Public Library and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  A toaster.

  A cowslip.

  It makes me laugh now, sitting on the verge along from my still-ticking car, so long after. It makes me fond of my much younger self. I was moral, me, then. Decades it’s taken me, finally to understand why I felt shame that May morning.

  Here’s one of the poems Robert Herrick wrote; it’s called Upon a Child: An Epitaph.

  But born and, like a short delight,

  I glided past my parents’ sight.

  That done, the harder Fates denied

  My longer stay, and so I died.

  If, pitying my sad parents’ tears,

  You’ll spill a tear or two with theirs,

  And with some flowers my grave bestrew,

  Love and they’ll thank you for it. Adieu.

  He was born in 1591 and died in 1674. When he was an infant, it says in the introduction, which I’ve been reading sitting here in this long grass with the May cold coming through my clothes, his father, Nicholas, either threw himself out of or fell out of the fourth-floor window of the house they lived in, leaving his widow not just with six children to feed, of whom the youngest was Robert the poet, but also pregnant with the seventh. Robert Herrick himself was apprenticed young to his uncle, a goldsmith, then went on to become a churchman. He is most famous, it says here, for his poems about girls, love, spring, flowers. Fair daffodils, we weep to see / ye haste away so soon. Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes. How Roses Came Red. To a Bed of Tulips. To Violets. To Meadows. To Primroses Filled with Morning Dew. To Daisies, Not to Shut so Soon.

  The car door is hanging open, the car parked as far up the verge as I can get it, but there’s nobody on this road but me, there’s been nobody for the last half hour. It’s a while since I got out of the traffic and followed my nose through a couple of rough-looking villages whose high streets were boarded-up shops, past some well-to-do houses and barn conversions; I have no idea where I am right now but there are five or six different kinds of long grass here where I’m sitting. They must be different kinds because they have different shaped seed-heads. This one has a smooth stalk, dark green, and a head with long branching clumps of flowering seed on it. This one’s seeds are much smaller and bushier. Its stalk is much lighter green. The core of the second one is sweeter, when I put it in my mouth, than the first.

  I have no idea what the grasses are called. I recognize some of the flowers. That’s ragwort. Those are cornflowers. That’s red clover. Those are ox-eye daisies.

  Swear on your mother’s life. Nearly three decades on and my mother is dead, my father too. The place where the shop was is still there, though now it’s a place selling highland clan souvenirs. That old woman who used to wheel the pram of rags; she must be long dead too.

  I’d cover them with flowers. My mother, folding done things into neat piles for a poor woman; my father, imagining heatwaves for the Highlands: I’d gather up all the seasonals, the wild and the cut and the cultivated, the old roses, the new, the bluebells and primroses, the columbines and woodbines, the meadow cranesbill, the ragged robin, the jasmine, the honeysuckle, the poppies and cornflowers, the everything else, yellow cowslips, the cowslips particularly. I’d knock on the door of the house I grew up in and when they answered, my much younger parents, I’d cover the step with the wealth of them, and when that old woman knocked on the door with her rag pram I’d fill it till they came over the sides and filled the torn black hood, spilling on to the pavement behind her as she wheeled it off down the road.

  I empty the change from my pockets into the long grass. The money disappears as I watch. I can still just see the edge of the fifty pence piece, so I pick it up again, turn it over, tails, heads, and check the date. 1997. It was a year I lived through. Britannia is sitting on a lion’s flank holding a sprig in her hand. Olive? Laurel? I stand up. I throw the coin as far as I can into the thick new growth in the coppiced wood behind me.

  Ha! It goes quite far.

  I’d fill every toaster that ever stopped working, got thrown out, got buried in landfill. I’d fill all their slots with wild colours and flowerheads. I’d fill that old shop with the smell of this earth.

  Here’s what Helen Oyeyemi told me about the connective network of public libraries:

  Public libraries were the making of me. The local library was a very practical solution to restlessness of mind plus very minimal funds. But the amazing thing was that there were three libraries in one. I lived close to the smallest of those (Deptford branch) but if I needed a book that the Deptford library didn’t have, I was referred to the medium-sized library (Lewisham), which was a longer bus ride away, and if the medium-sized library didn’t have the books I needed, then the biggest one definitely did, and I’d go all the way to Catford for those books. Between them these three never let me down. It was like living in a triangle of protection. The public library network definitely strikes me as some sort of live and benevolent organism.

  Say I won’t be there

  I had a dream, I say.

  Don’t tell me about any dream right now, you say, I can’t listen to it right now.

  We are sitting in what characterizes weekday breakfast, which means us not saying anything and the Today programme on in the background. Today the Today programme is about the possible break-up of the Eurozone, about a government scheme to give parents online training in how to look after new babies, and about how some government people are swearing they’re not in the pockets of newspaper people regardless of any SMS messages they may have sent to them and how nobody is going to resign. The word they keep using is transparent.

  It’s not just any dream, it’s the recurring dream, I say. The one I’ve been having all year. I had it again. I keep having it.

  Tautology, you say.

  What? I say.

  You just said the same thing four times over, you say. And I can’t hear about your dream right now. I’ve got work in a minute.

  I’ve got work too, I say.

  Then I don’t say anything for a minute because we both know that sending CVs out online to try and find work doesn’t really constitute work.

  Anyway I don’t want to tell you it, I say. I’m just telling you the fact that I had it again.

  Good, you say.

  There’s a graveyard in it, I say.

  In the dream? you say.

  You raise your head from your coffee because today the company you work for is meeting some people who run a business which is extending its premises into the site of an old churchyard, to see if the people like the company’s plans for turning burial ground into tidy new landscaping. Some of the things I’ve said to you about this and that you’ve shrugged your shoulders at are: are you allowed to do that? and what about the dead people? and you can’t tidy a graveyard into something else, it’s always going to be a graveyard. If the graveyard deal falls through it looks like your job will too, because your company is laying off people right left and centre.

  Am I in it? you say.

  The graveyard? I say.

  The dream, you say. Don’t tell me the whole dream. I just want to know if I’m in it.

  You’re not, I say, and it’s not your graveyard, it’s a 1960s graveyard. And I’m not even in the dream, myself. I mean, I’m in it, but not as me.

  How then? you say.

  Well, I say, in it I’m a different person. I’m, like, a character in a 1960s novel.

  Which 1960s novel? you say. Who by?

  Not a real actual novel, I say. Not a novel that exists. I’m just trying to find a way to describe what it feels like to have the dream.

  And you’re like a character or you are a character? you say.

  Pedant, I say.

  Are there scooters? you say.

  Eh? I say.

  Milk machines? you say. Where you put your coin in and a little carton of milk drops out. Photo booths. Record booths, upstairs in Woolworths. Where you wait your turn then you listen to a record and don’t have t
o buy it.

  Don’t start trying to turn my dream into a cheap graphic-designy version of the 1960s, I say.

  Are there any women in it who are pregnant and thinking about having an abortion but know how impossible that’ll be so they end up having a terrible miscarriage because they have to go to a backstreet place to have it done? you say.

  Yes, hundreds of them, I say, and they’re all queuing up looking aggrieved at the future. Stop hijacking my dream.

  How do you know it’s a 1960s book and not a 1960s film? you say.

  I’m not telling any pedant anything else about any dream of mine, I say.

  I told you already I don’t want to hear about your stupid dream – you say.

  It’s not a stupid dream – I say.

  And I was just interested for a moment in the form it’s taking, you say. Because dreams are usually really visual, aren’t they? More like films. Is it like A Hard Day’s Night?

  No, I say.

  Do you remember that time we were driving back from Wales, you say, and I was falling asleep at the wheel and the only way we could keep me awake was to play the soundtrack of A Hard Day’s Night really loud?

  No, I say.

  No? you say.

  No I don’t, I say. And it’s not like a film, it’s grimier, and calmer, and smaller, and less meaningful than a film is. It’s kind of nothing. And everything.

  How does that make it a novel? you say.

  It’s like I can sort of taste the paper, I say, and smell it, the paper the book’s made with, even though I’m sort of seeing it happen.

  Seeing what? you say.

  There’s this man with his arm in a sling, I say, and he comes home from work late one night and goes up the stairs and there are these three small girls all in a row in a bed, tucked in, they’re asleep, but he wakes them. So he can tell them.

  Tell them what? you say.

  I thought you didn’t want me to tell you my dream, I say.

  I’ve got to go in a minute, you say. Come on.

  He tells them, I say, how the day before he comes home – he’s been down south working in London – anyway the day before, he’s just walking along the road, turning a corner on an ordinary London street on his way to work when all of a sudden he sees her.

  Who? you say.

  Dusty Springfield, I say.

  Dusty? you say. Really? What’s she singing?

  She isn’t singing anything, I say, she’s having her photograph taken in a graveyard by a man from the Daily Mirror.

  How do you know he’s from the Daily Mirror? you say.

  I just do, I say. Dream logic.

  I can’t believe she’s not singing something, you say. That’s because you don’t like her music.

  I do so like her music, I say. I just don’t know very much about it.

  You don’t even know a single song she sang, you say.

  I do so, I say.

  Name some songs, you say.

  She sings the song in that Quentin Tarantino film where the man gets his ear cut off, I say.

  Son of a Preacher Man, you say, and it’s not in that film, it’s in a different Tarantino film.

  Whatever, I say.

  Name one, you say. Just one.

  That one where she waves her arms about in the air when she sings it, I say. And that song about only wanting to be with you, that Annie Lennox sang. And, uh, she sings, eh, she also –

  It’s me who likes Dusty, not you, you say. And you’ve stolen my workplace too. Dusty Springfield. In the graveyard. Your dream is filched from me. You’ve taken something I like and you’ve put it into something I’m working on. You’re filching my subconscious.

  No I’m not, I say. I’ve been having this dream much longer than you’ve been working on any graveyard project. I’ve been having this dream for more than a year.

  Well, where’s it come from? you say. It must have come from somewhere. Is it something that happened in your childhood?

  No, I say. Not at all.

  Is it your father in the dream? Did your father do something like that? Who are the other two girls in the bed? Is it from before your mother went?

  All the people in the dream, I say, are strangers to me. I recognize them, but only from having dreamed about them before. And I’m looking out of the eyes of a different person in the dream every time I dream it.

  You’re looking at the clock. You stand up, wipe the crumbs from round your mouth, wash your hands at the sink and take your ironed shirt off the back of the spare chair. I follow you to the hall mirror.

  So sometimes I’m the man coming up the stairs, I say, and sometimes I’m the girls’ mother, and sometimes I’m one or other of the three girls in the bed.

  You are buttoning yourself up.

  And sometimes you’re Dusty? you say.

  No, I say. I never get to be Dusty. Not yet, anyway.

  Why? you say.

  I don’t think we get to choose with dreams, I say. And properly speaking, she isn’t actually in the dream. I never get to see her. I only get to hear about her or tell people about seeing her.

  You are at the door now pulling your jacket on. Your ironed shirt is rumpling up already beneath the jacket.

  Right then. Bye then. Wish me luck, you say.

  Luck, I say.

  See you later. I’ll text you, you say.

  Not if I text you first, I say.

  The door shuts behind you.

  I go back and sit at the table in the noise of the radio news.

  The people on the radio tell me that the jobless figures are down, but that if you look at the statistic while taking other statistics into account the jobless figures are up. A presenter tells me I can send in my thoughts. He tells me the hashtag. He tells me about the 24 hour newsfeeds online and how to contact the programme. It is amazing how many ways there are now to be personally in touch with what’s happening in the world. The presenter reads out a couple of comments some people have emailed or tweeted.

  I look at the shut door. Houses change when people come in and out of them. Even the radio sounds different with just me here; this whole house and all the air in it is practically reeling with your going, even though it’s just a simple going, an everyday off-to-work kind of going.

  I am far too sensitive. Something will have to be done about such sensitivity.

  There was a time in our lives, some years ago now, when you and I took to writing down our dreams. It was when we were still being idealistic about our relationship. We wanted to see how dreams would read, especially after time had passed and immediacy had blurred. We wanted to see if two different people’s dreams could have anything in common. I remember us arranging, some nights, before we went to sleep, to meet in our dreams. Of course, we never did. You can’t control dreams. And partly we started writing them down – though we didn’t say so out loud – because it’s really boring to have to sit and listen, in the morning when you’re hardly awake yourself, to a dream someone else has had, which inevitably sounds mad because dreams always sound mad, and can go on for what seems like ever.

  We bought the book in Habitat, before Habitat became defunct. We wrote dreams down in it for about six months, this is eight or nine years ago now. It’s a blank book with thick hand-made paper and hand-stitching up the spine; its cover has an Indian goddess riding an elephant on it in a kind of Bollywood poster image. It’s underneath the couch in the front room, quarter-filled with outdated dreams. At least I’m assuming it’s under the couch. We tend to dislodge it yearly when summer comes around and we pull the deckchair out and find it again among the long sashes of dust that have formed themselves of what’s escaped the hoover since the end of the summer before.

  *

  At lunchtime you send me a text. It arrives at exactly the same time as an email from you in my inbox. The text is quite long. Before I have time to read either, the doorbell goes. I answer the door and a girl courier, holding her bike by the handlebars, gives me a padded envelope. Wh
ile I’m signing the form on her clipboard, the house phone kicks into answerphone behind me and I can hear your voice leaving a message. When I get back into the kitchen there’s also a voicemail from you waiting on my mobile. I look at the envelope in my hand. My name and the address on it are in your writing.

  I press the button on the house answerphone first, since your voice was in the room just a moment ago. The automaton tells me the date and the day and the time. Then you. Hi. I just wanted to inform your subconscious that one day in the 1960s Dusty Springfield was eating in the revolving restaurant at the top of the new Post Office Tower. And she saw a head waiter giving a lower ranking waiter a hard time, the head waiter was tearing a strip off him about something, and Dusty Springfield thought the telling-off was unjustified, so she picked up a bread roll from a basket on the table and she threw it at that head waiter and hit him with it. Bye for now. Love.

  Then your message ends, the automaton voice repeats the time it got recorded, and the recorder rewinds and switches itself off.

  I pick up my mobile and press the text icon. This is what your text says. In 1964 Dusty Springfield was kept under house arrest in a South African hotel for several days because she refused to play a concert where the venue was racially segregated. This got her into considerable trouble not just in South Africa but at home too where other entertainers, among them contemporary luminaries like Max Bygraves and Derek Nimmo, complained to the papers that by doing this she was endangering their chances of performing in South Africa. XXX

  Your email, by comparison, is very short. Dusty Springfield was 1 of the reasons in the 1960s that Motown music reached the UK at all XXX

  I press the voicemail button on my mobile. Hi. It’s me. I just wanted to let your subconscious know that at the end of the 60s, well, in 1970, Dusty Springfield told a newspaper that she was every bit as capable of being swayed, in terms of sexual attraction, by a girl as by a boy. At the time this was as you might imagine a near-incendiary thing for anyone to say out loud, even though male homosexuality had (though only very recently) been decriminalized. In England, not in Scotland. In Scotland it wasn’t legal till 1980. Love. See you later. Bye.