Solar Bones. Mike McCormack

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