I woke with a dry sour taste in my mouth. With my head still on the pillow and keeping my eyes closed I put my mind back through the last stages of the evening before. The man with a back beard would not allow me to fall asleep pushing my head off his shoulder and insisting that I drink another two pints so as to see my way through the rest of the evening. Hegarty had gone home at some point and the man and I were back standing at the bar as Sinead started to close the place down, wiping down the wood and turning off the lights  until there was just one bulb left on above the till in the corner. The curtains were closed.

‘Its raining again,’ Sinead told us.

‘It’ll stop in the morning,’ the man said. ‘You watch it will be dry tomorrow and you’ll look at the blue sky and wonder how there could ever be such rain. You’ll be out fishing then.’

I nodded my head.

‘If it was dry I’d take you out now. Night is a good time to be fishing but you have to go out to where the water is deep. There’ll be a great black mass of them down there. They slow at night but still have to keep moving and so they move down away from the surface. The weight of that water pushes the oxygen they need more cleanly through their gills.’

‘And they are beautiful fish at night. Pull them out of the water as the moon is up and the colours there on their belly will wink at you and it will seem a shame to have to kill them and eat them. But that’s what we do and then we go out and get them again.’

‘I’m going home now,’ and he walked to the door and opened it and went out into the night. We bowed our heads against the rain and he turned to walk up the hill. He looked at me.

‘Are you alright getting back?”

I nodded my head and turned to walk back down the hill towards the pier.

There was a pile of wet clothes next to the bed. The curtains were open and the sky was blue and I could see the view out across the bay to brown and green hills of The Mizen. I got out of bed and went downstairs to cook bacon for breakfast.

It was early evening and starting to get dark outside. We were onto our eighth pint. The man and I had moved from the bar and were sat in the corner of the room on the right hand side as you walk into the pub. We had been joined by a blonde man whose surname when I caught it was Hegarty. There were empty glasses on the table in front of us.

The man and Hegarty were talking and they had slipped into their accents and apart from the odd word I couldn’t follow them although it was apparent they were talking about ‘some feckin’ idiot who lost his cow.’

My tongue felt thick at the back of my throat  If they’d asked me a question it felt too full for me to get out an answer and the walk up to the bar for another pint looked to be too far.

The man looked at me. Despite the drink his eyes were still blue and clear.

‘Don’t fall asleep now. There’s the rest of the evening to come and then you can walk back to your cottage for your bed. A day like this is not a great deal. Feck it might slow you down a bit but you can still walk.’

‘His father,’ he looked over at Hegarty. ‘His father would stop here a dozen times over the day before stopping for the night. His farm was up the hill there along the side of the stream and he’d a field back there beyond where you are on the left up from the sea. So if he was working he’d have to take his tractor from the farm down to the field and back again. His first pint would be set up as they opened the curtains in the morning and then as he drove past through the day he’d stop for another. Feck if he was working hard he could be past the place a dozen times before six in the evening and as he worked harder there were more times to stop.’

‘He’d only be in for 12 minutes. Six minutes for them to draw down his pint, three minutes for the first drink and another three minutes to finish it off. So if he was drinking ten pints that would only be two hours out of the day. Not enough time to notice.Then he’d finish his work at six and would be here to relax and take a bit more time over his pints. That didn’t stop him from drinking them but he’d allow more than the three minutes to finish them.’

‘Once he was done for the evening then he’d climb back into his tractor to go home for something to eat. There were no lights on the feckin’ thing but he swore that he’d been doing it so long he could do it with his eyes closed and if he was here for a long night that’s how he was. If people worried he’d tap their head and swear to drive the thing slowly.’

‘But there was one year he missed the turn for the road up the hill and got onto the back road to Durrus. He had to walk home that night and he didn’t get there ’til past four in the morning all covered in black mud. It took them another three days to find the tractor. He’d got it stuck up the top of the hill down by one of the cuts where they used to cut peat. He had to drive his cows up there to help pull it out he got it stuck there so deep’

He turned his eyes back to Hegarty and I was lost from the words again as they went back to the ‘idiot cows lost on the hill.’ There was another full pint in front of us now and I took my pull at it and sat back on the bench my head against the thick hard blue wool of the man’s jumper.

I closed my eyes and thought of mackerel drinking pints and what they would taste like.

Although it had stopped raining we had decided on a fifth pint. There was no real flow to the conversation. In fact the conversation was sparse but the company and the view through the window was enough. Out over the bay the sky was starting to clear and the grey clouds were starting to turn light and white and over the hills of The Mizen the blue sky was starting to widen. Maybe the man was right and there would be fish tomorrow.

We finished our pints and the man looked up at Sinead and she got off her chair and started to pour another round. As she left the pints to settle the man looked at her again and she turned her back to us and filled two glasses with Powers.

‘It’ll help settle the stomach,’ he said as we snatched them down. The taste of it was raw at the back of my throat and I had to catch at my breath as it went down.

The man waited until the pints were put in front of us. There was no need to hurry now. We’d had enough and from now on it was just down to greed.

‘You’ve had the cheese from round here and you know why its good. Feck you look at the rain that came down today and the colour it gave to the grass. If you spend your day eating something as green as that it will be good for you. Cows they are supposed to spend some time of the day with their other stomachs thinking on the grass that they’ve been chewing but when its raining like that they will spend all day eating it down and that is the grass that makes the milk that makes the cheese. Feck you want to taste some good cheese you could go out there and chew at some grass and it’ll give it to you.’

‘Now the man from Wales that I told you about. The man Jones. He had some thoughts on the making of cheese. He kept his goats and if you have heard it right there are still some deep cracks in the rocks there where he put his rounds of cheese so that it would be ready. Jones would tell you that all good cheese started with goats and not cows and the cheese you got from a cow was cheating.’

‘Jones said that the making of cheese was easy. The first man to do it kept goats for their milk and they drank it at the end of the day and that was enough. Then one of those goats  cracked its neck or something and was left there dead for some days and when it was found there was nothing to be done. But the man who found it he took a knife to the pink balloon under its back legs and the milk there had gone hard and when he took it back home it lasted a while and they tasted it and it wasn’t so bad’

‘Now with a story like that you’d expect them to be up in the hills waiting for the next goat to break its neck so they could have more cheese. Well maybe they did for a while but them one of them just took the stomach from a dead goat and left it there with the milk and they were found with cheese.’

‘Its too sour for me,’ he said and we took at our pints.

The man had a question for me.

‘What do you go back for? You are here for your two weeks in the summer and you’re back here again when you can and I’ve heard you say it that away from here you’re never really sure if you’re ok. Away from here and no feckin’ pint in your hand it is only “I think.” well what is the feckin’ good is “I think.” ‘

‘Sinead,’ he said. ‘Will you set up two more pints for us both I have to tell this man something and he needs to listen close.’

He steadied himself with his hands against the wooden bar. His hands were big and heavy   and the joints in his fingers were thick with use and the weather.

‘Now I’ve asked you that question and I know your answer. You have a nice home there to go to and a job that pays for it all. But what the feck is a job. A job is a way to knit your bones together and when you are tied up in knots and can’t move well then you drop dead and what the feckin’ use are you dead.’

He picked up my right hand and pushed at the palm hard with his thumb. He looked at me with his blue eyes and I had to look away to where Sinead was pouring the pints.

‘Your fingers are soft with money,’ he said. ‘Back there you’ll sit at a chair and there’ll be a screen in front of you and you’ll tap at some words. Is that what you do? Feck the money’ll be good but you’ll be a fool to want it for that.’

He put my hand down as Sinead put the pints in front of us. We picked them up and drank at them keenly. We were onto our fourth pint.

‘Look out there,’ he said. ‘The rain it will stop soon and there’ll be mackerel out in the bay. You’ll take your boat out and catch some tomorrow but wait ’til the late afternoon and the tide will have turned and you will get a bucket full then. Cook them and eat them straight out of the water and you will be done.’

‘You’ll be half right,’ he said. ‘It is not so good here when you are here every day and its not stopped raining for a month and there is feck all to do but catch fish that are gone and sit and talk about the weather. The ground here is hard and when its not hard it is thick with mud and try make your peace with that. But there’ll come a time or a day when the knots that come with all that will start to unravel for a while and you won’t get that back where you come from.’

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m talking shite.’ This time he put his hand over mine on the bar and I could feel the weight of him pressing down before he took his hand away to pick up his pint.

‘Now a pint will unravel you soon enough but I come back to my question and why do you go back?’