Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

Not long after that, I remembered, and looked up the meaning. Something fell. Sepulchral.

*

I was walking through the park, through the bit where the fountains and the bushes are all laid out neatly. It was dusk and I was coming home from a meeting. It had been quite a tough meeting. I had had to lay off three people, most of a whole team, and we’d been told that Google Translate was basically going to be used to replace our report copywriting in all the sub-Saharan countries. I was a bit fed up. On top of this, I’d gone into the park to get a bit of space from the traffic and the people on the pavements, but I was still feeling crowded even here in the park, as if someone was walking a little too close to me. Someone was walking a little too close to me. There was a definite feeling of boundary-trespass in it. Then this voice, close to my ear, said: To think one can speak with someone who really knew Tchekhov .

I stepped to the side, turned like you do when you want to signal to people to back off.

I’ve no change, I said, I’ve no money at all to spare and there’s no point in asking me.

Indecent , she said and shook her head. We must never speak of ourselves to anybody : they come crashing in like cows into a garden.

Look, I said –

How did Dostoievsky know , she interrupted me, about that extraordinary vindictiveness, that relish for bitter laughter that comes over women in pain?

What? I said because she had stopped me in my tracks, was standing right in front of me now blocking my way, and because it was the first time I had realized quite how in pain I was. I was actually in physical pain, walking through the park, without you.

Supposing , she said, ones bones were not bone but liquid light .

It was a dead person stopping me on my path, young and wiry and alarmingly lively, alarmingly bright at the eyes.

Back off, I said. I mean it. I don’t know who you are, but I know who you are.

She laughed. She turned on her heel in a little dance, like I was the dead person, compared to her.

I shall be obliged , she said, if the contents of this book are regarded as my private property .

Then she threw me a little look.

Yes! I said. Yes exactly! Because that’s what I was always saying!

I am thinking over my philosophy , she said. The defeat of the personal. And let us be honest. How much do we know of Tchekhov from his letters. Was that all? Of course not. Don’t you suppose he had a whole longing life of which there is hardly a word?

That’s what I told her, over and over! I said.

This is the moment which, after all, we live for , she said, the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal .

You’ve no idea, I said. I mean, one night it was even the genealogy of your cats, for God sake.

She flung her arms into the air and shouted at the sky.

Robert Louis Stevenson is a literary vagrant! she shouted.

Then she burst out laughing. I joined in. Whatever it was she was laughing about, it was contagious.

Fiction , she said when she’d stopped laughing, is impossible but enables us to reach what is relatively truth.

Okay, I said, yeah, I think that’s fair, I mean, if people are reading your stories and enjoying or understanding and analysing them as stories and everything. That’s different. But people who were born, like, decades after you died, writing about pictures of your scissors.

I sat down on a bench. She sat down next to me with a thump and huffed a breath out loud like a teenage girl. She turned towards me nodding, confidential, like we were such friends.

What the writer does is not so much to solve the question, but to put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true and the false writer.

Then she stood up on the bench. She laughed, then got her balance. She spoke generally, to the trees in the park.

As I see it, she said, the whole stream of English literature is trickling out in little innumerable marsh trickles. There is no gathering together, no fire, no impetus, absolutely no passion!

She waved her arm at the bushes behind us, and her other arm at the pond in front of us.

This new bracken is like HG Wells dream flowers, like strings of Beads , she said. The sky in the water is like white swans in a blue mirror.

She was right. The sky in the water did look like she said. The bloom on the bracken behind us was like beads, did look strange, like made up in a dream. But while I was looking at this, off she went. When I looked back there was nobody else on the bench and though the park was full of people it was like there was nobody left in it either.

*

I don’t know who you are but I know who you are.

The way it was impossible haunted me.

That night I sat down in front of my computer and wrote you an email. It was the third email I’d sent you since we broke up. The first one had been fifteen pages long when I printed it out; it was mostly mundane lists of things: kitchenware, DVDs, things you’d done that’d made me furious. The second one said: Please also return the three Kate Rusby CDs, the hat that belonged to my father, the picture frame which I bought and paid the whole amount for in Habitat and have a receipt for, the TV Digibox, the food processor which I bought and paid the whole amount for in Dixons and have the receipt for, and the kitchen bin which I still can’t believe you took. I will record any other items I find missing as I find them missing.

You had sent me none, not even one saying you wanted those precious books back.

This time I typed in your address (I had to do it by hand and from memory because I’d deleted you off my system) and I wrote in the subject box: not about the Kate Rusby CDs etc please read.

Then in the body of the email I wrote: Please write back telling me one single thing you think I should know about the life of the writer K Mansfield.

I pressed send, then I went to bed.

I saw the light come round the edge of the windowblind. I heard the waking of the birds.

I logged on before I left for work, and under the subject heading one thing you had sent me this:

Mansfield was close good friends with the writer DH Lawrence, but it was a very rocky friendship, it blew hot and cold, and there were times in their lives when neither of them could stand the other. Once, when they’d had one of their most serious fallings-out and Mansfield was full of fury at him, she was sitting in a tea room with some friends and they overheard two or three people talking about one of Lawrence’s books, a collection of poems called Amores. One of them was holding it up and they were all being most disparaging about it. She herself had just been being most disparaging about Lawrence to her friends, before they went to tea. But seeing these other people be it, she leaned over and asked politely, sweetly, might she just have a look at that book they were talking about for a moment. Then she stood up and simply left the tea room, taking the book with her. The people sat there waiting for her to come back. She didn’t come back.

I read this three times before I left for work. At work I read it too many times to count. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I liked it. I sat in my mid-morning break and thought about how like you it was to use the words most disparaging . Most disparaging. Most disparaging. Blew hot and cold . I sat in my lunch break. I loved the last sentence, but all the same it worried me. She didn’t come back.