Why, Donie demands, when the train has had a full eight minutes to wait on the platform, can it not leave precisely at the appointed time of its schedule?

‘There is no call for it,’ he says.

And it is not as if his watch is out – no fear – for he checks it each morning against the speaking clock. The speaking clock is a state-run service; it surely cannot be wrong. If it was, the whole system would be thrown out.

The train climbs to the high ground outside Boyle. He rides the ascent into the Curlew mountains, and he whistles past the graveyard. The judder and surge of the engine is its usual excitement and he tries to forget the anxiety of Boyle station, but it recedes slowly as tide. Now the broken-down stone walls of the old rising fields. Now the mournful cows still wet from the dew and night’s drizzle. Now the greenish tone of the galvanised tin roof on the lost shack. The spits of rain against the window, and the high looming of the Bricklieves on a mid-distant rise, north-westerly, a smooth-cut limestone plateau.

He was allowed to make the journey first on the morning of his sixteenth birthday. This is now the twentieth year of his riding the Boyle–Sligo leg, all the working days of the week, all the weeks of the year. It is Donie’s belief that if he is not on the 9.33 train, the 9.33 will not run, and who is there to say otherwise?

And distantly, now, the iridescence of the lakes, a vapourish glow rising beyond the hills, and the father is dead of the knees. The father was a great walker and he walked five miles daily a loop of the Lough Key forest park, among the ferns and the ancient oaks, across the fairy bridge and back again. Then the knees went on the father – the two simultaneously – and he could walk no more.

‘Oh I have a predicament now,’ he would say from the armchair, looking out at Boyle; the slow afternoons.

The weight piled up on the father quickly. He turned into a churn of butter on the armchair. He took a heart attack inside the year.

‘My father,’ Donie tells people, ‘died of a predicament of the knees.’

The high land of the south county. The approach to Ballymote. He names the fields for the elder, the yellow iris (the flags), the dog rose. Past the hill of Keash – a marker – and it is 9.45 a.m. on the nose, the lost seconds have been regained; the breath runs easily the length of Donie again. High above the treetops the tower of the castle of Ballymote appears, it is worried this morning by rooks, the rooks blown about on the fresh summer breezes; the rooks are at their play up there. Two elderly ladies wait on the Ballymote platform and Donie knows they are for the Sligo hospital – he can see the sickness in them; they are gaunt and drawn from its creeping spread.