Mr. Dixon disappears: a mobile library mystery (22 page)

'Who?'

'Mr Dixon.'

'I'm sure.'

'Why are you sure?'

'Look, can you remember the periodic table?' said Ted.

'What?'

'From school. Can you remember the periodic table?'

'Erm…'

'No. Fine. Your times tables?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Seven eights then?'

'I don't know what seven eights are, Ted.'

'Well.'

'What is your point exactly?'

'Second Law of Thermodynamics?'

'All right, all right. Your point?'

'People can't remember, even basic facts. OK?'

'Yeah.'

'We all have to be reminded. Everyone's the same. So if Mr Dixon's away, he's gone into hiding or whatever, then the chances are he's gone somewhere where he can remember what it was like to be himself.'

'I hope you're right, Ted.'

'Well, if I'm wrong, it's Plan B.'

'What's Plan B?'

Ted just looked at Israel.

'Oh.'

When they got to Buncrana they'd missed the last ferry across Lough Swilly to Rathmullan. It was a long drive round without it.

'So now what?' said Israel.

'We'll wait till morning now,' said Ted. 'Element of surprise still with us.'

'Erm. OK. And now?'

'We'll go see an old friend of mine. We need someone to mind the pups for us.'

'You know someone here, in Buncrana?' It seemed to Israel like claiming to know someone in Timbuktu.

'Yes. He's an old surfing friend.'

'Surfing?'

'Aye. Have you heard of that over in England?'

'Of course…So, what, you met him on the Internet?'

'No, surfing, you fool, with surfboards.'

'You're a surfer?'

'Used to be. Haven't been out in a while, but.'

'You're having me on?'

'No. I took it up years ago. When I was in Australia.'

'What were you doing there?'

'Another time. How're the pups?'

'They're fine.'

They drove into the centre of Buncrana and pulled up outside a shop called Swilly's.

Swilly's called itself a Sports, Leisure and Gaming Centre, but basically it was a headshop: it had psychedelic T-shirts and lava lamps displayed in the window, and imitation firearms, and knives, and herbal cigarettes, and AC/DC posters, plus wet-suits and surfboards, and Frisbees, and novelty bikinis, and guitars, and sew-on heavy metal badges; if you were about fourteen years old and you were living in Buncrana, then Swilly's probably seemed to you about the coolest place on earth; then again, it wasn't facing a lot of competition. At five thirty on an April evening downtown Buncrana was absolutely deserted. There was a shop opposite Swilly's called Nice Things, which was open but empty; not just empty of customers but actually empty of anything. And next to Swilly's was 'Pat's Manicure and Footcare', which advertised its services as 'Manicure, Polish, Acrylics, Corns, Callouses, And Verucas'; it was not immediately clear whether the few tattered scraps displayed in transparent pouches and stuck to the window were in fact flesh or plastic.

Swilly's was shut, but Ted banged on the door until eventually a man with a vast white moustache and cropped hair emerged from out back.

He was smiling broadly when he unbolted the door and opened up. He had gold front teeth.

'Ted!' he said. 'Where you been, man?' Israel had never before heard an Irish/Californian accent: it was swollen and sweet and guttural, like a raisin in peat.

'Here and there,' said Ted.

'It's good to see you. You're looking great!'

He hugged Ted, and Ted hugged him back, without embarrassment or hesitation; Israel hadn't had Ted down as a hugger.

'So who's this guy?'

'He's a friend. Israel, this is Tommy. Tommy, Israel.'

'Hi,' said Israel.

'Good to meet you, man.'

'We need a favour, Tommy.'

'Sure, Ted. It's legit?'

'Absolutely, Tommy; those days are over. We just need a place to stay the night.'

'That's not a favour, that's a pleasure, Ted. Come on in.'

'And somewhere to park the van? Out of the way?'

'No problem.'

'Ah,' added Ted, 'and someone to look after a few puppies for us?'

As if on cue, a big curly-haired mongrel came lolloping through the shop towards them.

'You came to the right place, my old friend. The more the merrier.'

Israel, Ted, Mrs Muhammad and the puppies were safely installed in the back of Swilly's headshop, where Tommy appeared to live in squalor. The place was not merely dirty, it was inexplicably dirty: a thick grease on top of the kitchen cupboards; slime on the dish-rack, and what appeared to be acid stains on the lino; the walls sticky with nicotine. The toilet seat in the bathroom was encrusted and its plastic mouldings rotting; a couple of old towels, furry and grey with dirt, hung from grey plastic loops coming away from the wall. And everywhere there were books and records, stacked in milk-crates and in cardboard boxes, piled on every surface. Israel couldn't help but think that unless he got his life sorted out this was perhaps where he was heading.

Tommy prepared white bread and paste sandwiches and a plate of luncheon meat and what he called a 'Tropicana Salad'–some on-the-turn cottage cheese and pineapple chunks–and they drank beer out of polystyrene beakers. There was a cardboard box and a convector heater for the puppies. Van Morrison was playing loudly in the background, bellowing, 'Gloria, G-L-O-R-I-A.'

'Van Morrison was from over here, wasn't he?' said Israel, delighted to be free of the bagpipes.

Ted and Tommy looked at each other and laughed.

'Aye,' said Ted.

'So I believe,' said Tommy.

'What's funny?' asked Israel.

'Tommy here used to play guitar with Van.'

'Right, sure he did.'

'He did.'

'And you're also best friends with Ozzy Osbourne, I suppose.'

'No,' said Tommy. 'But I once met Johnny Cash.'

'Did you?'

'I did.'

'That's…'

'What?'

'Incredible?'

'It's also true.'

'He thinks we're all up to nothing over here, Tommy.'

'Ah, a real-life colonial Englishman!'

'No,' said Israel indignantly. 'I am not!'

'You still playing?' asked Ted.

'Not really,' said Tommy. 'Don't get the time, you know. But I tell you what I haven't given up, Ted.'

'What?'

'I've a little of the auld shamrock tea here, if you know what I mean.'

Ted looked shyly at Israel. 'I don't know, Tommy. I've the boy to think about here. We've had a big day today, and it's a big day tomorrow.'

'Shamrock tea?' said Israel.

'You want some?' said Tommy.

'Erm. What does it—'

Tommy winked at him. 'Very refreshing,' he said.

'Oh, right, I get it!'

'You'd take some?'

'Erm…'

'You're not of the temperance inclination?'

'No. I…'

'I've vodka, if you'd rather. Or I can go and get some—'

'Erm. No, not at the moment. I'm fine, thanks,' said Israel.

'Ted? For old times' sake?'

Israel excused himself and asked if he could use the phone, which was in the shop, and he rang through to the Devines back in Tumdrum. He wanted to see if the police had been looking for him.

They had. The mobile library was featuring quite prominently on local radio and television news; the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals would be delighted. He was expecting George to be furious, but she wasn't. She said she had some bad news for him. He thought maybe that she meant that they were throwing him out of the house, but it wasn't that.

His grandmother had died. She'd died yesterday. Israel's mother had been trying to get in touch with him. It meant he'd have missed the funeral, which would have been today, in accordance with tradition. She'd been taken into hospital, and that was it.

'I'm sorry, Armstrong,' said George.

'Yeah,' said Israel. 'Thanks.'

He was stunned. He walked out of the shop and through the streets of Buncrana, past the kebab shops and amusement arcades, through the usual paper litter and dreck, and down to the lough, which had the view of the paintings that everyone in Northern Ireland seemed to have somewhere in their house: a generic picture of mountains, water, and sky.

So, that was it, his last grandparent gone. His childhood finally over. And here he was, far from home.

He tried to remember good things about his grandmother, but they kept turning to bad. He tried to screen memories in his mind, like he was watching a series of lantern-slides, or a home video, but it didn't work, the mechanism was faulty. He remembered that when he was seven years old she'd bought him a violin, because when you're seven you have to learn the violin. But he couldn't picture the violin, and he couldn't remember if in fact it was his other grandmother, his father's mother, who'd bought it. And besides, he never learned the violin; he lacked the application. He thought about her speaking Yiddish, but he couldn't remember any actual phrases or sentences, just words–
shlump
and
schlep
and
shlemiel
–so it was as if the language itself had packed up in a hurry and left, leaving behind just a few useless ornaments and a couple of bits of unmanageable old furniture. He tried to remember going to synagogue with her as a child, and all he could remember was her giving him liquorice allsorts to keep him quiet, but then he thought that maybe that had been when he'd gone to church with his father, and not with her at all.

And then he thought about being a Jew, how he was really only Jewish in the same way his friends were Church of England: the bar mitzvah, and the occasional service, the odd festival, Hanukkah plus Christmas, a vague sense of being on the side of the good guys rather than the bad. But nothing else; nothing more; if there was anything more. One of his great-grandfathers had been a rabbi, but that was a long time ago and in another country long before Israel was born, and he knew virtually nothing about the rest of his family history; it had never interested him. It didn't seem like history; it was just life. When they were all still alive, what was the point of asking his grandparents about the past? And anyway both his grandparents, his mother's parents, he'd always thought of as English, Protestant almost–more English than the English, in fact, marmalade and net curtains, and milky white tea in a cup and a saucer–although he knew that his grandmother's family was Romanian, and his grandfather's had been from Russia, but they'd been living in England long before the 1930s, long before being Jewish became difficult or a problem. Most of what Israel knew about the Holocaust had come from Art Spiegelman and reading Primo Levi; he was Jewish, but he had no real experience of
being
a Jew; he thought of being Jewish simply as being human, of being who he was. And yet, really, who was he?

Obviously this was not a good or helpful question at the end of what was without a doubt the worst day of the worst week of his life, and yet even this terrible day somehow didn't seem real to him, was not something he could claim definitively for his own. It almost didn't seem to have happened to him. Already it was as if it happened to someone else. And if he was honest what was upsetting about his grandmother's death was not her death as such, but his deep blankness about it. Even his grief seemed second-hand.

He found himself absentmindedly throwing stones into the water.

And that night, lying on the Z-bed at the back of Swilly's, the puppies in their box suckling their mother close by him, he sobbed and sobbed, his chest heaving, and when he woke in the morning his clothes still smelt of beer and cigarettes, and Ted smelt of dope.

Neither of them ate breakfast. Tommy had no food in. They left him in charge of the puppies and drove down to the little quay to catch the early morning ferry over to Rathmullan. While they sat waiting, Israel told Ted about his grandmother.

'Mmm.' Ted shook his head. 'That's not good. I'm sorry to hear that. You have my condolences, of course. You all right?'

'Yeah, I'm fine.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah.'

'You're not going to start howling and wailing? Isn't that what you do?'

'What?'

'Jewish people? Don't they—'

'No. I'm not going to be howling and wailing.'

'Good. Can't be doing with howling and wailing this time in the morning.'

'No.'

They both stared out at the pale, misty sky–like a great blanket, the lough and the mountains laid out carelessly upon it, like yesterday's clothes for the morning.

'I remember when my father died,' said Ted. 'First dead body I ever saw. I was–what?–fifteen, I suppose, just left school. My father was working with this fella, Roy, a builder. My father was like a builder's mate–you know what that is?'

Israel nodded.

'Well, he used to take me along with him sometimes, give him a hand, like. It was a house up in east Belfast. I was downstairs, fetching up some bonding. And I heard this thud upstairs, you know.' Ted's voice grew thicker and slower as he spoke. 'I thought at first it was a bag of Carlite Finish. But I went up there, calling out for my da, and there was no reply, and I went into the room, and I was looking at the wall, at the first coat of bonding, which was setting, and I couldn't see him.' Ted cleared his throat. 'He was on the floor. His face was completely white. White with dust–you know, the bonding. I didn't know what to do. You don't. Fifteen.'

'That's terrible.'

'Yeah. And d'you know what I can remember most clearly? The bonding on the wall, which was all scarred, like rivers, or like veins. I can still see it, exactly what it was like. And that was–what?–best part of forty years ago.'

'That's awful.'

'Yeah. Well. You never forget.' Ted nodded behind him. 'I'm not the best person to talk to, probably, when someone's died. But I'll tell you what I do know. You see all those?'

'What?'

'The books.'

'Yep.'

'They'll be no good to you at all, I'm afraid. You can't learn how to grieve from a book. Like you can't learn to deliver a puppy from a book. You just have to do it. That's the only way you learn, in the end. For better or for worse. You did a good job yesterday.'