Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

It was with one of the twigs, with its roughly split greenwood end rather than its bud end, that the child pointed at the row of toasters in boxes on the shelf behind me — as if pointing the broken stick back not at the toasters at all but at himself.

That one please, he said.

I closed my book. I looked up at the toasters.

This one? I said.

The one next to it please, the child said.

That one’s exactly the same as this one, I said.

It isn’t, the child said.

They’re all exactly the same, I said. It makes no difference which one I get down.

They look the same. But they are different individual toasters of the same make and model, the child said.

It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I grew haughty.

Pff, I said.

I climbed up two steps of the stepladder and picked up the first box I came to. I got down off the stepladder, put the box on the counter and told the child the price.

The child put the long twigs down on the counter next to the box and began peeling bluebell stems free of each other and laying the flowers separately out in front of me.

Is ten enough? the child said.

What for? I said.

The toaster, he said.

You’re joking, I said.

How many do you need? the child said.

I pointed to the price sticker on the box. Then I picked up the box as if to put it back on the shelf. But the child looked panicked. So instead, with the toaster box under my arm, I came round the side of the counter and out into the front of the shop because it had struck me that maybe that child had pocketed something while I’d been up on the stepladder with my back turned.

But the child had no bag and only the thinnest grass-stained tee-shirt and shorts on, so I pretended to have gone out there especially to tidy the top layer of the rack of battery-powered mini-fans with the picture of the ecstatic woman cooling herself, a blur of little fan blades close to her delighted face. Not that anyone was ever likely to buy a mini-fan from an Inverness shop. The very existence of such an appliance was like a kind of highland Scottish joke. My father, an optimistic man, had ordered in fifty of them a couple of years ago plus this large display rack. Nobody had bought a single one.

Meanwhile the child, who was nearly as thin as those broken-off branches, as thin and sharp as a sapling whip, and whose eyebrows, as I saw when I came back round to my side of the counter, were low and troubled, was passing a single many-headed cowslip from one hand to the other.

Okay, this one too, he said putting the cowslip beside the other flowers next to the toaster.

You can’t buy a toaster with these flowers, I said.

Which flowers can I buy it with? the child said.

If you want this toaster I’ll need actual money, I said.

The child pointed again at the row of boxes above me.

That one instead? he asked.

This is a shop, I said.

Please? he said.

Don’t be stupid, I said.

The child sighed. He looked me straight in the eye and dropped all his flowers out of his arms on to the counter. They lay there in a heap next to the petalled twigs and the toaster in its box. I shook my head.

No, I said.

I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember the child leaving. I presume he gathered up his flowers and left. Now, all the years later, I can’t remember for the life of me the price of those toasters. What I can remember is the bruised look of the bluebells, the green of their stems against their own blueness next to the photo of the toaster on the side of the box. I remember the way the blossom on those flowering branches on the counter was giving way to the green of the leaves behind it.

The other thing I remember is that a month or so after that child came into the shop and tried to buy the toaster with sticks and bluebells, I was sitting an exam. It will have been a May morning, dust-motes lazy in the air in the sunlight above us coming through the high glass in the senate hall. I wrote down a quote from the poet I was answering on. As I did so I was filled with shame. Shame filled me literally, as if I were a jug held under a cold water tap.

The question was something about gallantry.

I bowed my head in the exam room with all the other heads bent over their papers in front of me, round me and behind me, all of us answering questions about poetry, and I felt like I had been found out. But about what, exactly, or what exactly it was I’d done to feel like that, I hadn’t a clue.

A toaster.

A cowslip.

It makes me laugh now, sitting on the verge along from my still-ticking car, so long after. It makes me fond of my much younger self. I was moral, me, then. Decades it’s taken me, finally to understand why I felt shame that May morning.

Here’s one of the poems Robert Herrick wrote; it’s called Upon a Child: An Epitaph.

But born and, like a short delight,

I glided past my parents’ sight.

That done, the harder Fates denied

My longer stay, and so I died.

If, pitying my sad parents’ tears,

You’ll spill a tear or two with theirs,

And with some flowers my grave bestrew,

Love and they’ll thank you for it. Adieu.

He was born in 1591 and died in 1674. When he was an infant, it says in the introduction, which I’ve been reading sitting here in this long grass with the May cold coming through my clothes, his father, Nicholas, either threw himself out of or fell out of the fourth-floor window of the house they lived in, leaving his widow not just with six children to feed, of whom the youngest was Robert the poet, but also pregnant with the seventh. Robert Herrick himself was apprenticed young to his uncle, a goldsmith, then went on to become a churchman. He is most famous, it says here, for his poems about girls, love, spring, flowers. Fair daffodils, we weep to see / ye haste away so soon. Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes. How Roses Came Red. To a Bed of Tulips. To Violets. To Meadows. To Primroses Filled with Morning Dew. To Daisies, Not to Shut so Soon.

The car door is hanging open, the car parked as far up the verge as I can get it, but there’s nobody on this road but me, there’s been nobody for the last half hour. It’s a while since I got out of the traffic and followed my nose through a couple of rough-looking villages whose high streets were boarded-up shops, past some well-to-do houses and barn conversions; I have no idea where I am right now but there are five or six different kinds of long grass here where I’m sitting. They must be different kinds because they have different shaped seed-heads. This one has a smooth stalk, dark green, and a head with long branching clumps of flowering seed on it. This one’s seeds are much smaller and bushier. Its stalk is much lighter green. The core of the second one is sweeter, when I put it in my mouth, than the first.

I have no idea what the grasses are called. I recognize some of the flowers. That’s ragwort. Those are cornflowers. That’s red clover. Those are ox-eye daisies.

Swear on your mother’s life. Nearly three decades on and my mother is dead, my father too. The place where the shop was is still there, though now it’s a place selling highland clan souvenirs. That old woman who used to wheel the pram of rags; she must be long dead too.

I’d cover them with flowers. My mother, folding done things into neat piles for a poor woman; my father, imagining heatwaves for the Highlands: I’d gather up all the seasonals, the wild and the cut and the cultivated, the old roses, the new, the bluebells and primroses, the columbines and woodbines, the meadow cranesbill, the ragged robin, the jasmine, the honeysuckle, the poppies and cornflowers, the everything else, yellow cowslips, the cowslips particularly. I’d knock on the door of the house I grew up in and when they answered, my much younger parents, I’d cover the step with the wealth of them, and when that old woman knocked on the door with her rag pram I’d fill it till they came over the sides and filled the torn black hood, spilling on to the pavement behind her as she wheeled it off down the road.