She stuck her head out the bender’s slit and tugged at Doctor Sot’s arm so that he did the same.

‘Chicken wire,’ she said. ‘I’ve closed off space between pallets, haven’t I? Means no rat run.’

‘There’s peace of mind in that, Mag.’

They had cake. She showed him in detail her equations. Mag, he learned, was involved in divining the true nature of time and memory. She believed that each of these ungraspable entities ran in arcs, and that the arcs bent away from each other. She had concluded this after long study of her staked willow branches. The diverging nature of these arcs was the source of all our ills. She might be onto something there, thought Doctor Sot. He wasn’t sure where she was getting the figures for her equations from. Perhaps they were being carried to Slieve Bo in the talons of the great wingéd creatures.

‘Do you take medication at all, Mag?’

‘Poisons? Hardly,’ she said.

‘Nip of this, Mag?’

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Don’t agree with me.’

They sat beside each other with their backs to the shale. She drew up a blanket over her striped legs and offered him some of it. He took a piece and raised it to his face to smell it. It was the smell of a child’s blanket: stale rusk and hot milk.

‘Do you sleep, Mag?’

‘In daylight more so,’ she said.

But after a time her eyes did close. Doctor Sot slid a hand from beneath the blanket and lightly, very lightly, he laid it against her face. He felt the tiny fires that burned there beneath her skin. Her lashes were unspeakably lovely as they lay closed over her light sleep. If Doctor Sot could draw into his palm these tiny fires and place them with his own, he happily would.

Down in the valley the blackbirds were singing against the winter dark. The White Lady’s River ran calmly beneath the hump-back bridge and past the may tree whose blossom would in late spring protect us. The town slept, but in the back kitchen of the terrace house he knew that Sally was on her pink sofa yet. Dear Sal – her gown, her grin, her mad thyroidal eyes. She rose from the sofa and went calmly on a tour of the house. She flowed through the house. For fear that he would get back early, she would lay cloths now over all the mirrors in the house.

The Girls and the Dogs

THE GIRLS AND THE DOGS