The case of the missing books (3 page)

The mobile library is to the library profession what, say, chiropody is to medicine, or indoor carpet bowls to professional sport.

'No,' repeated Israel.

'I have some Tayto cheese and onion, if you'd prefer?' said Linda Wei, who was busy licking her palms.

'No. I am not going to drive a mobile library,' said Israel.

'No, no, no!' said Linda, snapping back to attention. 'Ach. Of course not. Silly! We'll give you a driver for that. To show you the ropes. At least at first.'

'No thanks.' Israel got up to leave. 'I'm not going to be a mobile librarian.'

'Outreach Support Officer,' corrected Linda Wei.

'Sorry?'

'We don't call them mobile librarians any more. You'd be an Outreach Support Officer.'

'Oh.'

'We're hoping to offer people assistance with IT, and digital photography, surfing the net, family history, that sort of thing.'

'And books?'

'Books?'

'In the mobile library?'

'Oh, books,' said Linda dismissively, 'there'd be plenty of them as well of course, lots and lots of books. Everything, we're going to have.'

'In a mobile library?'

'We'll squeeze it all in, sure: it's just a question of storage. It's like with your kitchen corner cupboards: it's amazing what you can get in a small space. I'm just after having my kitchen done. Honestly, it's like the Tardis.'

'Right, well,' said Israel, making towards the door. 'That's all very interesting, and good luck to you, but I'm really not going to be an Outreach Support Officer on a mobile library, sorry.'

'Mobile learning centre!' corrected Linda.

'Right. Whatever it is you want to call it. I'm not going to be running a mobile library, thank you. I was employed to run a branch library. So, thanks and what have you. And, er.' There was no nice way of saying this. 'Goodbye.'

'No!' said Linda, as Israel was about to open the door. 'No. No you don't!'

Israel stopped.

'Good, now. Ahem. Don't go. Sit down. Come on. Come on! Sit!'

Israel, who was too tired to do otherwise, did as he was told.

'Good. Now. Now. I think if you check your'–Linda coughed, crisps caught in her throat–'your contract, you will find that your role is to fulfil all the duties as required by the Department of Entertainment, Leisure and Community Services.'

She handed him a copy of his contract and tapped it with a Biro. The relevant passage had already been circled. Israel read it once. Then twice. He attempted to think of all the ways the words could be interpreted and reinterpreted. But the contract was tight. She was right.

'Well,' he said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm really not interested. I'm going to have to resign from the position before I've begun.'

'Ah. Ergh. Excuse me!' Linda took a quick swig of Coke and motioned for Israel to pat her on the back, which he did, leaning across the desk, and which seemed to do the trick. 'Ah, that's better,' she said. 'Sorry. Crisp.'

'Right.'

'What were you saying?'

'I'm not taking the job.'

'Well, you have, strictly speaking, already taken the job.'

'Yes. But I resign.'

'Ah. You can't.'

'I can.'

'You can't.'

'I can,' said Israel slowly. 'And I do. I am. Right now. I resign. Now. This minute.'

Filled with sudden overwhelming despair and rage and a desire to get out, and with no feasible or logical means of expressing his discontent in this small beige office, Israel snatched up Linda's Biro, and reached for his contract, on which he began to write the words, in capitals, 'I RES,' but before he got to the 'I' Linda had snatched the pen back from his hand.

'Thank.
You
.'

She stared at Israel.

He stared back.

Now he might have had a headache and he might have had a long journey, but you didn't argue with Israel Armstrong: he had an Irish father and a Jewish mother, and three sisters, and had therefore a long childhood of often heated debate and disputation behind him, plus another three years of rigorous training in the discipline of English and American Studies at one of the best former polytechnics turned universities in the country. His body was round but his mind was honed: he could carry his weight.

But nor did you argue with Linda Wei: she was a Northern Irish Chinese Catholic with a secure job at the council.

It was a stand-off.

'Now. Calm down,' said Linda, seizing the initiative. 'Let's not get carried away. I clearly can't accept your resignation myself, Mr Armstrong, in the here and now. There are all sorts of procedures.'

'Whatever. But I'm not doing the job. I'm just going to leave.'

'Well, obviously, if that's your decision…But it would be
such
a shame. I don't know what I would tell everyone: they'll be
so
disappointed. People were
so
looking forward to meeting you and getting to know their new librarian.'

'I'm sure.'

'They'll be just devastated. When I think of them,' said Linda, with a slight pause, and leaning her head meditatively, staring into her almost empty tub of Pringles, 'all those old ladies not able to get out any books, and the wee childer unable to do their homework, their thirst and hunger for knowledge unquenched and unsatisfied, their longing for the green pastures of learning and Internet surfing denied and—'

'Yes, all right, I get the picture,' said Israel.

'Desperate, desperate altogether.'

'Yes, that's very sad, I agree, but—'

'And dear knows it could be months by the time we re-advertise and fill the post, by which time we may have had to reallocate resources once again, which might mean'–and here Linda took a longer pause, for dramatic effect, and another quick swig of Coke–'there wouldn't be any library service at all.'

'None at all?'

'Nope. None. At all.' She made a little moue with her mouth, and popped in a crisp. 'Which would be desperate. For everyone, wouldn't it?' She picked up the tub of Pringles at this point, turned it upside down and picked at the last few crumbs in her upturned palm. 'No library. At all. And all,' she said, between munches. 'Because.'

Munch.

'Of.'

Munch.

'You.'

Israel had absolutely no intention of giving in to this woman's attempt at emotional blackmail, and he had half a mind to get back on the bus, and the train, and the ferry, and the coach, and then finally the Underground back home to lovely, leafy north London.

Except that…well, except that, the thing was, Israel Armstrong hadn't actually worked
as a librarian
for some time now, not since the end of his short-term contract working in a little library at a City law firm, a job that his girlfriend Gloria, who was an actual lawyer, had managed to wangle for him.

Jobs for graduate librarians are not that easy to come by–a lot of people don't realise that–and Israel's career so far had been a little…patchy.

Which Linda Wei, being in possession of his CV, must have known: she would certainly have known, for example, that Israel had graduated from Oxford Brookes University with only a 2:2 in English and American Studies, a mark that did not reflect his abilities, according to his lecturers and his mother, and she would have known also that after six months on a graduate librarianship course he'd drifted from short-term contract to short-term contract and that in fact the longest he'd worked anywhere had been in a discount bookshop in the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock, off the M25, in Essex, not the kind of a job that a successful career librarian tends to take, or to stick at for any length of time, and that he'd been there for three years, two months and five days, until last Friday, in fact, when he'd grandly shaken hands with everyone in the shop, said goodbye, and gone home to pack to come to Tumdrum, off on his great Irish adventure.

So as she sat staring him down and psyching him out in her tatty beige office gobbling crisps and swigging Coke, Linda Wei, Deputy Head of Entertainment, Leisure and Community Services, may well have surmised that Israel needed this job.

She may well have surmised, indeed, that Israel Joseph Armstrong–a great-grandson of the rabbi of Brasov, in Romania, no less, whose children and grandchildren had survived pogroms and concentration camps and had gone on to make successful lives for themselves throughout the capital cities and great trade centres of Europe and in America, and in Turkey, and indeed in Israel itself, as doctors, and dentists, and chemists, and as Assistant, Associate, Tenure-Track and Full Professors in the Humanities and in the Sciences–that he–a scion also of the mighty Armstrong clan, a breed of hard-headed, big-handed farmers originally out of County Dublin and Dublin's fair city, but also these days to be found in New Haven, Connecticut, and Toronto, Canada, and London, England, and anywhere else where there's a phonebook and where people need tax consultants, and jobbing builders, and publicans, and journalists–that Israel–this proud, dextrous, determined, committed reader, and a beneficiary of all that a childhood in London could offer–was absolutely desperate.

And if she had surmised such, she was right.

Israel really needed this job. He needed it to get away from his mother, who never let him forget that he was a genius in waiting, if only he could just settle on the thing he was going to be a genius at: working for the UN, probably, after having retrained as a doctor or a lawyer, or both, and married an all-singing, all-dancing, fertile, home-cooking and just slightly less well-qualified doctor or lawyer willing to drop everything to follow him into troubled yet not actually dangerous UN-peacekeeping-type situations. He also needed the job to prove to his girlfriend Gloria that he wasn't just a scruffy, overweight slacker who was sponging off her in order to be able to continue to afford to buy expensive imported American hardback fiction. And he needed it to prove to his old dead dad that he was proud to be Irish, or at least half Irish, and even though Tumdrum, County Antrim, was a long way away from his dad's home town of Dublin, County Dublin ('So good they named it twice,' his dad used to joke), it was the same island, after all, and a homecoming of sorts. Above all, he needed this job to prove to himself that he wasn't going to have to spend the rest of his life behind the till, ringing up
Da Vinci Codes
and Schott's
Miscellanies
at a discount bookshop in the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock.

So Israel was resolved. There was no way he was staying.

'No,' he told Linda Wei. 'I'm sorry.'

'You wouldn't even consider giving it a go?'

'Nope.'

'Just a wee go?' asked Linda, making a face.

'No.'

'A little, little go?' she pleaded.

'No.'

'Not even for a couple of months or so, just to get things up and running?'

'No.'

'Six weeks?'

'No.'

'A month, and see how you like it?' She was virtually begging now. 'Go on.'

'No.'

'Oh, go on. Go on. Go on. A couple of weeks, till Christmas just?'

'No. No. No.'

'Reduced hours? Renegotiated salary?'

'No.'

'And we'll fly you home at the end of it?'

Well.

That was it, that was the fatal Cleopatra, that was the clincher for Israel, who at this point was not merely notionally desperate, not desperate merely in the medium and the long term, but desperate also in the here and now –in the traditional sense of being cold and hungry and fed up and far from home and completely unable to face the prospect of getting back on the ferry for another eight hours and the ten-hour coach journey back to London. Linda was offering him a couple of weeks in Ireland, and then home, no disgrace, with money in his pocket, and he could at least put it on his CV, plump it up a bit, expand two weeks into two months or even two years, and start his job search over again. It was that, or back to the bargain bookshop with his tail between his legs.

'Oh, all right then,' he said, prodding his glasses grudgingly. 'But just a couple of weeks.'

This was how most of the big decisions in life got taken, in Israel's experience, and contrary to what he'd always been given to understand from his reading of the world's great literature: you needed to go to the toilet, or you were bored, or you were just tired from arguing and you couldn't think of anything else to do, and suddenly you found yourself married, or you'd signed the petition, or you'd volunteered for something you wouldn't normally consider doing even if you were paid for it, or you'd accepted a job driving a mobile library in a godforsaken corner of the north of the north of the island of Ireland.

'Oh, that's great! That's great!' exclaimed Linda, punching the air with her salty, chubby fists. 'I'm delighted, delighted, delighted. Wonderful!' She reached over her desk and shook his hand. 'It'll be like a holiday for you.'

Israel rubbed his hand on his trousers.

'Sure. And you'll be re-advertising the post?'

'Of course. Yes. Absolutely. Right away. I'm glad we've sorted that out. We've your accommodation and everything all arranged for you.'

'Right.'

'You're going to love it! You're going to be staying with George up country. It's lovely! And if you just get yourself down to Ted he'll sort you out with the mobile library—'

'Ted?'

'Ted Carson. You'll love Ted! He's going to be showing you round. He has his own wee cab company there in town. You know, you're going to love it here, Mr Armstrong. I really think you're going to fit right in.'

He was not fitting right in. In fact, on the contrary. In fact, to be honest, to be absolutely, perfectly honest–and he wouldn't have wanted to have offended anyone by saying this, particularly his long-dead father, but still, the truth hurts and sometimes it's important to speak one's mind, if only to oneself and to the familiar dead, who can take it–to be absolutely frankly,
brutally
honest, Israel had taken an immediate, huge and intense dislike both to the people and to the place of Ireland in general, to Northern Ireland in particular, and to Tumdrum, County Antrim in very particular. And he was getting to dislike it more and more all the time.