‘It’s the man below, Doctor O’Connor.’

‘Do you mean, Tom …’

‘I do.’

‘He mightn’t be doing all you’d require of him?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘No?’

‘It’s the opposite of that.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m in a state,’ the sixty-year-old crane man said, ‘of constant excitement.’

Doctor Sot prescribed a week’s Valium and the taking up of a new hobby. He was in the back kitchen by five past two, kissing Sal, and telling her he was away on a mission.

‘Outreach, Sal!’

‘Bloody hell they’ve snapped you up quick enough!’

‘I’ll be back for the tea surely.’

‘Careful how you go, honeybob!’

Over the bridge, a three-note whistle, and the main road he turned off for a side road. The side road became a boreen. The boreen as he climbed became track. Track became narrower track, and it turned onto a rutted half-track. It was like a path animals had trampled down. Suddenly space opened out on all sides and Doctor Sot steered his Megane through the air but she laboured, Elizabeth. The high country had its own feeling. Ascending into the iron-grey of its colours as the afternoon light fatted up, Doctor Sot was alerted to the different intensities of these greys and shale tones. Austere from below, they were radiant when you were up and among them. The higher reaches of the mountain were now everywhere open to him, the turloughs glistened coldly in the valley below, the gorse was seared to its winter bronze. The half-track hairpinned, and the travellers’ camp was announced by a sudden assault of skinny dogs.

‘Easy, Liz,’ said Doctor Sot, as he steered the old girl through the dogs.

The camp was sheltered by a great outcrop of shale. High and wind-blown were the voices of perhaps a dozen shaven-headed children (their voices travelled) and as many again were the skinny dogs. The grown travellers skulked in the rearground, and were watchful; they came nearer. The children and dogs surrounded Doctor Sot as he climbed from the Megane. The ground was hard-packed underfoot, brittle and flinty; the frost wouldn’t think to lift up here for months at a time. The children were pin-eyed and unpleasantly lively. The dogs might have been alien dogs, so skinny and yellow-skinned and long-headed they were, like bad-dream dogs, and they pawed him madly.

‘Ah down off me now please! For the love of God!’

He might have landed in far Namibia such was the foreignness of things. There was something that resembled a teepee. Inside it was a generator, juddering. Sinister crows were present in numbers. There were rough shelters made with lengths of tarpaulin and these were strewn around a copse of trees by the outcrop’s base. There was a horse trailer with a smoking chimney. The distressed van of rainbow colours was parked beside it. There was a pair of old rusted caravans. The young chap who had earlier driven the van came through the barking children and the laughing dogs.

‘S’about?’ he said.

‘Doctor Carl O’Connor!’ cried Doctor Sot. ‘North Western Health Board!’