'Mother!' said Israel.
'Where is it, Ted?' said Israel's mother. 'Your cousin's pub?'
'It's…Hold on,' said Ted. 'I've a wee scrap of paper here.' He took some crumpled papers from his pocket and sorted through them. 'Here we are,' he said. 'I wrote it down. It's called the Prince Albert, in Camden Town. I thought I might look him up while I was over here.'
'That's a lead!' said Israel's mother.
'That is not a lead,' said Israel. 'Ted's cousin who works in some grotty pub in Camden is not a lead. I might as well go and ask some of my friends if they've come across a stolen mobile library recently.'
'That's not a bad idea either,' said Israel's mother. 'We've got to cover every angle.'
It's a wild-goose chase, Mother.'
'It's not a wild-goose chase.'
'Yes, it is.'
'Well, have you got any other leads?'
'No.'
'And how do you know it'll be grotty?' said Israel's mother.
'What?'
'Ted's cousin's pub.'
'Of course it'll be grotty!'
'You don't know that. It could be like a gastropub,' said Israel's mother.
'Yeah, right,' said Israel. 'Maybe we should go there for lunch, then?'
10
Israel was glad that he'd managed to persuade his mother not to join him and Ted for lunch at the Prince Albert.
The Prince Albert was not a gastropub.
The Prince Albert sits on the corner of Georgiana Street and Royal College Street, in Camden, London, NW1, a big wedgy-shaped red-brick and terracotta building. It reminded Israel of the Flatiron Building in New York. Israel absolutely loved the Flatiron Building; to Israel, the Flatiron Building represented Manhattan itself, which in turn represented the good life, the cosmopolitan, the sophisticated, and everything that Israel aspired to-intelligence, wit, repartee, and profound, geeky men in suits and sneakers, and complicated, elegant women in sunglasses, and evenings out with high-end friends in hip new neighbourhood cafés discussing the latest intellectual fashions and comparing stock portfolios. To Israel, the Flatiron Building represented a way of life.
Unfortunately, it wasn't his way of life. (Israel had never ever been to the Flatiron Building: he'd seen it in Spider-Man films. The Flatiron Building, like Grand Central Station, and the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty, and the whole of the rest of New York, and Boston, and San Francisco, and all America, indeed, as well as most of continental Europe, and Asia, and Africa, and Australia, and Antarctica, existed only in Israel's mind, where they had all come to resemble one another: cities, plains and mountains fabulously, exotically and glamorously there, a world of undiscovered and unreachable El Dorados compared to Finchley's and Tumdrum's unavoidable and everyday here. Israel had travelled widely in his imagination, and gone absolutely nowhere; he was imprisoned by limitless horizons. Just the thought of travel gave him a headache.)
And inside, of course, inside, the Prince Albert was nothing like the Flatiron Building. Inside, comparisons to Manhattans both real and imagined quickly evaporated. Inside, the Prince Albert was a typical stinking London Irish boozer: dirty, depressing, dull and completely empty, except for one lone drinker who wore a porkpie hat and dirty boots and a ravaged-looking suit, and who didn't look up as Israel and Ted approached the bar.
'Gastropub!' said Israel. 'God!'
'Language,' said Ted.
'Sorry,' said Israel. 'But I mean…Couldn't they at least give the place an occasional sluicing out?'
There was music playing, a tinny radio-cassette player behind the bar, its shiny silver plastic rubbed black and white with age, the sound of a female singer sighing and deep-breathing and claiming that she wanted to be a slave to your rhythm, over ululations and ecstatic drumming, and a bass line that sounded like it was being played on very tight knicker elastic. In a too-small alcove off the bar there was an old, frayed and chipped pool table, with a big dark stain on the baize that looked as though someone might once have given birth on it. The table was wedged in with just a few feet to spare all round-London Irish pool players having notoriously short arms-and it was flanked and shadowed by big faded, framed posters on the walls all around it, showing the Mountains of Mourne sweeping down to the sea, and County Kerry, and Cork, and a framed jigsaw of the Giant's Causeway, which made it look as though the basalt rocks had been machine-cut and pieced together on a Sunday afternoon by bored children and their maiden aunts.
Above the bar a chain of pathetic, dirty nylon Irish tricolours hung down like leprechauns' washing, a set of rainbow flags hanging even more pathetically below them, and behind the optics, tacked to dirty mirrors, there were nicotine-stained, crumpled, damp cartoon pictures of the Great Irish Writers: James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney and W. B. Yeats, and also, incongruously, ABBA and Barbra Streisand, all crowded together and looking as though someone had pissed all over them. Brown paper peeled from the walls and yellow paper hung down from the ceiling. The floor's grey lino was cracked and turning black with age, and the paintwork on the doors and windows was worn almost through to the wood. You could hardly say that the Prince Albert was a bar in decline; the Prince Albert had already declined; it had long since stooped, and slipped, and was starting to go under.
Israel texted Gloria.
No reply.
'Tricolours!' murmured Ted, 'bloody tricolours!' while he ordered drinks from the barman, who was not blessed with English as a first language, but who coped manfully, square-jawed with it as perhaps his fourth or fifth, and who could certainly manage any instructions that included the word 'Guinness', if spoken loudly. He fared less well with Ted's asking if his cousin Michael was in working that day, and if not, where they might possibly find him. After a few minutes of complex misunderstandings-involving the barman talking about his cousins, who were somewhere back home in Silesia, apparently-the barman disappeared behind a beaded curtain. He came back a few moments later.
'Name?' he said.
'My name?' said Ted.
'Yes.'
'Ted,' said Ted.
'Sorry. Again?'
'Ted,' said Ted. 'T. E. D. Carson. C. A. R. S. O. N.'
'Okay. One minute please.'
'Foreigners!' said Ted, as the barman disappeared back behind the beaded curtain.
'You're a foreigner here, remember,' said Israel.
'I don't think so,' said Ted.
'Yes, you are,' said Israel.
'Aye,' said Ted. 'The United Kingdom? United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Ever heard of it?'
Israel harrumphed and tutted-did Ted never get tired of being a relic?-and as he tutted, almost as a kind of tut echo, there was a sound as of a large object, a man, or a side of beef, or a beer barrel perhaps, being rocked slowly down a stairway, and then suddenly the barman re-emerged from behind the beaded curtain, with an old man following him.
The old man walked stiffly, loudly, with a crutch-like a beer barrel or a side of beef being rocked slowly down a stairway-and he had worn, patchy white hair and an unshaven, furry sort of puce-coloured face, as though someone had just rolled a little baby pig's head around in pinhead oatmeal. He wore tight grey nylon slacks and a too-large tomato-red shirt with pure white cuffs and collar, a shirt of a kind that Israel had only ever heard rumours of; the kind of shirt that now existed only in retro TV dramas. He also wore a black-and-white polka-dotted silk scarf. And then there was the jewellery, lots and lots of jewellery: rings, bracelets, a big chunky gold necklace and a huge watch of the kind that looked like you could fly to the moon with it and still not have exhausted all its unique features. The old man may have had a head like a pig and may have struggled to walk farther than a couple of hundred yards, but he was utterly, utterly blingtastic.