Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

It’s me who likes Dusty, not you, you say. And you’ve stolen my workplace too. Dusty Springfield. In the graveyard. Your dream is filched from me. You’ve taken something I like and you’ve put it into something I’m working on. You’re filching my subconscious.

No I’m not, I say. I’ve been having this dream much longer than you’ve been working on any graveyard project. I’ve been having this dream for more than a year.

Well, where’s it come from? you say. It must have come from somewhere. Is it something that happened in your childhood?

No, I say. Not at all.

Is it your father in the dream? Did your father do something like that? Who are the other two girls in the bed? Is it from before your mother went?

All the people in the dream, I say, are strangers to me. I recognize them, but only from having dreamed about them before. And I’m looking out of the eyes of a different person in the dream every time I dream it.

You’re looking at the clock. You stand up, wipe the crumbs from round your mouth, wash your hands at the sink and take your ironed shirt off the back of the spare chair. I follow you to the hall mirror.

So sometimes I’m the man coming up the stairs, I say, and sometimes I’m the girls’ mother, and sometimes I’m one or other of the three girls in the bed.

You are buttoning yourself up.

And sometimes you’re Dusty? you say.

No, I say. I never get to be Dusty. Not yet, anyway.

Why? you say.

I don’t think we get to choose with dreams, I say. And properly speaking, she isn’t actually in the dream. I never get to see her. I only get to hear about her or tell people about seeing her.

You are at the door now pulling your jacket on. Your ironed shirt is rumpling up already beneath the jacket.

Right then. Bye then. Wish me luck, you say.

Luck, I say.

See you later. I’ll text you, you say.

Not if I text you first, I say.

The door shuts behind you.

I go back and sit at the table in the noise of the radio news.

The people on the radio tell me that the jobless figures are down, but that if you look at the statistic while taking other statistics into account the jobless figures are up. A presenter tells me I can send in my thoughts. He tells me the hashtag. He tells me about the 24 hour newsfeeds online and how to contact the programme. It is amazing how many ways there are now to be personally in touch with what’s happening in the world. The presenter reads out a couple of comments some people have emailed or tweeted.

I look at the shut door. Houses change when people come in and out of them. Even the radio sounds different with just me here; this whole house and all the air in it is practically reeling with your going, even though it’s just a simple going, an everyday off-to-work kind of going.

I am far too sensitive. Something will have to be done about such sensitivity.

There was a time in our lives, some years ago now, when you and I took to writing down our dreams. It was when we were still being idealistic about our relationship. We wanted to see how dreams would read, especially after time had passed and immediacy had blurred. We wanted to see if two different people’s dreams could have anything in common. I remember us arranging, some nights, before we went to sleep, to meet in our dreams. Of course, we never did. You can’t control dreams. And partly we started writing them down — though we didn’t say so out loud — because it’s really boring to have to sit and listen, in the morning when you’re hardly awake yourself, to a dream someone else has had, which inevitably sounds mad because dreams always sound mad, and can go on for what seems like ever.

We bought the book in Habitat, before Habitat became defunct. We wrote dreams down in it for about six months, this is eight or nine years ago now. It’s a blank book with thick hand-made paper and hand-stitching up the spine; its cover has an Indian goddess riding an elephant on it in a kind of Bollywood poster image. It’s underneath the couch in the front room, quarter-filled with outdated dreams. At least I’m assuming it’s under the couch. We tend to dislodge it yearly when summer comes around and we pull the deckchair out and find it again among the long sashes of dust that have formed themselves of what’s escaped the hoover since the end of the summer before.

*

At lunchtime you send me a text. It arrives at exactly the same time as an email from you in my inbox. The text is quite long. Before I have time to read either, the doorbell goes. I answer the door and a girl courier, holding her bike by the handlebars, gives me a padded envelope. While I’m signing the form on her clipboard, the house phone kicks into answerphone behind me and I can hear your voice leaving a message. When I get back into the kitchen there’s also a voicemail from you waiting on my mobile. I look at the envelope in my hand. My name and the address on it are in your writing.

I press the button on the house answerphone first, since your voice was in the room just a moment ago. The automaton tells me the date and the day and the time. Then you. Hi. I just wanted to inform your subconscious that one day in the 1960s Dusty Springfield was eating in the revolving restaurant at the top of the new Post Office Tower. And she saw a head waiter giving a lower ranking waiter a hard time, the head waiter was tearing a strip off him about something, and Dusty Springfield thought the telling-off was unjustified, so she picked up a bread roll from a basket on the table and she threw it at that head waiter and hit him with it. Bye for now. Love.

Then your message ends, the automaton voice repeats the time it got recorded, and the recorder rewinds and switches itself off.

I pick up my mobile and press the text icon. This is what your text says. In 1964 Dusty Springfield was kept under house arrest in a South African hotel for several days because she refused to play a concert where the venue was racially segregated. This got her into considerable trouble not just in South Africa but at home too where other entertainers, among them contemporary luminaries like Max Bygraves and Derek Nimmo, complained to the papers that by doing this she was endangering their chances of performing in South Africa. XXX

Your email, by comparison, is very short. Dusty Springfield was 1 of the reasons in the 1960s that Motown music reached the UK at all XXX

I press the voicemail button on my mobile. Hi. It’s me. I just wanted to let your subconscious know that at the end of the 60s, well, in 1970, Dusty Springfield told a newspaper that she was every bit as capable of being swayed, in terms of sexual attraction, by a girl as by a boy. At the time this was as you might imagine a near-incendiary thing for anyone to say out loud, even though male homosexuality had (though only very recently) been decriminalized. In England, not in Scotland. In Scotland it wasn’t legal till 1980. Love. See you later. Bye.

The only message left now is whatever’s in the padded envelope. I open it.

Inside is a bright orange CD box with two men and a woman in what look like 50s clothes on the cover. Did the early 60s really look so like the 50s? The men are both looking straight at the camera and holding guitars. The woman, a very early Dusty Springfield, is clasping her hands and looking upwards, demure, like a good girl, well, I say girl, but she looks like she could be any age between fifteen and fifty.

There’s a note in the padded envelope. I unfold it. In your handwriting, it says Hi. This is a present for your thief of a subconscious from the early 1960s. The song called Island of Dreams stayed in the charts for the whole first half of 1963. It has a Thomas Hardy reference in it which I thought you’d enjoy. If I’m remembering rightly Dusty Springfield was unhappy with her vocal on this song, she thought it was too nasal and slightly off key, but then she was the kind of perfectionist who, after she went solo that same year, would do things like insist on recording her vocals in the echo of the ladies toilets or the stairwells of the Philips Music building, to get the tonal dimension she particularly wanted.