The Bad Book Affair. Ian Sansom

anyone. Until he came to Tumdrum, where warm, outgoing, friendly sorts of individuals who thought they could rub along with anyone but who weren’t from round here were generally considered to be pushy, uppity good-for-nothings. He was a square peg in a round hole, a fish out of water, out of step, out of time, and out of place. He was a misfit, though admittedly a slightly lighter, bearded misfit, after his two weeks in bed, contemplating the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and weeping over Gloria, and the plight of the Hebrew people, and the thought of his forthcoming thirtieth birthday, which he would be celebrating, unbelievably, in Tumdrum. Alone.

      He grimaced at his reflection in the windscreen. He’d lost quite a bit of weight, what with pretty much surviving on wine, cider and spoonfuls of peanut butter for the past few weeks, with only the occasional variation.

      Not that he was on a diet. Not as such. Since he’d split up with Gloria he’d been losing weight at a rate of several ounces a day—the equivalent of about a bag of lean beef-mince a week—and had gone down from a size 36 waist to a 32 in just a couple of months, achieving a weight and a size that he’d last seen when he was a schoolboy. He was using safety pins on his trousers, and had had to trim some of the vast expanses of his shirt-tails and use them for rags. His duffel coat flapped around him like a dirty brown toggle-tie blanket left out on the line to dry.

      It wasn’t that he’d decided not to eat. He just found that he couldn’t eat; he wasn’t able to eat. It wasn’t a diet; it was more like an unofficial hunger strike: his body was refusing him. Tayto cheese-and-onion crisps—certainly the best and possibly the only good reason for living in Northern Ireland—tasted like ashes in his mouth. And champ—often he couldn’t manage more than a mouthful of old Mr Devine’s creamy champ at dinner, all that potato and spring onion and good salted butter going to waste, scraped away for the pigs. Potato bread likewise. Sodas. Even the tray bakes—he’d not been able to finish a tray bake for weeks. At lunchtime he’d go to the Trusty Crusty and buy himself a couple of caramel squares, and a church window, a fifteen, maybe a Florentine—just the normal day’s Tumdrum home-baked snacks—but it was no go. He’d be about to tuck in, and suddenly his body seemed to just give up, seemed to say, ‘What’s the point?’ Since splitting up with Gloria he’d changed from a coffee-guzzling, comfort-eating, vaguely troubled fat person into a graze ‘n’ nibbling, wine-bibbing, deeply troubled thin person. He was hardly eating anything, but felt bloated the whole time. His hunger, which had always been his friend, had seemingly deserted him. His headaches were worse than ever, and at night he was having these dreams, vivid dreams all the time—bobbing around on a life raft, scanning the horizon, no land in sight; tripping down mountainsides; wandering lost through vast deserts…abandonment.

      He was not only a misfit. He was an eating-disordered misfit.

      As he was musing on his profound, increasing, ageing misfittedness, a young woman had come up the steps into the library. Israel glanced up. She looked to be in her mid-teens, although it was difficult to tell, because she had long, blonde hair hanging down over her face, big mascaraed eyelashes, and a black beanie hat pulled down tight over her head. Israel gave her a second glance: if she was indeed in her mid-teens, she should probably have been at school. They had this problem all the time, children bunking off school and skulking around the library. They called it ‘mitching off’, the children. ‘Aye, I’m mitching off, what are ye going to do about it?’ they would retort to Israel’s polite suggestion that they return to school. He always felt vaguely responsible for truants, in the same way he felt vaguely responsible for the future of the rainforests, and global warming, and the war on terror. He felt bad, ineffectively bad, ruminatively bad. He felt bad, but could do absolutely nothing about it. He wasn’t a politician, or a policeman, or a teacher, he was just a librarian, and alas librarians aren’t able to save the world, or even to act in loco parentis. He was powerless. In the end Israel’s only real responsibility was towards the books, rather than the readers. There wasn’t really much he could do for readers. The books he could cope with. The great thing about books is that they don’t talk back—unlike the teenagers, and the Mrs Hammonds and Hughie Boyds and Mrs Onions of this world. Israel absolutely dreaded teenagers coming on board the mobile library, more even than he dreaded reading to the children of Tumdrum Primary, or even dealing with Mrs Onions. Children are bad enough—children are rude, selfish, greedy and unthinking individuals who are unable to distinguish between their own selfish wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. And adults are children with money, alcohol and power. But that in-between stage, the teenage, is even worse, the interim between childhood and adulthood. In the interim between raging, selfish, impotent childhood and raging, impotent, insignificant adulthood you have adolescence, which is childhood with hormones. He hated Tumdrum’s teens.

      The girl was wearing a short, black skirt, and thick black tights, and heavy black boots, and a long black jumper, and she carried over her shoulder a black bag covered all over in black plastic spikes. It was a bag that looked as though it might have been useful as a cat-scratcher, or as a kind of orthopaedic aid for people with lower back problems caused by bad posture from sitting staring at a computer all day playing multiuser-dimension games.

      She looked like trouble. She looked like a Goth. He hated Goths.

      ‘I don’t like the Goths,’ he’d mentioned to Ted one day.

      ‘Why not?’ said Ted.

      ‘I don’t know. They look like they’re in the Addams Family.’

      ‘That’s the idea, isn’t it?’ said Ted.

      ‘Yes, but it’s…weird.’

      ‘Weird!’ said Ted. ‘Weird?’

      ‘Yes, weird.’

      ‘Aye, and ye’d know weird, right enough.’

      ‘Yes. I would.’

      ‘Aye, ye see, that’s just like ye—you’re a terrible hypocrite, so you are.’

      ‘I am not.’

      ‘’Course you are. You’re all for this political correctness, and then ye’re after saying ye don’t like the Goths.’

      ‘Well, I don’t.’

      ‘Ach, ye’re a sickener, so you are.’

      ‘They come in wearing trench coats and…’

      ‘What’s wrong with trench coats?’ said Ted. ‘You don’t like people wearing trench coats?’

      ‘No. It’s just…People wearing long black coats and…’

      ‘Who are those people in Israel?’ said Ted.

      ‘Jews?’

      ‘Yes, them. The ones in the long black coats and the hats.’

      ‘That’s different. That’s religion.’

      ‘Well, it’s the same thing for the young ones here.’

      ‘It’s not a religion.’

      ‘It is to them.’

      ‘Anyway, Ted. I do not like the Goths coming on the library and smoking. And we’re not meant to be issuing them with X-rated DVDs and…’

      ‘It’ll do them no harm, sure. And at least if they’re on the van they’re not out cloddin’ stones.’

      ‘Clodding?’

      ‘Throwing stones, ye eejit.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘Not a jot of harm in ’em.’

      ‘How do you know there’s not a jot of harm in them?’

      ‘I just know,’ said Ted. ‘When you’ve known people as long as I have, you just know.’

      ‘Well, when the Goths go on the rampage and…’

      ‘Ach, Israel, will ye lighten up for just one minute, will ye? It’s like listening to an auld man, so it is.’

      Israel