Читать книгу Solar Bones - Mike McCormack - Страница 5

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 and 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

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 others 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 –

he’s like a child with that thing, my mother said

until he was gone from sight as completely as if they had been rubbed from the world and even if the tractor’s successful restoration did not surprise me neither did it do anything to rid me of the gnawing conviction that nothing less than the essential balance and smooth running of the universe’s mechanism had now been tampered with in some way that might eventually prove fatal to us all and it is no exaggeration to say that

the sight of that engine spread over the floor would stand to me forever as proof of a world which was a lot less stable and unified than my childish imagination had held it to be, the world now a rickety thing of chance components bolted together in the dark, the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected, a child’s fear that sometimes, to this day, takes hold of me and draws me back to that hay barn, just as it did a few years ago when

I was in the village and standing outside Kenny’s shop with a carton of milk and a newspaper in my hand, standing on the pavement watching

a huge low-loader pass up the main street, a long, growling beast of a machine hauling itself along in low gear with the driver high up in the cab over the wheels, taking her carefully through the narrow street, making sure she did not strip the wing mirrors off the cars parked on either side of her while the flatbed behind carried something that was dismantled in sections and tied down on both sides with ratchet straps and chains, something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass, and it was only when the whole thing had passed by completely and I saw the back of the trailer hung with caution tape and hazard decals that I recognised the load as a wind turbine which had been completely broken down with the vanes and conical tower separated from the nacelle and stacked lengthwise along the trailer but with enough corrosion around the flanges on the base sections to indicate that this turbine had recently been taken apart as a working project, faulty or redundant or obsolete in some way or other, possibly

burning oil

as my father might have said

so I stood there watching it pass, thinking there was something sorrowful in seeing this felled machine being hauled through our little village out here on the Western Seaboard, something in me recognising this as a clear instance of the world forfeiting one of its better ideas, as if something for which there was once justified hope had proven to be a failure and the world had given up on some precious dream of itself, one of its better destinies, and I was not the only one who’d stood to stare at its passing because three doors up, on Morrison’s corner, an old man had stopped in mid-stride and was standing with both hands planted down on the boss of his stick, looking on as the trailer made its careful way through the village, while across the street a few others stood and stared on in spite of themselves, generating a stillness which held for a long moment as the low-loader rumbled by, crossing the square and down the street before turning out of sight beyond the church and off out the Westport road before people became aware of themselves and were now looking at each other querulously and laughing as if they had succumbed to some childish foolery in the middle of the day while, standing across the street from them I wondered where this fallen turbine might be going to, at the same time thinking it was surely a mistake to believe that such things ever go anywhere at all or, more accurately, that there is a place to where such things could go, as stillness and stasis was the very nature of these constructs, much like myself at that moment, stuck as I was in a renewal of that same old anxiety I had experienced as a nine-year-old in the hayshed looking at that diesel engine, the component parts of the world spread across the floor except that now

four decades on

when the idea has come a patient arc through my life I now understood that if I saw the dismantled tractor as the beginning of the world, the chaotic genesis which drew it together and assembled it from disparate parts, then this wind turbine was its end, a destiny it had been forced to give up on, a dream of itself shelved or aborted or miscarried, an old idea which echoed

a radio programme I listened to a while back in which a panel of experts discussed the future of these wind turbines, weighing their environmental impact against whatever their energy efficiency was, the argument going back and forth between various critics and advocates but making little real headway until the topic was turned over to the listeners who by and large, one after another, echoed what had already been said except for one woman, whose hesitant voice cut across the strident tones of the debate when she phoned in to say that

she was living under a hill planted with several of these turbines and whatever about their environmental impact or their worth as a source of clean energy she herself had developed something of a spiritual regard for them as she had only to stand at her back door and look up towards them for a few minutes every day and she could easily believe there was something sacred about them because, grouped and silhouetted against the horizon, their blades stark against the sky, were they not vividly evocative of Christ’s end on Calvary, crucified without honour, thieves to the left and right of him and, when turning, weren’t they almost prayerful, the hum of their dynamo and their ceaseless rhythm so freely generated by the breeze which was of course nothing less than God’s breath across the land, their turning so evocative of all those Buddhist prayer wheels she had met during her years of travel in India and Tibet and it was surely the case also that only machines built to so large a scale and of such pristine alloys could bridge the span between heaven and earth with their song on our account and

was she alone in these thoughts she wondered or

did anyone else have similar feelings about these machines, this technology

which of course they didn’t, or if they did they chose that moment to keep it to themselves so that after a few garbled comments with which the radio host laboured hopelessly to place some practical or common sense on her remarks, her contribution to the debate was excused as a quasi-artistic outburst, more in the nature of mystical reverie than reasoned argument, definitely idiosyncratic in a way which allowed it to be harmlessly set aside after a few more words of praise were levied on its heartfelt eloquence and the obvious depth of the woman’s feelings

something similar to what I felt that day in the middle of Louisburgh, standing on the sidewalk watching the dismantled turbine being hauled through the main street on its bier without fanfare or procession, the whole thing so lonely and monumental it might well have been God himself or some essential aspect of him being hauled through our little village on the edge of the world, death or some massive redundancy finally caught up with him so that now he was being carted off to some final interment or breakers yard beyond our jurisdiction, some place where the gods were dismantled and broken down for parts or disposed of completely, possibly loaded onto a barge and towed offshore by a salvage tug, out beyond the continental shelf to be weighed down and sunk in some mid-Atlantic abyssal, down between tectonic plates, all these redundant gods lying crushed and frozen in the blackest depths with no surface marker to show where they lie, out of sight and out of mind, among those things in the world that are

burning oil

in some way or other

all of which

reminds me, should I ever forget, that my childhood ability to get ahead of myself and reason to apocalyptic ends has remained intact over four decades and needs only the smallest prompt for it to renew itself once more and for me to get swept away in such yawing deliriums of collapse that I might lose my footing on the ground entirely and spin off into some dark orbit which takes me further and further away from home and into the deepest realms of space, a strange mindset for an engineer whose natural incline is towards the stable construct and not

this circular dreamtime of chaos which

gives such warp and drift to this day so that

it is clear from these stories in the papers that the idea of collapse

needs some expanding beyond the image of things toppling and falling down – plunging masonry, timber, metal, glass – the engineer’s concept of collapse, buildings and bridges staggered before crumbling to the ground and raising up clouds of dust because, from what’s written here about the global economic catastrophe, all this talk of virus and contagion, it is now clear to me that there are other types of chaos beyond the material satisfactions of things falling down since, it appears, out there in the ideal realm of finance and currency, economic constructs come apart in a different way or at least

in ways specific to the things they are, abstract structures succumbing to intensely rarefied viruses which attack worth and values and the confidence which underpin them, swelling them beyond their optimal range to the point where they overbalance and eventually topple the whole thing during the still hours of the night so that we wake the following morning to a world remade in some new way unlikely to be to our benefit and of course

all this is only clear in hindsight

as if every toppled edifice creates both the light and lens through which the disaster itself can properly be seen, the ashes and vacated space becoming the imaginative standpoint from which the whole thing is now clearly visible for those with eyes to see because up to the moment the whole thing came down it was never clear to me

or anyone else

what was happening

same as when

that story started drifting towards us in mid-March, coming out of the middle distance with its unlikely news of viral infection and contamination, a whole city puking its guts up, the stuff of a B-movie apocalypse seventy miles up the road with

GP clinics and hospital wards across the city reporting a sudden spike in the number of people presenting with stomach ailments, complaining of cramps and vomiting with severe diarrhoea, a rise in numbers so wholly out of proportion with what might be expected for the time of year that initially an outbreak of food poisoning was suspected, an outbreak spread through the city from some large public event or gathering, but when an immediate investigation showed that the cases were evenly spread and did not appear to cluster in any geographic or demographic area it was clear that the source of the illness had to lie in something that was present without discrimination in all parts of the city, a conclusion which

prompted an immediate analysis of the city’s water supply and which quickly revealed that it was severely contaminated with the coliform Cryptosporidium, a viral parasite which originates in human faecal matter so that

I can’t understand it, what the hell were the city engineers doing

Darragh wanted to know from the other side of the world, his unshaven face filling the screen when he Skyped me that evening, his voice coming with that slight delay as it crossed the distance between us, since

I’ve been reading about it online – it looks like it could get very serious

it’s serious now

and it will all be on the heads of those engineers who fell asleep on the job, how could they have missed it and

Darragh’s voice had that note of hysteria to which it is prone whenever he has to grapple with the human slobberiness of the world, a gifted academic mind, or so Mairead tells me, but one that sometimes leaves him with little real notion of how the world actually works so that too often you have to listen to him in this mode, ranting on, sometimes in a language that’s difficult to grasp, so I said

yes, those engineers have a case to answer, there should be continual monitoring of the supply but obviously someone slipped up, no doubt there will be an investigation and an analysis of the whole water system but the politicians

let me guess, the politicians will make sure the engineers take the blame for this

blame, responsibility, it’s all the same in a case like this, the important thing now is to find the cause and fix it before the whole thing escalates, there’s already over a hundred chronic cases and

I’m sorry to have missed it, five years living there and nothing this interesting ever happened so

it was obviously timed for your absence – how is the fruit picking going

not bad, shaking snakes out of trees and filling bags, long hours but the money is ok and there’s only a few more weeks of it left before we hit the road

so there’s a plan

it might be going too far to call it a plan but there’s talk of buying a second-hand van and taking it across country, Ayers Rock the whole lot, then leave it in Perth and fly back home so

how long will that take

we reckon we have enough funds to carry us for four to five months so I should be home in early August, just in time for the business end of the Championship

you won’t be missing much if you don’t make it, we will be well out of the running by then

Jesus, Dad, don’t put a hex on us this early in the year, the Championship doesn’t start for nearly two months yet

ahhh

you have to have faith, Dad, that’s what we Mayo people do, we journey in hope, true believers

martyrs more like, and your faith hasn’t taken as many blows as mine down the years

speaking of martyrs, Mam tells me that you’re hobbling a bit, some sort of a limp

it’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a side effect of the Lipitor, it weakens the tendons in the heel

that’s very mythic altogether

it’s very painful whatever about mythic, I’ll probably have to get the dose changed or recalibrated or something like that

so long as it brings down the cholesterol

yes, that’s down to manageable levels now, three point two or something

and you’re staying away from chips and cake and all that sort of shit

yes, I’ve cut out all the dashboard dining

good, we want you around for another few years, by the way, and on another topic, did you make any headway with Kid A

I listened to it all right, I liked it – I think – it sounded a lot like unleaded King Crimson though, the same

Jesus, King Crimson, music for engineers, all those dissonant chords laid down at right angles to each other

exactly, my generation demanded more from our music than soft emoting and

you’re welcome to it – how is Mam, I haven’t spoken to her in a couple of days

Mam’s good, she’s gone to bed, it’s been a long week at school, she’s tired

ok so, give her my love

I will, take care of yourself, and one last thing

yeah

don’t be afraid to take out a razor and a comb once in a while

will do, bye

mind yourself

bye

and then he was gone, his hand reaching towards me, fingers extended from the other side of the globe as if to touch my face before he shut down the laptop in the flat he shared with five other lads somewhere on the outskirts of Brisbane, the connection broken now and that sense of immense distance closed down in an instant, the world nothing more than the four walls of the room within this house so that it took a moment to get used to the collapse of scale before I got up and walked out to the kitchen to find

something different about moving through the house today

a feeling of dislocation as if some imp had got in during the night and shifted things around just enough to disorientate me, tables, chairs and other stuff just marginally out of place by a centimetre or two, enough to throw me so that now, trying to make a cup of tea for myself, the last two minutes spent searching for the tea bags because the green canister in which they are usually kept is not where it normally sits on the worktop, tucked into the corner beside the boxes of herbal teas Mairead uses for her infusions, but

here it is, finally

stacked away on top of these plates in the cupboard over the sink, god knows why she put it there, why would she want to shift it, she knows full well how these small changes throw me, sending me rushing about the place, pulling stuff apart, never remembering where things are anyway – keys, wallet, phone, everything – can never leave a thing out of my hand without having to look for it, the same panic every morning – the hunt for my keys before leaving for work – turning out pockets and opening drawers, never remembering to put them where they can be found, just throwing them aside without a thought and then searching for them the following morning, a full ten or fifteen minutes wasted lifting newspapers and cushions and jackets until they turn up somewhere obvious, like on the hook over the holy-water font inside the front door, or the bowl on the hall table – who the hell put them there, why can’t people leave things alone – every morning this shambolic search through the house, that frustration which is very different to

the anxious feeling running through me now as

some twitchy voltage cutting across me so that it’s hard to focus properly on anything, my mind flocked with ideas as if it is filled with electric birds, always in flight, blue shivers which probably caused me to miss the fact that Mairead has laid out some food for me on the table and

looking at it now

looking at it now

a sandwich on a side plate, covered with a napkin and a glass of milk beside it, the whole thing standing there so complete in its own detailed neatness, so perfectly evocative of Mairead herself with all the attentiveness she brings to these little tasks, her capacity for joy in the proper completion of these small considerations so evident in the way it’s put together that it feels right to stand over it for a moment just to savour its appearance before lifting the napkin to see that the sandwich is good and simple – cheese with relish between slices of brown bread – a staple carried over from my childhood and which Mairead makes me from time to time as a small kindness, a gesture which touches me deeply at this moment, so much care and attention gathered to the separate parts of it but something inexplicably intense in me reaching towards it, my hand monumental and belated as if it had to pass across a cosmic realm, eons wide, glass and plate absolutely unreachable in a way that cannot be fathomed with all the time in the world to

remember when Agnes and Darragh were children

and it was part of their whole Christmas thing to leave food and drink on the kitchen table for Santa Claus and Rudolph, something to keep them fed on their big night’s work, usually cake or a sandwich and a carrot, and it was my job, before going to bed to eat some of it – or at very least to leave teeth marks in it – to show that Santa had indeed sampled our hospitality so that, the following morning, when they had got over the initial delight of their presents they would stand beside the table to examine the remains of the food and the whiskey glass lying sideways on the table because obviously, with a drop taken in so many houses along the way, Santa must have been well slewed by the time he got to our door and it was a wonder at all he managed to leave the right presents in the right houses and there was Agnes standing by the table in her pyjamas listening to me saying all this, weighing it up, while Darragh was already surging ahead, examining the carrot and cake but still not saying anything so that I began to wonder if I had slipped up somewhere in my story and given something away that would spoil the whole thing and I was about to open my mouth again but Mairead was looking at me from across the table, shaking her head, wearing that expression, both fearful and dismayed, which was telling me without words to

stop now, before you go too far

stop now

so I stopped

because every echo of that expression brings me back to that morning when we were just four months married and Mairead stood at this same breakfast table waving a small blue wand over my head and wearing that imploring look I had never seen on her face before, so compromised and uncertain of itself, startling in a woman who, till then, had conducted her life with all the confidence of one who had trusted her first instincts, her way of going about a life which had led her across Europe and through various teaching and cultural posts in Madrid, Berlin, Prague and all the way to the banks of the Danube in Budapest where, after two years working in a language school, she had suddenly turned for home – happily enough, as she admitted herself – but this time taking the scenic route through Northern Europe – Warsaw, Oslo and Copenhagen – before finally fetching up in our local secondary school covering maternity leave for the vice principal, which was when I met her, shortly after I took up work with the County Council and we started a courtship which saw us married a few years later and buying this house which we were settled in only a few months the morning she stood over me

at this same table

waving the stick that was telling us, by way of an unbroken line through its tiny window, that she was pregnant, that we were going to have a child and furthermore that this was something she was so totally unprepared for that she tried to stifle a giggle of fright in an effort to grasp the consequences of what it all might mean – this wand she was holding up between thumb and forefinger as if she were about to cast a spell in the room and draw down a cloud of glittering fairy dust over

this very table here

which at the time, stood in a house that was little more than a concrete shell, an old house going through a radical refurbishment, no doors or windows in some of the rooms, walls and ceilings stripped while the hallway was strewn with timber offcuts and copper piping, a house beginning to evolve around us, a wall-by-wall gain on structure and order, a space in the world we could call our own even if that morning it was in fact little more than a bedroom and a kitchen with the whole place smelling of sawdust and wet cement as she stood over the kitchen table

this same table

with that blue pregnancy indicator in her hand which was telling us with ninety-eight percent accuracy that she was indeed pregnant, because that’s what the clear line through its little window was saying, definite as any line drawn in the sand or any surveyor’s contour or any of those global parallels

longitude and latitude

which demark those national borders that are drawn up in the wake of long, complex negotiations – the 45th parallel which separates Alaska from Canada or, more accurately, the 38th parallel which separates North from South Korea – a definitive boundary or threshold over which you can venture only if you accept that you are leaving your old life behind with all its habits and customs, a life that has served you well enough up to this but which will not suffice in the new circumstances when

we were both faced with this threshold which most likely had its origins in one of those sudden, joyful fucks on the stack of doors in the bedroom at the end of the hall or on one of the carpenter’s trestles in the kitchen, one of those sudden coming-to-grips with each other to which we were given in those days, waylaying each other before moving on to whatever it was we had originally set out to do, an airy ignoring of each other which suited us both, smug and heedless but all demolished by the small baton which Mairead waved over my head with its news of how our lives had taken such a radical swerve away from all the old habits and rhythms we had so easily inhabited up to this but which now, surprisingly, I would relinquish without too much regret because

marriage to Mairead had brought with it a settling of my whole spirit into a kind of banal contentment I was comfortable with, a contentment which had drawn from me some nameless yearning the moment I wedded this spirited woman who stood over me as I sat

with my breakfast and newspaper in front of me

a man in the process of having his life overturned by news his young wife found so disabling but which

I seemed to be taking in my stride, having readily interpreted it as another extension of that ordinary contentment which had come to me in marrying Mairead, so much so that now I found myself marvelling, not at the dullness of my response, but at the realisation that if she had stood there telling me she was not pregnant this indeed would have been shocking news, this would have stopped me in my tracks and caused me something deeper than that mild surprise which kept me sitting there at the kitchen table with my wife repeating desperately that yes, she was pregnant and with that settled there should have been a finality to the moment which would have allowed us to acknowledge it with a tearful embrace and congratulations before setting the whole thing aside for the time being – fuller discussion later that evening – as I was anxious to return to my breakfast and squeeze the last drop of peace and quiet from those few remaining minutes before going to work – all of which was my normal way of going about the morning but

which I now saw, from the look on Mairead’s face, that the normal way of doing things would not suffice anymore as a new set of circumstances had just supervened and that I would have to dig deeper within myself to find something which would soothe the startled expression from her pale face beneath the severe centre parting which gave Mairead that ascetic look which so became her as the traveller who had crossed so many time-zones and borders but which spoke nothing of her bright spirit or the generous way her face opened so completely in laughter with such broad disclosure of all her features that it was sometimes impossible to refer back to the pale woman who now

stood there with that blue twig in her hand as

the moment lengthened to a dangerous silence in which it became obvious to both of us that even though we may have had four years of a relationship behind us, we were not yet as skilled as we might wish in coping with news like this, not yet capable of assigning it its proper place and dimension or seeing it in context, because right then we seemed to be incapable of getting past this moment or of putting it to rest for the time being so that we might get on with our day and why

sitting here

at this kitchen table

this particular incident should come to me now it’s hard to say, except to confirm that the blue line in that tiny window was

Agnes

or as Darragh would sometimes have it

Agnes Dei

Agnes the Unhinged

the Abbess of the Abyss

Agnosia

Anagnorisis

Agnes, our first born and that threshold in our lives which brought with it all those demands and responsibilities which pushed myself and Mairead into our older selves, our very own need-bearer whose presence in the world was promised in that blue line and confirmed nine months later when she clocked in shortly before noon, tipping the scales at seven pounds four ounces, slightly jaundiced but otherwise fine with fingers and toes all present and correct, latched onto her mother’s breast within forty minutes of seeing the light of day and who was fully authorised a couple of days later by her birth certificate which

I saw drawn up before my eyes in a little office down the hall from the maternity ward of the county hospital, a single-page document which told me that now my child was completely realised and that

the seal had been set on her identity as an Irish citizen, who, although less than four days old, was nevertheless the point of all the massive overarching state apparatus within which she could live out her life as a free and self-determining individual, the protective structure of a democracy which she in turn would uphold as a voter, a consumer, a patient, a student, a banking customer, a taxpayer and so on while gathering to herself all those ID cards and certificates that would enable her draw down all the benefits of being born a free child of a republic, accessing education and medicine and bank accounts and library books, all of these rights devolving from

her birth certificate, the source document, which was drawn up for her in a small office at the end of the hall, the cramped space shelved to the roof with files and records and lit by a single fluorescent strip which cast down a hard light on the head of the smiling lady with large arms who took down my details and Mairead’s details and then entered them carefully in a newly opened file before she went to a cupboard and took out a blank certificate which we both signed before she entered some final details on it and then, reading it through one last time to ensure it was complete to her satisfaction, took a stamp and pressed the state seal onto it before handing it to me with a smile, where I, affected with a deep sense of occasion, found myself reaching out to shake her hand because this surely was how the moment should be marked and

ten minutes later, sitting in the car with Mairead in the back and Agnes in her arms, I continued to stare at this document

the document scarcely less miraculous than the child in the way

it fixed her within a political structure which undertook to spend a percentage of its GDP on her health and her education and her defence among other things and over twenty years later I can still feel something of that mysterious pride which swept through me as I sat there behind the steering wheel, the uncanny feeling that my child was elevated into something above being my daughter or my own flesh and blood – there was a metaphysical reality to her now – she had stepped into that political index which held a space for her in the state’s mindfulness, a place that was hers alone and could not be occupied by anyone else nor infringed on in any way which might blur her identity or smudge her destiny, this document which did not tag or enumerate her but freed her into her own political space, our citizen daughter who

are we ever going to leave this car park or are you going to sit all day gawping at that certificate

Mairead called from the back seat and

of course all these high ideas passed into oblivion very quickly or, more accurately, were swept away in the messy flesh and blood circumstance of having a child in our lives, the whole drama of night feeds and nappy changes, the terrors of vaccinations and all those developmental markers which infants have to hit, my heart in my mouth every time the district nurse pulled up outside the house and all that was, hard to believe

the last millennium

ancient history

and of course

none of it on my mind twenty-two years later, the first week of March, when Mairead and I attended the opening of Agnes’s first solo exhibition in the Dominic St Gallery in Galway, that exhibition which was her prize for having graduated top of her class in paint two years previously, a gifted artist Mairead assured me whose work in oil had been praised by her tutors as

a sustained attempt to marry the vatic gaze of a hallowed tradition with a technique which strove to find some way out of the redundancy it was so often accused of in a world awash with electronic imagery

or so Mairead told me, as we drove along

recalling the essential feedback points Agnes had received for the degree show which had secured this exhibition while Mairead stressed for me also that this was an important occasion for Agnes not just because it was her first solo show but because it was her first new work since her graduation and as such it would be interesting to see how her themes and technique had progressed in that period of independent experiment, what new paths she had explored and at this point something in me should have been alert to the note of warning in her voice but I ignored it as a coded appeal that I should make a special effort on Agnes’s behalf tonight, that I should be especially convivial or at least shed some of my social awkwardness to do her proud and be supportive but, of course, neither of us should have worried on her account because when we walked into the gallery I saw immediately that this was that occasion when

Agnes was never so essentially herself or so self-contained as she was that evening, and that this was yet another of those times when I’ve looked at her and thought that had Mairead and myself never come together as husband and wife Agnes would still have contrived to exist and be exactly who she was in some other way because she did not appear contingent on anything or anyone and while we might be her parents she was essentially irreducible in the way she was completely at one with herself when I walked into the gallery and saw how, among a fashionable crowd of well-wishers and friends, she still managed to stand alone in the middle of the room with a composite air of being both jilted and the belle-of-the-ball at one and the same time, standing there in the centre of the gallery, hovering above the ground in a black shift, her whole being as Darragh would clarify for me later, an amalgam of witness and pale accuser, exemplary sufferer and Cruella de Vil, a fully achieved study in western gothic, commanding her space with such an impressive aura of quiet disdain that for a moment I was cautious of approaching her for fear of shattering something essential in the exhibition itself, a hesitancy Mairead did not share as she strode across the floor towards her and stood off her at arm’s length for a moment before they moved fully into each other’s embrace from which Agnes eventually unwrapped herself to welcome and kiss me and draw me into the circle of her friends and well-wishers, men and women in their early twenties, all the young women called Emma or Emily, and all the lads Naoise or Oisin or something like that and of course it took me a while to get my bearings as I found myself caught up in a blur of handshakes and introductions with various snatches of conversation and observations whizzing by which acknowledged, among other things, that

yes, it was an important night and

no, we were only up for the night and

yes, I was proud of her and

no, not too bad, we missed the worst of it and

so on and

so forth

till someone handed me a glass of red wine and I took it with the hope that it might grow in my hand to the size of something I might hide behind while I could see already that Mairead was enjoying herself immensely, moving easily among Agnes’s friends, picking up the mood of the evening without having to adjust anything in herself so I took this opportunity to take a step back, literally, to find myself on the edge of the gathering where it was less crowded and a relief to have space and time in which to gather myself before moving away to take a look at the exhibition itself, my eyes needing a long moment to adjust to the light in the room which seemed to be suffused with some sort of ochre mist, something grainy and falling, an effect of the low evening rays reflecting off the walls, or more explicitly off the red script which covered the entire gallery from ceiling to floor along its length, handwriting in various types and sizes, a continuous swathe of text which closer examination revealed to be snippets of news stories lifted from the provincial papers – The Telegraph, The Sentinel, The Herald, the Western People – all recently dated and all dealing with court cases which covered the full gamut from theft and domestic violence to child abuse, public order offences, illegal grazing on protected lands, petty theft, false number plates, public affray, burglary, assault and drink-driving offences – in short, all those cases that came within the remit of the district and circuit courts, all detailed in descriptive passages crossed with contextualising pieces and direct quotes from court transcripts in which voices of victims and the accused, plaintiff and defendant, sang clear off the walls

when I got him to the ground, Your Honour, I administered

we have stood by him even though he has caused us untold grief

a series of consecutive slaps, Your Honour

I hope he rots in hell, no right father would have done what he did to this family

a strong smell of soot and petrol from her, Your Honour

four types of psychotropic drugs in his system

woke up three weeks later with quarter of my skull gone and fitted with a titanium plate

you will have no luck for this you bastard

and so on and so on, a surge of red script flowing across the gallery, ceiling to floor, rising and falling in swells and eddies through various sizes and spacings, congested in the tight rhythms of certain examples only to swell out in crashing typographical waves in others, a maelstrom of voices and colour and it was quite something to stand there and have your gaze drawn across the walls, swept along in the full surge of the piece while resisting the temptation to rest and decipher one case or another, wanting instead to experience the full flow and wash of the entire piece, my gaze swept on in the relentless, surging indictment of the whole thing, its swells and depths, until I was startled from my reverie by Mairead who appeared by my side to press the exhibition catalogue into my hands with an anxious expression, positioning herself at my elbow where she looked fretful, not a mood I would have associated with her on such an occasion but one which became clear to me when I turned the catalogue over in my hands and read the cover title as

The O Negative Diaries

An Installation by Agnes Conway

Medium – Artist’s Own Blood

and I stood there in the middle of the crowd, vacant of everything save the single thought – that whatever dreams a man may have for his daughter it is safe to say that none of them involve standing in the middle of a municipal gallery with its walls covered in a couple of litres of her own blood because this, I slowly realised, was what I was looking at, this was the red mist that suffused the weak evening light which streamed in the front windows in such a way that the script itself appeared to project from the walls into the middle of the room, the livid words and sentences themselves hanging in a light so finely emulsified that we might take it into our very pores and swell on it, so that even if the crowd broke up the continuity of the space there was no doubting that the light served to make everyone part of a unified whole that occupied the whole gallery, Agnes’s blood was now our common element, the medium in which we stood and breathed so that even as she was witness-in-chief, spreading out the indictment which, how ever broad and extravagant it may be on rhetorical flourish, how ever geographically and temporally far-flung it might be, the whole thing ultimately dovetailed down to a specific source and point which was, as I saw it

me

nothing and no one else but

me

plain as day up there on the walls and in the sweep of each word and line, I was the force beneath, driving it in waves up to the ceiling and it was clear to me through that uncanny voice which now sounded in my heart, a voice all the clearer for being so choked and distant, telling me that

I did this

I was responsible for this

whatever it was

definitely something bad and not to my credit because only real guilt could account for that mewling sense of fright which took hold of me there in the middle of that room, something of it returning to me now

sitting here at this table

that same cramping flash within me which twisted some part of me with such sudden fear that before I had made any decision whatsoever I was praying, or rather

I was being prayed as

a prayer

torqued up out of me with an irreversible urgency, speaking itself to completion before the words had properly stumbled through me

Jesus Christ

let it be some vision ahead of her

and not torment behind

responsible for this

just as Mairead grabbed my elbow, a startled look on her face which, for one wild moment, had me believe I may have spoken my plea out loud like a madman because I was now finding myself scrabbling on a knife-edge of panic, a horrible vertiginous moment which I overcame only with a savage effort of will which pushed me in a sudden, awkward lurch across the floor and out the door into the March dusk where rain and the rush-hour traffic clogged the narrow street in which the gallery was situated and those few people who had stood out into the mist to smoke and chat along the pavement now stared at me in such alarm while I tried to gather my wits and steady my breathing that I had a clear vision of how I must have looked careering through the gallery and out into the street, the country man with the big farmer’s head on him in the collar and tie, shouldering his way through the crowd with his two fists balled at his side

fit to kill

fit to fucking kill

Mother of Jesus

and so much for the promise to put my best foot forward for Agnes’s sake on her big night, so much for making a good impression on her behalf I thought bitterly as I stood there with the rain pissing down on me, nothing but sour embarrassment churning around inside me as

a young man with a wispy beard took a step towards me, concern writ across his face and I can’t remember what I said to him or how I replied but his two hands were suddenly raised in front of his face as if someone was going to lash out and hit him – and how ever I responded at that moment it seemed to convince him fairly sharpish that he did not want anything to do with me so he backed off, leaving me alone on the sidewalk outside the gallery where I stood for a further half hour, trying to get a grip on myself, getting soaked through while the crowd gathered up and down the street, smoking and drinking wine before eventually breaking up and spreading out into the gathering night by which time I had calmed down a bit

just a bit

my temper and nerves under control somewhat, helped by the fact that I had gleaned from the snatches of conversation around me that the exhibition was a striking achievement and should, with any luck, be a real success, so I was relieved for Agnes – I did not appear to have done any damage – and could set aside those worries for the moment while I examined once again what I had seen of the installation itself and more specifically try to fathom the shock I had in its presence, why had I felt so deeply about it all, why had I taken it so personally and, most bafflingly of all, how a man of my age could be so overcome by his own feelings, so totally undone as to make him feel very foolish since all I knew, standing there in the rain, was that this was something I did not appreciate one little bit, sifting through feelings that grated and twisted within me, trying to give them their proper place and measure with my back to the cut stone wall of the gallery and I had no need to step outside of myself to know that I must have presented a strange sight to anyone who cared to look, this burly man with a suit and tie on him and the raw winter face of a farmer, standing there as if he was outside second mass of a Sunday, and how ever this may have looked to those last stragglers who stood along the pavement, it was safe to say that no one could have guessed the degree of turmoil and inner vexation which troubled me because never

had the consequences of fatherhood and everything it entailed weighed so completely on me than at that moment with

the anxious worry that I might be responsible in some way for what was on the walls of the gallery behind me, a wringing fear within me which gathered to its tight core two decades of consequence, so that it was now clear to me that this whole evening might be nothing less than a full reappraisal of myself as a man and as a father, something I had not reckoned on when I got into the car that evening and drove the sixty or seventy miles to the gallery, that I was travelling towards this moment of reckoning with myself because, like many another man, I had gone through life with little in the way of self-examination, my right to a life of peace from such persecution something I had taken for granted, something I might have acknowledged as the responsibility of others but not the type of inward harrowing I ever expected of myself but which nevertheless I now found myself subjected to in a way which took its prompt from a central, twitching nerve within me which kept asking

had I failed my daughter

had I pushed her towards this – whatever this was – on the walls of the gallery, this was the question that would not resolve one way or another beneath the sifting rain which shadowed the street in both directions, with the conviction hardening within me that having lived a decent life might not in itself be enough – or a life which till now I had honestly thought had been decent – since there was now some definite charge or accusation in the air which made it appear that not having done anything wrong was not enough and I noticed also that

the rain had that steady fall to it which meant it was down for the rest of the evening with the traffic passing in a muted light that was cold and wet and made me realise I was now soaked, particularly across my shoulders and down my back but also, that I could not move, I could not go back inside from shame and embarrassment so I spent another fifteen minutes standing there alone with the wall pressed to my back until Mairead and Agnes finally showed up on the pavement beside me with a look of irritated relief on both their faces, exclaiming

so that’s where you are

we wondered where you’d got to and

I tried to avoid the look in Mairead’s eye, that look which told me that she was going to set aside her anger and disappointment for the moment but that I would hear about it later on, so I made some foolish play of welcoming them both, hopelessly pressing the excuse that

I’ve been here all the time, I needed some fresh air, which

was a lie neither of them believed but one they went along with for the moment in their anxiety to move out of the rain, Agnes grimacing and doing a little stamping dance of impatience on the pavement, her high-collared coat, buttoned up under her chin, transforming her from the pale totem of earlier in the evening to someone almost corporate-looking, her whole appearance now that of a young, professional woman who had just dropped into the exhibition on her way home from work and I remembered that this coat was a recent gift from Mairead in both our names to mark this occasion, the prize at the end of a long day spent shopping together, a day which had brought Mairead home glowing with a renewed sense of her daughter’s good taste in such things as coats because even if, as she admitted at the time, it would not have been the one she would have chosen for her – so conservative, plain even – and even if she was slightly perplexed by her choice, she was also pleased because for all her support of Agnes’s artistic career there were periods when Mairead openly worried about her and wondered would it not have been better if she had not chosen a career which was so governed by luck and uncertainty, a career which was likely to bring more than its share of disappointment and frustrations and

did I know how few practising artists managed to make a living from their work, did I

which of course I didn’t

but which sometimes gave me to believe when listening to Mairead going on in this vein, that her all worry was not really for Agnes but was in reality for herself in that it underlined some hesitancy in her own character, possibly evoked a moment in her own past when she might have done something similar with her life but had settled instead for the safer option of teaching, discovering somewhere along the way that for all her travel and adventuring abroad she lacked that courage to make the commitment to something as dicey as an artistic career so that now, whenever Agnes made a conservative choice in something like a coat it was as if Mairead was no longer suffering that rebuke to herself and

here she was now, our artist daughter in her sensible coat, looking so sharp that had she been someone else I would not have been surprised to hear that she worked in some sort of financial services job, insurance or something, some career where the value of the present moment was wagered against some unknowable future and standing there in the rain, looking at her, I found myself getting so carried away on this idea, this alternative life to which my daughter might have been born, that it took me a moment to realise that I was being spoken to, Agnes suggesting that we go for something to eat as she was meeting up with friends later for a few drinks but that it would be nice if we could have some time alone together, just the three of us, besides

I’m famished, she said, absolutely famished

as she hadn’t had time all day to have a proper meal and had not eaten since before noon, all nerves and anxiety, which might well account for the fevered glow of her cheeks now which blushed up her pale complexion in that same way that makes mothers want to place their hands on children’s foreheads and get them to stick out their tongue as she finished pulling on the leather gloves that completed her outfit, that final detail which so clinched the whole look from smart-casual to something much more purposeful and the sight of which galvanised me into a kind of blustering anxiety to move the whole evening on to another place and mood so

yes, something to eat, where can we go this time of the evening, won’t everywhere be booked out, we should have thought about this earlier and rung ahead and

Mairead was giving me that look, shaking her head sorrowfully and I hauled up, mid-surge

calm down for fuck’s sake, I said to myself, calm down

so I shut up and stood back while the two women consulted and eventually the three of us moved off, following Agnes up the narrow street and across the bridge, through a small alleyway in the shopping centre which opened into a parallel street where there was a restaurant wedged between a church on one side and a theatre on the other, a quiet place where we had the full attention of a waiter who stepped up and fussed around us when we entered, took our coats and bags and led us to a table, one of seven or eight in a small room that was near empty and I was glad to see how happily Mairead surveyed the tables with their linen napkins and heavy cutlery and, as if reading my mind, she turned with a wide smile and a girlish squeeze of my hand to say

isn’t this very nice Marcus, very stylish and

her glad enjoyment filled the space around us with its own brightness while the next few minutes were taken up with settling into our seats and picking our way through the menu, gladly taking guidance from Agnes who seemed familiar with the place and what it had to offer so it wasn’t long before our orders were taken and we were relieved of the large menus to settle back and review the whole evening which, from what I could gather, had been an unqualified success, with much for Agnes and Mairead to talk about, specifically how the exhibition was likely to play out in the weeks ahead – hopefully it might travel to other galleries, possibly going to Dublin, the work would need that kind of exposure if it were to get any reviews in the national papers – and I chipped in with a few questions to assure them that I was not sulking or upset and that, like a good schoolboy, I had been paying attention and Agnes answered them with that careful measure of attention and consideration which assured me that nothing I had done during the evening, nothing of my fright or panic, had thrown her or damaged her confidence and I was relieved and proud of her also because

her self-confidence was one of those markers I’ve always held up to myself as proof that I had done a decent job as a father, a true indicator that she had grown strong and self-sufficient and would not be buffeted too easily by whatever life threw at her, nor would she shirk those moments when she would have to stand her ground, moments such as now when she turned her full face towards me and began abruptly

you were surprised by the work, upset

by way of opening the topic

I saw it on your face, it took you by surprise

yes, I conceded, a bit shocked, it wasn’t what I had expected, nothing like your previous work and

while the puzzlement in my voice was genuine it did nothing to hide the hurt which I feared would swell up in that surge of self-pity that was boiling within me and which was aggravated by the patient, conciliatory tone with which Agnes began telling me that

yes, it’s a bit of a departure all right, I don’t think I’ll ever fully get away from oils – nor would I want to – but over the last couple of months I’ve wanted to try something else, an experiment – to step outside the idea of oil painting towards something new and

this is it

yes, she said, with a frown, and however successful this exhibition is, my next work will probably be a return to oil, oil with blood on canvas, some sort of new amalgam possibly, I don’t know yet

she said, smiling and

leaning forward in the chair to offer me her full face, her shoulders straining out of the folds of her shift as if anxious to give clear evidence of both her commitment to the idea and her wish to set my mind at rest, all of which undid me so that in a gulping lurch I found myself explaining that

what I found difficult about the whole piece wasn’t just the blood

I should have warned you

it wasn’t just any blood, it was your blood

it’s ok, I took precautions

it’s a mutilation

no it’s not Dad, it was just a jab for god’s sake and she threw up her hands and smiled so

I felt assured now, ready to grasp this moment and press ahead with my own thoughts because

what I found difficult was the mixture of finger pointing and sanctimony in the whole piece, your righteous standpoint over the material, I wasn’t so sure about that

you think that’s a cheap shot, that I’m standing on some urban stage and poking fun at culchies with

her voice threaded through with that steely edge which always gratified me – a response all her own and so different to what would have been her brother’s evasive clowning in such moments – Agnes was always likely to go toe to toe on any point she felt strongly enough on so that

I’m not sure my accusation is that you are taking a cheap shot or

that maybe I’m Uncle Tomming here, gratifying urban audiences with the comedy capers of their country cousins

something like that, cheap ridicule, although I would be disappointed if you hadn’t thought of that yourself, you’re smarter than that

yes, that crossed my mind, but that’s not the same as saying I managed to circumvent it and

the choices you made were soft options, just the sort of stuff that would make us look ridiculous, all those drink-driving convictions, common assault, public order offences – as crimes there was something almost comic about them so that

yes, I agree, there is more comedy than danger in some of them – even the incidents of assault – but all the cases were taken from reports of the circuit and district courts and it was that sense of local reckoning which appealed to me – why, I cannot honestly say, but it was as if there was something manageable about the transgressions and sins that go to trial there – I don’t know, as an idea it’s still not fully formed, I’ve given it a lot of thought but it’s still not fully clear to me and

she looked serious now and I had a moment in which to consider that maybe I’d got ahead of myself in an attempt to understand the whole thing as these were not words that normally came tripping off my tongue, or more accurately I had never found myself in the sort of places where words of this type were necessary, but now they flooded ahead of me, threatening to carry me off to some sort of disaster so I drew hard on the reins and pulled back from wherever it was I was going because nothing good could come from losing the run of myself at an hour of the evening when it was nearly won, especially now with Agnes herself in such a conciliatory mood and winding up the topic by admitting

there’s nothing to worry about Dad, yes, there might be finger-pointing and accusation but it wasn’t personal, none of it was at you or Mam for that matter – you’re exonerated of all charges – it’s an idea in embryo and

she turned her whole face towards me with an expression of such open appeal that I softened instantly as some wiry tension in my gut unravelled to something warmer which drew the edge off the moment so that we could raise our glasses now, allowing us to settle into the knowledge that we had tested the moment severely and could let it rest for the time being, a conclusion confirmed in the relaxed expression on Mairead’s face who, till then, had studiously faded into the background but now, sensing the difficult moment had passed, was refilling her glass from the water carafe in the centre of the table and raising

a toast to our daughter on her big day, that it may be the first of many, and

so the moment was solved and we raised our glasses and clinked them together with a lingering note that hung over the table, taking a long time to fade

like the Angelus bell

which still reverbs in my head now, a single note ringing on in the brightness of the day as if the whole world were suspended from it

mountains, rivers and lakes

past, present and future with

the whole moment so complete now and tidied away that we could settle easily into each other’s company and turn to safer topics – specifically Darragh and his adventures down under, a subject which drove each of us in turn to different types of disbelief and frustration because

have you seen the head on him

the beard and the hair

that Methuselah look he’s cultivating

is it Methuselah or Mad Max

you can hardly see his face now when he comes on screen, just two eyes stuck in a bush

he reminds me of your father with that hair

Jesus, don’t go saying that

I don’t think he’s shaved since he crossed the equator

it’s more scarecrow than Old Testament prophet, if that’s what he’s going for

he say’s it’s hard work, that whole Waltzing Matilda thing, no time for personal grooming or

hard work my arse, the only photos he’s posted are of himself and the lads around a campfire in a woollen hat, skulling cans of Four X so

he had to go the other side of the world to do that and

but I think he’s moving on to some other job shortly, they’ve picked all the fruit in the greater Brisbane area and now they’re thinking of doing some time on a dairy farm and

what does he know about dairy farming when

as ever, when Darragh was the subject we fell easily to our separate roles – Agnes, the contentious older sister who looked on his antics with a mixture of admiration and jealousy, Mairead, the doting mother who saw something to be proud of in the blithe way he had set aside his studies to take to the road and myself, the father whose patience was sorely tested and who found himself in a constant state of grating irritation with him – a topic of conversation enlivening and productive of so many different themes and moods that to be reminded

later, as we drove home, by Mairead of how completely overthrown I had been earlier in the evening reduced me instantly to a shamed helplessness which she probed in that way of hers, warning me there may have been every chance I had reacted more aggressively than I thought so that it was now advisable that I should bethink myself and come to a clearer assessment of what had happened because

you were frightened

how do mean

you were, I was worried you might lash out at someone

when have I ever lashed out at anyone

I know, that’s what worried me

Mairead said, with the darkness passing in a wet glare on the windscreen as we made our way along the narrow secondary roads connecting the sleepy villages of our homeward journey, me in the passenger seat, unused to someone else behind the wheel of my own car, so finding it doubly hard to cope with Mairead’s questions but eventually admitting

yes I was

hoping that the subject would be buried quickly once and for all

I was frightened, both for me and for her, are you saying I overreacted

no, but I was surprised you reacted as you did – what was it exactly that got you so upset

there was blood

yes, it’s different to oils, a big swerve away from her previous work, but I still find it odd that you could be so shocked by it

I would have thought it would be shocking not to be shocked by it – when did we become so blasé about such things – and she was so poorly as a child

she wasn’t poorly, she was a bit anemic, low in iron so she had to take a supplement which stained her teeth – did you notice how she had them polished tonight, it gave her that shine –

I wasn’t looking at her teeth – all that blood – I had an image of her sitting on the side of a bed with a syringe in her arm, that’s the picture that came to me

for god’s sake Marcus, you’ve no worries about her

I’m her father, it’s my job to worry, do you know how she harvested it

harvested it – you’d swear we were talking about one of her organs

you have a better word

no, but if she said she was careful then I believe her – look, you need have no worries about a woman who wears a coat like that, they are not likely to put themselves in harm’s way

that’s nonsense

no it’s not, so now

I worried that some new sensitivity to shock and fear had opened up in me, some defect or weakness that might expose me to some unanticipated shame with which I would have no ability to cope, something that would have to be met with definite refutation if the grinding anguish which now churned inside me were to be prevented from growing into something more corrosive and

not to worry, Mairead continued, it was only blood, it could have been a lot worse

how could it have been worse

you could have walked into the gallery and found her standing naked

why would she be naked

oh you know, some of these performance artists are pretty out there, she could have been cuddling a pig

a pig

yes, or naked and peeing into a

ok Mairead, I get the picture

I groaned as she

drove on through the wet night, passing through those small towns and villages which slept with their empty streets under a sodium shroud, moving on into the narrow bog roads that were unlit but that had a precarious sense of being raised over the sea of heather and scutch grass stretching out on both sides, driving on through the ragged moonlight in which we seemed to be the only car on the road, Mairead taking it easy because

I’ve never driven these roads at night

she said, her gaze focused as she kept a steady speed into the bends and sudden turns which

you never realise how narrow they are till you have to drive them at night, so narrow and twisty

there’s no rush, just take your time

I thought you engineers would have straightened all these roads during the boom years

we were told we had better things for doing with our money – most of the boom money went into bypassing or linking major urban centres – there wasn’t a whole lot spent on bog roads, certainly not a few miles of blue road like this

blue road

yes

what does blue road mean

blue road means that it is not green road

blue road and green road

yes

let me guess, blue and green politics

that’s it

and this road got ignored

it did

because green was in power

yes

because, let me guess again – the ballot boxes in this townland keep coughing up blue votes

that’s right

and as long as they do these roads will stay narrow and windy and the pot-holes will deepen

certainly not much will be spent on straightening them out – slow down here, this is a temporary surface stretch, these chippings could slide out from under you on a bend like this and

she drove on, keeping a steady speed in the middle of the road, through more bogland stretching away into the darkness, the lights of scattered homesteads winking in the level distance like ships out to sea, miles of bog before stone walls and sod fences began to rise on both sides of the road to close in around the car and

that’s odd, she said

what’s odd

we just passed a single street light in the corner of that field, one street light all on its own in the middle of nowhere and

I know, did you see what was under the streetlight in the corner of that field

a few cows

there was a half ring feeder

so

so why would you need a street-light over a half ring feeder

how would I know

think about it

it’s the light

yes, shining on

feeding cattle

exactly

so someone got a streetlight put in the corner of his field so he can see his way at night to feed them, is that right

yes, that light has been there for years, one engineer tried to get rid of it but word came down from on high that the light was to stay where it was

so now we’re stuck with it

we are

that’s ridiculous

it’s not as ridiculous as trying to remove it now, when our engineer tried to do that he was told fairly sharpish that he could forget about making a budget submission the following year if he moved it

a friggin streetlight, Mairead murmured, in the middle of nowhere

yes, a streetlight and

we finally arrived home just as it was coming up to one o’clock in the morning and when we got inside Mairead went straight to bed as she had to be up for her first class at nine but I stayed up for another forty minutes, took a bottle of beer from the fridge and turned on the telly to watch one last news bulletin before turning in for the night, Sky News inevitably, from which I learned that avian flu was threatening to cross the species barrier in Southeast Asia and that the surge of troops in Iraq was likely to continue for the rest of the year, while the search for a serial killer was now underway in some city after the bodies of two prostitutes had been discovered on waste ground – the same old stories at that hour of the night but still somehow new, after which I turned off the television and set aside the urge to check my email and see if Darragh had dropped me a line, because I knew that if I sat down to the computer so late at night I was likely to get swept away for another hour or so on other news sites or on Amazon or something, sliding sideways into one search after another and all of a sudden it would be three in the morning and I’d have wasted two hours better spent asleep, for which I would have to pay the following day in sluggishness and fatigue, so I checked that my keys were on the stand inside the front door and switched off the lights in the hall and the bathroom before turning into bed behind Mairead with my arm around her and her arse tucked into my belly, drifting off on the warmth of her body, asleep within moments, deep and untroubled and so completely free of dreams that

I got to work shortly after eight o’clock the following morning feeling fresh and sharp, arriving in the council offices just as the two girls at reception, Miriam and Eimear were sorting through the morning mail and pulling on their headsets to answer the phones and there was already a few people in the foyer filling out motor tax forms, trying to get ahead of the queue which would form in half an hour when the counter opened, so I waved to the girls and

took the stairs up to my office at the end of the hall, the small narrow office with its twelve-foot-high ceilings, where I screwed open the blinds on the window which is high up on the wall behind my desk so that light pours down on me from a great height, often giving me the feeling that I am trapped at the bottom of a well and forever unable to see the sky save for this lighted sliver above, an impression which never fails to colour my mood every morning I step into this room so, with my

jacket hung on the chair behind me and the cuffs of my shirt rolled up, I swept my gaze over the desk with its computer and its clutter of papers and envelopes and straight away I lined up five jobs for immediate attention – a penstock outside the village of Kilasser which needed to be opened quickly if the recent heavy rainfall was not to build up on the road surface – a procurement order for six hundred tons of polished granite from Roadstone had to be sorted, a couple of invoices to be signed and passed on to the accounts department and lastly, a message on my answering machine from Charlie Halloran that I should give him a call as soon as possible, a message logged at twenty-two minutes past seven, which was early even by Halloran’s standards and which I knew immediately signalled nothing but bad news and while I toyed for a moment with putting it off till later in the morning, I thought to hell with it, better get it out of the way early and not have it hanging over me the whole day, so I dialled him up and cut across him with my cheeriest tone before he could start, saying

Councillor, you’re on the ball early this morning

I’m early every morning

he said bluntly

which caused me to sit up immediately because there was no doubt now but that he was on the warpath as he said

you’re not the only one who knows what a day’s work is –

what can I do for you, Councillor