Ian Sansom - The Delegates' Choice aka The Book Stops Here

He was confused.

He had a headache.

He rang again.

No answer.

Oh God.

Food. That was the answer. Food is always a great consolation in such circumstances, Israel had always found. He'd often turned to food in such circumstances in the past. When he and Gloria had argued in the past, for example, he'd usually find a way to slip out for a Chinese takeaway, or at least something from the corner shop-a packet of Pringles, at least: it was his version of therapy. It was always there for you, food. Everywhere, and always the same. A meal was a meal was a meal. And you couldn't say that about a therapist. Or a girlfriend.

They'd driven back to his mother's in silence, Israel and Ted, both shocked, and depressed, and irritated and annoyed by their encounter with Barry Britton. Ted said he needed time to prepare for their trip to Essex to find the van.

'What do you mean prepare?' said Israel.

'Prepare,' said Ted.

Israel imagined hunting gear and weaponry.

'We're not taking any weapons though, right?'

'Of course we're not taking any weapons, ye eejit; we're not the feckin' SAS.'

To prepare himself for going to Essex, Israel knew that he should probably have been doing yoga, napping and eating a freshly prepared salad, some steamed fish, and drinking some extract of wheatgrass, but he decided instead he'd be better off going to Grodzinski's for some cheesecake and an espresso. He rang round trying to rustle up a few old friends, managed to rustle up a couple and arranged to meet up with them to kibitz and to help him try to get his head together. Maybe they could brainstorm on what to do about the van. And Gloria. He needed help. He needed to reconnect.

He left his mum and Ted scheming in the kitchen, as usual, drinking coffee, petting the dog. He wondered what his father would have thought: his mother and Ted, sitting there. He decided not to wonder.

His mother had put up posters everywhere on lampposts in the surrounding streets, stuck them up with Sellotape and drawing pins. She'd got a clip art image of a mobile library; it looked more like an American school bus. 'Have you seen this vehicle?' the posters said. 'Reward £100.' Her mobile number. The posters were so weird-and so useless-they could have been an art installation.

The High Street looked different. Not just the street. Everything looked different. The people. Especially the people: a woman wearing a miniskirt and thigh-length suede boots, a man with his hair cut like something out of a Picasso and another man with-was that?-eye makeup. You didn't see that every day in Tumdrum. Israel walked from home in his worn-out old brogues, and his duffle coat-which was too hot, for the summer, clearly, but he had no other jacket, because all his clothes were with Gloria, in the flat-and his eyes popped, and his mind boggled: the sight of men in T-shirts with huge, pointless muscles, men who had obviously recently and consistently been to the gym, and to a hairdressing salon, and to shops that sold new clothes; and women too, who had obviously invested heavily in shoes, and bags and accessories; and people who had had their teeth capped, or something, something shiny to do with their teeth; and people who had been sleeping rough; people who looked like they had been sleeping around; people indeed of every proverbial creed and colour and race and nation. Israel felt like he was in a novel by Zadie Smith.

To steady himself he stepped for a moment inside Verdi's Stores, the Asian newsagent-cum-greengrocer's, and he was faced not only with shiny red apples, but also with watermelons, and ethnic vegetables, and sacks of peas and beans, and harissa paste, and big tubs of feta cheese, and cans of olive oil and the newspapers! Piles of newspapers in a dozen different languages. And the magazines! Every taste and impulse catered for. And cigarettes. And high-energy drinks. He stood staring around, in a daze, like an idiot. Mr Singh behind the counter, wearing his turban: the bright orange of the turban. And a man who came in, who was wearing a beret-an actual beret. And a woman, who looked Mexican or Spanish. And 'Shalom!' someone was saying. And 'Arrivederci!' And 'Adios!' And other stuff in languages he could not understand and did not even recognise-Hindi? Czech? Geordie? It was too much. He had to get some fresh air. He had to walk out.

And out on the street, at a bus stop, a group of black teenage girls were talking together, the sheer uninhibited noise of them, rising up out of them, bold as brass and twice as shiny, the sound of the city. One of the women was doubling back, laughing a laugh that seemed to come from deep down inside her, almost from underground, and which made its way up through vast echoing chambers, a booming laugh, like organ pipes with all the stops pulled out; this was a laugh of a kind that simply did not exist in Tumdrum; it was a laugh that could not arise there; it would have to have stayed underground; it would have remained a distant rumble, or a polite tune on a backroom harmonium. And then a car going past with its radio on, playing some kind of music-bhangra? Bhangra! The sheer noise of the traffic. Impossible to distinguish between all the noises or to make sense of the sights. Past the hairdresser's-all that grooming!-and the nail bar next door, with false nails like miniature pelts or butterfly wings displayed in the window. And the bookshop-the bookshop where he had first gone to buy Just William books as a boy, and then the Bellows, and the Malamuds, and the Philip Roths, and he could see his reflection in the window of this shop, a shop packed full of shiny, new, good-looking books, books that you might actually want to spend money on-non-library books-and he could see his face in the window, his shop window, his wide, long nose, and somewhere behind his glasses, that was him.

And he realised-or rather, half-realised, or he felt, he intuited-that it was as if he were observing all this for the first time, that he was enjoying it as someone who was not of it. He realised-half-realised-that he had exchanged his life in London for a life somewhere else, somewhere he did not belong, and so without meaning to, without even noticing it was happening, he had become doubly foreign: he had lost his place and failed to find another. He was a stranger even unto himself. The streets were no longer his home; they were for him now merely a tableau, something for him to observe, and to consume, and all these people, all these people with marvellous teeth, and extraordinary hairstyles, and the men in their berets and turbans, and the women in their fastidiously short dresses and skirts, they weren't real to him anymore. They were a show.

And he felt insulted, as though the place had tricked him or let him down, had turned its back on him. And so he hurried on to meet his friends at the café.

Which was no longer there.

Grodzinki's, which had been a fixture on the street for goodness only knows how long, had disappeared completely, and in its place was the inevitable brand-spanking-new Starbucks. The jumbly, intricate interior of the old Grodzinki's had been completely gutted and stripped and made over into the soft-edged comfy veneers of corporate creams and browns. There were none of the old posters, no nooks and no crannies, no mirrors; Grodzinski's had been full of mirrors. You could sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's and watch yourself sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's, watching yourself sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's, ad infinitum. It was a flaneurs' paradise. Israel had grown up there.

But now-what was it now? What was it supposed to be? What did it mean? In Grodzinki's you could have imagined Carson McCullers and Karl Kraus and Frank O'Hara sitting down and enjoying some strudel together, and espresso in pure white espresso cups, but here, now, in Starbucks, the best you could imagine was Elton John getting together with the man with ginger hair out of Simply Red for a sunrise muffin and a skimmed milk latte in a stupid fat mug with a logo.