The Girl From Yesterday (4 page)

‘I’ll take it,’ I said, and we shook.

The school and the newspaper were to be my life for the next two years.

Millie and I stayed at the hotel for another week, which is as long as it took me to find us a small bungalow at the coast end of Garshaigh. Jeff McKinney watched from the window of the bar as I packed our meagre belongings into the Austin. I half expected to see him hanging about outside our new lodgings, but he was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen.

It took me all of forty-five minutes to move in, after which I sat in the kitchen at the rickety chipboard table the landlord had thoughtfully provided and wrote a list of all the things I would now have to buy to make our new residence even semi-functional – most of these missing items I had, of course, left behind when I fled my previous home. This made me feel not a little bit ridiculous, but that was something I was getting more and more used to the older I got, so I shoved the sensation aside and just got on with it.

The house had a tiny garden: a postage-stamp-sized patch of grass surrounded by a sturdy, high wooden fence, so I left Millie to sunbathe out there while I went and bought most of the odds and ends on my list, as well as enough groceries to stock up the fridge and make the place seem a little bit more accommodating. When this was all done I sat on the couch in the Spartan living room and looked at the wall. It looked back. I knew that I should get up and do something – maybe go for a walk, or take my instruments out and give them a clean, perhaps change some strings.

I knew I should, but I just couldn’t work up the impetus to move. So I didn’t.

I opened my eyes some time later and knew from the texture of light that it was getting towards evening. I had slept most of the day, and felt sluggish and slightly ill. As I shifted on the lumpy couch I realized that my phone was ringing – it was clearly what had woken me. I stood up awkwardly and stumbled into the empty, detergent-smelling kitchen, catching the call just before it went to voicemail.

‘Mr Dunphy.’ The words were barked into the phone almost like an accusation. In my still sleep-addled state, I almost recoiled in shock.

‘Uh . . . um . . . who is this please?’

‘George Taylor. I’m calling about your night classes.’

I recalled the grey man who ran the local secondary school.

‘Oh, yes. Of course. How can I help you Mr Taylor?’

‘I have some paperwork for you – your syllabus, students, a calendar for the year – school holidays and such. I thought you might wish to come by and pick them up.’

‘What time is it?’ I asked, realizing that I usually used my phone to check the hour, and that it was pressed to my ear.

‘It is a quarter to five almost precisely. I’m here for another fifteen minutes. After that I will be convening to my bridge club.’

‘Bridge?’ My brain was still not really performing to par.

‘The game of the cultured man, wouldn’t you agree?’

I paused for a moment. I didn’t know much about bridge, other than it having some vague connection in my head with the actor Omar Sharif.

‘I’ll come right over,’ I said, finally, deciding not to pursue the bridge conversation any further. ‘Thanks for waiting.’

He hung up without further ado, or the nicety of a ‘goodbye’. I, however, did extend the courtesy to Millie, who repaid it by sneezing noisily and then curling up in the warm spot I had just vacated on the couch. Maybe I could learn something from George Taylor.

He did not get up when I was shown in to his office. The desk he sat behind was an enormous, oaken affair with various files, books and odds and ends organized carefully along the edge. Probably alphabetically, or by date, perhaps. Without looking up from the page he was reading, a red pen poised in his right hand, he gestured with his left at a chair by the wall. It wasn’t in front of the desk, but slightly to the side, as if the occupant was not meant to be the centre of attention – more an afterthought. But there was nowhere else to sit, and I didn’t fancy standing awkwardly while my new boss decided he was ready to speak to me, so I did as instructed and twiddled my thumbs.

‘Your references are all very good, Mr Dunphy,’ George Taylor said, his head still bowed to his work.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I use them. I have found that being bad-mouthed by former employers does not serve me well when job hunting.’

George Taylor’s head rose slowly to look at me.

‘Are you mocking me, Mr Dunphy?’

I grinned.

‘Mr Taylor, I have the unseemly habit of finding myself amusing from time to time. When this happens, I tend to feel the need to share my humorous observations with those around me. Please forgive me.’

Taylor blinked, as if what I had just said had been in a foreign language.

‘Well . . . yes . . . quite. A gentleman named Benjamin Tyrrell whom I spoke to said you could be a bit of a wit.’

‘Ben said I could be a bit of a wit?’

‘Those were not his exact words.’

‘No?’

‘I believe he said you could be a “pain in the arse” and that you “thought yourself far funnier than you were”. He also said you were one of the most talented people he had ever worked with.’

‘Well, the first part sounds like him.’

George Taylor put down his pen and opened a drawer, taking out a thick grey cardboard folder. He handed it to me.

‘The course we run here is the standard professional qualification in childcare – the FETAC Level 5 certificate. This contains eight modules, four of which you will teach the groups this year, four next year. Starting one week from today, you will commence tutoring your students in Child Development, Professional Practice in Childcare, Physical Care of the Child and Early Childhood Education. The remaining four will be addressed in the following academic year.’

‘Seems pretty straightforward,’ I said.

‘You will find the syllabi for all modules in your folder, as well as the names of your students, broken down into two classes, one which you will take from 7 until 9.30 on a Tuesday evening, one for the same duration on a Thursday. The classrooms you will be using are detailed therein, and you will also see that I have included a map of the building and its surrounding grounds. Any support equipment you may need – photocopiers, computers, computer disks, whiteboard markers and dusters – is available here, and you have a list of where to locate everything in your pack too. Tea, coffee and a selection of biscuits will be available in the staffroom on your first evening, but the usual custom is for staff to operate a kitty to keep supplies replenished.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Do you have any questions, Mr Dunphy?’

‘You have made everything admirably clear,’ I said. ‘Is there anything further you would like to ask me?’

‘Would you consider cutting your hair and shaving your beard? If you pardon my saying so, you do not look like a teacher, and the school has a reputation to uphold.’

I smiled. I had wondered if this was going to come up. The older I got, the less often people took offence at my appearance, but George Taylor struck me as a big fish in a very small pond. He was used to being the headmaster, not just of the school, but of the entire town – I would be prepared to bet good money that he had either taught or been principal to three-quarters of the people living in Garshaigh. I was under no illusions that he was only taking me on out of desperation. I would never have been his first choice, a blow-in who had never been a pupil in his school and chose to affect such a shameful, scruffy appearance.

‘You know, Mr Taylor, because you have been through my CV with a fine-tooth comb, that I have had a long career, working for many different agencies, often at management level. I have looked like this since I was in college, give or take some grey hairs and a few spare pounds. I’m a good teacher. I can assure you that your students will be happy and well informed. But no, sir, I will not be going to the barbers, nor will I be taking a razor to my whiskers. You recruit me to the staff of your night school and you do so despite my appearance, windswept and interesting though it may be.’

George Taylor sighed deeply.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, I cannot be condemned for raising the issue. I may raise it again at a future juncture.’

‘The result will be the same,’ I said. ‘And if we are to be working together, would you please call me Shane?’

The grey man nodded briskly. ‘So be it. You may continue calling me Mr Taylor. Now, I must away to my bridge club. If you have any difficulties, please call me immediately. It is essential we make a good impression on the first night. Mature students can be very difficult.’

‘I’ll be sure to do so,’ I said as he ushered me out the door, closing it behind me and taking his leave once again without a goodbye or a thank you. Shaking my head in exasperation, I walked back to my new home through the growing shadows of the early evening.

The girl was sitting beside me on a bank of grass overlooking a field of buttercups. We were reading a storybook,
Beauty and the Beast
, although I was doing all the reading. My companion contributed by commenting on the pictures.

‘Her gots a
beautiful
dress. Lookie that. Is blue, that dress.’

I had noticed she seemed to have only the one dress, of indistinct grey/white.

‘Do you like blue dresses?’

‘I like blue an’ red an’ lellow an’ pink an’ green’ an’ purpural an’ norange an’ . . . an all dem colours!’

‘Why don’t you ask your mum or dad to get you one?’

‘Daddy says you shouldn’ oughta spend you money. Tha’s how you keep whats you got an’ gets more.’

‘By never buying anything?’

‘Show me nudder picture.’

I turned over the page. The Beast, who looked like a cross between a goat and an ape, was leering at the terrified Beauty. He was dressed in a black cape and a pair of dark leggings.

‘Him scary,’ the girl observed.

‘He is. But sometimes he’s nice, isn’t he? See, here, Beauty has gone into a room she’s been told not to. So I think he’s mad. He has been nice to her though, mostly.’

The girl ran her finger gently over the picture.

‘Maybe there a Good Beast an’ a Bad Beast.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I know someone like dat.’

‘Do you?’

‘Show me nudder picture!’

Robert Chaplin was driving his 1990 Volkswagen Golf down a narrow country lane that looked to me as if it hadn’t seen much traffic for a very long time.

‘The Blaneys are well known around Garshaigh,’ he said, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip as if it were stuck on. ‘Tom Blaney, the paterfamilias, is the next to last in a line of thugs, gangsters and dodgy dealers going back to the fucking Norman invasion. He still has ideas about himself and his entitlements, but he is about the only person hereabouts who does. Tom is built like a shithouse wall and has about as much charm. He is ignorant, low minded, vicious and evil, and he would think absolutely nothing of beating you to a pulp and dumping you in a bog hole somewhere. He doesn’t look like much, Shane, but please, take my word for it: do not under-estimate him, and never turn your back on him.’

‘He
did
invite us out here, didn’t he?’ I asked as a wide field of corn opened up to my left.

‘He did, but that means nothing,’ Chaplin said.

‘You said he was the next to last in his familial line.’

‘I did. The Blaneys have always had money, and lots of it. It came here from England and France in the warships that brought Strongbow and his people here a thousand years ago.’

‘You think their money’s that old?’

‘I know it is. I’m the editor of a local newspaper in a small town in which almost nothing of gravity ever happens. One of the few interesting things for a hack like me to do is Blaney watching. I’ve spent a long time researching them, and I can assure you, my young friend, their money still has sand on it from the fucking crusades.’

‘So Tom is rich.’

‘No. Well, sort of, I suppose. See all this land?’

I glanced about. We were driving through a huge expanse of what seemed to be farmland, although most of it was lying fallow, generally untended and overgrown.

‘I see it.’

‘This is all Tom’s. Fifty acres. He inherited the lot – it was granted to the Blaneys in one of the early medieval charters and has never been out of their coffers.’

‘It doesn’t look like it’s being treated with love, exactly,’ I observed.

‘Tom is not a great farmer. And over the past ten years or so he has developed some strange ways.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You’ll see. I don’t want to ruin it for you.’

The lane wound on through the flat landscape, sometimes punctuated by a grove of trees or a standing stone. At times I could see the ocean, and with the window rolled down slightly I could smell it, too, a sharp undercurrent of salt behind the wind. It was a wild, untouched kind of place, and I did not find it difficult to imagine medieval farmers tending the land with huge, shaggy cattle lumbering about them, tearing the tough scutch grass from the ground with flat, blunt teeth.

‘And Tom and his family live out here?’ I said. ‘We’re at least a mile from the road to town.’

‘Closer to two,’ Chaplin said. ‘You’re gonna be walking for an hour if you want to get back to civilization. But Tom rarely does. Here we are.’

We rounded a corner and there, rising out of the earth like a monolith was a huge, brown stone house that seemed to grow out of the harsh country rather than having been built by human hands. The roof, once made of red slate, had over the years sprouted a healthy crop of moss which was now green and glistening. Here and there patches of high reeds reached skywards as if they were waiting for someone to pull them free. The structure itself looked as if it had been built in various stages over many hundreds of years – one corner looked as if it was an original Norman castellum, and was now all but in ruins. Other wings could have dated from any time during the past two centuries, windows seemingly punched into the walls with little or no thought as to how the external facade would look. Some blocks of the construction were a good four floors in height, while others were one. I spied a gate opening onto a flight of stairs running below ground, and surmised that the dwelling also had some subterranean rooms.