Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

1917

BRITISH PRISONERS

INTERNED ABROAD

This book is the gift of Miss M. Fletcher

Newnham College Cambridge

and is supplied through the Agency

at the Board of Education

Whitehall London S. W.

On the right-hand inside page, the pasted-in note says in clear handwriting:

If this book is ever returned,

it will be gratefully received,

though not expected.

M. Fletcher, Librarian

Newn: Coll: Cambridge

Jan 1917.

Underneath that, it says, in the same hand:

Returned May 13, 1919.

I stepped out of the city and into the park. It was as simple as that.

It was January, it was a foggy day in London town, I’d got off the Tube at Great Portland Street and come up and out into the dark of the day, I was on my way to an urgent meeting about funding. It was possible in the current climate that funding was going to be withdrawn so we were having to have an urgent meeting urgently to decide on the right kind of rhetoric. This would ensure the right developmental strategy which would in turn ensure that funding wouldn’t conclude in this way at this time. I had come the whole way underground saying over and over in my head, urgent, ensure, feasibility, margin, assessment, management, rationalization, developmental strategy, strategic development, current climate, project incentive, core values, shouldn’t conclude, in this way, at this time. But it also had to be unthreatening, the language we were to use to ensure etc, so I went up the stairs repeating to myself the phrase not a problem not a problem not a problem, then stopped for a moment at the Tube exit because (ow) my eye was really hurting, out of nowhere I’d got something in my eye.

It made everything else disappear. I stopped and stood. I blinked. I felt about in one of my pockets, folded the edge of a kleenex into what felt like a point and ran it along the inside of my lower lid. I blinked again and looked to see. The something that had been in my eye was stuck now on the edge of the kleenex. It was tiny, and it might once have had legs, hard to tell now. Maybe its legs were still in my eye; the eye was still stinging a little, still running. Running. Legs. Ha ha.

Urgent. Core values. Shouldn’t conclude.

The eye was still a bit sore. I tried focusing into the distance. What I saw was the edge of the park. Then I saw myself pressing the button on the pedestrian crossing. Then I was crossing the road anyway, between the fast-coming cars, before I changed my mind.

On the wide path on Avenue Gardens I dried a bit of bench with the kleenex I still had in my hand. I sat down and held my other hand over the sore eye. I could hear traffic, background, faded. When my eye stopped stinging, I’d go back.

But it was turning into one of the days in January that spring sends ahead of itself. The fog would burn off. It was burning off right now. It was clearing. I could see. There were magpies. There were pigeons. There were all sorts of birds, everywhere. When was the last time I had looked at a blackbird, or at a robin? When was the last time I had looked properly at anything? There were runners on the park’s paths. There was a cordon of very young schoolchildren out on a trip in the middle of the day. There was a man whistling, walking along holding a can of Skol ahead of himself. He was holding the can like a compass. There was a man in a wheelchair, being wheeled by a boy. The boy looked very like him. There was a man with a camera on a tripod. He was filming a woman who’d stopped to feed a squirrel. There was a woman doing a sideways-stepping walking exercise. There were two joggers and a dog. The dog, keeping the pace beside them, looked full of happiness, and there were patterns everywhere, in the line of benches stretching towards and away from me, in the fountains and the stone urns, in the trees, in the died-back tidied beds of flowers, and that’s when I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years, it’s back when I’m twenty-five, we’ve been together for six weeks, we’ve no money, it’s my birthday and as a birthday present you sit me down and blindfold me. You lead me by the hand, blindfolded, out of the flat to where your old Mini with the holes in its floor is parked. You guide me into the car and then you drive me I have no idea where. There’s a strangeness in every noise. Everything I touch and everything that touches me is so complex that all my senses flare. How closed-in things are when we’re in the car, and is this what open actually means, when you get me out of it, still blindfolded, and lead me up a steep path, into what feels like somewhere whose openness will never end? At the top of this steepness we stop. You take me by the shoulders and turn me. You wish me happy birthday. Then you take the blindfold off me.

It’s light, colour, it’s the top of the hill. It’s the city itself I see under the huge sky.

It was one of the best birthday presents I’d ever been given, I knew now so many birthdays on, twenty-five years later, a different person yet the same person, sitting in the park in the future, one hand over one eye. Where were you now? I wondered. What were you doing right now in the world?

A bee passed me. It was quite a large bee, bright yellow and black. A bee in January? Far too early in the year for a bee to be out, it should be wintering, it would surely die. I’d better go, I thought. I had a (not a problem) meeting to chair, and as clear as day the thought came into my head. I could follow that bee up Avenue Gardens. I could turn left and go to the Rose Garden. I hadn’t been to the Rose Garden for years. There’d surely be some roses out, regardless of January, and I could go and see the little statue of Cupid with his arrows, was I remembering rightly, riding on the back of a stone duck or a goose? Cupid, with the tips of his arrows dipped in honey. And what was that old poem, about Cupid getting stung by a bee and complaining to his mother, Venus, and her holding her sides laughing at him because of the stings his arrows give lovers, and him put out by a tiny bee? Cupid, in a bed of roses, no, Cupid, as he lay among, Roses by a bee got stung.

It was years since I’d thought of that poem.

It was years since I’d thought about any poem.

I would go and look at the little statue to see if Cupid really was sitting on the back of a bird, or if I was just imagining it. When I’d done that I could go to the meeting.

Urgent. The word was a bit shaming when I thought about it. Not a problem. What did not a problem actually mean?

I would go to the Rose Garden. From there I would walk to the boating lake, then up past the sports pitches to the big fountain and round by the zoo.

From there I’d go to the bottom of Primrose Hill, choose a path, any path, and follow it to the top.

*

That was all, the passing thought, the mere slant of the thought of all the different possible ways there are just to cross a park, and that did it, the morning shook its pelt, slipped its rein and did a sideways dash across Regent’s Park — no, not just Regent’s Park but the Regent’s Park, the park, the park that began as a forest whose sky was the tops of its trees, then the park of the left-handed King on horseback chasing the stag (and that’s why the park is the lopsided shape it is, because Henry the Eighth was left-handed, so when he drew over the map of the Abbess’s woods to mark the land he wanted thus , that’s what his hand did, made a great curve there and a straight line there). The park of grazing smutty sheep (it’s Henry James who called them smutty), the park of visions and assignations, fairs and ballads, footpads in their element, prostitutes in their ribbons. The park of the pretty girl out walking among the pretty flowers, taken suddenly and kissed hard on the mouth, pray, alarm yourself not, Madame, you can now boast you’ve been kissed by Dick Turpin . The park with the roofless theatre, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the midsummer air. The park where the crowds fed as much cake and biscuit as they could to Jumbo, The Biggest Elephant In The World, who’d been sold to America, in the hope it’d make him too heavy to be shipped across the Atlantic.