Early mornings in Lissbeg were always loud with the sounds of impatient horns, as cars competed with delivery vans and with shopkeepers struggling through Broad Street trying to get to work. Conor McCarthy couldn’t be doing with all that bother. Half the time he left his car at home and drove to his work in the library on his Vespa. It was the real thing, bought from an ad in the back of a newspaper and lovingly restored by Conor himself in a shed at the back of the cowhouse. Weaving down Broad Street in Lissbeg might not be quite as cool as scooting round cathedral squares in Italy, but Conor reckoned that coming to work on his Vespa was a lot cooler than trying to find a place to park his old Ford.
The town of Lissbeg was five miles from the village of Crossarra. It was hardly more than a wide street that got wider in the town center and had four narrow streets running off it. At its broadest point, a space that had once been a marketplace was given over to parking; the old horse trough in the middle of it, now filled with earth and surrounded by stone slabs, was planted each year by the council with busy lizzies or petunias. On one side of the flowery trough, bolted to the slabs, was a bench; but few people ever sat there because of the cars parked around it. According to Conor’s mam, all the schoolkids used to hang out round the horse trough back in the day. But you’d hardly see a kid in town at all now the new coed school was way out the road.
Across from the horse trough, the center of Broad Street was taken up by the frontage of the old girls’ school. The footprint of the site reached back along the two side streets that bordered it, taking in both the old school buildings and the convent that had once run it. When the nuns closed the school, the county council had rented some space there and Lissbeg Library was moved from a prefab—which had always been unsuitable—into the long, panelled room that had once been the school assembly hall. The main council building was in Carrick, but the council had located a few of its offices in the old classrooms on the ground floor in Lissbeg and a small parking lot had been carved out of the nuns’ walled garden. Both the library and the offices were accessed from a courtyard that had once been the entrance to the school. You got into the parking lot via a pedestrian gate from the courtyard and a security gate from the street, but only people with designated parking spaces had zappers to let them in. Miss Casey had a space with LIBRARIAN stencilled on the tarmac in bright yellow spray paint, but Conor had to fend for himself because, as far as the County Library in Carrick was concerned, a part-timer with a parallel existence as a farmer wasn’t a real council worker. Which was fine by Conor. He didn’t fancy himself as what his dad always called a pen pusher. He just liked books.
Besides, it was no trouble to find a corner for the Vespa, though Miss Casey was always complaining that he ought to have a designated parking space. Conor reckoned that had a lot to do with keeping her own end up by demanding respect for her assistant. But it was nice of her all the same. And, oddly enough, he liked Miss Casey. Most people called her stuck-up and standoffish, but she was grand once you got to know her. It was weird to think that the library had been her school hall when she was a kid and that the whole place used to be leppin’ with nuns. There was still a couple of old ones living behind in the convent, which, according to Conor’s brother, Joe, was probably why the Church hadn’t sold the place off long ago. Some of the lads in the pub said Joe was daft. All right, it was a grand big site in the middle of town, but you only had to look at the state of the property market to see that no one would offer for it. What with the banks refusing loans and the country full of brand-new houses that wouldn’t sell, the Bishop must be down on his two knees thanking God that he’d struck his deal with the council. At least he had a decent whack of rent coming in to keep the damp out of the buildings and the lights on.
Conor steered the Vespa round the mass of parked cars in the center of Broad Street, cutting in and out between the cars and trucks. Then he got off and wheeled it into the courtyard that had once been the entrance to the school. According to his mam, that entrance had never been used by the nuns. They had a private door round the back of the block, leading into the convent. The old school door now had a plastic notice saying OPENING HOURS 9:30–5:00, MONDAY TO FRIDAY. The door to the library was across the courtyard. Generally Conor left his Vespa there in a corner, except on Wednesdays when the space was blocked by garbage bins waiting to be emptied. This morning the space was free so he locked his bike, took off his helmet, and went into the library.
He loved the smell of the books in the panelled room. Most of them were fairly new but some belonged to a collection that had been there when the room was the old school hall. They had leather covers and thick pages with torn edges, and the leather and the paper smelled wonderful. He wasn’t sure he’d want to read them, mind, with their tiny print and dark pictures and diagrams, but he loved the feel of them in his hand. Some of the bindings had tooled edges and rubbed gilt decoration and the endpapers had feathery patterns on them like you’d get on a cream slice. There were masses of them, including O’Neill’s big music collection, The Dance Music of Ireland, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and a Talbot Press edition of selections from Maria Edgeworth’s works. Miss Casey kept them in the old bookcase with glass doors at the end of the room and nobody really noticed them. The novels and reference books and all the other sections were displayed on modern metal shelves. Each was covered in a transparent plastic jacket and whenever a book was returned the jacket was cleaned with a solution of dish detergent kept in a spray bottle. And before anything was put back on the shelves it had to be checked for bookmarks. People left the most unlikely things in books. Once Conor had discovered a rasher of bacon in a Maeve Binchy novel and Miss Casey had hit the roof. She drafted a stern email saying the book would have to be replaced at once and an official invoice would follow. Conor loved the idea of old Fitzgerald the butcher, a tetchy little man with a face like a hen’s bottom, being a closet Maeve Binchy reader. The book had been taken out by Fitzgerald’s wife—it was almost always women who came into the library—but there was no doubt that the rasher had come from the butcher’s shop.
So Conor and Miss Casey didn’t have much in common. Except the books. Having said that, there were times when you’d think Miss Casey didn’t like books at all, the way she wouldn’t want to chat about them. But, then, other times, she’d show him things like that big book about Canaletto that had amazing paintings of Italy. Afterwards, Conor had typed “Images + Italy” into a search engine and been blown away by a mixture of really old paintings and really cool photographs, including guys on Vespas whizzing round cathedral squares. That was what had made him determined to find himself a Vespa of his own.
Today, as soon as he’d checked the computers, Conor went down to make himself a coffee. Miss Casey was at the desk looking a bit grim so he didn’t disturb her. Not that her moods upset him; he was used to them and, anyway, as his mam said, you’d have a right to be moody if you lived with old Mary Casey. While he was waiting in the little kitchen for the kettle to boil, he gave the sink a bit of a scrub. You might as well get on with other stuff since you didn’t get many borrowers this early in the morning. Though young mums with strollers would sometimes use the library as a meeting place, which was another thing that annoyed Miss Casey. Conor suspected that, if she had her way, she’d have an old-fashioned sign up saying SILENCE. She despised what she called gossip, and the sight of a bunch of girls with their heads together in the corner drove her wild. Conor thought they livened up the place.
The trouble with Lissbeg was that there were few enough places for people to meet. It seemed like every year someone would get the notion of opening a coffee shop or a deli where you could sit round and chat. They’d borrow money, paint a place up, and put out plants and stuff to attract attention. Sometimes there’d be a bit about it on the local radio or they’d take an ad in the free newspaper that was delivered to the hotels and B&Bs up and down the peninsula. But most tourists drove by Lissbeg without stopping and people like Conor’s mum weren’t up for expensive organic pine nuts or mozzarella wraps. So, sooner or later, handwritten signs advertising full Irish breakfasts for a few euro would get stuck up in the new coffee shop windows and then you’d see tea and maybe toast thrown in for free. In the end the money would run out, the business would collapse, and yet another window in the town would be full of lists of kitchenware and shop fittings for sale.
And each time Conor attended a farewell party for another of his friends who had given up on making their living in Lissbeg, he thanked his lucky stars for his own job in the library. It might only be three days a week, but it was steady work and it meant that the family farm hadn’t had to be sold. Conor’s dad, Paddy McCarthy, had injured his back several years ago: he could still get about but the heavy work was more than Conor’s brother Joe could do on his own, and the farm didn’t yield a decent wage for the three of them. If it hadn’t been for the library, Conor would have been on the emigrant boat and the land the McCarthys had farmed for generations would have been sold off to strangers. It was great to know that they could stagger on, at least for the time being. And maybe later on, if things changed at home, he could train for a proper qualification and find himself a full-time library job. Nothing was certain these days, though. And, like his dad always said when he had a black mood on him, it only took a stroke of some pen pusher’s pen to turn everyone’s dreams upside down.