“How are you?” shouted Jack.

The gardener did not answer, but stopped, looked and moved on with an ironic smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” mumbled Jack.

Dusk was falling. The surf rose silently. Outside a pub two tractors sat with their engines running. Local girls, high-cheeked, with jet-black Spanish hair, and dressed in virgin white, spilled out of a house speaking Irish. Dusk was falling quicker. The beach, when he reached it, was possessed of a low light. The sand was a quiet phosphorescent carpet. Suds lay the landward side of the wrack.

It was Saturday night, and all the Catholics were headed for evening Mass. The old sabbath was being rejuvenated. The roads on the peninsula were lit by a convoy of trundling cars. The town was deserted, except for the hotel where the priests sat drinking, and the eating house, where the altar boys were shooting pool. An old gambling machine blinked on and off. In the distance, on the mainland, limestone glittered as if the sun were shining.

He walked a street of ruined houses, then took a short cut across the lawns of the small industrial estate. The names were floodlit – Warners (Éire) Teo, Ionad Cloch lorrais, Ruibéar Chomhlacht Atlantach Teo, Fás. He went along a road where old shopfronts stared back with blank faces. The light from Eagle Island lighthouse swept across the sky three times. Count eight. Three times again. He stood on the new bridge. A light came on in the golf club. Nurses stepped into cars at the hospital. Standing there he listened to the alarming silence. The black sky blinked again.

“Isn’t it getting late terribly early,” Mrs Moloney, the receptionist, said to him when he re-entered the hotel.

“Were there any calls for me?”

“No,” she said. “There was none since you last asked.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Fair enough.”

He stood by the desk wondering what to do.

He went into the bar.

“Hugh.”

“Jack.”

“Aye.”

“No sign yet?” asked Hugh.

“No,” answered Jack, “that’s about it.”

The wind thrashed against the glass windows in the roof.

“I think I’ll have a brandy.”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“A brandy and crème de menthe I think.”

Hugh filled a double measure.

“Good luck,” Hugh said.

It was only as he entered the sun lounge that Jack became aware of the glass in his hand. He stopped on the threshold and looked at the glass and thought, how did that happen? It was as if he had been transformed into someone else, someone he had once been. Someone he disliked entirely. In his sleep on the boat he’d often dream of drinking and wake with immense relief to find that it had not happened. The glass of whiskey he’d been swallowing in some unlit room of his consciousness he’d find did not exist. Now it did. It sat whole in his hand. After his two weeks of sobriety he’d ordered a drink without thinking. If she comes now what will I do? I’ll not drink it! He found the carpet under his feet. I have not drunk it yet! Holding the drink away from him he made his way to a deserted corner of the room and put the glass down at a safe distance from himself.