Ever since the death of my father I’ve slept badly, and my father died twenty years ago … that means I’ve slept badly almost half my life. No matter how deep or peaceful I may be, any untoward sound and I’m bolt upright in a shot, prepared for the worst sort of bad news. So when the knock came to the window that night I was already on the floor and into my jeans with my heart hammering in my chest before the sound had died in my ears. I ran through the hall in my feet and pulled the front door open.

With his shoulder towards me and his face in profile it took me a moment to recognize him. When he turned around and saw my face he took a small step back under the porch light and held up his hands.

‘Calm down,’ he said, ‘there’s no one dead, no one hurt or anything.’

It was cousin Davey, a man I hadn’t seen in twelve months and yet here he was, on my doorstep at three in the morning telling me everything was OK.

‘I thought that was Anthony’s room,’ he added. ‘I thought that was his room there to the front.’

By way of gaining a moment, my heart still hammering in my chest, I put out my hand. He took mine in his and shook it with slow deliberation. However, as genuine and solid as the handshake was, I now felt inexplicably angry. ‘Davey,’ I blurted hoarsely, ‘what’s up?’

Davey opened his mouth to speak and seemed to lose the run of himself for a few moments. He uttered a couple of garbled sentences about someone in the car out on the road and then something about someone’s gasúr … and then suddenly he stopped, in a fluster of confusion that was clear now, even to himself. Starting again with a resolute air he began. ‘Mark, I won’t mince words, I’m looking for drink: beer, a bottle of wine, anything.’ And with that he took another step back under the light.

This was the second week of December, less than fourteen days before Christmas and I knew there was drink in the house. I knew that not two feet away from me in the hall cupboard there were four bottles of wine; I knew also that in the kitchen to my back there was an unopened bottle of Powers. Nevertheless, I shook my head.

‘Davey, there isn’t a drop here. You know herself, she doesn’t like having it in the house.’

‘Wine, beer, anything,’ he persisted.

I shook my head, desperately wishing him gone and ashamed of my pathetic lies. ‘Davey, I’m telling you there isn’t a drop in the house, no bottles or cans, nothing.’

And there we stood, the two of us locked into this moment of knowing lies and embarrassment. Finally Davey nodded his head and raised his hand. ‘Sound, Mark, that’s fair enough, I’ll let you back to bed.’ He turned and moved off over the gravel and I was relieved to close the door and put out the light.

‘Who the hell was that?’

Anthony, my youngest brother, stood in socks and T-shirt at the end of the hall, his face swollen with sleep.

‘Cousin Davey.’

‘Cousin Davey at this hour, what did he want?’

‘What do you think he wants? What does he always want at this hour of the night?’

Anthony sighed, I didn’t have to spell it out for him. ‘Was he loaded?’

‘Of course he was loaded.’

Anthony looked sorrowful and ran his hand through his hair. ‘He’s back on it again, the poor bastard. No one gets this as bad as Davey does; he’ll go through the village now tonight looking for drink. I’ll bet he’ll go over and knock up the uncle.’

I remembered the fragile grace with which Davey had moved away from the door, how he had seen through my lies and yet squared with me. I went into my bedroom.

‘Don’t forget you’re giving me a lift into town tomorrow,’ Anthony called.

‘Why am I giving you a lift into town tomorrow?’

‘The results of that test, they should be back.’

‘What’s wrong with your own car?’

‘I’m leaving her in for the NCT, I told you all this.’

‘Shite,’ I breathed, ‘OK, give me a shout after nine.’

‘Make it ten, I have to drive it to the garage at nine. I’ll call you when I get back.’

‘Fine, whatever, Jesus …’

I switched off the light and lay on the bed with my hands clasped to my chest, my heart still pounding away like a bastard.

I turned forty over a month ago and that makes me seven years younger than my father was when he died suddenly of a heart attack. For some years now I’ve been meaning to have a full physical check-up as soon as I struck the big four-oh. I’ve always had some notion that this marker signalled the end of my youth and now that I was entering the foothills of middle age I needed this check-up to see how I was holding up. And any idea that I might postpone it for a while was done for by a series of heart attacks that had ripped through the family this last year. First up was my uncle, a strong, fit man in his mid-fifties who drove a truck for a builder’s yard, a man who never abused himself and whose only vices were a fondness once in a while for twelve-year-old Jameson and a fry. Pushing a lawnmower brought it on. One moment the sun is shining, his family is reared and he’s looking forward to spending a week with the grandkids; the next he’s under the knife having a stent fitted and his whole life is turned upside down. Two months later his brother in America is walking up the hill to his holiday home in the Catskills when that unmistakeable, clamping pain hits him in the chest.

Quadruple bypass: a dead man walking was how the surgeon described him. That was late autumn but the year had not finished with us. On the phone to her son, an aunt on the same side of the family stops in mid-conversation. Her son on the other end, baffled at the sudden silence, goes, Mom, what’s up, did you have a stroke or something? And she had, right there holding the phone, just like that. I knew what I wanted to say, she would recount later, but I just couldn’t say it. Something was wrong … That stroke required surgery, a procedure that was complicated further when she had a heart attack under the knife. So phone calls were made, a family conference through the wires, and all the menfolk and women got appointments for check-ups. I’d postponed mine for a few weeks. A chest infection had risen into my throat and sent me to a doctor for the first time in years; the antibiotics brought on a dose of diarrhoea, which seriously weakened me, so I had put off the appointment until I got back to something near my normal strength. But today I was in town with Anthony to get the results of his blood test. I saw him now, coming along the street towards the car, a crooked smile on his face. He sat into the passenger side, looked across at me, but said nothing.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘how long do you have left?’

Quick as a flash, without dropping a beat, he shoots back, ‘Every day’s a bonus from now on.’ He pulled out a white package. ‘I’m going to be on these for the rest of my life, my cholesterol is through the roof. So a complete change of diet and I have to be back here in three months.’

Anthony was three years old when our father died. To this day I can see him sitting up in bed in his pyjamas, his little face swollen with mumps and him listening to me telling him some bullshit story of how dad was needed in heaven and how he would not be seeing him any more. And if ever I’ve had to summon up an image of incomprehension, I just think of that swollen, flushed face with those huge eyes staring off into the distance. At twenty years of age that bullshit story was all I could do for him; I had neither the wit nor the wisdom to do any better. But sitting there on the side of the bed, feeding him ice cream to bring down his temperature, I knew well that whatever fathering he was going to get in this life would fall to me. Now, with him sitting there beside me and waving that jar of pills, I didn’t care to think what sort of a job I’d done of it.

I was suddenly angry at him.

Over the years Anthony had put on a bit of weight, filled out quickly after his tonsils were taken out at the age of seventeen. He was the heaviest in the family and I worried about him. But this summer I learned there was nothing soft about him. In early June we had cut down a stand of blackthorn that had grown up around the house. It was the first time in years we had worked together like that; five hard days with bush-saws and chainsaws in the hottest spell of the year till at the end of the week we had a big pile of logs stacked at the gable of the shed and a view from the kitchen window that opened out over the hills. And I could hardly keep up with him. In the sweltering heat he had moved easily, wielding the chainsaw lightly in those tight, narrow spaces I could neither reach nor stand in. I saw a toughness in him that I would never have guessed at and I was ashamed of myself for having doubted him. Now, near the middle of December, I saw that week as the happiest spell of the entire year. But right now, with him sitting beside me in the car, I bit my tongue and stayed quiet. He was my youngest brother and worrying me was part of his job. I wasn’t going to start on at him because I knew how it would end if I did. I’d lose the head, start effing and blinding, and he’d close up and blank me, stare straight ahead in that stubborn way of his, letting it all wash off him. Someone else would have to talk to him, someone else. So I said nothing, I just started up the car without a word and pulled out into the street.

He kept up the gallows humour that evening – it was just the thing to get a rise out of the mother. He was in the kitchen with one foot up on the chair, lacing his boots before going to work; she was standing over him, drying her hands on a dishcloth, telling him something she needed done for the Christmas.

‘You’re not listening,’ she said.

‘I’m listening,’ he replied, without straightening up. ‘You want the decorations up in the hall and you need a new set of lights for the tree.’ He stood up and looked at her. ‘But sure what business would I have putting up Christmas decorations; I’ll hardly be around to see …’

‘Anthony!’

‘… I’d be better off buying a new suit in case anything happens. I wouldn’t want people seeing me lying there …’

‘Stop it!’ She swiped him with the dishcloth, and moved to the sink. Anthony pulled his jacket off the back of the chair and turned to me.

‘You coming down for one later?’

‘Yes,’ I said, I would be down later; I could do with a pint.

Coming in out of the night air, the warmth of the pub wrapped itself around me. I unzipped the jacket and made for a stool at the centre of the bar. It being mid-December the place was dead, only two other men sitting at opposite ends of the U-shaped bar. I recognized both of them and called their names: Jimmy Lally and Liam Cosgrave. Anthony shoved a pint across the counter to me. On the telly overhead, Sky News was keeping us abreast of the search for Osama. The Yanks were still bombing the caves around Tora Bora, but months on from the start of the invasion there was no sign of the bearded one. The segment ended and the news bulletin cut to the weather.

Anthony spoke in the breathy rasp of an old man. ‘Set me down there with my dog and my stick, I’d soon find him.’ He resumed his own voice. ‘Austie Mangan was in last night looking at that, that’s what he had to say, Set me down there with my dog and my stick …’

‘He could hardly do any worse,’ Liam piped from the far end, ‘and at a fraction of the price.’

‘The CIA will send for him one of these days, so,’ Jimmy added from the other end. ‘Man and dog into the helicopter and off.’ Jimmy pushed his glass towards Anthony.

‘Fudge,’ Anthony said, laughing over at Liam.

‘What?’ I’d missed something.

‘Fudge,’ Anthony repeated, ‘that’s the name of Austie’s dog, the only one in the house talking to him, he reckons.’

‘Fudge and Austie in Afghanistan, we could watch them on Sky.’

Anthony’s been a barman for ten years, ever since his late teens. And he’s a good one, and that’s something I’m proud of. He has this way with him, knows straight off the customer who wants to talk and knows also the man who has things on his mind and wants to have his pint in peace. He can name everyone in this parish but he’s not shy of throwing a few fucks into someone if they’re acting up. I’ve been in enough pubs to know a good barman from the other sort, and while I’ve seen a few who are as good, I’ve seen none better.

‘You had a visitor last night, Mark,’ Liam called.

Anthony looked at me. ‘I was telling the lads about Davey.’

‘I did, Liam, not the sort I would have wished for.’

‘You didn’t expect that when you opened the door, that apparition.’

‘No, not that.’

I’m ten years older than Liam, went to school with his brother, but sixty fags a day and God knows what amount of drink have driven him into bloated middle age twenty years before his time. Now he held a fag in one hand and clasped his other around his glass. His tone was knowing.

‘That’s what happens when you start drinking like that in fits and starts – you’re out of practice, not thinking. Davey wouldn’t have fallen for that a few years ago when he was on it proper; he’d have had a few cans or a bottle stashed away for himself.’ Liam shook his head ruefully. ‘You’re on it all day and then it’s one o’clock in the morning and every place closed – then you’re fucked. I know it well, been there many’s a time.’ He shook his head sorrowfully and stubbed out his cigarette.

Liam would know these things; he’s done more than his share of it. I sat here one night and listened to him tell a story of how he’d been on the beer all day and had decided to go home for a kip in the evening before coming back for the night shift. But when he got home he found the house locked and remembered that the wife and kids had gone to her parents’ place for the day. With no key on him he took a walk around the house and found the small window over the bathroom open. Only that he had drink taken he wouldn’t have chanced it; he threw the jacket in and followed after it. Shoulders and hips went through easy enough but when he was lowering himself head down between the bath and the toilet, the window shut like a mantrap on his ankle. Three hours he hung there, upside down in the bathroom. By the time the wife came back his head had nearly exploded and the rest of him was blue with the cold. He took an awful dose of the flu and spent a full week in bed with it.

He told that story where he is sitting now and when he’d finished he took a fit of coughing that would have killed a lesser man. He tilted his chin and hauled up a ratcheting series of coughs from the bottom of his lungs, which was painful to hear, his head lowering all the time and his hand locked around the pint on the counter. Worst of all were those long, agonized moments when, caught between coughs, he struggled for air, his tongue rolled outside his lips, going puce in the face, desperately trying to suck air down into his tattered lungs. ‘Give that man a plunger,’ someone called. And when he eventually stopped and pulled a hankie out to wipe his eyes, he said that he’d never got over that flu, never shook it; and I would have said there wasn’t a man along the counter listening to him who didn’t think that flu was the least of his worries.

Liam and Anthony’s attention is taken by an ad on the television. It’s one in a new campaign series cautioning the perils of drink-driving. Running in alternate sequences, it shows a little kid playing football in his neat suburban garden, kicking a ball into a goalmouth manned by an oversized teddy; then it cuts to a young man who’s scoring a proper goal in some local football match and celebrating afterwards, having a few pints with the lads. On his way home he’s in flying form, singing along to Fleetwood Mac on the car radio, tapping out the beat on the steering wheel, his mind obviously not on the road.

Of course the inevitable happens: the car hits the kerb, veers out of control and bursts through a flimsy timber fence; between crushed flowers and tumbling cars and screaming kids the child footballer lies dead on the lawn: the child’s father rushes out, picks up the prone body and sinks to his knees, crying out to the heavens. The ad ends with a white text on a black screen: ‘Could you live with the shame?’ I haven’t seen it before and it’s undeniably good. The lingering mood is sombre, admonitory, and it carries real weight in the quietness of the bar. Liam, however, is having none of it. He gestures at the screen.

‘That wouldn’t have happened if your man had a right wall there. A timber fence is no good. Blocks on their flat, that’s what he should have had there.’

Laughter comes choking up into my throat and I leave down my pint. Inside the bar Anthony has his head lowered over the tap, his shoulders rocking with mirth. Liam pushes his glass towards the centre of the bar, the devil’s grin on his face.

‘Put a last one in that, A; we’ll fuck off home to our beds, then.’

Anthony locked the door, pulled down the blinds and I helped him stack the chairs on the tables. Now that the place was cleared, we were going to have a last pint together.

‘It was very quiet tonight.’

He reached for a glass. ‘It’ll be like that for another week. Besides, cops were pulling at the bridge last night and on the Westport road two nights ago. People are afraid to come out, even if it’s only for a few pints.’

‘It’s not worth chancing it.’

‘No, it’s not. And this place is a soft touch, the cops rack up the numbers of arrests and don’t give a shit. Half the charges are thrown out in court, then, for one reason or another. It’s a pure farce.’ He placed two pints in front of me and ducked out under the counter. ‘Jimmy Whelan was the best I ever saw. Jimmy would come in here and have the craic and drink ten, twelve pints and walk out as sober as he came in, no piss or nothing.’ He pointed to a table in the middle of the floor. ‘The cops came in one night and told anyone with cars to put their keys on the table there. Jimmy finished up his pint and pushed past them to the door. If you think I’m walking out that bollocks of a road at this hour … They let him go as well and of all the men coming and going that road he was never caught.’

‘He went fast in the end, though, the same Jimmy.’

‘He did, he got a heart attack in the house, the brother found him the following day.’

We’ve done this before, had these pints after closing time and I enjoy them like no other. Here in the quiet warmth, with the lights dimmed, there is a type of contentment you can’t get anywhere else. Man to man, putting the world to rights, getting on that blissful buzz when the world and everything in it becomes coherent – there’s nothing like it. In this mood and these hours nothing is impossible.

A couple of years back, before he took to sea in a trawler and worked on construction, Anthony ran his own pub just up the street. Within a year, he turned an old man’s pub into the kind of place where young surfer dudes stood shoulder to shoulder with old sheep farmers in the middle of a concrete floor. He met his figures plus fifteen per cent and gained listings in two tourist guides as one of the best licensed premises in Ireland. And late at night, after he’d cleared the place and swept the floor, we’d do exactly as we’re doing now; sit alone in the dim light, talking football and movies and books, listening to music. Hank and John Denver were the big favourites at that hour of the night: Some days are diamonds …

Some days are diamonds

Some days are stones

Some days the hard times

Won’t leave me alone.

We’d play that song over and over, singing along to the chorus, giving it loads, and I remember those nights lit with such unlikely well-being that it would have been almost foolish to acknowledge it.

‘So the pig is barred,’ he says suddenly, ‘I can’t go the pig.’

‘What?’

‘The diet, the doctor says I need to have a whole change of diet. Anything to do with the pig is out. So it’s rabbit food from now on.’

‘That’ll be tough. Did he say anything about getting up off your hole and doing some exercise?’

‘I’ve sorted that out. Liam was telling me before you came in that he’s starting groundwork on those houses across from us in the New Year. He asked me would I be interested. I said sound, there’s four months’ work in it, just hop across the fields to it in the morning. It beats driving in and out to Galway for the same thing.’

‘Is he any good at that sort of thing, is he tidy?’

‘He’s tidy and he’s tasty,’ Anthony said, ‘you mightn’t think to look at him but he leaves neat work behind him. Kerbing, manholes, paving, he does all that groundwork and as long as it doesn’t rise above the window sill he’s fine – same as myself, though, he has no head for heights.’

I know that sometime in the past Anthony has taken a fall off a roof. He never told me but I learned it from one of the lads. From what I know, he was fixing lead flashing around the base of a chimney when he lost his footing; he tipped back off the apex of the gable into the blue air and landed, by the grace of God, flat on his back in a pile of sand. The thought of it makes me weak and although I’ve never asked him about it, I do know that it put an end to him doing any work on roofs or scaffolding or anything that rose above his own head. Soon after that fall he took to the bay in a 25-foot trawler.

‘And he has a great head as well, he can size up a job in an instant,’ he continued solemnly. ‘When we had that job in Barna we had six houses on one side of a cul-de-sac, the other six were given over to some crowd from Connemara. One day during lunch break Liam goes over to see how the other lads are getting on. He’s gone about twenty minutes and when he comes back to the hut he’s bursting his arse laughing. We’ll have a few more weeks here yet, he says – when the engineer comes tomorrow he’ll pull up every bit of work they’ve done. And that’s exactly what happened. The engineer came the next day, took one look at their work and ran the lot of them: steps where there shouldn’t be steps, manholes where there should be water-traps, inclines running the wrong way, the whole thing upside down and back to front … one glance and Liam saw it all – we had another two months’ work there. That same evening he was pushing a barrow with a few paving slabs in it. One of the lads up on the scaffold calls down to him, says, Come on to fuck, Liam, put a few more slabs in that barrow. Quick as lightning Liam shoots back, My ears are on the side of my head boy, not on top of it … That quietened the buck … Wasn’t that a good one? My ears are on the side of my head …’

Anthony doesn’t know it but this is something he takes from dad – an ear for the keen phrase, the mimicry, the joyous telling of these tales. In no other way does he so completely resemble him. None of the rest of us – my other brother or sister – has his gift for it. He comes home at night and I say to him, Any craic? That’s enough to start him off. Young and all as he is, he must have a thousand stories already.

Now he throws back the last of his pint and gathers up the glasses. ‘Will we have a short before we go or will we leave it at that?’

I take up my jacket. ‘Let’s leave it at that. I’m driving back in the morning.’

‘Sound.’

We walk down the empty street together, out over the bridge and through the crossroads. The house is three minutes up the road and when we get around the back we stand for a while, pissing off the walk into the grass. A small moon hangs over the village and we can see across the dark hills as far as the Reek on one side, Mweelrea on the other. Rain begins to fall, one of those light mists that drifts by in the moonlight. Anthony is zipping himself up and chuckling away.

‘Jimmy told a good one this evening before you came in: how he lost a field of silage earlier this summer. How did you manage that, I asked. Jimmy grinned and said, I left it to God and God left it to me and between the two of us we lost it, that’s how.

We laugh and stand there a moment and, with nothing more to be said, we open the back door and turn into the house.

So we’ve made it to Christmas and we’re walking the beach beyond the town. This is our new health regimen: exercise and diet. Santa’s brought me a new pair of boots and they’re stiff on my feet so I’m breaking them in over even ground. It’s a beautiful day, one of those clear sharp days that thrills you deep in the bone, makes you feel properly alive. Our goal is half a mile distant, a small stream running to the sea, marked out by a large rock; overhead a watery sun is doing its best.

‘Look who’s coming,’ Anthony says.

There’s a lot of people on the beach: kids playing football; couples; dogs. Up ahead a young fella is leaning back, taking the strain from a huge kite high above. It looks like nice work – even at this distance I can feel the draw in his arms, the pull in the small of his back.

‘Uncle T, out walking as well.’

I see him now, coming towards us with his hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket. Another moment and he spots us.

‘It’s no use standing up, lads,’ he calls cheerily, ‘you have to keep walking, you won’t do it standing up.’

We shake hands and wish him happy Christmas and he’s in flying form. His family is down for the holiday, his two girls with husbands and kids and his only son back from Jersey. We talk and make plans to meet up later that night for a drink. After a few moments we move off in opposite directions.

‘What the hell’s a stent, anyway?’ I ask, ‘do you know what it is?’

Anthony nods. ‘Yes, he showed me a leaflet in the house. You wouldn’t believe it; it’s like shuttering in your arteries, keeping it open.’

‘That’ll put an end to John Jameson.’

Anthony looks at me like I’ve said something stupid. ‘He doesn’t care, he told me himself. He said life is too sweet, his family is reared, there’s just himself and herself; it’s not too much now to look after his health. He’s talking of getting a taxi licence.’

‘He can’t drive a truck but he can drive a taxi, how does that work out?’

‘Fucked if I know, some sort of insurance thing, I think.’

We turn at the rock and put the low sun behind us. Now we’re going in the right direction. The summer before he died, myself and my father were on this same beach together. It was a Sunday – it had to be or we wouldn’t have been here. I was after coming out of the water, drying in the sun, and we were talking about something or other when, out of the blue, he challenges me to a sprint.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘as far as the rock,’ his face keen with the sudden idea of it.

My heart sank. I was nineteen that summer and fitter than I’d ever been. I was playing senior football with the parish team and I’d had county trials earlier that year. He was forty-six and I didn’t want this challenge but what could I do? He took off his shoes and socks and rucked up the ends of his trousers and we stood side by side. He leaned forward then and called it: Ready, Steady, Go! He had eaten up two whole strides before I’d put a foot forward, running with a rigid, upright stride that carried him lightly over the sand, his elbows pumping, his shirt swelled out across his back. I surged off and drew beside him at the halfway mark, all my reluctance swept aside by the savage competitiveness that was my way in these things. I pulled ahead of him, one stride, and said now I’ll burn him off, fuck it. But that one stride was all I managed, not another inch, no matter how hard I pumped or how deep down I reached – not another inch. We drew up at the stream and he was breathless and laughing his head off, his face broad with glee. I couldn’t understand it at first but after a moment I thought I knew: he was glad, glad for both of us, glad I’d won and glad that he’d made more than a fight of it. I tried not to sound surprised.

‘I never knew you were that fast.’

He continued laughing and turned towards the sea, hauling in deep breaths. ‘Not running,’ he said, ‘handball was my game, doubles; myself and Peter Burns, we were never beaten.’

Six months later he would die in his bed, home after a few pints in the same pub Anthony would manage fifteen years later. He went to bed with the paper and sometime in the middle of that night our bedroom door burst open and our mother came through shouting, Get up, get up lads, there’s something wrong with daddy! I charged through the hall after my brother, into their bedroom, and saw him lying on his back, his face blue and him gasping for air. I turned back out of the room, pulled on my boots and jacket in the kitchen and set out into the pissing night to run the quarter of a mile into the town to get the doctor. When I got back he was dead.

I haven’t told Anthony any of this and I’m not going to tell him today. Someday yes, but not today. This is Christmas and today is about walking, keeping these dodgy hearts of ours ticking over; stories like that can hold for another time, for some night after hours when they’re really needed. Anthony’s mobile goes off in his pocket and he pulls it out and holds it to his ear.

‘Sound,’ he says, ‘about fifteen minutes.’ He turns to me. ‘Let’s speed it up, the dinner’s on the table.’

We pick up the pace for the final stretch, lengthening our stride and feeling the cold, sharp air reach down into the bottom of our lungs.