‘Seriously, lads, we haven’t seen a tide that high, surely? Have we?’

It was lapping by now at the top of the harbour wall. The estate agent had assured me that the place never flooded. I’d looked the slithery old fuck in the eye and believed him. I had suspected, I had hoped, that the life I found out here would eventually do something for my work. Something would gestate in me. I’d be able to move away from all that obtuse, arrhythmic stuff about the sex heat of cities that had made me mildly famous in provincial English departments. My poetry was known of but was not a difficulty for the Killary locals – there had never been a shortage of poets out there. Every last crooked rock of the place had at some point seated the bony arse of some hypochondriacal epiphany-seeker. Some fucker who’d forever be giving out about his lungs.

‘You’d do jail time for that,’ John Murphy said.

He was eyeing once more the rear quarters of Nadia as she headed for the kitchen.

‘John, I’ve warned you about this,’ I said.

‘I’m only sayin’,’ he said.

He sullenly turned back to his stout. The people of this part of north Galway are oversexed. That is my belief. I had found a level of ribaldry that bordered on the paganistic. It goes back, of course. They lick it up off the crooked rocks. Thackeray, indeed, remarked on the corset-less dress of rural Irish women, and the fact that they kissed perfect strangers in greeting, their vast bosoms swinging.

‘It’s not,’ John Murphy said, ‘like I’m goin’ to take a lep at the little bitch. My leppin’ days are long fuckin’ over.’

A notion came: if I sold the place for even three-quarters of what I paid for it, I could buy half of Cambodia and do a Colonel fucking Kurtz on it altogether. Lovely, cold-hearted Nadia came running from the kitchen. She was as white as the fallen dead.

‘Is otter!’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Is otter in kitchen!’ she said.

He was eating soup when I got there. Carrot and coriander from a ten-gallon pot. Normally, they are terribly skittish, otters, but this fellow was languorous as a surfer. Nervously, I shooed him towards the back door. He took his own sweet time about heading there. Once outside, he aimed not for the tide-line rocks, where the otters all lived, but for the higher ground, south.

I looked out towards the harbour. The harbour wall was disappearing beneath spilling sheets of water. I came back into the lounge.

‘A fucking otter is right,’ I said.

They looked at me, the locals, in quiet disgust, as if I could expect no less than otters in the kitchen, the way I was after letting things go.

I pointed to the harbour.

‘Will it flood?’ I asked, and there was a quake in my tone.

‘You’d make good time coming out of Sligo, normally,’ Bill Knott said. ‘Unless you had a Thursday on your hands. But of course them fuckers have any amount of road under them since McSharry was minister.’