Solar Bones Read online

  MIKE McCORMACK

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books

  www.canonagte.co.uk

  Copyright © Mike McCormack, 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in 2016 by Tram Press, www.tramppress.com

  An extract of an earlier form of this novel appeared in Shine On: Irish Writers for Shine, edited by Pat Boran. Published by Dedalus Press, 2011

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is availalbe on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 127 3

  for Maeve

  the bell

  the bell as

  hearing the bell as

  hearing the bell as standing here

  the bell being heard standing here

  hearing it ring out through the grey light of this

  morning, noon or night

  god knows

  this grey day standing here and

  listening to this bell in the middle of the day, the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing out through the grey light to

  here

  standing in the kitchen

  hearing this bell

  snag my heart and

  draw the whole world into

  being here

  pale and breathless after coming a long way to stand in this kitchen

  confused

  no doubt about that

  but hearing the bell from the village church a mile away as the crow flies, across the street from the garda station, beneath the giant sycamore trees which tower over it and in which a colony of rooks have made their nests, so many and so noisy that sometimes in spring when they are nesting their clamour fills the church and

  exhausted now, so quickly

  that sprint to the church and the bell

  yes, they are the real thing

  the real bells

  not a transmission or a broadcast because

  there’s no mistaking the fuller depth and resonance of the sound carried towards me across the length and breadth of this day and which, even at this distance reverberates in my chest

  a systolic thump from the other side of this parish, which lies on the edge of this known world with Sheeffry and Mweelrea to the south and the open expanse of Clew Bay to the north

  the Angelus bell

  ringing out over its villages and townlands, over the fields and hills and bogs in between, six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void which gathers this parish together through all its primary and secondary roads with

  all its schools and football pitches

  all its bridges and graveyards

  all its shops and pubs

  the builder’s yard and health clinic

  the community centre

  the water treatment plant and

  the handball alley

  the made world with

  all the focal points around which a parish like this gathers itself as surely as

  the world itself did at the beginning of time, through

  mountains, rivers and lakes

  when it gathered in these parts around the Bunowen river which rises in the Lachta hills and flows north towards the sea, carving out that floodplain to which all roads, primary and secondary, following the contours of the landscape, make their way and in the middle of which stands

  the village of Louisburgh

  from which the Angelus bell is ringing, drawing up the world again

  mountains, rivers and lakes

  acres, roods and perches

  animal, mineral, vegetable

  covenant, cross and crown

  the given world with

  all its history to brace myself while

  standing here in the kitchen

  of this house

  I’ve lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land

  through hail and gale

  hell and high water

  men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers many of them, all

  adding to the home place down the generations till it swelled to twenty acres, grazing and tillage, with access to open commonage on Carramore hill which overlooks the bay and

  this pain, this fucking pain tells me that

  to the best of my knowledge

  knowledge being the best of me, that

  that

  there is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment those bells began to toll, something flitting through me, a giddiness drawing me

  through the house

  door by door

  room by room

  up and down the hall

  like a mad thing

  bedrooms, bathroom, sitting room and

  back again to the kitchen where

  Christ

  such a frantic burst

  Christ

  not so much a frantic burst as a rolling crease in the light, flow- ing from room to room only to find

  this house is empty

  not a soul anywhere

  because this is a weekday and my family are gone

  all gone

  the kids all away now and of course Mairead is at work and won’t be back till after four so the house is mine till then, something that should gladden me as normally I would only be too happy to potter around on my own here, doing nothing, listening to the radio or reading the paper, but now the idea makes me uneasy, with four hours stretching ahead of me till she returns,

  alone here for four hours

  four hours till she returns so

  there must be some way of filling the span of time that now spreads out ahead of me, something to cut through this gnawing unease because

  the paper

  yes

  that’s what I’ll do

  the daily paper

  get the keys of the car and drive into the village to get the paper, park on the square in front of the chemist and then stand on the street and

  this is what I will do

  stand there for as long as it takes for someone to come along and speak to me, someone to say

  hello

  hello

  or until someone salutes me in one way or another, waves to me or calls my name, because even though this street is a street like any other it is different in one crucial aspect – this particular street is mine, mine in the sense of having walked it thousands of times

  man and boy

  winter and summer

  hail, rain and shine so that

  all its doors and shop-fronts are familiar to me, every pole and kerbstone along its length recognisable to me

  this street a given

  this street is something to rely on

  fount and ground

  one of those places where someone will pass who can say of me

  yes, I know this man

  or more specifically

  yes, I know this man and I know his sister Eithne and I knew his mother and father before him an
d all belonging to him

  or more intimately

  of course I know him – Marcus Conway – he lives across the fields from me, I can see his house from the back door

  or more adamantly

  why wouldn’t I know him, Marcus Conway the engineer, I went to school with him and played football with him – we wore the black and gold together

  or more impatiently

  I should know him, his son and daughter went to school with my own – we were on the school council together

  or more irritably

  of course I know him – I lent him a chainsaw to cut back that hawthorn hedge at the end of his road and

  so on and so on

  to infinity

  amen

  the basic creed in all its moods and declensions, the articles of faith which verify me and upon which I have built a life in this parish with all its work and rituals for the best part of five decades and

  this short history of the world to brace myself with

  standing here in this kitchen, in this grey light and wondering

  why this sudden need to rehearse these self-evident truths should press so heavily upon me today, why this feeling that there are

  thresholds to cross

  things to be settled

  checks to be run

  as if I had stepped into a narrow circumstance bordered around by oblivion while

  looking for my keys now

  frisking my pockets and glancing around, only to see that

  Mairead has beaten me to the job, she has been out early and bought the papers – not one but two of them, local and national, both lying in the middle of the table neatly folded into each other, the light glossing unbroken across their surface, making it clear she has not read them herself that I might have the small pleasure of opening up a fresh newspaper, hearing it rattle and creak as it discloses itself, one of those experiences which properly begin the day or the afternoon as is the case now, turning it over and leafing through it

  starting at the back, the sports pages, to read the headline

  Hard Lessons in Latest Defeat

  as if this were the time and the place for a sermon

  which prompts me to close it again quickly, not wanting any homily at this hour of the day with the paper showing the date as

  November 2nd, the month of the Holy Souls already upon us, the year nearly gone so

  what happened to October

  come and gone in a flash, the clocks gone back for winter time only last week and

  the front-page stories telling that the world is going about its relentless business of rising up in splendour and falling down in ruins with wars still ongoing in foreign parts – Afghanistan and Iraq among others – as peace settlements are being attempted elsewhere – Israel and Palestine – while closer to home, the drama is in a lower key but real nonetheless – bed shortages in hospitals and public sector wage agreements under pressure – all good human stories no matter how they will pan out, you can feel that, the flesh and blood element twitching in them, while at the same time

  in the over-realm of international finance other, more abstract indices are rising and falling to their own havoc – share prices, interest rates, profit margins, solvency ratios – money upholding the necessary imbalances so that everything continues to move ever forward while on one of the inside pages there is

  one year on

  a long article with an illustrative graph and quotes outlining the causes and consequences of our recent economic collapse, a brief résumé of events that culminated on the night of September 29th, feast of the archangel Michael – the night the whole banking system almost collapsed and the country came within a hair’s breadth of waking the following morning to empty bank accounts and

  for clarity’s sake

  this article is illustrated by a sidebar which gives some indication of just how outsized the nation’s financial folly was in the years leading up to the collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small island economy, awe-inspiring magnitudes which shifted forever the horizons of what we thought ourselves liable for and which now, stacked on top of each other like this – all those zeroes, glossy and hard, so given to viral increase – appear like

  the indices and magnitudes of a new cosmology, the forces and velocities of some barren, inverse world – a negative realm that, over time, will suck the life out of us, that collapse which happened without offering any forewarning of itself, none that any of our prophets picked up on anyway as they were

  all apparently struck dumb and blind, robbed of all foresight when surely this was the kind of catastrophe prophets should have an eye for or some foreknowledge of but didn’t since it is now evident in hindsight that our seers’ gifts were of a lesser order, their warnings lowered to a tremulous bleating, the voices of men hedging their bets and without the proper pitch of hysterical accusation as they settled instead for fault-finding and analysis, that cautionary note which in the end proved wholly inadequate to the coming disaster because pointing out flaws was never going to be enough and figures and projections, no matter how dire, were never likely to map out the real contours of the calamity or prove to be an adequate spell against it when, without that shrill tone of indictment, theirs was never a song to hold our attention and no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was

  our prophets deranged

  and coming towards us wild-eyed and smeared with shit, ringing a bell, seer and sinner at once while speaking some language from the edge of reason whose message would translate into plain words as

  we’re fucked

  well and truly fucked because

  with the signs stacking up like this there will only be one out- come and

  here’s more of it

  the eyes on that woman

  a local story featuring in both the national and local newspaper, the story of

  an environmental campaigner who has begun a hunger strike against the energy consortium planning to run a pressurised gas pipeline through her particular part of North Mayo and which has already commenced work on the seabed of Broadhaven Bay, the articles in both papers illustrated with the same picture of a haggard-looking woman in her late fifties wrapped in a blanket and staring bug-eyed from the back of a car as her hunger strike now enters its second week, by which time she has reportedly lost ten pounds from a body that weighed less than seven stone before she began her fast so that, day by day, she is approaching that dangerous weight threshold, the critical loss of body mass at which point her health could be irreparably damaged as she begins to fade from the world entirely, the sight leaving her eyes first, followed by muscle mass and bone density, so that now – both articles make this clear – there is a special urgency to all those pleas and petitions and representations which have been made to the relevant public and private bodies on her behalf but which as yet – eight days into her fast – have elicited no official response from either the government or the energy consortium and while

  this woman weakens day by day

  she vows to continue her strike till the largest pipe-laying ship in the world, registered in Switzerland, the Solitare – all three hundred metres of it, with its ninety-six thousand tons and four hundred crew – leaves Broadhaven bay and Irish territorial waters beyond so that

  two images coming together

  this small woman against this ship

  recalls that photograph of the lone protester standing in front of the column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, way back in 1989, similar in that it’s equally unlikely the Solitare will run aground on the slight body of this woman who, wrapped in a blanket, peers out from the back of the car, another drama that has the weighted, irrefutable sense of the real about it, that dangerous confluence of the private and political converging on this frail woman’s body to make it the arena of the dispute and, not for the first time, stories like this always strike me as

  peculiar to Mayo />
  Mayo God help us

  Mayo abú

  a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles, a political reflex that has twitched steadily down the years and seems rooted in some aggravated sense of sinfulness because, like no other county it is blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer houses and hermitages just as it is crossed with pilgrim paths and penitential ways, the whole county such a bordered realm of penance and atonement that no one should be surprised that self-starvation becomes a political weapon when, to the best of my knowledge, no other county in the Republic has called up three of its sons to starve to death for flag and country so late in the twentieth century

  McNeela, Gaughan, Stagg

  Arbour Hill, Parkhurst, Wakefield

  valiant souls who took their inspiration from our martyred land and saw a world beyond themselves as did

  my own favourite

  a young hermit who, towards the end of the last millennium, took up residence in a ruined bothán on the side of a hill not ten miles from here, a young woman who, by way of some ancient rite, was professed a hermit by the Vatican with licence to beg and preach among these rainy hills, claiming that God had called her to go deeper into the desert so that she could be more aware of his presence in greater silence and solitude but who, after a few years living the full sacramental life on the mountains of West Mayo with nothing to distract the eye or hand save damp sheep and stone walls, came forth with her message to the world, telling us that

  hell is real and it’s not empty

  simple and blunt as that

  hell is real and it’s not empty

  she said, the sum total of everything she had gleaned from all her years of prayer and penance, her savage epistle with no mention in it anywhere of the redeemer having passed this way on his mission of mercy or forgiveness and

  this is how you get carried away

  sitting here in this kitchen

  carried away on an old theme, swept up on a rush of words and associations strewn out across the length and breadth of this county, a hail of images surging through me while at the bottom of the page another story of how

  a large, abandoned industrial facility in the north of the county is being assessed as a possible site for an asbestos conversion plant which will form part of a massive toxic dump to process industrial and medical waste from the rest of the province in a state-of-the-art incineration process which, if economic studies and environmental assessments prove favourable, could come online in a few years’ time with the promise of jobs and subsidiary investment across the county and