The Bad Book Affair

‘All right, thank you, Ted,’ said Israel.

‘The look on his face, but. Brilliant. Brilliant. You must have done something bad to upset him! Oh, brilliant!’

‘He’s just a miserable bas—’ began Israel.

‘Language!’ said Ted. ‘Mebbe he just doesn’t like the look of you.’

‘Horrible,’ said Israel. ‘A creepy, slimy, rude, horrible man.’

‘Ach, he was maybe in a bad mood, just, eh? “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, you sick bastard!” Oh dear, oh dear.’

‘He’s got some sort of problem,’ said Israel. ‘Personality disorder probably.’

‘It’s the election, isn’t it?’ said Ted. ‘Pressure getting to him.’

‘I know the feeling,’ said Israel.

‘What? Pressure?’

‘Yes,’ said Israel. ‘Do you have any Nurofen?’

‘Ach, wise up,’ said Ted, as though Nurofen were a heroin substitute. They pulled into the school playground. ‘Who’d ye think ye are, Barack O’Bana?’

‘Obama,’ said Israel. ‘O.Ba.Ma.’

‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘His family were from Kerry, weren’t they?’

‘What? He’s a black man from Hawaii,’ said Israel.

‘I’m not arguing with you about it,’ said Ted. ‘Just get on with it. Come on. We’re late.’

They visited the school once every two weeks and the routine was always the same: the children would choose their books from the library under Ted’s menacing gaze and without major incident—no tears, no fights, no tantrums—and then Israel would trudge with them into the classroom for the compulsory story time, and all hell would break loose.

Israel was just not a story-time kind of a librarian: he absolutely hated children’s books, for starters. Most of them were mind-bogglingly bad, illustrated by the artistically challenged—can no one draw hands any more?—and with words by people who clearly hated words. He was always trying to read Where the Wild Things Are, or Green Eggs and Ham, again, but the children, being children, wanted novelty, and the teachers wanted something more appropriate to the national curriculum’s reading strategy. So Israel would read something dull and appropriate in a dull and appropriate monotone, and the children would inevitably fidget, and then this would lead inevitably to shoving and poking, and then usually to a fight, and hence to chaos. It didn’t help that Israel also didn’t much like children, per se. He could never remember their names, or if he could remember them, he couldn’t pronounce them.

‘How do you say the name of the boy with the big ears?’ he asked Ted, as he always did.

‘Who?’ said Ted.

‘The one who always asks the difficult questions.’

‘Pod-rig,’ said Ted.

‘I thought last time you said it was more like…’ He puckered up his lips. ‘Pahd-rag.’

‘Ach, I don’t know,’ said Ted. ‘I’m not good with these Irish names.’

‘You’re Irish,’ said Israel.

‘I’m an Ulsterman,’ said Ted.

‘Right.’

‘Big difference,’ said Ted.

‘Sure,’ said Israel.

‘It might be Paw-rick.’

‘Right,’ said Israel.

‘It just depends,’ said Ted.

‘On what?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Ted.

‘So, is it Pod-rig? Or Paw-rick?’

‘Paaah-ric?’ said Ted, rolling the vowels around in his mouth. ‘I don’t know. Paw-drig.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Israel.

‘Just call him Paddy,’ said Ted. ‘That’s what I do.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Israel.

‘I’ll just have a wee smoke here, then,’ said Ted.

‘But—’

‘Me back’s a bit sore, still. You hurry on there, sure.’

While Ted waited cosily in the van Israel trudged towards the classroom and the moon-faced children of Tumdrum, who stared up at him, as they always did, loudly fidgeting, while Tony Thompson, headmaster of the school, sat at the back, in his shiny black suit, and his grey shirt, and black tie, smirking, and poor Israel droned.

The reading was bad enough. He read from a supersized book about someone called Red Ted, who sat on a shelf and did very little else, except clearly demonstrate some pointless rule of phonics. There were the usual skirmishes. It was awful. But there was worse to come. Question time. He absolutely hated question time.

‘Yes, Laura,’ said Tony Thompson, when Israel had finished reading about Red Ted, on his shelf. ‘You have a question for Mr Armstrong—the librarian.’

Tony somehow always managed to make the word ‘librarian’ sound dirty and sinister, as though a librarian were a sort of a book pimp.

‘Why have you grown a beard?’ asked Laura, a girl with pure pale blue eyes, and a full head of fizzing ginger hair, like a changeling out of a horror film.

‘Erm.’ Israel was thrown. ‘Just to make my face look…smaller. Any other questions?’

‘Are you on a diet?’ asked Laura.

‘No. I am not on a diet. Any book questions?’