Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

Every time I travel, I head for it. Every time I come home, I look for it.

This is what Kamila Shamsie told me about why libraries, and what becomes of libraries, matter:

The library was located on Bleak House Road. It had high ceilings, and whirring fans and thick brick walls painted light blue which kept both paper and humans from curling over in the Karachi heat. Those were the days of military dictatorship when the movie ‘Rambo III’ (in which the hero killed Soviets in Afghanistan) seemed to be the only cultural import that the state deemed necessary for its citizens; some English language bookshops did exist but they were likely to stock primarily the kinds of novel that I would later learn to refer to as ‘airport bestsellers’ rather than anything that conformed to my childhood tastes. Besides, my reading rate of a book a day would have made it impossible for bookstores alone to meet my needs, even if we weren’t in Rambo world.

And so, the visits to the British Council library on Bleak House Road where, if memory serves, a single pink library card allowed you to withdraw six books at a time. I read my way from childhood to adolescence here — Rumpole of the Bailey left me cold, but Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy was everything I wanted from fiction. That I remember those grim days of dictatorships as personally filled with joy and possibility has more than a little to do with the thrill of a library where it was possible to encounter the whole world from Alexander the Great to the newest version of me (for what better way to mark the changes in yourself than via the books your eyes once skipped over which now hold you in their thrall?).

In 2002, post 9/11 ‘security concerns’ shut down the library. It has yet to re-open. Talk to Karachi’s citizens long enough about what that vast, troubled city of 20 million plus most needs and eventually you stumble on the phrase ‘places to escape to’. In other words, libraries.

Ten years ago it was reported in the Evening News that I was dead. LOCAL MAN DIES.

We were in Spain on holiday. When we got home the neighbours came running out to meet us. LOCAL MAN NOT DEAD AFTER ALL.

The paper apologized profusely, sent flowers. I became a minor celebrity. I’d be walking down the street and total strangers would cross the road to shake my hand. I went in to work the following Monday; it was really something, coming back from the dead. Several women even made advances (and I showed them both, well, the one who definitely did, my wedding ring; I am an old-fashioned kind of man at the end of the day).

I’d get home and my wife, Ellie, would kiss me and mean it; our two kids would look at me like I was a king. We held a dinner party for all our friends; we fitted our twenty-eight guests all the way up the stairs in the house and took a group photo with the camera delay button. It was a wonderful night. And the next night Ellie and I sat back into the sofa and watched Top of the Pops and Annie Lennox was on, battleworn but undaunted; she was going to be one of the people singing the new Millennium in. Our two kids cuddled into us, my wife was pregnant. Death wasn’t relevant to me.

Then, yesterday, ten years almost to the day, it happens again. LOCAL MAN DIES.

The report says I was hit in my Mazda by a truck at a road junction, that the truck had been delivering online shopping and that its driver suffered minor injuries.

I phone the police to tell them I’m not dead and that I don’t have and have never had a Mazda. They tell me they’ve no record of me being dead anyway. I phone the paper. I leave a voice message on an automated phone system, which instructs me that the best way to contact them is online. I knock on Chloe’s bedroom door. Chloe flings the door open. She’s the only person in this house who opens a door fully these days.

How can I be of subsistence? she says.

Can I use your computer? I say. Your brother and sister are using theirs, and your mother’s looking up Michael Ball on ours.

Mitch is using mine, she says.

Chloe, I say.

He’s helping me do a genealogy search, she says.

You’re nearly ten, I say. Stop it.

You can use it —, she says.

Thank you, I say.

— but only if you acknowledge Mitch, she says.

Mitch has been a figment of Chloe’s imagination for about four months now. His full name is Mitchell Kenyon. Chloe has somehow come by a DVD of some ancient silent films, just of ordinary everyday people, made by two men called Mitchell and Kenyon a hundred years ago. The films were almost thrown in a skip but now they’re golddust and film buffs are restoring them. I know all this because Chloe watched the DVD obsessively on the lounge DVD player until I complained about wanting to watch TV. Mitch is what she’s decided to call the small boy she’s seen in one, got a crush on, and claimed as companion as surely as if he’d rolled bodily out of one of those old metal cans himself and turned up at our house. When I asked her a couple of weeks ago how old he was, she thought for a moment then said, a hundred and eighteen. I’m putting my foot down, he’s far too old for you, I said. That’s quite witty, Dad, she said. It’s like going out with your great-grandfather, I said. Did I ever tell you the story of your great-grandfather and the jungle? Uh huh, how he was in a war, Chloe said, and they made a road, they cut through the jungle to make it, and the next morning they woke up and the road they’d made had disappeared, the jungle grew back over it overnight, lots of times, and I’m not going out with Mitch, we’re just friends. What, like your mother’s three hundred and fourteen Michael Ball Fan friends on Facebook? I said. The difference is, Chloe said, that Mum’s belief that they’re her friends is a figment of the imagination.

I contact the Evening News by phone and email that night. But in the morning the online report is still pronouncing me dead. So before I go to work, and because the phone won’t connect me to anyone alive, I go in person to the newspaper offices. I speak to someone upstairs in editorial through a security speaker system downstairs outside the front door of the building.

It says here James Gerard is deceased, the box-voice says.

I’m him, I say.

I’ve just checked it again and with all due respect, the voice says.

Something catches my eye through the reinforced glass of the door. A CCTV black bubble in the ceiling of their foyer is blinking a red light at me.

Can you see me? I say.

I wave.

Have you got photographic proof of ID? it says.

I get my driver’s licence out and slap it against the glass.

We’ll need a verification meeting with the newsgroup’s lawyers and your own self’s lawyers present before we can take this discussion any further, it says.

Is this a joke? I say.

The tannoy system clicks off. I hit the doorbell speaker box with the flat of my hand. Two security men appear from nowhere and stare at me through the reinforced glass. I mouth the words I’m not dead at them.

Then I go to work.

I’m alive again, then, I say to Claudine on reception.

Right, Claudine says.

She is slumped at her desk, her face pale in the light off her screen, her chin in her hand like it’s the end of the day. It’s 9.15 a.m.

I circulate the report of my death in an email headed You Only Live Thrice. My computer spellcheck asks me did I mean You Only Live The Rice. I get one email back. Amazing , it says, wow. Can you copy me the file re Friday’s meeting and confirm the confirmation? Nobody phones. Nobody makes a pass at me.

When I get home not a single person has phoned the landline about whether I am alive or dead, though there are two cold-call messages on the answerphone from double glazing life assurance salespeople.