The Girl From Yesterday (6 page)

‘These intruders,’ I said. ‘Have you been frightened by them?’

‘I haven’t seen any,’ she said. ‘I’m inside the house mostly, but Tom has seen them, and so have the kids. It scares me that they’re out there, looking to do us harm.’

‘What have they threatened to do?’

‘To hurt us.’

‘How?’

She paused, drying up a mug.

‘I don’t really know. Tom has been dealing with them.’

I continued to wash the cutlery in the virtually cold water.

‘And would you like to move? Sell up?’

She sighed and leaned her back against the draining board. She was about ten years younger than her husband and seemed educated. I got the sense that a lot of the joy in life had been taken from her.

‘When I married Tom, I knew I was marrying a Blaney. He was quite a catch in those days. But of course I had no idea what I was getting myself in to. I thought I was going to get a nice chunk of money and land and maybe a little respect locally. But sure he’s the ‘weird’ brother. The strange one. Gerry, he would have been the
real
catch, but sure I was a fool. I’ll be straight with you – I hate this house, I hate the land and I’m none too fond of the Blaney legacy, neither. It’s brought me nothing but pain. Would I sell up? You’d better believe I would, in a heartbeat.’

‘But all the history . . .’

‘When I got married first, I tried to go through all the papers. There are literally rooms and rooms of them out back. I spent months on it, and I thought Tom would be thrilled. You know what he told me? He said the legacy, the history, is all in his head and in his heart. He didn’t need any documents or papers to preserve it.’

We finished the washing up in silence. I wanted to take a walk around the land, but I was well aware that if I did and someone showed up intent on intimidating the family I could not be contacted – I was the only one with a mobile phone.

‘Your house is really amazing,’ I said as we put the last mug away. ‘Is it as old as it looks?’

‘The first section was built in the twelfth century,’ Dora said, ‘or so Tom says. It’s been added on to in dribs and drabs since then as various Blaneys decided they required extra space. To be honest, we only live in the living room, which you’ve seen, the kitchen, and three bedrooms directly above. The rest is in a fair state of disarray. It drives Tom nuts, but then, he isn’t prepared to clean it.’

‘Can I have a look around? I’m kind of a history buff.’

‘If you want to.’

‘I won’t poke about. I just think the building is really unique.’

‘Oh, it’s surely that all right.’

I spent the next hour wandering about what proved to be a much bigger superstructure than I had at first realized. I had a vague sense as I passed from one ruined ramshackle section to another of the time frames they had been built in, but only in a very loose way. The rooms currently occupied seemed to have been finished in the 1960s or thereabouts, and adjoining these was a series I reckoned dated back to the 1880s – at this stage it seemed the Blaneys were less concerned about the onslaught of technology as, on an old office stand, I found an ancient wireless radio. In this part of the house also were outlets for gas lamps still attached to the walls. Black and white photographs showed faces with strong familial likenesses to Tom and the children: a man leaning against a plough, another with his arm about the neck of a huge horse; a sad-eyed woman in a ball gown gazing into the camera, a swarthy, heavily moustached man beside her; a child of indeterminate gender dressed in what looked like a white dress, his/her arm resting on a spaniel dog. I found an attic room filled with toys of varying ages, children’s annuals dating back to the Victorian era and a pianoforte that was at least 200 years old and desperately out of tune. In one of the basements, using the light from my fancy new phone, I found an old church, complete with rows of pews, an altar made from rocks taken from the wild fields about the house itself and a huge crucifix above the stone table carved from local bog oak, burnished by hand.

Finally I came out into the section that was the oldest, clearly an ancient castle house built by the Blaney who’d sailed here with his mercenary colleagues back in the days when Celtic tribes still walked the land hereabouts and the Vikings had just settled in my own native Wexford. I stood on the second floor, which was just about safe, made as it was of thick wooden planks set into grooves in the stone. One of the windows had started to crumble at the edge, creating a large hole through which I could see the land right down to the sea. I took a deep breath, feeling the wind on my face. It was pleasant after spending so long in the dust and dark of the ruined estate. A soft footfall made me turn, and there was Emma, the blonde, ringleted youngest of the family.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Have you been following me?’

The little girl nodded.

‘For long?’

No reaction to that. Just wide eyes as she leaned against the rough stone of the doorway.

‘You live in a strange and beautiful place, Emma,’ I said. ‘All this space and so much history. Your family have lived and worked and played and died on this very spot for close to a thousand years.’

‘It is . . . who we are,’ the little voice was quiet and halting, but I could make out what she said very clearly.

‘It is who you are,’ I repeated, turning to her. ‘Does your dad say that?’

She nodded, seemingly embarrassed by having spoken.

‘Well, I reckon that is a very good way of thinking about it. This place
is
who you are in a lot of ways.’

Emma, in tiny, skittering steps, came from the door to stand beside me.

‘Where is the place that is who you are?’ she asked as we both gazed out over her homestead.

I laughed.

‘D’you know what, sweetie? I have no idea.’

She tutted and shook her head.

‘Your home!’ she said. ‘Where is that?’

She had little accent, but her voice had a sweet, musical quality that was very pleasant to listen to. In the light of early afternoon, I could see that beneath the mop of hair she was extremely pretty.

‘Right now my home is a rather horrible little house in Garshaigh. Before that it was a cottage far away from here. Where it will be next, I don’t know.’

The girl tutted and shook her head, as if I was speaking terrible nonsense. Suddenly, I sensed her tense.

‘Look!’ she said, pointing at a spot on the horizon. I gazed in the direction she indicated and there, coming down the lane I had traversed with Chaplin that morning, was a green jeep.

‘Strangers,’ Emma said, turning and disappearing into the dark of the house. ‘They come to run us off.’

I followed her at a run.

They stopped half a mile up the road and got out of the jeep, four of them walking towards the house, each carrying an axe handle or a hurley. Tom Blaney met them before they had covered half the distance, his eldest son Jim at his side. Tom had a shotgun in his hand, Jim an old-fashioned shillelagh, its vicious blunt head weighted with lead.

I lurked about ten yards behind them, standing a little off to the side, hoping rather pathetically that I might not be seen if things got nasty (though still close enough to hear what was being said).

‘I’m asking ye to stop right where ye are, lads,’ Tom Blaney said, cocking his gun loudly.

‘That’s not very hospitable,’ the man second from the left said. He was tallest and widest and had a mean, pug-faced look that spoke of little intelligence, and suggested that the small amount there was tended to be focused on meanness and cruelty.

‘I offer hospitality to those I invite onto my land, not those who arrive uninvited,’ Tom said. ‘Now, I know you’ve come to urge me and mine to leave, I know you are going to suggest that harm will come to us if we don’t, and I gather from the fact that you’ve brought weapons with you that you have every intention of inflicting some of that harm yourselves.’

‘He sure do talk nice,’ the man on the far right of the group said. He was little more than five feet in height, but was about the same across, his head shaved tight and a livid scar crossing his face in a garish zigzag. ‘I think I’m a gonna shut ’im up.’

Tom lowered his gun in an assured, languid movement, as if he cared little either way what happened next, but the tension in the air jumped up a notch, and suddenly it was as if I could feel static in my hair.

‘You move one inch, boy, and I’ll make a hole in you,’ Tom said, the tone of his voice unchanged.

‘You’re awful jumpy,’ the first man said. ‘Someone could get hurt with you wavin’ that firearm about the place. God knows, could even be your young lad there.’

The sound of the shotgun going off was like someone had punched a gap in existence: it was a sort of crunch, and time imploded for a second. The four men dived in slow motion in varying directions, all desperately trying to avoid the deadly hail coming their way. I (to my shame) let out a little squeal and took two or three steps backwards, then sat down hard.

When time began to speed up again, Tom was still standing right where he was, and the four interlopers were all lying in various undignified positions here and there. The dirt about three feet in front of where they had been standing was all chewed up – Tom had clearly aimed to miss.

‘That was one barrel I unloaded,’ he said. ‘Which means I have a full one here should I choose to use it. Now, Jim,’ to his son, who had not even flinched during the shooting, ‘I want you to go over to that man who said you might get hurt, and punch him in his head.’

‘He comes within arm’s reach of me and I’m gonna floor him,’ the subject of this instruction said, although it is difficult to sound tough when you are sprawled in the weeds.

‘You so much as raise a hand against him and I will hit you directly in the gut, which will not kill you outright, but will leave you in agonizing pain as you bleed to death slowly. Go on now, Jim. Give him a good thump. He needs to be shown that you do not insult or threaten a Blaney.’

Jim nodded and walked solemnly up to the man, drew back his fist and delivered a punch directly to the top of his head. I could hear the pop from where I still sat on the ground. The man groaned and sagged for a moment, stunned and disoriented.

‘Good boy, Jimbo,’ Tom Blaney said. He walked up to where the men were struggling to get on their feet. ‘Now, gentlemen, would you be so good as to go back to my brother and tell him that I have no intention at all of leaving my home, and that if he has anything else to say, to be man enough to come down here and say it himself? The quality of help he’s sendin’ is pretty damned awful anyway.’

Helping their still stunned comrade to his feet, the gang of four unsteadily made their way back to the jeep. Tom watched as it turned and drove away.

‘You did good, Jim,’ he said. ‘He won’t forget you in a hurry. The next time he comes across you, he’ll know you can throw a punch. That makes a difference.’

He turned to me.

‘You seen enough, longhair?’

‘I have,’ I said.

‘Well why don’t you go on and tell your boss that I am not a fantasist, then.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘I just need to ring for a cab.’

‘Jim here will run you into town.’

I nodded and followed the boy to the ancient Range Rover the family used, which was parked by the front door.

‘I have one question, Mr Blaney, before I go,’ I said.

He paused, his back still to me.

‘What did you do to your brother to make him
so
pissed off at you?’

Tom Blaney stayed frozen for a second, then continued walking.

‘Goodbye Mr Dunphy,’ he said, ‘please send my regards to your employer.’

Jim drove me back to Garshaigh in silence.

The first evening of my night classes was upon me before I knew it. I had spent hours looking over the modules I would be covering and refamiliarizing myself with the finer points of the ideas, concepts and practical activities I would be delivering to my groups.

For the first night I determined to make George Taylor happy by dressing a little smarter than usual, so I dug out a shirt and ironed it, polished my shoes and made sure my hair was at least slightly under control for a change.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Millie, standing before her in all my finery. ‘Do I look like someone you would listen to? When you see me do you think “educator”?’

Millie looked me over with a bored expression and gave a rough bark that seemed non-committal. I felt she was trying to avoid giving me a definitive answer.

There was nothing to be gained by arguing with an evasive greyhound, so I packed my laptop into my shoulder bag and strolled the short distance to the school.

George Taylor had requested that I arrive an hour early, to give me a chance to get set up so that when the students arrived I could begin orientation immediately. He was buzzing about in the reception area when I came in, looking anxious and bothered.

‘Good, good, you’re here,’ he said.

‘I am,’ I agreed.

‘Do you require any photocopying to be done, or any other equipment to be in place?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I have everything under control.’

‘You think?’ George Taylor said tersely. ‘I do not like people who “think” they are ready.’

‘I
know
that I am ready, Mr Taylor, and I would like to go to my classroom now and get everything prepared. The students will, I expect, be arriving within the next forty minutes.’

‘Yes. Quite so, quite so,’ Taylor said, and buzzed off to annoy someone else.

The map the principal had given me was accurate, but to be safe I had gone to the school the previous week to ensure I could find my way around, and was therefore able to go straight to my class without difficulty. It was a wide, characterless room, unadorned by posters or art of any kind, simply a space filled with tables and chairs, a large whiteboard at the front with a teacher’s desk in front of it. Hanging from the ceiling was a PowerPoint projector, and the cable to connect my laptop to it hung down onto a little platform set into the wall. I plugged my computer into the mains, switched it on, stood on a chair to turn on the projector, which made a little singsong noise to let me know it was functional, then plugged the cable running from the projector into the computer. A blue square was being projected onto the whiteboard, but nothing else happened. I hit a couple of keys, enabling my system to be read by the school’s network, and in a second my desktop screen was being shown in an enlarged format on the board.