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!’

‘Oh yeah? I’m Joxie.’

‘Outreach!’ cried Doctor Sot. ‘Welcome to Slieve Bo … Joxie?’

The young man swept back his mass of braided hair and arranged it away from his face. He was sharp-featured, sallow, bemused.

‘I’m here about the nutrition,’ said Doctor Sot. ‘I’m here about the sex diseases.’

‘You jus’ piss yerself?’ said Joxie.

More adults came forward. They swatted the children and kicked the dogs. A forest of braided hair sprang up around Doctor Sot but the beautiful young woman was not to be seen. He shielded his crotch with his satchel. Indeed there had been a tiny seepage.

‘Aim of the Outreach programme,’ he explained, ‘is to bring the, ah … the services … to …’

He should have boned up on the stuff in the leaflets. He should have learned some of the lingo. But the travellers smiled at him regardless. They were not unwelcoming. Their accents were mostly English, the burr of them specifically south-western.

‘Devon, so happens,’ said Joxie.

He poured for Doctor Sot a cup of green tea. They were now in back of the horse trailer by a wood-burning stove. The young man’s full title, it emerged, was Joxie The Rant.

‘Rant, Joxie? Why so?’

‘’Coz I get a rant on,’ he said. ‘A ranter, yeah?’

‘Do him a rant, Jox!’

‘Bit early, is it no?’