Solar Bones Read online

  something out of the past

  a psychic link which dates back to my childhood when

  my father worked on its construction

  he fucking did

  worked on it at a time when, with a similar promise of prosperity, it was spoken of as if it were a cathedral or a temple that was being built on that raised site above the small town of Killala, such a beacon of industrial progress that for the two years of its construction I would watch my father pack his bags every Sunday evening for the week ahead and when seven o’clock came he would kiss my mother and sister goodbye and walk up to the top of the road where he would be picked up by a minibus full of other men from around the parish, tradesmen and labourers, men who would spend a full two years concreting and block-laying and steel-fixing this massive facility into existence which, when fully operational, would employ three hundred and fifty men and women in the manufacture of acrylic yarn and fibre, an end purpose which initially disappointed me as it seemed such a puny thing considering all the hope and effort invested in it, unworthy in every way, until I learned that the manufacturing process would utilise a highly toxic compound called acrylonitrile, a chemical that would have to be transported overland in the middle of the night under security escort, shipped in double-hulled, crash-proof containers, a vivid circumstance suffused with enough danger to recast the whole project in a more credible apocalyptic glow so that it now appeared, to my refired imagination, a pioneering enterprise which called for fearless, heroic men like my father whom

  I would accompany every Sunday evening to the top of the road to watch him head off in that minibus and every time feel his leaving so keenly it was as if a part of myself was going off to work on that distant project so that in this way, my own father working on this facility, it was readily established in my young mind that I too was heroic and courageous and possibly cut out for some notable destiny, all this just twenty years before the facility would cease production entirely, the last of the dirty industries in this part of the world, the whole enterprise succumbing to a convergence of adverse factors – oil rising through fifty dollars a barrel and the world’s turn to natural fabrics principal among them – till the day came when it stood empty and dilapidated on a shallow plateau above the town of Killala – the last shipment of yarn gone through the gates, the workers paid off and the lights turned out – a monumental example of industrial gothic corroding in the winds which blew in from the Atlantic, an empty facility fully serviced with state-of-the-art utilities – road, rail, water and electricity – but which no one would touch because the whole thing was sheathed in asbestos, walls, roofs and ceilings, acres of it and with a projected cost of dismantling it in accordance with EU environmental code calculated to run close to ten million euro, it was decided that its owners, the county council, would leave it there to fuck and not disturb it in any way lest it shed its lung-corroding fibre over the whole of North Mayo

  Crossmolina, Ballina, Attymass and

  west into the badlands of Ballycroy and Mulranny

  the terra damnata of Shanamanragh

  the land that time forgot but

  well known to us as it’s

  near Mairead’s home place and we have driven there many times, particularly so in the early years of our marriage when Agnes and Darragh were young and we would take them to visit their grandparents for their summer holidays, pack them into the car and drive north, the journey itself about sixty miles but one which crossed into terrain so different to this part of the world a few miles north of the small village of Mulranny at precisely that point where the N59 twists its way under a single-arch stone bridge set among blazing rhododendrons, the bridge always marked for me that complete change of terrain from the hills and drumlins of South Mayo to the open and more desolate expanses of the north, this bridge always affected something deep in me because every time I passed beneath it, with Mairead beside me and the kids in the back, I would experience that subtle shift within me which I always imagined was my soul flinching in the landscape that opened up beyond that bridge, where, within a few miles and with a sudden thinning of the light the mountains withdrew into the clouded distance and the world levelled down to that open bogland through which the road wended its way towards Ballycroy and Bangor and out onto Doohoma Head where Mairead’s parents lived on a small farm which had come down on her mother’s side and where Darragh and Agnes would run wild through the fields of hay and tillage which stretched in a neat stripe from the gable of the house to the shore for a couple of weeks of every summer and

  this is how you get carried away again

  in memory of

  swept up in that sort of reverie which has only a tangential connection to what you were thinking of, in this case the collapse of our banking system and the economy, a collapse so sudden and comprehensive that one year later it still threatens to have a domino effect across several linked economies, fully capable of undermining banking systems across Germany and France, not to mention crippling our neighbour’s export trade to this country, the collapse of a small bank in an island economy becoming the fault line through which the whole universe drains, the whole thing ridiculously improbable, so unlikely in scale and consequence it’s as if

  something that never was has finally collapsed

  or revealed itself to be constructed of air before eventually

  falling to ruin in that specific way which proved it never existed even if all around us now there is that feeling of something massive and consequential having come asunder, as when certain pressures exceeded critical thresholds to admit that smidgen of chaos which brings the whole thing down around itself so that even if we believe this collapse is essentially in some adjacent realm there is no denying the gravitational pull we feel in everything around us now, the instability which thrills everywhere like a fever, so tangible you have to wonder

  how come we never noticed those tensions building

  were we so blind to the world teetering on the edge that we never straightened up from what we were doing to consider things more clearly or

  have we lost completely that brute instinct for catastrophe, that sensitivity now buried too deep beneath reason and manners to register but which, once upon a time, was alert to the first whining vibrations radiating from those stress points likely to give way first, that primal faculty which lies in the less evolved, reptilian part of our brain and which we credit to

  dogs and vermin and birds as

  their ready reflex to flee or take flight en masse just before the ground or the tree or the building beneath them begins to shudder, their primal attunement to danger stampeding them in droves from buildings and structures before they come crashing down around them, a sensitivity we have lost apparently, a faculty which has atrophied through the softening circumstances of our ascent because

  collapse is never far from an engineer’s mind

  and

  as ever

  and ever again

  any image of collapse or things coming apart, always summons up memories of my father – not the ragged shambles he would become at the end of his life, but the quick man with the large hands and ready laugh I knew from childhood, the man who was such a deft touch at dismantling things and putting them back together again – harrows, ploughs and scufflers – not necessarily because of any fault or redundancy in the constructs themselves, but because there was in him that need to know how these things held together so that he could be assured his faith in them was well placed and

  one of my first memories dates back to a day in childhood when I stood beside him in the hayshed and he had one of those implements dismantled across the concrete floor

  the harrow, the plough or the scuffler

  one of those robust constructs that slept standing at the far end of the hayshed, dreaming their iron dreams through the winter months – implements which, even if they had not essentially evolved since the medieval period in which they were perfected, were still in use on our farm as on many oth
ers right up to the 1980s

  harrows, ploughs and scufflers

  implements from a more solid age when the world was measured out in lumpish increments, like pounds and ounces, shillings and pence

  standing at the far end of the hayshed during the fallow months of autumn and winter, all tempered blades and forged spikes, held together with iron-banded timber and biding their time as if they were the very embodiment of their own names and were indeed instruments of torment

  harrows, ploughs and scufflers

  names so clearly evocative of torment that years later, when I attended a conference on bridge construction in Prague or, as months later Mairead would cry in a broken howl

  fucking bridge construction

  I found myself browsing through the Museum of Torture near the Charles Bridge and was shocked to recognise in scale and material the exact same principles of construction echoed in those instruments of torment standing in the murky light of that dilapidated exhibition, baleful assemblages which were the persuasive tools of various judicial and ecclesial authorities, all dating from a time when the world was ever mindful of its sinfulness but sure of its judgements and had, by way of engineering, gone to some lengths to prise, screw, and pressurise the truth into the light so that they stood now in their shadowed gloom

  the maiden, the rack and the wheel

  and they too were all banded timber and spikes, blunt constructs held together with bolts and dome-headed rivets which, at that crucial stage of their forging, would have glowed white hot, contraptions so evocative of pain and torment in the tenebrous light of the museum that gradually my mood sifted down within me to an anxious shame as it became clear from their craft and complexity that these machines, with their screws and gearing mechanisms were, at a time when the level of engineering was at its lowest point in the Western world since antiquity, the highest technical expressions of their age, the end to which skilled minds had deployed their gifts, this wretched end such an ignoble instance of the engineer’s vocation that I felt sorrowful for although I was young at the time I already had a keen sense that engineering was a high and even noble calling, firmly on the side of human betterment where it stood with a host of other values loosely grouped at the social democratic end of the political spectrum as I understood it then, so that

  lost in these thoughts, I wandered through the exhibits, among the shadows and brocade until I realised or, had to admit to myself, that I had been stalking an auburn-haired woman in a quilted anorak whose face was burnished red from the sub-zero temperature which crippled Prague in February of that year, and which was causing her to sniffle into a tissue as she moved past the exhibits, dwelling on each one in turn before ticking them off in a scraggy catalogue and her allure was not merely her looks nor the methodical way she went about the exhibition, but the fact that we were the only two people present on that winter afternoon and in our separate solitude had now come together in a kind of intricate courtship dance with and against each other, a delicate gavotte around the exhibits and down through the golden age of mechanised agony till we finally came together and stood shoulder to shoulder before a Catherine wheel, one of those complex mechanisms which deployed with

  clamps and blades and spikes

  all those pressures and tensions which sunder flesh and bone, all the ways of engineered anguish which quickly lost me in my attempt to fathom exactly what sort of imagination lay behind such a machine with all its evident ingenuity, most especially that awful alignment by which the body weight of the accused slowly but inevitably overcame the strength needed to uphold it and the gradual downward pressure collapsed it eventually, impaling it slowly, these thoughts going through my mind when I heard the woman standing beside me say in an American accent

  it’s all about sex isn’t it, they were obsessed with it

  something I had not noticed but which now, with the idea prompted, seemed obvious enough, the true origin and object of all this pressured penetrating and tearing and now, with these images clear in my head and this woman looking at me from over her tissue, it appeared also that I had assented to something more than the truth of her proposition

  fucking bridge construction, Mairead wailed, when she stumbled upon all this and even if

  the encounter never quite delivered on all the shameless fucking it promised in those first charged moments among the exhibits, even if it was something genuinely tender over the course of a few days in a small hotel in the workers’ suburb of Žižkov, an erotic interlude which at the time I both held dear and was ashamed of in one and the same moment, grateful in many ways but relieved that we took leave of each other with no intention whatsoever of further meetings or keeping in touch so that it was

  bridge building, Mairead choked

  the story of another man from another age, something remem- bered

  standing here in this kitchen

  only because it is woven into that memorial arc which curves from childhood to the present moment, gathering up memories of that time with my father on our farm, a skein of connections I am not likely to unravel at this moment for fear they might banish forever the image of all those agricultural implements and machines which were kept around the barns during my childhood and which my father would take apart on the floor of the hayshed, simple constructs from an age when the world understood itself differently

  ploughs, harrows and scufflers

  pounds, shillings and pence

  rough-hewn, vernacular instruments that were primitively crude compared to the lathed elegance of the one true machine around which all the energy and work on the farm centred – the farm’s soul in many ways – the grey Massey Ferguson 35 my father bought at an agricultural show in Westport in the late sixties, paying four hundred and eighty pounds for it, a machine he was forever tinkering with, always scrutinising some part of its engine, peering into it, standing back from it and cleaning his hands on an old rag after having made some adjustment to its workings, a memory so clear to me now

  here in this kitchen

  that I could reach out and touch it with my hand

  man and machine

  same as they were

  the day I came home from school and walked into the hayshed to find him standing over the engine completely broken down and laid out on the concrete floor that was dusted with hayseed, piece by piece along its length

  cylinder head, pistons, crankshaft

  to where I stood in the doorway in my school trousers and jumper, terrified at the sight because to one side lay the body of the 35, gutted of its most essential parts and forlorn now, its components ordered across the floor in such a way as to make clear not only the sequence of its dismantlement but also the reverse order in which it would be restored to the full working harmonic of itself and my father standing over the whole thing, sighting through a narrow length of fuel line, blowing through it till he was satisfied that it was clean through its length before he laid it on the floor, giving it its proper place in the sequence and explaining to me, saying simply

  it was burning oil

  as if this were some viral malfunction likely to spread from the machine itself and infect the world’s wider mechanism, throwing the universe itself out of kilter to bring it crashing down through the heavens because I knew well that this dismantlement went beyond a fitter’s examination of a diesel engine, well beyond stripping out the carburettor to clear the jets – once again my father had succumbed to the temptation to take something apart just to see how it was put together, to know intimately what it was he had put his faith in as

  he stood over this altar of disassembly with nothing in his hand but a single, open-end spanner which he waved over the assemblage as if it were a gesture of forgiveness and when he told me that this single tool was capable of breaking down the entire tractor, dismantling the whole thing to its smallest component and that it was then sufficient in itself to put it back together again without need of any other instrument my fear only deepened as I recoiled at the
thought that something so complex and highly achieved as this tractor engine could prove so vulnerable, so easily collapsed and taken apart by this single tool and so frightened was I by this fact it would be years afterwards before I could acknowledge the engineering elegance of it all and see it as my father did – something graceful and beautifully conceived, not the instrument of chaos it presented itself as to my childish imagination and

  this may have been my first moment of anxious worry about the world, the first instance of my mind spiralling beyond the immediate environs of

  hearth, home and parish, towards

  the wider world beyond

  way beyond

  since looking at those engine parts spread across the floor my imagination took fright and soared to some wider, cataclysmic conclusion about how the universe itself was bolted and screwed together, believing I saw here how heaven and earth could come unhinged when some essential cottering pin was tapped out which would undo the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations and send them plummeting through the void of space towards some final ruin out on the furthest mearing of the universe and even if my fear at that specific moment did not run to such complete detail, only such cosmic awareness could account for the waves of anxiety that gripped me as I stood over those engine parts on the hayshed floor

  soul sick with an anxiety which

  was not soothed one bit the following day when my father drove the tractor out of the hayshed with a clear spout of smoke blurting from the exhaust as it bounced down the narrow mucky road and into the field beyond where it took off into the distance, my father perched up on the seat, getting smaller and smaller in the dim light before man and machine disappeared into a dip in the land as we watched from the gable of the house – Onnie, my mother in her housecoat and Eithne clutching the Polaroid camera which seldom left her hands, a present from visiting Yanks –