The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery (29 page)

'Northern Ireland,' said the little woman, who seemed close to tears. 'Ted Carson and Israel Armstrong, and—'

'His mother!' said Ted.

'—and their…mobile library from Tumdrum.'

'The Delegates' Choice!' said Ted.

Israel hugged his mother. Ted hugged Israel's mother. Israel hugged Ted, almost, and then thought better of it.

And as they got up, triumphant, and walked forward to collect the prize the doors to the Nissen hut burst open and in walked Stones and Bree, closely followed by a dozen armed police officers.

T
he police decided that under the circumstances Israel and Ted could be released without charge, and Ted in return decided not to press charges against Stones and Bree. Israel's mother decided she could maybe do with some more adventure in her life, and that it was time to spread her wings a little.

And Israel had made his decision also: he was going to go and surprise Gloria. Five days after arriving in England, five days without seeing her, five days in pursuit of the van. Now he was going in pursuit of her. He was going to the flat—to their flat.

He'd brought flowers. And chocolates. He was going to do it right.

He caught the bus. There was the little park opposite the flat. He went to sit in the park. To prepare himself. You could see the park from their window. He would sometimes watch people come and go in and out of the park. Parents with little children, how sometimes they'd be arguing or angry. And there was a man he used to see every day, always wearing a suit, the man, not much older than himself and he obviously got home every day and said, 'I'll take the children', and he'd go to the park, and he'd be absorbed in playing with his children: the sight of it, day in, day out; week in, week out. It became part of Israel's routine, coming home from the Bargain Bookstore at Lakeside, waiting for Gloria, watching the man watching his children. And then one day he wasn't there. He must have moved, or moved on.

There was no one in the park today. It was a beautiful London summer's evening. He sat on the bench. If Gloria arrived he'd be able to see her. He could see their window.

He waited. And he waited.

But he couldn't sit waiting forever.

The little patch of front lawn and the flower beds at the front of the flats; Mrs Graham, one of the old women on the ground floor, she kept it nice. Gloria had never liked her; she said she was smelly and weird, and she called her Grumps. But Israel quite liked her; she reminded him of his grandmother: she was balding, she chain-smoked, her hair was vivid with nicotine and she would occasionally post furious letters of complaint—too much noise, people leaving the main door on the snib—addressed to 'OCCUPANTS!' She was harmless.

He stood on the doorstep and could feel himself shivering and shaking with nerves. He was excited also, as though having recently won something, or been awarded a prize. He'd washed his hair specially and shaved. He was wearing his smartest clothes: fresh cords.

He was ready. He'd returned.

Maybe it was a mistake, though, him coming. There was a great weight of the unspoken between them now. Why hadn't she rung? Why hadn't she written? Why hadn't she visited? What was he going to say? He held a hand out in front of him—he was shaking. Not like a leaf exactly. More like jelly on the plate. He felt sick. He'd taken all his Nurofen.

The old entry system to the flats. The porcelain bell buttons.

Should he stay or should he go?

He'd come this far.

He was determined that they weren't going to argue. They just needed to talk.

The cool touch of the bell on his fingers.

No reply.

He rang again.

Nothing.

He checked in his pocket for the keys.

Took a deep breath.

Let himself in.

They'd had it fixed, the main entry door—it used to jam halfway. The communal hallway was completely plain, magnolia, blue-grey carpets, the mirror. He glanced at himself in the mirror, wrinkled his brow, adjusted his glasses. His face was comic: there was nothing he could do about it; he always looked as though he weren't able to take himself entirely seriously, as though he were not entirely in control of his expressions. At best, he thought, you might describe it as charm. At worst…He tried to look sophisticated. He tried to look smart. But he couldn't. He was permanently dishevelled. Too big, too awkward. Not somehow…right. But, if he tried, he could carry it off. Shoulders back, head up—if it worked for Gérard Depardieu…

Going up the stairs, it felt like he'd never been away. He could remember the day they'd moved in together, how they'd talked for months about moving in together, and then eventually it had just seemed like the right thing to do, and so they did: they'd got the deposit together somehow—mostly a loan from Gloria's father, nice man, wealthy, charming,
bastard
—and then hired a van for the day, and Israel had picked up his stuff from his mother's house, and Gloria collected her stuff from her house share, and they'd done it. That was it. It seemed so simple, looking back. All the future ahead of them. Names on the doorbell. Israel and Gloria. Adam and Eve.

Up the last flight, and he looked at the walls, at the scuff marks where they'd carried up his old desk, and everything else; every stick of their furniture he'd carried up these stairs. Their bed: going to buy their bed together. IKEA. And Gloria insisting on buying the best mattress they could afford, and it was so heavy they'd had to ask their neighbours to help them up the stairs. Heaving their way up the stairs, and in through the door and into the bedroom. The fresh mattressy smell of it. The smell of their lives together. He could remember himself tingling with anticipation.

He came to the front door. He thought it would be better to knock, just in case.

He knocked.

And knocked again.

Perhaps he'd made a mistake in coming. Had he made a mistake in coming? He couldn't decide.

He put his eye to the little spyglass.

And then, at last, without further further ado, Israel Armstrong took out his key, put it in the lock, turned, pushed and walked in.

Finally, he was home.

'Hello? Gloria? Hello? It's only me.'

The flat swallowed his words.

No one was home.

Gloria wasn't there.

The hallway looked different. He couldn't decide at first what it was—not much. It was just…different. It wasn't as if she'd redecorated or anything. A complete rearrangement would have been easier to understand: but this, this felt more like…It wasn't a riposte. It was more like a subtle undermining. It was the posters. They'd never agreed on the posters. He didn't like Klimt. She didn't like Klee. He had that Matisse. She had a Georgia O'Keeffe. They hadn't agreed on a lot of little things. But it didn't really matter, stuff like that. He didn't like
Friends
. She didn't like
Seinfeld
. She loved
The West Wing
. He loved
The Sopranos
. It didn't matter. That's just who they were. Israel and Gloria. Gloria and Israel.

His posters had gone.

And the other things: a carved wooden bowl that his mother had given them, for salad, which Gloria had never liked, which they'd used for keys and loose change, gone; the pile of newspapers and magazines which he used to stack by the phone, gone; the old galvanised-steel USA mailbox with the red flag, which he kept by the door for umbrellas, gone. Gloria had stamped her mark upon the place, simply by erasing his. And it was
her
place. For legal purposes, when they moved in, Gloria had insisted that she sign the contracts for the flat; it made sense; Israel at the time wasn't earning much money. His name was on no piece of paper. He did not officially exist.

On into the main room, the living room.

He'd decorated this room when they moved in. From top to bottom. Stripped the paper. Put up fresh lining paper. Badly. Repapered. Big job. The radiators: he could remember pretending that he knew how to bleed the radiators, to impress Gloria, and how he'd attempted to take the first one off the wall, and not only did he find a stash of crinkly old porn mags stuffed down behind it, but he then discovered to his horror that the radiator itself had rusted to its brackets and the whole wall came away, bracket and radiator attached, and it turned out that his leaching had been rather less than successful because the carpet was soaked with stagnant water, and he just about managed to re-fix the brackets back on using some Polyfilla, but then he couldn't seem to get the radiator fitted back on and attached to the pipe, and there was water dripping not only from the radiator but also from the pipe, and…Everything. He'd done everything here. He'd made it his own;
they
'd made it
their
own.

But now…His books. She'd moved his books. His books had been cleared from the top row of shelves, the IKEA shelves, and in their place were photographs. None of him. Photographs of Gloria and her family. Black-and-white photographs—a family in black-and-white photographs; that's the kind of family they were—in modern frames. And Gloria's law books. The kind of book that cost £500. His books—paperbacks, books that cost about £5.99, maximum—were now jumbled and double-stacked on the bottom shelves, down behind the sofa.

He knelt down, pushed away the sofa, looked at his books, stood up.

Took a deep breath.

Into the kitchen. The little baby Gaggia in the corner: his machine. The top-of-the-range blender: hers. It was cleaner than he remembered, the kitchen.

The whole flat seemed to have been deep-cleaned.

Cleaned of him.

And finally the bedroom. Candles in the bedroom. New duvet cover—white. Gloria had a thing about Egyptian cotton. And the pillows had been redistributed, presumably so that Gloria was sleeping in the middle of the bed. His presence had been overruled. His space had been colonised. He checked the wardrobe. Where were his clothes? Since arriving in Tumdrum he'd been wearing cast-off clothes, like a scarecrow or a younger brother. His clothes had gone. He looked under the bed. He had no idea where she might have put his clothes.

He went back into the living room. Sat down on the sofa. The sofa he had carried up the stairs.

He was definitely going to maintain his dignity.

It was fine.

Everything was going to be absolutely fine.

He tried to do some deep breathing—he'd read about deep breathing exercises in a book from the mobile library,
Breathe to Live, Live to Breathe
, by an American with a foreign name, and he'd tried the exercises a few times, when they were parked up in lay-bys; they made him sleepy, but now, when he needed to, he found he couldn't do it. His breathing was…

He felt himself shaking again, and he began to feel long dormant emotions, terrible forces, welling up within him. He didn't know exactly what they were: rage, passion, lust for destruction. It was as though…He couldn't explain it. It felt like he had suddenly fallen into a whirlpool. Him, he—Israel Armstrong, mild-mannered, vegetarian, Jewish librarian—was drowning. And he had to fight for his life.

He suddenly got up and started to ransack—that was the only word for it—
ransack
the flat, looking for clues. Clues of something.

Of another man's occupation?

Possibly.

Possibly it was that.

Maybe that's what he was looking for. Maybe he knew. Maybe he'd known all along.

He searched through the cupboards. The wardrobe they'd carried up the stairs together. The chest of drawers that Gloria had inherited from an aunt; he searched under the bed; in every drawer. Nothing. There was no sign anywhere, no trace. But then wouldn't they deliberately hide the evidence? They? Them?

He was shaking so violently now he could barely contain himself. He thought he was going to explode. He realised he could never be satisfied ever again and he found himself yelling out loud, 'I will never be satisfied.'

Then there was the vase. By the bed. A vase that Gloria's mother had given them when they'd moved in together. He'd always hated that vase. White vase. He picked it up. It was full of stagnant water. He held it—felt it, the weight of it—in his hand.

And he went to the bathroom and poured out the water. Then returned to the bedroom, stood by the bed, felt it, held it—and threw it, very deliberately, very hard against the wall on Gloria's side of the bed. It dented the wall—plasterboard walls. The vase shattered.

And that seemed to do it. That broke the spell.

He was overcome then with guilt and shame, and he fell down onto his knees and began quietly sobbing.

He cried, and he cried—deep, satisfying, pointless, lonely, self-pitying tears—and then he picked himself up, went to the bathroom, wiped his eyes, took some toilet paper and returned to the bedroom.

And he carefully picked up every scrap and splinter of the vase.

He wasn't angry with Gloria. He wasn't disappointed with Gloria.

He was angry and disappointed in himself.

He was stupid.

Totally stupid.

It was late. He lay down on the bed.

That night the ceiling, half lit by the streetlights through the curtains, became the screen for Israel's nightmares. He saw himself with Ted, in the van, travelling forever. Travelling with no hope of arrival or rest. Pointlessness. Humiliations. Gloria with other men. Ted with his mother.

He was stupid.

Totally stupid.

It could never have worked between them. They were mismatched. Gloria's family: they had money. They were 'accomplished'—that was it. There was no higher term of praise in Gloria's family for someone they admired: 'accomplished'. Which meant money, really. He remembered Gloria's mother had once used the phrase 'inferior people'. He was an inferior person. Worse: he was neither one thing nor the other. He was neither inferior nor superior. He was just middling. He imagined himself riding in the van, down the middle of a long road, and then suddenly braking sharply, and the van beginning to keel over. The feeling of the van falling over.