With his bloodshot eyes and his hammering heart! Doctor Sot hurried the beer, and he would leave the sandwich uneaten on the plate. He needed five minutes before surgery for the business with the mouthwash and the gum. His hurry would carve out another five for the call to the Health Board. As he downed the last of his beer, pain ripped the back of his skull. He went to the sink to block the wince from her. He squinted out and up to the white sky. The usual great wingéd creatures were taking shape for him up there. He turned quickly again to Sal.

‘Service!’ he cried. ‘What ever happened to the notion of serving the people?’

‘You know what, sweetness?’

Sal’s mouth shaped with awe as she grasped the brilliance of his idea.

‘It could be just the thing for you! Take you out of yourself!’

Whatever this heroically complicated husband came up with was fine with Sally. She quickly forgot the details of his frequent and disastrous adventures. Before he had even reached the phone in the hallway’s nook, she was deep in the pink sofa and in the tale of her Tulsa-bound maniac: he was snacking on innards as he zoomed along the blacktop.

‘Obviously, Carl, we’re delighted you’d volunteer.’

‘I’m sensing a but,’ said Doctor Sot.

This Mahoney fellow at the Health Board was easy enough to read. All he wanted for Outreach was the young guns with the big grins and the surfer hair. Sot raged:

‘Thirty-five years of experience! And I offer it up to you! I am offering, Mr Mahoney, to take part in your bloody Outreach programme. Just like you asked!’

‘Carl, it was only a circular. Just a general call for volunteers. This was three months ago and really we’ve got it sorted now? All the halting sites are serviced. The seminars for the community centre are looked after. I’ve a couple of lads who’ve …’

‘And our new-age travellers?’ said Doctor Sot. ‘Who’s providing Outreach there?’

‘You mean the crowd above on … Slieve Bo?’

That had him. Mahoney had to admit that the new-age travellers had not, in fact, been added to the Outreach list.

‘Animals, are they, Mr Mahoney?’

‘Oh I mean they’d qualify, I suppose, at least if they’re receiving benefits but …’

‘But but but, Mr Mahoney!’

It was agreed by sighing Mahoney that the new-age travellers would be assessed to see if they qualified for Outreach.

‘In the meantime,’ said Doctor Sot, ‘it’d be no harm, surely, to go up there and show a friendly face? Just to introduce oneself? Maybe a few leaflets about nutrition? About chlamydia, that type of thing?’

‘Whatever you think, Carl,’ said Mahoney.

It was Doctor Sot’s experience that the longer he stayed on the phone to people, the more he got what he wanted.

His surgery ran from noon until two. It was as slow as it always was now. Only the old and fatalistic still patronised the O’Connor practice. The lady of the Knotts whose twin had died in the winter was in about the voices again but the voices had turned benevolent and she was less disturbed than she had been. Ellie Troy had that grey, heart-sick look but she was seventy-two now and she’d had the grey, heart-sick look since she was forty: it was a slow death for poor Ellie. It was the weather for sore throats, Doctor Sot told Bird Magahy. His own headaches weren’t so bad during surgery and he was careful not to gaze out towards the white sky. Skies and mirrors – these were the fields of his visions, and oh, the strangenesses that he saw; hallucinations, yes, but no easier to handle for that. Last into surgery was Tom Feeney, the crane driver.