‘I said will it flood, Bill? Will it flood? Are you even listening to me?’

A grey silence swelled briefly.

‘Hasn’t in sixteen years,’ he said. ‘Won’t now.’

I spent all my waking hours keeping the Water’s Edge on the go. I was short-breathed, tense, out of whack. I was at roughly the midpoint of what, for poets, would be termed ‘a long silence’ – five years had passed since my last collection. Anytime I sat down to page or screen, I felt as if I might weep, and I didn’t always resist the temptation. Mountain bleakness, the lapidary rhythms of the water, the vast schizophrenic skies: these weren’t inspiring poetry in me; they were inspiring hopeless lust and negative thought patterns. Again and again, the truth was confronting me – I was a born townie, and I had made a dreadful mistake in coming here. I set down a fresh Bushmills for Bill Knott.

‘This place your crowd are from,’ he said. ‘Belarus?’

‘Yes, Bill?’

‘What way’d they be for road out there?’

‘When you think,’ Vivien Harty said, ‘of what this country went through for the sake of Europe, when we went on our hands and fuckin’ knees before Brussels, to be given the lick of a fuckin’ butter voucher, and as soon as we have ourselves even halfways right, these bastards from the back end of nowhere decide they can move in wherever they like and take our fuckin’ jobs?’

On the Killary hillsides the dogs howled again in fright-night sequence, one curdling scream giving way to another; they were even louder now than before.

‘Mother of Jesus,’ John Murphy said.

The dogs were so loud now as to be unignorable. We all went to the windows. The roadway between hotel and harbour wall had in recent moments disappeared. The last of the evening light was an unreal throb of Kermit green. The dogs howled. The rain continued.

‘The roads,’ Bill Knott said, at last impressed, ‘will be unpassable.’

Mick Harty’s hands slipped down over the backs of Vivien’s thighs. The rain came in great, unstoppable drifts on a high westerly from the Atlantic.

‘That ain’t quittin’ anytime soon,’ I said, stating the blindingly obvious.

‘Water’s up to the second step,’ Vivien Harty noted.

Four old stone steps led up to the inn’s front porch.

‘And rising,’ Mick Harty said.

‘I haven’t seen rain the likes of that,’ John Murphy said, ‘since Castlebar, the March of ’seventy-three.’

‘What’d we be talkin’ about for Castlebar?’ Bill Knott said. ‘Forty-five minutes on a light road?’

*

We moved back from the windows. Our movement had become curiously choreographed. Quiet calls were made on mobiles. We spoke now in whispers.

All along the fjord, word quickly had it, the waters had risen and had breached the harbour walls. The emergency services had been alerted. There was talk – a little late for it – of sandbagging. We were joined in the lounge bar by six of the nine Belarusians – the other three had gone to the cineplex in Westport, fate having put on a Dan Brown adaptation – and by the two elderly couples, who had managed not to die off in the library.