He was not only a misfit. He was an eating-disordered misfit.

As he was musing on his profound, increasing, aging misfitedness, a young woman had come up the steps into the library. Israel glanced up. She looked like she was in her midteens, although it was difficult to tell, because she had long, blonde hair hanging down over her face, big mascaraed eyelashes, and a black beanie hat pulled down tight over her head. Israel gave her a second glance: if she was indeed in her midteens, she should probably have been at school. They had this problem all the time, children bunking off school and skulking around the library. They called it “mitching off,” the children. “Aye, I’m mitching off, what are ye going to do about it,” they would retort to Israel’s polite suggestion that they return to school. He always felt vaguely responsible for truants, in the same way he felt vaguely responsible for the future of the rainforests, and global warming, and the war on terror. He felt bad, ineffectively bad, ruminatively bad. He felt bad but could do absolutely nothing about it. He wasn’t a politician, or a policeman, or a teacher, he was just a librarian, and, alas, librarians aren’t able to save the world, or even to act in loco parentis. He was powerless. In the end Israel’s only real responsibility was toward the books, rather than the readers. There wasn’t really much he could do for readers. The books he could cope with. The great thing about books is that they don’t talk back-unlike the teenagers, and the Mrs. Hammonds and Hughie Boyds and Mrs. Onionses of this world. Israel absolutely dreaded teenagers coming on board the mobile library, more even than he dreaded reading to the children of Tumdrum Primary, or even dealing with Mrs. Onions. Children are bad enough-children are rude, selfish, greedy, and unthinking individuals who are unable to distinguish between their own selfish wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. And adults are children with money, alcohol, and power. But that in-between stage, the teenage, is even worse, the interim between childhood and adulthood. In the interim between raging, selfish, impotent childhood and raging, impotent, insignificant adulthood you have adolescence, which is childhood with hormones. He hated Tumdrum’s teens.

The girl was wearing a short black skirt, and thick black tights, and heavy black boots, and a long black sweater, and she carried over her shoulder a black bag covered all over in black plastic spikes. It was a bag that looked as though it might have been useful as a cat scratcher, or as a kind of orthopedic aid for people with lower back problems caused by bad posture from sitting staring at a computer all day playing multiuser dimension games.

She looked like trouble. She looked like a Goth. He hated Goths.

“I don’t like the Goths,” he’d mentioned to Ted one day.

“Why not?” said Ted.

“I don’t know. They look like they’re in the Addams Family.”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” said Ted.

“Yes, but it’s…weird.”

“Weird!” said Ted. “Weird?”

“Yes, weird.”

“Aye, and ye’d know weird, right enough.”

“Yes. I would.”

“Aye, ye see, that’s just like ye-you’re a terrible hypocrite, so you are.”

“I am not.”

“Course you are. You’re all for this political correctness, and then ye’re after saying ye don’t like the Goths.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Ach, ye’re a sickener, so you are.”

“They come in wearing trench coats and…”

“What’s wrong with trench coats?” said Ted. “You don’t like people wearing trench coats?”

“No. It’s just…People wearing long black coats and…”

“Who are those people in Israel?” said Ted.

“Jews?”

“Yes, them. The ones in the long black coats and the hats.”

“That’s different. That’s religion.”

“Well, it’s the same thing for the young ones here.”

“It’s not a religion.”

“It is to them.”

“Anyway, Ted. I do not like the Goths coming on the library and smoking. And we’re not meant to be issuing them with X-rated DVDs and…”

“It’ll do them no harm, sure. And at least if they’re on the van they’re not out cloddin’ stones.”

“Clodding?”

“Throwing stones, ye eejit.”

“Right.”

“Not a jot of harm in ’em.”

“How do you know there’s not a jot of harm in them?”

“I just know,” said Ted. “When you’ve known people as long as I have, you just know.”

“Well, when the Goths go on the rampage and…”

“Ach, Israel, will ye lighten up for just one minute, will ye? It’s like listening to an auld man, so it is.”

Israel peered at the girl Goth over his book-Infinite Jest. She did look familiar, the Goth, but then all Goths looked the same to him: pale faces, dark clothes, like priests or Pierrots or members of Parisian mime troupes. The only discernible difference between all of Tumdrum’s Goths seemed to be in size: there were fat ones and thin ones, but nothing in between. There didn’t seem to be any such thing as a mediumsize Goth: Gothicism seemed to be a minimal and a maximal kind of a teenage subculture.

“There are no medium Goths,” he remarked idly to Ted one day.

“A medium Goth is called an emo,” said Ted. “Keep up, ye eejit.”

Ted of course had no problem with Tumdrum’s Goths. Or the emos. Because of course Ted had no problem with anyone: Goths, emos, drunks, loonies, children, Mrs. Onions, oldage pensioners. As part-time driver of the mobile library, and proprietor-driver of Ted’s Cabs (“If You Want to Get There, Call the Bear”), Ted knew everyone in town by name, and mostly from birth. He certainly knew all of Tumdrum’s Goths from when they were mewling and puking in the children’s book trough, and so was able to handle them with his usual aplomb, which mostly meant slagging, mocking, and teasing them, but also allowing them to smoke on board the library when it was raining. Ted called the Goths the Whigmaleeries, or the Wee Yins.

“And what are Whigmaleeries when they’re at home?” asked Israel.

“They’re Wee Yins,” said Ted.

So that had cleared that up.

The young female Goth hovered nervously around the fiction shelves for a few moments, glancing over her black-sweatered shoulder.

“Good morning, madam,” said Israel, breaking the Gothic silence. “How can I possibly help you?” He found sometimes that if he pretended to be positive and helpful it made him feel positive and helpful, for a brief moment at least. Were all positive and helpful people just pretending? “Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps?”

“What?”

“Edgar Allan Poe?” he said. “Master of the macabre.”

The girl looked blankly at him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just…You know. I like to guess sometimes which books people are going to borrow, just from the way they…You know…big…fat person, probably going to borrow a…diet book. Child, probably going to borrow…a children’s book…And a weird-looking person is probably going to…Anyway.”

Israel looked at the young woman’s unsmiling face. Either that was very heavy makeup and eyeliner she was wearing, or she had a very pale complexion and hadn’t slept for weeks.

“I’m looking for something…” said the young woman. She looked around again, over her shoulder, and lowered her voice. “From the Unshelved.”

“Ah,” said Israel, lowering his voice conspiratorially also. “Of course. The Unshelved.”

“Yes.”

Israel winked at her and reached down under the issue desk.

The Unshelved was an unofficial category of books that the library service-under considerable pressure from representatives from churches, and so-called community groups and local political parties-had agreed not to display on open shelves in the mobile library. The arrangement had been made long before Israel’s time in Tumdrum, but apparently, unbelievably, it had been agreed that because of the unique status of the mobile library-its stock being so small, and its serving such diverse communities-certain books would be kept under the issue desk, duly catalogued and available for loan but unseen by the young, the impressionable, and the mentally infirm who thronged the van’s potentially virulent, morally infecting eight foot by three foot browsing area. Books in the Unshelved category included perennial favorites such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, A Clockwork Orange, Nineteen Eighty-four, and American Psycho, and one or two racier titles such as Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and The Hite Report. During quieter moments in isolated lay-bys Israel had been known to have an occasional glance at the latter titles. There was, it seemed, no limit to human ingenuity and imagination. He’d also spent one entire uneventful afternoon on the van counting the various offensive words in Lady Chatterley. Thirty fucks or fuckings, fourteen cunts, thirteen balls, six each of shit and arse, four cocks, and three pisses. Which was quite a lot, really, when you thought about it.