The Girl From Yesterday (25 page)

Jim answered the door. He looked awful – a bruise covered his left cheekbone and he had a tooth missing. It had been three weeks since I had seen him, and he looked rib thin.

‘We’re not meant to talk to you,’ he said, scowling at me. ‘Dad says you is a yellow coward traitor and he’d like to string you up by your pinkie.’

‘My pinkie?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well that doesn’t sound very nice,’ I agreed. ‘Can I come in? I’d like to see the others, and I have some food.’

I saw his eyes drop to the basket I had under my arm.

‘Do you?’

‘Lots,’ I said.

He swung open the door and I left the basket and went to get the cooler and the box with the cakes.

‘Let’s bring them to the kitchen and we can have a proper meal there,’ I said.

I set things up while Jim got his brother and sisters. When I saw them my heart fell. All were hollow-eyed, all showed signs of beatings, and Emma had raw, bald patches in her beautiful hair. I thought I saw the marks of ringworm on Winnie’s arm and Dom seemed to have no energy at all – he was sluggish, lethargic – he barely showed any enthusiasm, even for the food.

‘Come on, dig in,’ I said, passing around plates and offering drinks.

Most of the meal was in silence. The reality was clear: I had lost any bond of trust I had once shared with the children. I had let them down. I couldn’t blame them for clamming up on me – and I didn’t. These kids had never been given an even break – the world had repeatedly handed them a bum deal, and the abortive Section 12 had been the last straw.

I had heard a story once about an innocent man who had been sentenced to death. Ten years he sat in a cell on Death Row, and finally the day came for his execution. He had no family – or maybe those he did have had given up on him – and he spent his final hours reading and listening to music. He ate a hearty last meal and then made his shuffling, clumsy walk to the death chamber, his ankles in chains. He was strapped down to the table where he would receive the fatal injection, and asked if he had any final words. He simply proclaimed his innocence one last time and said that he had made his peace with God and was ready to die. Then he closed his eyes, and waited for the end.

Just as the button was about to be pushed the telephone rang – there had been a stay of execution, an appeal had been successful. The man was not just not going to die, he was being pardoned: he was to go free.

One would imagine that this would be the most amazing news in the world, but apparently the man was never the same afterwards. He changed from a calm, easy-going, quiet man to an angry, dour, aggressive individual.

Five years later he killed himself.

It seems that he had been ready to die, had prepared himself and, figuratively at least, packed his bags. Coming back from that was more than he could cope with.

I wondered about the Blaney children. Their experience, combined with the effect of the whole thing on their father, had been devastating.

When they had finished eating, the children’s mood lifted slightly. I sat Emma on my knee and had a look at her hair. It did not take me long to see that the poor little thing was riddled with head lice – that voracious parasite that makes its living off the blood of its host and can become very debilitating if the infestation gets bad enough.

‘You’ve been scratching a lot, haven’t you?’ I asked.

‘My head been real itchy,’ Emma said.

The bald patches had been caused by her ripping at her head to deal with the itch – I had seen it before. Her hair was full of oval white eggs, stuck to the follicles. So far along was the colonization I could see the adults moving about close to her scalp.

‘Did you have some visitors out here?’ I asked – head lice are passed on by physical contact. The other kids hadn’t had them, so where did Emma get them?

‘Daddy’s lawyer comed out, and his kids was with him,’ Emma said. ‘They was mean. I din’ like them none.’

‘Well, unless you caught these off your dad, those kids gave you a nasty present,’ I said. ‘I better check the rest of you.’

Dom had them too, though nowhere near as bad as Emma, and Winnie did have ringworm, which despite the name is not caused by a worm but is a fungal infection. The child probably had it due to being run-down from stress and lack of food – and the hygiene in the house couldn’t have helped.

There was little I could do – all the children needed to be treated with the proper medicinal applications, and Emma and Dom’s hair would also need to be treated with a fine comb. I could get these things without any real difficulty, I just wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get back out and make sure the children used them.

‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ I said after I had finished looking the kids over.

‘You made Bad Daddy real mad,’ Winnie said. ‘I don’ think I ever seen him so mad as he was that day. He was happy at first when you all went away, but then he got mad again. He shouted so loud, and he hit us. He kept on talking to hisself, sayin’ he was the on’y one who understood.’

‘He kept talking to himself?’

‘Yeah. He’d scream at Jim and box him in the head, and then he’d say, real quiet: “What? No, you know I have to teach him. He’s my first born.” Stuff like that.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘He’s say: “You told me to look out for enemies. I did all you said, but they still come.” ’

‘And has Bad Daddy been around a lot?’

‘Most of the time,’ Emma said. ‘Good Daddy is hardly ever here now.’

‘And you haven’t been to school?’

‘Not since that day all the men came,’ Dom said. ‘Iss a pity, ’cause I liked school.’

‘I knew it wouldn’t last long,’ Emma said, scratching thoughtfully.

‘You might get to go back yet,’ I said.

‘Naw,’ Jim said. ‘We won’t. This is how it’s gonna be from now on.’

* * *

I parked outside the courthouse and waited. I knew that business for the day would be over at about five, so I only had a few minutes to wait. The public all spilled out first, milling about, sharing their perspectives on what had happened that day. Slowly they dispersed. Gerry Blaney and his team came out, talking rapidly, then Tom, Dignam and their people. I waited. Tom’s group wandered off to the side a bit, and then the person I’d been waiting for emerged: Dora. Not waiting for her to take off, I hopped from the car and called over.

‘Dora, can I have a word?’

Tom never even looked over at me. I opened the passenger door of the Austin for her and, shrugging, she got in.

‘Nice car,’ she said. ‘I noticed you had a nice ride the last time you were out.’

‘Dora,’ I said, too annoyed to engage in niceties, ‘what the fuck are you thinking?’

‘What?’ she gasped, blind-sided.

‘I went out to see your kids today. Now, do you want me to describe what I saw – cuts, bruises, parasitic infestations, not to mention the fact that they look as if they haven’t eaten a bite since the last
fucking time I fed them!’

‘You don’t know anything,’ Dora hissed.

‘What is fucking wrong with you?’ I asked. ‘Dora, you’re not a Blaney, you don’t have this bullshit “we came here with the Normans” nonsense they all seem to buy in to. You can be better than that. Look, for right or wrong, you’ve been given a second chance with your kids. Why in the name of God have you let them get into the state they’re in right now?’

‘What about the state I’m in?’
Dora screamed at me all of a sudden. ‘None of ye ever cares a damn about me! You have no fucking clue of what I have suffered down through the years.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, catching her hand and squeezing it. ‘I’m sitting here right now, asking you to make me understand.’

‘You couldn’t get your head around it even if I told you,’ she spat.

‘If you don’t talk to me, let me help you find someone else that you can speak to,’ I said. ‘You aren’t in this on your own – your children need you. Do it for them, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, opening the door. ‘It’ll all work out.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ I said.

‘I don’t fuckin’ care what you think,’ she said, and was gone.

I didn’t wait for Tom to realize what had just happened. I turned on the engine and drove away. As I drove, I had a feeling that I might have caught a glimpse of the truth. The problem was, I had no idea what it was.

‘You ’member that story you telled me ’bout ’Laddin and that magic lamp?’

The girl and I were lying on our backs watching the clouds, something that had become a favourite pastime of hers.

‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’s a good story.’

‘I thinked I found a lamp like that in one o’ the rubbish rooms in our house.’

‘A magic lamp?’

‘Yeah. It looks like one, anyway.’

‘What you gonna do with it?’

‘I hid it. I’m savin’ it for jus’ the right time.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘When it all gets so bad, I can’ take it no more. Then I’m gonna get the lamp, and rub it, and bring that genie out right fast to give me a wish.’

‘That sounds like a good plan,’ I said. ‘But are you sure there’s a genie in that lamp? What if you wait for the right time and then you go running to your lamp and nothing happens? You’ll be very upset, won’t you?’

‘I’m sure. I put my ear to the side of the lamp, and I listened real good, and I could hear him movin’ round in there!’

I didn’t have an answer to that, so I stayed quiet.

‘Want to know what I’m gonna wish?’ she asked after a bit.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘I’m gonna ask for me and my brothers and sister to be whisked off to a beautiful island, with a beach, and a nice house to live in and all the food we can eat and lots of games.’

‘That sounds really nice,’ I said.

‘An’ you can come and visit me,’ she said.

‘Can I?’

‘Yeah. Each of us can have one friend. You can be mine.’

‘Sweetie, I’m very flattered,’ I said, and I really was.

‘One o’ these days, I’m gonna do it,’ she said. ‘One o’ these days.’

Rachel’s phone made a beeping sound, and the screen flashed.

A message had been delivered, and the number it came from flashed up on the screen too – it was Jeff McKinney’s number.

Rachel, as it happened, didn’t have her phone. She had, at my request, loaned it to me for a few days. When this message came in, I was sitting in the staff room at the school – class was to start in a couple of hours. I opened the message, read the first line and stopped. The author had cut to the chase fairly quickly, and I didn’t need to ingest any more of his lurid prose. Suffice it to say his intentions were unpleasant and maybe not even legal.

I stood and walked to the door and down the stairs, stopping halfway down, on the first landing. There was Jeff, parked in the lobby, busily fiddling with his own phone. I kept my eye on him, and rang the number that had just sent the disturbing message.

Nothing at first, then I heard a ring at my end. McKinney’s phone didn’t ring – then it did. He jumped, clearly surprised. He looked at the handset for several long moments, then slowly brought the phone to his ear.

‘Hello,’ he said shakily.

‘Hello Jeff,’ I said. ‘Guess who?’

Pause. I could see his mind working furiously. He seemed unable to work out what had happened.

‘Who is this?’ he said at last.

‘It’s the guy who teaches the class full of little whores,’ I said, walking down the stairs towards him. ‘As you know, you just sent one of your delightful, colourful little vignettes to this phone, which belongs to a friend of mine who would like you to stop.’

I reached the bottom step.

‘This girl,’ I hung up and held the phone up to him. ‘This girl
is
prepared to go to the cops and to show your handiwork to George Taylor. But she still feels a little sorry for you. The soft thing, she wants to give you a chance: stop sending her, and everyone else, your filthy messages or she
will
go to the authorities.’

Jeff, his lower lip trembling furiously, never gave me a chance to negotiate. He let out a wail of fright and dismay and bolted out the front door.

‘I’m going to take that as a sign of agreement,’ I said to the empty hallway, and went to my classroom.

Gladys and I had been meeting for an hour (or as close to it as she managed to get) every Wednesday since that first night. My assessment of her had proved more or less correct. She was, according to an educational psychologist she had gone to for a few sessions, dyslexic with dyspraxic tendencies (although what this last term meant I was not sure).

Gladys’s dyslexia showed up most in her handwriting, but I had shown her how to use the word-processing programs on the computers in the school, and with a little practice on the spell-checker we had managed to eradicate a lot of the telltale signs.

Her fear of reading was another issue, however, and that was the main reason we met. I had already learned that she had no fear at all of celebrity gossip magazines and tabloid newspapers, but broadsheets, books of any kind and anything, even a magazine, with the slightest hint of intellectualism sent her into a complete spin, during which she was utterly incapable of reading anything.

We always started out easy, with something she was familiar and comfortable with – this might be a children’s story, an article from
OK
or the horoscope from the
Sun
. This particular evening, I had brought the
Western News
along with me. I reasoned she had seen it in her house every week growing up and would feel secure enough with it.

‘Pick whatever story interests you the most from this and read it to me,’ I said, laying the paper open on the desk between us.

‘Whatever I want?’

‘You choose.’

‘Everyone’s talkin’ about the Blaney thing. Can I read about that?’

‘If you like. There’s about twenty pages on it in this week’s edition, so you won’t be stuck for choice.’

‘Of course, I am sort of related to the Blaneys,’ Gladys said, winking at me.

‘Is that so?’ I said, sounding credulous – saying you were related to the Blaneys in Garshaigh was like claiming to be related to the royal family in England.