‘Ach,’ said Ted, picking a date out of his scone.
‘You’re just inured to it, Ted.’
‘Ee-what?’
‘Inured. It’s…Anyway, I’m young and you’re…’
‘What?’
‘Older.’
‘Aye.’
‘And look at us! We’re nothing more than errand boys!’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Ted.
‘I’ve got a degree from Oxford you know,’ said Israel.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, picking at his scone. ‘Oxford Brookes, wasn’t it you said?’
‘Which is in Oxford,’ said Israel. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been there?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ said Ted. ‘No.’
‘No!’ said Israel triumphantly. ‘Well then. I am a highly educated librarian. I shouldn’t be—we shouldn’t be—just doing errands for people.’
‘We’re not just doing errands for people.’
‘Yes, we are!’
‘We’re a service,’ said Ted.
‘A library service,’ said Israel. ‘A library service. Not a Tesco home delivery service! Picking up people’s groceries is not the kind of service I had in mind when I got into this job,’ said Israel. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s not ridiculous.’
‘It is!’ said Israel. ‘Honestly. This morning…’
First stop of the day, up round the coast, and first in, a man in his seventies, not one of their regulars.
‘D’ye have the Impartial Recorder?’
‘Sorry?’ said Israel.
‘The paper? D’ye have the paper?’
‘No. No. I’m afraid not.’
‘The Tele then?’
‘No. Sorry. We don’t have any papers.’
‘You don’t sell any papers?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘You sell books then?’
‘No, no, we don’t sell books either.’
‘D’ye not?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘We’re a library.’
‘Ach, aye. Second-hand books then.’
‘Erm…Well, yes. Sort of, I suppose.’
‘By the yard, or by the pound?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I saw a thing about it on the telly once. Books by the yard. Or the dozen. I don’t know. I can’t rightly remember.’
‘Right. Well, we don’t actually sell books here at all. You have to join a library. Like you do a video shop or…something. I need to see a utility bill, something with your name and address on it, and then I can—’
‘I’d not be showing you that, indeed; that’d be under the Freedom of Information Act, wouldn’t it? I don’t know who ye are. Are ye the police?’
‘No. I’m not the police.’
‘You could be anybody.’
‘Yes, true. I could, of course, be…anybody. I am in fact the librarian though. Here. In the…mobile library. Where we…are.’
‘You’re a funny-lookin’ librarian.’
‘Yes, well, sorry, I…’
‘D’ye sell milk?’
‘No.’
‘Bread?’
‘No.’
‘A pan loaf just?’
‘No!’
‘Ach. We used to have Paddy Weekly—he was great, so he was—but he was driven out by the supermarkets, ye know.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve to get to Ballycastle for shopping these days.’
‘Right.’
‘I prefer the shopping in Coleraine, meself.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I can get me feet done and me hair cut—there’s a wee girl who comes round the Fold—but if I give ye a wee list ye couldn’t do me a few messages once a week, could ye?’
It just wasn’t right.
‘It’s just not right,’ said Israel, picking absent-mindedly at his scone. ‘You know, the longer I spend working as librarian, the more I’m questioning my vocation.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Ted, whose own scone was rapidly diminishing in size, down from bowling-ball size to tennis-ball size; maybe a little larger.
‘No!’ said Israel, correcting himself. ‘Not just my vocation in fact. The very ground of my being.’
‘Would ye like a top-up of coffee?’ said Minnie, who was doing the rounds.
‘Yes, thanks,’ said Israel.
‘Still on Beckett then?’ she said, pouring Israel another cup of the café’s so-called coffee.
‘Questioning the very ground of his being,’ said Ted.
‘Oh,’ said Minnie. ‘I think I’ll leave you to it then.’
As a child back home in north London, Israel had always imagined that a life communing with books might be a life communing with the great minds and lives of the great thinkers of the past, those who had formed the culture and heritage of the world, and that it might perhaps be his role to share these riches with others. In fact, in reality, as a mobile librarian on the perpetually damp north coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland, Israel seemed to spend most of his time communing with the great minds and lives and thinkers who had produced Haynes car manuals, and Some Stuff I Remember About Visiting
