Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  will she start

  is the battery dead

  as I turned the key in the ignition to bring up all the lights in the dash before a couple of sluggish, laboured turns of the engine finally caught and the causal chain from ignition spark to engine turn was completed smoothly and held as the car surged to life with a healthy growl which carried through the floor panels and up through the seat so that I could feel it vibrate in the bottom of my spine as I pumped the accelerator a few times, warming her up, the noise of the engine rising and falling against the gable of the house, and in that roaring moment all neglect and idleness was set aside as the engine sung out in some mysterious way which thrilled me but embarrassed me by bringing tears to my eyes, sitting there and pumping the accelerator while all the gauges in the dash rose to their proper levels

  temp, oil, revs and petrol

  of which there was over half a tank, more than enough for the journey ahead so I sat there a few moments longer revving her, feeling extraordinarily happy and impressed that this car had started so easily after lying idle so long in rain and cold, this fifteen-year-old car which had a full circuit of the clock behind it, most of it racked up during the kids’ teenage years with all its trips to

  discos, cinemas, summer camps, football matches

  all the childhood and adolescent occasions to which, I have to admit, Mairead more often than I ferried the kids and their friends, so much so that she was especially attached to it, a sentimental link to that special part of our family’s life, a repository of all our times together which would be gone forever if it were scrapped, even if for the time being there was no pressing reason why it should be, as year after year it passed the NCT, flying through the test with none of those major engineering flaws that would consign it to the breakers yard, each year returning a snag list of small fails

  mirrors, number plates, shocks, lights, tracking and steering but

  never any major parts needing replacement, nor mechanical failure after fifteen years bouncing across the roads of West Mayo, till it had gradually become clear that this car might keep going forever like some pristine machine that had been engineered in some frictionless realm, knowing nothing of deterioration or obsolescence as long as the body hung together, which, in fairness, might not be too many years longer as corrosion had begun to eat along the bottom of the door and the edges of the bonnet, which was to be expected, but so long as the floor-panels held out and the road did not start showing under our arses, I didn’t have to weld steel plates onto the chassis, and

  I sat there a while longer enjoying the sound of the engine humming away as if it were a melody from a better world where things ran to their proper purpose – a world where things worked as they should – before I fired some water up on the windscreen and was momentarily blinded as the dirt thickened under the wipers, driven across the screen in a heavy scurf for a few moments before it gradually cleared a broad sweep through which I could see clearly by which time the sound of the engine had sunk into my own flesh and bones, synching with my own shorter rhythms in such a sweet way that when I

  put her into first to

  turn out onto the main road and moved her up through the gears I experienced a shameless, rising joy in my heart as if finally, for the first time in a long while I was hearing something good, something which was not of this world’s raucous tumult but which spoke of that harmonic order which underlay everyone and everything, the gentle vibrations running through my spine and up my arms so that after a few miles I was relaxed in a way I had not been in weeks, settled back with the radio on and,

  it was a beautiful day

  with the sun high in the sky as the road ahead ploughed through the blue air, disappearing into the day’s depth along the lower slopes of Croagh Patrick on my right and the green sea to my left, such a vivid wash of light off the mountains that I recognised it immediately as one of those startling days when the beauty of this whole area is new again, the harmony and coherence of all its shades and colours washing down to the sea which was laid out like a mirror all the way across the bay to Achill Island and Mulranny, one of those days which makes you wonder how we could ever be forgetful of it because that is what happens, driving this coast road so often from Louisburgh to Westport, my morning route to work with its mountains falling through a chroma of blues and greens into the shallow, glaciated inlet of Clew Bay, a road ingrained on the very contours of my mind and so much a part of me that sometimes I have to make a conscious effort to really see it at all which was what I attempted to do that day, concentrate in such a way as to take in all those details that have passed by me unheeded on so many of my journeys along this route but

  I had no sooner resolved to do this and cleared my mind of all distractions in order to soak up everything than I completely forgot about it, let the resolution slip away so cleanly that the next thing I knew I had arrived in the middle of Westport and was pulling the car into the kerb along the mall at the bottom of the main street – ten miles driven in the blink of an eye but no memory of any of it – one of my favourite places as there is something lovely on a sunny day in getting out of the car under those elm trees and stopping in their shade for a moment to listen to the slow moving river which runs through the town – so slow you can hardly hear it at all – and after I locked up the car I headed off, thinking to myself I was lucky to get such a good spot in the middle of the day because there was a good crowd in town, a steady stream of cars passing over the bridge into Main Street with a run of sunlight glinting off the windscreens and a flow of pedestrians making their way along the pavements, this unexpectedly bright day bringing people out in good numbers to turn their pale faces to the sun as

  I crossed the street to the chemist where I handed the prescription to a young uniformed woman behind the counter who glanced at me and told me with a smile that it would take five minutes so I said

  fine, no rush

  which was the truth but which now left me standing around feeling a bit self-conscious with nothing around me but stacks and shelves of women’s potions and perfumes, twisting and turning, conscious of being well out of place and not knowing where to look so I was a bit relieved to spot the section with the male toiletries nearby, shelves of the stuff, aftershave and body sprays and hair gels and so on

  Farenheit and One and Hugo Boss and Diesel and Beckham and

  each one of them with testers so I took one up and turned it over, sprayed it and smelled it and then another and before I knew it I was enveloped in a sickly mist of conflicting scents with my sense of smell hopelessly confused, feeling slightly dizzy and I almost bolted for the door in embarrassment but I saw also that there was a stand with sunglasses on it and I thought I might hide there for a few moments longer, working my way through them one by one, round ones and square ones and plastic frame and metal frame, checking my appearance on the narrow vertical mirror running up the side of the stand, thinking that if the weather kept sunny like this I might get a pair, possibly wire-framed ones with that scholarly touch, but none of them seemed to do anything for me, or rather each made me look foolish in one way or another, too comic or too odd or too obviously chasing something I no longer possessed, each of them altering my face slightly but so radically that I did not recognise the man who looked back at me out of the narrow mirror, a silly experience which vexed me and left me feeling embarrassed so that I sighed with relief when the girl behind the counter returned eventually, smiling and holding up a little package which I took, purchasing also a small tube of heartburn lozenges which were on display beside the till because I’d had this burning sensation in my chest ever since I woke up that morning, took my change and made my way out of the shop onto the busy pavement

  where I stood for a moment to stow the package in the pocket of my jacket, glad to have that job done, before crossing the street to get the paper in the shop on the corner where I bought two – the national paper and the local one – plus a carton of apple juice and took them three doors fur
ther up to a small coffee shop which had a clear view of the main street as far as the clock at the top and which was just beginning to fill up now as it was after twelve and obviously some people like myself had it in mind to get in ahead of the lunchtime rush for a bite to eat – a few suited office workers, men and women from the banks probably and a few solicitors whom I recognised and nodded to along with the usual scattering of tourists in boots and Gore-Tex – where I managed to get a table at the very back which gave me a clear view of the whole place and out onto the street, so I set the papers down and ordered a cup of coffee with a club sandwich from the young waitress and while it had been my intention to scan through the papers and catch up with the world I now found myself wholly engrossed in the people who were filling up this small coffee shop which hardly had more than eight or nine tables in all, the nearest of which was taken up by a young woman sitting alone, dressed in a pinstripe suit and reading the sports pages of a tabloid which carried the story of a premiership footballer thought to be on the verge of a move from Arsenal back to Barcelona, the club which had nurtured his talent as a child and this story appeared to be holding her complete attention as she was sitting with her head bowed over the tabloid which caused her hair to fall down the side of her face as she held her soup spoon over the paper and it was interesting to see a woman so obviously lost in the soap-opera politics of English football, this woman who had about her that lush, affluent attractiveness which was so different to Mairead’s and which sometimes I found myself lusting after, a feeling which always convinced me I was betraying Mairead who was physically so different to this woman who was now turning the pages of her newspaper with no idea whatsoever that a complete stranger was having these thoughts about her while

  at the table inside the window, a tourist couple with their big all-weather jackets draped on the chairs behind them were tending to a little girl sitting in a high chair, being spoon-fed from a jar by the father who was all kitted out in the regulation gear for unpredictable weather – boots, cargo pants and fleece – while his wife beside him sorted through her wallet – a woman in her mid-forties with the airy look of a hillwalker or a marathon runner, one of those disciplines that had burned away the same body fat which was so obvious in the round, comfortable girl in the high chair, so clearly relishing her food, chewing happily but with half of it smeared all over her chin and with a ready way of thumping the little table in front of her if she was not being fed fast enough, a habit which, judging by the expression of open delight on her father’s face, had great ability to charm him, and would probably do so into her adult years as I saw also that this man had about him that same, slightly dazed expression I have noticed sometimes on Mairead whenever she dealt with Darragh, that faint slippage of the critical faculties on this man too, as if he was seeing the child for the first time and not, as was likely the case, witnessing her little charm-show for the umpteenth, with all those mannerisms already gathering, which would set and refine her to the woman she would become while he in turn would gradually have a sense of himself slackening and coming apart at the same time, as

  his wife returned from paying at the counter to begin gathering up their coats and bags, bringing a quiet surge of purpose to the scene, organising and shepherding them through the narrow spaces towards the door while

  over to my left a smaller, more intimate drama was unfolding between a woman in her thirties and an older man in an open-neck shirt with cufflinks, the woman leaning into him, trying to gain his attention while his whole focus was on tending to his pipe, scraping out the bowl with a little penknife and tapping it onto the side of his saucer, glancing up from his scraping and tapping to look the young woman in the eye by way of assuring her that he was indeed listening to her, giving her his full attention, or as much of that attention left over from tending to his pipe, she leaning across the table with her jaw set as if it would underline whatever it was she was saying or trying to convince him of, the whole scene so physically intimate that I wondered what their relationship was as there was obviously some close connection – professional or romantic – but it was hard to say because while the woman’s anxiety was very real, palpable to any onlooker, it could have fitted either scenario as there was not only the pleading of romantic breakdown, but also an urgent need to persuade this older man in a way which inclined me to believe that this might be a professional matter and that some workplace drama had occurred which still needed clarifying or smoothing over in some way or other because there was no mistaking the look on the woman’s face as anything other than a visible fear she was being misunderstood, the fear that some gain or position has been jeopardised, or that some reputation, hard won but fragile, had been sullied in some way or other but, whether this was the case or not, one thing was obvious and it was that the man would rather not have had to hear about it on his lunch break because there was something aggrieved about him now in the way he was bent over his pipe, scraping out the bowl and sighting through the stem, the whole rigmarole and ceremony of it reminding me that it had been a very long time since I had seen anyone smoke a pipe in public – or in private for that matter – and it was strange, a scene from another world, a memory from a recent historical epoch when a small room like this would have been blue with smoke, food or no food, clothes and hair impregnated with it and having to be washed out the same evening as

  these thoughts were interrupted when the waitress arrived with my order, leaving it down neatly on the table – coffee and a club sandwich with the cutlery wrapped in a napkin – the whole thing so neatly assembled and expert looking that I sat for a moment to admire the whole ensemble, the coffee with its brassy smell sunk beneath a creamy head which I was reluctant to disturb and the tidy way the sandwich was laid on the plate beside a small green salad – angled towards me like a hip-roof and skewered at both ends by two cocktail sticks – the whole thing so complete in itself that it seemed only right to admire it before I dismantled and ate it which is what I did after letting it sit for as long as it took me to put milk into the coffee and stir it around, after which it was a further pleasure to discover that the sandwich tasted as good as it looked and that there was no disparity or margin between its appearance and its taste which was moist with crisp lettuce, tomatoes and chicken between slices of warm toast and even before biting into it

  this moment here

  this crowded room with its clutter of chairs and tables

  these people, with their separate thoughts and lives

  I was overwhelmed with a sense of what a strange privilege it was to be able to sit in this coffee shop among other people who did not wish me any harm and who would, more likely than not, be happy for me if they were to know that I was having a good day – that my wife was on the mend and that my car had started and that this was a tasty sandwich and that the sun was shining outside – none of these people would begrudge me any of this and all would appreciate the expert way this sandwich was put together and how everything about it revealed a degree of attentiveness which went beyond mere expertise and spoke something of a care and commitment which was gently humbling, so unexpected and baffling also to come across something so banal which filled me with a sense of how improbable life was and how this unlikely construct – a sandwich for Christ’s sake – could communicate such intimate grace that

  I was now completely overtaken with a foolish excess of gratitude for this half hour in this coffee shop, a quiet spell among decent people, good food and the careful work of those who ran it so that for one moment in which time and space seemed to plummet through me in terraced depths which had me reaching out to grip the edge of the table, I had a rushing sense of the cosmic odds stacked against this here-and-now, how unlikely and how contingent it was on so many other things taking their proper place in the wider circumstance of the universe and exerting their right degree of pressure on the contextual circumstances so that for one moment, sitting there with a cup of coffee in my hand and the chair bracing my back I had a clear view
down through the vortex of my whole being, down through all the linked circumstances that had combined to place me here at this specific moment in time and this wave of gratitude and terror swept through me with such violent force that I feared I would mortify myself by breaking down in tears, an ecstasy of joy and terror for the world and everything in it, an unbidden feeling which was so overpowering that it was as much as I could do to hold myself together for as long as it took me to get up and make my way between tables to pay the bill at the cash register where, in a voice ridiculously choked, I replied to the girl’s kind query as she totted up the bill that

  yes, everything was fine, thank you very much

  which drew a sweet smile as she took the ten euro note and returned the change to my hand before I headed back through the maze of tables and chairs to the door and out onto the pavement to find that a watery sun now lit the day, flaring off the passing cars, splintering off windscreens and the glass fronts on the opposite side of the street, light echoing beyond its real capacity to illumine the day, the whole world over-lit in some way or other as I stood there squinting and shading my eyes, regretting that I had not bought one of those pairs of sunglasses no matter how daft they looked on me but the chemist was now on the other side of the street and I thought it would be better to get into the car and drive home as by this time I had been away from Mairead for nearly an hour and a half which is nothing in itself but which had me feeling a bit antsy even if in all likelihood she was probably only too glad to be rid of me for a while, free of my anxious fluttering around her, that role into which I had fallen all too easily and fitted so comfortably almost before I had bethought myself, fussing over her, forever checking to see that she was all right