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.

‘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.