Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

I empty the change from my pockets into the long grass. The money disappears as I watch. I can still just see the edge of the fifty pence piece, so I pick it up again, turn it over, tails, heads, and check the date. 1997. It was a year I lived through. Britannia is sitting on a lion’s flank holding a sprig in her hand. Olive? Laurel? I stand up. I throw the coin as far as I can into the thick new growth in the coppiced wood behind me.

Ha! It goes quite far.

I’d fill every toaster that ever stopped working, got thrown out, got buried in landfill. I’d fill all their slots with wild colours and flowerheads. I’d fill that old shop with the smell of this earth.

Here’s what Helen Oyeyemi told me about the connective network of public libraries:

Public libraries were the making of me. The local library was a very practical solution to restlessness of mind plus very minimal funds. But the amazing thing was that there were three libraries in one. I lived close to the smallest of those (Deptford branch) but if I needed a book that the Deptford library didn’t have, I was referred to the medium-sized library (Lewisham), which was a longer bus ride away, and if the medium-sized library didn’t have the books I needed, then the biggest one definitely did, and I’d go all the way to Catford for those books. Between them these three never let me down. It was like living in a triangle of protection. The public library network definitely strikes me as some sort of live and benevolent organism.

I had a dream, I say.

Don’t tell me about any dream right now, you say, I can’t listen to it right now.

We are sitting in what characterizes weekday breakfast, which means us not saying anything and the Today programme on in the background. Today the Today programme is about the possible break-up of the Eurozone, about a government scheme to give parents online training in how to look after new babies, and about how some government people are swearing they’re not in the pockets of newspaper people regardless of any SMS messages they may have sent to them and how nobody is going to resign. The word they keep using is transparent.

It’s not just any dream, it’s the recurring dream, I say. The one I’ve been having all year. I had it again. I keep having it.

Tautology, you say.

What? I say.

You just said the same thing four times over, you say. And I can’t hear about your dream right now. I’ve got work in a minute.

I’ve got work too, I say.

Then I don’t say anything for a minute because we both know that sending CVs out online to try and find work doesn’t really constitute work.

Anyway I don’t want to tell you it, I say. I’m just telling you the fact that I had it again.

Good, you say.

There’s a graveyard in it, I say.

In the dream? you say.

You raise your head from your coffee because today the company you work for is meeting some people who run a business which is extending its premises into the site of an old churchyard, to see if the people like the company’s plans for turning burial ground into tidy new landscaping. Some of the things I’ve said to you about this and that you’ve shrugged your shoulders at are: are you allowed to do that? and what about the dead people? and you can’t tidy a graveyard into something else, it’s always going to be a graveyard. If the graveyard deal falls through it looks like your job will too, because your company is laying off people right left and centre.

Am I in it? you say.

The graveyard? I say.

The dream, you say. Don’t tell me the whole dream. I just want to know if I’m in it.

You’re not, I say, and it’s not your graveyard, it’s a 1960s graveyard. And I’m not even in the dream, myself. I mean, I’m in it, but not as me.

How then? you say.

Well, I say, in it I’m a different person. I’m, like, a character in a 1960s novel.

Which 1960s novel? you say. Who by?

Not a real actual novel, I say. Not a novel that exists. I’m just trying to find a way to describe what it feels like to have the dream.

And you’re like a character or you are a character? you say.

Pedant, I say.

Are there scooters? you say.

Eh? I say.

Milk machines? you say. Where you put your coin in and a little carton of milk drops out. Photo booths. Record booths, upstairs in Woolworths. Where you wait your turn then you listen to a record and don’t have to buy it.

Don’t start trying to turn my dream into a cheap graphic-designy version of the 1960s, I say.

Are there any women in it who are pregnant and thinking about having an abortion but know how impossible that’ll be so they end up having a terrible miscarriage because they have to go to a backstreet place to have it done? you say.

Yes, hundreds of them, I say, and they’re all queuing up looking aggrieved at the future. Stop hijacking my dream.

How do you know it’s a 1960s book and not a 1960s film ? you say.

I’m not telling any pedant anything else about any dream of mine, I say.

I told you already I don’t want to hear about your stupid dream — you say.

It’s not a stupid dream — I say.

And I was just interested for a moment in the form it’s taking, you say. Because dreams are usually really visual, aren’t they? More like films. Is it like A Hard Day’s Night?

No, I say.

Do you remember that time we were driving back from Wales, you say, and I was falling asleep at the wheel and the only way we could keep me awake was to play the soundtrack of A Hard Day’s Night really loud?

No, I say.

No? you say.

No I don’t, I say. And it’s not like a film, it’s grimier, and calmer, and smaller, and less meaningful than a film is. It’s kind of nothing. And everything.

How does that make it a novel? you say.

It’s like I can sort of taste the paper, I say, and smell it, the paper the book’s made with, even though I’m sort of seeing it happen.

Seeing what? you say.

There’s this man with his arm in a sling, I say, and he comes home from work late one night and goes up the stairs and there are these three small girls all in a row in a bed, tucked in, they’re asleep, but he wakes them. So he can tell them.

Tell them what? you say.

I thought you didn’t want me to tell you my dream, I say.

I’ve got to go in a minute, you say. Come on.

He tells them, I say, how the day before he comes home — he’s been down south working in London — anyway the day before, he’s just walking along the road, turning a corner on an ordinary London street on his way to work when all of a sudden he sees her.

Who? you say.

Dusty Springfield, I say.

Dusty? you say. Really? What’s she singing?

She isn’t singing anything, I say, she’s having her photograph taken in a graveyard by a man from the Daily Mirror.

How do you know he’s from the Daily Mirror? you say.

I just do, I say. Dream logic.

I can’t believe she’s not singing something, you say. That’s because you don’t like her music.

I do so like her music, I say. I just don’t know very much about it.

You don’t even know a single song she sang, you say.

I do so, I say.

Name some songs, you say.

She sings the song in that Quentin Tarantino film where the man gets his ear cut off, I say.

Son of a Preacher Man, you say, and it’s not in that film, it’s in a different Tarantino film.

Whatever, I say.

Name one, you say. Just one.

That one where she waves her arms about in the air when she sings it, I say. And that song about only wanting to be with you, that Annie Lennox sang. And, uh, she sings, eh, she also –