When I was a kid, and we lived in Rathrout, Ballinadee, dad used to work in the boatyard. I used to play around it, swallowing ball bearings and burying my vile candy floss (that I had begged to try and then rapidly regretted) in sandpits. My best friend Lee and I, used to hang with the bigger kids and jump off the boat launch and try to look brave.

We learned to play pool in Keoghan's bar, before we could see over the edge of the table, and gorged ourselves silly on Tayto crisps. Once, I even drank so much lucozade after a school sports day that it streamed out of my nose.

I remember my parents playing pool competitions while I sat on the windowsill in the tiny pool room. I remember whistling Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life' when stuck up there for hours, while eating blue smarties - which were subsequently outlawed for having evil dyes in the shells.

Good times. These days, no one visits the bar. The seats around the pool table are the same ones my Dad built in the 80s, there are still sparse walls, a Mother Mary hanging on the end wall, and just a Guinness Toucan, a Black and Whites whiskey mirror, and a pool cue rack.

A couple of the old characters still go there- the star of which is the mentally impaired Doaney, a pig farmer who still lives with his mother and tells us inappropriate tales of French prostitues on his first trip out of Ireland. He tells of giving one of the travellers in a nearby field a blowjob- "you have to get it where you can"... he grunts a lot and has been drinking out of the same glass for 40 years. Nelius sits behind the bar, austere, unsmiling, like Frakenstein carved from driftwood. Sylvie sits in the back room under Mother Mary, warm yet empty. The pair built a house up the road that took ten years to complete- they'll never move there and will probably always live in the one room annex to the bar.

Some things I never looked at, or noticed though- lie how beautiful Kilmac is in the evening, when the water is glassy and the air is thick.

Related tags:

reflection, river, kilmacsimon boat yard, keoghan's bar

Copyright info: