Public Library and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  The 1984 version of Wilfred Owen, I say.

  Hardly, he says. Boy George never saw a war. Christ. What a war would’ve done to him.

  Wilfred Owen was gay too, you know, I say.

  I say it because I know it will annoy him. But he doesn’t take the bait. Instead:

  People aren’t stupid. It’s that song that’s stupid, he says.

  It’s not a stupid song, I say.

  You got that Wilfred Owen book as a school prize, he says.

  Oh yes, so I did, I say.

  You chose it yourself at Melvens, he says. 1st prize for German. 1978.

  How do you remember all this stuff? I say. And really. What does it matter, what prize I ever got for anything?

  You were good at German, he says. Should’ve kept on with your languages. Should’ve learned them all while you had the chance, girl. You still could. I wish I’d had the chance. You listening to me?

  No.

  No, cause you never listen, he says. And you were learning Greek last year –

  How do you even know that? You’re supposed to be dead, I say.

  – and gave it up, didn’t you? he says. As soon as it got too difficult.

  The past and the future were hard, I say.

  Start it again, he says in my ear.

  Can’t afford it, I say.

  Yes you can, he says. It’s worth it. And you don’t know the first thing about what it means not to afford something.

  I’m too old, I say.

  Learn anything, any age, he says. Don’t be stupid. Don’t waste it.

  While I’m trying to think of other songs I can sing so I don’t have to listen to him (Broken English? Marianne Faithfull? It’s just an old war. It’s not my reality) –

  here, lass, he says. Culture Club!

  What about them? I say.

  That fungus! In that hospital, he says. Ha ha!

  Oh – ha! I say.

  And you could write your war thing, he says, couldn’t you, about when you were the voice captain.

  When I was the what? I say.

  And you had to lay the wreath at the Memorial. With that boy who was the piper at your school. The voice captain for the boys. Lived out at Kiltarlity. His dad was the policeman.

  Oh, vice captain, I say.

  Aye, well. Vice, voice. You got to be it and that’s the whole point, he says. Write about that.

  No, I say.

  Well don’t then, he says.

  It was a bitter cold Sunday, wet and misty, dismal, dreich, everything as dripping and grey as only Inverness in November can be; we stood at the Memorial by the river in our uniforms with the Provost and his wife and some people from the council and the British Legion, and we each stepped forward in turn below the names carved on it to do this thing, the weight of which, the meaning and resonance of which, I didn’t really understand, though I’d thought I knew all about war and the wars, until I got home after it and my parents, with a kindness that was quiet and serious, sat me down in the warm back room, made me a mug of hot chocolate then sat there with me in a silence, not a companionable silence, more mindful than that. Assiduous.

  Damn. Look at that. I just wrote about it even though I was trying not to.

  Silence,

  silence,

  silence.

  Good. It’s a relief.

  That image of the soldiers on the railway tracks is still on the screen of my computer. I click off it and look up some pictures of Inverness War Memorial instead. Red sandstone, I’d forgotten how very red. I never knew before, either, that this Memorial was unveiled in winter, 1922, in front of a crowd of five thousand. Imagine the riverbanks, the crowd. I’m pretty sure I never knew either till now, and it’s a shock to, that one in every seven men from Inverness who fought in the First World War died, or that the Scottish Highlands had the highest casualty rate, per capita, of the whole of Europe. Then from God knows where my father says:

  and do you remember, girl, when we drove around all that Sunday for the project you were doing at university, and you needed to record people speaking for it, but no one would stop and speak to you?

  Yes! I say. Ha ha! It was for a linguistics class. I’d wanted to test out something I’d been told all through my growing up, that the people in and around Inverness spoke the best English. I’d made him ferry me round the town and all the villages between Ardersier and Beauly, trying to stop random people and get them to speak sentences into a tape recorder so I could measure the pureness of their vowels. For a start it was a Sunday, so there was no one much out and about. But you know why it’s called the best English, one of the three passers-by who did stop when I asked said into the microphone. It’s because of the Jacobite wars with the English, because in the late 1700s when they banned the Gaelic – which was all anybody spoke here – and they moved the troops into Fort George and Fort Augustus and the soldiers intermarried with all the local girls, then the English that got spoken was a Gaelic-inflected English.

  Inflected, my father says now as if he’s turning the word over in his mouth.

  War-inflected.

  That’s it. I have a clever idea.

  I go to the shelf and take down my Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Its spine is broken and pages 187–208 are falling out of it.

  I take a blank page and a pencil. I flick through the book and I make a list of everything I’ve happened to underline in it over the years.

  Consciousness : in that rich earth : for the last time : a jolting lump : feet that trod him down : the eyeless dead : posturing giants : an officer came blundering : gasping and bawling : you make us shells : very real : silent : salient : nervous : snow-dazed : sun-dozed : became a lump of stench, a clot of meat : blood-shod : gas shells dropping softly behind : ecstasy of fumbling : you too : children : the holy glimmers of goodbyes : waiting for dark : voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn : a god in kilts : God through mud : I have perceived much beauty : hell : hell : alleys cobbled with their brothers : the philosophy : I’m blind : pennies on my eyes: piteous recognition : the pity war distilled : I try not to remember these things now : people in whose voice real feeling rings : end of the world : less chanced than you for life : oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice : many crowns of thorns : emptied of God-ancestralled essences : the great sunk silences : roots in the black blood : titan : power : in thirteen days I’ll probably be dead : memories that make only a single memory : I hear you still : soldiers who sing these days.

  I read it. A man of mud and sadness rises like a great wave. He is like a great cloud much bigger than the earth, like an animation from a Ministry of Information film, amateur, jerky, terrifying. He is made of spores, bones, stone, feet still in their boots, dead horses, steel. He speaks with all the gone voices. He is a roaring silence. There are slices of railway track sticking out of his thighs and wrists.

  I’m in tears. Christ.

  The men in that picture were shooting people so close to them that they could have reached forward and touched them without even moving their feet, and the dust simply rose in the air as the people got shot.

  My father jogs my elbow.

  Come on, girl, he says.

  He sings the song as loud as he can in his Gracie Fields falsetto.

  Sticking out my chest, hopin’ for the best.

  He waits for me to sing.

  War is stupid, I sing again.

  He nods.

  Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye, he sings. Cheerio, here I go, on my way.

  He waves. I wave.

  Say it in broken English, I sing back.

  Kensal Rise Library, built by public subscription on a site donated by All Souls College, Oxford, was ceremoniously opened by Mark Twain in the year 1900.

  It was closed by Brent Council in 2011 and sold to a property developer called Platinum Revolver.

  Public pressure to save and protect the library has been so strong over the past four years that the property restorers now working on t
he site converting the space into flats (Uplift Property, whose marketing hook is ‘homes to make you happy’) have been forced to produce redevelopment blueprints which include both designated public space and designated library space.

  This is what Pat Hunter told me:

  Libraries have been a focal point in my life and work for seventy-five years. In my childhood (born 1932) one could only be enrolled at the library at seven years of age. In 1939 I did so with a sense of great awe and excitement. In 1949, at seventeen years, I went from sixth-form grammar school to work and train as a librarian, and finally retired in 1996 after forty years’ service. In all those years I saw the value of and need for libraries to all the population.

  The importance of libraries was recognized by the Public Libraries Act 1850 and affirmed by the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964. In all the media mention of cuts to services in libraries I heard no reference to these Acts or any other statutory requirement for the provision of libraries – nor have they been rescinded.

  Because libraries have always been a part of any civilization they are not negotiable. They are part of our inheritance.

  The beholder

  I had been having difficulty breathing so I went to the doctor. He couldn’t find anything wrong. My respiratory function tests came out clear and strong. My heart was fine, my blood was fine. My colour was fine.

  Tell me again, about the breathing, he said.

  It starts slight, then gets sorer and sorer, I said. It’s sore at the very top of my breath then sore at the very bottom of my breath. It feels like I’ve been winded. It’s very unpredictable. I never know when it’ll come or when it’s going to go.

  The doctor looked again at his computer screen. He clicked his tongue.

  And life generally? he asked. How’s life?

  Fine, I said.

  Nothing out of the ordinary? he said.

  No, I said, not really, well, my dad died and my siblings went mad and we’ve all stopped speaking to each other and my ex-partner is suing me for half the value of everything I own and I got made redundant and about a month ago my next-door neighbour bought a drum kit, but other than that, just, you know, the usual.

  The doctor printed something out and signed it then handed it to me.

  Take these, he said. Come back in a few weeks if life hasn’t improved.

  I went to Superdrug and they gave me a little box. In it was a blisterpack, three months’ worth of antidepressant. I read the piece of paper that came with the blisterpack. It said that one of the side-effects was that these antidepressants would make you depressed. I left the pills unopened on the shelf in the bathroom. The pain came and went. When it came I sat very still, if I could, and tried not to think of anything. But it’s hard not to think of anything. I often ended up thinking of something.

  I thought of us going through the old clothes in a wardrobe in his house and outside all the apples in the grass going soft, just falling off his trees because none of us had thought to pick them. I thought of the liquidizer on the sideboard in the kitchen back when we were married, a thing which we simply used, in the days when things were simple, to make soup. I thought of the sheen on the surfaces of the tables all pushed together in the meeting room and the way that when I came back to my desk nobody, not even the people I had thought were my friends, would look at me. I thought of sleep, how much I missed sleep. I thought how it was something I had never imagined about myself, that one day I would end up half in love with easeful sleep.

  Yes, see that? the unexpected word easeful just slipping itself in like into a warm clean bed next to the word sleep. Easeful. It wasn’t a straightforward word, the kind of word you hear much or hear people use often; it wasn’t an easeful word. But when I turned it over on my tongue even something about its sound was easeful.

  Then one day not long after I had surprised myself by crying about, of all things, how beautiful a word can be, I had just got up, run myself a bath and was about to step into it. I opened the top buttons of my pyjamas and that’s when I first saw it in the mirror, down from the collarbone. It was woody, dark browny greeny, sort of circular, ridged a bit like bark, about the size of a two pence piece.

  I poked it. I stared at it in the mirror. I got the mirror down off the shelf and held it to my chest against myself.

  I’ve no idea, the doctor said. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s definitely not a wart. I’m pretty sure it’s not a tumour, at least it’s nothing like any tumour I’ve seen.

  He picked a pencil up off his desk. He sharpened the pencil. He poked me with the blunt end of the pencil and then the sharp end.

  Ow, I said.

  And it hasn’t changed since you first noticed it? he said.

  No, I said, apart from that it’s got a bit bigger, and then these four little stubby branch things, well, they’re new.

  He left me in the room with the obligatory nurse and came back with two of the other doctors from the practice, the old one who’s been there since the surgery opened and the newest youngest one, fresh from medical school. This new young doctor filmed my chest on her iPhone. The most senior doctor talked her through filing a little of the barky stuff into one sterilized tube then another. Then the most senior doctor and my own doctor each fingered the stubs until my doctor yelped. He held up his finger. At its tip was a perfect, round, very red drop of blood. While all three doctors ran round the room ripping open antiseptic packaging, the nurse, who’d been sitting against the wall by the screen, gently tested with the tip of her thumb the point of one of the thorny spikes on the stub furthest away from my chest.

  Really remarkably sharp, she said quietly to me. Have they nicked you at all in the skin?

  Once or twice, I said.

  Does it hurt when they do that? she said.

  Hardly, I said. Not on any real scale of hurt.

  She nodded. I buttoned my shirt up again carefully over the stubs. That week I had ruined three shirts. I was running out of shirts.

  The young and the old doctor left. The nurse winked at me and left. My own doctor sat down at his desk. He typed something into his computer with difficulty because of the size of the bandage on his finger.

  I’m referring you to a consultant, he said. Actually – you might want to make a note – I’m going to refer you to several consultants at the following clinics: Oncology Ontology Dermatology Neurology Urology Etymology Impology Expology Infomology Mentholology Ornithology and Apology, did you get all that? and when you see Dr Mathieson at Tautology, well, not to put too fine a point on it, he’s the best in the country. He’ll cut it straight out. You’ll have no more problems. You should hear in the next ten days or so. Meanwhile, any discomfort, don’t hesitate.

  I thanked him, arranged my scarf over the bits of the stubs that were too visible through my shirt and left the surgery.

  On my way to buy a new shirt, I met a gypsy. She was selling lucky white heather. She held out a sprig to me.

  I’m sorry, I’ve no money, I said.

  Well, she said looking me up and down, you’ve not got much, true enough, I can see that. But you’ve a kind face, so money’s the least of your worries. Give me everything you’ve got in your pockets and that’ll be more than enough for me.

  I had two ten pound notes in my purse and a little loose change in one of my pockets. I gave her the change.

  Ah but what about those notes? she said. I can see them in your wallet, you know.

  Can you? I said.

  Burning a hole in you, she said.

  If I give you all my money I’ll be broke, I said.

  Yes, you will, she said.

  She held out the heather. I took it. It was wrapped at the stem in a little crush of tinfoil warm from her hand. She took my money and she tucked it into her clothes. Then she stood in front of me with her hands up in benison and she said:

  may the road rise to meet you, may the wind always be at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, may the rains fall soft up
on your fields, and until we meet again may absence make your heart grow, and I think that may well be a very nice specimen you’ve got there in your chest, if I’m not wrong, a young licitness.

  A young what? I said but a couple of community police officers were strolling up the street towards us and she was busy tucking away her sprigs of heather into her many coat pockets, in fact it looked like her coat was more pocket than coat.

  Give it a few hours of sun every day if you can, she called back over her shoulder as she went, stay well hydrated and just occasionally you’ll need to add some good well-rotted manure and cut yourself back hard, but always cut on the slant, my lovely. All the best, now.

  What did you say it was, again? I called.

  But she was well gone; it wasn’t until a bit later when I chanced to be whiling away an early spring afternoon wandering around in the park that I saw what I was looking for and found the right words for it. Meanwhile the letters from the clinics arrived, the first, then another, then another, then another, and as they came through the letterbox I piled them unopened on the hall table. Meanwhile the pairs of little stubby antlers grew and greened and notched themselves then split and grew again, long and slender, as high as my eyes, so that putting on a jumper took ten very careful minutes and I began to do a lot of improvisation with cardigans and V-neck vest-tops. There were elegant single buds at the ends of thin lone stems closed tight on themselves, and a large number of clustered tight-shut buds on some of the stronger thicker branches. My phone went off in my pocket and as I reached in, took it out, pressed Answer, arched my arm past the worst of the thorns and got the phone to my ear pretty much unscratched, the whole rich tangled mass of me swung and shifted and shivered every serrated edge of its hundreds and hundreds of perfect green new leaves.

  Hello, a cheery voice said. I’m just doing a follow-up call after your visit and your tests earlier this month, so if you could just let us know whether there’ve been any changes or developments in your condition.

  Yes, I said, a very important development, I know what it is now, it’s called a Young Lycidas, it’s a David Austin variety, very hardy, good repeater, strong in fragrance, quite a recent breed, I was in Regent’s Park a couple of days ago and I saw it there, exactly the same specimen, I wrote down what the label said and when I got home I looked it up, apparently they named it only a couple of years ago after the hero of Milton’s elegy about the shepherd who’s a tremendous musician but who gets drowned at sea at a tragically young age.