The Bad Book Affair

by Ian Sansom

  “Mobile librarian.”

  “-Learning Support Facilitator.”

  “No,” said Israel.

  “Fine,” said Linda. “You do realize, Mr. Armstrong, that you are required to complete a certain number of hours’ training as part of your continuing professional development?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think face painting is really the kind of professional development I’m interested in, Linda. Difficult to do the…lolling tongues and-”

  “Lolling tongues?”

  “You know, they always have sort of lolling tongues, with face painting, don’t they?”

  “What is the kind of professional development you’re interested in, Mr. Armstrong?”

  “I’m not really sure,” said Israel.

  “Self-defense?” said Linda.

  “Self-defense?”

  “‘Designed especially for the council’s public-facing staff,’” Linda began reading again, “‘this course is designed to-’”

  “‘Public-facing’?”

  “Yes. That’s you, Mr. Armstrong. I’m sure you must sometimes encounter…difficulties with readers.”

  “Ha!” said Israel.

  “I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?”

  “Yeah!” said Israel. “Right. The window lickers.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Window lickers. We call them window lickers.”

  “Please do not refer to our customers as window lickers.”

  “Fine,” said Israel. “Nutters, then.”

  “And do not refer to them as nutters.”

  “Freaks?

  “Or freaks, clearly, Mr. Armstrong. Anyway, the course is called Minimizing Risk. I shall sign you up for-”

  “The only way to minimize risk is not to let anyone on the library!” said Israel.

  “Clearly,” said Linda. “Computing?”

  “I hate computing.”

  “Health and Safety?”

  “No.”

  “Fire Safety?”

  “No.”

  “What about your PSV test?”

  “No, I don’t want to do the test.”

  “It’s run by the Road Transport Industry Training Board, down at Watt’s Corner.”

  “No, thank you.”

  At which point the laser printer concealed under Linda’s desk on a little shelf hummed awake like a tiny tiger and coughed up a sheet of paper that Linda gratefully took, glanced at, signed, and pushed across her desk for Israel to countersign. The page was titled ISRAEL ARMSTRING and contained two columns, titled AKP (Addressing Known Problems) and AICS (Actions for Improving Customer Service), that listed problems and pointed out solutions, with dotted lines at the bottom asking for Israel’s signature and the date.

  Israel signed and dated. And then he signed and dated another. And another. One for Linda’s records, one for Israel, and one for the Education and Library Board. This incriminating statement of failure and intent would be kept on file for future reference, Linda explained. Israel didn’t even know he had a file.

  “Good,” said Linda. “Well, I think that was very helpful, wasn’t it?”

  “Very,” said Israel.

  “I’ll just be ringing the police and offering any assistance we can.”

  “Super,” said Israel.

  “And you’ll be providing me with that doctor’s note?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Immediately.”

  “If not sooner.”

  “Good. Well, I think that’s all.”

  “Thank you, Linda.”

  11

  “Israel,” said George. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re saying sorry to me?”

  “Yes. I…I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  They were in the Devines’ kitchen. Israel had been on the library all day after his appraisal meeting with Linda. After a long day, returning to the Devines’, for all its faults, felt like rejoining humanity. It was his little niche, his little place in among the Devines’ familial smells, and the mess, and the debris and decay. There was a kettle whistling on the Rayburn. The dogs. The long, placid sound of the clock. The floor, washed and scrubbed clean, and the hot, overrich smell of cleaning products and of deep, deep grime; the smell of dishes having been recently washed. It wasn’t home, but it was the closest thing he had to home.

  “Problems with the goats?” said Israel. He’d lived here so long now he couldn’t imagine worse news. And he couldn’t understand why George was saying sorry. She never said sorry. And certainly not to him. Sorry for what?

  “Sorry,” she was saying again, stony-faced. She was wearing a white apron, the white apron she always wore in the kitchen.

  “The chickens?” said Israel. “Pigs?” George looked down at the floor. Israel looked to old Mr. Devine, tucked up in his blanket on his seat by the Rayburn. “OK,” he said, not getting a reply, and he stroked his beard. He’d taken to stroking his beard; it gave him something to do with his hands. “What’s up? You’re not kicking me out of the chicken coop again?”

  George looked him in the eye and held his gaze for a moment.

  “I’m afraid it’s Pearce.”

  “What?”

  George paused, just for a moment, and Israel realized: it was the pause. The pause that everyone dreads, and that everyone knows ultimately is coming, and whose meaning is as clear as any outpouring of however many words; the total eloquence of a moment’s silence.

  “No?” said Israel.

  “I’m so sorry,” said George.

  “No!” said Israel.

  George averted her gaze.

  “Oh, no.”

  “I know you were fond of him.”

  “But…I was…just. I just saw him, yesterday.”

  “I know.”

  George reached out and patted Israel’s arm, and it was the touch that was like the pause, a touch entirely expressive and direct in meaning: the black spot, the bad news, the curse. And it suddenly brought everything back, the way she touched him: the day his father died. He was thirteen. His mother. They were in the front room. They had this new sofa-they hadn’t had it long. You could still smell its newness-almost as if it’d been born into the room. And he was there, sitting on the sofa. He’d been watching TV. His father had been in hospital for some time. But Israel still somehow had no idea his father was going to die; it just hadn’t occurred to him. He’d thought that it was like in a television drama-that it was a difficult story, but that everything sorted itself out in the end. As if life were like a drama. Like Dawson’s Creek. And his mum was sitting on the sofa next to him, and she was saying his name, and there was a pause, and she ruffled his hair, and he somehow knew in that moment that everything didn’t sort itself out. That things went wrong and couldn’t be put right, that beyond crisis there was…nothing. Darkness. And everything after that moment, after his father’s death, seemed to lose its color, as if someone had literally put on a filter that had blocked out the light. As though a cloud had passed over. And the colors had never quite returned. As though the world was on mute. Which is why he read books. That’s when he’d become a serious reader. To try to regain the color. But he never could regain the color. The books always promised they would help him regain the color-as though the stories could somehow redeem things. But they never could. So he always had to read more and more books, just in case the next book was going to be the one that made the colors return. Thirteen. Which was when he’d started suffering from migraines. And he’d started putting on weight. And retreating. Into a sort of long insomnia. Which was why, ultimately, he was here. Nowhere. With the touch and the pause, awakening him again to grief.

  “But how did he…” He was speaking, without even knowing he was speaking.

  “It’s…” began George. “They’re not sure at the moment.”

  “Thou shalt not kill,” said old Mr. Devine, shuffling under the rug.

  “What?�
�

  “Granda! Sshh!” said George.

  “The Lord does not abrogate his care over his elect,” mumbled Mr. Devine.

  “What?” said Israel, suddenly angry. “What’s he talking about?”

  “It was an accident…Israel…I’m sorry.”

  “Accident?”

  “Killed hisself,” said old Mr. Devine.

  “What?” said Israel. What was this wretched man suggesting? “What happened?”

  “He seems to have been…I don’t know. Some bookshelves, they…”

  “What?”

  “The bookshelves, they came down and…”

  “Leonard Bast,” said Israel. He was clutching his head, as though in pain. “Oh, god.”

  “Leonard Bast?”

  “Howards End. Leonard Bast, he’s…crushed.”

  “Howards End by E. M. Forster?”

  “Pearce mentioned it to me.” Israel’s voice had become uneven, as though lacking air. “I didn’t think anything of it.” He felt as though he were choking. He felt like prostrating himself. “He couldn’t have…”

  “It was an accident,” said George, reassuringly. “It was definitely an accident.”

  “He’ll not get a burial if he killed hisself,” said Mr. Devine.

  “Granda!” George was becoming exasperated.

  “Speaking the truth,” said Mr. Devine, apparently oblivious. “‘Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield.’”

  “Anyway, he’s at peace now,” said George.

  “‘And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, Lord-’”

  “Will you shut up!” yelled George at old Mr. Devine, unable to contain herself anymore. “You stupid, selfish man!” And as George screamed, Israel recognized the emotion, which wasn’t grief but rage, and the rage not just of today, but of years, and everywhere, and everything, the same rage he’d felt when his father died-the rage of being wounded, of being disgusted with himself, of being sacrificed by the dead to mourning. And he could suddenly see it in George too-having been sacrificed by her parents’ death all those years ago. Hence her rage at Mr. Devine. And “Shut up!” she was yelling again at Mr. Devine. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” and then she was banging her way out of the kitchen, with Israel hurrying out after her into the yard.

  “George!” he called.

  “Go away!” she screamed back, not turning, striding away from him, as if she was to blame.

  “You want to be left alone?” called Israel.

  “Yes,” she said. “I want to be left alone!”

  She didn’t want to be left alone.

  He left her alone.

  He didn’t want to be left alone. He found himself in the van, driving. Out of Tumdrum and down the coast road, remembering what Pearce had said: the best road in Europe. And then he was parking down in Glenarm and taking the keys from the ignition and sitting there looking out to sea. And could see nothing. Because there was nothing to see. And sitting and crying and shivering by himself. With nowhere to go. And nowhere to be. And nothing to think.

  And then hours later, having disappeared into himself, in deep, pitiful mournful self-involvement, he was driving back, half-dazed and despairing, to the Devines’. He needed to talk to someone.

  He couldn’t talk to George.

  He couldn’t talk to Gloria.

  So there was no one to talk to.

  Except perhaps the Reverend Roberts.

  Lights were on in the manse, which was a two-bed semi-inconveniently situated on a new-build estate just off the coast road. Tumdrum Presbyterian Church had sold the original-the real-manse many years before. The original-the real-manse was a five-bedroom redbrick Victorian villa bang in the center of town, with its own orchard and a walled garden, and a small housemaid’s room, and a library, which had been home to generations of upright ministers and their uptight offspring, and which was now home to local pinstripe-jacket-and tight-jeans-wearing businessman Martin Mortimer and his life partner, Kevin, the hairdresser. Martin and Kevin were accepted, on the whole, in Tumdrum because, it was generally agreed, they were not “flamboyant” and “didn’t rub your noses in it,” and they had lavished time and money on the old manse and transformed it into a home of top-of-the-range chrome and mahogany fittings, with a wet room and a lot of signature wallpaper, while the orchard had been sold and was now a development of-only three-executive-style town houses called “The Orchard.” While in the new manse the Reverend Roberts was living simply and quietly, lacking entirely in Martin and Kevin’s financial common sense and interior design flair. The reverend’s possessions consisted almost exclusively of the clothes he wore and a few Bible commentaries, and the furniture in the house consisted of the congregation’s castoffs: an outdoor plastic picnic table in the living room, which served as his desk, a straight-backed mock-velvet armchair, and no pictures on the wall, and no mess. The Reverend Roberts was someone who had somehow cleansed himself of the everyday mess of things, the detritus. He was not distracted. Which is probably what made him a great minister, and which is certainly why, when Israel could think of no one to turn to, he now answered the door wearing a faded blue terry cloth dressing gown that had once belonged to a member of the congregation. It was too short for him. He was wearing his glasses.

  “Israel?” said the Reverend Roberts, peering into the darkness.

  “I…just happened to be passing,” said Israel.

  The Reverend Roberts double-checked his watch.

  “At half past eleven on a Monday night?”

  “Erm. Gosh. Is it? Sorry. I didn’t realize. I’ll-”

  “No, no! Come on in,” said the Reverend England Roberts, reaching out and ushering Israel into the narrow hallway. “It’s fine. I was just making some coffee.”

  “At half past eleven on a Monday night?”

  “Come on. Come in.”

  He led Israel into his kitchen, a room with old white melamine units and nothing else: it could have been the kitchen of a show-home.

  “Well,” said the Reverend Roberts, as he busied himself with his coffee-making paraphernalia-the beans, the grinder, the silvery screw-top stove-top espresso pot. He didn’t believe in skimping on coffee. It was his one luxury. Israel sat silently in the bright glare of the kitchen’s down-lighters. “Everything all right?” The reverend asked.

  “Yeah,” said Israel, whose eyes were sore and puffy from tears. “Yeah.”

  “I was very sorry to hear about Pearce.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know that you were very close.”

  “Well…”

  “Very, very sad,” said the Reverend Roberts. “He was a good man.” And then he added, reaching into the pocket of his dressing gown. “Can I tempt you?” He produced a small white paper bag.

  “What is it?”

  “Cystallized ginger,” said the Reverend Roberts.

  “You keep a bag of crystallized ginger in your dressing gown pocket?”

  “At all times,” said the Reverend Roberts. “In case of emergencies.” He took a piece himself. “It’s very good. I get it from a shop in Derry. Vitelli’s? Italians. Very good. They do amaretti biscuits as well, but I’m afraid I’m all out till next payday.”

  “No, thanks, I’m OK.”

  “Sure? You on a diet?”

  “No.”

  The Reverend Roberts reached into his other pocket.

  “I have chocolate limes, if you’d prefer,” he said. He held out the bag. “From the Sweetery. I’ve never known anyone to refuse a chocolate lime.”

  “No,” said Israel. “Thanks anyway.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well,” said Israel, taking one. “Maybe just one.”

  “Good,” said the reverend as Israel unwrapped a chocolate lime. “So, let’s get our priorities right, shall we? You take the weight off your feet, and I’ll see to the coffee. Sit. Sit. Go on.” The reverend set two stools incongruously either side of the o
ven, as though flanking a fireplace: Israel sat down, and the Reverend Roberts busied himself with the grinding and brewing of the coffee.

  “How’s your chocolate lime?”

  “Good,” said Israel, letting the taste fill his mouth.

  “You ever try chocolate and champagne?” asked the Reverend Roberts.

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “Oh, you must try it. The next time you’re having chocolate and champagne.”

  “Hmm.” Israel laughed.

  “You let the chocolate-what would you call it?-the chocolate slime stick to the roof of your mouth, and then you drink champagne, and it washes it all away, cleansing your palate. Most extraordinary sensation. Wonderful.” He lit a flame under the coffeepot. “There we are, then. Coffee’s brewing.”

  He sat himself down next to Israel on the other stool.

  “So. It’s always nice to see you, Israel. But I guess you didn’t come here to drink coffee and eat my chocolate limes?” he said.

  “No,” said Israel.

  “Is it Pearce?”

  “I suppose,” said Israel.

  There was a long silence.

  “Can I ask you a question?” asked Israel.

  “Fire away,” said the Reverend Roberts.

  “What does the Bible say about suicide?” asked Israel eventually.

  “Mmmm,” said the Reverend Roberts. “The Bible…” He weighed his words very carefully. “The Bible, Israel, is silent on a lot of things that we would like it to be clear about.”

  “If Pearce did commit suicide-”

  “Pearce?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh!” boomed the Reverend Roberts. “Pearce! I was worried for a moment you were talking about yourself there! Thank goodness!”

  “Ah, right. Sorry.”

  “That’s OK! I’m delighted! I mean, not delighted about the whole situation.”

  “No.”

  “Obviously. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion of suicide is there? It was an accident, is what I heard.”

  “But Mr. Devine was saying that he thought-”

  “You shouldn’t listen to everything Mr. Devine says, Israel. You surely know that by now.”