Public Library and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  It was the kind of cheap thing a teacher did when he didn’t really want to teach the class that period. I thought about what I’d do with the time, if it was me who learned the words the fastest. Since there was nobody at home till one o’clock there’d be no point in me leaving school half an hour early, because I didn’t have a key for the house and I’d have to sit in the garden until one of my parents got home from work, and the dog would hear me and start barking to get out, and anyway it was raining, but if the shed was unlocked, I could sit in the shed and wait. Okay.

  But I had barely started reading the poem, barely got to the end of its second line, when someone at the back of the class pushed a chair back and stood up. We all turned.

  Face the front, old Macneacail shouted.

  Facing the front, we all heard Debbie begin at the beginning. If you can keep your head when all about you. Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. I followed the poem in the book in front of me through all four of its verses. She was word-perfect. She ended at the end. You’ll be a man, my son, she said.

  Then she picked up her bag and walked between the desks to the front of the class.

  Ah, but you didn’t learn that here in this classroom today, though, did you, em, eh, –, old Macneacail, who was flustered and had misplaced Debbie’s name, said.

  My father says it into the mirror every morning when he shaves, Debbie said. And you never said anything about us not being allowed to know it already.

  She swung out the door without looking back. The door clicked shut. We were all left behind.

  Debbie had gone elsewhere.

  *

  Elsewhere there are no mobile phones. Elsewhere sleep is deep and the mornings are wonderful. Elsewhere art is endless, exhibitions are free and galleries are open twenty-four hours a day. Elsewhere alcohol is a joke that everybody finds funny. Elsewhere everybody is as welcoming as they’d be if you’d come home after a very long time away and they’d really missed you. Elsewhere nobody stops you in the street and says, are you a Catholic or a Protestant, and when you say neither, I’m a Muslim, then says yeah but are you a Catholic Muslim or a Protestant Muslim? Elsewhere there are no religions. Elsewhere there are no borders. Elsewhere nobody is a refugee or an asylum seeker whose worth can be decided about by a government. Elsewhere nobody is something to be decided about by anybody. Elsewhere there are no preconceptions. Elsewhere all wrongs are righted. Elsewhere the supermarkets don’t own us. Elsewhere we use our hands for cups and the rivers are clean and drinkable. Elsewhere the words of the politicians are nourishing to the heart. Elsewhere charlatans are known for their wisdom. Elsewhere history has been kind. Elsewhere nobody would ever say the words bring back the death penalty. Elsewhere the graves of the dead are empty and their spirits fly above the cities in instinctual, shapeshifting formations that astound the eye. Elsewhere poems cancel imprisonment. Elsewhere we do time differently.

  Every time I travel, I head for it. Every time I come home, I look for it.

  This is what Kamila Shamsie told me about why libraries, and what becomes of libraries, matter:

  The library was located on Bleak House Road. It had high ceilings, and whirring fans and thick brick walls painted light blue which kept both paper and humans from curling over in the Karachi heat. Those were the days of military dictatorship when the movie ‘Rambo III’ (in which the hero killed Soviets in Afghanistan) seemed to be the only cultural import that the state deemed necessary for its citizens; some English language bookshops did exist but they were likely to stock primarily the kinds of novel that I would later learn to refer to as ‘airport bestsellers’ rather than anything that conformed to my childhood tastes. Besides, my reading rate of a book a day would have made it impossible for bookstores alone to meet my needs, even if we weren’t in Rambo world.

  And so, the visits to the British Council library on Bleak House Road where, if memory serves, a single pink library card allowed you to withdraw six books at a time. I read my way from childhood to adolescence here – Rumpole of the Bailey left me cold, but Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy was everything I wanted from fiction. That I remember those grim days of dictatorships as personally filled with joy and possibility has more than a little to do with the thrill of a library where it was possible to encounter the whole world from Alexander the Great to the newest version of me (for what better way to mark the changes in yourself than via the books your eyes once skipped over which now hold you in their thrall?).

  In 2002, post 9/11 ‘security concerns’ shut down the library. It has yet to re-open. Talk to Karachi’s citizens long enough about what that vast, troubled city of 20 million plus most needs and eventually you stumble on the phrase ‘places to escape to’. In other words, libraries.

  After life

  Ten years ago it was reported in the Evening News that I was dead. LOCAL MAN DIES.

  We were in Spain on holiday. When we got home the neighbours came running out to meet us. LOCAL MAN NOT DEAD AFTER ALL.

  The paper apologized profusely, sent flowers. I became a minor celebrity. I’d be walking down the street and total strangers would cross the road to shake my hand. I went in to work the following Monday; it was really something, coming back from the dead. Several women even made advances (and I showed them both, well, the one who definitely did, my wedding ring; I am an old-fashioned kind of man at the end of the day).

  I’d get home and my wife, Ellie, would kiss me and mean it; our two kids would look at me like I was a king. We held a dinner party for all our friends; we fitted our twenty-eight guests all the way up the stairs in the house and took a group photo with the camera delay button. It was a wonderful night. And the next night Ellie and I sat back into the sofa and watched Top of the Pops and Annie Lennox was on, battleworn but undaunted; she was going to be one of the people singing the new Millennium in. Our two kids cuddled into us, my wife was pregnant. Death wasn’t relevant to me.

  Then, yesterday, ten years almost to the day, it happens again. LOCAL MAN DIES.

  The report says I was hit in my Mazda by a truck at a road junction, that the truck had been delivering online shopping and that its driver suffered minor injuries.

  I phone the police to tell them I’m not dead and that I don’t have and have never had a Mazda. They tell me they’ve no record of me being dead anyway. I phone the paper. I leave a voice message on an automated phone system, which instructs me that the best way to contact them is online. I knock on Chloe’s bedroom door. Chloe flings the door open. She’s the only person in this house who opens a door fully these days.

  How can I be of subsistence? she says.

  Can I use your computer? I say. Your brother and sister are using theirs, and your mother’s looking up Michael Ball on ours.

  Mitch is using mine, she says.

  Chloe, I say.

  He’s helping me do a genealogy search, she says.

  You’re nearly ten, I say. Stop it.

  You can use it –, she says.

  Thank you, I say.

  – but only if you acknowledge Mitch, she says.

  Mitch has been a figment of Chloe’s imagination for about four months now. His full name is Mitchell Kenyon. Chloe has somehow come by a DVD of some ancient silent films, just of ordinary everyday people, made by two men called Mitchell and Kenyon a hundred years ago. The films were almost thrown in a skip but now they’re golddust and film buffs are restoring them. I know all this because Chloe watched the DVD obsessively on the lounge DVD player until I complained about wanting to watch TV. Mitch is what she’s decided to call the small boy she’s seen in one, got a crush on, and claimed as companion as surely as if he’d rolled bodily out of one of those old metal cans himself and turned up at our house. When I asked her a couple of weeks ago how old he was, she thought for a moment then said, a hundred and eighteen. I’m putting my foot down, he’s far too old for you, I said. That’s quite witty, Dad, she said. It’s like going out with your great-grandfather, I said. Did I ever
tell you the story of your great-grandfather and the jungle? Uh huh, how he was in a war, Chloe said, and they made a road, they cut through the jungle to make it, and the next morning they woke up and the road they’d made had disappeared, the jungle grew back over it overnight, lots of times, and I’m not going out with Mitch, we’re just friends. What, like your mother’s three hundred and fourteen Michael Ball Fan friends on Facebook? I said. The difference is, Chloe said, that Mum’s belief that they’re her friends is a figment of the imagination.

  I contact the Evening News by phone and email that night. But in the morning the online report is still pronouncing me dead. So before I go to work, and because the phone won’t connect me to anyone alive, I go in person to the newspaper offices. I speak to someone upstairs in editorial through a security speaker system downstairs outside the front door of the building.

  It says here James Gerard is deceased, the box-voice says.

  I’m him, I say.

  I’ve just checked it again and with all due respect, the voice says.

  Something catches my eye through the reinforced glass of the door. A CCTV black bubble in the ceiling of their foyer is blinking a red light at me.

  Can you see me? I say.

  I wave.

  Have you got photographic proof of ID? it says.

  I get my driver’s licence out and slap it against the glass.

  We’ll need a verification meeting with the newsgroup’s lawyers and your own self’s lawyers present before we can take this discussion any further, it says.

  Is this a joke? I say.

  The tannoy system clicks off. I hit the doorbell speaker box with the flat of my hand. Two security men appear from nowhere and stare at me through the reinforced glass. I mouth the words I’m not dead at them.

  Then I go to work.

  I’m alive again, then, I say to Claudine on reception.

  Right, Claudine says.

  She is slumped at her desk, her face pale in the light off her screen, her chin in her hand like it’s the end of the day. It’s 9.15 a.m.

  I circulate the report of my death in an email headed You Only Live Thrice. My computer spellcheck asks me did I mean You Only Live The Rice. I get one email back. Amazing, it says, wow. Can you copy me the file re Friday’s meeting and confirm the confirmation? Nobody phones. Nobody makes a pass at me.

  When I get home not a single person has phoned the landline about whether I am alive or dead, though there are two cold-call messages on the answerphone from double glazing life assurance salespeople.

  I sit beside Ellie at the dining room table.

  Clearly there’s no story in coming back to life, I say.

  Mm, she says.

  Why has this happened twice to me, d’you think? I say.

  Really strange, Ellie says.

  She doesn’t take her eye off the screen.

  Can I use the laptop? I say.

  I’m busy on it, Ellie says.

  Yeah, but all you’re doing is looking up pictures of koalas, I say.

  She turns and glares at me.

  Chlamydia. Eucalyptus shortage. Drought. The koalas are dying, she says. And there’s nothing we can do.

  There is desperation in her eyes. I look away. I don’t say anything. Then I go upstairs.

  I stand outside Nathan’s room. At Hallowe’en a boy in the same school year as him was kicked to real death by three sixteen-year-olds outside a kebab shop, apparently because he was wearing gloves.

  The door is shut. Foreign-sounding music is playing in his room. I knock.

  He’s watching Euro porn, Emily shouts through her own shut bedroom door. He needs cognitive behavioural therapy for being fascistly satisfied like the rest of the brainless masses by brainless wank and if he wanks in the upstairs bathroom again I’ll tell all the girls in his class what he does all night, the wanker.

  Emily, I say to her door. Don’t use words like that in this house.

  Which ones? she shouts back.

  Cognitive, behavioural and therapy, I say.

  Chloe opens her door.

  I think I can be of persistence, she says.

  I look up the Evening News website on Chloe’s computer and find that news of my death has been syndicated to all local news sources and has also spread to 1,663 sites. The response piece I sent last night saying I’m actually alive is published in their ‘Opinions’ blogspace. Below it is a post from someone called sophiecatxyz who castigates whoever is pretending to be James Gerard a man who has clearly died tragically for causing pain and emotional upset to a grieving family. Below this someone called Doctormyeyes has written: Like Michael Jacskon he may be dead but he will never ever die. I click on a link to a blog by someone called truthizoutther who says I’m definitely dead as a dodu as a doornail his coast is toast RIP JAME GERARD dead meat accept it man only zombies fight the force submit ok?? lol.

  I fill in the little reply box. At least I’m more alive than you are, I write. At least I can spell dodo properly, something you’re clearly too braindead to do.

  I sign my name. I thwack the send icon. I immediately feel better. Then I feel much worse and wish I hadn’t sent anything to anyone. It is somehow a defeat to have engaged at all.

  Chloe is playing with a plastic pony on her bed. She is galloping it up to a ridge in the covers and making it jump over the ridge. Each time she makes the ridge a little higher. I watch her form with her hands and knees a particularly high ridge.

  Chloe, I say. Am I dead?

  We are certain that you are not dead, she says.

  Who? I say. You and the horsie?

  I’m not a child, she says. You know perfectly well who.

  Chloe, I say. You’ve been told.

  She squares the pony in front of the high wall of bedspread and duvet. Then she starts pressing buttons on her phone.

  Who are you texting at this time of night? I say.

  My pony, to wish him luck, she says.

  Does your pony have a mobile? I say.

  Dad, she says as if the word dad means stupid.

  What about Rip Van Mitchell? I say. Does he have one?

  Chloe shakes her head.

  It’s like when the one eyed giant shut the sailor in the cave and started eating his shipmates, she says, and the sailor has to think how to get them all out of there, and what they do is they sharpen the phone mast and they stick it right in its eye.

  What, like with the Cyclops? I say.

  And then they camouflage themselves and get out of there, Chloe says. Because there’s so much more of the journey still to go. But they have to be ingenious to survive. He has to be a nobody. I’m A Nobody, Get Me Out Of Here. Do you want to stay for the Puissance?

  The what? I say. Are you doing the Cyclops at school?

  Half horse, half bike, Chloe says. Mitch thinks that humans will evolve like in Charles Darwin to have a square screen in our foreheads instead of having eyes. We will look at their screen to see everything we need to know. We won’t need to cogitate any more.

  Enough of the Mitching, I say.

  Are you finished on my MacBook? she says. Put it here. No, closed. It’s the water jump.

  It takes me a while to get it. Cyclops: half horse, half bike. When I finally do I’m in bed, lying awake again next to my sleeping wife. I’d come downstairs and she’d been looking up the symptoms of diseases. Why? I said. To see if I’ve got any of them, she said. Are you feeling unwell? I asked. She looked at me in surprise. No, she said, not at all.

  I get out of bed and put my dressing gown on. I stand for five minutes in the dark. I look out of the window at the front gardens of our neighbours in the streetlight, at the way the light reflects off the roofs of all our cars.

  Then I shake Ellie awake. I bang on all the bedroom doors. I tell everybody to meet me round the dining room table. I put the kettle on. I look in the fridge. There are some olives, grapes. I slice a carrot into sticks and upend a tub of hummus on to a plate. I open a bottle of wine.


  As soon as she gets into the living room Emily presses the TV remote.

  Put it off, Emily, I say.

  I’m watching it, she says.

  Turn it down, I say.

  She turns it fractionally down and angles her chair away from the table towards it. As the rest of them come downstairs bleary, the Twin Towers erupt again onscreen and I remember seeing it for the first time, I was passing a TV shop in town and every screen was showing the same thing. A programme called The Top One Hundred Things You Need To Know About The Noughties is on. A fast edit montage flashes up images of the Cheeky Girls, a MySpace page, a broadband hub, a page of Tesco’s online site, a newscaster with the words WMD on the screen behind her, Tony Blair laughing, the boys who present I’m A Celebrity in the jungle, an iPod, the word Twitter, a melting icecap, the painted C of the Congestion Charge, people holding little plastic bags in departures, a copy of The Da Vinci Code, the logo for YouTube, a newspaper hoarding saying MPS EXPENSES DUCKPOND SCANDAL, Damien Hirst’s skull, some logos for banks, Kirsty and Phil, people being vaccinated by a doctor in a surgery, Andy Murray flexing his arm-muscles, a PowerBook, a contestant for Big Brother coming out to a booing crowd, the screen of an iPhone, Baghdad in flames, a bendy bus.

  The decade between my deaths.

  I make Chloe put the extra chair for Mitch back where it was, against the wall.

  The kids look exhausted. My wife looks at the food on the table and the full glass of wine by her hand. She looks at me with tiredness and suspicion.

  I just thought we should all, you know, talk, I say.

  It’s half past two in the morning. What do you want to talk about? she says.

  Anything you like, I say.

  She looks away.

  I look at my son.

  Nathan? I say.

  I mime taking earphones out of my ears. He does as I ask.

  Start the conversation, son, I say. Anything. Anything random. Tell us what you were doing earlier this evening.