‘I get the twelve o’clock to Boyle station. It gets in 12.33 p.m.’

‘Take tiny little bites, would it?’

The man grinds and bites with his teeth rapidly – he gnashes, and he aims a sharp smile at Donie.

‘Will we go for a walk so?’ he says.

Donie with all the force he can muster wrenches his hand free and rises from the bench to go. The man is up as quickly, and as he walks beside Donie, he places a hand softly on his lower back, and he whispers super-fast the bad words now.

‘Do you know what I’ll do to you when I see you down here again …’ is how it begins but the rest is lost to the high-vaulted pitch of Donie’s screech. The screech is held as a shield against the words. But the man just gently shushes.

‘Easy now, honey-child,’ he says.

The man stops suddenly, and Donie feels the hand lift from his back, and he feels the dread of the pause, and now there is a piston jerk of force from opened palm to small of back, and the man sticks a leg out to trip Donie as he flails forward, and he is sprawled on the pathway by the riverside and there are people all about, but nobody comes forward to help. Donie knows they think it’s just mad fellas fighting.

He is on the ground and the man is for a moment above him, is blocking out the sky, and he leans down close.

‘Hyena,’ he says, and walks away.

All is thrown out for Donie now as he goes through the tight streets of Sligo town. He does not stop today to look at the equipment in the mountaineering shop, and usually that is a fifteen-minute dream for Donie, a dream of crampons and frost-in-the-beard and great snowy peaks. He does not today say hello to the wood carver. He does not count the paving slabs through the arcade shortcut.

An hour is lost to trembles on the platform. And he is sat on the twelve o’clock train now but he misses its departure utterly as the eyes of the hyena burn into him. He misses Collooney and the climb to Ballymote. He has no joke for the inspector. The high land of the south county; hyena. The lost shack, and he does not today fantasise the happy family that once lived there. Boyle station; hyena.

‘What’s up with you, Donie?’

A kind man notes the distress and says the words on Elphin Road in the town of Boyle but Donie does not stop to talk to him. He does not go to Supervalu for the bag of six donuts. He goes straight back to the terrace.

The sun has come out. It is a pure white screech of sun. He hurries along the row of houses as familiar as the mouth-feel of his own teeth and he must squint into the sun, into the light, and the feeling does not break and it will not ease – hyena – until the door of the house opens for him, and it does so, and she steps outside, the moment timed to his arrival, her silhouette against the glare of the sun, mother-shaped.