by Ian Sansom
“What?”
“Ouch!” said Ted.
“You OK?”
“My back. Never mind it. Yer blessings. Ye want to count them.”
“Right. All right, Ted, thank you. I’m here, all right. I don’t want to hear any more-”
“Go on, then.”
“What?”
“Count ’em.”
Israel sighed.
“Go on,” repeated Ted. “Count ’em.”
“Ted. I’m really not in the mood. I have a headache and I’m really not well.”
There was a pause of a few seconds.
“Ye counted ’em?”
“I am not counting my blessings, Ted. Thank you.”
“How many d’ye get?”
“I’m not counting blessings!”
“Aye. Because ye’re scared.”
“What? Scared of what?”
“That yer miserable life is not as blinkin’ miserable as ye like to think, ye streak of misery. I tell ye what, as long as ye’re dodging the undertaker ye’re doing OK.”
“Right. Sure.”
“Good. Are ye ready?”
“Do I look like I’m ready?”
“Count them.”
“All right. All right,” said Israel, who had learned from long experience that the only way to conclude an argument with Ted was to lose it.
Israel attempted to tot up his blessings in his mind, while Ted pulled onto the main coast road back into central Tumdrum.
“So, how many d’ye get?” said Ted.
“Two,” said Israel. He was alive, after all. And he wasn’t starving.
“Two?”
“Yes,” said Israel.
“That it?” said Ted. “Two?”
“Yes,” said Israel. “Alas.”
“Well, that’s better than one,” said Ted, “isn’t it. Sure, some people have no hands.”
“What?” said Israel, watching the grim outer-lying estates flashing by.
“No hands,” repeated Ted, sticking his own arm out the window as they approached the first of Tumdrum’s many mini-roundabouts. “Must get that indicator fixed.”
“Some people have no hands?” said Israel.
“That’s right. I saw a program on the television the other week, about a fella with no legs.”
“No legs?”
“Aye. Makes ye think, doesn’t it? Come back to me when you’re in that sort of a position and start complainin’ and I might start listening to ye.”
“Right, OK. When I’ve lost my legs in some horrific-”
“Or yer arms.”
“Or my arms.”
“Aye. Get back to me then with yer troubles.”
“I will, Ted, most certainly get back to you when I have lost either my arms or my legs-”
“Or both.”
“Both.”
“And ye might get some sympathy then. In the meantime,” continued Ted, “turn the peat.”
“What?”
“It’s a saying.”
“Right.”
“And get a haircut and a shave as well while ye’re at it-that’ll cheer you up.”
“I don’t need cheering up, Ted.”
“You need a haircut and a shave, but.”
“All right, thank you. Let’s drop this whole conversation now, can we?”
“Well, I promised yer mother I’d look out for ye, and I don’t intend lettin’ her down.”
“I don’t need you keeping an eye on me, Ted, thank you.”
“Well, believe me, it’s the last thing I want to do either, but I told your mother I would, and I will. She’s a good woman, yer mother.”
“She doesn’t need to worry about me.”
“Of course she needs to worry about ye,” said Ted. “That’s what mothers are supposed to do.”
“Right.”
“You know what they say.”
“No. What?”
“You always meet your mother when you’re young.”
“Right,” said Israel. “Well, thank you, Martin Buber. Illuminating as ever.”
They were approaching the square, the downtown of Tumdrum.
“Ye probably just need a new challenge,” continued Ted.
“Probably,” agreed Israel.
“A hobby,” said Ted, “is what you need.”
“A hobby?”
“Aye. A choir or something.”
“A choir?”
“Or line dancing.”
“Line dancing?”
“Aye, or a jigsaw even.”
“A jigsaw?”
“Or walk a good brisk mile every morning. That’d cure you.”
“A jigsaw?” repeated Israel.
“Yes.”
“And a good brisk walk.”
“Aye.”
“I’m sure that’d do the trick, Ted. But can we talk about something else now, please?”
“It wasn’t me got us started on the subject of yer hartship,” said Ted.
“Anyway,” said Israel.
They pulled off the main road.
“Ye all ready for the morning, then?” said Ted.
“Oh yes,” said Israel, who wasn’t ready at all. He’d spent the best part of two weeks in bed reading David Foster Wallace, and he’d lost all track of time, place, sense, meaning, or himself. “What day is it? Where are we going?”
“It’s Friday. All day. Morning in the lay-by. And then we’re off to the school.”
“Oh god. No.”
“No language, thank ye.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Israel.
“Shut up,” said Ted, leaning over and slapping Israel across the back of his head. “I’ll not tell ye again.”
Israel and Ted were back in business.
2
Tumdrum. Tumdrum. Tumdrum was not the back of beyond. No.
It was much, much farther.
No. Farther.
A little bit farther.
There. That’s about right.
Tumdrum, the armpit of Antrim, on the north of the north coast of the north of Northern Ireland, a place where the sky was always the color of a pair of very old stone-washed jeans, beaten and rinsed, and where the only pub, the First and Last, was a harbinger of Armageddon, and where The Bible Shop was the bookshop, where the replacement of what little remained of Edwardian and Victorian historic architecture with stunning, high-spec turnkey apartments was almost complete, and where a trip to Billy Kelly’s edge-of-town Car and Van Superstore (“Please Pull In to View Our Massive Stock with No Obligation”) represented a day out, and where scones-delicious, admittedly, served warm, buttered, and spread with jam-were the height of culinary sophistication at Zelda’s Café, the town’s “Internet Hot Spot: The First and Still the Best.”
And here, of all places, was Israel Armstrong, back at his post in this godforsaken Nowheresville, sitting on the mobile library, parked up in a lay-by, doing nothing but issuing true crime books about local thugs, and thinly fictionalized books about local thugs, and books by local thugs, and memoirs by the wives of local thugs, while enjoying all of the usual banter and craic with his regular readers. Such as Mr. McCully.
“I’m looking for the De Saurus.”
“Sorry?”
“The DE SAURUS.”
“Right. And it’s a foreign author?”
“A foreign author?”
“De Saurus. Like the Marquis de Sade?”
“The what?”
“Or de Maupassant?”
“Are ye having me on?”
“No. No.”
“Are ye having a wee laugh?”
“No. Not at all. I’m trying to help.”
“Good. So, it’s the book with the words in it.”
“Well, sir, I think you’ll find that…most books have words in…”
“Don’t ye be patronizing me now, ye wee skite, I know exactly what your game is.”
“I can assure you, Mr. McCully, that the last thing I would do would be to patroni
ze you.”
It was like he’d never been away.
“Come on then. The De Saurus. The book with all the words in it.”
“The book with all the words in it,” repeated Israel. “The…Book…with…All…the…Words…in…It.”
“Aye! THE DE SAURUS!”
“Ah, right! Yes! Roget’s Thesaurus?”
“No. That’s not it.”
“I think it might be, actually. If you want to have a look here…”
“No.”
“The classic book of synonyms and antonyms?”
“No! Cymbals and antimals?”
“I think it’s the thesaurus.”
“It is not. The De Saurus.”
“OK, well, sorry. We can’t help you with the De Saurus.”
“D’ye have any books on the foreign legion then?”
“Certainly.”
“And a guidebook to Prague for the wife?”
“Of course.”
He was harmless, really, Mr. McCully. They were all harmless: the only real harm they did was to Israel’s fragile mental and emotional health.
Like Mrs. Hammond, for example.
“I’m looking for a book.”
“Yes, Mrs. Hammond. Good. You’ve come to the-”
“It’s a true story.”
“OK.”
“About a man.”
“Good. What kind of a man?”
“It was on the telly yesterday, sure. A fella was talking about it.”
“I see. And the man was…?”
“It was the fella on the telly. The English man. With the lovely hair.”
“Right. The man who wrote the book was an English man with lovely hair? Or the man who the book is about is an English man with lovely hair?”
“Ach, no, the man with the program on the telly with the lovely hair.”
“Ah. The man with the program on the telly…who interviewed the man…? About his book…about the man…is an English man…with lovely hair?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, let’s see what we can find here.”
And Hughie Boyd.
“I was in last year, sure, and there was a book on a shelf down there, but it’s not there now.”
“Right.”
“D’ye not have it, then?”
“Erm. Whereabouts on the shelf was it exactly?”
“Just there, look. There.”
“Here?”
“No! There!”
“Ah. Oh. Right. There. Well. I’m afraid we’ve moved that book.”
“Typical.”
“Thank you, Mr. Boyd! Lovely to see you! Have a nice day!”
And George Kemp.
“D’ye have Bibles?”
“Yes, indeed, we do, Mr. Kemp. Bibles. Bibles. Let me see. A Bible, anyway. Here we are. Yes.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Erm. Well. It’s reference only, I’m afraid.”
“What do ye mean?”
“I can’t issue it to you.”
“But it’s the Bible.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You can’t stop me getting out the Bible.”
“Well, yes, I can, actually, if it’s a reference book.”
“It’s not a reference book!”
“Yes it is. It’s-”
“It’s the Word of God.”
“Yes. But I’m afraid it’s our reference copy of the Word of God. I’m afraid you can’t take it with you right now. I can get you a copy on interlibrary loan for next week.”
“That’s no good to me, is it? I want to read it now.”
“Well, you can read it here, if you want to.”
“In here? Are ye mad? I want to read it in the privacy of my own home. It’s for the purposes of private devotion.”
“Well, I’m sorry, I can’t-”
“Yer’e not a Christian, are ye?”
“Erm…”
“Ye’re not washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
“Erm…”
“You know you’re going to hell, unless you turn to Jesus.”
“Right. Good. Thank you, Mr. Kemp. Have a nice day!”
And of course Mrs. Onions’s friend Noreen.
“Now, young man, will ye choose me a book?”
“Yes, of course, Noreen. I…Just remind me, what sort of books do you like to…”
“I’ve read them all now.”
“OK. What, all the books in the library?”
“Every last one of them.”
“All the books?”
“Aye.”
“Everything?”
“Aye. I’m eighty-four, you know.”
“Yes. Well done.”
“I waited fourteen years for a knee replacement.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was crumbling away.”
“Right.”
“I’ve read all these books, you know.”
“Yes, you said.”
“All the Mills and Boons.”
“There are other books you could try, Noreen…”
“Ach, no. I don’t have time for them. I had a friend, she died while she was reading one of them other books.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’re all right-it wasn’t a library book. She bought her own books.”
“Right.”
“Her son looked after her rightly. Not like mine. I’ve not a phone call from them from week to week. I wonder, would ye be able to do me a few bits of shopping in?”
Misplaced, that was the word for it. That’s what he was, Israel. That was his problem. He was misplaced. He rightly belonged in delightful places, Israel, filled with delightful people: Ravello, for example, in the 1920s, or somewhere around Lake Como, perhaps, with people who enjoyed painting watercolors of old buildings, and who drank prosecco and grappa from small tumblers, whilst enjoying intellectually stimulating, and ever-so-slightly erotically charged conversations. His natural habitat was formal terraced gardens, swagged with wisteria, with ancient fig trees and vine-covered trellises, and shaded patios leading into light-filled villas with shutters and faded parquet flooring. Even back home in leafy north London, with access to good coffee and a reliable broadband service, that’d do. Instead, he’d somehow ended up as the mobile librarian in a town where Pat’s Manicure and Footcare (“Manicure, Polish, Acrylics, Corns, Calluses, and Verucas”) in the town square was a popular meeting place for young and old alike, and where local fishmonger Tommy Turner’s recent winning of the local chamber of commerce’s Small-to-Medium Business Personality of the Year Award was a cause for celebration (“Small-to-Medium Personality of the Year Awarded to Local Man” ran the headline in the Impartial Recorder).
Israel had always liked to think of himself as a warm, outgoing, friendly sort of an individual who could rub along with anyone. Until he came to Tumdrum, where warm, outgoing, friendly sorts of individuals who thought they could rub along with anyone but who weren’t from round here were generally considered to be pushy, uppity good-for-nothings. He was a square peg in a round hole, a fish out of water, out of step, out of time, and out of place. He was a misfit, though admittedly a slightly lighter, bearded misfit, after his two weeks in bed, contemplating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and weeping over Gloria, and the plight of the Hebrew people, and the thought of his forthcoming thirtieth birthday, which he would be celebrating, unbelievably, in Tumdrum. Alone.
He grimaced at his reflection in the windshield. He’d lost quite a bit of weight, what with pretty much surviving on wine, cider, and spoonfuls of peanut butter for the past few weeks, with only the occasional variation.
Not that he was on a diet. Not as such. Since he’d split up with Gloria he’d been losing weight at a rate of several ounces a day-the equivalent of about a bag of lean beef mince a week-and had gone down from a size thirty-six waist to a thirty-two in just a couple of months, achieving a weight and a size that he’d last seen when he was a schoolboy. H
e was using safety pins on his trousers, and had had to trim some of the vast expanses of his shirttails and use them for rags. His duffle coat flapped around him like a dirty brown toggle-tie blanket left out on the line to dry.
It wasn’t that he’d decided not to eat. He just found that he couldn’t eat; he wasn’t able to eat. It wasn’t a diet; it was more like an unofficial hunger strike: his body was refusing him. Tayto cheese and onion crisps-certainly the best and possibly the only good reason for living in Northern Ireland-tasted like ashes in his mouth. And champ-often he couldn’t manage more than a mouthful of old Mr. Devine’s creamy champ at dinner, all that potato and spring onion and good salted butter going to waste, scraped away for the pigs. Potato bread likewise. Sodas. Even the traybakes-he’d not been able to finish a traybake for weeks. At lunchtime he’d go to the Trusty Crusty and buy himself a couple of caramel squares, and a church window, a fifteen, maybe a Florentine-just the normal day’s Tumdrum home-baked snacks-but it was no go. He’d be about to tuck in, and suddenly his body seemed to just give up, seemed to say, “What’s the point?” Since splitting up with Gloria he’d changed from a coffee-guzzling, comfort-eating, vaguely troubled fat person into a graze ’n’ nibbling, wine-bibbing, deeply troubled thin person. He was hardly eating anything but felt bloated the whole time. His hunger, which had always been his friend, had seemingly deserted him. His headaches were worse than ever, and at night he was having these dreams, vivid dreams all the time-bobbing around on a life raft, scanning the horizon, no land in sight; tripping down mountainsides; wandering lost through vast deserts…abandonment.
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.