The Girl From Yesterday (10 page)

‘We had lunch when you was here, ’member?’

‘And you haven’t had lunch since then?’

Emma shook her head. I felt anger starting to prickle about the base of my neck.

‘Where’s your mum and dad?’ I asked. ‘Or even Jim or Winnie? You aren’t here all by yourself, are you?’

‘I don’t know where they are,’ she said. ‘What does that button do?’

She was pointing at the radio on the dashboard of the Austin.

‘That switches on the radio. Your dad has a jeep. It must have a radio.’

She shook her head.

I turned the switch and the radio lit up. I fiddled with it until I found a music station. Paul McCartney was singing ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’, from
The White Album
.

‘This is brilliant,’ I said. ‘Come on!’

I jumped out, leaving the door open, and opened her door too, scooping the child up in my arms.

‘When you have music like this, you have to dance,’ I said, and started singing and dancing along to the wonderful, silly song, skipping from foot to foot on the gravel and earth of the Blaney’s front yard. Emma giggled uncontrollably, clearly having the time of her life. Sir Paul and I sang about Desmond and Molly, their barrow in the marketplace, the band, Desmond’s proposal, their new home and their growing family, all punctuated by the infectious, nonsense chorus. The child learned the words to it quickly, and joined in with great gusto.

‘More, more!’ she begged when it was over.

‘You have to let me get my breath back for a second,’ I said. ‘Or maybe you can carry me for the next one.’

The next song was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’, which required more athletic boogying. I was in the middle of the first chorus when the Blaney parents pulled up in their aforementioned jeep. I waved, as did Emma. Tom, on the other hand, had a face like thunder, and the door open before his vehicle had even stopped.

‘What in the hell are you doin’ here?’

‘I came to see you, as it happens. When I couldn’t get an answer I thought you might be in another part of the house, which, of course, you weren’t, and when I got back to my car, this little one was sitting in the driver’s seat. You really shouldn’t leave her unattended, you know.’

‘Winnie was meant to be minding her!’

‘Winnie isn’t here,’ I said calmly.

‘And what is that god-awful music?’

‘That’s Creedence,’ I said. ‘I like it.’

‘I like it too,’ Emma said, which made him even more annoyed.

‘I have gone to great lengths to ensure that my children are not exposed to the dross that is pumped out by the media. And now you come along with your fancy car and your hitech radio and your modern music ’

I couldn’t but intercede at this juncture.

‘Hold on there just one cotton pickin’ moment!’ I said. ‘My
fancy car
is a vintage model, way older than your jeep. The radio is an original push button, hardly hi-tech, and the song you refer to as “modern music” dates back to 1969! I’m hardly bombarding the girl with the twenty-first century now, am I?’

Tom stuttered and stammered for a moment, clearly a bit blindsided by these facts. I put Emma down and tousled her hair.

‘I came out to tell you I’d been chatting to your brother, and I think I may have shamed him in to calling off his goons. But you seem to have things under control here.’

I walked back to the Austin and then turned back to Tom.

‘I got the impression your daughter there is hungry, that she might have missed some meals. Now, seeing as how you have more money than Santa Claus and the Count of Monte Cristo put together, I’m sure that has to be a mistake or an oversight.’ I waved at Emma and smiled when she waved back.

‘Bye bye sweetie. I enjoyed our dance very much.’

‘B’bye,’ she said.

I drove away cursing myself. I was worried I might have done more harm than good. But then, I was quite used to that.

The class listened closely. I had turned all the lights off except that which was thrown by the PowerPoint projector. On the board at the top of the room was the flickering image of a handsome, athletic-looking man in fatigues, carrying a camera. Gathered about him was a group of what looked like children but were, on closer examination, clearly adults of very small stature.

‘The Mbuti pygmy are one of the oldest indigenous populations in the world,’ I said. ‘They live in the Ituri forest, a tropical jungle covering about 70,000 square kilometres in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in what we used to call Zaire. The Mbuti have been about since at least the year 2500
BC
, when they were mentioned on an Egyptian stone tablet. Their lifestyle hasn’t changed much since then – they remain one of the few true hunter-gatherer groups in the world, and they still live in incredibly isolated communities deep in one of the most inhospitable jungles imaginable.’

I looked about me. All faces were attentive, rapt in concentration.

‘Despite all this, they are one of the most studied of all native peoples. Since that first Egyptian explorer came across them, the Mbuti have proven to be a very friendly, welcoming group. They warmly include outsiders into their homes and will happily talk about their lives and their ways. Sociologists have been spending time with them for almost a hundred years, now. I want you to imagine that you are a documentary maker, and have been asked to produce a programme on the Mbuti. The only way you can get to their village is by helicopter, after which you have to hike for several hours to get to the settlement proper. When that whirlybird takes off, you know you are all alone with the tribe until it comes back – probably in two months’ time. Until then, you have to fend for yourself as best you can.’

I stood and clicked the mouse to bring up another slide.

‘What do you think would be the main things you’d have trouble with,’ I asked. ‘In which areas would you struggle?’

I looked about the room and there, with her hand held aloft, was Gladys. Pleased, I nodded in her direction.

‘What do you reckon would be your greatest challenge, Gladys?’ I asked.

‘The biggest problem any of us is gonna have is that them little fellas ain’t real.’

I shook my head. I wasn’t following.

‘Who’s not real?’

‘Them little lads. They don’t really exist.’ This last statement said in a loud whisper, as if trying to break it to me gently.

‘Gladys, I assure you, there
is
such a thing as pygmies. They are very real. There are about 40,000 of them in the Ituri rainforest alone, so in the grander scheme of things they are quite successful.’

Gladys was shaking her head sadly, as if I had completely lost my mind.

‘He’ll be telling us leprechauns is real next,’ she said to the person next to her. ‘He must think we’re awfully thick.’

* * *

I had to run home at the break and get a book to prove to Gladys (and a few of the others who were beginning to believe her, so convincing were her protestations) that the Mbuti were a real people and not just a figment of my or anyone else’s imagination.

‘Jaysis,’ she said, poring over the photos in the book. ‘What next, eh? Is Bigfoot real too?’

Yet again, she had me stumped.

As I had not had time for a cup of coffee at the break, I left the class leafing through the book I had brought, and hurried up to grab a cup. As I spooned coffee into a cafetière, I heard steps behind me, and Carla, the pretty waitress from the café, came in.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked.

‘Um . . . no, actually,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure who I should talk to about this.’

‘Well, I’m here,’ I said. ‘Sit down. If I can help you, I will.’

Carla was as tall as me, slim, with thick dark hair and a fresh friendly face. She dressed in a hippyish style which I had noticed the younger people about Garshaigh tended to favour.

‘This is really embarrassing,’ she said, and passed her mobile phone over to me.

‘What do you want me to do with this?’ I asked, picking it up.

‘Read the message that’s on the screen.’

I touched the screen and it lit up. There was a short message there, and I did as she asked. It was the sort of message one person sends to another when they are in a very intimate relationship, and that person desires to get intimate again very soon. It made me blush.

‘Carla . . . I’m not sure why . . .’

‘That isn’t from my boyfriend,’ she said.

I looked up at her.

‘There are twenty others like it on my phone, all sent within the past two weeks. All from the same number.’

‘Have you or your boyfriend rung the number?’

‘No one ever answers.’

‘I think the thing to do would be to go to the police,’ I said. ‘You can get the number blocked. And they can probably have the owner traced.’

Carla laughed, cynically.

‘I know who’s doing it,’ she said.

‘You do?’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Who is it?’

‘That fucking
asshole
Jeff McKinney.’

‘The guy in the wheelchair?’

‘The very one.’

‘How’d he get your number?’

Carla laughed again.

‘I
gave
it to him. Sure he was always coming in and out of the café always alone. I felt sorry for the fucker. He started talking to me one day about some issue he said they were having with the service system in the hotel, and I gave him some advice, and before I knew it, he was asking for my number so he could call to clarify – and I didn’t think, I just wrote it on a napkin and gave it to him.’

‘Have you tried talking to him?’

‘No. I’d kill him if I did.’

‘What about your boyfriend?’

‘He doesn’t want to – he says if we ignore the problem, it’ll go away.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ I said. ‘He looks quite committed to the whole thing just now.’

‘It creeps me out,’ Carla said. ‘I feel like he’s been going through my things. I mean, I know he
hasn’t
but that’s how it feels.’

‘Do you want
me
to talk to him? I’d be happy to.’

She shook her head and patted the back of my hand.

‘No. I think I just needed to let off steam. To vent.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, yes really. Get your coffee. Let’s do some learning.’

I pushed the plunger and poured myself a cup.

‘Let’s do that,’ I said.

After class Gladys was at my desk again.

‘I’m sorry I gave ya a hard time there, Shane.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘I did say I wanted you to speak up if something was on your mind. I don’t mind being challenged. It shows you’re thinking.’

‘So why do I feel like an idiot then?’

‘I hope I didn’t make you feel that way,’ I said.

‘No. It’s just . . . I’m not a big reader, see? I haven’t looked at a book since I left school, and I don’t really watch the documentary channels a whole lot either. So stuff like you was talkin’ about, tribes and stuff – I don’t know about that.’

‘The class wasn’t really about the Mbuti,’ I said. ‘I used them as an example to get everyone thinking about the process of socialization – how we learn to behave within the communities where we live. I don’t expect anyone to walk out of here this evening thinking that they’ve spent the whole night being taught about pygmy lifestyle.’

‘Is there any books I can read?’ Gladys asked.

‘About what?’ I asked. ‘I can recommend loads of books, but they might not be about what you want.’

‘I don’t know – you were reading a book last time during the break. What was that about?’

I took the book from the shelf below my desk.

‘This is called
Dibs
and it’s about a little boy going to see a play therapist. It’s sort of a classic in the field of childcare. You can borrow it if you like.’

Dibs
is not a thick book, which is attractive if you’re a little bit afraid of reading. Gladys picked it up and turned it over in her hand, as if to read the blurb on the back.

‘Is it easy to read?’

‘Yeah. The author, a woman called Virginia Axline, gets a bit flowery at times, but in the main it’s easy enough. It should only take a few sittings to get it finished.’

Gladys looked nervously at the print, which was quite small.

‘I don’t know. I’m not good with books.’

‘You asked me, Gladys,’ I said. ‘I’m not trying to force it on you. And there is no onus on you to take it anyway. I won’t think any less of you if you decide to give it a miss.’

The woman chewed her lower lip, flicked through the pages as if speed-reading them, then in a surge of movement tossed the book back at me and darted away from the desk and out the door of the room. I sat where I was, convinced that I must have done something to bring on that kind of behaviour. When I couldn’t work out what it was, I got up and went home.

The girl looked at me with a strange expression.

‘Wha’ you talkin’ bout?’

‘Okay, let’s start again,’ I said. ‘You just asked me a question about butterflies. I don’t know the answer.’

‘You don’ know?’

‘No, I don’t. But, see, what I
can
do is, when I go home, I can switch on my computer and ask
it
the question, and it will find out the answer for me.’

‘What a compoother?’

‘It’s a machine that is linked up to millions and millions of people all over the world, and it can look in lots and lots of different books and files until it finds the answer to your question, and then it brings it back to me. And it does all this in about three seconds.’

‘How?’

‘It’s really, really fast.’

‘You see it runnin’ ’round?’

‘No. The answer is sent down the telephone wires – sort of . . .’

‘So it’s really, really small?’

‘Um . . . no . . . it’s like as big as a book. Maybe a little bigger.’

‘How it fit in the wire then?’

‘No, you plug the wire into it.’

‘It have books inside it?’

‘In a way, yes.’

‘Why not jus’ look for de answer in a book den?’

I had to admit, she had a point.

It was seven o’clock in the evening and I had put in a long day at the newspaper offices. I had written yards of column inches on topics as diverse as local government elections, potholes, a dog show in the community centre, the price of heating oil, potholes, another meeting of the anti-development protesters, a lady in Garshaigh who was having her ninety-ninth birthday, and potholes. I was locking up the door to the street when I felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to find two of the men who had tried (and failed) to intimidate Tom Blaney.