Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

Urgent. Core values. When I got cold I walked across the park in the happy noise of blackbirds. Then I went to the top of the hill and looked at the view. The city gathered round the park and rose out of itself as usual. I saw it all over again, as if for the first time.

*

Cupid, as he lay among

Roses, by a Bee was stung.

Whereupon in anger flying

To his Mother, said thus crying:

Help! O help! your Boy’s a dying.

And why, my pretty Lad, said she?

Then blubbering replyed he,

A winged Snake has bitten me,

Which country people call a Bee.

At which she smil’d; then with her hairs

And kisses drying up his tears:

Alas! said she, my Wag! if this

Such a pernicious torment is:

Come, tel me then, how great’s the smart

Of those, thou woundest with thy Dart!

(from Anacreon, translated by Robert Herrick)

Miriam Toews told me about how once, a couple of years ago, when she was sitting reading at a desk in Toronto’s public library, she saw her own mother come in and sit down in one of the sunlit seats by the windows. Her mother, without noticing her daughter there, settled down, stretched out and fell asleep.

She sat where she was and watched her mother sleep.

A library assistant approached her mother. She saw this assistant reach out a tentative hand and give her mother a shake.

Her mother didn’t wake up.

The assistant stepped back, stood as if thinking about it for a moment, then left her mother sleeping in the library sunlight.

I am no longer as young. But it’s May, chilly and damp but May. That sound above the far-off noise of traffic is birds. That smell is cow parsley. It’s rife in the hedgerow all round me now. A couple of hours ago when I was stuck on the motorway and hedgerows weren’t even imaginable, the air that came into the car was high with the smell of something, and when I finally got off the main road and on to the back roads I found out what.

My car is near worthless. It’s worth so much less than I imagined that the fact that it still works at all is now surprising to me. I’d taken it to the dealership two towns away, took it to market like in Jack and the Beanstalk when he takes the cow to sell because they’re so poor they have to give up the last thing of value they own. I’d been in a traffic jam all the way back: a pile-up further along the motorway; it wasn’t the accident itself that was causing the crawl but the fact that everybody who drove past it slowed up to take phone footage. Nothing was moving. So I pressed the window button, which works very well in my worthless car, and I leaned out. I played with the channels on the radio and the button that makes the surroundsound happen. I switched the radio off. I checked my eyes in the mirror. I checked my teeth. I checked my phone. I noticed that the car clock was still on winter time. (This explained why I’d been exactly an hour late for a couple of meetings over the past few months.) I pressed the button that changes time. Summer at last. We inched forward then came to a standstill. I yawned. I sniffed the air. I looked to see what the stuff was in the pocket in the car door and I found this book in there.

It must have been one of the books I’d boxed up for the charity shop. I had no idea how it’d got into the door pocket; it must have fallen out of the box. Maybe the mechanic who’d just looked the car over had found it under a seat and put it in there. Selected Herrick. It was a book I didn’t remember at all. Was it even mine? When I opened it, it was full of notes in my writing, the writing of my much younger self, so I must’ve read it at some point.

My younger writing is narrow and pinched. My name, which I’d written on the first page, is squeezed up against itself as if determined to take up as little room as possible. I’d written things in pencil in the margins. Carpe diem. Greek mythological nymphs who took care of beautiful garden. On the inside back page I’d made a list of words I clearly thought were of use, bunch assortment tussock shock sheaf truss heap swathe bouquet nosegay posy skein hank. In the poems, I had underlined things; the phrase wild civility, the words and every tree / Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.

Leafy gallantry. The words filled me with unease. Then they made me think of flowers in among, of all things, lightbulbs, batteries, hairdryers, curling tongs, irons, the stuff my father used to sell in his shop.

I laughed out loud, I laughed so loud that the person in the Audi in front of me reached to adjust his or her mirror to get a look at where the laughter was coming from.

It’s over two decades, a quarter of a century ago, the day the child with the flowers came into my father’s shop.

I was looking after the shop for my father while I was home on holiday. I was doing this for almost no salary because three electrical goods chainstores had recently come to our town. This meant people didn’t bother bringing things in for repair because it was equally as cheap to throw things away and buy new ones outright (except not from my father’s shop). Christmas was the time of year my father usually made most in the shop. This most recent Christmas he’d barely scraped through. One of the new chainstores was twenty yards from the front door of the shop and lit up like Christmas all the year round.

Now, though, it was Easter. I sat on the old kitchen stool at the counter every day that Easter holiday and read books for my Finals. It was literally quieter in there than a library. I picked at the sellotape over the rip in the cushioned seat of the stool and turned the page and the next page and nobody came in to buy anything.

The book I was reading was about the life of a poet. There wasn’t much known about this poet’s actual life, the book said, other than that his father killed himself by jumping out of a fourth-floor window, so the book was a lot about what it was like to be on the edge of poverty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the part of London called Cheapside, and about how the houses jutted out from themselves above their first floors, overhung themselves like mushrooms, or galleons, and how until 1661 the people in London had been duty-bound to see to the lighting of their own streets, required by law to hang out lit candles on dark nights. There were seventeenth-century line drawings of places called Fynnesburrie Field and Moor Field, great grassy flat expanses with a few peasants selling things drawn on them, drawings of women drying clothes flat on the grass, soldiers practising archery. The shop door opened and I looked up. A child came in, nine or ten, arms full of bluebells and primroses and sticking up in the air high above the child’s head like radio aerials or butterfly antennae a couple of broken branches covered in blossom.

The child’s long dark hair was girl-length and wavy, held back from falling across the eyes by two hairclips, one on each side of the head above the ears. Hairclips equalled girl. But it was something about the hairclips being so plain and then the face, a different kind of beautiful between them, that made me suspect that the child maybe wasn’t what I’d first thought.

Where’d you get your flowers? I said.

Canal banks, the child said.

Up the canal was where the rougher girls at school tended to go to have sex with people. It was illicit no matter what you did up there. As children we weren’t, ever, supposed to go up there. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t grass about where we were. So the child was suspect as soon as I heard the word canal.

It was true that the canal banks were often lined with bluebells at that time of year. But the branches, more likely they’d been snapped off trees like the ones in the front gardens of the houses in the Crown where the people who had money lived, closer to the town, far from the canal. I myself had grown up very close to the canal, which meant that anyone I told my address, if they knew the town at all, would be able to decide what sort of person I was and what kind of people my parents were — just like I was deciding stuff about this child, because something about him made me think of the woman who pushed the pram full of rags through the long grass of the fields at the backs of the houses, to whom my mother was always exceptionally polite and kind when this woman knocked on our door, and for whom she always saved our old clothes, done things, folded neatly in the cupboard at the back door where we kept the old newspapers.