The Case of the Missing Books

2

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 to compete for the chance to have their houses redecorated by their favourite celebrities by entering a lookalike karaoke competition.

Trying to sleep upright in a chair, next to men twice his not inconsiderable size dribbling burger juice, with Sky TV at full volume: this was not how his new life and new career in Ireland were supposed to begin. His new life in Ireland was supposed to be overflowing with blarney and craic. He was supposed to be excited and ready, trembling on the verge of a great adventure.

But instead Israel was just trembling on the verge of being sick again, and the journey had given him a headache, a terrible, terrible headache; he was a martyr to his headaches, Israel. He'd probably had more headaches in his life than most people have had hot dinners, assuming that people these days are eating a lot more salads and mostly sandwiches for lunch. It was all the books and the lack of fresh air that did it, and the fact that he was a Highly Sensitive Person.

When the ferry finally arrived in the grey-grim port of Larne, hours late, and disgorged its human, pantechnicon and white-van contents onto the stinking, oily, wholly indifferent harbourside, Israel had a bad feeling, and it wasn't just his headache and the sea-sickness. He was supposed to be met at the ferry terminal, but there was no one there and no one was answering the phone at his contact number at the library, so he had to use what little remained of his money and his initiative to get the train out of Larne to Rathkeltair, and then the bus to Tumdrum, and through the long grey streets end-on to the hills and to the sea, and all the way to the library-to the big shut library. It felt as though someone had slammed his own front door in his face.

Israel had grown up in and around libraries. Libraries were where he belonged. Libraries to Israel had always been a constant. In libraries Israel had always known calm and peace; in libraries he'd always seemed to be able to breathe a little easier. When he walked through the doors of a library it was like entering a sacred space, like the Holy of Holies: the beautiful hush and the shunting of the brass-handled wooden drawers holding the card catalogues, the reassurance of the reference books and the eminent OEDs, the amusing little troughs of children's books; all human life was there, and you could borrow it and take it home for two weeks at a time, nine books per person per card. By the age of thirteen Israel had two pink library tickets all of his own-you were only really allowed one, but his dad had had a word with the librarian and won him a special dispensation. 'More books?' he could remember his dad proudly saying when he used to stagger home from the library after school with another sports-bag full of George Orwells and specialist non-fiction. 'More books? That's my boy!' he'd say. 'He's read hundreds,' his father would boast to the librarians, and to teachers, and to friends of the family, and to other parents. And 'Hundreds?!' his mother would correct. 'What do you mean, hundreds? Thousands of books that boy's read. Thousands and thousands. His head is full of books.'

And so it was this Israel Armstrong-this child of the library, his head full of books and a little overweight perhaps these days in his brown corduroy suit, portly even, you might say, but not stout, and not yet thirty years old-who had found himself barred and locked out in the fishy-smelling, grey-grim town of Tumdrum on that cold December afternoon, and who found his way eventually to the Tumdrum and District Council offices, after having had to ask directions half a dozen times, and who was finally being ushered in, old brown suitcase in hand, to see Linda Wei, Deputy Head of Entertainment, Leisure and Community Services, to sort out the apparent misunderstanding.

'Ah! Mr Armstrong' said Linda Wei, who looked as though she might have been quite at home on the Larne-Stranraer ferry-she was a big Chinese lady wearing little glasses and with a tub of Pringles open on her desk, and a litre bottle of Coke, half its contents already drained; you wouldn't have blinked if you'd seen Linda behind the wheel of an articulated lorry, honking on her horn while offering a one-fingered salute.

'We meet at last,' she said; they had previously spoken on the phone. 'Come on in, come on in,' she motioned to him, rather over-animatedly, and then again, for good measure, because Israel already was in, 'Come in, come in, come in!' She gave a small Cola burp and extended a sweaty, ready-salted hand. 'Lovely to meet you. Lovely. Lovely. Good journey?'

Israel shrugged his shoulders. What could he say?

'Now, I am sorry there was nobody to meet you at the ferry terminal this morning…'

'Yes,' he said.

'You were late, you see.'

There was an awkward silence.

'But. Never matter. You're here now, aren't you. Now. Tea? Coffee? It'll be from the machine, I'm afraid.'

'No, thanks.'

'Erm? Crisp?'

'No. Thanks.'

'They're Pringles.'

'No. Thank you.'

'I missed breakfast,' said Linda.

'Right.'

'Sure I can't tempt you?'

'Absolutely sure. Thanks anyway.' This was not a moment for Pringles.

'Well. OK. So. You're here.'

'Yes.

'And you've been to the library?'

'Yes.'

'Ah. Then you'll be aware that-'

'It's shut,' Israel said, surprised to hear a slight hysterical edge to his voice. 'The library. Is shut.'

'Yeeees,' she said, drawing out the 'yes' as though stretching a balloon. 'Yes, Mr Armstrong. There's been a wee change of plan.'

Linda paused for a crisp and rearranged herself more authoritatively in her padded black-leather-effect swivel-seat.

'So. You probably want to know what's happened?'

Israel raised an eyebrow.

'Yes. Now. Let me explain. Since your appointment as the new Tumdrum and District branch librarian I'm afraid there's been a little bit of a resource allocation. And the library-'

'Has been shut.' Israel tried to control the quavering in his voice.

'Temporarily,' said Linda, raising-almost wagging-a finger.

'I see. So you no longer need my-' began Israel.

'No! No, no! No! Not at all, not at all!' Linda licked some crisp crumbs from her lips. 'No! You are essential, in fact, to the…planned resource allocation. We are absolutely delighted to have attracted someone of your calibre, Mr Armstrong. Delighted.'

'But there's no library for me to work in.'

'Not exactly.'

'Not exactly?'

'That's right. You see, it's not a cutback in our funding, or anything like that we're talking about-no, no, no! It's more a re-targeting of our resources. Do you see?'

Well, to be honest, no, at that moment, Israel did not see.

'No. Sorry. You've lost me.'

'Well, yes, of course. You've had a long journey. London, was it?'

'That's right. Ten hours on the coach, eight hours on the-'

'I've a sister in London,' interrupted Linda.

'Oh.'

'Southfields? Would you know it at all?'

'No. I'm afraid not.'

'She's a project manager. For-what are they called? Something beginning with D?' She struggled for the answer. 'The mobile phone mast people?'

'No. Sorry. I haven't come across them.' Israel was not interested in Linda Wei's sister who lived in Southfields and who worked for a mobile telephone mast company which began with D. 'And getting back to the library?'

'Yes. Erm. The library. Well, first of all I want to assure you that we at Tumdrum and District Council are absolutely committed to continuing the public's free access to ideas and resources.'

'To libraries.'

'Yes. If you want to put it like that.'

'Fine. But you've closed the actual library?'

'Yes.' And here she ballooned out the 'yes' as far as seemed possible without it actually popping and deflating and turning into a 'no', and she reached up high to a shelf behind her and took down a fat ring-bound report, which she handed to Israel, and gestured for him to read. 'Here,' she said. 'This'll explain.'

The report had a title: The Public Library: Democracy's Resource. A Statement of Principles. Israel started flicking through. It was all output measures and graphs and tables-the usual sort of thing. He turned to the recommendations at the back.

'In the opinion of the Information Resources Steering Committee,' recited Linda Wei, who seemed to have memorised the key passages, 'it is important for the borough to continue to provide information resources with a high service proposition combined with increased competitive flexibility. The overall aim should be to minimise cost per circulation, and to maximise number of patrons served.'

'Right,' said Israel. High service proposition? Increased competitive flexibility? 'Which means?'

'Do you have a current British driving licence, Mr Armstrong?'

'Yes.'

'You do! Grand. That's grand!' She clapped her hands together, delighted.

'Because?'

'Because, the position we are now able to offer you is really very exciting. Very, very exciting. If, admittedly, slightly different to what you may have been expecting.'

'I see.'

'It's more…mobile.'

'Mobile?'

'Yes.'

'You mean a mobile library?'

'Exactly!' said Linda Wei. 'That's it, that's it.' She was so delighted with Israel 's powers of deduction that she helped herself to a handful of Pringles. 'You're like Hercule Poirot!' she said. 'I knew we'd picked the right man for the job. Although these days we don't call it a mobile library. We call it a mobile learning centre.'

'Right.'

'Pringle?'

'Thanks,' said Israel. 'But no. Thanks.'

Linda leaned to one side slightly in her chair then, and smiled, and audibly passed wind.

Oh, God.

It would probably be safe to say that the mobile library is not considered by many people in the know to be at the pinnacle of the library profession. At the pinnacle of the library profession you might have, say, the British Library, or the New York Public Library, or the Library of Congress, or of Alexandria. Then coming down from those Parnassian heights you have university libraries, and private research libraries, and then maybe the big public libraries, and then district and branch libraries, and school libraries, hospital libraries, libraries in prisons and long-term mental institutions. And then somewhere off the bottom of that scale, around about the level of fake red-leather-bound sets of the Reader's Digest in damp provincial hotels and dentists' waiting rooms is the mobile library.

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.'