The Case of the Missing Books. Ian Sansom
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stood there, and around his corduroy turn-ups, and he really didn’t do well with dogs, Israel, he didn’t get on with dogs at all – he was a typical vegetarian – and this thing was a mangy flea-bag, and half-blind by the look of it, and scraggly and arthritic – it reminded Israel a little too much of himself, actually – and he shooed it away: ‘Go on, go! Get away!’ Then he rubbed his eyes and glanced around and behind him, to see if it was for real, this grim, godforsaken place, to see if he’d made some terrible, simple, idiotic mistake, had come to the wrong library maybe, or the wrong town, too tired after his long journey to be able to see that people were in fact flocking into some secret, fabulous library entrance, some little tunnel or nook, some rabbity-hole known only to the locals. They were not.
No one was approaching with armfuls of books or tickets in their hands: there were no sour and pear-shaped OAPs; no straggle-haired young mums at their wits’ end with smeary, miserable children dragging along for story time; no one clutching important-looking unimportant documents to be photocopied in triplicate for their solicitor or the DSS; no wrinkled, stubbly, fragrant winos; no schoolkids half-heartedly working on projects about ancient civilisations or the Second World War or the processes of human digestion. No madmen. No one. None of them. The building was empty. The car park was deserted. The library was shut.
There is a terrible poignancy about a building intended for the public that is closed to the public: it feels like an insult, a riposte to all our more generous instincts, the public polity under threat, and democracy abandoned. Back home in London, Israel had always found the sight of Brent Cross shopping centre at night depressing enough, and his girlfriend Gloria, her family’s swimming pool when it was drained in the winter, but the sight of the big red-brick library with its dark windows affected him even more deeply, in the same way that the sight of a derelict school might affect a teacher, or an empty restaurant a chef: a clear sign of the impending collapse of civilisation and the inevitable bankruptcy, a reminder never to count your chickens, or to overspend on refurbishments and cutlery. No one likes to see a shut library.
But for Israel Armstrong the sight of this shut library was more than just an omen or a mere unpleasantness. For Israel, this was personal. For chubby little Israel Armstrong, in his brown corduroy suit and his best brown shoes, all the way over from England, first time in Ireland and first time in the north, the sight of this particular shut library was an absolute disaster. This was unmitigated. For Israel, far from home and in a country not his own, this was the punch that comes out of nowhere and sends you heading for the canvas. For Israel, this particular shut library meant that he was out of a job. It also meant, as the cold December winds lashed around his legs and blew up litter all around him, that he had absolutely no idea where he was going to spend the night.
He hadn’t exactly expected a welcoming committee. He hadn’t expected the whole country, or even the whole of the north of the country, or the whole of County Antrim even to turn out with flags and banners, he hadn’t expected an all-Ireland green and orange, Guinness-sponsored celebration, but some kind of acknowledgement of his arrival would have been nice, some recognition that finally he was here, that the new Tumdrum and District librarian had arrived. But no. There was no sign of interest or excitement in Israel’s presence in the town of Tumdrum in the county of Antrim late on that cold December afternoon. He had arrived and no one cared.
So. He did the only thing he could do under the circumstances. In the face of rejection he attempted to maintain his dignity and his pride. He turned his back on them, the whole lot of them – on the library, on the dog, on the faceless, faithless people of the north of the north of Ireland – he turned his back on the big empty building, picked up his suitcase, pulled his big flapping duffle coat tighter around him, his pockets bulging neurotically with emergency paperbacks and newspapers, just in case he was ever caught short without something to read, and he sighed a sigh, and prodded his glasses boldly back, and stepped forward. And into the huge, hot, curling turd left behind by the fat, half-blind, arthritic Irish dog. Israel groaned and he cursed and he limped over to a muddy patch of grass near the library entrance and wiped his soles.
That was just his luck. That was just bloody typical.
He managed to wipe most of it off on the grass, and used the Guardian to scrape off the rest. He shrugged again and trudged down the cracked concrete disabled access ramp and through the empty car park and back down to the road.
This was definitely not supposed to happen. No. This was not it at all.
Israel Joseph Armstrong, BA (Hons), had arrived in Northern Ireland on the overnight ferry from Stranraer. It was his first experience of sea travel, and he had found he did not agree with it, or it with him.
In his rich imagination, Israel’s crossing to Ireland was a kind of pilgrimage, an act of necessity but also an act of homage, similar to the crossings made by generations of his own family who had made the reverse journey from Ireland to England, and also from Russia and from Poland, from famines and pogroms and persecution to the New World, or at least to Bethnal and then Golders Green and eventually further out to the Home Counties, and to Essex, and similar also to the fateful trip made by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood on board the Champlain in 1939, say, or Robert Louis Stevenson sailing the South Seas, or the adventures of Joseph Conrad the mariner, or the young Herman Melville, or similar, at the very least, to the adventures of Jerome K. Jerome’s eponymous three men rowing in a boat on the Thames.
He’d read far too many books, that was Israel’s trouble.
Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’d been a bookish child, right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing, who enjoyed books without his parents’ insistence, who raced through non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide-ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone.
His expectations were sky-high, and his grasp of reality was minimal.
The big white ferry that had carried Israel over to Ireland, for example, he realised sadly and too late, was not the boat of his imaginings and dreams; it was not like the Pequod, or Mark Twain’s Mississippi riverboat; it was more like…
It was more like a floating Little Chef Travelodge, actually, full of Scots and Irish and possibly Scots-Irish lorry-drivers, men profoundly pale of colour and generous of figure, men possessed of huge appetites and apparently unquenchable thirst, and Israel couldn’t understand a word they said, and they couldn’t understand him, and he couldn’t believe how much they were drinking. They were drinking gallons. Literally. Enough to sink a ship.
He’d never been a great one for the drink himself, Israel, although he wasn’t entirely averse; he found that two glasses of red wine was usually about his limit and seemed to have approximately the same effect on him as a dozen pints of super-lager on his peers and contemporaries. Any more and he was usually violently sick, as he had been on the ferry a little earlier actually, although without so much as a sip of red wine and only coffee and snacks inside him: he wasn’t sure if it was nerves or the swell, or the after-effects of the ten-hour coach journey up from London Victoria, and a couple of vegetable samosas on the way, a 10% Extra Free! pack of Doritos, two Snickers, two hard-boiled eggs and a souvenir packet of ‘Olde London’ fudge bought on impulse from a kiosk at Victoria moments before departing.
He had tried to regain his sense of balance and his composure in the ferry’s bar – the unfortunately named Sea Dogs – with a glass of Coke to settle his stomach, but by eight o’clock things were getting a little rowdy in Sea Dogs, and a little choppy, and he had no desire to add further to the mess and the confusion, so he moved on to the television room, where he had to endure a charity reality TV show in which people were forced