The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery

by Ian Sansom

  He was not only a misfit. He was an eating-disordered misfit.

  As he was musing on his profound, increasing, aging misfitedness, a young woman had come up the steps into the library. Israel glanced up. She looked like she was in her midteens, although it was difficult to tell, because she had long, blonde hair hanging down over her face, big mascaraed eyelashes, and a black beanie hat pulled down tight over her head. Israel gave her a second glance: if she was indeed in her midteens, she should probably have been at school. They had this problem all the time, children bunking off school and skulking around the library. They called it “mitching off,” the children. “Aye, I’m mitching off, what are ye going to do about it,” they would retort to Israel’s polite suggestion that they return to school. He always felt vaguely responsible for truants, in the same way he felt vaguely responsible for the future of the rainforests, and global warming, and the war on terror. He felt bad, ineffectively bad, ruminatively bad. He felt bad but could do absolutely nothing about it. He wasn’t a politician, or a policeman, or a teacher, he was just a librarian, and, alas, librarians aren’t able to save the world, or even to act in loco parentis. He was powerless. In the end Israel’s only real responsibility was toward the books, rather than the readers. There wasn’t really much he could do for readers. The books he could cope with. The great thing about books is that they don’t talk back—unlike the teenagers, and the Mrs. Hammonds and Hughie Boyds and Mrs. Onionses of this world. Israel absolutely dreaded teenagers coming on board the mobile library, more even than he dreaded reading to the children of Tumdrum Primary, or even dealing with Mrs. Onions. Children are bad enough—children are rude, selfish, greedy, and unthinking individuals who are unable to distinguish between their own selfish wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. And adults are children with money, alcohol, and power. But that in-between stage, the teenage, is even worse, the interim between childhood and adulthood. In the interim between raging, selfish, impotent childhood and raging, impotent, insignificant adulthood you have adolescence, which is childhood with hormones. He hated Tumdrum’s teens.

  The girl was wearing a short black skirt, and thick black tights, and heavy black boots, and a long black sweater, and she carried over her shoulder a black bag covered all over in black plastic spikes. It was a bag that looked as though it might have been useful as a cat scratcher, or as a kind of orthopedic aid for people with lower back problems caused by bad posture from sitting staring at a computer all day playing multiuser dimension games.

  She looked like trouble. She looked like a Goth. He hated Goths.

  “I don’t like the Goths,” he’d mentioned to Ted one day.

  “Why not?” said Ted.

  “I don’t know. They look like they’re in the Addams Family.”

  “That’s the idea, isn’t it?” said Ted.

  “Yes, but it’s…weird.”

  “Weird!” said Ted. “Weird?”

  “Yes, weird.”

  “Aye, and ye’d know weird, right enough.”

  “Yes. I would.”

  “Aye, ye see, that’s just like ye—you’re a terrible hypocrite, so you are.”

  “I am not.”

  “Course you are. You’re all for this political correctness, and then ye’re after saying ye don’t like the Goths.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Ach, ye’re a sickener, so you are.”

  “They come in wearing trench coats and…”

  “What’s wrong with trench coats?” said Ted. “You don’t like people wearing trench coats?”

  “No. It’s just…People wearing long black coats and…”

  “Who are those people in Israel?” said Ted.

  “Jews?”

  “Yes, them. The ones in the long black coats and the hats.”

  “That’s different. That’s religion.”

  “Well, it’s the same thing for the young ones here.”

  “It’s not a religion.”

  “It is to them.”

  “Anyway, Ted. I do not like the Goths coming on the library and smoking. And we’re not meant to be issuing them with X-rated DVDs and…”

  “It’ll do them no harm, sure. And at least if they’re on the van they’re not out cloddin’ stones.”

  “Clodding?”

  “Throwing stones, ye eejit.”

  “Right.”

  “Not a jot of harm in ’em.”

  “How do you know there’s not a jot of harm in them?”

  “I just know,” said Ted. “When you’ve known people as long as I have, you just know.”

  “Well, when the Goths go on the rampage and…”

  “Ach, Israel, will ye lighten up for just one minute, will ye? It’s like listening to an auld man, so it is.”

  Israel peered at the girl Goth over his book—Infinite Jest. She did look familiar, the Goth, but then all Goths looked the same to him: pale faces, dark clothes, like priests or Pierrots or members of Parisian mime troupes. The only discernible difference between all of Tumdrum’s Goths seemed to be in size: there were fat ones and thin ones, but nothing in between. There didn’t seem to be any such thing as a mediumsize Goth: Gothicism seemed to be a minimal and a maximal kind of a teenage subculture.

  “There are no medium Goths,” he remarked idly to Ted one day.

  “A medium Goth is called an emo,” said Ted. “Keep up, ye eejit.”

  Ted of course had no problem with Tumdrum’s Goths. Or the emos. Because of course Ted had no problem with anyone: Goths, emos, drunks, loonies, children, Mrs. Onions, oldage pensioners. As part-time driver of the mobile library, and proprietor-driver of Ted’s Cabs (“If You Want to Get There, Call the Bear”), Ted knew everyone in town by name, and mostly from birth. He certainly knew all of Tumdrum’s Goths from when they were mewling and puking in the children’s book trough, and so was able to handle them with his usual aplomb, which mostly meant slagging, mocking, and teasing them, but also allowing them to smoke on board the library when it was raining. Ted called the Goths the Whigmaleeries, or the Wee Yins.

  “And what are Whigmaleeries when they’re at home?” asked Israel.

  “They’re Wee Yins,” said Ted.

  So that had cleared that up.

  The young female Goth hovered nervously around the fiction shelves for a few moments, glancing over her black-sweatered shoulder.

  “Good morning, madam,” said Israel, breaking the Gothic silence. “How can I possibly help you?” He found sometimes that if he pretended to be positive and helpful it made him feel positive and helpful, for a brief moment at least. Were all positive and helpful people just pretending? “Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps?”

  “What?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe?” he said. “Master of the macabre.”

  The girl looked blankly at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was just…You know. I like to guess sometimes which books people are going to borrow, just from the way they…You know…big…fat person, probably going to borrow a…diet book. Child, probably going to borrow…a children’s book…And a weird-looking person is probably going to…Anyway.”

  Israel looked at the young woman’s unsmiling face. Either that was very heavy makeup and eyeliner she was wearing, or she had a very pale complexion and hadn’t slept for weeks.

  “I’m looking for something…” said the young woman. She looked around again, over her shoulder, and lowered her voice. “From the Unshelved.”

  “Ah,” said Israel, lowering his voice conspiratorially also. “Of course. The Unshelved.”

  “Yes.”

  Israel winked at her and reached down under the issue desk.

  The Unshelved was an unofficial category of books that the library service—under considerable pressure from representatives from churches, and so-called community groups and local political parties—had agreed not to display on open shelves in the mobile library. The arrangement had been made long before Israel’s time in Tumdrum, but apparently,
unbelievably, it had been agreed that because of the unique status of the mobile library—its stock being so small, and its serving such diverse communities—certain books would be kept under the issue desk, duly catalogued and available for loan but unseen by the young, the impressionable, and the mentally infirm who thronged the van’s potentially virulent, morally infecting eight foot by three foot browsing area. Books in the Unshelved category included perennial favorites such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, A Clockwork Orange, Nineteen Eighty-four, and American Psycho, and one or two racier titles such as Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and The Hite Report. During quieter moments in isolated lay-bys Israel had been known to have an occasional glance at the latter titles. There was, it seemed, no limit to human ingenuity and imagination. He’d also spent one entire uneventful afternoon on the van counting the various offensive words in Lady Chatterley. Thirty fucks or fuckings, fourteen cunts, thirteen balls, six each of shit and arse, four cocks, and three pisses. Which was quite a lot, really, when you thought about it.

  Not that he agreed with censorship. Not at all. On the contrary. He did not agree with the Unshelved, on principle. As a north London Jewish vegetarian liberal freethinker—someone who would most certainly be reading the Guardian on a daily basis, if the Guardian were available on a daily basis in Tumdrum—Israel saw no problem with open access to all available books and to all of the rich and peculiar outpourings of the human mind. Once you were about eleven, frankly, in Israel’s opinion, you could and should be reading whatever was out there. You might not be able to drink alcohol or marry or drive a car, but surely you should be allowed to read Under the Volcano and Madame Bovary and Crash? How else were you going to learn? Personally, Israel had gone through all of William Burroughs and D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer and Lolita in his local library back home in north London in his early teens, looking for the dirty bits, which usually someone else had already found and had marked on your behalf, and it hadn’t done him any harm at all. Or not much.

  The only books in the library that Israel had any real doubts about were in fact the young adult readers, which were proudly and openly displayed on the mobile on the “Teen Fiction” shelves, in their garish jackets with their subliterate jacket blurbs. Israel avoided uplifting, joyous, life-affirming reads as much as the next man—who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?—but even he found some of the young adult material depressing and creepy. In Israel’s experience as a librarian most young teenagers these days seemed to be reading deeply disturbing, adult-sanctioned psychosexual fantasies about zombies and vampires. This probably tells you something very profound about where we are as a society, but Israel would have needed the Guardian, or perhaps the Daily Telegraph, to remind him exactly what.

  The Goth waited patiently while Israel scooped up the dozen or so books from the shelf under the desk and placed them on the table. It was always a slightly awkward moment, the displaying of the great Unshelved—you never knew if the borrower really was looking for George Orwell, or was really angling for Madonna’s Sex. Israel suspected that Nineteen Eighty-four was borrowed more times out of embarrassment than out of choice. He always preferred to absent himself while the borrower…browsed.

  “I’ll, er…just tidy a few books here,” he said.

  When the young woman’s nervous shuffling made it clear that she had made her decision, Israel swiftly and discretely issued the books with half-closed eyes.

  “Thank you, then. Enjoy your reading!”

  Philip Roth. American Pastoral: the young woman would not be disappointed.

  Israel glanced at his watch.

  Eleven o’clock.

  Which in a town like Tumdrum, wherever you were, meant only one thing.

  Zelda’s.

  He called Gloria, again, quickly.

  No reply.

  3

  Pearce Pyper was wearing an oatmeal sweater—or at least a woolen sweater of an oatmeal color—and a pair of bright red corduroy paint-splattered plus fours, and worn brown leather sandals, and knee-length papal yellow socks, and a black beret. Two of his dogs, the mongrels, Picasso and Matisse, in their matching blue paisley neckerchiefs, sat by him, eyes closed, tongues lolling, like a couple of huskies exhausted from some long artistic hike. Pearce had a greasy-looking cap down at his feet, a violin in one hand, and a straggly bow in the other. He had recently grown a thin, grizzled beard, and he wasn’t looking at all well. He was standing like a wind-cracked Lear on the stormy heath, except he was in Tumdrum, standing outside Zelda’s Café, staring into the distance, a rheumy, faraway look in his eyes, as if he’d suddenly caught sight of his own destiny and it wasn’t looking good.

  “Pearce! How are you?” said Israel as he and Ted approached the door.

  “Israel, Israel!” said Pearce, his voice thin but still forceful, the gingery voice of George Bernard Shaw on an old wax cylinder. “How lovely are the…” He started coughing. “Feet of thee…”

  “Er…?”

  “Israel…?” asked Pearce.

  “Armstrong,” said Israel generously. “Israel Armstrong.”

  “Ah!” Pearce pantomime-smacked his forehead. “Of course!”

  “The librarian?” offered Israel.

  “Yes. Yes. Have you lost weight?”

  “Maybe a little bit.”

  “And the beard?”

  “Yes.”

  “El Barbaro,” said Pearce. “Had dinner once with Castro. With my second wife. Pork. Relentless talker.”

  “Aye, that’s the two of yous then,” said Ted.

  “Sshh,” said Israel.

  “Is he dead?” asked Pearce.

  “Fidel Castro?” said Israel. “No, Pearce, I think he’s still going strong.”

  “I heard he’d died,” said Pearce.

  “No, that was maybe Che Guevara.”

  “Oh. Really. But how are you…?” asked Pearce.

  “Israel.”

  “Israel, yes.”

  “Good, thanks, yes…Erm, Pearce?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “You’re playing the violin?”

  “Viola, Israel. Viola. You can tell the difference, surely? Oxford-educated man like yourself.”

  “Oxford Brookes,” said Ted, taking a last, deep, desperate draw on his cigarette before going into the cafe. “Wasn’t it? The polytechnic.”

  “Ex-polytechnic,” said Israel. “Thank you, Ted. Ex.”

  “Aye,” said Ted, coughing.

  “Oxford,” said Pearce, reverently, as though describing a lover. “Much darker tone.”

  “Sorry?” said Israel. “You’ve lost me. Oxford has a much darker tone than…?”

  “The viola,” said Pearce. “Compared to the violin. Much darker. Voice of the soul. C. G. D. A.” Pearce plucked at the strings of the instrument in his hand. “Prelude to the Bach cello suites, arrangement by an old friend of mine. My first wife—beautiful soprano voice. Igor wrote something for her mother…”

  “Erm.” Israel hesitated. Pearce had recently been showing signs of memory loss and confusion. He’d been found as far away as Belfast, on his bicycle, claiming that he was riding in the peloton in the Tour de France. “You know you’re outside Zelda’s, playing your violin?” said Israel.

  “Viola,” said Pearce. “I’m collecting money for the Green Party. Forthcoming elections. Need every penny.”

  “You’re busking,” said Israel.

  “That’s illegal,” said Ted, spitting on the pavement.

  “Fund-raising,” said Pearce. “Spare a few coppers, guv’nor?”

  “Not likely,” said Ted.

  “I didn’t know you were a Green Party supporter,” said Israel.

  “Isn’t everybody these days?” said Pearce, breaking into another wracking coughing fit, which doubled him over, his slight frame shaking as he stood himself up straight again.

  “No,” said Ted.

  “Sssh,” said Israel, staring hard at Ted. “Are you all right, Pearce?�
��

  “Yes,” coughed Pearce. “Fine.”

  “Good,” he said to Pearce. “Good for you.”

  “It’s not good for me,” said Pearce. “Not at all. That’s not the point of it, my dear. It’s good for the planet.”

  “Yes,” said Israel, soothingly. “I meant—”

  “I’ve been planting trees up at the house, you know, carbon offsetting. About a thousand now, I think.”

  “A thousand trees?”

  “Indeed.”

  “That’s a lot of trees,” said Israel.

  “Hardly,” said Pearce. “You can never have enough trees.”

  “No,” agreed Israel. “They don’t grow on…trees.”

  “Sorry?”

  “They don’t—” began Israel.

  “Just ignore him,” said Ted. “And he shuts up in the end.”

  “Handbook of the soul,” said Pearce. “A tree.”

  “Is it?” said Israel.

  “Of course.”

  “Right. Yes. Probably it is.”

  “Irish oak. Native species. Sorbus aucuparia. Sorbus hibernica…I had a friend who grew hurley ash for profit, you know. Nice little business.”

  “Aye, all right,” said Ted. “Let’s get in here for our coffee, Israel, shall we?”

  “Yeah, sure. Pearce, do you want a cup of tea or anything to keep you warm? We’re just going in to Zelda’s here—”

  “No, thanks,” said Pearce. “No time for tea. Work to be done. Planet and what have you…Raging against the…” He hawked up some phlegm and spat it into a polka-dot handkerchief. “Dying of the light.”

  “OK. Good to see you,” said Israel. “Look after yourself, OK?”

  “Aye, you enjoy yourself there,” said Ted.