The Girl From Yesterday (8 page)

I was amazed when I arrived in the tea room with my group to find someone there already: Jeff McKinney had parked his wheelchair in the middle of the floor and was sitting, smiling a welcome. I wasn’t sure what to say, so decided simple politeness would have to suffice.

‘Hello Jeff,’ I said, shaking his extended hand. ‘You working here too, then?’

‘No, I’m taking a class.’

There were quite a few others on that night, so I waited for him to tell me which one. He didn’t, though.

‘Are you going to introduce me to your students?’

‘Of course,’ I said, turning to face them. ‘This is Jeff, everyone. He’s a student here too, so you’ll have plenty in common.’

When everyone was settled in and pots of tea and coffee brewed, I scuttled back to the classroom to rearrange the seats into a circle for the second hour.

When the group came back I could feel the nervousness radiating from them, but I didn’t care – we had overcome their inhibitions in the first hour and we would this time too.

‘Here’s something we will do from time to time,’ I said. ‘Childcare is all about setting the children we work with at ease, and part of that is showing them that everyone has a right to be heard, to have a voice and to express themselves in whatever way works best for them. There will be days where I will bring in some of my musical instruments and we will spend an hour singing.’ This met with a mixture of delight and total horror. ‘There will be days when I bring in paints and paper or crayons and we will draw. I will participate fully in everything – there is nothing that you will be asked to do that I will not do myself. Today, we are going to start getting your views on a few things, call it a “getting to know you” session. So, I’m going to begin by going around to everyone, and I want you first to introduce yourself, then to say why you have an interest in childcare. Tim, because I used you as a guinea pig earlier, I’m going to give you the option to either be the first up, or to go last. If you want to go last, choose the person to go instead of you now.’

Tim, as I had suspected, did want to go, and he continued the story of his aunt the nurse. It was well into the hour before Gladys Pointer’s turn came around.

‘Hi everyone, I’m Gladys,’ she said. She was maybe five feet two inches in height, slim and well dressed with a fashionable haircut and very high heels. Her coat was belted at the waist, and I realized that she hadn’t taken it off despite the warmth of the room. Maybe it would ruin her look.

‘So, why are you here, Gladys?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’m gonna fail. I just kinda wanted to give it a go.’

‘Why do you say that you’ll fail?’ I asked, laughing. ‘You haven’t even been with me a night yet. You should give the course a go for a while before making up your mind.’

‘Oh, it’s not me that thinks it,’ she said. ‘It’s everyone else. Me teachers always told me I was thick and that I was gonna fail. And they were right about the Leaving Cert. But see, I always liked childcare. I thought maybe if I was int’rested in a subject I might work harder.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ I said. ‘Don’t take all that stuff to heart. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “thick” person. Just ’cause school didn’t work out doesn’t mean this won’t.’

‘Don’t you worry about it,’ Gladys said, smiling. ‘All we can do is try, right?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ I said.

She looked at me for a moment as if I was a well-meaning simpleton.

‘I expect I’ll be gone by Christmas,’ she said gently. ‘But it won’t be your fault. I’m just not that smart, that’s all.’

I didn’t know what to say. I was struck by the dichotomy of her incredible confidence side by side with her utter defeatism. I only knew one thing: I was determined that I would do my utmost to make sure she did as well as she could.

At the end of the night, as the students were saying goodbye to their new friends and filing out, I called Gladys over. She came loaded down with her recently retrieved bags of shopping.

‘So,’ I said, ‘will we be seeing you again?’

‘Yeah. It looks like it might be interesting enough,’ she said, eyeing me warily. I could tell that, in her world, teachers of all kinds were the enemy. I could understand the perspective – I’d had enough experience of bad educators to know that their impact can be devastating.

‘I think you missed me saying at the start of class that my job is to ensure you have the best time here you possibly can,’ I said. ‘Teaching at this level isn’t about my standing at the top of the room and preaching at you for a couple of hours. I want you to realize that you know a lot of this material already – you’ve been a child, you’ve been around kids – I’m going to help you put the proper words and language on some of the ideas, but most of it is locked up in your head already.’

‘There’s one problem right there,’ Gladys said, shifting one of her bags from one hand to another – I wanted to take it from her, but I’d had so much trouble wresting them from her grip before, I thought it might be wiser to leave them. ‘I has awful trouble with words. I know what I want to say, I don’t know how most of the time. And I sometimes think that my head isn’t connected to the rest of me at all. I can have all the knowledge in the world locked up there, but there is no way I’m going to get at it.’

‘I can teach you how,’ I said, ‘when you have a tough time at school, books, learning and so on can become very threatening. Look, we made a good start tonight. I just wanted you to know I heard what you said, and I want us to work hard together to make sure it doesn’t come to pass.’

Gladys sighed, shaking her head indulgently, and joined her comrades in their exodus from the room. I busied myself rearranging the furniture into its initial formation, and was packing up my computer when George Taylor knocked and entered.

‘How went the night, Shane?’

‘Well, I think,’ I said. ‘We had a full contingency and I believe they’ll come back.’

‘Excellent. That is what I like to hear. In these times of economic ill-health, we need the night school more than ever. It pays for an awful lot of the basic things we need to run the day school – paper, photocopying toner, even heating oil. It is an essential part of what we do, so it is of the utmost necessity that our students leave happy, informed and ready for more.’

‘I had a student this evening,’ I said, ‘Gladys Pointer. I’m assuming she’s local, so she probably attended here as a day student. She’s not that old, mid-twenties, I think. Do you remember her?’

‘The Pointers are a well-known local family,’ Taylor said. ‘Farmers. I do remember Gladys, yes. If you have her as a student, you will have your work cut out for you. She was a challenging young woman when she was here. I seem to recollect her failing her final exams quite spectacularly.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘She did, Shane. That is the only thing that can go wrong when it comes to failing an examination.’

‘No,’ I said, getting a little impatient. ‘Does she have poor literacy skills, is it her concentration, her comprehension . . . where is she falling down academically?’

‘I never taught her,’ Taylor said. ‘I’ll find out who did and ask them some discreet questions, if you wish, but she is an adult now, Mr Dunphy. Poking about in her records is not really appropriate.’

I paused. He was right. I was falling back on old habits.

‘Maybe I should just work with her a bit and see how I go,’ I said. ‘Thanks for your offer, though.’

‘You are quite welcome,’ Taylor said, and breezed out. I finished packing up, switched off the lights and went home. Jeff McKinney was sitting in the car park in the dark as I left. I gave him a wave, but he didn’t respond.

I took Millie for a walk about the town, smoking a cigar while I did so. Pausing to look in the windows of some of the clothes shops (my wardrobe was still very compromised), I realized that fashion had passed me by. There was no way I was going to purchase most of what I saw on offer in the outlets about Garshaigh. As we strolled homewards, I wondered if I might have got it wrong: maybe fashion had, in fact, passed
Garshaigh
by. I thought a trip to Galway might be called for that weekend.

Back at the house I broke out the Bushmills again and plonked in front of the TV. My viewing options hadn’t improved since moving from the hotel. Without a satellite dish I could still only pick up an Irish language station, an advertising channel that seemed to specialize in cleaning products (which I noticed always claimed to do absolutely everything you could require a cleaning product to do, which surely made all the
other
products for sale on the channel obsolete), and the erstwhile 1970s and 80s crime channel. This evening a Perry Mason movie was showing, Raymond Burr growling at bad guys in the courtroom.

I’d only had a couple of glasses when Lonnie spoke up from the armchair in the corner.

‘Good to see you’ve moved into a decent place . . . sort of.’

‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked. ‘I could’ve used the help moving in.’

‘What, to help you carry your one suitcase? I think you were able to manage that by yourself.’

I grinned and nudged the bottle towards him.

‘I actually have a spare glass this time,’ I said. ‘Under the sink.’

I heard him moving about and then he reached over and took the whiskey, pouring a generous shot for himself.

‘So I see you’re gainfully employed.’

‘Two jobs,’ I said. ‘I’m gainfully employed twice.’

‘Isn’t that because both jobs pay you hardly anything at all?’

‘It is, but it’s not polite to mention that.’

‘Okay,’ Lonnie said. ‘I won’t bring it up again.’

‘You know, Perry Mason was a little before my time,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t bad.’

‘Has it occurred to you that you may be developing a form of Stockholm Syndrome?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re starting to identify with your captors. The TV in this town is so fucking bad, you’re forcing yourself to develop a taste for it. Out of desperation. It’s a survival mechanism, and I understand why you’re giving in.’

‘Come on,’ I said, laughing at his hypothesis. ‘It’s not that bad . . .’

‘Shane, they show daytime TV all day!’ he said. ‘What could be worse than that?’

We both erupted into laughter at the good of it.

‘They had a
Mannix
weekend,’ I said barely able to speak from the laughing. ‘I watched three hours of it – back to back! I thought I was going to go crazy!’

‘You’re talking to a dead dwarf,’ Lonnie said. ‘I think you
are
crazy!’

We laughed even harder at that. When we finally calmed down I poured us both more drinks and sat back to watch the movie. Except Lonnie had other ideas.

‘I’ve come to talk to you about something.’

‘Lonnie, it’s really great to see you, but do you always have to arrive full of weighty import? Can’t you just drop by like you used to?’

‘Shut up and listen to me. You were out at the Blaney place the other day.’

‘So?’

‘Anything occur to you while you were out there?’

‘Well they’re pretty damned weird, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No. There’s more than that.’

‘What?’

‘You need to keep your eyes open, that’s all.’

‘You can’t tell me that and not say what about.’

‘You’ll know when you see it.’

‘You are an inscrutable fucking ghost or whatever the hell you are.’

Lonnie grinned and sipped his drink.

‘How do you know I’m not an angel?’

I looked at him aghast.

‘A ghoul I would believe. A demon from the seventh circle of hell, I would believe. An angel? Pull the other one, Lonnie.’

He snorted derisively.

‘It’s only because of my size. Everyone thinks angels are supposed to be tall and have expansive wings.’

‘Well, aren’t they?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t Cupid a sort of angel? He’s small.’

I shook my head in horror.

‘If you start flying about the place, stark bollock naked, firing a bow and arrow at people, I will personally buy a shotgun and shoot you down! For the good of the wider community! Cupid – for the love of Jehovah! You have a heart attack and start to develop delusions of grandeur about yourself.’

‘Just watch the film,’ Lonnie said, clearly annoyed but also not a little amused at my reaction. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand matters of such an ethereal nature.’

I fell asleep in front of the TV around one. He was gone when I awoke, cold and lonely in the darkness.

The girl danced as I played a jig on the mandolin: ‘Out on the Ocean’. We were down at the beach, so it seemed appropriate. She hopped, skipped, jumped, pirouetted and finally did a rapid cartwheel, all the time giggling with sheer joy and exuberance.

‘Again, again!’ she called when the tune came to an end, and I played another, a reel this time, ‘Drowsy Maggie’. She squealed and capered off across the wet sand, kicking her legs behind her. She reached the waterline and dipped in a toe, taking it out in time to the music and splashing a beat.

‘We sing now,’ she said when she was too tired to dance any more.

‘What songs do you know?’ I asked.

‘I know every song,’ she said.

‘Every song?’

A nod.

‘No one knows
every
song.’

‘I do. I have music inside my heart.’

I thought that was a beautiful thing to say, and decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

‘All right then. I’m going to sing you this song, and you can join in.’

‘ ’Kay.’

I played the intro, a sort of slow waltz, and then began to sing
‘Well they say from this valley you are leaving; I will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile; For they say you have taken the sunshine; that had brightened my path for a while.’

She didn’t sing, just listened quietly.

‘So come and sit by my side if you love me; do not hasten to wish me adieu; but remember the Red River Valley; and the cowboy who loved you so true.’

‘Him goin’ way?’

‘No, I think she is.’

‘Leavin’ dere home?’

‘Yes.’