The Girl From Yesterday (5 page)

It was, in all, one of the most muddled, jumbled constructions I had ever seen.

Chaplin pulled up right outside a large door that had once been painted red but was now a cracked, peeling rusty brown, much like the rest of the building.

‘Here we go,’ he said, reaching across me to pull a notebook and a couple of pens out of the glove compartment. ‘You’ve got an audio recorder on your phone?’

‘Yup.’

‘Great. Obviously we need his permission to use it, but be ready to roll when I give you the nod. During the interview, I don’t want you to say anything, okay? Tom is really easily riled, and I’m used to him. I need you to listen, observe and we’ll pool our thoughts when we get back to the office.’

‘You still haven’t really told me why we’re here,’ I said.

‘I want you to come to it as fresh as possible. The whole Blaney thing is really fucking complicated – there’s so much history and such a hell of a lot of bitterness, coming from inside the family itself and directed at the family from outside – see, I’m not a hundred per cent certain I can stay completely objective.’

‘So that’s why you brought me along. An outside ear.’

‘Exactly. I’ll more than likely write this one up myself – the Blaneys have been a project of mine for a lot of years now. But I want your take on it as a comparison.’

‘Right you be,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and see what the story is.’

Chaplin knocked and as we waited I checked the new phone I had bought when I’d gotten the gig at
The Western News
. It was one of those fancy, touch-screen jobs that were all the rage (and which I did not have a great deal of fondness for), but it had a data storage capacity greater than most computers and a voice recorder app that was as good as most professional digital sound studios. It was also small and inconspicuous, and therefore unlikely to cause any undue alarm. Satisfied that it was working, I set it to begin recording at a single touch, slipped a wireless earphone into my left ear and put the phone back in my pocket.

The door was opened by a large, dark-haired, stubble-faced man dressed in a stained grey shirt, tatty jeans and sandals with odd socks. He was perhaps five feet eleven in height with wide shoulders and a startlingly pronounced gut.

‘Tom, hello. You asked me to come out for a chat,’ Chaplin said, not offering his hand. ‘This is the new fella, Shane Dunphy.’

Tom said nothing, but scrutinized me sourly. After a few seconds he stepped back to allow us entry.

The house was surprisingly dark. As we walked a long, narrow hallway, I noticed that there were light fittings at regular intervals above us, but that none contained bulbs. The passage opened onto a high-ceilinged room, that seemed to be a general living area – I noted some books lying here and there, a few ancient children’s toys and a couple of unwashed coffee mugs. The floor was scuffed, well-worn wood, the walls bare plaster. Tom motioned to a couch that looked as if it might be homemade: wooden beams nailed together and loosely stuffed pillows, their covers made of rough wool. We sat.

‘You’ve pissed me off in the past,’ were the first words our host said as he pulled up a wooden stool and sat heavily down on it, leaning his elbows onto his knees.

‘You’re easily annoyed, Tom,’ Chaplin said, taking out his box of cigarettes and offering them about. Tom took one, I shook my head.

‘You’re as attracted to fiction as you are to the truth,’ Tom said when his smoke was lit.

‘Where you and your brood are concerned, it’s often hard to tell the difference.’

‘I called you out here to tell you the truth. The truth about events that could destroy the Blaney family in these parts – maybe forever.’

Chaplin shrugged. ‘Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe it would please me better to let ye eat yourselves up. Quietly, so as no one would ever get wind of it. God knows, you’ve done enough damage to Garshaigh and its people to deserve such a fate.’

Tom eyed my boss warily. ‘Do you want to hear my story or not?’

‘You go on the record, fully. You sign a release to say that you agreed to us recording what you say, and you do not go on local radio or talk to that fucking free advertiser they give out in the supermarket saying I misquoted you.’

Tom nodded.

Chaplin looked at me rapidly, and took out his pen. I tapped the phone in my pocket, and heard the earphone hiss into life. We were recording.

‘All right. If you have a story I think is worth writing, I’ll publish it. So go on: talk.’

Tom Blaney settled himself and took a breath. I got the sense that he had rehearsed what he was about to say.

‘You know that this land has been in my family for hundreds of years. The house and the land it is on were left to me by my father, and they were left to him by his father and so on back into the mists of time: father to eldest son. As it should be.’

He drew on the cigarette and exhaled smoke through his nose.

‘I have tried to treat it with respect – the land. I work it using the old methods: no chemicals, no heavy machines. I live in this house with my family as generations have done before me – I light the house with candles we make in a workshop out back. I heat it with wood I take from the sea or cut myself from the ditches. I build my own furniture, I grow or kill my own food. I draw water from my own well to drink, cook with and wash in. My family is
connected
to the land, Mr Chaplin. It is in our blood.’

I listened carefully. If I was interpreting it correctly, Tom Blaney was saying that he did not use electricity, and that the house did not have running water. They seemed to be operating a self-sufficient lifestyle. I felt a surge of admiration – such a path was not easy to walk.

Then something caught my eye.

Somewhere down the back of the long room I sensed movement. I peered through the gloom – the windows in this part of the rambling house were small and high up – yes, I was right: a head of blonde curls peeped over the top of a chair and ducked out of sight. We were being watched.

‘I always believed that I would pass the estate on to my eldest boy, Jim, when the time came. I never thought for one second that anyone would try and take away my son’s birthright. And if such a thought had crossed my mind, the notion that the person who would attempt such an act of barbarity would be my own brother would have been so foreign as to be laughable.’

‘But that’s what has happened?’ Chaplin coaxed him on.

‘Yes.’

The blonde curls had crept closer. I could see now that they sat atop the head of a girl who looked to be five or six. She was dressed in a shapeless, colourless shift dress and was barefoot. I did not make any sign that I had seen her. I could tell that the game she was playing was all about sneaking up on us without being detected.

‘You know my brother, Gerry,’ Tom said.

‘Everyone living hereabouts knows Gerry,’ Chaplin said. ‘He’s on the local council, he runs half a dozen very profitable businesses, he sits on just about every society going, from the Masons to the school board . . . so he’s trying to buy the land?’

‘It’s not so simple. If he were just trying to buy it I would say no and that would be that.’

‘So what is happening then?’

‘There are moves afoot to build a large development on the coastline – shops, a hotel, a cinema, a huge car park.’

‘Yes, I sent my man here out to cover a meeting of the protest group last week.’

‘Gerry has done some deal with the developers, told them he can get me to sell so they can start their work on this land rather than the bog they set their sights on – he seems to think local opinion will be less hostile to them uprooting me and my brood.’

‘He can’t make you,’ Chaplin said. ‘Tell him to sling his hook.’

‘He’s contesting my right to hold the land. He has produced some document that indicates my father was not of sound mind when he passed the estate to me. Which means he can look for the lot to be sold and the proceeds divided.’

Blondie was now crouched behind some sort of narrow table, on top of which a lumpy, homemade vase of marsh flowers sat unevenly. She grinned at me when I tried to steal a look at her, and put her fingers to her lips:
sshhh!

‘Well, that’s a legal matter,’ Tom said. ‘Not really a case for the newspaper.’

‘They have tried to intimidate us out. There have been people skulking about the fields, threatening my wife. Scaring the children. You know what Gerry can be like.’

Chaplin considered that. ‘I do. But then, he’s cut from the same cloth as you. You’re not above coming into a man’s offices and threatening to break up his already virtually obsolete equipment when he prints an opinion piece you don’t like.’

‘I never have and never would target your family. If he was just coming after me, I wouldn’t mind.’

Chaplin pursed his lips and thought about this information.

‘When was the last time he sent someone out?’

‘It’s almost a daily occurrence.’

‘You understand that I can’t accuse a prominent businessman or a large multinational company of threats and intimidation without evidence.’

‘I don’t own a phone or a camera or even a television set,’ Blaney said. ‘What evidence are you looking for?’

‘I’d like to leave my associate here for the day. If anything happens, he’ll be here, can testify to the truth of your claims. And that, you see, is evidence.’

‘He can stay so long as he doesn’t get in the way.’

‘I’ll be the soul of discretion,’ I said ruefully.

The blonde child had begun her creep back across the room, unseen by my two companions. I watched her until she disappeared into the murk.

I discovered that the child’s name was Emma, and she was ten. I sat at a rough-hewn table in the kitchen while Dora, Tom’s wife, cut thick slices of home-baked brown bread, with the child perched opposite me. Dora was a doughty, broad woman, physically very like her husband, with a thick frizz of strawberry-blonde hair that was almost an afro. Her hands were like shovels. Next to her was a small red-haired boy, Dom, who was twelve but looked perhaps eight, and an auburn-haired girl, Winnie, who was thirteen but looked ten. There was another boy, Jim, whom Tom had referred to during our conversation, but he had gone off with his father to scout the perimeter for intruders. They refused to allow me to go with them, stating that they would bring any interlopers back with them. There wasn’t much to say to that, so I had waited with the children and Dora.

It was immediately clear that what Tom Blaney claimed about their lifestyle was true: they most certainly did not use either electricity or running water. Dora had a pump installed over a deep metal sink, and she gave it one or two vigorous tugs if she needed water. A huge solid-fuel stove burned on the back wall, and she intermittently added a block of wood to it.

‘I hope you don’t mind my saying, Mrs Blaney, but I’m fascinated by your decision to live in such a . . . uh . . . a traditional way. It must be very challenging.’

‘It wasn’t my decision,’ she said, banging the plate of bread down in front of me. ‘Tom Blaney is a stubborn man, and he and his father developed this notion of living in a way that would make their forefathers proud or some such nonsense. I’d kill for a washing machine and drier. But he won’t hear of it.’

The children watched us, following the conversation wide-eyed. I stuck my tongue out at Emma. She wrinkled her nose in a rude face.

‘To be honest, there’s a story just in the way you live from day to day,’ I said. ‘It would certainly put things in perspective – do you know that I come across people who couldn’t imagine going a day without Facebook, let alone without electricity altogether.’

‘Emma there is our youngest,’ Dora said, setting a plate of cured ham and a glass of buttermilk in front of me. ‘She has never seen a television, except the ones in the shop windows on the rare occasions we go into town. She has never hit a switch and had a light come on, and she has never eaten a meal cooked on an electric hob.’

I looked at the tiny child, who was spreading butter onto her bread from a block in the middle of the table. This little girl had never watched MTV, had no experience of the radio or of mobile phones. Sitting there with her ringlets and her huge blue eyes, it was as if I had been beamed into the past by magic. She was a child from the past – a girl from yesterday.

‘So you had to learn how to use all this retro kitchen equipment?’

‘I did. It’s actually not as difficult as you’d think. The oven cooks much quicker than a gas or electric one. You just have to learn how to control the heat. It’s all about piling up the coals at various points. But you get the hang of it by trial and error.’

The bread was very good, as was the meat – salty and sweet all at once. I generally don’t drink milk, but I actually do like buttermilk, so I had a hearty lunch. The children all remained completely silent, but I chatted at them and continued to pull silly faces and generally try to make friends. It was nice to be able to do so without the added responsibility of knowing I might have to take them into care, and I just relaxed and had fun.

They were a strange lot, all dressed in their drab, sagging clothes, all very small for their age and more than a little grubby. But these were simply observations. I figured that I would probably be more than a little dirty too if I had no running water and the only way to heat what water I did have was to put it in a large pot over the fire.

I drained my glass and banged it down on the table.

All the children jumped as if I had fired a gun: they froze for a second, seemingly waiting for me to do something even more threatening. Of course, I had frozen too, alarmed at
their
reaction. When I did nothing, Emma started to laugh, almost hysterically. I joined in, more out of discomfort than anything else. Such a startle reflex usually meant a rather volatile home environment, but then Chaplin had told me that Tom was a bit of a thug.

Dora sent the children out to play and I insisted on helping with what little washing up there was, more to get a chance to talk to her away from the kids than anything else.