Ian Sansom - The Delegates’ Choice

He turned up the radio louder to drown out the ennui and focused on his packing.

Brownie was back for the summer break from univer-sity over in England, so the Devines had moved Israel out of Brownie’s room, where he’d been staying, and out of the house and back into the chicken coop in the yard, where he’d first started out when he arrived in Tumdrum. Israel didn’t mind, actually, being back in the coop. It was good to get a little breathing space, and to be able to put a bit of distance between himself and George Devine—his landlady with the man’s name—and the perpetually Scripture-quoting senior Mr Devine, George and Brownie’s grandfather, and he’d done his best with the coop; had put in quite a bit of work doing the place up over the past few weeks. He had a desk in there now, along with the bed, and the Baby Belling and the old sink battened to the wall, and it was a nice desk he’d picked up from the auction down in Rathkeltair (Tippings Auctions, every Thursday, six till ten, in one of the new industrial units out there on the ring road, hundreds and hundreds of people in attendance every week, from as far afield as County Down and Derry, drinking scalding-hot tea and eating fast-fried burgers from Big Benny McAuley’s Premier Meats and Snacks van, and bidding like crazy for other people’s discarded household items and rubbish, and rusty tools, and amateur watercolours, and telephone seats and tubular bunk beds, and pot-plant stands, and novelty cruet sets, and golf clubs, and boxes overflowing with damp paperback books; Israel loved Tippings; it was like a Middle Eastern bazaar, except without the spices and the ethnic jewellery, and with more men wearing greasy flat caps buying sets of commemorative RUC cap badges). Lovely little roll-top desk it was, although the top didn’t actually roll, and a couple of the drawers were jammed shut, and Israel had had to patch up the top with some hardboard; but it did the job.

He also had a table lamp, which had first graced a home some time in the 1970s, by the look of it, and whose yellow plastic shade bore the scars of too many too-high-watted light bulbs; and also a small armchair which had at some time been re-upholstered with someone’s curtains, and which had a broken arm; and a couple of old red fire buckets to catch the rain that made it through the coop’s mossy asbestos roof; and also he’d rigged up a washing line using some twine and a couple of nails; and he had a walnut-veneer wardrobe crammed in there, with a broken mirror and only one leg missing, to keep his clothes in. To store his books he’d broken apart some old pallets and knocked up some shelving—him, Israel Armstrong, wielding a hammer and nails, and with the blackened thumb and fingernails to prove it—and these pretty sturdy shelves of his were now piled with books on one side of the bed and with jars of tea and coffee on the other, and an old teapot containing all his cutlery, two Duralex glasses and his enamel mug. He’d cut off a bit of an old mouldy scaffolding plank to cover the sink when he needed to prepare his food. The chicken coop wasn’t exactly a palace, but nor was it quite the proverbial Augean stable. Israel liked to think of it as an eccentric World of Interiors kind of a look—Gloria loved The World of Interiors. It was…there was probably a phrase for it. Shabby chic, that was it. With the emphasis, admittedly, on the shabby. Super-shabby chic? Shabby shabby chic?

It was shabby.

He squeezed his spare corduroy trousers into his case and went to the farmhouse, to the kitchen to say goodbye to the Devines.

There was only Brownie in, hunched over the table, reading. It was June, but the Rayburn was fired up, as ever. There were flies, but even the flies were resting. Old Mr Devine was a firm believer in fly-paper; the kitchen was festooned with claggy plumes of curling brown tape.

‘Israel!’ said Brownie, looking up. You could always count on Brownie for a warm welcome.

‘Brownie.’

‘How are you?’

‘I’m doing good, actually,’ said Israel. ‘Pretty good. What are you reading?’

‘Levinas,’ said Brownie. Brownie was studying Philosophy at Cambridge.

‘Oh, right. Yes.’

‘ Totality and Infinity ?’

‘Absolutely, yes,’ said Israel.

‘Have you read it?’

‘Erm. That one? Er. Yes, I think so. I preferred some of his…others though, actually—’

‘Alterity.’

‘Yes, that’s a good one.’

‘No, that’s the idea, translation of the French.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Israel dubiously.

‘Anyway, how are things on the mobile?’ asked Brownie.

‘Good! Yes. Excellent,’ said Israel. ‘Even better now, we’re going away for a few days.’

‘Oh, really? In the van?’

‘Yes. Yeah. Big conference thing over in England.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you giving a paper or…’

‘No. No. I mean, they did ask me, of course, but I was…It’s difficult to fit it all in when you’re at the…’

‘Coalface?’ said Brownie.

‘Exactly. The library is the coalface of contemporary knowledge management.’

‘Right,’ said Brownie. It was something Israel had read in one of the brochures for the Mobile Meet.

‘Anyway. I was wanting to explain to George I wouldn’t be around, just so that she—’

‘Ah, right. I think she’s out with Granda in the vegetable patch if you want to catch them.’

‘Great.’

‘Good. Well, enjoy the conference.’

‘Thanks, you enjoy the…’

‘Levinas.’

‘Yeah. What was it called again?’

‘ Totality and Infinity. ’

‘Yeah. Great book. Great book.’

Israel’s reading had always been erratic and undisciplined; there were huge chunks missing in his knowledge, while other areas were grossly over-represented; it was like having mental biceps, but no triceps, or glutes, or quads, or forearms; he was a kind of mental hunchback; misproportioned; a freak. Graphic novels, for example, were ten a penny up in Israel’s mental attic, along with the novels of E.F. Benson and Barbara Pym—God only knows how they’d got there—piled up uselessly like old trunks full of crumbling paper, together with a whole load of Walter Benjamin, and Early Modernism, and books by Czechs, and the Oedipus Complex, and the Collective Unconscious, and Iris Murdoch, and William Trevor, and Virtual Reality, and Form Follows Function, and Whereof One Cannot Speak Thereof One Must Remain Silent, and The White Goddess, and William James, and Commodity Fetishism, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Ruth Rendell, and Jeanette Winterson, and Anthony Powell—Anthony Powell? What was he doing there? Israel had no idea. He had a mind like Tippings Auctions. His actual knowledge of philosophy proper, say, or eighteenth-century literature, or science, anthropology, geology, gardening, or geometry was…skimpy, to say the least.

And since arriving in Tumdrum his reading had become even more erratic and undisciplined; he’d had to cut his cloth to suit his sail. Or was it sail to suit his cloth? He was reading more and more of what they stocked in the van, which meant crime fiction, mostly, and books by authors whose work had won prizes or who were in some other way distinguished or remarkable; thus, celebrity biographies and books about people’s miserable childhoods. But it wasn’t as though he felt he’d lowered his standards. On the contrary. Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent, that was a great book, much better than most Booker Prize-shortlisted books, in his opinion. And The Firm, by John Grisham, that was pretty good too. He’d even started reading Patricia Cornwell from A to Z, but they seemed to go downhill rapidly, and he’d lost interest around about D. Cookery books also he liked: a man cannot survive on scrambled eggs alone. For the journey over to England, Israel was taking with him A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Purpose-Driven Life, and a couple of large-print crime novels. most of the library’s crime novels were large print. Israel had discovered a direct correlation between print size and genre: crime fiction, for example, came in big and small sizes, and also in audio, and in hardback, and in several kinds of paperback, and trailing TV tie-ins; literary fiction occasionally came with a different cover relating to a film adaptation. And poetry was just poetry: he’d never come across a book of large-print poems; for poetry you needed eyes like a pilot, with twenty-twenty vision, opposable thumbs, and never-ending patience; on the mobile library they stocked only Seamus Heaney, and derivatives.