Solar Bones. Mike McCormackЧитать онлайн книгу.
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