Israel, grinding the gears.
And he was certainly getting used to the colourful locals and their charming and eccentric ways.
He hadn’t had any breakfast, that was Israel’s problem, a cup of tea before he left the Devines’ farm, which was hardly enough to sustain a growing young man like himself. Israel had lost a little weight since arriving in Tumdrum, due to the lack of readily available non-meat protein, but he still clocked in at a solid 36-inch waist and 16 stone, not hideously fat by any means, but big enough for people to refer to him as ‘big lad’ and to mean it. He’d worked up a sweat already this morning and could have done with a nice fried egg soda or maybe a big bowl of porridge with the cream off the milk. Or some Tayto cheese and onion crisps. Or maybe a nice croissant. No, don’t get him started on croissants, or pains au chocolat, or muffins: Israel fantasised about breakfast pastries. Fresh breakfast pastries were not readily available in and around Tumdrum, although the baker’s, the Trusty Crusty, did do a nice cinnamon scone; scones were about the closest thing Tumdrum had to fresh patisserie items.
He’d been working hard, up until midnight and up again since six, getting the van loaded. Today was the big day. Easter Saturday. Today was the first day of Israel’s first ever mobile library touring exhibition, his debut as keeper and curator of Tumdrum’s heritage and history. Today was the day when Israel got to unveil Tumdrum and District’s mobile-library-sponsored five-panel display showing the history of the famous Dixon and Pickering’s department store, which was celebrating one hundred years of serving Tumdrum and District, and indeed the whole of the north coast of the north of Ireland and beyond, keeping the local farmers and their wives supplied with polyester-cotton sheets, Royal Doulton figurines, and Early Bird Light Suppers in the Cosy Nook, the award-winning cafeteria on the first floor, where on a clear day it was possible to see Scotland while you ate your jumbo gammon panini (served with chips and a light salad garnish).
It might not seem like it to you or me, and it certainly wouldn’t have seemed like it to Israel six months ago, but today was the real deal, a genuine event, a happening around Tumdrum. Dixon and Pickering’s was about as famous locally as the Giant’s Causeway a little further up round the coast: it was the Harrods, the Selfridges, the Fortnum and Mason, the Macy’s, the Tiffany’s, the Woolworths and the Wal-Mart of North Antrim all under one roof, and it had survived and thrived where other family-owned department stores had failed; it had made it to one hundred. And now it was none other than Israel Armstrong, mobile librarian, who had been tasked and commissioned to help the store to commemorate the occasion in style.
Israel couldn’t deny 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
