The Delegates’ Choice
The Delegates’ Choice
Ian Sansom
Israel Armstrong, one of literature’s most unlikely detectives, returns for more crime solving adventure in this hilarious third novel from the Mobile Library series.Israel has been invited to attend the Mobile Meet in London, the annual mobile library convention, with his irascible companion Ted Carson. Back in the UK, Israel is reunited with his family, and there is much eating of paprika chicken, baklava and the drinking of good coffee. But within only twenty-four hours of their arrival, the mobile library has been nicked.Who on earth would want to steal a thirty-year old rust-bucket of a van, and who can the two men turn to for assistance? Can Mr and Mrs Krimholz, the parents of Israel's childhood rival Adam Krimholz, help them out? Amidst all this mayhem, will Israel and Ted, one of literature's oddest oddball couples, ever make it to the Mobile Meet? In this, his most puzzling, personal and problematic case yet, Israel has never had it so bad… neither has his library.
THE DELEGATES’ CHOICE
IAN SANSOM
For the Group
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua7f4e610-e566-5900-8445-07d7314fa253)
Title Page (#u6978244c-1ee2-5127-a12b-094de0473cc8)
Dedication (#u44efdd7b-57c7-53b0-bf46-2b883c7b6509)
Chapter 1 (#uac11a99d-1f2d-5da3-b088-f815cf1fe554)
Chapter 2 (#u66eff7d8-ebf2-5603-a68f-0dea8b4b6c88)
Chapter 3 (#u78a1768e-4e3f-5aaa-baba-e7aa502a11ad)
Chapter 4 (#u3365a765-2a6c-515e-91ba-c31bb8c22bf5)
Chapter 5 (#u08dbba12-ffb5-5e18-86f1-a196912fb1f6)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_c9aac922-679f-5a32-af04-d1427e09bd6d)
‘I resign,’ said Israel.
‘Aye,’ said Ted.
‘I do,’ said Israel.
‘Good,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m resigning,’ said Israel. ‘Today.’
‘Right you are,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve absolutely had enough.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Of the whole thing. This place! The—’
‘People,’ said Ted.
‘Exactly!’ said Israel. ‘The people! Exactly! The people, they drive me—’
‘Crazy,’ said Ted.
‘Exactly! You took the words right out of my mouth.’
‘Aye, well, you might’ve mentioned it before,’ said Ted.
‘Well, this is it. I’m up to—’
‘High dough,’ said Ted.
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘You’re up to high dough with it.’
‘No,’ said Israel. ‘No. I don’t even know what it means, up to high dough with it. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s an expression.’
‘Ah, right yes. It would be. Anyway, I’m up to…here with it.’
‘Good.’
‘I’m going to hand in my resignation to Linda.’
‘Excellent,’ said Ted.
‘Before the meeting today.’
‘First class,’ said Ted.
‘Before she has a chance to trick me out of it again.’
‘Away you go then.’
‘I am so gone already. I am out of here. I tell you, you are not going to see me for dust. I’m moving on.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’m going! Look!’
‘Ach, well, it’s been a pleasure, sure. We’re all going to miss you.’
‘Yes,’ said Israel.
‘Good,’ said Ted.
‘So,’ said Israel.
‘You’ve time for a wee cup of coffee at Zelda’s first, mind? For auld time’s sake?’
‘No!’ said Israel. ‘I need to strike while the—’
‘And a wee scone, but?’
Israel looked at his watch.
‘Meeting’s not till three,’ said Ted.
‘What day is it?’ said Israel.
‘Wednesday.’
‘What’s the scone on Wednesdays?’
‘Date and almond,’ said Ted, consulting his mental daily special scone-timetable.
Israel huffed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But then we need to get there early. I am definitely, definitely resigning.’
They’d had this conversation before, around about mid-week, and once a week, for several months now, Israel Armstrong BA (Hons) and Ted Carson—the Starsky and Hutch, the Morse and the Lewis, the Thomson and Thompson, the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the Dante, the Virgil, the Cagney, the Lacey, the Deleuze and Guattari, the Mork and the Mindy of the mobile library world.
Israel had been living in Tumdrum for long enough—more than six months!—to find the routine not just getting to him, but actually having got to him; the selfsame rainy days which slowly and silently became weeks and then months, and which seemed gradually to be slowing, and slowing, and slowing, almost but not quite to a complete and utter stop, so that it felt to Israel as though he’d been stuck in Tumdrum on the mobile library not just for months, but for years, indeed for decades almost. Israel felt trapped; stuck; in complete and utter stasis. He felt incapacitated. He felt like he was in a never-ending episode of 24, or a play by Samuel Beckett.
‘This is like Krapp’s Last Tape,’ he told Ted, once they were settled in Zelda’s and Minnie was bringing them coffee.
‘Is it?’ said Ted.
‘Are ye being rude about my coffee?’ said Minnie.
‘No,’ said Israel. ‘I’m just talking about a play.’
‘Ooh!’ said Minnie.
‘Beckett?’ said Israel.
‘Beckett?’ said Minnie. ‘He was a Portora boy, wasn’t he?’
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘In Enniskillen there,’ said Minnie. ‘The school, sure. That’s where he went to school, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Israel. ‘Samuel Beckett?’
‘Sure he did,’ said Minnie. ‘What was that play he did?’
‘Waiting for Godot?’ said Israel.
‘Was it?’ said Minnie. ‘It wasn’t Educating Rita?’
‘Riverdance,’ said Ted. ‘Most popular Irish show of all time.’
‘That’s not a play,’ said Israel wearily.
‘Aye, you’re a theatre critic now, are ye?’ ‘Och,’ said Minnie. ‘And who was the other fella?’
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘That went to school there, at Portora?’
‘No, you’ve got me,’ said Israel. ‘No idea.’
‘Ach, sure ye know. The homosexualist.’
‘You’ve lost me, Minnie, sorry.’
‘Wrote the plays. “A handbag!” That one.’
‘Oscar Wilde?’
‘He’s yer man!’ said Minnie. ‘He was another Portora boy, wasn’t he, Ted?’
Ted was busy emptying the third of his traditional three sachets of sugar into his coffee. ‘Aye.’
‘Zelda’s nephew went there,’ said Minnie. ‘The ones in Fermanagh there.’
‘Right,’ said Israel. ‘Anyway…’
‘I’ll check with her.’
‘Fine,’ said Israel.
‘And your scones are just coming,’ said Minnie.
‘That’s grand,’ said Ted, producing a packet of cigarettes.
‘Uh-uh,’ said Minnie, wagging her finger. ‘We’ve gone no smoking.’
‘Ye have not?’ said Ted.
‘We have indeed.’
‘Since when?’
‘The weekend, just.’
‘Ach,’ said Ted. ‘That’s the political correctness.’
‘I know,’ said Minnie. ‘It’s what people want though, these days.’
‘You’ll lose custom, but.’
‘Aye.’
‘Nanny state,’ said Ted, obediently putting away his cigarettes and lighter.
‘Smoking kills,’ said Israel.
‘Aye, and so do a lot of other things,’ said Ted darkly.
‘It is a shame, really,’ said Minnie. ‘Sure, everybody used to smoke.’
Israel stared at the yellowing walls of the café as Ted and Minnie reminisced about the great smokers of the past: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro.
‘Beagles,’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Minnie.
‘And Sherlock Holmes,’ added Israel.
‘Aye,’ said Ted.
‘Was he not a druggie?’ said Minnie.
‘Sam Spade,’ said Israel.
‘Never heard of him,’ said Minnie.
Sometimes Israel wished he was a gentleman detective, far away from here, with a cocaine and morphine habit, and a slightly less intelligent confidant to admire his genius. Or like Sam Spade, the blond Satan, pounding the hard streets of San Francisco, entangling with knock-out redheads and outwitting the Fat Man. Instead, here he was in Zelda’s, listening to Ted and Minnie and looking up at old Christian Aid and Trócaire posters, and the dogeared notices for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and the wilting pot plants, and the lone long-broken computer in the corner with the Blu-Tacked sign above it proclaiming the café Tumdrum’s Internet hot-spot, ‘The First and Still the Best’, and the big laminated sign over by the door featuring a man sitting slumped with his head in his hands, advertising the Samaritans: ‘Suicidal? Depressed?’
Well, actually…
He sipped at his coffee and took a couple of Nurofen. The coffee was as bad as ever. All coffee in Tumdrum came weak, and milky, and lukewarm, as though having recently passed through someone else, or a cow. Maybe he should take up smoking, late in life, as an act of flamboyance and rebellion: a smoke was a smoke, after all, but with a coffee you couldn’t always be sure. The coffee in Tumdrum was more like slurry run-off. He missed proper coffee, Israel—a nice espresso at Bar Italia just off Old Compton Street, that was one of the things he missed about London, and the coffee at Grodzinski’s, round the corner from his mum’s. He missed his friends, also, of course; and his books; and the cinema; a nice slice of lemon drizzle cake in the café at the Curzon Soho; and the theatre; and the galleries; and the restaurants; it was the little things; nothing much; just all the thriving cultural activities of one of the world’s great capital cities…
‘Just remind me,’ he said to Ted, once Minnie had gone off for the scones. ‘Why do we come here?’
‘It’s the only place there is,’ said Ted.
‘Yes,’ said Israel, amazed. ‘I know, but…it’s, like…’ He took another sip of his coffee. ‘They don’t even serve proper coffee.’
‘I think the machine’s broken,’ said Ted.
‘The machine’s always broken.’
‘Mmm.’
‘It’s that sort of chicory stuff, isn’t it,’ said Israel, licking his lips, trying to figure out what it was, the unpleasant burnt taste and the feral, sicky smell, like something someone had just brought up. ‘That’s what it is. I think it’s that…what do you call it?’
‘What?’
‘Ersatz coffee.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Ted. ‘I had a cappuccino once in Belfast.’
‘What?’
‘They have coffee bars down there everywhere now. It’s like the Continent.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘No,’ said Israel, shaking his head. ‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No. Just no. It’s no good, I can’t drink this,’ said Israel, drinking his coffee.
He was thinking now about Gloria: whenever he started thinking about London his thoughts turned quickly to Gloria.
Gloria was the Eros in Israel’s Piccadilly Circus, the Serpentine in his Hyde Park, the St Paul’s in his City, the Brick Lane of his East End…her dark hair cascading down over her shoulders, her piercing brown eyes, his hand in hers, their bodies entwined…
‘Scones!’ said Minnie, interrupting Israel before the point of no return, and placing a couple of enormous steaming chunks of hot scone down on the plastic gingham-look tablecloth.
‘I was wrong,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’ said Israel. ‘Wrong? About what?’
‘It’s not Zelda’s nephew at Portora.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s her other nephew.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Zelda’s other brother’s boy—Niall, the fella who’s the computer-whizz?’
‘Right,’ said Israel.
What? Who? Niall? The nephew? The other nephew? Why on earth did people in Tumdrum go on like characters in Russian novels, insisting on talking about their friends and family members as if you’d known them for years, when of course you hadn’t, you had no idea who the hell they were talking about, unless you’d lived here your whole life, which Israel hadn’t. Did Israel speak to people in Tumdrum endlessly and incessantly about his family and friends? Did he ever mention his sisters, or his cousins, including the successful ones, or his mother’s neighbours Mr and Mrs Krimholz, or the butcher, the baker and the candlestick makers of his own lovely little patch of north London? No, he did not. People in Tumdrum seemed to assume that the mere fact of living there instantly made you a local, as though you absorbed local knowledge of complex hereditary diseases and bloodlines by osmosis. I mean, how was he supposed to keep up with the progress of your mother’s sister’s urinary tract infection when he’d never even met your mother? It was a physical impossibility: he’d have had to be telepathic, and a qualified medical practitioner, and, also, he’d have to care, and he didn’t. He was not bothered. Am I bothered? Est-ce que je suis bovvered? Israel slathered a piece of scone with butter.
‘Was that the fella who used to go out with Zelda’s cousin’s husband’s sister?’ said Ted.
‘Ugh!’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘That’s yer man,’ said Minnie.
‘Who?’ said Israel. ‘Who? Who are you talking about now?’
‘You know,’ said Minnie. ‘The big fella. They used to live down there at Lough Island Reevy, in Down.’
‘Hello?’ said Israel. ‘Excuse me! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Some of us were not born around here you know.’
‘No, pet,’ said Minnie pityingly, moving off to another table. ‘Never mind.’
‘God,’ said Israel.
‘Don’t,’ said Ted, wagging a finger.
‘What?’
‘You know what.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘I’ll not tell ye again,’ said Ted, who was a very vehement anti-blasphemer, unless he was doing the blaspheming.
‘Sorry,’ said Israel. ‘I’m going to have to bite the bullet, though,’ he continued, picking up his scone, trying to decide where to start.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, who’d already started on his own. ‘She’s a fair junt of scone, but, isn’t she? And nice and warm.’
‘No, I mean with the job. I’m definitely going to resign.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Even if it means going back to working in the Bargain Bookstore.’
‘Good man ye are.’
‘In Thurrock.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘In Essex,’ said Israel, convincing himself. ‘I still have plenty of friends there.’
‘Mmm.’
‘A man has to have his self-respect,’ said Israel.
‘Or what does he have?’ said Ted, finishing a mouthful.
‘Exactly!’ said Israel. ‘Take this morning.’
‘Why?’ said Ted.
‘Because,’ said Israel.
‘It wasnae a bad morning,’ said Ted.
‘Wasn’t bad!’ said Israel, using the scone gavel-like on the table; the crust did not give. ‘You see! That’s it!’
‘What’s it?’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘Is it? The scone?’
‘No! This morning wasn’t bad, you said?’
‘Aye.’
‘Wasn’t bad?’
‘Aye.’
‘Wasn’t bad?’
‘Yer right.’
‘No, it wasn’t bad! It was terrible!’
‘Ach,’ said Ted, picking a date out of his scone.
‘You’re just inured to it, Ted.’
‘Ee-what?’
‘Inured. It’s…Anyway, I’m young and you’re…’
‘What?’
‘Older.’
‘Aye.’
‘And look at us! We’re nothing more than errand boys!’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve got a degree from Oxford you know,’ said Israel.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, picking at his scone. ‘Oxford Brookes, wasn’t it you said?’
‘Which is in Oxford,’ said Israel. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been there?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ said Ted. ‘No.’
‘No!’ said Israel triumphantly. ‘Well then. I am a highly educated librarian. I shouldn’t be—we shouldn’t be—just doing errands for people.’
‘We’re not just doing errands for people.’
‘Yes, we are!’
‘We’re a service,’ said Ted.
‘A library service,’ said Israel. ‘A library service. Not a Tesco home delivery service! Picking up people’s groceries is not the kind of service I had in mind when I got into this job,’ said Israel. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s not ridiculous.’
‘It is!’ said Israel. ‘Honestly. This morning…’
First stop of the day, up round the coast, and first in, a man in his seventies, not one of their regulars.
‘D’ye have the Impartial Recorder?’
‘Sorry?’ said Israel.
‘The paper? D’ye have the paper?’
‘No. No. I’m afraid not.’
‘The Tele then?’
‘No. Sorry. We don’t have any papers.’
‘You don’t sell any papers?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘You sell books then?’
‘No, no, we don’t sell books either.’
‘D’ye not?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘We’re a library.’
‘Ach, aye. Second-hand books then.’
‘Erm…Well, yes. Sort of, I suppose.’
‘By the yard, or by the pound?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I saw a thing about it on the telly once. Books by the yard. Or the dozen. I don’t know. I can’t rightly remember.’
‘Right. Well, we don’t actually sell books here at all. You have to join a library. Like you do a video shop or…something. I need to see a utility bill, something with your name and address on it, and then I can—’
‘I’d not be showing you that, indeed; that’d be under the Freedom of Information Act, wouldn’t it? I don’t know who ye are. Are ye the police?’
‘No. I’m not the police.’
‘You could be anybody.’
‘Yes, true. I could, of course, be…anybody. I am in fact the librarian though. Here. In the…mobile library. Where we…are.’
‘You’re a funny-lookin’ librarian.’
‘Yes, well, sorry, I…’
‘D’ye sell milk?’
‘No.’
‘Bread?’
‘No.’
‘A pan loaf just?’
‘No!’
‘Ach. We used to have Paddy Weekly—he was great, so he was—but he was driven out by the supermarkets, ye know.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve to get to Ballycastle for shopping these days.’
‘Right.’
‘I prefer the shopping in Coleraine, meself.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I can get me feet done and me hair cut—there’s a wee girl who comes round the Fold—but if I give ye a wee list ye couldn’t do me a few messages once a week, could ye?’
It just wasn’t right.
‘It’s just not right,’ said Israel, picking absent-mindedly at his scone. ‘You know, the longer I spend working as librarian, the more I’m questioning my vocation.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, whose own scone was rapidly diminishing in size, down from bowling-ball size to tennis-ball size; maybe a little larger.
‘No!’ said Israel, correcting himself. ‘Not just my vocation in fact. The very ground of my being.’
‘Would ye like a top-up of coffee?’ said Minnie, who was doing the rounds.
‘Yes, thanks,’ said Israel.
‘Still on Beckett then?’ she said, pouring Israel another cup of the café’s so-called coffee.
‘Questioning the very ground of his being,’ said Ted.
‘Oh,’ said Minnie. ‘I think I’ll leave you to it then.’
As a child back home in north London, Israel had always imagined that a life communing with books might be a life communing with the great minds and lives of the great thinkers of the past, those who had formed the culture and heritage of the world, and that it might perhaps be his role to share these riches with others. In fact, in reality, as a mobile librarian on the perpetually damp north coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland, Israel seemed to spend most of his time communing with the great minds and lives and thinkers who had produced Haynes car manuals, and Some Stuff I Remember About Visiting my Granny on her Farm in the Country, Before I Was Horribly Mentally, Physically and Sexually Abused by my Uncles and Married Three Unsuitable Husbands and Became an Alcoholic and Lost Everything and Lived in a Bedsit in Quite a Nasty Part of a City Before Meeting my Current Husband Who is Rich, and Wonderful, and Then Moving Back to the Country, Which is Ironic When You Think About It: The Sequel, and Shape Up or Ship Out! The Official US Navy Seals Diet, and How to Become a Babillionaire—Tomorrow!, and pastel-covered Irish, English and American chick-lit by the tonne, the half-tonne, the bushel, and the hot steaming shovel-load.
‘Ach, come on,’ said Ted. ‘It’s not that bad. You’re exeggeratin’.’
‘I’m what?’
‘Exeggeratin’.’
‘Exaggerating?’
‘Aye.’
‘I’m not! What about that other old man in this morning?’
‘Who? Which other old man?’
‘The old man in the baseball cap, that was dripping with rain.’
‘When?’
‘When it was raining?’
‘Ach, aye.’
Their second stop, up further round the coast. A lay-by. The rain had come on—even though it was June. June! Pounding with rain in June! Jesus Christ!
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Ye’ve some books here, boy.’
Israel (restrainedly): ‘Yes. Yes. It’s a library.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Aye.’
Israel (doing his best to be helpful): ‘And can I help you at all?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘No. I’m only in for to be out of the rain.’
Israel: ‘Right. OK. That’s fine. Happy to be of—’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Mind, would ye have any books about…’
Israel: ‘About? What?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (indicating width between finger and thumb): ‘About this thick?’
Israel: ‘Er. Well, possibly. Any subject in particular you’re after?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘I don’t mind about the subject.’
Israel: ‘Right. So, anything really, as long as it’s…’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (indicating his required width again): ‘This thick.’
Israel: ‘I see. What’s that, then? About two, three centimetres?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Quarterinch.’
Israel, scanning the shelves: ‘OK. Erm. I don’t know, Carol Shields, have you read any of her? She’s very popular.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘How thick’s she?’
Israel: ‘Erm.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (taking book from Israel): ‘She’ll do rightly.’
Israel: ‘Do you have a ticket with you?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘No. I’ve not a ticket. The wife does, but.’
Israel: ‘I’d need to see the ticket really. I could always hold it over for you.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (glancing outside): ‘Ach, no. I’ll not bother. We’ve family over at the weekend. I thought it might be the thing for to fix the table—there’s a wee wobble where we had the floor tiled.’
Israel: ‘Right.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘I’ll get an offcut a wood, sure. It’s only because you were insisting that I was askin’.’
Israel: ‘OK, right.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Rain’s off.’
Israel: ‘Good.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain exits.
Israel: ‘Sorry we couldn’t be of more help!’
‘Sure, there was no harm in him,’ said Ted.
‘No!’ said Israel. ‘No! You’re right. There may have been no harm in him, but he did harm to me! To my mental health! I am a highly trained professional.’
Ted coughed.
‘I am though,’ continued Israel. ‘We are. And we should be treated with respect.’
Israel had imagined that a librarian in a small town might be regarded as a kind of cultural ambassador, an adept, like a country priest guiding his grateful parishioners into the mysteries of the holy realms of the book. In fact most library users in and around Tumdrum and District seemed to regard a librarian as nothing more than a glorified shop assistant, and the mobile library as a kind of large motorised shopping trolley. There were only so many small errands that Israel could perform in a day without beginning to feel like a grocer’s assistant, and there was only so much sugar, tea, biscuits, potatoes, newspapers, betting slips and hand-rolling tobacco that the mobile library could carry before they would have to start abandoning the books altogether and go over entirely to carrying dry goods and comestibles. If they ripped out the issues desk and put in a deli counter and got a licence for selling drink, Israel and Ted could probably have made a fortune: your breaded ham, a bottle of Bushmills, and the latest Oprah or Richard and Judy Book Club Recommends, available together at last from a veritable touring one-stop shop; they’d be babillionaires by Christmas.
‘You’re getting carried away now,’ said Ted.
‘I am not getting carried away!’ said Israel.
Israel glanced around the café at all the old familiar faces. ‘Look!’ he said
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Sshh! Behind you!’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Ted, turning round.
‘No! Don’t turn around!’
‘Why?’
‘It’s her.’
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Onions.’
‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘What’s wrong with her, sure?’
‘Oh, God, Ted. She’s another one.’
‘Another one of what?’
‘Another one who’s cracking me up!’
That was the third stop.
Mrs Onions: ‘D’ye have any books with those sort of suedey covers?’
Israel: ‘Erm. No, no, I’m afraid not. We’re right out of the…suede-covered books at the moment, I think.’
Mrs Onions: ‘You’ve plenty of other sorts of books.’
Israel: ‘Yes. We do. That’s true.’
Mrs Onions: ‘I could take one of those. But I like the old suede covers, ye see. My granny used to have one, when she lived on the farm down in the Mournes. The butter, honestly, beautiful it was.’
Israel: ‘Uh-huh.’
Mrs Onions: ‘Will ye be getting any in?’
Israel: ‘It’s possible, yes, that we will be getting in some suede-covered books in the future. I could certainly—’
Mrs Onions: ‘Ach, I’ll not bother for the moment. I’ve shopping to get here.’
Israel: ‘Good. Well, it’s lovely to…’
And there was more! Much, much more, every day: the man who’d come in and take out any books that he deemed were unChristian, and then claim that he’d lost them; the woman who used Sellotape as a bookmark; the creepy man with the moustache who was continually ordering gynaecology textbooks on inter-library loan. It was too much. Israel still found it hard to believe that he’d ended up here in the first place, and the longer he stayed the less he believed it, the more he felt like merely a vestigial presence in his own life, a kind of living, breathing Chagall, floating just above and outside the world, staring down at himself as librarian, as though this weren’t really him at all, not really his life, as if he were merely observing Tumdrum’s nether-world of inanities and bizarre and meaningless human exchanges. The longer he stayed in Tumdrum the more he could feel himself slowly withdrawing from the human world, becoming a mere onlooker, a monitor of human absurdities.
He took another bite of his scone.
‘I feel like a Chagall,’ he said.
‘He says he feels like a Chagall,’ said Ted to Minnie, who’d arrived with offers of another top-up of coffee.
‘He’d need to get himself smarted up first,’ said Minnie, winking; Israel was wearing corduroy trousers, his patched-up old brown brogues, and one of his landlady George’s brother Brownie’s old T-shirts, which read, unhelpfully, ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘But anyway,’ said Minnie. ‘We’ll not have that sort of dirty talk in here, thank you, gents.’
‘I can’t go on, Ted,’ said Israel.
‘No?’ said Ted, reaching forward and taking Israel’s other half of scone.
‘Not the scone!’ said Israel. ‘I mean…this. Life! Here, give that back, it’s mine!’
‘Say please,’ said Ted.
‘Just give me the bloody scone!’
‘Steady now,’ said Ted, handing back the scone. ‘Temper, temper.’
‘Och, you’re like an old married couple, the pair of you,’ said Minnie.
‘Oh, God,’ said Israel, groaning.
‘Language,’ said Ted.
‘Coffee?’ said Minnie.
‘No. I don’t think so,’ said Israel, checking his watch. ‘Oh, shit! Ted!’
‘Language!’ said Minnie.
‘Sorry, Minnie.’
‘Ted!’
‘What?’
‘We’re late for the meeting!’
‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘Behind like the cow’s tail.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll have to hand in your resignation after.’
‘He’s resigning?’ said Minnie.
‘Again,’ said Ted.
‘Yes!’ said Israel. ‘That’s right. I am. I’m handing in my resignation today. I was just distracted there for a moment.’
Ted winked at Minnie as they got up to leave.
‘See you next week then?’ said Minnie.
‘I very much doubt it!’ said Israel. ‘Bye! Come on, Ted, quick, let’s go.’
And with that, Israel Armstrong went to resign, again, from his job as mobile librarian for Tumdrum and District on the windswept north coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland.
2 (#ulink_b41d616c-3dd4-5db0-b12f-bc9225b9d80b)
‘Sorry, Linda,’ he said when they arrived. It was his customary greeting; he liked to get in his apologies in advance. ‘Sorry, everyone.’
‘Ah, Mr Armstrong and Mr Carson,’ said Linda. ‘Punctual as ever.’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘You are aware that the last Wednesday of every month at three o’clock is the Mobile Library Steering Committee?’
‘Yes,’ said Israel.
‘Always has been.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And always will be,’ said Linda.
‘Right.’
‘For ever and ever, Amen,’ said Ted.
‘And yet you, gentlemen,’ continued Linda, ignoring Ted, ‘somehow always manage to be late?’
‘Yes. Erm. Anyway, you’re looking well, Linda,’ said Israel, trying to change the subject.
‘Don’t try to change the subject, Mr Armstrong,’ said Linda. ‘This is not a fashion show.’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘Honestly!’ said Linda, playing up to the—very appreciative—rest of the committee. ‘You put a bit of lipstick on, and they can’t think about anything else. Typical man!’
‘Sorry,’ said Israel, sliding down lower and lower in his seat.
‘You’re all the same.’
‘Sorry. We had some trouble…with the van.’
They hadn’t had trouble with the van, actually, but they often did have trouble with the van, so it wasn’t a lie in the proper sense of the word; it wasn’t as if Israel were making it up because, really, the van was nothing but trouble. The van was an old Bedford, and Ted’s pride and joy—rescued, hidden and restored by him at a time when Tumdrum and District Council were scaling down their library provision, and resurrected and brought back into service only six months ago when Israel had arrived and taken on the role of mobile librarian. The van wasn’t merely a vehicle to Ted; it wasn’t just any old van; it wasn’t, to be honest, even a van in particular; the van was the epitome, the essence, the prime example of mobile library vans in general. To Ted, his van represented pure undiluted mobile library-ness. It was the Platonic van; the ur-van; the über-van; it was a totem and a symbol. And you can’t argue with symbols: symbols just are. Thus, in Ted’s mind, there was absolutely nothing—not a thing—wrong with the mobile library van. The corrosion in the engine, and the mould and mildew in the cabin, and the occasional seizure of the clutch, and some problems with the brake callipers, and the cables, and the wiring looms, and the oil filter, and the spark-plugs, and the battery—these were simply aspects of the van’s pure vanness, a part of its very being, its complete and utter rusty red-and-cream-liveried perfection.
‘So,’ the chairman of the Mobile Library Steering Committee, a man called Ron, an archetypically bald and grey-suited councillor, was saying, ‘Here we all are then.’ Ron specialised in making gnomic utterances and looking wise. ‘All together, once again.’
Also on the committee was Eileen, another councillor, a middle-aged woman with short dyed blonde hair who always wore bright red lipstick with jackets of contrasting colours—today, an almost luminous green—which made her look like the last squeezings of a tube of cheap tooth-paste. Eileen was a great believer in Booker Prize-winning novels. Booker Prize-winning novels, according to Eileen, were the key not merely to improving standards of literary taste among the adults in Tumdrum and District, but were in fact a panacea for all sorts of social ills. Booker Prize-winning novels, according to Eileen, were penicillin, aspirin, paracetamol and snake oil, all in one, in black and white, and in between hard covers. Eileen believed passionately in what you might call the trickle-down theory of literature; according to her, the reading of Booker Prize-winning novels by Tumdrum’s library-borrowing elite would lead inevitably and inexorably to the raising of social and cultural values among the populace at large. Even a mere passing acquaintance with someone who had read, say, Ian McEwan or Salman Rushdie could potentially save a local young person from a meaningless and empty life of cruising around town in a souped-up hot hatch and binge-drinking at weekends, and might very possibly lead them instead into joining a book group, and drinking Chardonnay, and learning to appreciate the finer points of the very best of metropolitan and middle-brow fiction.
Israel did not like Eileen, and Eileen did not like him.
‘Can’t we just get lots of copies of the Booker Prizewinning novels?’ Eileen would opine, all year round. Her clothes and her slightly manic cheeriness always gave the Mobile Library Steering Committee meetings a sense of evening occasion—like a Booker Prize awards night dinner, indeed—as though she might at any moment stand up at a podium, raise a glass of champagne, and offer a toast, ‘To Literature!’ Other members of the committee could often be heard to groan when she spoke.
The other committee members were two moon-faced men whose names Israel could never remember, and who both required endless recaps and reiterations and reminders of the minutest detail of the mobile library’s activities, most of which, when recapped, they found profoundly unsatisfactory. Both of them wore glasses and were bald. Israel called them Chi-Chi and Chang-Chang.
And then of course there was Linda Wei, Israel’s boss. His line-manager. His nemesis. The person who—apart from his landlady, George, and Ted, and most of the other inhabitants of this godforsaken town—had made Israel’s stay in Northern Ireland as unpleasant and as difficult and as miserable as possible. Linda it was who, when Israel complained about his working conditions, would put her fingers in her ears and sing, ‘I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!’ Linda it was who had introduced performance-related pay—for librarians! What were they supposed to do? Force books on people? Offer them money-back guarantees and loyalty cards?—and who had doubled the number of runs that Israel and Ted were expected to complete in a week, and at the same cut the stock back to the bare bones of celebrity autobiographies, bestsellers and self-help manuals. And now Linda it was to whom Israel was about to hand in his resignation. Sweet, sweet, sweet revenge. He was composing in his mind the words he was going to use.
‘It is with great regret that I have to inform you that…’?
No, that wasn’t right.
‘I have to tell you now that I have discharged my last…’?
No.
‘You are probably all aware of the reasons why I have chosen to renounce…’?
No.
‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility…’?
‘Hasta la vista, baby!’?
That was about the best he could come up with.
He was looking forward to it. A grand exit and then up, up and away from Tumdrum. Over to England. To London! The bright lights. The streets paved with gold. And never to return. This place was bad for him—psychically bad. It was doing him damage. He could feel it: he was calcifying inside; he could feel himself losing synaptic connections on a daily basis. He was de-evolving. He needed to beat a retreat, start over, and get his old life back.
He couldn’t wait for the meeting to be finished. He wasn’t good in meetings; he was meeting-phobic.
‘Anyway, as I was saying,’ Ron was saying, ‘before we were interrupted. Meltdown. Total. Meltdown.’
Israel tried to follow the conversation for a few minutes, and failed. He and Ted seemed to have arrived at the Mobile Library Steering Committee in the middle of a hotly contested debate about the pros and cons of installing an on-board microwave oven in the van. This seemed unlikely, but Israel checked the agenda:
6) Microwave ovens
To note that the Council is to consider the use of microwave ovens in all public areas, including mobile learning centres.
This proposed innovation had developed into a passionate debate about the Health and Safety implications of combining hot food and drink and members of the public. Ron believed that there were indeed major Health and Safety implications, there having already been unconfirmed reports, from some councils which had introduced microwaves and drinks machines into community halls, of some less forward-thinking members of the public using non-microwavable plastic beakers in the microwaves.
‘Meltdown!’ Ron kept saying. ‘A very high risk of meltdown.’
It was generally agreed that the risk of meltdown needed to be further looked into. The issue was therefore referred to the Mobile Library Steering Committee Health and Safety Sub-Committee—Israel and Linda—for further discussion. Israel wouldn’t mind a microwave in the van: he could maybe get pies from the Trusty Crusty for his lunch.
They moved on to the next point on the agenda.
7) Sexual and racial harassment—appointment of advisers
To note that Council policy on sexual and racial harassment now requires two members of staff (one male, one female) from each library to act as advisers. These advisers to be appointed annually by each library.
‘We need to appoint advisers,’ said Ron.
‘I’ll advise,’ said Linda.
‘Good. Thank you, Linda. So now we need a male,’ said Ron.
Ted was looking at the floor.
Israel was pretending he couldn’t hear.
‘Israel?’ said Ron.
‘Yes?’ said Israel.
‘Sexual and racial harassment?’
‘Yes. Terrible,’ said Israel.
‘Would you mind?’ said Ron. ‘With Linda?’
‘Erm.’
‘Sexual and racial harassment with Linda?’ said Ted, mostly to himself.
‘Yes,’ said Ron.
‘Sure,’ said Israel.
‘What’s that on your T-shirt?’ said Eileen. ‘“Smack My Bitch Up”?’
‘Yeesss,’ said Israel. ‘It’s just a phrase.’
There was a lot of other stuff: stuff about budgets; and footfalls; and deadlines for this, and deadlines for that; and Israel soon lost interest and pretty soon after that he also lost the will to live. While Linda was speaking about rolling out wi-fi connections across the county, Israel sat staring down at the thinly veneered pale wood surface of the table around which they were all sitting, like miniaturised modern-day medieval knights discussing their forthcoming crusade against the Infidel, or Mafia bosses running a failing cold-storage and meat-packing plant, and for a moment he imagined that they were a parachute display team and that the table was in fact nothing but a big inverted bag of air held by a gathering of cords and they were all about to drop down thousands of feet, out of the blue sky, down to earth…Which, indeed, promptly they did.
‘Mr Armstrong?’ Linda was saying. ‘Hello? Mr Armstrong? Earth calling Armstrong? Excuse us?’
He was doodling. His agenda looked like a greyscale photocopy of an early Jackson Pollock, pre-Full Fathom Five. At the last Mobile Library Steering Committee meeting Linda had proposed a motion banning all doodling, claiming that it was an act of passive aggression, perpetrated almost wholly by males, but the motion was voted down—Ron was a secret doodler, as were Chi-Chi and Chang-Chang. Linda had also been pressing for a Mobile Library Steering Committee team-building weekend away—with orienteering, and white-water rafting, and abseiling—which absolutely nobody else at all thought was a good idea. No one wanted bonding; quite the opposite. She’d also been pressuring Ted and Israel to sign up for a ‘PR and Power Presentation Skills’ course running over in Derry; they had, so far, successfully resisted.
She was basically completely crazy, Linda, as far as Israel could tell, and she’d got even crazier since splitting up with her husband and coming out as a lesbian, which made her Tumdrum’s only Chinese Catholic lesbian single parent, as far as Israel was aware, and as much as he disliked Linda—and he really disliked her a lot—you had to respect her for that. There’d been a leaving-do recently for a retiring librarian down in Rathkeltair, and they’d all gone out to a Chinese restaurant which had a karaoke, and once everyone had done their ‘Country Road’s and ‘Imagine’s and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’s, Linda insisted on getting up, Baileys in hand, and singing—unaccompanied, because there was no backing track—an old music-hall song, ‘Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty’, encoring with ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ and ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’.
Really, you couldn’t help but like Linda.
‘Armstrong!’ Linda was saying. ‘Pay attention!’
At least, you couldn’t help but like her in theory.
As always, the major issue facing the Mobile Library Steering Committee had been tucked away deep into the agenda.
‘So, gentlemen. Now the good news.’
‘Item 9,’ said Eileen.
Ted looked at Item 9.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Israel. ‘Ted?’
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Oh. My. God!’
‘What?’
‘Item 9.’
‘What about it?’
‘Look at it.’
Ted peered at the agenda. ‘Aye.’
Israel read it out: ‘“Replacement of mobile learning centre vehicle.”’
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Your van, gentlemen,’ said Linda, with some pride, ‘is going to be replaced.’
‘What?’ repeated Ted.
‘The van, Mr Carson, we’ve found the money through some Lottery funding and a new development grant.’
‘No way!’ said Israel.
‘Way,’ said Linda.
‘We can’t get rid of the van,’ said Ted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the van.’
‘Now, now, Mr Carson,’ said Linda.
‘That van is perfect,’ said Ted.
‘Except for the steering,’ said Israel.
‘It’s a wee bit sloppy, just,’ said Ted.
‘Corrosion in the engine,’ added Israel.
‘Well? New engine,’ said Ted.
‘Clutch,’ said Israel.
‘Needs replacing just.’
‘Brakes.’
‘Yes, yes, we get the picture, thank you, gentlemen,’ said Linda. ‘Well, Mr Carson?’
Ted was silent.
‘When do we get the new one then?’ said Israel. ‘What’s it going to be like? What colour is it going to be?’
‘Well, actually, gentlemen,’ said Linda, with a further flourish, ‘we would like you to go and choose.’
‘What?’ said Israel. ‘You are joking!’
‘No. We are not joking, Mr Armstrong. We’re sending you to the Mobile Meet, so you can meet up with some of the manufacturers and—’
‘The what?’
‘The Mobile Meet,’ said Linda, ‘is organised by the Chartered Institute of Information and Library Professionals. It’s an annual event where mobile librarians can meet and swap experiences and discuss the latest technology. It’s a prestige event.’
‘Right,’ said Israel.
‘It’s in England,’ said Linda.
‘No!’ said Israel.
‘Yes,’ said Linda.
‘You’re joking!’
‘No. We are not joking. Again,’ said Linda.
‘That’s fantastic! You’re sending us over?’
‘Yes,’ said Linda.
‘Like on a business trip?’ said Israel.
‘I suppose,’ said Linda.
‘Wow!’ said Israel. ‘All expenses paid?’
‘Well—’ began Linda.
‘Whereabouts?’ said Israel. He could barely contain his excitement.
‘Somewhere down in Wiltshire?’ said Linda. She pronounced it Wilt Shire.
‘Wiltshire? Great! God! Where’s that?’
‘Stonehenge?’ said Ron. ‘Somewhere round there.’
‘How close to London?’ said Israel.
‘M3,’ said Ron. ‘M4?’
‘Is that close by?’
‘Not far, I don’t think,’ said Ron. ‘I went with the wife once to Salisbury. Years ago. Visiting some friends of ours over there. That was nice.’
‘Oh, yeah!’ said Israel, punching the air. ‘Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!’
‘What?’
‘This is brilliant. Linda, I can’t thank you enough. This is fantastic! It’s the best day of my life.’
‘Right, well, thank you, Mr Armstrong.’
Ted had been rather quiet.
‘Mr Carson?’ said Linda.
‘You can’t replace the van,’ said Ted. ‘She’s irreplaceable.’
‘No one and nothing is irreplaceable, Ted, I’m afraid,’ said Ron. ‘Us old warhorses included.’
‘We’ve had that van nearly thirty years,’ said Ted.
‘Exactly,’ said Linda. ‘What about a refurbishment?’ said Ted.
‘We’ve looked into the price of a refurbishment and it’s not economical, I’m afraid,’ said Linda.
‘When did ye look into a refurbishment?’
‘We’ve looked into a refurbishment.’
‘Not with me you haven’t.’
‘No, we had some consultants look into it.’
‘You had consultants looking at my van?’
‘It’s not actually your van, Mr Carson. It’s the—’
‘It only needs a bit of work.’
‘New engine?’ said Linda, referring to a list. ‘Bodywork. Chassis.’
‘Well?’ said Ted.
‘She’d hardly be the same vehicle, would she, Ted?’ said Ron.
‘Like the philosopher’s hammer,’ said Israel.
‘What’s he going on about?’ said one of the nameless councillors.
‘No idea,’ said the other.
‘We’re looking at a number of possible suppliers at the moment,’ said Linda. ‘Mostly specialist coach builders—they do hospitality units, mobile police stations.’
‘Wow!’ said Israel. ‘Ted! We could have our own hospitality area, and a VIP lounge.’
‘Here are the brochures, gents,’ said Linda, handing over some thick glossy booklets. ‘If you’d like to be having a look at those.’
‘Fantastic,’ said Israel.
‘You will of course be fully consulted about the exact specifications.’
‘Ted! Look at this! What about a mini-bar, eh, Ted?’
Ted’s eyes were glazed.
‘We could have a toilet and everything. Remember that time you were caught short and…Ted?’
‘I think you’ll agree the standard of craftsmanship on this sort of vehicle is quite different to your own—’ began Linda.
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Efforts, Ted. Which have been much appreciated, may I just say.’
‘I want it minuted that I’m very unhappy with this,’ said Ted.
‘Right,’ said Linda. ‘I really don’t think there’s any need for that.’
‘I want it in the records!’ said Ted.
‘Well, that’s fine, if you insist.’
‘This’ll be fantastic, Ted,’ said Israel. ‘Listen—’
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll listen to you when you’ve learned to wipe your arse,’ said Ted.
‘Right. Thanks.’
‘Come on now, Ted, there’s no need for that sort of language now, is there? There’s ladies present,’ said Ron.
‘Women, thank you,’ said Linda. ‘This is the twenty-first century. Anyway, maybe you two…gentlemen…can talk it over between yourselves? And let me know whether we can go ahead with our plans and book your tickets over to England?’
3 (#ulink_f1418570-94b3-5f0b-b0a5-7c4a6351ed7d)
The meeting had ended, as was traditional at Mobile Library Steering Committee meetings, amidst argument, dissolution and general disarray—‘Don’t forget the Booker Prize longlist, announced in August!’ cried Eileen. ‘That’s August!’; ‘PR!’ Ron was saying. ‘New van! Great PR!’; and ‘Some reports of discrepancies in cataloguing!’ Linda was reminding Ted and Israel; and ‘What?’ said Chi-Chi; and ‘What?’ said Chang-Chang—and then it was the long drive home in the van with Ted silent and sulking and Israel flicking through the fat, plush brochures and the programme for the Mobile Meet, the UK’s, quote, Premier Mobile Library Event. Unquote.
It was an uncomfortable, damp, sweaty summer’s evening; tempers were frayed; temperatures high; and Israel knew that he was going to have to do something pretty special to persuade Ted to go with him over to England. This was his opportunity to ensure himself a free trip back home: the prospect of leaving Tumdrum was the best thing that had happened to him since arriving.
‘There’s some really good stuff on at this Mobile Meet thing,’ he said casually.
‘Huh,’ said Ted.
‘Look. A Guide to Electronic Self-issue,’ said Israel.
‘Bullshit,’ said Ted.
‘Supplier-Select Book-Buying For Beginners,’ said Israel.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Bibliotherapy,’ said Israel.
‘What?’
‘Bibliotherapy,’ repeated Israel.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Honestly, some of this stuff looks really good,’ said Israel. ‘I think it’ll be really interesting.’
‘That’s because you’re a ragin’ eejit, like the rest of them.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure. Hirstle o’ blinkin’ eejits, the whole lot of youse.’
‘What’all of idiots?’
‘Ach, read a fuckin’ dictionary, Israel, will ye? I’m not in the mood.’
‘Right. Ted,’ said Israel soothingly, ‘not being funny, but you really shouldn’t take this personally.’
‘I shouldn’t take it personally?’
‘No. The whole van thing, you know. You need to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat.’
Israel could sense Ted’s neck and back—his whole body—stiffening in the van beside him, which was not a good sign. Ted was like a dog: he gave clear warnings before attacking. Israel’s softly-softly, soothing approach was clearly not working; he’d rubbed him up the wrong way.
‘An opportunity!’ said Ted, his shaven head glistening, his slightly shiny short-sleeved shirt shining, and his big hairy forearms tensing and tensing again. ‘An opportunity! The van I’ve tended like me own wean for the past…God only knows how many years, and they’re planning to throw on the scrap heap? And I should view that as an opportunity?’
‘Yes, no, I mean, just…You know, all good things must…and what have you—’
‘Ach!’
‘Plus,’ said Israel, trying an entirely other approach. ‘Yes! Plus! You could think of it as a nice holiday, you know. We’re going to get to go over to England, relax, choose a new van. It’ll be great fun.’
‘Fun?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are actually stupit, aren’t ye?’
Israel thought fast. ‘We could have air conditioning in the new van,’ he said, wiping the sweat dramatically from his brow. ‘You know how hot it gets in here sometimes. And with the rain, in the summer. You were complaining about it only yesterday. Dehumidification.’
‘We don’t need dehumimidifaction.’
‘For the…books, though.’
Maybe a clerkly appeal, an appeal to worthiness, to the ancient and high-minded principles of librarianship?
‘We can’t think of ourselves always, Ted. We’re librarians. We have to think of the good of the books. You know, that’s our first responsibility, as librarians, to the books, rather than to the van.’
‘To the books?’
‘That’s right. To the books. And…’
God, what else would appeal to Ted?
‘Our responsibility to the clients.’
‘The clients?’
‘Yes,’ said Israel, without conviction.
‘Are ye having me on?’
‘No,’ said Israel. Clearly an appeal to their responsibility to readers wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked with him either.
‘You’re not even half interested though?’ said Israel tentatively. ‘I mean, they’re giving us carte blanche, Ted. We could go for the full works. Anything we want. You know, like a mobile Internet café. “Would you like an espresso with your Catherine Cookson, madam?” We could have our own blog! Honestly, it’d be amazing.’
‘No,’ said Ted. ‘It wouldn’t be amazing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re not getting a new bloody van!’
‘Language, Ted.’
‘Don’t talk to me about my language, ye fuckin’ eejit!’
‘Sorry,’ said Israel.
‘Thank you,’ said Ted.
‘We are getting a new van, though,’ said Israel determinedly.
‘We’re not getting a new van,’ said Ted, more determinedly. ‘We are not going to England, we’re not going to some daftie wee librarian conference—’
‘The Mobile Meet,’ corrected Israel.
‘And we’re not getting a new van.’
‘But—’
‘They’ll not get rid of this van,’ said Ted. ‘If they want to get rid of this van they’ll have to get rid of me first.’
‘Don’t say that, Ted.’
‘The van’s staying.’
‘Ted!’
‘And so am I. Here! In Norn Iron. And we are not getting a new van.’
‘We are, Ted,’ said Israel.
‘We’re not.’
‘We are.’
‘We’re not. I’m telling you now,’ said Ted, turning across to look at Israel, and gripping the steering wheel so tight that Israel thought he might actually choke it and throttle the whole vehicle. ‘Again. We. Are. Not. Getting. A. New. Van! We’re not going anywhere. We’re staying put! D’ye understand me?’ When Ted raised his voice it was like someone hitting you around the ears.
‘Please?’ said Israel quietly.
‘No!’ yelled Ted.
Israel was worried that Ted might have a heart attack or a stroke and they’d end up swerving and crashing and they’d both die, and they’d make the front page of the Impartial Recorder: ‘Librarians killed in tragic mobile library crash’, with a grainy black and white photo. And a few words of tribute from Linda Wei. Which was not the way Israel would have wished to be remembered.
Ted had lost his temper, and Israel had no other means of persuasion. He was reduced to pathetic pleading.
‘Please, Ted. A new van? A trip over to England? Seize the day. Carpe diem and all that.’
‘Aye, and who’s he when he’s at home?’
‘Carpe diem? It means—’
‘Of course I know what carpe diem means, ye fuckin’ wee shite!’
Ted punched the steering wheel. Which was never good. It made the whole front of the dashboard wobble.
‘Listen!’ said Ted. ‘Let me make meself perfectly plain. Do not patronise me. Do not try to talk me round. And do not try to appeal to my better nature!’
‘No, Ted. No, I wouldn’t dream of…appealing to your…’
That gave Israel an idea. They drove on in silence for a few minutes longer, Israel flicking through the programme of events for the Mobile Meet.
‘At the Mobile Meet they have all these competitions, you know.’
‘Hmm,’ said Ted.
‘Driver of the Year.’
‘Hmm.’
‘State of the Art Vehicle.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Best Livery.’
Israel thought he could just detect a slight interest in Ted’s ‘hmm’s. This could be it. He tried to utilise his advantage. Counter-intuitive was the way to go with Ted; there was no point setting out premises and establishing arguments. There was absolutely no point arguing with Ted, or appealing to his better nature. Cunning—that’s what was called for.
‘This old thing probably wouldn’t stand a chance, of course, at that sort of competition level.’
‘Don’t ye get started into the van again now.’
‘No, no, I’m not. I mean, she just wouldn’t, though, would she, realistically, stand a chance of winning a prize at the Mobile Meet? With that, you know, all that competition. Not a chance.’
‘Ach, of course she’d stand a chance.’
‘I don’t think so, Ted. Not up against all those English vans.’
‘Ach,’ said Ted.
‘Not a chance of winning. Not in a million years. If you look at these categories. Concours D’Elégance.’
‘What?’
‘Concours D’Elégance means, you know, the best-looking van there on the day.’
‘Ach, well, if she was there, she’d definitely win that. Best van, no problem.’
‘No?’ said Israel. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Of course she would!’
‘Well, I suppose if you pimped her up a bit and—’
‘Wee bit of work, no problem,’ said Ted. ‘Definitely she’d win it. She’s a beauty,’ said Ted, affectionately stroking the dashboard. ‘Aren’t you, girl?’
He had found Ted’s Achilles heel; his underbelly; his soft spot; his weakness; his fatal Cleopatra. Pride.
‘I tell you what,’ said Israel. ‘Do you want to have a bet on it?’
‘A what?’ said Ted. ‘A bet?’
‘Yes, a bet, on you winning the Concours D’Elégance at the Mobile Meet.’
‘With you, a bet?’ said Ted.
‘Yes.’
‘Ach,’ said Ted. ‘I’m good living. I don’t gamble.’
‘Oh,’ said Israel. He knew that in fact Ted did gamble; the week of the Cheltenham Gold Cup he’d talked about nothing else. Israel had had to cover for him every day. Then again, Ted also claimed he didn’t drink. And didn’t smoke. And he did. And he did.
‘I don’t gamble,’ repeated Ted. ‘Unless I know I’m going to win.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Israel.
Israel could see a glint in Ted’s eye.
‘A bet,’ Ted said to himself. ‘The van to win the…What did you call it?’
‘Concours D’Elégance.’
‘Concord De Elephants,’ repeated Ted.
‘That’s it,’ said Israel.
‘Are ye serious?’
‘Yes, absolutely I’m serious.’
Israel could see Ted thinking through the proposition. ‘Well?’ he said gingerly.
‘I tell you what, son,’ said Ted, pausing dramatically. Big pause. ‘Seeing as you’ve asked.’ Another pause. ‘You’re on.’
‘No. Really? Honestly?’
‘Yes,’ said Ted.
‘Really?’ said Israel.
‘I said yes.’
‘Great!’ said Israel. ‘How much? A couple of pounds?’
‘Couple of pounds!’ said Ted, bellowing with laughter. ‘Couple of pounds! Ach, ye’re a quare geg. No, no, no. No. If I’m going all the way over to the mainland I want to get my money’s worth out of you. We’ll do it properly. I’ll get JP to open up a book on it.’
‘JP?’
‘The bookie on Main Street. He’ll see us right.’
‘Erm.’
‘Yer bet’s definitely on now; ye’re not going to back out?’
‘No. Definitely. Absolutely,’ said Israel. ‘Game on.’
‘You don’t want to change yer mind?’
‘Nope.’
‘Ye know ye don’t back out of a bet, now?’
‘Quite.’
Ted reached a hand across. ‘Five hundred pounds,’ said Ted.
‘Five hundred pounds!’ said Israel.
‘You’re right,’ said Ted. ‘Five hundred’s not enough. One thousand says we win the…What did you call it?’
‘Concours D’Elégance. But I haven’t got one thousand pounds, Ted. The van’s not worth a thousand pounds.’
‘I thought you wanted a bet?’
‘I do, but—’
‘Aye, right, that’s typical, so it is. You’re trying to wriggle out of it now.’
‘No, I am not trying to wriggle out of it.’
‘Ach, you are, so you are. Ye’re not prepared to put your money where your mouth is. Typical Englishman.’
‘I am not trying to wriggle out of it, Ted.’
‘Well, then, are youse in, or are youse out?’
‘All right,’ said Israel, trying to suppress a grin. ‘One thousand pounds says you won’t win the Concours D’Elégance at this year’s Mobile Meet.’ He knew his money was safe.
The rest of the journey continued in silence, with Israel elated and exhausted from his negotiations and Ted already planning the few little tweaks and alterations he needed to get the van into top condition. Eventually, Ted pulled up outside the Devines’ farm, where Israel was a lodger, and Israel clambered down wearily from the van.
‘Hey!’ called Ted, as Israel was about to shut the door. ‘Did ye not forget something?’
‘No,’ said Israel, patting his pockets, patting the seat. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I think you did,’ said Ted.
‘What? “Thank you” for the lift?’
‘No,’ said Ted.
‘What? The bet?’
‘No. The bet’s on—we’ve shaken.’
‘Yes,’ said Israel. ‘And I am a man of my word.’
‘Aye. Exactly. And you remember what you were going to do today, Man of Your Word?’
‘Erm. No. I don’t remember. Should I?’
‘You were going to tell her?’
‘Tell who?’
‘Linda. That you were resigning.’
‘Ah, yes. Well…things have changed since this afternoon.’
‘Have they now?’
‘Yes. I feel I have a…responsibility to the readers of Tumdrum and District to…’
‘And it’s not because you’re getting a free holiday to England?’
‘No! Of course not!’
‘You shouldn’t ever try to kid a kidder,’ said Ted.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know your game.’
‘I don’t…I’m not playing a game, Ted.’
‘Aye.’
‘No. I just feel very strongly that my responsibility is to books, and to…encouraging the people of the north coast of Northern Ireland to…indulge their learned curiosity and to give them unlimited assistance…by helping to choose a new mobile library van.’
‘Aye, tell the truth and shame the devil, why don’t ye?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t care what you think your responsibility is,’ said Ted. ‘My first responsibility is to the van. One thousand pounds, remember.’
‘Fine.’
‘Pay for some refurbishments, wouldn’t it? You’d better start saving, boy!’
‘No, Ted, I don’t need to start saving, because alas very soon we shall be in sunny England choosing a brand spanking new top-of-the-range mobile library and we will no longer have need of this…’ And with that, Israel walked away and slammed the door. ‘…piece of junk,’ he muttered under his breath.
Oh, yes!
Ted had been reeled in hook, line and sinker!
Israel Armstrong was going home!
4 (#ulink_61c3002b-4f68-5602-9549-1a46e8ed6652)
He was packing! Israel Armstrong was packing up and getting ready to go. He had his case out from under the bed, and his little portable radio turned up loud, and he was listening to BBC Radio Ulster, the local station; he’d gone over some time ago, had switched from Radio 4, had made the move away from the national and the international, from big news stories about Bush and Blair and the plight of the Middle East and worldwide pandemics and whither the UN Security Council, to local news stories about men beating each other with baseball bats in local bars and pubs, and road closures due to mains-laying down in Cullybackey, and good news about the meat-processing plant in Ballymena taking on ten new workers due to expanding European markets and increased orders from Poland for pork. He knew it was a bad sign, but he couldn’t help himself; he had grown accustomed to the rhythms and the pitch of local radio, to the shouty-voiced shock-jock first thing in the morning, and the faded country music star at lunchtime who played only Irish country and read out requests for the foot-tappin’ welders in Lurgan and all the lovely nurses on the cancer wards down there at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the mid-morning bloke from Derry who specialised in trading daring double-entendres with his adoring female callers.
Somehow—and how he wished it were not so—Israel could now recognise a tune by Daniel O’Donnell from far distant, and the supersweet sound of Philomena Begley and her band, and he also knew the time the Ulster Bank closed on a Wednesday (three thirty, for staff training), and the times of the high tides (varied according to season), and the best grocer to go to for your soup vegetables (Hector’s) and which one for eggs (Conways). This was not what was supposed to happen. Israel had imagined himself, heading into his late twenties, being able to recommend fine restaurants in Manhattan to his friends, many of whom probably worked for the New Yorker magazine, or who were up-and-coming artists with a gallery representing them, and he could have told you what time to go to MOMA and what was happening at the Whitney Museum. Instead, somehow, Israel had ended up knowing what night the Methodists had their ladies’ indoor bowling practice (Tuesday) and the Post Office opening hours (Mon-Fri, 9.00 a.m.-1.00 p.m., 2.00 p.m.-5.00 p.m.; early closing Wed, 3.30 p.m.; Sat, 10.00 a.m.-1.00 p.m.).
He turned up the radio louder to drown out the ennui and focused on his packing.
Brownie was back for the summer break from univer-sity over in England, so the Devines had moved Israel out of Brownie’s room, where he’d been staying, and out of the house and back into the chicken coop in the yard, where he’d first started out when he arrived in Tumdrum. Israel didn’t mind, actually, being back in the coop. It was good to get a little breathing space, and to be able to put a bit of distance between himself and George Devine—his landlady with the man’s name—and the perpetually Scripture-quoting senior Mr Devine, George and Brownie’s grandfather, and he’d done his best with the coop; had put in quite a bit of work doing the place up over the past few weeks. He had a desk in there now, along with the bed, and the Baby Belling and the old sink battened to the wall, and it was a nice desk he’d picked up from the auction down in Rathkeltair (Tippings Auctions, every Thursday, six till ten, in one of the new industrial units out there on the ring road, hundreds and hundreds of people in attendance every week, from as far afield as County Down and Derry, drinking scalding-hot tea and eating fast-fried burgers from Big Benny McAuley’s Premier Meats and Snacks van, and bidding like crazy for other people’s discarded household items and rubbish, and rusty tools, and amateur watercolours, and telephone seats and tubular bunk beds, and pot-plant stands, and novelty cruet sets, and golf clubs, and boxes overflowing with damp paperback books; Israel loved Tippings; it was like a Middle Eastern bazaar, except without the spices and the ethnic jewellery, and with more men wearing greasy flat caps buying sets of commemorative RUC cap badges). Lovely little roll-top desk it was, although the top didn’t actually roll, and a couple of the drawers were jammed shut, and Israel had had to patch up the top with some hardboard; but it did the job.
He also had a table lamp, which had first graced a home some time in the 1970s, by the look of it, and whose yellow plastic shade bore the scars of too many too-high-watted light bulbs; and also a small armchair which had at some time been re-upholstered with someone’s curtains, and which had a broken arm; and a couple of old red fire buckets to catch the rain that made it through the coop’s mossy asbestos roof; and also he’d rigged up a washing line using some twine and a couple of nails; and he had a walnut-veneer wardrobe crammed in there, with a broken mirror and only one leg missing, to keep his clothes in. To store his books he’d broken apart some old pallets and knocked up some shelving—him, Israel Armstrong, wielding a hammer and nails, and with the blackened thumb and fingernails to prove it—and these pretty sturdy shelves of his were now piled with books on one side of the bed and with jars of tea and coffee on the other, and an old teapot containing all his cutlery, two Duralex glasses and his enamel mug. He’d cut off a bit of an old mouldy scaffolding plank to cover the sink when he needed to prepare his food. The chicken coop wasn’t exactly a palace, but nor was it quite the proverbial Augean stable. Israel liked to think of it as an eccentric World of Interiors kind of a look—Gloria loved The World of Interiors. It was…there was probably a phrase for it. Shabby chic, that was it. With the emphasis, admittedly, on the shabby. Super-shabby chic? Shabby shabby chic?
It was shabby.
He squeezed his spare corduroy trousers into his case and went to the farmhouse, to the kitchen to say goodbye to the Devines.
There was only Brownie in, hunched over the table, reading. It was June, but the Rayburn was fired up, as ever. There were flies, but even the flies were resting. Old Mr Devine was a firm believer in fly-paper; the kitchen was festooned with claggy plumes of curling brown tape.
‘Israel!’ said Brownie, looking up. You could always count on Brownie for a warm welcome.
‘Brownie.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m doing good, actually,’ said Israel. ‘Pretty good. What are you reading?’
‘Levinas,’ said Brownie. Brownie was studying Philosophy at Cambridge.
‘Oh, right. Yes.’
‘Totality and Infinity?’
‘Absolutely, yes,’ said Israel.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Erm. That one? Er. Yes, I think so. I preferred some of his…others though, actually—’
‘Alterity.’
‘Yes, that’s a good one.’
‘No, that’s the idea, translation of the French.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Israel dubiously.
‘Anyway, how are things on the mobile?’ asked Brownie.
‘Good! Yes. Excellent,’ said Israel. ‘Even better now, we’re going away for a few days.’
‘Oh, really? In the van?’
‘Yes. Yeah. Big conference thing over in England.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you giving a paper or…’
‘No. No. I mean, they did ask me, of course, but I was…It’s difficult to fit it all in when you’re at the…’
‘Coalface?’ said Brownie.
‘Exactly. The library is the coalface of contemporary knowledge management.’
‘Right,’ said Brownie. It was something Israel had read in one of the brochures for the Mobile Meet.
‘Anyway. I was wanting to explain to George I wouldn’t be around, just so that she—’
‘Ah, right. I think she’s out with Granda in the vegetable patch if you want to catch them.’
‘Great.’
‘Good. Well, enjoy the conference.’
‘Thanks, you enjoy the…’
‘Levinas.’
‘Yeah. What was it called again?’
‘Totality and Infinity.’
‘Yeah. Great book. Great book.’
Israel’s reading had always been erratic and undisciplined; there were huge chunks missing in his knowledge, while other areas were grossly over-represented; it was like having mental biceps, but no triceps, or glutes, or quads, or forearms; he was a kind of mental hunchback; misproportioned; a freak. Graphic novels, for example, were ten a penny up in Israel’s mental attic, along with the novels of E.F. Benson and Barbara Pym—God only knows how they’d got there—piled up uselessly like old trunks full of crumbling paper, together with a whole load of Walter Benjamin, and Early Modernism, and books by Czechs, and the Oedipus Complex, and the Collective Unconscious, and Iris Murdoch, and William Trevor, and Virtual Reality, and Form Follows Function, and Whereof One Cannot Speak Thereof One Must Remain Silent, and The White Goddess, and William James, and Commodity Fetishism, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Ruth Rendell, and Jeanette Winterson, and Anthony Powell—Anthony Powell? What was he doing there? Israel had no idea. He had a mind like Tippings Auctions. His actual knowledge of philosophy proper, say, or eighteenth-century literature, or science, anthropology, geology, gardening, or geometry was…skimpy, to say the least.
And since arriving in Tumdrum his reading had become even more erratic and undisciplined; he’d had to cut his cloth to suit his sail. Or was it sail to suit his cloth? He was reading more and more of what they stocked in the van, which meant crime fiction, mostly, and books by authors whose work had won prizes or who were in some other way distinguished or remarkable; thus, celebrity biographies and books about people’s miserable childhoods. But it wasn’t as though he felt he’d lowered his standards. On the contrary. Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent, that was a great book, much better than most Booker Prize-shortlisted books, in his opinion. And The Firm, by John Grisham, that was pretty good too. He’d even started reading Patricia Cornwell from A to Z, but they seemed to go downhill rapidly, and he’d lost interest around about D. Cookery books also he liked: a man cannot survive on scrambled eggs alone. For the journey over to England, Israel was taking with him A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Purpose-Driven Life, and a couple of large-print crime novels. most of the library’s crime novels were large print. Israel had discovered a direct correlation between print size and genre: crime fiction, for example, came in big and small sizes, and also in audio, and in hardback, and in several kinds of paperback, and trailing TV tie-ins; literary fiction occasionally came with a different cover relating to a film adaptation. And poetry was just poetry: he’d never come across a book of large-print poems; for poetry you needed eyes like a pilot, with twenty-twenty vision, opposable thumbs, and never-ending patience; on the mobile library they stocked only Seamus Heaney, and derivatives.
To get to the vegetable patch Israel had to pass by the chickens, and he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty, having turned them out of their home. George had fixed them up with new runs using some old manure bags over wire netting, but Israel could tell they weren’t happy. They eyed him—gimlet chicken-eyed him—suspiciously as he hurried past.
George and old Mr Devine were indeed, as Brownie had suggested, in the vegetable patch, which was close by the main house, protected on one side by fruit trees and on the others by red-brick walls; it was a walled garden; or rather, it had been a walled garden. Like most things around the farm, it had seen better days; one might best now describe it as a half-walled garden.
‘George!’ Israel called as he entered through what was once a gateway, but which was now merely a clearing through some rubble.
George was kneeling down in among rows of vegetable crops. She ignored Israel, as usual.
‘George?’
‘What?’
‘Could I just—’
‘No, thanks. Whatever it is. We’re working here.’
‘Yes, sure. I see that. I just wanted to—’
‘Can you just let me finish here?’
‘Yeah, it’s just—’
‘Please?’
‘Sure.’
‘If you want to make yerself useful you could be thinning and weeding the onions.’
‘Yes, of course. I could…I’ll just…’
‘Over there.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
He looked around him at vast muddy areas where plants were poking through. He didn’t recognise anything. He wasn’t sure which were the onions. He went over towards Mr Devine, who was sitting on a wooden bench, a rug across his legs.
‘Lovely day,’ said Israel.
‘It’s a bruckle sayson,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Is it?’
‘Aye.’
‘Yes, I thought so myself actually,’ said Israel. ‘Erm.’ He pointed towards some green shoots. ‘Onions?’
‘Cabbages,’ said Mr Devine.
Israel pointed again.
‘Onions?’
‘Cabbages,’ said Mr Devine.
‘OK.’ Israel tried again, pointing at some sort of pointy thing. ‘Onions?’
‘Cabbages.’
‘Is it all cabbages?’
‘“Thou shalt not sow thy seed with mingled seed,”’ said Mr Devine.
‘Yes. Of course. Lovely. Beautiful. And they are…’ he said, gesturing vaguely towards the rest of the crops.
‘Cabbages. Kale. Cabbages. Radish. Potatoes. Chard. Cabbages. Potatoes. Shallots. Cabbages. Onions.’
‘Bingo!’ said Israel.
Israel got down on his knees. He didn’t quite know what to do next. The only thing he’d grown had been mustard and cress, at school, in a plastic cup.
‘Thinning?’ he shouted enquiringly, over to George.
‘Yes, thinning!’ George shouted back impatiently.
‘Thinning?’ he appealed quietly to Mr Devine, having no notion whatsoever what thinning onions might involve.
‘“And he shall separate them one from another; as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats,”’ said Mr Devine.
‘Erm.’
‘Two inches apart,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Ah, right, OK,’ said Israel. ‘Thank you.’
Israel occupied himself not unpleasantly, for about ten minutes, concentrating on the job. It was surprisingly satisfying. For about ten minutes he fondly imagined himself as a smallholder, with cows, and pigs, and a small orchard, and bottling his own tomatoes and mashing his own beer. He could be like Thoreau.
‘Ta-daa!’ he said, standing up and admiring his handiwork. ‘A perfect row of thinned onions!’ He stretched out and took in the view. It was idyllic here, really; it was pure pastoral. There were beehives down by the wheat field, and oats, some barley, sheep, the paddock. He took in these sights and breathed deeply, admiring a bunch of huge plants with bright yellow flowers.
‘They’re lovely-looking flowers,’ he said to Mr Devine.
‘Aye.’
‘What are those flowers?’
‘What do they look like?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know.’
‘Ye don’t know what a corguette plant looks like?’
‘Er…Is it a courgette plant, by any chance?’
Mr Devine’s eyes narrowed.
‘And you’ve some lovely trees there,’ said Israel, gesturing towards the fruit trees.
‘Plum,’ said Mr Devine. ‘And pears like a trout’s back.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Planted by my father. Cherries. Apple.’
‘Good,’ said Israel, as though he were a landowner inspecting a tenant farmer’s fields. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Good for you. Anyway, George,’ he said, as George approached. ‘I’ve done the onions.’
‘I’m just checking on these early croppers,’ she said, ignoring Israel’s onion-thinning achievements, and knelt down by some bushy patches of green.
‘It’s finding something early that’s floury enough,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Israel, faux-knowledgeably. ‘It’s quite a crop you have here.’
‘Mebbe,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Yes, you’re certainly going to get lots of…cabbages. And…potatoes. Have you never thought of diversifying into…I don’t know. Avocados, or artichokes?’
‘Ach, wise up, Israel, will ye?’ said George, from in among the foliage.
‘Asparagus?’ said Israel.
‘I refuse to grow anything beginning with “A”,’ said George.
‘Oh,’ said Israel. ‘Right.’
‘Och, Jesus. I’m joking, ye fool. What do you want, Israel? Get it over and done with and then you can be on your way.’
Israel stood up straight as if about to read a proclamation. ‘Well, actually, I’ve just come to say goodbye,’ he said.
‘What did you say?’ said George.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’
George straightened up slowly from her potato row and raised an unplucked eyebrow.
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No. I’m going away, over to England.’
‘Well, well, well,’ said George, crossing her arms.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just.’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t take you long, did it?’
‘To what?’
‘Cut and run.’
‘I’m not cutting and running.’
‘Well, you’ve been here, what, six months?’
‘Nearly eight,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Eight months,’ said George. ‘And then you’re away? That sounds to me like someone who’s cutting and running.’
‘Aye, I always thought he was a quitter,’ said Mr Devine. ‘“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet—”’
‘All right, yes, thank you, Granda,’ said George.
‘I’m not a quitter, actually,’ said Israel.
‘Are ye not?’
‘No. I’m going to be coming back.’
‘He’s coming back?’ said Mr Devine.
‘Are ye coming back, Armstrong?’ said George, crossing her arms. ‘You don’t want to dash our hopes now.’
‘Ha ha. Yes, I will be back. It’s just a…business trip I’m going on.’
‘A business trip? Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘With what, your job as an international financier?’
‘No.’
‘With the mobile library?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Mr Devine started wheezing with laughter.
‘A business trip!’ said George. ‘That right? What is it, an international conference?’
‘Well, yes, as it happens.’
‘Ach, you’re priceless, Israel, so you are.’
‘A mobile library conference? Holy God!’ said Mr Devine.
‘A junket then,’ said George.
‘Junket? No. It’s not a junket. It’s the Mobile Meet, which is the UK’s premier mobile library conference and—’
‘Paid for with our taxes no doubt?’ said George.
‘“Render unto Caesar,”’ said Mr Devine.
‘No,’ said Israel.
‘Not paid for with our taxes then?’
‘Well—’
‘You’re paying to go yourselves then?’
‘No. It’s—’
‘A holiday then, is it?’
‘No. It’s work. And—’
‘Good. How long are you gone for?’ said George.
‘It’ll be—’
‘Can we sub-let?’ said Mr Devine.
‘Sub-let?’ said Israel. ‘The chicken coop?’
‘You’ve it looking rightly,’ said Mr Devine.
‘How long?’ said George.
‘We’ll be gone about a week, I think. Few days visiting my family, and then to the Mobile Meet.’
‘A whole week?’ said George. ‘Sure, what are we going to do without ye?’
The conversation had not gone as well as Israel had hoped. He’d half hoped that his departure might excite some small favourable comment and wishes for a good journey and a safe return. He was wrong.
‘Is he here for the Twelfth?’ asked Mr Devine.
‘Are you here for the Twelfth?’ asked George.
‘Of?’ said Israel.
‘July,’ said George. ‘Obviously.’
‘Yes. Yes. We’ll be back by the twelfth of July.’
‘You wouldn’t want to miss the Twelfth.’
‘Right. No. Anyway,’ said Israel. ‘You’re not…considering a holiday yourselves this year?’ he asked, trying to be pleasant.
‘I’ve not been on holiday for seventy-eight years,’ said Mr Devine, pulling the rug tighter around his knees. ‘D’ye not think I could do without one now?’
‘Er. Yes. Probably.’
‘And some of us have work to do,’ said George.
‘Yes, quite,’ said Israel.
George was already walking away, her back turned from him.
‘Goodbye then,’ called Israel.
She didn’t turn to wave or answer.
Israel walked bitterly back to the chicken coop. He couldn’t wait to get away from here, to England, to Gloria, to good coffee, and home.
5 (#ulink_33318160-8bd8-506e-8703-b545ec25af0f)
They very nearly missed the ferry.
Brownie dropped Israel off at Ted’s little bungalow out on the main coast road, just by the sign saying ‘Try Your Brakes’, and along past the little new-build ‘Café Bistro’, which had never been occupied or let, and which was now proclaiming on a large, ugly estate agent’s hoarding its extremely unlikely ‘Potential as a Gift Shop’.
Ted’s bungalow was sheltered at the foot of a sheer white limestone cliff, its extraordinary vast clear views of the sea—to the left, far out to Rathlin Island and then across to the Mull of Kintyre—blotted out by the perpetual blur of traffic. It could and should have been the perfect little spot, with a bounteous vista, vast and uninterrupted. Instead it was dark and cold, with long, depressing, interrupting views of cars, white vans and lorries; paradise obscured, like Moses allowed a glimpse of the Promised Land, and then cut off by the A2 coast road.
Parked up proud out on the bungalow’s weed and gravel forecourt, wedged tight between bins and Ted’s neighbours’—the McGaws—little fenced-off area for sheep, and shadowed by the cliff above, yet still somehow shimmering in the late afternoon light, was the mobile library. She looked different.
Ted had absolutely no intention of losing the bet with Israel and had undertaken some essential care and maintenance tasks: he had scraped and cleaned and waxed the van, polishing her and buffing her until her red and cream livery was all ice cream and municipal bright once again, the words ‘Mobile Library’ and ‘The Book Stops Here’ picked out gorgeously in a honey gold and crisp forbidding black. The chrome looked chromey, and the headlights clear, and all dirt had been washed from the windows. The van had had a makeover. She looked—and Israel actually thought this for a moment, a weird J.G. Ballard moment—she looked, he thought, the mobile library, she looked sexy. She looked absolutely fantastic. She looked flushed, and noble and come-hitherish. She looked good enough to eat. She looked—and again, this is what he thought, he couldn’t help it—she looked like Marilyn Monroe.
Israel knew in that instant of recognition, in that perverse, momentary gaze upon the van’s pouting, polished, peach-like beauty, that she would win the category for Concours D’Elégance at the Mobile Meet, and that all was lost. He knew that Tumdrum would never get a new mobile library, and that Ted would triumph and would demand his pound of flesh, and that he, Israel, would have to beg for a loan to pay off the bet, would have to beg from Mr Mawhinney, probably, the manager of the Ulster Bank on Main Street in Tumdrum, who borrowed to his limit from the library every week, biographies, mostly, and military history, so perhaps Israel could borrow to his limit from the bank in return? ‘I need the money,’ he would have to explain, ‘because Marilyn Monroe melted the hearts of the mobile library judges at the annual Mobile Meet.’ And Mr Mawhinney would say, ‘What?’ and Israel Armstrong would be ruined and ridiculed by beauty, by this great curvaceous ambulant thing. He’d be condemned to life with Ted on the mobile library for ever. He’d be ruined. He’d lose the duffle coat off his back, and the brogues from his feet, his corduroy trousers; everything.
But, then, on closer inspection it seemed that Israel’s dignity and his money were perhaps safe; on closer inspection you could still see the many little rust spots that Ted’s primping couldn’t cover, and the scuffs and the scrapes and the scratches on the chrome, the little dints on the windscreen, the horrible filthy dirt-brown exhaust. The van was not a movie star; Marilyn was a person. The van was real. Some of the paintwork looked as though it might have been touched up using ordinary household emulsion. And the hand that had painted ‘The Book Stops Here’ could perhaps have been steadier. Even Ted couldn’t work miracles in just a few days. A makeover could not make new.
Buoyed, confused, excited and relieved, Israel rapped loudly and rang at Ted’s door.
He was greeted first from inside with the sound of irritable growling from Muhammad, Ted’s little Jack Russell terrier, and then with irritable shushings and hushings as Ted quieted the dog, and opened up the door with a scowl. Or at least, not literally with a scowl. Ted opened the door literally with his hand, obviously, while scowling, but when Ted scowled it was overwhelming; whatever it was Ted did while scowling became an act of scowl; the scowl became constitutive. He scowled often when they were out on the van, and in meetings with Linda Wei, and often unexpectedly and for no good reason at all in mid-conversation. Ted’s mouth would be saying one thing—‘How can I help you, madam?’ or ‘Yes, we can get that on inter-library loan’—but his scowl at the same time would be clearly saying something entirely different, something like ‘Ach,’ usually, or ‘Away on,’ or ‘Go fuck yourself, ye wee runt, ye.’ This last was the scowl now facing Israel. He’d only been to Ted’s bungalow once before, and Ted clearly wished that Israel wasn’t here now. Ted did not believe in franertising—his word—with work colleagues. Franertising was extremely frowned—scowled—upon. Ted held the door open only a crack and Israel could just about see the room behind him, with its drab sofa and the yelping dog.
‘Ted,’ said Israel.
‘That’s correct,’ said Ted. ‘Quiet, Muhammad!’
‘Are you ready?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. You were supposed to be ready.’
‘Aye,’ said Ted.
‘Well, look, hurry up, we need to go, the ferry’s at six.’
‘Aye.’
‘We’ve not got much time. I can wait outside if you’d rather. But we do need to hurry.’
‘Hurry is as hurry does.’
‘What?’
‘It’s just a—’
‘Saying, right, fine. Whatever. We need to get going here. Do you want me to load your bags in the van? You’re all packed?’
‘No.’
‘No, you don’t want me to load your bags, or no, you’re not packed?’
‘I’m not packed.’
‘What do you mean you’re not packed? We’ve only got a couple of hours before the ship sails.’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘What do you mean, you’re not coming? Of course you’re coming.’
‘I’m not. Coming.’
‘All right, yeah, stop muckin’ about now, Ted. We’ve got to go.’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘But we’ve a bet on.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘You said you couldn’t change your mind once you’d made a bet.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
Well, no.
On this occasion Israel could not afford to have Ted change his mind. He had already had just about enough of Northern Irish intransigence, and stubbornness and self-righteous inconsistency for the past eight months, and now he was pumped and ready to go, and Ted was holding him back.
So, no. No, no, no.
‘No,’ he said, using his considerable weight to push against the door. ‘No. That’s it. I’m not having this, Ted.’
Israel stood staring up at Ted’s scowl, wedged between the door and some old green cans containing peat. ‘You’ve mucked me about with this enough already,’ he said. ‘I’m getting on that boat to England this evening whether you like it or not.’
He was trying to squeeze into the bungalow. Muhammad was going crazy. Israel was a bona fide intruder.
‘Aye, right, you go on ahead, son,’ said Ted, pushing Israel back out of the door, with little effort. ‘Because I’m not going. You.’ Shove. ‘Can.’ Shove. ‘Go.’ Shove. ‘Yerself.’
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Ian Sansom
Israel Armstrong, one of literature’s most unlikely detectives, returns for more crime solving adventure in this hilarious third novel from the Mobile Library series.Israel has been invited to attend the Mobile Meet in London, the annual mobile library convention, with his irascible companion Ted Carson. Back in the UK, Israel is reunited with his family, and there is much eating of paprika chicken, baklava and the drinking of good coffee. But within only twenty-four hours of their arrival, the mobile library has been nicked.Who on earth would want to steal a thirty-year old rust-bucket of a van, and who can the two men turn to for assistance? Can Mr and Mrs Krimholz, the parents of Israel's childhood rival Adam Krimholz, help them out? Amidst all this mayhem, will Israel and Ted, one of literature's oddest oddball couples, ever make it to the Mobile Meet? In this, his most puzzling, personal and problematic case yet, Israel has never had it so bad… neither has his library.
THE DELEGATES’ CHOICE
IAN SANSOM
For the Group
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua7f4e610-e566-5900-8445-07d7314fa253)
Title Page (#u6978244c-1ee2-5127-a12b-094de0473cc8)
Dedication (#u44efdd7b-57c7-53b0-bf46-2b883c7b6509)
Chapter 1 (#uac11a99d-1f2d-5da3-b088-f815cf1fe554)
Chapter 2 (#u66eff7d8-ebf2-5603-a68f-0dea8b4b6c88)
Chapter 3 (#u78a1768e-4e3f-5aaa-baba-e7aa502a11ad)
Chapter 4 (#u3365a765-2a6c-515e-91ba-c31bb8c22bf5)
Chapter 5 (#u08dbba12-ffb5-5e18-86f1-a196912fb1f6)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_c9aac922-679f-5a32-af04-d1427e09bd6d)
‘I resign,’ said Israel.
‘Aye,’ said Ted.
‘I do,’ said Israel.
‘Good,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m resigning,’ said Israel. ‘Today.’
‘Right you are,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve absolutely had enough.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Of the whole thing. This place! The—’
‘People,’ said Ted.
‘Exactly!’ said Israel. ‘The people! Exactly! The people, they drive me—’
‘Crazy,’ said Ted.
‘Exactly! You took the words right out of my mouth.’
‘Aye, well, you might’ve mentioned it before,’ said Ted.
‘Well, this is it. I’m up to—’
‘High dough,’ said Ted.
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘You’re up to high dough with it.’
‘No,’ said Israel. ‘No. I don’t even know what it means, up to high dough with it. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s an expression.’
‘Ah, right yes. It would be. Anyway, I’m up to…here with it.’
‘Good.’
‘I’m going to hand in my resignation to Linda.’
‘Excellent,’ said Ted.
‘Before the meeting today.’
‘First class,’ said Ted.
‘Before she has a chance to trick me out of it again.’
‘Away you go then.’
‘I am so gone already. I am out of here. I tell you, you are not going to see me for dust. I’m moving on.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’m going! Look!’
‘Ach, well, it’s been a pleasure, sure. We’re all going to miss you.’
‘Yes,’ said Israel.
‘Good,’ said Ted.
‘So,’ said Israel.
‘You’ve time for a wee cup of coffee at Zelda’s first, mind? For auld time’s sake?’
‘No!’ said Israel. ‘I need to strike while the—’
‘And a wee scone, but?’
Israel looked at his watch.
‘Meeting’s not till three,’ said Ted.
‘What day is it?’ said Israel.
‘Wednesday.’
‘What’s the scone on Wednesdays?’
‘Date and almond,’ said Ted, consulting his mental daily special scone-timetable.
Israel huffed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But then we need to get there early. I am definitely, definitely resigning.’
They’d had this conversation before, around about mid-week, and once a week, for several months now, Israel Armstrong BA (Hons) and Ted Carson—the Starsky and Hutch, the Morse and the Lewis, the Thomson and Thompson, the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the Dante, the Virgil, the Cagney, the Lacey, the Deleuze and Guattari, the Mork and the Mindy of the mobile library world.
Israel had been living in Tumdrum for long enough—more than six months!—to find the routine not just getting to him, but actually having got to him; the selfsame rainy days which slowly and silently became weeks and then months, and which seemed gradually to be slowing, and slowing, and slowing, almost but not quite to a complete and utter stop, so that it felt to Israel as though he’d been stuck in Tumdrum on the mobile library not just for months, but for years, indeed for decades almost. Israel felt trapped; stuck; in complete and utter stasis. He felt incapacitated. He felt like he was in a never-ending episode of 24, or a play by Samuel Beckett.
‘This is like Krapp’s Last Tape,’ he told Ted, once they were settled in Zelda’s and Minnie was bringing them coffee.
‘Is it?’ said Ted.
‘Are ye being rude about my coffee?’ said Minnie.
‘No,’ said Israel. ‘I’m just talking about a play.’
‘Ooh!’ said Minnie.
‘Beckett?’ said Israel.
‘Beckett?’ said Minnie. ‘He was a Portora boy, wasn’t he?’
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘In Enniskillen there,’ said Minnie. ‘The school, sure. That’s where he went to school, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Israel. ‘Samuel Beckett?’
‘Sure he did,’ said Minnie. ‘What was that play he did?’
‘Waiting for Godot?’ said Israel.
‘Was it?’ said Minnie. ‘It wasn’t Educating Rita?’
‘Riverdance,’ said Ted. ‘Most popular Irish show of all time.’
‘That’s not a play,’ said Israel wearily.
‘Aye, you’re a theatre critic now, are ye?’ ‘Och,’ said Minnie. ‘And who was the other fella?’
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘That went to school there, at Portora?’
‘No, you’ve got me,’ said Israel. ‘No idea.’
‘Ach, sure ye know. The homosexualist.’
‘You’ve lost me, Minnie, sorry.’
‘Wrote the plays. “A handbag!” That one.’
‘Oscar Wilde?’
‘He’s yer man!’ said Minnie. ‘He was another Portora boy, wasn’t he, Ted?’
Ted was busy emptying the third of his traditional three sachets of sugar into his coffee. ‘Aye.’
‘Zelda’s nephew went there,’ said Minnie. ‘The ones in Fermanagh there.’
‘Right,’ said Israel. ‘Anyway…’
‘I’ll check with her.’
‘Fine,’ said Israel.
‘And your scones are just coming,’ said Minnie.
‘That’s grand,’ said Ted, producing a packet of cigarettes.
‘Uh-uh,’ said Minnie, wagging her finger. ‘We’ve gone no smoking.’
‘Ye have not?’ said Ted.
‘We have indeed.’
‘Since when?’
‘The weekend, just.’
‘Ach,’ said Ted. ‘That’s the political correctness.’
‘I know,’ said Minnie. ‘It’s what people want though, these days.’
‘You’ll lose custom, but.’
‘Aye.’
‘Nanny state,’ said Ted, obediently putting away his cigarettes and lighter.
‘Smoking kills,’ said Israel.
‘Aye, and so do a lot of other things,’ said Ted darkly.
‘It is a shame, really,’ said Minnie. ‘Sure, everybody used to smoke.’
Israel stared at the yellowing walls of the café as Ted and Minnie reminisced about the great smokers of the past: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro.
‘Beagles,’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Minnie.
‘And Sherlock Holmes,’ added Israel.
‘Aye,’ said Ted.
‘Was he not a druggie?’ said Minnie.
‘Sam Spade,’ said Israel.
‘Never heard of him,’ said Minnie.
Sometimes Israel wished he was a gentleman detective, far away from here, with a cocaine and morphine habit, and a slightly less intelligent confidant to admire his genius. Or like Sam Spade, the blond Satan, pounding the hard streets of San Francisco, entangling with knock-out redheads and outwitting the Fat Man. Instead, here he was in Zelda’s, listening to Ted and Minnie and looking up at old Christian Aid and Trócaire posters, and the dogeared notices for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and the wilting pot plants, and the lone long-broken computer in the corner with the Blu-Tacked sign above it proclaiming the café Tumdrum’s Internet hot-spot, ‘The First and Still the Best’, and the big laminated sign over by the door featuring a man sitting slumped with his head in his hands, advertising the Samaritans: ‘Suicidal? Depressed?’
Well, actually…
He sipped at his coffee and took a couple of Nurofen. The coffee was as bad as ever. All coffee in Tumdrum came weak, and milky, and lukewarm, as though having recently passed through someone else, or a cow. Maybe he should take up smoking, late in life, as an act of flamboyance and rebellion: a smoke was a smoke, after all, but with a coffee you couldn’t always be sure. The coffee in Tumdrum was more like slurry run-off. He missed proper coffee, Israel—a nice espresso at Bar Italia just off Old Compton Street, that was one of the things he missed about London, and the coffee at Grodzinski’s, round the corner from his mum’s. He missed his friends, also, of course; and his books; and the cinema; a nice slice of lemon drizzle cake in the café at the Curzon Soho; and the theatre; and the galleries; and the restaurants; it was the little things; nothing much; just all the thriving cultural activities of one of the world’s great capital cities…
‘Just remind me,’ he said to Ted, once Minnie had gone off for the scones. ‘Why do we come here?’
‘It’s the only place there is,’ said Ted.
‘Yes,’ said Israel, amazed. ‘I know, but…it’s, like…’ He took another sip of his coffee. ‘They don’t even serve proper coffee.’
‘I think the machine’s broken,’ said Ted.
‘The machine’s always broken.’
‘Mmm.’
‘It’s that sort of chicory stuff, isn’t it,’ said Israel, licking his lips, trying to figure out what it was, the unpleasant burnt taste and the feral, sicky smell, like something someone had just brought up. ‘That’s what it is. I think it’s that…what do you call it?’
‘What?’
‘Ersatz coffee.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Ted. ‘I had a cappuccino once in Belfast.’
‘What?’
‘They have coffee bars down there everywhere now. It’s like the Continent.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘No,’ said Israel, shaking his head. ‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No. Just no. It’s no good, I can’t drink this,’ said Israel, drinking his coffee.
He was thinking now about Gloria: whenever he started thinking about London his thoughts turned quickly to Gloria.
Gloria was the Eros in Israel’s Piccadilly Circus, the Serpentine in his Hyde Park, the St Paul’s in his City, the Brick Lane of his East End…her dark hair cascading down over her shoulders, her piercing brown eyes, his hand in hers, their bodies entwined…
‘Scones!’ said Minnie, interrupting Israel before the point of no return, and placing a couple of enormous steaming chunks of hot scone down on the plastic gingham-look tablecloth.
‘I was wrong,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’ said Israel. ‘Wrong? About what?’
‘It’s not Zelda’s nephew at Portora.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s her other nephew.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Zelda’s other brother’s boy—Niall, the fella who’s the computer-whizz?’
‘Right,’ said Israel.
What? Who? Niall? The nephew? The other nephew? Why on earth did people in Tumdrum go on like characters in Russian novels, insisting on talking about their friends and family members as if you’d known them for years, when of course you hadn’t, you had no idea who the hell they were talking about, unless you’d lived here your whole life, which Israel hadn’t. Did Israel speak to people in Tumdrum endlessly and incessantly about his family and friends? Did he ever mention his sisters, or his cousins, including the successful ones, or his mother’s neighbours Mr and Mrs Krimholz, or the butcher, the baker and the candlestick makers of his own lovely little patch of north London? No, he did not. People in Tumdrum seemed to assume that the mere fact of living there instantly made you a local, as though you absorbed local knowledge of complex hereditary diseases and bloodlines by osmosis. I mean, how was he supposed to keep up with the progress of your mother’s sister’s urinary tract infection when he’d never even met your mother? It was a physical impossibility: he’d have had to be telepathic, and a qualified medical practitioner, and, also, he’d have to care, and he didn’t. He was not bothered. Am I bothered? Est-ce que je suis bovvered? Israel slathered a piece of scone with butter.
‘Was that the fella who used to go out with Zelda’s cousin’s husband’s sister?’ said Ted.
‘Ugh!’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘That’s yer man,’ said Minnie.
‘Who?’ said Israel. ‘Who? Who are you talking about now?’
‘You know,’ said Minnie. ‘The big fella. They used to live down there at Lough Island Reevy, in Down.’
‘Hello?’ said Israel. ‘Excuse me! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Some of us were not born around here you know.’
‘No, pet,’ said Minnie pityingly, moving off to another table. ‘Never mind.’
‘God,’ said Israel.
‘Don’t,’ said Ted, wagging a finger.
‘What?’
‘You know what.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘I’ll not tell ye again,’ said Ted, who was a very vehement anti-blasphemer, unless he was doing the blaspheming.
‘Sorry,’ said Israel. ‘I’m going to have to bite the bullet, though,’ he continued, picking up his scone, trying to decide where to start.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, who’d already started on his own. ‘She’s a fair junt of scone, but, isn’t she? And nice and warm.’
‘No, I mean with the job. I’m definitely going to resign.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Even if it means going back to working in the Bargain Bookstore.’
‘Good man ye are.’
‘In Thurrock.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘In Essex,’ said Israel, convincing himself. ‘I still have plenty of friends there.’
‘Mmm.’
‘A man has to have his self-respect,’ said Israel.
‘Or what does he have?’ said Ted, finishing a mouthful.
‘Exactly!’ said Israel. ‘Take this morning.’
‘Why?’ said Ted.
‘Because,’ said Israel.
‘It wasnae a bad morning,’ said Ted.
‘Wasn’t bad!’ said Israel, using the scone gavel-like on the table; the crust did not give. ‘You see! That’s it!’
‘What’s it?’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘Is it? The scone?’
‘No! This morning wasn’t bad, you said?’
‘Aye.’
‘Wasn’t bad?’
‘Aye.’
‘Wasn’t bad?’
‘Yer right.’
‘No, it wasn’t bad! It was terrible!’
‘Ach,’ said Ted, picking a date out of his scone.
‘You’re just inured to it, Ted.’
‘Ee-what?’
‘Inured. It’s…Anyway, I’m young and you’re…’
‘What?’
‘Older.’
‘Aye.’
‘And look at us! We’re nothing more than errand boys!’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve got a degree from Oxford you know,’ said Israel.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, picking at his scone. ‘Oxford Brookes, wasn’t it you said?’
‘Which is in Oxford,’ said Israel. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been there?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ said Ted. ‘No.’
‘No!’ said Israel triumphantly. ‘Well then. I am a highly educated librarian. I shouldn’t be—we shouldn’t be—just doing errands for people.’
‘We’re not just doing errands for people.’
‘Yes, we are!’
‘We’re a service,’ said Ted.
‘A library service,’ said Israel. ‘A library service. Not a Tesco home delivery service! Picking up people’s groceries is not the kind of service I had in mind when I got into this job,’ said Israel. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s not ridiculous.’
‘It is!’ said Israel. ‘Honestly. This morning…’
First stop of the day, up round the coast, and first in, a man in his seventies, not one of their regulars.
‘D’ye have the Impartial Recorder?’
‘Sorry?’ said Israel.
‘The paper? D’ye have the paper?’
‘No. No. I’m afraid not.’
‘The Tele then?’
‘No. Sorry. We don’t have any papers.’
‘You don’t sell any papers?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘You sell books then?’
‘No, no, we don’t sell books either.’
‘D’ye not?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘We’re a library.’
‘Ach, aye. Second-hand books then.’
‘Erm…Well, yes. Sort of, I suppose.’
‘By the yard, or by the pound?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I saw a thing about it on the telly once. Books by the yard. Or the dozen. I don’t know. I can’t rightly remember.’
‘Right. Well, we don’t actually sell books here at all. You have to join a library. Like you do a video shop or…something. I need to see a utility bill, something with your name and address on it, and then I can—’
‘I’d not be showing you that, indeed; that’d be under the Freedom of Information Act, wouldn’t it? I don’t know who ye are. Are ye the police?’
‘No. I’m not the police.’
‘You could be anybody.’
‘Yes, true. I could, of course, be…anybody. I am in fact the librarian though. Here. In the…mobile library. Where we…are.’
‘You’re a funny-lookin’ librarian.’
‘Yes, well, sorry, I…’
‘D’ye sell milk?’
‘No.’
‘Bread?’
‘No.’
‘A pan loaf just?’
‘No!’
‘Ach. We used to have Paddy Weekly—he was great, so he was—but he was driven out by the supermarkets, ye know.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve to get to Ballycastle for shopping these days.’
‘Right.’
‘I prefer the shopping in Coleraine, meself.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I can get me feet done and me hair cut—there’s a wee girl who comes round the Fold—but if I give ye a wee list ye couldn’t do me a few messages once a week, could ye?’
It just wasn’t right.
‘It’s just not right,’ said Israel, picking absent-mindedly at his scone. ‘You know, the longer I spend working as librarian, the more I’m questioning my vocation.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, whose own scone was rapidly diminishing in size, down from bowling-ball size to tennis-ball size; maybe a little larger.
‘No!’ said Israel, correcting himself. ‘Not just my vocation in fact. The very ground of my being.’
‘Would ye like a top-up of coffee?’ said Minnie, who was doing the rounds.
‘Yes, thanks,’ said Israel.
‘Still on Beckett then?’ she said, pouring Israel another cup of the café’s so-called coffee.
‘Questioning the very ground of his being,’ said Ted.
‘Oh,’ said Minnie. ‘I think I’ll leave you to it then.’
As a child back home in north London, Israel had always imagined that a life communing with books might be a life communing with the great minds and lives of the great thinkers of the past, those who had formed the culture and heritage of the world, and that it might perhaps be his role to share these riches with others. In fact, in reality, as a mobile librarian on the perpetually damp north coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland, Israel seemed to spend most of his time communing with the great minds and lives and thinkers who had produced Haynes car manuals, and Some Stuff I Remember About Visiting my Granny on her Farm in the Country, Before I Was Horribly Mentally, Physically and Sexually Abused by my Uncles and Married Three Unsuitable Husbands and Became an Alcoholic and Lost Everything and Lived in a Bedsit in Quite a Nasty Part of a City Before Meeting my Current Husband Who is Rich, and Wonderful, and Then Moving Back to the Country, Which is Ironic When You Think About It: The Sequel, and Shape Up or Ship Out! The Official US Navy Seals Diet, and How to Become a Babillionaire—Tomorrow!, and pastel-covered Irish, English and American chick-lit by the tonne, the half-tonne, the bushel, and the hot steaming shovel-load.
‘Ach, come on,’ said Ted. ‘It’s not that bad. You’re exeggeratin’.’
‘I’m what?’
‘Exeggeratin’.’
‘Exaggerating?’
‘Aye.’
‘I’m not! What about that other old man in this morning?’
‘Who? Which other old man?’
‘The old man in the baseball cap, that was dripping with rain.’
‘When?’
‘When it was raining?’
‘Ach, aye.’
Their second stop, up further round the coast. A lay-by. The rain had come on—even though it was June. June! Pounding with rain in June! Jesus Christ!
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Ye’ve some books here, boy.’
Israel (restrainedly): ‘Yes. Yes. It’s a library.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Aye.’
Israel (doing his best to be helpful): ‘And can I help you at all?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘No. I’m only in for to be out of the rain.’
Israel: ‘Right. OK. That’s fine. Happy to be of—’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Mind, would ye have any books about…’
Israel: ‘About? What?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (indicating width between finger and thumb): ‘About this thick?’
Israel: ‘Er. Well, possibly. Any subject in particular you’re after?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘I don’t mind about the subject.’
Israel: ‘Right. So, anything really, as long as it’s…’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (indicating his required width again): ‘This thick.’
Israel: ‘I see. What’s that, then? About two, three centimetres?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Quarterinch.’
Israel, scanning the shelves: ‘OK. Erm. I don’t know, Carol Shields, have you read any of her? She’s very popular.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘How thick’s she?’
Israel: ‘Erm.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (taking book from Israel): ‘She’ll do rightly.’
Israel: ‘Do you have a ticket with you?’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘No. I’ve not a ticket. The wife does, but.’
Israel: ‘I’d need to see the ticket really. I could always hold it over for you.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain (glancing outside): ‘Ach, no. I’ll not bother. We’ve family over at the weekend. I thought it might be the thing for to fix the table—there’s a wee wobble where we had the floor tiled.’
Israel: ‘Right.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘I’ll get an offcut a wood, sure. It’s only because you were insisting that I was askin’.’
Israel: ‘OK, right.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain: ‘Rain’s off.’
Israel: ‘Good.’
Old Man in Baseball Cap, Dripping with Rain exits.
Israel: ‘Sorry we couldn’t be of more help!’
‘Sure, there was no harm in him,’ said Ted.
‘No!’ said Israel. ‘No! You’re right. There may have been no harm in him, but he did harm to me! To my mental health! I am a highly trained professional.’
Ted coughed.
‘I am though,’ continued Israel. ‘We are. And we should be treated with respect.’
Israel had imagined that a librarian in a small town might be regarded as a kind of cultural ambassador, an adept, like a country priest guiding his grateful parishioners into the mysteries of the holy realms of the book. In fact most library users in and around Tumdrum and District seemed to regard a librarian as nothing more than a glorified shop assistant, and the mobile library as a kind of large motorised shopping trolley. There were only so many small errands that Israel could perform in a day without beginning to feel like a grocer’s assistant, and there was only so much sugar, tea, biscuits, potatoes, newspapers, betting slips and hand-rolling tobacco that the mobile library could carry before they would have to start abandoning the books altogether and go over entirely to carrying dry goods and comestibles. If they ripped out the issues desk and put in a deli counter and got a licence for selling drink, Israel and Ted could probably have made a fortune: your breaded ham, a bottle of Bushmills, and the latest Oprah or Richard and Judy Book Club Recommends, available together at last from a veritable touring one-stop shop; they’d be babillionaires by Christmas.
‘You’re getting carried away now,’ said Ted.
‘I am not getting carried away!’ said Israel.
Israel glanced around the café at all the old familiar faces. ‘Look!’ he said
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Sshh! Behind you!’ said Israel.
‘What?’ said Ted, turning round.
‘No! Don’t turn around!’
‘Why?’
‘It’s her.’
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Onions.’
‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘What’s wrong with her, sure?’
‘Oh, God, Ted. She’s another one.’
‘Another one of what?’
‘Another one who’s cracking me up!’
That was the third stop.
Mrs Onions: ‘D’ye have any books with those sort of suedey covers?’
Israel: ‘Erm. No, no, I’m afraid not. We’re right out of the…suede-covered books at the moment, I think.’
Mrs Onions: ‘You’ve plenty of other sorts of books.’
Israel: ‘Yes. We do. That’s true.’
Mrs Onions: ‘I could take one of those. But I like the old suede covers, ye see. My granny used to have one, when she lived on the farm down in the Mournes. The butter, honestly, beautiful it was.’
Israel: ‘Uh-huh.’
Mrs Onions: ‘Will ye be getting any in?’
Israel: ‘It’s possible, yes, that we will be getting in some suede-covered books in the future. I could certainly—’
Mrs Onions: ‘Ach, I’ll not bother for the moment. I’ve shopping to get here.’
Israel: ‘Good. Well, it’s lovely to…’
And there was more! Much, much more, every day: the man who’d come in and take out any books that he deemed were unChristian, and then claim that he’d lost them; the woman who used Sellotape as a bookmark; the creepy man with the moustache who was continually ordering gynaecology textbooks on inter-library loan. It was too much. Israel still found it hard to believe that he’d ended up here in the first place, and the longer he stayed the less he believed it, the more he felt like merely a vestigial presence in his own life, a kind of living, breathing Chagall, floating just above and outside the world, staring down at himself as librarian, as though this weren’t really him at all, not really his life, as if he were merely observing Tumdrum’s nether-world of inanities and bizarre and meaningless human exchanges. The longer he stayed in Tumdrum the more he could feel himself slowly withdrawing from the human world, becoming a mere onlooker, a monitor of human absurdities.
He took another bite of his scone.
‘I feel like a Chagall,’ he said.
‘He says he feels like a Chagall,’ said Ted to Minnie, who’d arrived with offers of another top-up of coffee.
‘He’d need to get himself smarted up first,’ said Minnie, winking; Israel was wearing corduroy trousers, his patched-up old brown brogues, and one of his landlady George’s brother Brownie’s old T-shirts, which read, unhelpfully, ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.
‘What?’ said Israel.
‘But anyway,’ said Minnie. ‘We’ll not have that sort of dirty talk in here, thank you, gents.’
‘I can’t go on, Ted,’ said Israel.
‘No?’ said Ted, reaching forward and taking Israel’s other half of scone.
‘Not the scone!’ said Israel. ‘I mean…this. Life! Here, give that back, it’s mine!’
‘Say please,’ said Ted.
‘Just give me the bloody scone!’
‘Steady now,’ said Ted, handing back the scone. ‘Temper, temper.’
‘Och, you’re like an old married couple, the pair of you,’ said Minnie.
‘Oh, God,’ said Israel, groaning.
‘Language,’ said Ted.
‘Coffee?’ said Minnie.
‘No. I don’t think so,’ said Israel, checking his watch. ‘Oh, shit! Ted!’
‘Language!’ said Minnie.
‘Sorry, Minnie.’
‘Ted!’
‘What?’
‘We’re late for the meeting!’
‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘Behind like the cow’s tail.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll have to hand in your resignation after.’
‘He’s resigning?’ said Minnie.
‘Again,’ said Ted.
‘Yes!’ said Israel. ‘That’s right. I am. I’m handing in my resignation today. I was just distracted there for a moment.’
Ted winked at Minnie as they got up to leave.
‘See you next week then?’ said Minnie.
‘I very much doubt it!’ said Israel. ‘Bye! Come on, Ted, quick, let’s go.’
And with that, Israel Armstrong went to resign, again, from his job as mobile librarian for Tumdrum and District on the windswept north coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland.
2 (#ulink_b41d616c-3dd4-5db0-b12f-bc9225b9d80b)
‘Sorry, Linda,’ he said when they arrived. It was his customary greeting; he liked to get in his apologies in advance. ‘Sorry, everyone.’
‘Ah, Mr Armstrong and Mr Carson,’ said Linda. ‘Punctual as ever.’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘You are aware that the last Wednesday of every month at three o’clock is the Mobile Library Steering Committee?’
‘Yes,’ said Israel.
‘Always has been.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And always will be,’ said Linda.
‘Right.’
‘For ever and ever, Amen,’ said Ted.
‘And yet you, gentlemen,’ continued Linda, ignoring Ted, ‘somehow always manage to be late?’
‘Yes. Erm. Anyway, you’re looking well, Linda,’ said Israel, trying to change the subject.
‘Don’t try to change the subject, Mr Armstrong,’ said Linda. ‘This is not a fashion show.’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘Honestly!’ said Linda, playing up to the—very appreciative—rest of the committee. ‘You put a bit of lipstick on, and they can’t think about anything else. Typical man!’
‘Sorry,’ said Israel, sliding down lower and lower in his seat.
‘You’re all the same.’
‘Sorry. We had some trouble…with the van.’
They hadn’t had trouble with the van, actually, but they often did have trouble with the van, so it wasn’t a lie in the proper sense of the word; it wasn’t as if Israel were making it up because, really, the van was nothing but trouble. The van was an old Bedford, and Ted’s pride and joy—rescued, hidden and restored by him at a time when Tumdrum and District Council were scaling down their library provision, and resurrected and brought back into service only six months ago when Israel had arrived and taken on the role of mobile librarian. The van wasn’t merely a vehicle to Ted; it wasn’t just any old van; it wasn’t, to be honest, even a van in particular; the van was the epitome, the essence, the prime example of mobile library vans in general. To Ted, his van represented pure undiluted mobile library-ness. It was the Platonic van; the ur-van; the über-van; it was a totem and a symbol. And you can’t argue with symbols: symbols just are. Thus, in Ted’s mind, there was absolutely nothing—not a thing—wrong with the mobile library van. The corrosion in the engine, and the mould and mildew in the cabin, and the occasional seizure of the clutch, and some problems with the brake callipers, and the cables, and the wiring looms, and the oil filter, and the spark-plugs, and the battery—these were simply aspects of the van’s pure vanness, a part of its very being, its complete and utter rusty red-and-cream-liveried perfection.
‘So,’ the chairman of the Mobile Library Steering Committee, a man called Ron, an archetypically bald and grey-suited councillor, was saying, ‘Here we all are then.’ Ron specialised in making gnomic utterances and looking wise. ‘All together, once again.’
Also on the committee was Eileen, another councillor, a middle-aged woman with short dyed blonde hair who always wore bright red lipstick with jackets of contrasting colours—today, an almost luminous green—which made her look like the last squeezings of a tube of cheap tooth-paste. Eileen was a great believer in Booker Prize-winning novels. Booker Prize-winning novels, according to Eileen, were the key not merely to improving standards of literary taste among the adults in Tumdrum and District, but were in fact a panacea for all sorts of social ills. Booker Prize-winning novels, according to Eileen, were penicillin, aspirin, paracetamol and snake oil, all in one, in black and white, and in between hard covers. Eileen believed passionately in what you might call the trickle-down theory of literature; according to her, the reading of Booker Prize-winning novels by Tumdrum’s library-borrowing elite would lead inevitably and inexorably to the raising of social and cultural values among the populace at large. Even a mere passing acquaintance with someone who had read, say, Ian McEwan or Salman Rushdie could potentially save a local young person from a meaningless and empty life of cruising around town in a souped-up hot hatch and binge-drinking at weekends, and might very possibly lead them instead into joining a book group, and drinking Chardonnay, and learning to appreciate the finer points of the very best of metropolitan and middle-brow fiction.
Israel did not like Eileen, and Eileen did not like him.
‘Can’t we just get lots of copies of the Booker Prizewinning novels?’ Eileen would opine, all year round. Her clothes and her slightly manic cheeriness always gave the Mobile Library Steering Committee meetings a sense of evening occasion—like a Booker Prize awards night dinner, indeed—as though she might at any moment stand up at a podium, raise a glass of champagne, and offer a toast, ‘To Literature!’ Other members of the committee could often be heard to groan when she spoke.
The other committee members were two moon-faced men whose names Israel could never remember, and who both required endless recaps and reiterations and reminders of the minutest detail of the mobile library’s activities, most of which, when recapped, they found profoundly unsatisfactory. Both of them wore glasses and were bald. Israel called them Chi-Chi and Chang-Chang.
And then of course there was Linda Wei, Israel’s boss. His line-manager. His nemesis. The person who—apart from his landlady, George, and Ted, and most of the other inhabitants of this godforsaken town—had made Israel’s stay in Northern Ireland as unpleasant and as difficult and as miserable as possible. Linda it was who, when Israel complained about his working conditions, would put her fingers in her ears and sing, ‘I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!’ Linda it was who had introduced performance-related pay—for librarians! What were they supposed to do? Force books on people? Offer them money-back guarantees and loyalty cards?—and who had doubled the number of runs that Israel and Ted were expected to complete in a week, and at the same cut the stock back to the bare bones of celebrity autobiographies, bestsellers and self-help manuals. And now Linda it was to whom Israel was about to hand in his resignation. Sweet, sweet, sweet revenge. He was composing in his mind the words he was going to use.
‘It is with great regret that I have to inform you that…’?
No, that wasn’t right.
‘I have to tell you now that I have discharged my last…’?
No.
‘You are probably all aware of the reasons why I have chosen to renounce…’?
No.
‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility…’?
‘Hasta la vista, baby!’?
That was about the best he could come up with.
He was looking forward to it. A grand exit and then up, up and away from Tumdrum. Over to England. To London! The bright lights. The streets paved with gold. And never to return. This place was bad for him—psychically bad. It was doing him damage. He could feel it: he was calcifying inside; he could feel himself losing synaptic connections on a daily basis. He was de-evolving. He needed to beat a retreat, start over, and get his old life back.
He couldn’t wait for the meeting to be finished. He wasn’t good in meetings; he was meeting-phobic.
‘Anyway, as I was saying,’ Ron was saying, ‘before we were interrupted. Meltdown. Total. Meltdown.’
Israel tried to follow the conversation for a few minutes, and failed. He and Ted seemed to have arrived at the Mobile Library Steering Committee in the middle of a hotly contested debate about the pros and cons of installing an on-board microwave oven in the van. This seemed unlikely, but Israel checked the agenda:
6) Microwave ovens
To note that the Council is to consider the use of microwave ovens in all public areas, including mobile learning centres.
This proposed innovation had developed into a passionate debate about the Health and Safety implications of combining hot food and drink and members of the public. Ron believed that there were indeed major Health and Safety implications, there having already been unconfirmed reports, from some councils which had introduced microwaves and drinks machines into community halls, of some less forward-thinking members of the public using non-microwavable plastic beakers in the microwaves.
‘Meltdown!’ Ron kept saying. ‘A very high risk of meltdown.’
It was generally agreed that the risk of meltdown needed to be further looked into. The issue was therefore referred to the Mobile Library Steering Committee Health and Safety Sub-Committee—Israel and Linda—for further discussion. Israel wouldn’t mind a microwave in the van: he could maybe get pies from the Trusty Crusty for his lunch.
They moved on to the next point on the agenda.
7) Sexual and racial harassment—appointment of advisers
To note that Council policy on sexual and racial harassment now requires two members of staff (one male, one female) from each library to act as advisers. These advisers to be appointed annually by each library.
‘We need to appoint advisers,’ said Ron.
‘I’ll advise,’ said Linda.
‘Good. Thank you, Linda. So now we need a male,’ said Ron.
Ted was looking at the floor.
Israel was pretending he couldn’t hear.
‘Israel?’ said Ron.
‘Yes?’ said Israel.
‘Sexual and racial harassment?’
‘Yes. Terrible,’ said Israel.
‘Would you mind?’ said Ron. ‘With Linda?’
‘Erm.’
‘Sexual and racial harassment with Linda?’ said Ted, mostly to himself.
‘Yes,’ said Ron.
‘Sure,’ said Israel.
‘What’s that on your T-shirt?’ said Eileen. ‘“Smack My Bitch Up”?’
‘Yeesss,’ said Israel. ‘It’s just a phrase.’
There was a lot of other stuff: stuff about budgets; and footfalls; and deadlines for this, and deadlines for that; and Israel soon lost interest and pretty soon after that he also lost the will to live. While Linda was speaking about rolling out wi-fi connections across the county, Israel sat staring down at the thinly veneered pale wood surface of the table around which they were all sitting, like miniaturised modern-day medieval knights discussing their forthcoming crusade against the Infidel, or Mafia bosses running a failing cold-storage and meat-packing plant, and for a moment he imagined that they were a parachute display team and that the table was in fact nothing but a big inverted bag of air held by a gathering of cords and they were all about to drop down thousands of feet, out of the blue sky, down to earth…Which, indeed, promptly they did.
‘Mr Armstrong?’ Linda was saying. ‘Hello? Mr Armstrong? Earth calling Armstrong? Excuse us?’
He was doodling. His agenda looked like a greyscale photocopy of an early Jackson Pollock, pre-Full Fathom Five. At the last Mobile Library Steering Committee meeting Linda had proposed a motion banning all doodling, claiming that it was an act of passive aggression, perpetrated almost wholly by males, but the motion was voted down—Ron was a secret doodler, as were Chi-Chi and Chang-Chang. Linda had also been pressing for a Mobile Library Steering Committee team-building weekend away—with orienteering, and white-water rafting, and abseiling—which absolutely nobody else at all thought was a good idea. No one wanted bonding; quite the opposite. She’d also been pressuring Ted and Israel to sign up for a ‘PR and Power Presentation Skills’ course running over in Derry; they had, so far, successfully resisted.
She was basically completely crazy, Linda, as far as Israel could tell, and she’d got even crazier since splitting up with her husband and coming out as a lesbian, which made her Tumdrum’s only Chinese Catholic lesbian single parent, as far as Israel was aware, and as much as he disliked Linda—and he really disliked her a lot—you had to respect her for that. There’d been a leaving-do recently for a retiring librarian down in Rathkeltair, and they’d all gone out to a Chinese restaurant which had a karaoke, and once everyone had done their ‘Country Road’s and ‘Imagine’s and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’s, Linda insisted on getting up, Baileys in hand, and singing—unaccompanied, because there was no backing track—an old music-hall song, ‘Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty’, encoring with ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ and ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’.
Really, you couldn’t help but like Linda.
‘Armstrong!’ Linda was saying. ‘Pay attention!’
At least, you couldn’t help but like her in theory.
As always, the major issue facing the Mobile Library Steering Committee had been tucked away deep into the agenda.
‘So, gentlemen. Now the good news.’
‘Item 9,’ said Eileen.
Ted looked at Item 9.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Israel. ‘Ted?’
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Oh. My. God!’
‘What?’
‘Item 9.’
‘What about it?’
‘Look at it.’
Ted peered at the agenda. ‘Aye.’
Israel read it out: ‘“Replacement of mobile learning centre vehicle.”’
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Your van, gentlemen,’ said Linda, with some pride, ‘is going to be replaced.’
‘What?’ repeated Ted.
‘The van, Mr Carson, we’ve found the money through some Lottery funding and a new development grant.’
‘No way!’ said Israel.
‘Way,’ said Linda.
‘We can’t get rid of the van,’ said Ted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the van.’
‘Now, now, Mr Carson,’ said Linda.
‘That van is perfect,’ said Ted.
‘Except for the steering,’ said Israel.
‘It’s a wee bit sloppy, just,’ said Ted.
‘Corrosion in the engine,’ added Israel.
‘Well? New engine,’ said Ted.
‘Clutch,’ said Israel.
‘Needs replacing just.’
‘Brakes.’
‘Yes, yes, we get the picture, thank you, gentlemen,’ said Linda. ‘Well, Mr Carson?’
Ted was silent.
‘When do we get the new one then?’ said Israel. ‘What’s it going to be like? What colour is it going to be?’
‘Well, actually, gentlemen,’ said Linda, with a further flourish, ‘we would like you to go and choose.’
‘What?’ said Israel. ‘You are joking!’
‘No. We are not joking, Mr Armstrong. We’re sending you to the Mobile Meet, so you can meet up with some of the manufacturers and—’
‘The what?’
‘The Mobile Meet,’ said Linda, ‘is organised by the Chartered Institute of Information and Library Professionals. It’s an annual event where mobile librarians can meet and swap experiences and discuss the latest technology. It’s a prestige event.’
‘Right,’ said Israel.
‘It’s in England,’ said Linda.
‘No!’ said Israel.
‘Yes,’ said Linda.
‘You’re joking!’
‘No. We are not joking. Again,’ said Linda.
‘That’s fantastic! You’re sending us over?’
‘Yes,’ said Linda.
‘Like on a business trip?’ said Israel.
‘I suppose,’ said Linda.
‘Wow!’ said Israel. ‘All expenses paid?’
‘Well—’ began Linda.
‘Whereabouts?’ said Israel. He could barely contain his excitement.
‘Somewhere down in Wiltshire?’ said Linda. She pronounced it Wilt Shire.
‘Wiltshire? Great! God! Where’s that?’
‘Stonehenge?’ said Ron. ‘Somewhere round there.’
‘How close to London?’ said Israel.
‘M3,’ said Ron. ‘M4?’
‘Is that close by?’
‘Not far, I don’t think,’ said Ron. ‘I went with the wife once to Salisbury. Years ago. Visiting some friends of ours over there. That was nice.’
‘Oh, yeah!’ said Israel, punching the air. ‘Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!’
‘What?’
‘This is brilliant. Linda, I can’t thank you enough. This is fantastic! It’s the best day of my life.’
‘Right, well, thank you, Mr Armstrong.’
Ted had been rather quiet.
‘Mr Carson?’ said Linda.
‘You can’t replace the van,’ said Ted. ‘She’s irreplaceable.’
‘No one and nothing is irreplaceable, Ted, I’m afraid,’ said Ron. ‘Us old warhorses included.’
‘We’ve had that van nearly thirty years,’ said Ted.
‘Exactly,’ said Linda. ‘What about a refurbishment?’ said Ted.
‘We’ve looked into the price of a refurbishment and it’s not economical, I’m afraid,’ said Linda.
‘When did ye look into a refurbishment?’
‘We’ve looked into a refurbishment.’
‘Not with me you haven’t.’
‘No, we had some consultants look into it.’
‘You had consultants looking at my van?’
‘It’s not actually your van, Mr Carson. It’s the—’
‘It only needs a bit of work.’
‘New engine?’ said Linda, referring to a list. ‘Bodywork. Chassis.’
‘Well?’ said Ted.
‘She’d hardly be the same vehicle, would she, Ted?’ said Ron.
‘Like the philosopher’s hammer,’ said Israel.
‘What’s he going on about?’ said one of the nameless councillors.
‘No idea,’ said the other.
‘We’re looking at a number of possible suppliers at the moment,’ said Linda. ‘Mostly specialist coach builders—they do hospitality units, mobile police stations.’
‘Wow!’ said Israel. ‘Ted! We could have our own hospitality area, and a VIP lounge.’
‘Here are the brochures, gents,’ said Linda, handing over some thick glossy booklets. ‘If you’d like to be having a look at those.’
‘Fantastic,’ said Israel.
‘You will of course be fully consulted about the exact specifications.’
‘Ted! Look at this! What about a mini-bar, eh, Ted?’
Ted’s eyes were glazed.
‘We could have a toilet and everything. Remember that time you were caught short and…Ted?’
‘I think you’ll agree the standard of craftsmanship on this sort of vehicle is quite different to your own—’ began Linda.
‘What?’ said Ted.
‘Efforts, Ted. Which have been much appreciated, may I just say.’
‘I want it minuted that I’m very unhappy with this,’ said Ted.
‘Right,’ said Linda. ‘I really don’t think there’s any need for that.’
‘I want it in the records!’ said Ted.
‘Well, that’s fine, if you insist.’
‘This’ll be fantastic, Ted,’ said Israel. ‘Listen—’
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll listen to you when you’ve learned to wipe your arse,’ said Ted.
‘Right. Thanks.’
‘Come on now, Ted, there’s no need for that sort of language now, is there? There’s ladies present,’ said Ron.
‘Women, thank you,’ said Linda. ‘This is the twenty-first century. Anyway, maybe you two…gentlemen…can talk it over between yourselves? And let me know whether we can go ahead with our plans and book your tickets over to England?’
3 (#ulink_f1418570-94b3-5f0b-b0a5-7c4a6351ed7d)
The meeting had ended, as was traditional at Mobile Library Steering Committee meetings, amidst argument, dissolution and general disarray—‘Don’t forget the Booker Prize longlist, announced in August!’ cried Eileen. ‘That’s August!’; ‘PR!’ Ron was saying. ‘New van! Great PR!’; and ‘Some reports of discrepancies in cataloguing!’ Linda was reminding Ted and Israel; and ‘What?’ said Chi-Chi; and ‘What?’ said Chang-Chang—and then it was the long drive home in the van with Ted silent and sulking and Israel flicking through the fat, plush brochures and the programme for the Mobile Meet, the UK’s, quote, Premier Mobile Library Event. Unquote.
It was an uncomfortable, damp, sweaty summer’s evening; tempers were frayed; temperatures high; and Israel knew that he was going to have to do something pretty special to persuade Ted to go with him over to England. This was his opportunity to ensure himself a free trip back home: the prospect of leaving Tumdrum was the best thing that had happened to him since arriving.
‘There’s some really good stuff on at this Mobile Meet thing,’ he said casually.
‘Huh,’ said Ted.
‘Look. A Guide to Electronic Self-issue,’ said Israel.
‘Bullshit,’ said Ted.
‘Supplier-Select Book-Buying For Beginners,’ said Israel.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Bibliotherapy,’ said Israel.
‘What?’
‘Bibliotherapy,’ repeated Israel.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Honestly, some of this stuff looks really good,’ said Israel. ‘I think it’ll be really interesting.’
‘That’s because you’re a ragin’ eejit, like the rest of them.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure. Hirstle o’ blinkin’ eejits, the whole lot of youse.’
‘What’all of idiots?’
‘Ach, read a fuckin’ dictionary, Israel, will ye? I’m not in the mood.’
‘Right. Ted,’ said Israel soothingly, ‘not being funny, but you really shouldn’t take this personally.’
‘I shouldn’t take it personally?’
‘No. The whole van thing, you know. You need to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat.’
Israel could sense Ted’s neck and back—his whole body—stiffening in the van beside him, which was not a good sign. Ted was like a dog: he gave clear warnings before attacking. Israel’s softly-softly, soothing approach was clearly not working; he’d rubbed him up the wrong way.
‘An opportunity!’ said Ted, his shaven head glistening, his slightly shiny short-sleeved shirt shining, and his big hairy forearms tensing and tensing again. ‘An opportunity! The van I’ve tended like me own wean for the past…God only knows how many years, and they’re planning to throw on the scrap heap? And I should view that as an opportunity?’
‘Yes, no, I mean, just…You know, all good things must…and what have you—’
‘Ach!’
‘Plus,’ said Israel, trying an entirely other approach. ‘Yes! Plus! You could think of it as a nice holiday, you know. We’re going to get to go over to England, relax, choose a new van. It’ll be great fun.’
‘Fun?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are actually stupit, aren’t ye?’
Israel thought fast. ‘We could have air conditioning in the new van,’ he said, wiping the sweat dramatically from his brow. ‘You know how hot it gets in here sometimes. And with the rain, in the summer. You were complaining about it only yesterday. Dehumidification.’
‘We don’t need dehumimidifaction.’
‘For the…books, though.’
Maybe a clerkly appeal, an appeal to worthiness, to the ancient and high-minded principles of librarianship?
‘We can’t think of ourselves always, Ted. We’re librarians. We have to think of the good of the books. You know, that’s our first responsibility, as librarians, to the books, rather than to the van.’
‘To the books?’
‘That’s right. To the books. And…’
God, what else would appeal to Ted?
‘Our responsibility to the clients.’
‘The clients?’
‘Yes,’ said Israel, without conviction.
‘Are ye having me on?’
‘No,’ said Israel. Clearly an appeal to their responsibility to readers wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked with him either.
‘You’re not even half interested though?’ said Israel tentatively. ‘I mean, they’re giving us carte blanche, Ted. We could go for the full works. Anything we want. You know, like a mobile Internet café. “Would you like an espresso with your Catherine Cookson, madam?” We could have our own blog! Honestly, it’d be amazing.’
‘No,’ said Ted. ‘It wouldn’t be amazing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re not getting a new bloody van!’
‘Language, Ted.’
‘Don’t talk to me about my language, ye fuckin’ eejit!’
‘Sorry,’ said Israel.
‘Thank you,’ said Ted.
‘We are getting a new van, though,’ said Israel determinedly.
‘We’re not getting a new van,’ said Ted, more determinedly. ‘We are not going to England, we’re not going to some daftie wee librarian conference—’
‘The Mobile Meet,’ corrected Israel.
‘And we’re not getting a new van.’
‘But—’
‘They’ll not get rid of this van,’ said Ted. ‘If they want to get rid of this van they’ll have to get rid of me first.’
‘Don’t say that, Ted.’
‘The van’s staying.’
‘Ted!’
‘And so am I. Here! In Norn Iron. And we are not getting a new van.’
‘We are, Ted,’ said Israel.
‘We’re not.’
‘We are.’
‘We’re not. I’m telling you now,’ said Ted, turning across to look at Israel, and gripping the steering wheel so tight that Israel thought he might actually choke it and throttle the whole vehicle. ‘Again. We. Are. Not. Getting. A. New. Van! We’re not going anywhere. We’re staying put! D’ye understand me?’ When Ted raised his voice it was like someone hitting you around the ears.
‘Please?’ said Israel quietly.
‘No!’ yelled Ted.
Israel was worried that Ted might have a heart attack or a stroke and they’d end up swerving and crashing and they’d both die, and they’d make the front page of the Impartial Recorder: ‘Librarians killed in tragic mobile library crash’, with a grainy black and white photo. And a few words of tribute from Linda Wei. Which was not the way Israel would have wished to be remembered.
Ted had lost his temper, and Israel had no other means of persuasion. He was reduced to pathetic pleading.
‘Please, Ted. A new van? A trip over to England? Seize the day. Carpe diem and all that.’
‘Aye, and who’s he when he’s at home?’
‘Carpe diem? It means—’
‘Of course I know what carpe diem means, ye fuckin’ wee shite!’
Ted punched the steering wheel. Which was never good. It made the whole front of the dashboard wobble.
‘Listen!’ said Ted. ‘Let me make meself perfectly plain. Do not patronise me. Do not try to talk me round. And do not try to appeal to my better nature!’
‘No, Ted. No, I wouldn’t dream of…appealing to your…’
That gave Israel an idea. They drove on in silence for a few minutes longer, Israel flicking through the programme of events for the Mobile Meet.
‘At the Mobile Meet they have all these competitions, you know.’
‘Hmm,’ said Ted.
‘Driver of the Year.’
‘Hmm.’
‘State of the Art Vehicle.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Best Livery.’
Israel thought he could just detect a slight interest in Ted’s ‘hmm’s. This could be it. He tried to utilise his advantage. Counter-intuitive was the way to go with Ted; there was no point setting out premises and establishing arguments. There was absolutely no point arguing with Ted, or appealing to his better nature. Cunning—that’s what was called for.
‘This old thing probably wouldn’t stand a chance, of course, at that sort of competition level.’
‘Don’t ye get started into the van again now.’
‘No, no, I’m not. I mean, she just wouldn’t, though, would she, realistically, stand a chance of winning a prize at the Mobile Meet? With that, you know, all that competition. Not a chance.’
‘Ach, of course she’d stand a chance.’
‘I don’t think so, Ted. Not up against all those English vans.’
‘Ach,’ said Ted.
‘Not a chance of winning. Not in a million years. If you look at these categories. Concours D’Elégance.’
‘What?’
‘Concours D’Elégance means, you know, the best-looking van there on the day.’
‘Ach, well, if she was there, she’d definitely win that. Best van, no problem.’
‘No?’ said Israel. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Of course she would!’
‘Well, I suppose if you pimped her up a bit and—’
‘Wee bit of work, no problem,’ said Ted. ‘Definitely she’d win it. She’s a beauty,’ said Ted, affectionately stroking the dashboard. ‘Aren’t you, girl?’
He had found Ted’s Achilles heel; his underbelly; his soft spot; his weakness; his fatal Cleopatra. Pride.
‘I tell you what,’ said Israel. ‘Do you want to have a bet on it?’
‘A what?’ said Ted. ‘A bet?’
‘Yes, a bet, on you winning the Concours D’Elégance at the Mobile Meet.’
‘With you, a bet?’ said Ted.
‘Yes.’
‘Ach,’ said Ted. ‘I’m good living. I don’t gamble.’
‘Oh,’ said Israel. He knew that in fact Ted did gamble; the week of the Cheltenham Gold Cup he’d talked about nothing else. Israel had had to cover for him every day. Then again, Ted also claimed he didn’t drink. And didn’t smoke. And he did. And he did.
‘I don’t gamble,’ repeated Ted. ‘Unless I know I’m going to win.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Israel.
Israel could see a glint in Ted’s eye.
‘A bet,’ Ted said to himself. ‘The van to win the…What did you call it?’
‘Concours D’Elégance.’
‘Concord De Elephants,’ repeated Ted.
‘That’s it,’ said Israel.
‘Are ye serious?’
‘Yes, absolutely I’m serious.’
Israel could see Ted thinking through the proposition. ‘Well?’ he said gingerly.
‘I tell you what, son,’ said Ted, pausing dramatically. Big pause. ‘Seeing as you’ve asked.’ Another pause. ‘You’re on.’
‘No. Really? Honestly?’
‘Yes,’ said Ted.
‘Really?’ said Israel.
‘I said yes.’
‘Great!’ said Israel. ‘How much? A couple of pounds?’
‘Couple of pounds!’ said Ted, bellowing with laughter. ‘Couple of pounds! Ach, ye’re a quare geg. No, no, no. No. If I’m going all the way over to the mainland I want to get my money’s worth out of you. We’ll do it properly. I’ll get JP to open up a book on it.’
‘JP?’
‘The bookie on Main Street. He’ll see us right.’
‘Erm.’
‘Yer bet’s definitely on now; ye’re not going to back out?’
‘No. Definitely. Absolutely,’ said Israel. ‘Game on.’
‘You don’t want to change yer mind?’
‘Nope.’
‘Ye know ye don’t back out of a bet, now?’
‘Quite.’
Ted reached a hand across. ‘Five hundred pounds,’ said Ted.
‘Five hundred pounds!’ said Israel.
‘You’re right,’ said Ted. ‘Five hundred’s not enough. One thousand says we win the…What did you call it?’
‘Concours D’Elégance. But I haven’t got one thousand pounds, Ted. The van’s not worth a thousand pounds.’
‘I thought you wanted a bet?’
‘I do, but—’
‘Aye, right, that’s typical, so it is. You’re trying to wriggle out of it now.’
‘No, I am not trying to wriggle out of it.’
‘Ach, you are, so you are. Ye’re not prepared to put your money where your mouth is. Typical Englishman.’
‘I am not trying to wriggle out of it, Ted.’
‘Well, then, are youse in, or are youse out?’
‘All right,’ said Israel, trying to suppress a grin. ‘One thousand pounds says you won’t win the Concours D’Elégance at this year’s Mobile Meet.’ He knew his money was safe.
The rest of the journey continued in silence, with Israel elated and exhausted from his negotiations and Ted already planning the few little tweaks and alterations he needed to get the van into top condition. Eventually, Ted pulled up outside the Devines’ farm, where Israel was a lodger, and Israel clambered down wearily from the van.
‘Hey!’ called Ted, as Israel was about to shut the door. ‘Did ye not forget something?’
‘No,’ said Israel, patting his pockets, patting the seat. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I think you did,’ said Ted.
‘What? “Thank you” for the lift?’
‘No,’ said Ted.
‘What? The bet?’
‘No. The bet’s on—we’ve shaken.’
‘Yes,’ said Israel. ‘And I am a man of my word.’
‘Aye. Exactly. And you remember what you were going to do today, Man of Your Word?’
‘Erm. No. I don’t remember. Should I?’
‘You were going to tell her?’
‘Tell who?’
‘Linda. That you were resigning.’
‘Ah, yes. Well…things have changed since this afternoon.’
‘Have they now?’
‘Yes. I feel I have a…responsibility to the readers of Tumdrum and District to…’
‘And it’s not because you’re getting a free holiday to England?’
‘No! Of course not!’
‘You shouldn’t ever try to kid a kidder,’ said Ted.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know your game.’
‘I don’t…I’m not playing a game, Ted.’
‘Aye.’
‘No. I just feel very strongly that my responsibility is to books, and to…encouraging the people of the north coast of Northern Ireland to…indulge their learned curiosity and to give them unlimited assistance…by helping to choose a new mobile library van.’
‘Aye, tell the truth and shame the devil, why don’t ye?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t care what you think your responsibility is,’ said Ted. ‘My first responsibility is to the van. One thousand pounds, remember.’
‘Fine.’
‘Pay for some refurbishments, wouldn’t it? You’d better start saving, boy!’
‘No, Ted, I don’t need to start saving, because alas very soon we shall be in sunny England choosing a brand spanking new top-of-the-range mobile library and we will no longer have need of this…’ And with that, Israel walked away and slammed the door. ‘…piece of junk,’ he muttered under his breath.
Oh, yes!
Ted had been reeled in hook, line and sinker!
Israel Armstrong was going home!
4 (#ulink_61c3002b-4f68-5602-9549-1a46e8ed6652)
He was packing! Israel Armstrong was packing up and getting ready to go. He had his case out from under the bed, and his little portable radio turned up loud, and he was listening to BBC Radio Ulster, the local station; he’d gone over some time ago, had switched from Radio 4, had made the move away from the national and the international, from big news stories about Bush and Blair and the plight of the Middle East and worldwide pandemics and whither the UN Security Council, to local news stories about men beating each other with baseball bats in local bars and pubs, and road closures due to mains-laying down in Cullybackey, and good news about the meat-processing plant in Ballymena taking on ten new workers due to expanding European markets and increased orders from Poland for pork. He knew it was a bad sign, but he couldn’t help himself; he had grown accustomed to the rhythms and the pitch of local radio, to the shouty-voiced shock-jock first thing in the morning, and the faded country music star at lunchtime who played only Irish country and read out requests for the foot-tappin’ welders in Lurgan and all the lovely nurses on the cancer wards down there at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the mid-morning bloke from Derry who specialised in trading daring double-entendres with his adoring female callers.
Somehow—and how he wished it were not so—Israel could now recognise a tune by Daniel O’Donnell from far distant, and the supersweet sound of Philomena Begley and her band, and he also knew the time the Ulster Bank closed on a Wednesday (three thirty, for staff training), and the times of the high tides (varied according to season), and the best grocer to go to for your soup vegetables (Hector’s) and which one for eggs (Conways). This was not what was supposed to happen. Israel had imagined himself, heading into his late twenties, being able to recommend fine restaurants in Manhattan to his friends, many of whom probably worked for the New Yorker magazine, or who were up-and-coming artists with a gallery representing them, and he could have told you what time to go to MOMA and what was happening at the Whitney Museum. Instead, somehow, Israel had ended up knowing what night the Methodists had their ladies’ indoor bowling practice (Tuesday) and the Post Office opening hours (Mon-Fri, 9.00 a.m.-1.00 p.m., 2.00 p.m.-5.00 p.m.; early closing Wed, 3.30 p.m.; Sat, 10.00 a.m.-1.00 p.m.).
He turned up the radio louder to drown out the ennui and focused on his packing.
Brownie was back for the summer break from univer-sity over in England, so the Devines had moved Israel out of Brownie’s room, where he’d been staying, and out of the house and back into the chicken coop in the yard, where he’d first started out when he arrived in Tumdrum. Israel didn’t mind, actually, being back in the coop. It was good to get a little breathing space, and to be able to put a bit of distance between himself and George Devine—his landlady with the man’s name—and the perpetually Scripture-quoting senior Mr Devine, George and Brownie’s grandfather, and he’d done his best with the coop; had put in quite a bit of work doing the place up over the past few weeks. He had a desk in there now, along with the bed, and the Baby Belling and the old sink battened to the wall, and it was a nice desk he’d picked up from the auction down in Rathkeltair (Tippings Auctions, every Thursday, six till ten, in one of the new industrial units out there on the ring road, hundreds and hundreds of people in attendance every week, from as far afield as County Down and Derry, drinking scalding-hot tea and eating fast-fried burgers from Big Benny McAuley’s Premier Meats and Snacks van, and bidding like crazy for other people’s discarded household items and rubbish, and rusty tools, and amateur watercolours, and telephone seats and tubular bunk beds, and pot-plant stands, and novelty cruet sets, and golf clubs, and boxes overflowing with damp paperback books; Israel loved Tippings; it was like a Middle Eastern bazaar, except without the spices and the ethnic jewellery, and with more men wearing greasy flat caps buying sets of commemorative RUC cap badges). Lovely little roll-top desk it was, although the top didn’t actually roll, and a couple of the drawers were jammed shut, and Israel had had to patch up the top with some hardboard; but it did the job.
He also had a table lamp, which had first graced a home some time in the 1970s, by the look of it, and whose yellow plastic shade bore the scars of too many too-high-watted light bulbs; and also a small armchair which had at some time been re-upholstered with someone’s curtains, and which had a broken arm; and a couple of old red fire buckets to catch the rain that made it through the coop’s mossy asbestos roof; and also he’d rigged up a washing line using some twine and a couple of nails; and he had a walnut-veneer wardrobe crammed in there, with a broken mirror and only one leg missing, to keep his clothes in. To store his books he’d broken apart some old pallets and knocked up some shelving—him, Israel Armstrong, wielding a hammer and nails, and with the blackened thumb and fingernails to prove it—and these pretty sturdy shelves of his were now piled with books on one side of the bed and with jars of tea and coffee on the other, and an old teapot containing all his cutlery, two Duralex glasses and his enamel mug. He’d cut off a bit of an old mouldy scaffolding plank to cover the sink when he needed to prepare his food. The chicken coop wasn’t exactly a palace, but nor was it quite the proverbial Augean stable. Israel liked to think of it as an eccentric World of Interiors kind of a look—Gloria loved The World of Interiors. It was…there was probably a phrase for it. Shabby chic, that was it. With the emphasis, admittedly, on the shabby. Super-shabby chic? Shabby shabby chic?
It was shabby.
He squeezed his spare corduroy trousers into his case and went to the farmhouse, to the kitchen to say goodbye to the Devines.
There was only Brownie in, hunched over the table, reading. It was June, but the Rayburn was fired up, as ever. There were flies, but even the flies were resting. Old Mr Devine was a firm believer in fly-paper; the kitchen was festooned with claggy plumes of curling brown tape.
‘Israel!’ said Brownie, looking up. You could always count on Brownie for a warm welcome.
‘Brownie.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m doing good, actually,’ said Israel. ‘Pretty good. What are you reading?’
‘Levinas,’ said Brownie. Brownie was studying Philosophy at Cambridge.
‘Oh, right. Yes.’
‘Totality and Infinity?’
‘Absolutely, yes,’ said Israel.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Erm. That one? Er. Yes, I think so. I preferred some of his…others though, actually—’
‘Alterity.’
‘Yes, that’s a good one.’
‘No, that’s the idea, translation of the French.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Israel dubiously.
‘Anyway, how are things on the mobile?’ asked Brownie.
‘Good! Yes. Excellent,’ said Israel. ‘Even better now, we’re going away for a few days.’
‘Oh, really? In the van?’
‘Yes. Yeah. Big conference thing over in England.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you giving a paper or…’
‘No. No. I mean, they did ask me, of course, but I was…It’s difficult to fit it all in when you’re at the…’
‘Coalface?’ said Brownie.
‘Exactly. The library is the coalface of contemporary knowledge management.’
‘Right,’ said Brownie. It was something Israel had read in one of the brochures for the Mobile Meet.
‘Anyway. I was wanting to explain to George I wouldn’t be around, just so that she—’
‘Ah, right. I think she’s out with Granda in the vegetable patch if you want to catch them.’
‘Great.’
‘Good. Well, enjoy the conference.’
‘Thanks, you enjoy the…’
‘Levinas.’
‘Yeah. What was it called again?’
‘Totality and Infinity.’
‘Yeah. Great book. Great book.’
Israel’s reading had always been erratic and undisciplined; there were huge chunks missing in his knowledge, while other areas were grossly over-represented; it was like having mental biceps, but no triceps, or glutes, or quads, or forearms; he was a kind of mental hunchback; misproportioned; a freak. Graphic novels, for example, were ten a penny up in Israel’s mental attic, along with the novels of E.F. Benson and Barbara Pym—God only knows how they’d got there—piled up uselessly like old trunks full of crumbling paper, together with a whole load of Walter Benjamin, and Early Modernism, and books by Czechs, and the Oedipus Complex, and the Collective Unconscious, and Iris Murdoch, and William Trevor, and Virtual Reality, and Form Follows Function, and Whereof One Cannot Speak Thereof One Must Remain Silent, and The White Goddess, and William James, and Commodity Fetishism, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Ruth Rendell, and Jeanette Winterson, and Anthony Powell—Anthony Powell? What was he doing there? Israel had no idea. He had a mind like Tippings Auctions. His actual knowledge of philosophy proper, say, or eighteenth-century literature, or science, anthropology, geology, gardening, or geometry was…skimpy, to say the least.
And since arriving in Tumdrum his reading had become even more erratic and undisciplined; he’d had to cut his cloth to suit his sail. Or was it sail to suit his cloth? He was reading more and more of what they stocked in the van, which meant crime fiction, mostly, and books by authors whose work had won prizes or who were in some other way distinguished or remarkable; thus, celebrity biographies and books about people’s miserable childhoods. But it wasn’t as though he felt he’d lowered his standards. On the contrary. Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent, that was a great book, much better than most Booker Prize-shortlisted books, in his opinion. And The Firm, by John Grisham, that was pretty good too. He’d even started reading Patricia Cornwell from A to Z, but they seemed to go downhill rapidly, and he’d lost interest around about D. Cookery books also he liked: a man cannot survive on scrambled eggs alone. For the journey over to England, Israel was taking with him A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Purpose-Driven Life, and a couple of large-print crime novels. most of the library’s crime novels were large print. Israel had discovered a direct correlation between print size and genre: crime fiction, for example, came in big and small sizes, and also in audio, and in hardback, and in several kinds of paperback, and trailing TV tie-ins; literary fiction occasionally came with a different cover relating to a film adaptation. And poetry was just poetry: he’d never come across a book of large-print poems; for poetry you needed eyes like a pilot, with twenty-twenty vision, opposable thumbs, and never-ending patience; on the mobile library they stocked only Seamus Heaney, and derivatives.
To get to the vegetable patch Israel had to pass by the chickens, and he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty, having turned them out of their home. George had fixed them up with new runs using some old manure bags over wire netting, but Israel could tell they weren’t happy. They eyed him—gimlet chicken-eyed him—suspiciously as he hurried past.
George and old Mr Devine were indeed, as Brownie had suggested, in the vegetable patch, which was close by the main house, protected on one side by fruit trees and on the others by red-brick walls; it was a walled garden; or rather, it had been a walled garden. Like most things around the farm, it had seen better days; one might best now describe it as a half-walled garden.
‘George!’ Israel called as he entered through what was once a gateway, but which was now merely a clearing through some rubble.
George was kneeling down in among rows of vegetable crops. She ignored Israel, as usual.
‘George?’
‘What?’
‘Could I just—’
‘No, thanks. Whatever it is. We’re working here.’
‘Yes, sure. I see that. I just wanted to—’
‘Can you just let me finish here?’
‘Yeah, it’s just—’
‘Please?’
‘Sure.’
‘If you want to make yerself useful you could be thinning and weeding the onions.’
‘Yes, of course. I could…I’ll just…’
‘Over there.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
He looked around him at vast muddy areas where plants were poking through. He didn’t recognise anything. He wasn’t sure which were the onions. He went over towards Mr Devine, who was sitting on a wooden bench, a rug across his legs.
‘Lovely day,’ said Israel.
‘It’s a bruckle sayson,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Is it?’
‘Aye.’
‘Yes, I thought so myself actually,’ said Israel. ‘Erm.’ He pointed towards some green shoots. ‘Onions?’
‘Cabbages,’ said Mr Devine.
Israel pointed again.
‘Onions?’
‘Cabbages,’ said Mr Devine.
‘OK.’ Israel tried again, pointing at some sort of pointy thing. ‘Onions?’
‘Cabbages.’
‘Is it all cabbages?’
‘“Thou shalt not sow thy seed with mingled seed,”’ said Mr Devine.
‘Yes. Of course. Lovely. Beautiful. And they are…’ he said, gesturing vaguely towards the rest of the crops.
‘Cabbages. Kale. Cabbages. Radish. Potatoes. Chard. Cabbages. Potatoes. Shallots. Cabbages. Onions.’
‘Bingo!’ said Israel.
Israel got down on his knees. He didn’t quite know what to do next. The only thing he’d grown had been mustard and cress, at school, in a plastic cup.
‘Thinning?’ he shouted enquiringly, over to George.
‘Yes, thinning!’ George shouted back impatiently.
‘Thinning?’ he appealed quietly to Mr Devine, having no notion whatsoever what thinning onions might involve.
‘“And he shall separate them one from another; as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats,”’ said Mr Devine.
‘Erm.’
‘Two inches apart,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Ah, right, OK,’ said Israel. ‘Thank you.’
Israel occupied himself not unpleasantly, for about ten minutes, concentrating on the job. It was surprisingly satisfying. For about ten minutes he fondly imagined himself as a smallholder, with cows, and pigs, and a small orchard, and bottling his own tomatoes and mashing his own beer. He could be like Thoreau.
‘Ta-daa!’ he said, standing up and admiring his handiwork. ‘A perfect row of thinned onions!’ He stretched out and took in the view. It was idyllic here, really; it was pure pastoral. There were beehives down by the wheat field, and oats, some barley, sheep, the paddock. He took in these sights and breathed deeply, admiring a bunch of huge plants with bright yellow flowers.
‘They’re lovely-looking flowers,’ he said to Mr Devine.
‘Aye.’
‘What are those flowers?’
‘What do they look like?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know.’
‘Ye don’t know what a corguette plant looks like?’
‘Er…Is it a courgette plant, by any chance?’
Mr Devine’s eyes narrowed.
‘And you’ve some lovely trees there,’ said Israel, gesturing towards the fruit trees.
‘Plum,’ said Mr Devine. ‘And pears like a trout’s back.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Planted by my father. Cherries. Apple.’
‘Good,’ said Israel, as though he were a landowner inspecting a tenant farmer’s fields. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Good for you. Anyway, George,’ he said, as George approached. ‘I’ve done the onions.’
‘I’m just checking on these early croppers,’ she said, ignoring Israel’s onion-thinning achievements, and knelt down by some bushy patches of green.
‘It’s finding something early that’s floury enough,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Israel, faux-knowledgeably. ‘It’s quite a crop you have here.’
‘Mebbe,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Yes, you’re certainly going to get lots of…cabbages. And…potatoes. Have you never thought of diversifying into…I don’t know. Avocados, or artichokes?’
‘Ach, wise up, Israel, will ye?’ said George, from in among the foliage.
‘Asparagus?’ said Israel.
‘I refuse to grow anything beginning with “A”,’ said George.
‘Oh,’ said Israel. ‘Right.’
‘Och, Jesus. I’m joking, ye fool. What do you want, Israel? Get it over and done with and then you can be on your way.’
Israel stood up straight as if about to read a proclamation. ‘Well, actually, I’ve just come to say goodbye,’ he said.
‘What did you say?’ said George.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’
George straightened up slowly from her potato row and raised an unplucked eyebrow.
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No. I’m going away, over to England.’
‘Well, well, well,’ said George, crossing her arms.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just.’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t take you long, did it?’
‘To what?’
‘Cut and run.’
‘I’m not cutting and running.’
‘Well, you’ve been here, what, six months?’
‘Nearly eight,’ said Mr Devine.
‘Eight months,’ said George. ‘And then you’re away? That sounds to me like someone who’s cutting and running.’
‘Aye, I always thought he was a quitter,’ said Mr Devine. ‘“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet—”’
‘All right, yes, thank you, Granda,’ said George.
‘I’m not a quitter, actually,’ said Israel.
‘Are ye not?’
‘No. I’m going to be coming back.’
‘He’s coming back?’ said Mr Devine.
‘Are ye coming back, Armstrong?’ said George, crossing her arms. ‘You don’t want to dash our hopes now.’
‘Ha ha. Yes, I will be back. It’s just a…business trip I’m going on.’
‘A business trip? Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘With what, your job as an international financier?’
‘No.’
‘With the mobile library?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Mr Devine started wheezing with laughter.
‘A business trip!’ said George. ‘That right? What is it, an international conference?’
‘Well, yes, as it happens.’
‘Ach, you’re priceless, Israel, so you are.’
‘A mobile library conference? Holy God!’ said Mr Devine.
‘A junket then,’ said George.
‘Junket? No. It’s not a junket. It’s the Mobile Meet, which is the UK’s premier mobile library conference and—’
‘Paid for with our taxes no doubt?’ said George.
‘“Render unto Caesar,”’ said Mr Devine.
‘No,’ said Israel.
‘Not paid for with our taxes then?’
‘Well—’
‘You’re paying to go yourselves then?’
‘No. It’s—’
‘A holiday then, is it?’
‘No. It’s work. And—’
‘Good. How long are you gone for?’ said George.
‘It’ll be—’
‘Can we sub-let?’ said Mr Devine.
‘Sub-let?’ said Israel. ‘The chicken coop?’
‘You’ve it looking rightly,’ said Mr Devine.
‘How long?’ said George.
‘We’ll be gone about a week, I think. Few days visiting my family, and then to the Mobile Meet.’
‘A whole week?’ said George. ‘Sure, what are we going to do without ye?’
The conversation had not gone as well as Israel had hoped. He’d half hoped that his departure might excite some small favourable comment and wishes for a good journey and a safe return. He was wrong.
‘Is he here for the Twelfth?’ asked Mr Devine.
‘Are you here for the Twelfth?’ asked George.
‘Of?’ said Israel.
‘July,’ said George. ‘Obviously.’
‘Yes. Yes. We’ll be back by the twelfth of July.’
‘You wouldn’t want to miss the Twelfth.’
‘Right. No. Anyway,’ said Israel. ‘You’re not…considering a holiday yourselves this year?’ he asked, trying to be pleasant.
‘I’ve not been on holiday for seventy-eight years,’ said Mr Devine, pulling the rug tighter around his knees. ‘D’ye not think I could do without one now?’
‘Er. Yes. Probably.’
‘And some of us have work to do,’ said George.
‘Yes, quite,’ said Israel.
George was already walking away, her back turned from him.
‘Goodbye then,’ called Israel.
She didn’t turn to wave or answer.
Israel walked bitterly back to the chicken coop. He couldn’t wait to get away from here, to England, to Gloria, to good coffee, and home.
5 (#ulink_33318160-8bd8-506e-8703-b545ec25af0f)
They very nearly missed the ferry.
Brownie dropped Israel off at Ted’s little bungalow out on the main coast road, just by the sign saying ‘Try Your Brakes’, and along past the little new-build ‘Café Bistro’, which had never been occupied or let, and which was now proclaiming on a large, ugly estate agent’s hoarding its extremely unlikely ‘Potential as a Gift Shop’.
Ted’s bungalow was sheltered at the foot of a sheer white limestone cliff, its extraordinary vast clear views of the sea—to the left, far out to Rathlin Island and then across to the Mull of Kintyre—blotted out by the perpetual blur of traffic. It could and should have been the perfect little spot, with a bounteous vista, vast and uninterrupted. Instead it was dark and cold, with long, depressing, interrupting views of cars, white vans and lorries; paradise obscured, like Moses allowed a glimpse of the Promised Land, and then cut off by the A2 coast road.
Parked up proud out on the bungalow’s weed and gravel forecourt, wedged tight between bins and Ted’s neighbours’—the McGaws—little fenced-off area for sheep, and shadowed by the cliff above, yet still somehow shimmering in the late afternoon light, was the mobile library. She looked different.
Ted had absolutely no intention of losing the bet with Israel and had undertaken some essential care and maintenance tasks: he had scraped and cleaned and waxed the van, polishing her and buffing her until her red and cream livery was all ice cream and municipal bright once again, the words ‘Mobile Library’ and ‘The Book Stops Here’ picked out gorgeously in a honey gold and crisp forbidding black. The chrome looked chromey, and the headlights clear, and all dirt had been washed from the windows. The van had had a makeover. She looked—and Israel actually thought this for a moment, a weird J.G. Ballard moment—she looked, he thought, the mobile library, she looked sexy. She looked absolutely fantastic. She looked flushed, and noble and come-hitherish. She looked good enough to eat. She looked—and again, this is what he thought, he couldn’t help it—she looked like Marilyn Monroe.
Israel knew in that instant of recognition, in that perverse, momentary gaze upon the van’s pouting, polished, peach-like beauty, that she would win the category for Concours D’Elégance at the Mobile Meet, and that all was lost. He knew that Tumdrum would never get a new mobile library, and that Ted would triumph and would demand his pound of flesh, and that he, Israel, would have to beg for a loan to pay off the bet, would have to beg from Mr Mawhinney, probably, the manager of the Ulster Bank on Main Street in Tumdrum, who borrowed to his limit from the library every week, biographies, mostly, and military history, so perhaps Israel could borrow to his limit from the bank in return? ‘I need the money,’ he would have to explain, ‘because Marilyn Monroe melted the hearts of the mobile library judges at the annual Mobile Meet.’ And Mr Mawhinney would say, ‘What?’ and Israel Armstrong would be ruined and ridiculed by beauty, by this great curvaceous ambulant thing. He’d be condemned to life with Ted on the mobile library for ever. He’d be ruined. He’d lose the duffle coat off his back, and the brogues from his feet, his corduroy trousers; everything.
But, then, on closer inspection it seemed that Israel’s dignity and his money were perhaps safe; on closer inspection you could still see the many little rust spots that Ted’s primping couldn’t cover, and the scuffs and the scrapes and the scratches on the chrome, the little dints on the windscreen, the horrible filthy dirt-brown exhaust. The van was not a movie star; Marilyn was a person. The van was real. Some of the paintwork looked as though it might have been touched up using ordinary household emulsion. And the hand that had painted ‘The Book Stops Here’ could perhaps have been steadier. Even Ted couldn’t work miracles in just a few days. A makeover could not make new.
Buoyed, confused, excited and relieved, Israel rapped loudly and rang at Ted’s door.
He was greeted first from inside with the sound of irritable growling from Muhammad, Ted’s little Jack Russell terrier, and then with irritable shushings and hushings as Ted quieted the dog, and opened up the door with a scowl. Or at least, not literally with a scowl. Ted opened the door literally with his hand, obviously, while scowling, but when Ted scowled it was overwhelming; whatever it was Ted did while scowling became an act of scowl; the scowl became constitutive. He scowled often when they were out on the van, and in meetings with Linda Wei, and often unexpectedly and for no good reason at all in mid-conversation. Ted’s mouth would be saying one thing—‘How can I help you, madam?’ or ‘Yes, we can get that on inter-library loan’—but his scowl at the same time would be clearly saying something entirely different, something like ‘Ach,’ usually, or ‘Away on,’ or ‘Go fuck yourself, ye wee runt, ye.’ This last was the scowl now facing Israel. He’d only been to Ted’s bungalow once before, and Ted clearly wished that Israel wasn’t here now. Ted did not believe in franertising—his word—with work colleagues. Franertising was extremely frowned—scowled—upon. Ted held the door open only a crack and Israel could just about see the room behind him, with its drab sofa and the yelping dog.
‘Ted,’ said Israel.
‘That’s correct,’ said Ted. ‘Quiet, Muhammad!’
‘Are you ready?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. You were supposed to be ready.’
‘Aye,’ said Ted.
‘Well, look, hurry up, we need to go, the ferry’s at six.’
‘Aye.’
‘We’ve not got much time. I can wait outside if you’d rather. But we do need to hurry.’
‘Hurry is as hurry does.’
‘What?’
‘It’s just a—’
‘Saying, right, fine. Whatever. We need to get going here. Do you want me to load your bags in the van? You’re all packed?’
‘No.’
‘No, you don’t want me to load your bags, or no, you’re not packed?’
‘I’m not packed.’
‘What do you mean you’re not packed? We’ve only got a couple of hours before the ship sails.’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘What do you mean, you’re not coming? Of course you’re coming.’
‘I’m not. Coming.’
‘All right, yeah, stop muckin’ about now, Ted. We’ve got to go.’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘But we’ve a bet on.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘You said you couldn’t change your mind once you’d made a bet.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
Well, no.
On this occasion Israel could not afford to have Ted change his mind. He had already had just about enough of Northern Irish intransigence, and stubbornness and self-righteous inconsistency for the past eight months, and now he was pumped and ready to go, and Ted was holding him back.
So, no. No, no, no.
‘No,’ he said, using his considerable weight to push against the door. ‘No. That’s it. I’m not having this, Ted.’
Israel stood staring up at Ted’s scowl, wedged between the door and some old green cans containing peat. ‘You’ve mucked me about with this enough already,’ he said. ‘I’m getting on that boat to England this evening whether you like it or not.’
He was trying to squeeze into the bungalow. Muhammad was going crazy. Israel was a bona fide intruder.
‘Aye, right, you go on ahead, son,’ said Ted, pushing Israel back out of the door, with little effort. ‘Because I’m not going. You.’ Shove. ‘Can.’ Shove. ‘Go.’ Shove. ‘Yerself.’
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Ian Sansom
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Israel Armstrong, one of literature’s most unlikely detectives, returns for more crime solving adventure in this hilarious third novel from the Mobile Library series.Israel has been invited to attend the Mobile Meet in London, the annual mobile library convention, with his irascible companion Ted Carson. Back in the UK, Israel is reunited with his family, and there is much eating of paprika chicken, baklava and the drinking of good coffee. But within only twenty-four hours of their arrival, the mobile library has been nicked.Who on earth would want to steal a thirty-year old rust-bucket of a van, and who can the two men turn to for assistance? Can Mr and Mrs Krimholz, the parents of Israel′s childhood rival Adam Krimholz, help them out? Amidst all this mayhem, will Israel and Ted, one of literature′s oddest oddball couples, ever make it to the Mobile Meet? In this, his most puzzling, personal and problematic case yet, Israel has never had it so bad… neither has his library.