Public Library and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  The only message left now is whatever’s in the padded envelope. I open it.

  Inside is a bright orange CD box with two men and a woman in what look like 50s clothes on the cover. Did the early 60s really look so like the 50s? The men are both looking straight at the camera and holding guitars. The woman, a very early Dusty Springfield, is clasping her hands and looking upwards, demure, like a good girl, well, I say girl, but she looks like she could be any age between fifteen and fifty.

  There’s a note in the padded envelope. I unfold it. In your handwriting, it says Hi. This is a present for your thief of a subconscious from the early 1960s. The song called Island of Dreams stayed in the charts for the whole first half of 1963. It has a Thomas Hardy reference in it which I thought you’d enjoy. If I’m remembering rightly Dusty Springfield was unhappy with her vocal on this song, she thought it was too nasal and slightly off key, but then she was the kind of perfectionist who, after she went solo that same year, would do things like insist on recording her vocals in the echo of the ladies toilets or the stairwells of the Philips Music building, to get the tonal dimension she particularly wanted.

  I sit at the table. I shake my head. I start writing a text. Thank you for the lectures in 1960s memorabilia. Did you get the job. Did you not get the job. Love.

  But then instead of sending it, I delete it. I put the phone down on the table and open the CD box.

  The song called Island of Dreams begins with a melancholy harmonica wail. Then a lopey rhythm sets in, swings along in an almost country and western way into a song about someone who can’t forget, and what she can’t forget is a lovely love affair which took place on a beautiful island, the island of dreams. High in the sky is a bird on the wing. Please carry me with you. Far far away from the mad rushing crowd. Please carry me with you.

  I spend the rest of the afternoon listening to the two CDs of digitally remastered songs by The Springfields. Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names. Say I Won’t Be There. Where Have All The Flowers Gone? (Sag Mir, Wo Die Blumen Sind). The last of these is sung in English and German by The Springfields, not very long after the war. The songs have an innocent bravado about them. Several songs slip not just from one language to another but from one national musical style to another, a bluntly international noise, raucous then soothing then raucous again sometimes in the same song. At the centre of all of them there’s this female vocal, tough and delicate, sometimes both in the space of a single held note.

  I’m surprised by how many of the songs I know. I’m almost embarrassed by their sheer energy, their optimism. It makes me think of the front garden of the new council house, churned-up waist-high mud when my parents arrived, all roses by the time I was small, and of one of my few memories of my mother, the day she ran down the road with a shovel after the milkman’s horse and cart had clopped past and the horse had left balls of dung on the tarmac steaming in the cold of April, my mother coming back with it and digging the bright smell of horseshit in round the roots of the bushes.

  *

  I’ll write a book instead, you say. I’ll call it The Dream: Grime and Transcendence In The 1960s Novel.

  Not very catchy title, I say. It’ll need to be better.

  We’re in bed. It’s later. We’ve been out for supper, to spend money while we have it and to talk about ways we might be able to make it when we need to, urgently, again, quite soon. That conversation didn’t last long. But now the very nice wine is wearing off. We’re lying beside each other, both with our arms behind our heads, both looking at the ceiling of our house. Not our house. The house belongs to the bank. The bank belongs to a different planet, aeons away from the planet which the people who have to use the banks live on. So much for space travel.

  Ah, it was all about things being better, getting better, back then, you say.

  Grime was transcendent back then, I say.

  Hems were transcendent back then, you say.

  Everything was transcendent back then, I say.

  We’ll be all right, you say.

  Course we will, I say. We’ll transcend.

  It’s not the transc-end of the world, you say.

  It never is, I say. Listen. I was wondering. Is Dusty Springfield actually dead?

  No, Dusty will never die, you say. She died in the late nineties I think.

  Where’s she buried? I say.

  In your dream, you say.

  She’s not buried in my dream, I say.

  Don’t tell me your dream, you say.

  She’s having her picture taken in my dream, I say.

  Yeah, and now you’re so fully prepared, you’ll really see her next time you dream that dream, you say.

  In fact, I say, she’s not actually having her picture taken in my dream. She’s just a character in a story told by someone else.

  Very postmodern structure, you say. Grime and transcendence in the postmodern 1960s novel. Don’t tell me it.

  I’ll never ever tell you it, I say, and nothing you can do will ever make me.

  I don’t know if she even is buried, you say. She might be scattered. It’ll probably say on Wiki.

  So much information so little time, I say.

  Scattered, spore-like, broken down and molecular, the hopes and the dreams and the new wipe-clean linoleums, you say. The new exciting fabrics and the clothes made of paper, the moisture from the evaporated coffee-bar steam of a recovering nation. Scattered, the notes of all the sung songs. Scattered, the filaments of light of all the new mornings that dawned across the brand new motorways with hardly any cars on them, the fogs and the smogs dispersing, the flashing neons dimming in the dawn light, season after season, round Eros in Piccadilly. There. That’s your opening page.

  Eros isn’t scattered, I say. He’s still there. I saw him, for real, last week, in London.

  You saw Eros? you say. For real?

  Well, the statue, I say. Not your actual Eros.

  If you ever see my actual Eros –, you say. In a dream, say.

  Uh huh? I say.

  Whatever you do –, you say.

  I won’t tell you, I say.

  The father shakes us awake. He’s sitting on the end of the bed in the light from the landing; the bedroom door’s open and the mother’s coming up the stairs saying don’t wake them, don’t, Fred, it’s late.

  This time in the dream I am the one in the middle of the bed, the smallest. I’ve had the flu. Because I’m still not quite better from the flu, I’ve been put to bed earliest, and before my sisters got put to bed too, right at the beginning of the dream, I leaned on our windowsill with the vintage car models my mother bought me because I had the flu, and raced them along the length of the sill. There was ice on the inside rim of the window. When I put my tongue on it, it tasted of the metal of the window frame. The vintage car toys are beautiful. I know the other two sisters are already thinking about how to steal them. But for the moment in the dream they’re mine.

  The father smells of alcohol. His arm is in a sling. The eldest of the sisters asks him how he did it.

  He did it in a pub fight, the mother says at the door.

  The father talks over the top of her.

  Guess who I saw, he says. Yesterday morning, early in the morning. I was walking down the street between the bus stop and work and I turned a corner, and guess who I saw, in person, in the flesh. Dusty Springfield.

  Both the sisters get very excited. I am too sleepy to be excited, and I am not completely sure who Dusty Springfield is.

  The sister who sleeps on the wall side of the bed writes secret poems in the spare pages in the back of the pocket dictionary she has for school. One of the poems is about how it would feel to be a vagrant or a beggar. She always gives any pocket money she might have to the people, if she’s passing them, who came back from the war with one leg or one arm missing and sit on the pavements outside the big shops.

  (When I’m this sister in the dream I know that she believes that the singer Dusty Springfield, who was New
Musical Express’s most popular female vocalist again last year, would understand what it is like to be her.)

  The sister on the door side of the bed is good at everything. A photo has been taken of her in her school uniform sitting at her desk pretending to write things down. It is framed on the sideboard downstairs.

  (When I’m this sister in the dream I know that she has noticed that the singer Dusty Springfield, whose eyes look as black as the vinyl of her 45s, uses her eyeshadow like a mask with which she protects herself.)

  Dusty Springfield! the mother is saying. She looks in awe in the landing light. She comes and sits on the end of the bed beside the father.

  (When I’m her in the dream and she says this, I can feel her heart open wider, like an eye inside her.)

  She was having her photograph taken, the father says. And I thought to myself, wait till I tell my girls.

  (When I’m him in the dream I know, as he throws himself and his story headlong up the stairs, how full his own heart is with bringing home the story.)

  And there were a lot of people there from the Daily Mirror, he says, a photographer and people, and there must have been lights, because the graveyard was lit up and she was standing way back in among all these old graves and overgrown grass and plants and suchlike, and she was wearing a bright pink suit, bright pink trousers and a bright pink jacket with her hair all yellow and up like it is, and she had her arms out like this.

  The father flings his one arm that’s not in a sling out wide. At the same time, because he’s forgotten, he tries to fling the arm in the sling out too.

  Ouch! he says like it really hurt to, then the mother starts to laugh, then he laughs too.

  And that, each time, is where the dream ends and I wake up.

  Anna James put it like this:

  Public libraries were hugely important to me growing up, as we lived in a fairly small village on the outskirts of Newcastle with minimal sources of entertainment. Without access to that library, as small and stern as it was, I don’t think I would be the reader I am now. That tiny library gave me access to worlds and lives that a child growing up in rural Northumberland could never have hoped to experience anywhere else. And so when I left university becoming a school librarian was the obvious choice for me, and I spent nearly five years working with 11–18-year-olds in Coventry, trying to give them that same access to the infinite possibilities of libraries.

  This is what Richard Popple said:

  The spectre of library closures in the current financial climate of austerity is, to a limited extent, understandable. Of course councils are looking to save money where they can, and, while libraries do have several sources of income, they are not set up to be profit-making themselves. Libraries are, at heart, helpful and kind providers. It is hard for those who perhaps don’t feel the need to visit their local libraries to understand what a vital service they provide for communities and individuals who do – and those who do are often the most vulnerable.

  Libraries provide free access to computers, and help with using them. This is so important as more and more services – job-searching, flight bookings, bus pass applications etc – now prefer or even require internet access. So for those who can’t afford a computer and are trying to find a job, or for those who did not grow up with the technology, the free access to technology and human assistance is becoming increasingly essential. Libraries provide this for everyone.

  They also provide access to (generally free) entertainment and activities for children and adults. These can help individuals and communities not to be isolated.

  And – books! Free books! Entertainment, knowledge, ideas, imagination, and all with the liberty to try book after book at no cost. And even if you’re housebound and unable to get to the library, they’ll usually have a service to choose and bring the books for you.

  It is the poorest, most isolated and the least able in our society who suffer most if they are gone. So if our society does not care for libraries, then it is not caring for its most vulnerable.

  Tracy Bohan told me a little of what’s happening to the public library in her neighbourhood:

  The council intend to offer it up to developers and presumably just go with the highest bid. It will undoubtedly become flats. The council has also cut the 2016 park budget in half. And they just razed an entire housing estate to make way for a private development.

  And finally, Sarah Wood told me this:

  After my mother died, I was clearing out the little compartments in her purse – the reward cards, credit cards, driving licence, they’d all become meaningless. The one thing I couldn’t bring myself to throw away was her library card.

  And so on

  Every time I sit down to try to write this story – which is a commission for a short story anthology where all the stories have to be about death – life intervenes.

  What I mean is, I have a friend who died far too young. In one of the fevers she was in, in hospital, she thought she was being abducted by art thieves. She believed that what was happening to her wasn’t that she was so ill she was hallucinating, but that she was a work of art and she was being stolen by unscrupulous people.

  When she was recovering – before she caught an infection, became gravely ill all over again then, weak from having been ill for so long, died – she sent me a very funny text about thinking she was art and was being stolen and how deluded she’d been. She couldn’t eat or drink at this point but she could send texts. The texts were very much in her voice, and now that she’s dead I hear that voice in my ear a lot, what about you? that was her way of saying hello; she was Irish; and more and more I’m coming to understand that she was a work of art and that she has, after all, been stolen by art thieves who are keeping her hidden until they can work out how to make a fortune from her, or maybe they already have, maybe she’s been sold already to a massively rich art collector who keeps her out of the public eye, shows her only to a select number of extremely rich and equally unscrupulous colleagues.

  That art collector’s lucky to be anywhere near my friend. My stolen friend will enhance that collector’s life. She will also alter his or her library shelves for the better; she will add a stack of bent old paperbacks, so well read that they barrel like accordions, to the shelves of stolen first editions and filched rare texts; she will add books by people that that collector’s never thought to read. She will fill the collector’s house with unimagined resonances, unexpected mythological, cultural, ancient and contemporary information and understanding, about which she was a walking library of rare things herself. She’ll change that person’s heart, whoever stole her, so that simply by dint of being in her presence he or she will soon be showing all the dodgily come-by artworks in the palazzo or mansion or wherever the collector lives to the public for free, and letting homeless people sleep in the forty-nine extra rooms that nobody else uses in that house – even sleep at the foot of his or her own bed.

  Or if she’s been filched by amateurs, then right now somewhere in Europe an old woman is swearing to the prosecutor that she never saw her son do anything wrong, she knows he hasn’t, she’ll swear on her life he hasn’t, he never brought home anything or anyone untoward, and that those long rolled-up canvas things she burned in the brazier weren’t precious original artworks at all – and all the time she’ll be longing to get out of the police station and home again simply to sit by the empty brazier with my dead friend who, having saved the da Vincis and Matisses and Cézannes and Munchs from any such fate by persuading her not to burn them, is sitting alongside her and distracting her with story after story, stories maybe a bit like this one:

  listen to this, an old woman who’s been fighting with all her closest relatives almost all her life, in fact hasn’t spoken to or had any contact with any of them for more than a decade, goes to the doctor and finds out she’s got terminal something. She comes home from the doctor’s and she’s troubled. Not about her death, she doesn’t think about that for a moment, she doesn’t give a t
oss about dying – except when it comes to who’s going to inherit her considerable wealth and belongings and estate. More than anything she wants to make sure none of what’s hers is going to go to any relatives she particularly dislikes.

  The thing is, she can’t remember which of them it is she dislikes most. Or least. She decides to choose one of them and leave it all as incontestably as possible to the person of her choice. But which one?

  So she writes and invites all five of her relatives to come and stay with her for a week. In that week, she thinks, she’ll be able to sort wheat from chaff. Because they all know she’s quite rich, and because they guess she might be dying, her relatives all write back immediately saying they’ve accepted her invitation and her offer of free plane tickets (they live in America or Australia, somewhere far away). The day approaches and she’s got everything ready for them, all the beds made up, all the food in the fridge. They arrive safely. One of them phones her from the airport to tell her they’ll be with her in a couple of hours.

  Then the taxi they’re in on the way to her house crashes on the motorway and they’re all killed.

  The old woman is more annoyed about her plan being ruined than that they’re dead. She arranges for a group funeral for them and doesn’t attend it. The week after that, she advertises in the papers and online for five actors. One of the conditions is that applicants must be able to sacrifice their Christmas holidays.

  She turns on the radiators in the front room of her house and holds the auditions there. She provides each person auditioning with a list of attributes and characteristics. She chooses the five she imagines most resemble her dead family members.

  Next, she hires a theatre director and tells him exactly what she wants the actors to do in the ten days they’ll spend with her.

  For a week the director schools the five actors she’s chosen in the roles she’s outlined.

  On Christmas Eve the five actors move into her house with her. The heating stays on in the front room throughout. On 2 January she pays them handsomely as promised and waves them all out of her house.