The Girl From Yesterday (3 page)

‘I have no idea,’ Lonnie said, and we both burst out laughing.

‘I’m gonna stay in this place for a while, I think,’ I said.

‘It’s kind of a shit hole,’ Lonnie said.

‘I don’t know where else to go,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you go home?’ Lonnie asked, putting his big hand on my shoulder. ‘Go home to Tush and to Tristan and to all the people who care about you.’

‘Can’t,’ I said, shaking my head, tears streaming down my face.

‘Why not?’

‘I fucked up, Lonnie,’ I said. ‘I fucked up real bad, and I . . . I need to jus’ get ’way from ev’rybody. ’Kay?’

My friend squeezed my arm and nodded sadly.

‘All right then. You know best, I suppose.’

I laughed bitterly.

‘I don’ know anythin’. That’s the fuckin’ problem.’

I took a deep gulp from my glass, feeling the liquor burn its way down my throat.

‘I think maybe you ought to lay off the hard stuff for a bit, don’t you?’ Lonnie said. ‘You’re going to be awfully sick in the morning.’

I blinked, looking at my empty glass and the three-quarter-empty bottle. Lonnie had only had a few sips from it. And Millie hadn’t had any at all.

‘I’m tired, man,’ I said. ‘Think I need t’ sleep a bit.’

Lonnie hopped up and got his hands under my armpits, hoisting me back up onto the bed – he was comparably as strong as an ant – I was always amazed by it.

‘You go on and sleep,’ Lonnie said, pulling the duvet over me.

‘Yeah,’ I said, already drifting. ‘You gonna stay?’

‘I’ll be around,’ Lonnie said. ‘Don’t you worry about it.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said, the words all mashing together. ‘I’m glad you’re a zombie ’r a vampire ’r somethin’. Be nice havin’ you about again.’

Then I was gone.

I had a ferocious hangover in the morning, but despite my throbbing head and heaving guts Millie needed to be let out for her morning ablutions. After she had taken what seemed like an age to find just the right place to relieve herself, I got some bottled water from the bar of the hotel (which never seemed to close), tried to drink some and then went back to bed for four hours. When I woke again, I still felt like hell but I was more or less able to function, and after a shower and change of clothes children didn’t run screaming when I walked past.

As I left the hotel, Jeff McKinney, who was sitting in the lobby looking bored, hailed me.

‘You have a visitor last night?’

I froze.

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Thought I heard voices coming from your room.’

‘Jeff, why were you listening to any noises coming from my room?’

He blustered a bit at that.

‘I just had to do something for one of the other guests at that end of the house . . .’

‘Are there any other guests?’

He made an excuse and disappeared down the corridor to the dining room.

I went out to the Austin, Millie trailing after me, sat inside the car and switched on the radio to catch the early afternoon news. Ireland hadn’t snapped out of the economic recession overnight, it seemed, and unemployment, crime and general misery were widespread. So nothing much had changed.

We had lunch in the little café again, and I felt some life returning as the caffeine did its work. I had a vague memory of talking to Lonnie the previous night, but that was something I did not want to spend too much time pondering – I had seen some strange things over the years, and while I applied a healthy pinch of salt to most of it, I tried to keep in mind that I had spent a good deal of my life working with people
in extremis
, and that meant that, sometimes quite literally, anything could happen. My recollection of the visitation was that it had been comforting and supportive, at any rate, so I figured the best thing to do might be simply to write it off as a little wish fulfilment and move on – I was reasonably certain that a degree of unresolved grief, combined with a liberal dousing of Irish whiskey, was the main culprit.

As I sipped my third cup of coffee, I watched people come and go outside the window. Garshaigh was a bustling little town. Everywhere I looked I saw industry and autonomy. It made me feel slightly guilty. I really did have to work out some sort of plan of action for what I was going to do with my life for the immediate future. Without beating around the bush, I needed money: I had some savings which I was living off, but they would not last forever, and staying in the hotel was going to eat a huge hole in my resources before very long. I was, on a temporary basis at the very least, in need of a job.

But what kind of job? And in this age of swollen dole queues and emaciated bank statements would there even be any gainful employment to be had?

I knew for certain that I did not want to do anything even resembling social care work – I had washed my hands of it twice before, and had always ended up being drawn back in. I had always blamed everyone else for this: people laying their problems at my feet or circumstances conspiring to place me in close proximity to children in need of help, but I now realized that it was my responses to events and to the people I found myself in contact with that had brought me back into the caring professions and child protection. I was determined that was not going to happen again: the work hurt me too much and caused me to do things, make decisions, I hated. I realized that I did not like that version of ‘me’, ‘Shane the child protection worker’, one little bit. He was judgemental, self-serving and could be quite a bully at times. People around him got hurt. I wanted to leave him behind and find out who I really was when I was away from all that drama and anguish.

I had tried my hand at living off my music when I moved to the Midlands three years ago, and had been quite successful, but playing music in local pubs had brought me in contact with the individuals who had eventually led me to Drumlin Therapeutic Training Unit, where I had met Lonnie, so I summarily dismissed being a musician as a course of action.

I was running out of options. Looking over my meagre skill set, I was left with teaching, which I had done on a part-time basis for some years to supplement my income, and writing, which was something I occasionally flirted with in terms of the odd article for a local newspaper or, from time to time, for the nationals. I had done one or two academic articles too, some of which had been quite well received. Writing didn’t pay much (sometimes it had paid me nothing at all) but I enjoyed it, and I reasoned that it probably wouldn’t put me in too great a risk of coming in contact with any child protection situations.

That said, a teaching gig seemed the most likely option. From the foot traffic on the street outside I judged that there had to be a good-sized school in the town, and that probably meant night classes. It being August, I reasoned they might be looking for new teaching staff. I thought that would be a sensible first port of call.

After one more cup of coffee.

The pretty waitress (whose name was Carla) told me how to find the school. It was an ancient-looking grey stone structure, all flat roofs and metal-framed windows, with a tangible air of emptiness about it a fortnight before the students were to return. The school administrator, a bombastic, heavily built woman with violently red hair, told me to wait on a plastic chair just inside the heavy wooden front door, and after what felt like an age but was more like ten minutes a harangued-looking man in his late fifties wearing a muted grey suit, which matched his grey hair and grey skin perfectly, came out and snapped his hand in my direction.

‘George Taylor,’ he said. ‘I’m principal of St Smoling’s, and that makes me head of the night school also.’

‘Shane Dunphy,’ I said, getting up and shaking his hand, which was what I assumed he wanted me to do with it.

‘Can we talk as we walk, Mr Dunphy, I have a hundred and one things to do today and we are severely understaffed. The school used to have two caretakers and a porter. Under the current economic restrictions we have one caretaker, despite the fact that the number of students has almost doubled. Do you know what that means?’

‘Um . . .’ It felt like I was being given a test which I had not studied for.

‘It means that I now have maintenance tasks to do on top of my usual workload,’ George Taylor strode briskly away from me. I gave chase.

‘We have five gaps on our night-class timetable,’ the principal said as he led me out the back of the building to what looked like an ancient tool shed. ‘Childcare, conversational French, Chinese cooking, motorcycle maintenance and tropical fish keeping.’

‘A mixed bag,’ I said.

George Taylor removed his jacket and hung it on a polished wooden hanger which he then returned to a hook on the door of the shed. He tucked his grey silk tie inside his shirt in a deft movement.

‘Do you have qualifications or experience in any of those subjects, Mr Dunphy?’

‘Yes. I have both in the area of childcare.’

‘Excellent. And you can furnish me with references from your professional and teaching experience?’

I took an envelope from my shoulder bag and held it out to him.

‘My CV, complete with written references and the contact details of previous employers who will vouch for me.’

George Taylor went into the shed and came out a second later carrying a large blade strimmer in one hand and a pair of plastic goggles in the other.

‘You may leave it with Regina in the front office. If all is as you say, you can consider the job yours. You will teach for three hours, two evenings a week. If you’ve done this kind of work before you will know what to expect.’

I nodded. ‘That’s it then?’

George Taylor pulled a ripcord on the strimmer and the machine roared into life.

‘I’ll call you with start-up details and a list of your students. The classes are already quite full,’ he shouted over the engine.

‘Now, I have work to do. Would you mind showing yourself out?’

The offices of the
Western News
filled two rooms over the supermarket. The editor was a thin, owl-like man in his forties called Robert Chaplin. He smelt of cigarettes and cheap aftershave. An out-of-date computer hummed on his desk, which was otherwise buried in scraps of paper, fast-food wrappers and stained coffee mugs.

‘What makes you think we need any more staff?’ Chaplin said tersely. ‘We haven’t fucking advertised.’

‘I’m just calling in on spec,’ I said. ‘I’ve never gotten a job yet that I applied for through a want ad. I’ve done some writing in the past, thought I might see if you were looking to fill some column inches.’

‘Who’d you write for?’

I told him. He raised an eyebrow.

‘Jim Davitt still writing for the
Citizen?’

‘He edited me a couple of times.’

‘So you did all this as a freelancer?’

I told him I did.

‘Ever had a more full-time writing gig?’

‘Nope. There have been some times when I was writing a few thousand words a week, but I was never full time in the office, no.’

‘I mean, it’s totally different when you’re doing it all day every day. How do I know you won’t dry up on me?’

‘I’ve never missed a deadline. Never come up short on an assignment.’

Chaplin nodded.

‘And your background is all this child abuse stuff? You’re what . . . a social worker or something?’

‘Something. To be honest, I’m looking for a change of scene, a change of job. Start me on the bottom rung of the ladder and see what I can do. If you don’t like what I produce, cut me loose. You’ll have lost nothing.’

The thin man coughed and looked at the CV I had given him. He pulled the keyboard of his computer towards him and tapped loudly on it, making a sound like a machine gun. He waited for a moment then clicked the mouse. He turned the screen a little to accommodate glare, then pondered the display. I knew he was looking up one of the pieces I had written, and waited for his verdict.

‘Okay, you can write,’ he said at last. ‘But you’re a bit fucking wordy, and you tend to put yourself into everything. My readers aren’t interested in you or your deepest darkest feelings. I run a local rag that lets Granny McDuff know when the flower show is on and who has been up in court for stealing knickers off their neighbour’s washing line. That’s what my audience want to read, and they don’t give a flying fuck what you think about any of it.’

‘I realize that, but thank you for flagging it up,’ I said.

‘You’re very welcome.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘So would you like to try me out?’

Chaplin sighed.

‘I don’t fucking know. Look, I’ll tell you what. Do you have a car?’

‘I do.’

‘Go along to this,’ he rooted around until he found a flyer, which he passed over to me. It advertised a gathering to protest the re-zoning of some bogland. I saw from the date that it was happening that evening at eight. ‘Write me eight hundred words on what happens. Then we’ll talk again.’

‘Right you be.’

I stood.

‘I’ll hang on to your CV,’ he said, turning back to the monitor. ‘I might give it a bit of a lookover again at some stage when I have a free moment.’

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a shout tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be here.’

The protest meeting proved to be mind-numbingly boring, but I managed to put together an article that made the local people look like courageous campaigners, the very soul of the land at stake as soulless foreign developers tried to steam roll over vital swathes of ecosystem. Which was, in fairness, true.

Chaplin read it thoughtfully.

‘This is good,’ he said when he was done. ‘And very clean. You can punctuate and you know how to use a spell check. And I believe this is eight hundred words bang on.’

‘It’s what you asked for.’

He nodded. ‘That’s true. That is true.’

I held out my hands. ‘So do we have a deal?’

‘On a probationary basis to begin with. Looking at your CV there, you come across as someone with itchy feet. I want to know you aren’t going to take off one day because the mood has suddenly come over you.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘I’m starting you on the salary of a student right out of college and we’ll see how you fare. That’s my best offer.’