“You’ll have a hard job,” he said, “I’ve never met one myself.” He gave an insane peal of laughter without moving his lips, and wrapped the bar. “Service please,” he yelled.

“I believe,” said Catherine, “that the Spanish landed up the coast.”

“We ate them,” he replied. “And now they’re killing all the rabbits. There’s not one rabbit to be had.” They drank. He looked at her for ages. “He’ll not land here,” he eventually said, “whoever told you that was not well.”

“No?”

“No,” he said emphatically.

“It’ll be Killybegs,” said the old fellow with relish, “before you’ll have him in your arms.”

Jack lay on his bunk, the pad resting on his chest and his eyes closed.

He had forgotten. Even as he had observed people he was forgetting their very essence. Except perhaps that there was always the possibility that somewhere in the future the naming might begin. But at that moment in time he doubted it. A face returned perhaps, not a face but an expression, not an expression but perhaps a reading of that expression, not what was in the thing observed but in the observer.

The wrong thing named.

And suddenly he was swept by a terrible fear of years having gone by which were filled with wrong meanings. He had been wrong from the very beginning. He knew nothing of the world. It had passed him by. It had all happened in another room.

“Hi,” said De Largey quietly.

“Yeah,” said Jack.

“I think we’re coming in.”

They threw the boxes of salmon onto the pier. Then pushed them on a trolley towards the icehouse. He was surprised to find that the sea had ceased to move beneath him. Thady and Hugh went down to sleep. Himself and De Largey headed towards the nearest pub.

He tasted the pint of Guinness and held it to his mouth, then he took a long swallow. The minute he drank he thought of Catherine.

“You’re enjoying that,” said De Largey.

“I am,” said Jack. The small, quiet euphoria inside him made him bless the nothingness. I have Catherine, he said to himself.

“What’s it like above now?” asked De Largey.

“I don’t know,” said Jack, “what it was like before.”

“It was all right, I suppose.”

“You’d wonder why the war started if everything was hunky-dory back then.”

“I didn’t say it was hunky-dory,” Theo corrected him.

“Ye are all given to reminiscence in Belfast,” said Jack.

“Would you say so?”

“Yes, and of the worst kind.”

“I see. Still and all,” said De Largey, “something bad may happen to you and then you’ll think everything was fine before that.”

“Do you ever want to go back?”