, on the other, upset that she should be put upon in any way whatsoever – a father’s rush to protect his child from everything, even her own innocence with the

  long and the short of the whole thing being

  that the boil-water notice would hold for another month at least or for as long as the number of cases needing hospital admission continued to rise, not rising so steeply now but still touching four hundred, a sickening populace evenly drawn from all areas of the city, the older working-class estates north of the river across to the newer, middle-class enclaves in the south ward, which stretches along the coast road, the virus favouring no particular demographic or area, everyone familiar now with the sight of bulk water carriers pulling into housing estates and cul-de-sacs with mothers and kids queueing up to fill plastic containers, this image now an established shorthand for the whole crisis across print and broadcast media and

  that was it, those were the facts as far as the crisis itself was concerned, Agnes telling them quickly but with a child’s eagerness to be as comprehensive as possible, as if a complete recital with all the trimmings might be conclusive and exhaustive, a sort of vanquishing spell set against it which would drain it of some essential vigour and displace it into some adjacent world where it would be rendered harmless, turning on itself and chewing itself into oblivion and

  as I listened something in me leaked towards her and, in that awkward, faltering way of middle-aged men with mature daughters I found myself trying to assure her that everything would turn out all right, this was merely one of those things which the passing of time would make harmless and someday soon Mairead would be up and about her work with a smile on her face and a song on her lips, telling her in as soothing a tone as I could manage that

  your mother is fine Agnes, don’t worry, yes she’s definitely improving, and she’s not as fevered as yesterday – she drank a small cup of soup today – the first thing she’s managed to hold down in three days so that’s a good sign and her sleep is not so broken any more, none of that awful thrashing around under the sheets which she suffered during the first days so all in all she has every sign of getting better and stronger, but of course there is no use me telling you that she’ll be back to anything like her real strength for a little while and

  my sense of these words dropping into a void as they came out of my mouth filled me with despair, something so feeble about them it was hardly credible that they could be of any comfort to anyone since they would do little whatsoever but embarrass both of us, this awkward attempt at soothing my daughter which drove our conversation into a pregnant lull from which she eventually took sudden inspiration to put us both out of our misery with a bright account of what she had planned for the weekend, yet another of those awkward trips or jaunts she always seemed to be taking on her own to some small town or village in the middle of the country, jaunts which involved bus connections and waiting alone at rain-swept country stations, field work she sometimes described them as but none of which, now that I thought of it, ever sounded hopeful or fun as these excursions were always enveloped in some aura of penitence, something of the pilgrimage about them which was dismaying to hear in a way that was difficult to grasp but which lodged like smoke in my soul, nagging and anxious-making but nevertheless I told her to have a great time and I could hear her subside with relief that the call was finally at an end and that she had once more successfully done her job, fulfilled the role of the dutiful daughter so that now she would sign off with

  oh, I nearly forgot

  yes,

  two things, first, I’ve told Darragh about Mam, I let it slip last night when I was talking to him – I know you wanted to keep it from him but

  there was no point in getting him worried

  I know and he’s not worried, he’s angry, he’s very upset, you’ll hear this when you talk to him, I’m sorry but it was my big mouth and

  don’t worry about it, he had to find out sometime and better you than me – you said there was something else

  yes, there’s a big demonstration planned for next week, the artistic community is getting together to protest the whole contamination thing and I’ve been asked to participate in some sort of street pageant

  why you

  I don’t know, it must have something to do with my new celebrity

  what sort of pageant

  I don’t know yet, dressing up and stuff I’d imagine, but I’m l
ooking forward to it so that’s it, I’ll let you know how it goes

  ok, look after yourself

  I will, love to yourself and Mam

  ok

  bye

  bye

  which brought the call to an end, killing the phone in my hand in such a delicate way – light draining from the screen – that I placed it gently on the table for fear any sudden movements might disturb some lingering element of Agnes’s love and farewell, the phone on the table hopelessly inert in

  the raw silence which always washed through me after these calls, always leaving me feeling lightened, not in the sense of being unburdened but more in the way of one who has undergone some trial and come through it not wholly unscathed, bruised in a way which left me tentative and anxious in some way beyond what the call itself was responsible for so that I spent the rest of the evening going through the house with the hoover and cleaning the bathroom just to take my mind off whatever it was now grating with such an anxious itch, something which made me wary of Darragh’s call later that night, his face

  looming out of the screen towards me with his hair longer and his anger still stoked from what Agnes had told him, the distant sense of Mairead’s suffering clearly aggravating his hopeless frustration at being unable to do anything other than ranting and heaping curses on the heads of those engineers and politicians he now lit upon, a scalding tirade that I listened to for a few minutes, a venomous cascade of fucks which confirmed for me that there had always been this sudden rage lurking beneath all his crowing and cackling and I was glad Mairead was not witnessing this anger on her account because while it was easy to predict that Darragh would feel deeply on her behalf and would need little prompting to cast himself in the role of her defender I was not so sure that she would have admired the mixture of snarling rage and frustration which spilled from him now, his face receding into the dark shadows of his cheeks and his hair wild around his head in that mad way which sure enough brought to mind his grandfather in the last bewildered months of his life, a memory which frightened me and caused me to cut across him, barking

  I have better things for doing Darragh than listening to this guff at this time of the night

  you could have told me

  and what could you have done

  I should have known

  your mother and I made the decision to keep quiet about it because we didn’t want to be putting worry on you

  yah

  and because we knew that this was how you’d react

  and how is that

  this brainless ranting

  how am I supposed to react

  with a bit more cop-on than this effing and blinding you’re going on with, if you think this kind of thing is going to make her any better you’d better think again

  so what am I supposed to do

  nothing Darragh, because there is nothing to be done, your mother is over the worst of it, the doctor was in at her and she’s weak but that’s all that’s wrong with her and she’ll be back on her feet soon – words to douse his anger and put his mind at rest which they seemed to do after

  he blew off steam for another few minutes, heaping more curses on the heads of engineers and politicians alike before he turned to another theme, his anger lending a caustic edge to his usual clowning tone when he said

  I believe Agnes is gathering her own coven about her – any day soon she’ll be minting her own religion

  English Darragh, for God’s sake

  I’m talking about Agnes Dei, she tells me that she’s become a totemic figure for a sensitive emo crowd

  you’re speaking in tongues again Darragh – that went over my head, emo what

  it would have been called goth in your day, Dad – emo is a more virulent strain of that old disorder, it’s that worldview in which black is the new white and life is the new death

  you can’t put it any plainer than that

  no

  and what has this to do with Agnes

  she tells me that she’s being stopped in the street by these emo girls who want to touch the hem of her garment, it’s all about her work of course, they recognise a kindred sufferer, and in fairness it’s easy to see how that installation could become a sacred spot for a small church of self-harmers, a little congregation of cutters and anorexics and dysmorphs, all with their own stigmata of tats and piercings

  you’re losing me again Darragh

  these are the last days Dad, the signs are everywhere, the writing’s on the wall and the people on the march, pestilence washing through the city – mark my words any day now they’re going to raise a yellow flag over the town hall and place the whole metropolitan area under quarantine and behind razor wire – that’s the kind of shambles in which a secular saint like Agnes would flourish

  this sort of guff wears me out, Darragh

  oh don’t worry Dad, you’ll have your own part to play in all this fairly soon, any day now the four of us will all be sitting around in a circle, the holy family, each of us in turn raising a vein so that the New Testament can be written afresh there’s good reason why this sort of thing is called the cutting edge

  and you believe we have some responsibility for all of this

  in fairness you have only yourself to blame Dad, yourself and Mam – what were you thinking when you named her Agnes, didn’t you know that name is destiny, you should look it up some time and see what was laid out for her

  this is all very tiring, Darragh

  you’re a tough audience Dad, I have to say

  I’m tired, that’s all

  well I suppose we won’t solve it all tonight

  hardly

  ok, keep checking your email, I’ll let you know when I’m likely to be online, and give all my love to Mam, let me know when she is ready to take a call from me

  I will, ok

  bye

  bye

  after which he seemed to reach towards me with his palm outstretched, fingers filling the screen for a darkening moment before it switched off and the line which connected us across the globe dissolved to a black portal, leaving me adrift for a moment, my mind still locked into the conversation we’d just had before I closed down the laptop, the sound of which drew the sitting room with its walls and pictures in around me in the darkness with

  Mairead down the hall in Agnes’s room, among the teddies and soft toys, sleeping easier now with her face turned onto the pillow, her breath levelled out and drawing gently, her body now almost purged of the virus, the wracking days of vomiting and sweating behind her just as

  the contamination finally rose to the top of the news agenda, climbing over the headlines of all those other stories, surmounting those larger brooding issues which were stacking up on the political horizon like some catastrophic high-pressure weather system, darkening the sky to promise of all sorts of devastation – stories of wage agreements, unemployment crises and so on, all of them inhabiting the most abstract realm of figures and geopolitics, none of them as yet achieving that immediate heft of bodily and civic catastrophe which gave the contamination story its gathering allure, as it still showed no sign of going away, if anything its persistence in the boil-water notice and the still escalating number of patients marked it out as a story with genuine resilience, an obstinacy one could easily associate with a viral event that would give it endurance, with a note of irony which ran through every report, the reminder that

  this was the wettest city in Ireland, a coastal city with a mean annual rainfall twenty percent above the national average and

  listening to all this on the nine o’clock news it seemed to me wholly beyond belief now that after all this time on one or no cause had been identified as the source of the crisis, no one to point to and say

  this person and their actions

  are the reason my wife is in bed with her strength leaking from every pore of her body, sour dreams of revenge coming to torment me which seemed reasonable and justified but, with no proper focus for my wrath, I proved t
o be a poor hand at revenge fantasies so my resentment turned towards

  sitting at this table and

  thinking these thoughts or

  being thought by them

  that sense of

  myself filling out the space of their being, being taken up with the idea or

  being the idea that

  my entire existence is these same thoughts, that each rolling idea, as it occurs now is wholly responsible for my

  being here

  like

  something lost, a revenant who has returned to his house at some grey hour to find the place boarded up and abandoned, becalmed in a sea of weeds and dandelion clocks, a line of grey crows along the ridge-tile, a child’s construct around which time itself has taken a detour leaving it to weather and deteriorate in some way other than it should so that now, drifting through it while

  sitting at this table

  conscious of something stagnant in the house itself, as if all its pulses and rhythms have been swept from it so that time itself is legless here with all things, myself included, suspended in a kind of stalled duration, an infinitely extended moment spinning like an unmeshed gear, a stillness within which no knife will blunt, no mirror will tarnish, no paint will peel, no hunger will grasp my belly nor will I ever have to shave as

  time itself could decay here, lapse completely in such a way as to leave this place like some stagnant inverse realm, the countervailing force of the whole world

  the source of all opposites

  where all things are stood on their head, some realm in which bread is poured and water is cut and our shadows have tired of us and got to their feet before walking away with their stick-men comrades, striding away over fields and commonage, barbed wire fences and dry stone walls, falling into step with each other as they pick up that steady stride which enables them to leave this world altogether and head off towards some other jurisdiction beyond the horizon where they and their kind thrive and god knows who they answer to so