Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

I sit at the table. I shake my head. I start writing a text. Thank you for the lectures in 1960s memorabilia. Did you get the job. Did you not get the job. Love.

But then instead of sending it, I delete it. I put the phone down on the table and open the CD box.

The song called Island of Dreams begins with a melancholy harmonica wail. Then a lopey rhythm sets in, swings along in an almost country and western way into a song about someone who can’t forget, and what she can’t forget is a lovely love affair which took place on a beautiful island, the island of dreams. High in the sky is a bird on the wing. Please carry me with you. Far far away from the mad rushing crowd. Please carry me with you.

I spend the rest of the afternoon listening to the two CDs of digitally remastered songs by The Springfields. Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names. Say I Won’t Be There. Where Have All The Flowers Gone? (Sag Mir, Wo Die Blumen Sind). The last of these is sung in English and German by The Springfields, not very long after the war. The songs have an innocent bravado about them. Several songs slip not just from one language to another but from one national musical style to another, a bluntly international noise, raucous then soothing then raucous again sometimes in the same song. At the centre of all of them there’s this female vocal, tough and delicate, sometimes both in the space of a single held note.

I’m surprised by how many of the songs I know. I’m almost embarrassed by their sheer energy, their optimism. It makes me think of the front garden of the new council house, churned-up waist-high mud when my parents arrived, all roses by the time I was small, and of one of my few memories of my mother, the day she ran down the road with a shovel after the milkman’s horse and cart had clopped past and the horse had left balls of dung on the tarmac steaming in the cold of April, my mother coming back with it and digging the bright smell of horseshit in round the roots of the bushes.

*

I’ll write a book instead, you say. I’ll call it The Dream: Grime and Transcendence In The 1960s Novel.

Not very catchy title, I say. It’ll need to be better.

We’re in bed. It’s later. We’ve been out for supper, to spend money while we have it and to talk about ways we might be able to make it when we need to, urgently, again, quite soon. That conversation didn’t last long. But now the very nice wine is wearing off. We’re lying beside each other, both with our arms behind our heads, both looking at the ceiling of our house. Not our house. The house belongs to the bank. The bank belongs to a different planet, aeons away from the planet which the people who have to use the banks live on. So much for space travel.

Ah, it was all about things being better, getting better, back then, you say.

Grime was transcendent back then, I say.

Hems were transcendent back then, you say.

Everything was transcendent back then, I say.

We’ll be all right, you say.

Course we will, I say. We’ll transcend.

It’s not the transc-end of the world, you say.

It never is, I say. Listen. I was wondering. Is Dusty Springfield actually dead?

No, Dusty will never die, you say. She died in the late nineties I think.

Where’s she buried? I say.

In your dream, you say.

She’s not buried in my dream, I say.

Don’t tell me your dream, you say.

She’s having her picture taken in my dream, I say.

Yeah, and now you’re so fully prepared, you’ll really see her next time you dream that dream, you say.

In fact, I say, she’s not actually having her picture taken in my dream. She’s just a character in a story told by someone else.

Very postmodern structure, you say. Grime and transcendence in the postmodern 1960s novel. Don’t tell me it.

I’ll never ever tell you it, I say, and nothing you can do will ever make me.

I don’t know if she even is buried, you say. She might be scattered. It’ll probably say on Wiki.

So much information so little time, I say.

Scattered, spore-like, broken down and molecular, the hopes and the dreams and the new wipe-clean linoleums, you say. The new exciting fabrics and the clothes made of paper, the moisture from the evaporated coffee-bar steam of a recovering nation. Scattered, the notes of all the sung songs. Scattered, the filaments of light of all the new mornings that dawned across the brand new motorways with hardly any cars on them, the fogs and the smogs dispersing, the flashing neons dimming in the dawn light, season after season, round Eros in Piccadilly. There. That’s your opening page.

Eros isn’t scattered, I say. He’s still there. I saw him, for real, last week, in London.

You saw Eros? you say. For real?

Well, the statue, I say. Not your actual Eros.

If you ever see my actual Eros —, you say. In a dream, say.

Uh huh? I say.

Whatever you do —, you say.

I won’t tell you, I say.

The father shakes us awake. He’s sitting on the end of the bed in the light from the landing; the bedroom door’s open and the mother’s coming up the stairs saying don’t wake them, don’t, Fred, it’s late.

This time in the dream I am the one in the middle of the bed, the smallest. I’ve had the flu. Because I’m still not quite better from the flu, I’ve been put to bed earliest, and before my sisters got put to bed too, right at the beginning of the dream, I leaned on our windowsill with the vintage car models my mother bought me because I had the flu, and raced them along the length of the sill. There was ice on the inside rim of the window. When I put my tongue on it, it tasted of the metal of the window frame. The vintage car toys are beautiful. I know the other two sisters are already thinking about how to steal them. But for the moment in the dream they’re mine.

The father smells of alcohol. His arm is in a sling. The eldest of the sisters asks him how he did it.

He did it in a pub fight, the mother says at the door.

The father talks over the top of her.

Guess who I saw, he says. Yesterday morning, early in the morning. I was walking down the street between the bus stop and work and I turned a corner, and guess who I saw, in person, in the flesh. Dusty Springfield.

Both the sisters get very excited. I am too sleepy to be excited, and I am not completely sure who Dusty Springfield is.

The sister who sleeps on the wall side of the bed writes secret poems in the spare pages in the back of the pocket dictionary she has for school. One of the poems is about how it would feel to be a vagrant or a beggar. She always gives any pocket money she might have to the people, if she’s passing them, who came back from the war with one leg or one arm missing and sit on the pavements outside the big shops.

(When I’m this sister in the dream I know that she believes that the singer Dusty Springfield, who was New Musical Express’s most popular female vocalist again last year, would understand what it is like to be her.)

The sister on the door side of the bed is good at everything. A photo has been taken of her in her school uniform sitting at her desk pretending to write things down. It is framed on the sideboard downstairs.

(When I’m this sister in the dream I know that she has noticed that the singer Dusty Springfield, whose eyes look as black as the vinyl of her 45s, uses her eyeshadow like a mask with which she protects herself.)

Dusty Springfield! the mother is saying. She looks in awe in the landing light. She comes and sits on the end of the bed beside the father.

(When I’m her in the dream and she says this, I can feel her heart open wider, like an eye inside her.)

She was having her photograph taken, the father says. And I thought to myself, wait till I tell my girls.