Public Library and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  Look at that, nothing but a passing honeybee, the kind of nothing that has two sets of eyes and makes a thousand flower-visits a day, a creature so clever that bees are already teaching themselves to combat the mites and diseases that have been killing them off so rapidly and so mysteriously (to humans at least) over the past few years. What’s honey? A sweetener? Two pounds of honey equals a hundred thousand bee miles. The ancient Egyptians were the first to use it as an antiseptic, it’s good on a burn, and it’s not just good with a cough or a sore throat, it can help fight anthrax, diphtheria, cholera, MRSA, and when doctors transplant people’s corneas the replacements are transported in honey.

  Without bees? Nothing. Nothing pollinated. Hardly any fruit, almost no vegetables. All the food chains disrupted, from the human one down to the insect.

  The beekeeper’s got twenty-eight hives in the park at the moment. He has no idea if they’ll survive the winter. Last year in the park only five out of twenty hives survived, and the year that followed was rough; a too-warm February, a too-cold spring, a too-wet summer; the bees needed supplementary feeding, God knows what’s to come. He began with imported New Zealand queens; they’re pretty, bright yellow and black. He’s worked at creating new colonies, new queens, in case of the same kind of bee loss as last year.

  Urgent. Current climate. He works for no salary. He makes a tiny profit on the honey he sells. Local feral bees are much blacker in colour. Last year he saw the yellow of the bees foraging in the roses by the café in the Inner Circle and he knew immediately they were Regent’s Park’s bees. The spring honey tasted, last year, of lime and somehow of passionfruit. Does light have a taste? Does the park have a taste? The late-extraction honey last year was medicinal, sweet, dark and powerful.

  Could any place be more historied and less ghostly? Where’s the ghost of the poet Elizabeth Barrett stealing the park’s flowers to put in an envelope addressed to her fiancé, Robert, in Italy? Where are the ghosts of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, sailing their paper boats on the pond? Where are the ghosts of the forty-odd people who went skating in January in 1867 and drowned in the lake when the ice gave way? Even them, cold and shivering, with the right to be a bit aggrieved, the right to hang about complaining for over a century, they’re just not here. It’s all open air. There’s nothing dead and gone about it. Elizabeth Bowen, watching the swans in their slow indignation; and Richard Wagner standing at the lake throwing bread to the ducks; and Samuel Johnson causing a mini riot because it’s too wet for the fireworks he’s come to see; Charles Dickens, melancholy, a woman’s been drowned in the canal; old George Bernard Shaw young again on the seat of a far-too-fast bike; Dodie Smith filling the park with the imaginary barks of dogs; Sylvia Plath, real as can be, hearing the hungry lion roar over the crib of her newborn child; then Ted Hughes, newly bereaved, the zoo-wolf howl in his ears; and Virginia Woolf herself, howling or furious or sad, doesn’t matter which, walking and walking by the flower-beds till it cheers her up, leaves her happily making up phrases.

  There’s the woman who comes into the park at half past six in the morning and spends all the daylight hours leaving little mounds of cake and sunflower seeds (she always buys organic) in the same places so the wildlife will find it there when it comes looking.

  There’s the story of the man who, nearly two hundred years ago, bought four tiny birds from a sailor he met in the park. He put the birds in his pocket. When he got back to his lodgings he set the birds free. He watched them soar up over London.

  Bet you any money, even if they’d been snared there in the first place, those birds flew straight back to the park.

  *

  One entire Park, compleat in unity of character. Endless stories, all crossing across each other, and mine tiny, negligent, quick as a blink, where nothing much happened except this: I stepped out of myself and into the park, I stepped off the pavement and into a place where there’s never a conclusion, where regardless of wars, tragedies, losses, finds, the sting or the sweetness of what’s gone in a life, or the preoccupations of any single time, any single being, on it goes, the open-air theatre of flowers, trees, birds, bees.

  In this way, at this time, nothing concluded.

  In other words: in foggy London town the sun, shining everywhere. The meeting could wait. It did wait, while I sat on the bench in Avenue Gardens and thought about the poem where the god of love gets stung by a bee and his mother laughs at him, and about whether there were as many different kinds of rose in the Rose Garden as there were different languages spoken in the city of London, and about the day back then when a visit to the park gave me back my own senses.

  I had no idea where you were today in the world. But I remembered, sitting there in the park, what it meant that our paths had crossed. I remembered, too, that old Mini you had and how its floor had rusted right through, and how we could look down and see the surface of the road pass so quickly beneath us that going at thirty miles per hour, twenty, ten, even something near walking-pace, shocked me every time with what it was that words like fast or slow or road or city really meant.

  Urgent. Core values. When I got cold I walked across the park in the happy noise of blackbirds. Then I went to the top of the hill and looked at the view. The city gathered round the park and rose out of itself as usual. I saw it all over again, as if for the first time.

  *

  Cupid, as he lay among

  Roses, by a Bee was stung.

  Whereupon in anger flying

  To his Mother, said thus crying:

  Help! O help! your Boy’s a dying.

  And why, my pretty Lad, said she?

  Then blubbering replyed he,

  A winged Snake has bitten me,

  Which country people call a Bee.

  At which she smil’d; then with her hairs

  And kisses drying up his tears:

  Alas! said she, my Wag! if this

  Such a pernicious torment is:

  Come, tel me then, how great’s the smart

  Of those, thou woundest with thy Dart!

  (from Anacreon, translated by Robert Herrick)

  Miriam Toews told me about how once, a couple of years ago, when she was sitting reading at a desk in Toronto’s public library, she saw her own mother come in and sit down in one of the sunlit seats by the windows. Her mother, without noticing her daughter there, settled down, stretched out and fell asleep.

  She sat where she was and watched her mother sleep.

  A library assistant approached her mother. She saw this assistant reach out a tentative hand and give her mother a shake.

  Her mother didn’t wake up.

  The assistant stepped back, stood as if thinking about it for a moment, then left her mother sleeping in the library sunlight.

  Grass

  I am no longer as young. But it’s May, chilly and damp but May. That sound above the far-off noise of traffic is birds. That smell is cow parsley. It’s rife in the hedgerow all round me now. A couple of hours ago when I was stuck on the motorway and hedgerows weren’t even imaginable, the air that came into the car was high with the smell of something, and when I finally got off the main road and on to the back roads I found out what.

  My car is near worthless. It’s worth so much less than I imagined that the fact that it still works at all is now surprising to me. I’d taken it to the dealership two towns away, took it to market like in Jack and the Beanstalk when he takes the cow to sell because they’re so poor they have to give up the last thing of value they own. I’d been in a traffic jam all the way back: a pile-up further along the motorway; it wasn’t the accident itself that was causing the crawl but the fact that everybody who drove past it slowed up to take phone footage. Nothing was moving. So I pressed the window button, which works very well in my worthless car, and I leaned out. I played with the channels on the radio and the button that makes the surroundsound happen. I switched the radio off. I checked my eyes in the mirror. I checked my teeth. I checked my phone. I notic
ed that the car clock was still on winter time. (This explained why I’d been exactly an hour late for a couple of meetings over the past few months.) I pressed the button that changes time. Summer at last. We inched forward then came to a standstill. I yawned. I sniffed the air. I looked to see what the stuff was in the pocket in the car door and I found this book in there.

  It must have been one of the books I’d boxed up for the charity shop. I had no idea how it’d got into the door pocket; it must have fallen out of the box. Maybe the mechanic who’d just looked the car over had found it under a seat and put it in there. Selected Herrick. It was a book I didn’t remember at all. Was it even mine? When I opened it, it was full of notes in my writing, the writing of my much younger self, so I must’ve read it at some point.

  My younger writing is narrow and pinched. My name, which I’d written on the first page, is squeezed up against itself as if determined to take up as little room as possible. I’d written things in pencil in the margins. Carpe diem. Greek mythological nymphs who took care of beautiful garden. On the inside back page I’d made a list of words I clearly thought were of use, bunch assortment tussock shock sheaf truss heap swathe bouquet nosegay posy skein hank. In the poems, I had underlined things; the phrase wild civility, the words and every tree / Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.

  Leafy gallantry. The words filled me with unease. Then they made me think of flowers in among, of all things, lightbulbs, batteries, hairdryers, curling tongs, irons, the stuff my father used to sell in his shop.

  I laughed out loud, I laughed so loud that the person in the Audi in front of me reached to adjust his or her mirror to get a look at where the laughter was coming from.

  It’s over two decades, a quarter of a century ago, the day the child with the flowers came into my father’s shop.

  I was looking after the shop for my father while I was home on holiday. I was doing this for almost no salary because three electrical goods chainstores had recently come to our town. This meant people didn’t bother bringing things in for repair because it was equally as cheap to throw things away and buy new ones outright (except not from my father’s shop). Christmas was the time of year my father usually made most in the shop. This most recent Christmas he’d barely scraped through. One of the new chainstores was twenty yards from the front door of the shop and lit up like Christmas all the year round.

  Now, though, it was Easter. I sat on the old kitchen stool at the counter every day that Easter holiday and read books for my Finals. It was literally quieter in there than a library. I picked at the sellotape over the rip in the cushioned seat of the stool and turned the page and the next page and nobody came in to buy anything.

  The book I was reading was about the life of a poet. There wasn’t much known about this poet’s actual life, the book said, other than that his father killed himself by jumping out of a fourth-floor window, so the book was a lot about what it was like to be on the edge of poverty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the part of London called Cheapside, and about how the houses jutted out from themselves above their first floors, overhung themselves like mushrooms, or galleons, and how until 1661 the people in London had been duty-bound to see to the lighting of their own streets, required by law to hang out lit candles on dark nights. There were seventeenth-century line drawings of places called Fynnesburrie Field and Moor Field, great grassy flat expanses with a few peasants selling things drawn on them, drawings of women drying clothes flat on the grass, soldiers practising archery. The shop door opened and I looked up. A child came in, nine or ten, arms full of bluebells and primroses and sticking up in the air high above the child’s head like radio aerials or butterfly antennae a couple of broken branches covered in blossom.

  The child’s long dark hair was girl-length and wavy, held back from falling across the eyes by two hairclips, one on each side of the head above the ears. Hairclips equalled girl. But it was something about the hairclips being so plain and then the face, a different kind of beautiful between them, that made me suspect that the child maybe wasn’t what I’d first thought.

  Where’d you get your flowers? I said.

  Canal banks, the child said.

  Up the canal was where the rougher girls at school tended to go to have sex with people. It was illicit no matter what you did up there. As children we weren’t, ever, supposed to go up there. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t grass about where we were. So the child was suspect as soon as I heard the word canal.

  It was true that the canal banks were often lined with bluebells at that time of year. But the branches, more likely they’d been snapped off trees like the ones in the front gardens of the houses in the Crown where the people who had money lived, closer to the town, far from the canal. I myself had grown up very close to the canal, which meant that anyone I told my address, if they knew the town at all, would be able to decide what sort of person I was and what kind of people my parents were – just like I was deciding stuff about this child, because something about him made me think of the woman who pushed the pram full of rags through the long grass of the fields at the backs of the houses, to whom my mother was always exceptionally polite and kind when this woman knocked on our door, and for whom she always saved our old clothes, done things, folded neatly in the cupboard at the back door where we kept the old newspapers.

  It was with one of the twigs, with its roughly split greenwood end rather than its bud end, that the child pointed at the row of toasters in boxes on the shelf behind me – as if pointing the broken stick back not at the toasters at all but at himself.

  That one please, he said.

  I closed my book. I looked up at the toasters.

  This one? I said.

  The one next to it please, the child said.

  That one’s exactly the same as this one, I said.

  It isn’t, the child said.

  They’re all exactly the same, I said. It makes no difference which one I get down.

  They look the same. But they are different individual toasters of the same make and model, the child said.

  It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I grew haughty.

  Pff, I said.

  I climbed up two steps of the stepladder and picked up the first box I came to. I got down off the stepladder, put the box on the counter and told the child the price.

  The child put the long twigs down on the counter next to the box and began peeling bluebell stems free of each other and laying the flowers separately out in front of me.

  Is ten enough? the child said.

  What for? I said.

  The toaster, he said.

  You’re joking, I said.

  How many do you need? the child said.

  I pointed to the price sticker on the box. Then I picked up the box as if to put it back on the shelf. But the child looked panicked. So instead, with the toaster box under my arm, I came round the side of the counter and out into the front of the shop because it had struck me that maybe that child had pocketed something while I’d been up on the stepladder with my back turned.

  But the child had no bag and only the thinnest grass-stained tee-shirt and shorts on, so I pretended to have gone out there especially to tidy the top layer of the rack of battery-powered mini-fans with the picture of the ecstatic woman cooling herself, a blur of little fan blades close to her delighted face. Not that anyone was ever likely to buy a mini-fan from an Inverness shop. The very existence of such an appliance was like a kind of highland Scottish joke. My father, an optimistic man, had ordered in fifty of them a couple of years ago plus this large display rack. Nobody had bought a single one.

  Meanwhile the child, who was nearly as thin as those broken-off branches, as thin and sharp as a sapling whip, and whose eyebrows, as I saw when I came back round to my side of the counter, were low and troubled, was passing a single many-headed cowslip from one hand to the other.

  Okay, this one too, he said putting the cowslip beside the other flowers next to the toaster.
/>   You can’t buy a toaster with these flowers, I said.

  Which flowers can I buy it with? the child said.

  If you want this toaster I’ll need actual money, I said.

  The child pointed again at the row of boxes above me.

  That one instead? he asked.

  This is a shop, I said.

  Please? he said.

  Don’t be stupid, I said.

  The child sighed. He looked me straight in the eye and dropped all his flowers out of his arms on to the counter. They lay there in a heap next to the petalled twigs and the toaster in its box. I shook my head.

  No, I said.

  I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember the child leaving. I presume he gathered up his flowers and left. Now, all the years later, I can’t remember for the life of me the price of those toasters. What I can remember is the bruised look of the bluebells, the green of their stems against their own blueness next to the photo of the toaster on the side of the box. I remember the way the blossom on those flowering branches on the counter was giving way to the green of the leaves behind it.

  The other thing I remember is that a month or so after that child came into the shop and tried to buy the toaster with sticks and bluebells, I was sitting an exam. It will have been a May morning, dust-motes lazy in the air in the sunlight above us coming through the high glass in the senate hall. I wrote down a quote from the poet I was answering on. As I did so I was filled with shame. Shame filled me literally, as if I were a jug held under a cold water tap.

  The question was something about gallantry.

  I bowed my head in the exam room with all the other heads bent over their papers in front of me, round me and behind me, all of us answering questions about poetry, and I felt like I had been found out. But about what, exactly, or what exactly it was I’d done to feel like that, I hadn’t a clue.