The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery (20 page)

'Yes,' said Barry.

'Good, thank you,' said Ted, releasing his grip on Barry Britton, and picking up his own money from the table. 'Next time, I'll punch your fucking teeth down the back of your fucking throat, you fucking English racist bastard.'

Barry Britton was sobbing now.

'You're crazy,' he said to Israel. 'You bastards. You're both…'

'Look,' said Israel, 'I'm really, really sorry.' He put an arm round Barry's shoulder. 'Do you want me to get you some tissue or—'

'Fuck off!' said Barry.

'Where are they?' said Ted.

'Who?' said Barry.

'The people who've stolen my van!'

'I don't know,' said Barry.

Ted went to kick him.

'Ted!' yelled Israel.

'Ongar!' said Barry. 'Somewhere near Ongar!'

'Whatter?'

'Ongar! Near Harlow!'

'You ever heard of it?' said Ted.

'No,' said Israel.

'Are you lying to me, you wee shite?'

'No!' said Barry.

'You'd better not be,' said Ted. 'Because I'll be back.'

'Ted! Leave him!' said Israel. 'Come on.'

It was then, on the way back to Israel's mum's car, that the real argument began.

'What the hell was that about?' said Israel. 'Are you completely out of your fucking mind?'

'Don't you dare use that sort of language with me!' said Ted.

'Don't you dare correct my
fucking
language! You nearly killed a bloke back there!'

'I did not nearly kill him.'

'Yes, you bloody did! You broke his fucking nose, and if I hadn't pulled you off God knows what would have happened.'

'I just don't like people calling me Paddy,' said Ted.

'Paddy! He just called you a name, that was all.'

'Yeah, but not Paddy.'

'Why not?'

'I don't like it, that's all.'

'You're a fucking grown man, Ted! You're not a kid.'

'I just don't like it.'

'Oh, grow up!' said Israel.

'No, you grow up,' said Ted.

'I'm not going to be doing this with you if you're going to be throwing your weight around,' said Israel.

'So how else are you going to do it?'

'I don't know. By our…Powers of…We just…Not by punching people!'

'I didn't hurt him,' said Ted.

'You broke his bloody nose!'

'That'll mend.'

'I'm serious, Ted. You're going to end up putting someone in hospital, or ending up in hospital yourself if you carry on like this.
And
I'll report you to the police.'

'Aye,' said Ted.

'And then how would we get the van back. Huh?'

'I don't know,' said Ted. 'But I do know we're out in the big bad world now, and I want my van back, and I will do whatever I need to do to get it back.'

'Well, all right, Arnold Schwarzenegger, I want the van back as well, but next time don't be getting carried away like that. Jesus! You're a fucking embarrassment. I've never seen anything like it…'

'Yeah? Well, mebbe ye need to get out more in the real world, and mebbe next time, ye'll keep yer mouth shut and don't be entermeddling.'

'Entermeddling?'

'Aye.'

'God! Believe me, Ted, I have no intention of entermeddling with you.'

'Good.'

'Right then.'

'Aye.'

'Oh, yes, actually, and while we're at it, you can stop entermeddling with my mother, all right?'

'What?' said Ted.

'Keep your hands off my mother,' said Israel.

'I wouldn't lay a finger on yer mother.'

'I'm serious, Ted. You mess around with my mother, and you will…have me to answer to.'

'Is that a threat?' said Ted, as Israel unlocked the car and they opened the doors to climb in.

'Yes,' said Israel hesitantly.

'Now I'm scared,' said Ted.

'Well, so you should be,' said Israel, and then, 'Aaggh!' he said. 'What's that smell? Ugh. That bloody dog!'

Muhammad sat innocently on the white leather interior.

G
loria
still
hadn't phoned. Or texted. Or indeed turned up, wearing perfume and a smile, bearing gifts and profuse apologies.

But then why should she?

She was probably away. She was busy.

And if she wasn't away? Maybe it was his fault? Maybe she was annoyed with him, staying at his mother's. But he'd not had time to go to their flat since he'd arrived, since the van had been stolen; it'd been absolute chaos, mayhem, utterly bonkers. He thought she might have understood that. But maybe she didn't.

He was confused.

He had a headache.

He rang again.

No answer.

Oh God.

Food. That was the answer. Food is always a great consolation in such circumstances, Israel had always found. He'd often turned to food in such circumstances in the past. When he and Gloria had argued in the past, for example, he'd usually find a way to slip out for a Chinese takeaway, or at least something from the corner shop—a packet of Pringles, at least: it was his version of therapy. It was always there for you, food. Everywhere, and always the same. A meal was a meal was a meal. And you couldn't say that about a therapist. Or a girlfriend.

They'd driven back to his mother's in silence, Israel and Ted, both shocked, and depressed, and irritated and annoyed by their encounter with Barry Britton. Ted said he needed time to prepare for their trip to Essex to find the van.

'What do you mean prepare?' said Israel.

'Prepare,' said Ted.

Israel imagined hunting gear and weaponry.

'We're not taking any weapons though, right?'

'Of course we're not taking any weapons, ye eejit; we're not the feckin' SAS.'

To prepare himself for going to Essex, Israel knew that he should probably have been doing yoga, napping and eating a freshly prepared salad, some steamed fish, and drinking some extract of wheatgrass, but he decided instead he'd be better off going to Grodzinski's for some cheesecake and an espresso. He rang round trying to rustle up a few old friends, managed to rustle up a couple and arranged to meet up with them to kibitz and to help him try to get his head together. Maybe they could brainstorm on what to do about the van. And Gloria. He needed help. He needed to reconnect.

He left his mum and Ted scheming in the kitchen, as usual, drinking coffee, petting the dog. He wondered what his father would have thought: his mother and Ted, sitting there. He decided not to wonder.

His mother had put up posters everywhere on lampposts in the surrounding streets, stuck them up with Sellotape and drawing pins. She'd got a clip art image of a mobile library; it looked more like an American school bus. 'Have you seen this vehicle?' the posters said. 'Reward £100.' Her mobile number. The posters were so weird—and so useless—they could have been an art installation.

The High Street looked different. Not just the street. Everything looked different. The people. Especially the people: a woman wearing a miniskirt and thigh-length suede boots, a man with his hair cut like something out of a Picasso and another man with—was that?—eye makeup. You didn't see that every day in Tumdrum. Israel walked from home in his worn-out old brogues, and his duffle coat—which was too hot, for the summer, clearly, but he had no other jacket, because all his clothes were with Gloria, in the flat—and his eyes popped, and his mind boggled: the sight of men in T-shirts with huge, pointless muscles, men who had obviously recently and consistently been to the gym, and to a hairdressing salon, and to shops that sold
new
clothes; and women too, who had obviously invested heavily in shoes, and bags and accessories; and people who had had their teeth capped, or
something
, something shiny to do with their teeth; and people who had been sleeping rough; people who looked like they had been sleeping around; people indeed of every proverbial creed and colour and race and nation. Israel felt like he was in a novel by Zadie Smith.

To steady himself he stepped for a moment inside Verdi's Stores, the Asian newsagent-cum-greengrocer's, and he was faced not only with shiny red apples, but also with watermelons, and ethnic vegetables, and sacks of peas and beans, and harissa paste, and big tubs of feta cheese, and cans of olive oil and the newspapers! Piles of newspapers in a dozen different languages. And the magazines! Every taste and impulse catered for. And cigarettes.
And
high-energy drinks. He stood staring around, in a daze, like an idiot. Mr Singh behind the counter, wearing his turban: the bright orange of the turban. And a man who came in, who was wearing a beret—an actual beret. And a woman, who looked Mexican or Spanish. And '
Shalom!
' someone was saying. And
'Arrivederci!'
And
'Adios!'
And other stuff in languages he could not understand and did not even recognise—Hindi? Czech? Geordie? It was too much. He had to get some fresh air. He had to walk out.

And out on the street, at a bus stop, a group of black teenage girls were talking together, the sheer uninhibited noise of them, rising up out of them, bold as brass and twice as shiny, the sound of the city. One of the women was doubling back, laughing a laugh that seemed to come from deep down inside her, almost from underground, and which made its way up through vast echoing chambers, a booming laugh, like organ pipes with all the stops pulled out; this was a laugh of a kind that simply did not exist in Tumdrum; it was a laugh that could not arise there; it would have to have stayed underground; it would have remained a distant rumble, or a polite tune on a backroom harmonium. And then a car going past with its radio on, playing some kind of music—bhangra? Bhangra! The sheer noise of the traffic. Impossible to distinguish between all the noises or to make sense of the sights. Past the hairdresser's—all that grooming!—and the nail bar next door, with false nails like miniature pelts or butterfly wings displayed in the window. And the bookshop—the bookshop where he had first gone to buy
Just William
books as a boy, and then the Bellows, and the Malamuds, and the Philip Roths, and he could see his reflection in the window of this shop, a shop packed full of shiny, new, good-looking books, books that you might actually want to spend money on—
non-library
books—and he could see his face in the window,
his
shop window, his wide, long nose, and somewhere behind his glasses, that was him.

And he realised—or rather, half-realised, or he felt, he
intuited
—that it was as if he were observing all this for the first time, that he was enjoying it as someone who was not
of
it. He realised—half-realised—that he had exchanged his life in London for a life somewhere else, somewhere he did not belong, and so without meaning to, without even noticing it was happening, he had become doubly foreign: he had lost his place and failed to find another. He was a stranger even unto himself. The streets were no longer his home; they were for him now merely a tableau, something for him to observe, and to consume, and all these people, all these people with marvellous teeth, and extraordinary hairstyles, and the men in their berets and turbans, and the women in their fastidiously short dresses and skirts, they weren't real to him anymore. They were a show.

And he felt insulted, as though the place had tricked him or let him down, had turned its back on him. And so he hurried on to meet his friends at the café.

Which was no longer there.

Grodzinki's, which had been a fixture on the street for goodness only knows how long, had disappeared completely, and in its place was the inevitable brand-spanking-new Starbucks. The jumbly, intricate interior of the old Grodzinki's had been completely gutted and stripped and made over into the soft-edged comfy veneers of corporate creams and browns. There were none of the old posters, no nooks and no crannies, no mirrors; Grodzinski's had been full of mirrors. You could sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's and watch yourself sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's, watching yourself sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's, ad infinitum. It was a flaneurs' paradise. Israel had grown up there.

But now—what was it now? What was it supposed to be? What did it mean? In Grodzinki's you could have imagined Carson McCullers and Karl Kraus and Frank O'Hara sitting down and enjoying some strudel together, and espresso in pure white espresso cups, but here, now, in Starbucks, the best you could imagine was Elton John getting together with the man with ginger hair out of Simply Red for a sunrise muffin and a skimmed milk latte in a stupid fat mug with a logo.

The smell of Grodzinski's—the smell of long-seated men and women of all ages, people with strong opinions and good humour—had been replaced by the smell of young people, of deodorant and of frothed milk. When you entered Grodzinski's, Mr Grodzinski would catch your eye—Mr Grodzinski, the son of the original Mr Grodzinski—and indicate to you with a nod of his brilliantined head where he expected you to sit, which table, or which booth, and then someone in a white shirt and black trousers, male or female—and often it was difficult to tell the difference, because Mr Jacobs employed a lot of little, hunched, elderly, wrinkled Lithuanians: 'So many little Litvaks!' Israel's mother would complain—would bustle over to take your order. Now you could sit anywhere, and serve yourself, but why would you bother? The place was absolutely sickening; the place was a joke. He was never going to taste Grodzinski's coffee again, coffee so strong and so sweet and so thick it was like Turkish coffee, only better, because it was Grodzinski's.

The boys were already there, drinking coffee from the big heavy mugs with the logos on them, foam clinging to their lips, Scylla and Charybdis.

'Israel Armstrong!' said Ben.

'The wanderer returns!' said Danny.

'Hi!' said Israel. 'Danny. Ben. How are things?' Danny attempted to engage Israel in an embarrassing high five, fist-knocking kind of a thing, and Ben shook his hand.

'Good.'

'You're looking well, gentlemen,' said Israel.

'You too,' said Ben.