stop
for the love of Jesus
stop talking
getting carried away like this on
tidal waves of nonsense, swept so far away from myself that it’s easy to forget, the aching towards my own end which draws me on while alive to this moment, sitting here at this table, so improbably here, the
cosmic odds so hopelessly stacked against me
being here as
this electric interval held within its circumference of flesh and bone, the full sense of myself to myself as a kind of bounded harmonic, a bouquet of rhythms meshing into one over-emergent melody which homes me within the wider rhythms of the world, the horizonal melody of the cosmos, the celestial harmonic which inscribes me against the biggest magnitudes, the furthest edge of the universe and
stop
Jesus
because
one two buckle my shoe
three four knock at the door
five six pick-up sticks
seven eight
seven eight
seven
as the crisis stretched on, the number of patients rose above four hundred and began putting a serious strain on the city’s health services, a number that cloaked what many observers believed to be a massive under-swell of sufferers who were not recorded in hospital wards but who did have an inverse presence in the rising tide of public and private sector absenteeism across all industries, the hospitality industry and the civil service in particular, a degree of absenteeism whose real numbers tallied towards three thousand, the figures supported by anecdotal evidence which the city’s authorities refused to acknowledge, or did so only to disparage as gross exaggeration and when pressed merely pointed to the number of hospital beds taken up with registered sufferers as the only true and reliable measure of the outbreak as no amount of anecdotal testimony could be considered accurate evidence of the crisis and while
the caginess of their response might have been understandable in terms of giving assurance to the outside world that the outbreak was indeed being carefully managed and contained, it also angered the populace deeper whose sardonic scepticism of the early days had given way to a kind of heedlessness which had them turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to all those newsletters and advisories which still continued to appear in public places like doctors’ surgeries or on supermarket notice boards, so heedless to it now that
a cloud of weariness enveloped the whole story as it played out over the national airwaves, all coverage coloured with a note of schadenfreude that a city which had made such a lucrative reputation as a cultural mecca with its twelve month calendar of festivals and celebrations should now be struck down with a biblical pestilence – not the wages of sin exactly but surely just recompense for a kind of fecklessness which seemed to afflict a place which had given itself so wholeheartedly to carnevale, no sympathy to spare for
a story that appeared to linger on so that the city itself now seemed becalmed in its own unmoving filth, stagnant as the algae cloud which thickened in the rising temperatures of those days, a toxic bloom under the sun which swarmed through the city’s nervous system and the digestive tracts of its inhabitants, shifting responsibility for the crisis onto the city itself, or more accurately onto
the rapid expansion of the city over the past decade with its large housing developments along the coast road which had radically increased the draw on the city’s supply lake, lowering its levels so that its purity was further compromised by the increased amount of slurry fertiliser that had washed into the lake during those spring weeks of steady rainfall, the flow going through the pipe overwhelming the filtration system and admitting the Cryptosporidium into the water pipes, which then spread through those same wards of a city that had grown at such an uninhibited rate throughout the preceding decade so that when
the civic authorities sought to locate the exact origin of the disaster it found that it could not be pinpointed to one specific cause, human or environmental, but that its primary source was in the convergence of adverse circumstances – decrepit technology and torrential rains, overdevelopment and agricultural slurry – which smudged and spread responsibility for the crisis in such a way as to make the whole idea of accountability a murky realm in which there was little willingness on the part of the authorities to point the finger at farmers or engineers or those planners and developers who had allowed the city to grow beyond its ability to keep itself supplied with potable water so that with
no blame or responsibility gathering anywhere
the story hung through the city’s ambience as a kind of rolling fog which, with each passing day, thickened to a whitewash over the whole crisis in which it became clear that no one would be blamed nor held responsible, the city now so enwrapped in a murk that
it began to inhabit a kind of dreamtime when its past and future unfolded simultaneously, a whole city dreaming itself with all its buildings, young and old, all its tarred and cobbled streets, all its clocks and steeples, all its signs and monuments and statuary, all its horizontal services, water and electricity, every part of it twitched between its real existence and its own dream-life where it morphed through all the changes of itself, its history unfolding in one ongoing delirium, culminating on the night
this city of pageants and festivals
its patience gone and its voice hoarse
politically at its wits’ end
raided its wardrobe and fancy-dress box to gather up its masks and face-paint so that it might deck itself out in its most ghastly colours and come staggering through the cobbled streets as
a company of zombies, moving with more purpose than you would imagine while trailing their winding cloths through the narrow lanes of the Latin quarter where they met up with a stilted Bo Peep – ten feet tall and with six days’ growth of beard under a platinum fright wig – shepherding a small flock of sheep away from flying spiders that menaced them from overhead, their pitiful bleating causing them to herd in a circle, bumping and tripping over each other just as a company of golden samba queens spilled out of a nearby pub and two by two, to the tune of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ they herded the sheep up the main pedestrian street, all plumed and gilded and gathering to their beat buskers and jugglers and a couple of fire-eaters who were naked to the waist and smelling of kerosene, all falling into step beside the zombies who had made common cause with the spiders, taking the lash of Bo Peep’s scourge along the pedestrian area with their own reflections in the large shop windows moving step by step with them to draw a family of clowns from a side street, mammy and daddy and two kids with wide red grins which threatened to engulf their heads and Elvis and Charlie Chaplin, both with their hands in their pockets and deep in conversation, both fell into step with no apparent heed of where they were headed, drawn on by some horizontal gravity which pulled from another side street the full complement of the medieval music society in full raiment, friars and pardoners, merchants and mendicants, maidens and widows fronted by a knight in knitted chain-mail and a wooden sword, all with their lutes and recorders and tambourines, doing what they could to rejig a madrigal to the samba beat, the procession moving on till it came to the top of the street where the park opened up beneath the banners of the city’s founding fathers which now flew over this congregation which appeared to have been drawn from some realm where the living and the dead stood shoulder to shoulder sharing a joke and a fag as a hen party of mermaids appeared with devil’s horns and an L-plate stitched to the girl’s chest who passed around a naggin of vodka and insisted on sharing it with a family of Fir Bolgs, swaying bulbous giants whose useless arms and height made the job impossible and threatened to spoil the girl’s fun for a moment before she disappeared into the maw of a multi-coloured dragon who appeared from around the corner of the public toilets, lowering his mouth over her to pick her up bodily amid much squawking laughter, her tanned legs kicking from the dragon’s mouth who now turned and made off with her into the centre of the park where the figure of a fifty-fo
ot Lemuel Gulliver was the natural focal point for all those other characters now streaming out of the night, two children in corpse-paint holding Morticia’s hand, the child with a square head and a bolt through his neck, paler children with capes and fangs – some cowled, with their own scythes and hourglasses – plus all the little girls in Irish dancing costumes who had their hair done up in fluorescent curlers on top of their heads like small Medusas beside those kids in cowboy suits and Indian feathers – kids out way past their bedtime on a school night but happy to recognise old friends – Snow White and her seven butties, Dopey and Sneezy and the whole gang, all tooled up with picks and shovels and marching to the beat
hey ho, hey ho
it’s off to work we go
whistling their little tune and drawn on by the rhythm of the samba beat they shouldered their picks and headed off across the grass towards the corner of the square where they fell in behind a small flatbed truck which was mounted by a trio of charred demons playing lead and rhythm guitars and drums, churning out a bass rhythm which hits the centre of the chest as it drew on the cortege with Gulliver leading the rest of the assembled night creatures as they funnelled into the narrow street with their whistles and tambourines, making space to skip and dance, ghouls and trolls and zombies picking up a kind of jigging two-step which took them past the Magdalene monument and across the intersection where traffic had to come to a halt, up the hill by the bus station and student hostel by which time everyone had taken up their proper place in the procession, the demon car leading the way with its bludgeoning rhythms and Snow White’s dwarves setting the military tone of the procession, marching along beneath the towering figure who was kept upright by so many outriders with ropes and stays, then manoeuvred carefully into the car park and up the path towards the city offices as if he were about to knock on its tiny door and request admittance at this late hour though, as he approached, the whole facade
disappeared on cue behind a massive white sheet which cascaded from the roof of the building, falling under its own weight from the top of the fifth story, unfolding in a soft billowing which carried it gently the last couple of feet to the ground before the dead gaze of the giant Gulliver who was now faced with a blank wall of pale fabric rippling across with those shadows cast by the lights from the parking lot behind the gathered congregation of ghouls and ghosts and mummers who now thronged the open area as far back as the car park, some standing on top of the wall which fronted onto the road, every hollow eye fixed on the civic building whose whole front had disappeared behind a white curtain so that the front presented nothing but the blank face of a mausoleum, the building readily lending itself to the illusion, five stories rising square-faced in a blank precipice as if it had been waiting there since its inauguration for its own effacement, blinded by this sheet which was now overcast by a projection of blue, childish waves within which all sorts of marine creatures happily cavorted, the whole building submerged and over the top of which
Agnes now stood
stepping out to the edge of the lake precipice and this time she was indeed naked, shockingly so with her white body catching the light from the car park, shadowing her breasts across so that she appeared as if half of her was cut away into darkness, her body now precisely the sort that would stand as an heraldic pillar, a caryatid and
all this
in my mind’s eye the following morning when I read the account in the national paper, the
naked girl standing on the edge of the sunken mausoleum as if she were a statue carved to that purpose with the glare from beneath lighting up the juncture between her hips, as she stepped forward in full possession of the moment, upheld in the gaze of the assembled ghouls, everyone teetering on the edge of some climactic gesture that would clinch the whole spectacle into a coherent act of political protest, something which, if not equal to the city’s confusion would be at least dramatic and striking enough to illustrate how it had the collective wit to gather itself for this moment in which she would either fall or take flight, the only options when you have walked this close to the edge with
the picture on the front page showing her with her arms outspread and tipping forward off the edge of the building, the image catching her at the precise moment her feet leave the edge of the building and gravity takes hold of her as she begins to plunge through the night air, the expressions on the faces of the onlookers still calm as their reactions lag a full second behind she who is already in mid-flight with
my own heart skipping a beat to see her stalled for a split second in mid-air before plunging through the blackened light onto the hidden air cushion beneath which swelled out of the ground, appearing to engulf her as she landed in its centre so that it rose up around her, swallowing her in a soft tumorous growth in front of the building, the gasp from the crowd simultaneous with the curved folds of the cushion rising up around her, as if the crowd’s shock gave it the substance to billow up towards my blue-skinned daughter before it gradually subsided and she was raised up on a small plinth within the dying bloom to emerge as a kind of Venus on the half-shell from beneath the blue projected waves of the lake that rippled across her body and
the whole thing was clunky, hempen homespun in its execution but the point of it all clear enough – City Hall and all who sailed in her, politicians and engineers, dead and drowned beneath the waves of this political protest and
did you see what our daughter got up to last night, Mairead wanted to know the following day, shaming us in front of the nation, not a stitch on her
yes, I saw
and were you shocked this time
I’m not so easily shocked any more
good, she replied, and sunk back in the pillow with a tired smile drawing her face open so
I’m a bit confused though, I said, the water thing is easy to understand but the jumping off the roof bit, what was that all about
I was a bit lost myself with that – I hope she calls today, she might explain it, maybe they hope it will be the sort of inspiring image or event that will rouse the city to more urgent protest
is that what they want
maybe it is, getting people to rise up and start a political and social renewal, startle the people out of their torpor and
you sound like Darragh
well, he didn’t lick it off the stones you know and
it’s coming back to me now, the stones and
driving to town that day
the trip to town with
Mairead sitting up in the bed, her first day on the turn, her first day getting better and
the pain of it all
this fucking pain when
I drove to town to pick up that prescription for her, some sort of a tonic prescribed by Dr Cosgrave to build her up towards the end of her illness, by which time she was seriously thin and enfeebled, her lowest ebb but the very point at which she began to rally, the illness draining from her like a neap tide, leaving her sitting up in bed against a pile of pillows, pale and breathless with her body labouring to keep her upright, the worst of it definitely over but weak as water so that Dr Cosgrave prescribed her this tonic after she examined her for the last time, pronouncing herself happy that she was indeed on the mend and that all the signs were good, her appetite gradually returning to cups of soup and toast after so long taking nothing but glasses of tepid water to wash the virus from her body, every puke and purge drawing with it some of her own colouring so that she was now almost translucent from all the weight she had lost but
that’s nothing to panic about
Dr Cosgrave assured us, smiling around at both of us in the dimly lit room
she’s lost weight but she has the summer months ahead of her to get stronger and build herself up and this will help her
she said, as she tore the script from her book and handed it to me and I understood that it was some sort of a tonic in capsule form, something to be taken three times a day after meals and that I would have to skip into Westport and get it for her
as
she frowned up at me, her voice rasping
a tonic – it sounds so old fashioned, do people still take that sort of thing
I guess so, at least that’s what this prescription calls for
it sounds like something from an age of poultices and leeches
I think you’ve had enough of leeches and bugs, will you be ok for an hour or two while I get this
yes, I’ll be fine
do you need anything else
bring back apple juice
ok
and will you take my car, it hasn’t been started in a while, it could probably do with a quick spin
ok, it’s half eleven now, I’ll be back around one o’clock, is that ok
yes, I’ll be fine
she smiled at me, her thin face opening along sharper lines than I was used to but still unmistakably hers
it’ll do you good to get away for a few hours
you’re trying to get rid of me
yes, I’m waiting for my fancy man to come and see me the minute you’re out the door
well I won’t get in his way, there’s water here and a towel and
that’s all I need, go on before I change my mind and one last thing
yes
you did a good job
what job
looking after me, you did a good job looking after me, thank you
yes
and I grabbed her keys from the bowl on the hall-stand, pulled the door behind me and went out to the car, her old Corolla, which stood at the gable in shadow and stillness with leaves and twigs caught in the wipers and a scurf of dust on the windscreen, all the markers of time passing converging on it, the wind and rain already going about the patient work of wearing it down, this car which had lain dormant for so long that I stood to look at it a moment, to marvel before I opened the door and sat into her, wondering to myself
will she start
I’ll bet the battery’s dead in her
as I pushed the seat back to give myself some legroom so that my knees were not up under the steering wheel and adjusted the seat-angle as I could never sit comfortably into a car after Mairead, whose legs are a lot shorter than mine and who always likes to sit forward in the seat, whereas I like to lean back from the steering wheel, settling myself in but still wondering
Solar Bones Page 22