“…and then I switched to the rum and Cokes. That was at last call, right, Lar?”

Minogue eyed Lar who gave him a tired smile and shrugged.

“So then we were sort of wondering where we’d go, you know? I was all on for getting a burger. Remember, Lar?”

Minogue scratched at his scalp with his pencil and stared out over the man’s head into the shadows beyond the lock. He remembered stopping the car by the canal bank some weeks ago to eye a nearly completed block of apartments by Percy Place. Sharp, aggressive corners, he recalled; windows in odd places and green-shaded glass; a lot of industrial-looking metalwork. Within a mile of where he now stood, the canal emptied into the docks where the River Liffey met Dublin Bay. Few craft came inland through those locks any more. Barges which had ferried Guinness and turf were decades disappeared from the canal, and aside from the few pleasure craft, the trickle of passenger traffic on the canal came from sporadic efforts to restore barges enough to get a licence to run cruise-and-booze trips between locks.

Episodic clean-ups had dredged up disheartening and marvellous tons of scrap from the canal. A youth group had found a 1957 Triumph motorbike in the canal some years ago and restored it to working order. A badly rusted rifle thought to have been thrown in during the Civil War had been placed in the museum. More people decried the degradation of the canal year by year. Something would have to be done. Minogue noted the same words cropping up in the Letters to the Editor: architectural rape; heritage; dastardly. There had been a symposium on the rebirth of the canal system, proposals of strict controls on planning permission, keen talk of demolishing some of the grosser buildings, of a rebirth.