Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

There are wolves in our valley — this is what Doctor Sot knew. We do not know when they will attack us but attack us they surely will, with their hackles heaped and drool sheering from between their yellow teeth. The careful study of sickness had taken a great toll and weakened him but just a moment’s view of the young woman had lifted him again to his calling, and Doctor Sot wasn’t back across the White Lady’s River before he had a plan formed.

The tinkers, those older travellers, held that the river’s crossing was here auspicious because on the bank by the hump-back bridge was a may tree hundreds of years old and Doctor Sot, who would take all the luck from the world that he could get, whistled again his three notes as he crossed back into the town. His home and practice was on a neat terrace of greystone. It had been bought cheaply in the long-gone heyday of his practice. Having come from less — his persevering mother had put him in the university out of a council house — Doctor Sot enjoyed still the mild grandeur of his address. The three stone steps that led up to his door, the nine-panel fanlight above it, the fine parquet blocking of his hallway’s floor, the blocks faded by the length of the years they had lived here; these were details that he greatly enjoyed. There was a bright, clean patch on the wall where a large gilt-edged mirror had lately been removed.

‘Oh adieu! Yes adieu! Oh adieu all my false-hearted looooves!’ sang Doctor Sot as he tap-danced through to the back kitchen, one hand flapping a minstrel’s wave, the other clasping the satchel. Sal, in her gown, flushed and chortled at the sight of him — the only illusion of permanence is that which is finagled by love. She threw down her serial killer novel and bounced up from the small pink sofa by the stove.

‘You’ll never guess!’ she cried. ‘He’s only taken the head and buried it in the desert!’

‘This is the prostitute he met at the truckstop?’

‘One and the same,’ she whispered. ‘Had the head in his fridge but it started to stink.’

‘Neighbours might be alerted, Sal.’

‘He’s making a move to be on the safe side,’ she said. ‘He’s headed for Tulsa. Ham sandwich, lovie?’

‘It would fill a hole, Sal.’

‘Your glass of beer with it?’

‘Might take the fear of God off me.’

They embraced. Sot was stick and bone, Sally was hot and pink and fleshy.

‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I’ve a bit of a rush on. I need to make a call before surgery.’

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘A call?’

She was already slicing the batch loaf. There weren’t many calls these days.

‘Health Board,’ he said.

She opened the fridge for the ham, the butter, the can of Smithwick’s. Happy as a duck she was, unshakable from her good humour, and of the opinion that her husband, if anything, grew more marvellous with every passing year.

‘They’re giving you gip again, dear-heart?’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s just I’ve had a think about this Outreach programme.’

He sipped from the glass of beer she handed to him. He rubbed nervously a frayed tweed elbow.

‘But they can’t force you, Carl?’

‘Of course not, my light. It’s just I’ve thought maybe I was a little quick to rule it out … Maybe I should, you know, give something back?’

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.

‘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.