The Case of the Missing Books

‘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.’