‘We could be swimming it yet, Bill.’

I had made – despite it all – a mild success of myself in life. But on turning forty, the previous year, I had sensed exhaustion rising up in me, like rot. I found that to be alone with the work all day was increasingly difficult. And the city had become a jag on my nerves – there was too much young flesh around. The brochure about the hotel appeared in my life like a revelation. I clutched it in my hands for days on end. I grew feverish with the notion of a westward flight. I lay in bed with the brochure, as the throb of the city sounded a kind of raspy, taunting note, and I moaned as I read:

Original beams.

Traditional coaching inn.

Thackeray.

Estd 1648.

The hotel had the promise of an ideal solution. I could distract myself (from myself) with its day-to-day running, its endless small errands, and perhaps, late at night, or very early in the morning, I could continue, at some less intense level, with the poetry.

All my friends, every last one of them, said, ‘The Shining’.

But I was thinking, the west of Ireland … the murmurous ocean … the rocky hills hard-founded in a greenish light … the cleansing air … the stoats peeping shyly from little gaps in the drystone walls …

Yes. It would all do to make a new man of me. Of course, I hadn’t counted on having to listen to my summer staff, a pack of energetic young Belarusians, fucking each other at all angles of the clock.

And the ocean turned out to gibber rather than murmur.

Gibber gibber – whoosh. Gibber gibber – whoosh.

Down the far end of the bar, Mick Harty, distributor of bull semen for the vicinity, was molesting his enormously fat wife, Vivien.

‘We’re after a meal at the place run by the Dutch faggots,’ he said. ‘Oysters for a starter … They have me gone fuckin’ bananas!’

Vivien slapped and roared at him as he stroked her massive haunches. She reddened and chortled as he twisted her around and pulled her vast rear side into his crotch area. Nobody apart from me paid a blind bit of attention to the spectacle. And even as she suffered a pretend butt-rape from her cackling husband, she turned to me and informed me, precisely, what they had paid for the meal at the Dutch couple’s restaurant.

‘Two starters, two mains, we shared a dessert, two bottles of wine, two cappuccinos,’ she said, as Mick grinded slowly behind her, hoarsely yodelling an Alicia Keys love ballad. ‘Hundred thirty-six euro, even – not cheap, Caoimhin.’

‘Cappuccino is a breakfast drink,’ I said. ‘You’re not supposed to drink it after a meal.’

I was not well liked out in Killary. I was considered ‘superior’. Of course I was fucking superior. I ate at least five portions of fruit and veg daily. I had Omega 3 from oily fish coming out my ears. I limited myself to twenty-one units of alcohol a week. I hadn’t written two consecutive lines of a poem in eight months. I was becoming versed, instead, in the strange, illicit practices of the hill country.