Mr Dixon Disappears. Ian Sansom

it: he was honoured. And he also couldn’t deny it: he was maybe going soft in the head.

      He drove round the side of the building to the back.

      It was undoubtedly a lovely spot, right by the sea. Actually, it wasn’t by the sea, that didn’t do it justice: you couldn’t really say that Dixon and Pickering’s was by the sea; Dixon and Pickering’s was on the sea.

      Dixon and Pickering’s official motto – which was printed boldly on all the shop’s plastic carrier bags, just below the company crest, an image of a lamb lying down with a lion in a bucolic scene also featuring fauns and nymphs frolicking beneath mountains by the sea – was ‘The Customer Is Always Right’, which was wrong, actually, in Israel’s experience round about Tumdrum and in Northern Ireland generally. In his experience around here the customer was almost always wrong, unless you wanted to make a big deal about it, in which case the motto should really be amended to ‘The Customer Is Always Right…Eventually’, or ‘…After Threat of Legal Action’.

      Dixon and Pickering’s was known locally as the Department Store at the End of the World, which was an accurate description, in several senses: you could have picked up Dixon and Pickering’s and plonked it down off a dirt-track near an old gold-prospecting town in the middle of Alaska or in some as-yet-undeveloped remote province in China, and people wouldn’t have blinked an eye; put moose or fried rice on the menu in the Cosy Nook and it would have fitted in just fine; because for all its airs and graces Dixon and Pickering’s remained an outback kind of shopping experience.

      Built in 1906, Dixon and Pickering’s still stocked items that other department stores had stopped selling quite some time back, around about the Second World War in fact – his and hers thermal underwear, and two-colour sock wool, and a full range of hearth-sets, and extending toast forks, and wind-up repeater alarm clocks, and paraffin lamps – and it looked as though, with a slight push, you might be able to topple this whole teetering mound of old stucco and kitsch and knick-knacks and watch it disappear under the Irish Sea’s big white waves. On a rough day the salt spray came right up over the stone walls of the car park and lashed at the store’s stone steps and the new disabled access ramp. People said that if you were to shop in Dixon and Pickering’s just once a week and parked down at the sea wall then your car would be gone in a year, eaten alive by salt and rust, like the proverbial cow in a bottle of Coke.

      The building itself was three storeys high, wide and spreading, and painted a lurid carnation pink, with palm trees planted all round it: it reminded Israel of a giant plate of salmon blini with chives, and it certainly looked as though it belonged somewhere else, in Miami maybe, or on a fully loaded side table at a north London bar mitzvah party, and definitely not on the lonely north coast of Ireland.

      There was absolutely no doubt about it: Dixon and Pickering’s was unique. Dixon and Pickering’s was undoubtedly – as one of the titles on the helpful A3-size laminated sheets of Israel’s five-panel touring exhibition pointed out – A Landmark and A Legend.

      Israel parked up.

      It was raining, of course. It was always raining in Tumdrum. Even if it wasn’t raining, not at that actual moment, then it was getting ready to rain, biding its time, waiting until you’d left the house without your coat and umbrella and you were more than halfway to wherever it was you were going so it was too late to turn back, and then whoosh!, suddenly you were wet right through.

      It rained here all the time, but still it somehow caught you unawares, creeping up on you. If it was possible for weather to be duplicitous and undermining, then Tumdrum’s weather was: it was bad weather, morally bad weather; it was rain that left no visible trace, no puddles, only a deep-down damp, a remorseless damp that at first you couldn’t get out of your clothes and then you couldn’t scrub out of your skin and then you couldn’t dig out of your soul; the kind of damp that if you could have smoked it, you wouldn’t have known but already you’d be addicted.

      And what was worse even than the soul-destroying rain was that around Tumdrum the sky always seemed to be the colour of the road and the road was always the colour of the sky, a grey, grey, grey, one of a million shades of grey that Israel knew by heart by now, and today, this morning, it still being early, the sky was a kind of beige grey, like the trim in the interior of a particularly nasty 1970s sports car, the shade of a soulless future.

      The caretaker emerged from the back of the store and into the rain and waved Israel over.

      ‘Come on ahead then. I’ll show you where you’re setting up.’

      ‘Would you mind, just…’ Israel turned up the hood on his duffle coat and half-heartedly indicated back towards the van, to the bags of poles and panels for the display, but the caretaker had gone already. So Israel followed him up the stone steps and inside the famous big pink building.

      The back entrance took you in through kitchenware and hardware, Panasonic bread-makers to the left of you, pop-up gazebos and battery display stands to the right. A worn but clean red carpet led through the store, up past linen and beds, skirting contemporary furniture and on through greetings cards, stationery, board games and leather goods until finally you reached the front entrance to the store, where, as is traditional, you could purchase gifts, watches, jewellery and crystal at the foot of a wide staircase which took you up to ladies’ fashions and accessories.

      ‘Here’s you,’ said the caretaker, indicating a tiny space between the sweeping staircase and a jumble of glass display cases featuring vases, decanters and earrings.

      ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to squeeze everything…’

      But the caretaker had gone.

      Right, thanks.

      Israel trudged back through the store – he was trudging because his old brown brogues were slowly breaking down, widening and splitting, the leather uppers and the smooth leather soles unable to contend with the fast pace, the pounding, and the never-ending dung of country living – and he prepared to unload the exhibition through the disabled access door at the back of the mobile library. Which was easier said than done.

      The disabled access door was actually more likely to render you disabled than to ease your access: it was pretty stiff to open, where someone had rear-ended the van at some time, and when you did get it open you had to tie it back with a piece of string because the catch had gone, and the roll-a-ramp itself weighed a ton and was a bugger to fold up and down.

      But then the whole van was just like that, and you got used to her eventually, and as long as you watched the oil, and the tyre pressure and the water, and kept her doors lubricated with petroleum jelly, and remembered not to use the full trigger on the petrol pump when you were filling her up, and had a couple of spare alternator belts on board at all times, and as long as you had a dedicated full-time mechanic on hand, then really she was no trouble at all. She took a little more care and maintenance than Israel’s mum’s old Honda Civic back home in London, but then you couldn’t get two thousand books and fully adjustable shelving in a Honda Civic – in fact, as far as Israel remembered, you’d be lucky to be able to get the weekly supermarket shop, a bag of sucky chocolate limes and a handful of CDs in a Honda Civic. To his surprise, Israel seemed to have outgrown little city runabouts. He’d grown accustomed to the van and to her big old-fashioned country ways; he’d got used to grinding the gears, and the uncomfortable, elevated driving position, and he’d grown accustomed to listening out for the little rattles and shakes that meant he needed to get Ted to take a look at the engine before the whole thing blew. As long as Israel didn’t have to touch anything mechanical, as long as everything was going smoothly, he was absolutely fine.

      He checked his watch. Ted was supposed to be meeting him, but there was no sign of him. He was going to have to do it all by himself.

      He eventually dragged all the display poles and panels out of the van and through the store and started setting up.

      The caretaker had turned some music on, which was now flooding the huge empty spaces of the store, filling up every little crack, like grains of sand in a picnic or long white worms of Polyfilla from a tube. There was ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA,