The Case of the Missing Books. Ian Sansom

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

       3

      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.

      Back at the council offices Linda Wei had got him to sign several forms on the dotted line, and had issued him with papers and instructions as СКАЧАТЬ