‘Age was he when he went, John?’

‘Forty-two.’

‘Youngish?’

‘Arra. He was better off out of it.’

My first weeks out at the Water’s Edge I had kept a surreptitious notebook under the bar. The likes of ‘thrun down’ would get a delighted entry. I would guess at the likely etymology – from ‘thrown down’, as in ‘laid low’? But I had quickly had my fill of these maudlin bastards.

This, by the way, was the Monday of the May bank holiday weekend. Killary was en fête. Local opinion, cheerfully, was that it had been among the wettest bank holidays ever witnessed. The few deluded hillwalkers and cyclists who had shown up had departed early, in wordless outrage, and in the library room of the Water’s Edge there was just a pair of elderly couples still enjoying the open fire. I left the bar and took a pass through the library to smile at them, throw on a few sods of turf, and to make sure they hadn’t died on the premises.

They stared into the flames.

‘That’s some evening?’ I tried, but there was no response.

Both couples held hands and appeared significantly tranquillised. Coming through the lobby again, I looked out through the doors and I saw a pair of minks creep over the harbour wall. They crossed the road, in perfect tandem, and headed for the rising fields beyond the hotel. I went back into the bar. I had an odd nausea developing.

‘They can cut out that particular gland,’ Bill Knott said, ‘but if the wound goes septic after?’

He shook his head hopelessly.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is when the fun and games start.’

Mine was one of four licensed premises in a scattered district of three-hundred-odd souls. This is a brutal scarcity, by Irish ratios, so there was enough trade to keep us all tunnelling towards oblivion. The bar was another of the elements that had sold the place to me. It was pleasant, certainly, with an old-fashioned mahogany finish, zinc-topped low tables, and some prints of photo finishes from fabled race meetings at Ballybrit. I always tended bar in the evenings. I’d had a deranged notion that this would establish me as a kind of charming-innkeeper figure. This was despite the fact that not one but two ex-girlfriends (both of them, admittedly, sharp-tongued academics) had described my manner as ‘funereal’.

The bar-side babble continued unchecked:

Bill Knott was now reckoning the distance to Derry if you were to go via Enniskillen. Vivien Harty was telling John Murphy that that wasn’t tuppence worth of a coat his wife had on the Tuesday gone, that he was looking after her all the same, and that no woman deserved it more, given what she’d been through with the botched hysterectomy. Mick Harty talked of the cross-border trade in stallions and looked faintly murderous. ‘Our horses the fuckers are after now,’ he said.

Nadia, meantime, was singing weird Belarusian pop beneath her breath as she got up on the footstool to polish the optics. A seep of vomit rose in my gullet. I was soul sick. I was failing spectacularly at this whole mine-host lark. I quietly leaned on the bar by the till. I looked out the small window. Watery, it was.