Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

I sit beside Ellie at the dining room table.

Clearly there’s no story in coming back to life, I say.

Mm, she says.

Why has this happened twice to me, d’you think? I say.

Really strange, Ellie says.

She doesn’t take her eye off the screen.

Can I use the laptop? I say.

I’m busy on it, Ellie says.

Yeah, but all you’re doing is looking up pictures of koalas, I say.

She turns and glares at me.

Chlamydia. Eucalyptus shortage. Drought. The koalas are dying , she says. And there’s nothing we can do .

There is desperation in her eyes. I look away. I don’t say anything. Then I go upstairs.

I stand outside Nathan’s room. At Hallowe’en a boy in the same school year as him was kicked to real death by three sixteen-year-olds outside a kebab shop, apparently because he was wearing gloves.

The door is shut. Foreign-sounding music is playing in his room. I knock.

He’s watching Euro porn, Emily shouts through her own shut bedroom door. He needs cognitive behavioural therapy for being fascistly satisfied like the rest of the brainless masses by brainless wank and if he wanks in the upstairs bathroom again I’ll tell all the girls in his class what he does all night, the wanker.

Emily, I say to her door. Don’t use words like that in this house.

Which ones? she shouts back.

Cognitive, behavioural and therapy, I say.

Chloe opens her door.

I think I can be of persistence, she says.

I look up the Evening News website on Chloe’s computer and find that news of my death has been syndicated to all local news sources and has also spread to 1,663 sites. The response piece I sent last night saying I’m actually alive is published in their ‘Opinions’ blogspace. Below it is a post from someone called sophiecatxyz who castigates whoever is pretending to be James Gerard a man who has clearly died tragically for causing pain and emotional upset to a grieving family . Below this someone called Doctormyeyes has written: Like Michael Jacskon he may be dead but he will never ever die. I click on a link to a blog by someone called truthizoutther who says I’m definitely dead as a dodu as a doornail his coast is toast RIP JAME GERARD dead meat accept it man only zombies fight the force submit ok?? lol.

I fill in the little reply box. At least I’m more alive than you are, I write. At least I can spell dodo properly, something you’re clearly too braindead to do.

I sign my name. I thwack the send icon. I immediately feel better. Then I feel much worse and wish I hadn’t sent anything to anyone. It is somehow a defeat to have engaged at all.

Chloe is playing with a plastic pony on her bed. She is galloping it up to a ridge in the covers and making it jump over the ridge. Each time she makes the ridge a little higher. I watch her form with her hands and knees a particularly high ridge.

Chloe, I say. Am I dead?

We are certain that you are not dead, she says.

Who? I say. You and the horsie?

I’m not a child, she says. You know perfectly well who.

Chloe, I say. You’ve been told.

She squares the pony in front of the high wall of bedspread and duvet. Then she starts pressing buttons on her phone.

Who are you texting at this time of night? I say.

My pony, to wish him luck, she says.

Does your pony have a mobile? I say.

Dad , she says as if the word dad means stupid.

What about Rip Van Mitchell? I say. Does he have one?

Chloe shakes her head.

It’s like when the one eyed giant shut the sailor in the cave and started eating his shipmates, she says, and the sailor has to think how to get them all out of there, and what they do is they sharpen the phone mast and they stick it right in its eye.

What, like with the Cyclops? I say.

And then they camouflage themselves and get out of there, Chloe says. Because there’s so much more of the journey still to go. But they have to be ingenious to survive. He has to be a nobody. I’m A Nobody, Get Me Out Of Here. Do you want to stay for the Puissance?

The what? I say. Are you doing the Cyclops at school?

Half horse, half bike, Chloe says. Mitch thinks that humans will evolve like in Charles Darwin to have a square screen in our foreheads instead of having eyes. We will look at their screen to see everything we need to know. We won’t need to cogitate any more.

Enough of the Mitching, I say.

Are you finished on my MacBook? she says. Put it here. No, closed. It’s the water jump.

It takes me a while to get it. Cyclops: half horse, half bike. When I finally do I’m in bed, lying awake again next to my sleeping wife. I’d come downstairs and she’d been looking up the symptoms of diseases. Why? I said. To see if I’ve got any of them, she said. Are you feeling unwell? I asked. She looked at me in surprise. No, she said, not at all.

I get out of bed and put my dressing gown on. I stand for five minutes in the dark. I look out of the window at the front gardens of our neighbours in the streetlight, at the way the light reflects off the roofs of all our cars.

Then I shake Ellie awake. I bang on all the bedroom doors. I tell everybody to meet me round the dining room table. I put the kettle on. I look in the fridge. There are some olives, grapes. I slice a carrot into sticks and upend a tub of hummus on to a plate. I open a bottle of wine.

As soon as she gets into the living room Emily presses the TV remote.

Put it off, Emily, I say.

I’m watching it, she says.

Turn it down, I say.

She turns it fractionally down and angles her chair away from the table towards it. As the rest of them come downstairs bleary, the Twin Towers erupt again onscreen and I remember seeing it for the first time, I was passing a TV shop in town and every screen was showing the same thing. A programme called The Top One Hundred Things You Need To Know About The Noughties is on. A fast edit montage flashes up images of the Cheeky Girls, a MySpace page, a broadband hub, a page of Tesco’s online site, a newscaster with the words WMD on the screen behind her, Tony Blair laughing, the boys who present I’m A Celebrity in the jungle, an iPod, the word Twitter, a melting icecap, the painted C of the Congestion Charge, people holding little plastic bags in departures, a copy of The Da Vinci Code, the logo for YouTube, a newspaper hoarding saying MPS EXPENSES DUCKPOND SCANDAL, Damien Hirst’s skull, some logos for banks, Kirsty and Phil, people being vaccinated by a doctor in a surgery, Andy Murray flexing his arm-muscles, a PowerBook, a contestant for Big Brother coming out to a booing crowd, the screen of an iPhone, Baghdad in flames, a bendy bus.

The decade between my deaths.

I make Chloe put the extra chair for Mitch back where it was, against the wall.

The kids look exhausted. My wife looks at the food on the table and the full glass of wine by her hand. She looks at me with tiredness and suspicion.

I just thought we should all, you know, talk, I say.

It’s half past two in the morning. What do you want to talk about? she says.

Anything you like, I say.

She looks away.

I look at my son.

Nathan? I say.

I mime taking earphones out of my ears. He does as I ask.

Start the conversation, son, I say. Anything. Anything random. Tell us what you were doing earlier this evening.

Ha ha! Emily says.

Nathan has gone bright red. I change the subject, quick.

Tell us about what you think has most changed over the last ten years, I say. The difference between then and now.

The indifference between then and now, he means, Emily says.

Nathan looks wasted. He is far too thin and as dark-eyed as his mother. I realize it’s now the norm for him to look as though he’s permanently flinching.