Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

The boys cheered. I did too. Now we could hear the woman’s voice through the open window. She said in a voice that was proper, rather upper middle class, that she wished she’d thought how to open that window earlier, and that she would love a cigarette, that she hadn’t had a cigarette for over five years now, that she deserved one after today. She thanked the boys. She turned then and said a separate hello to me, as if we were all at a party she’d thrown and she was simply emphasizing how very pleased she was to see each and every one of us.

I saw you on the train looking so thoughtful, she said. Thank you for finding me.

The notion that I had been seen, and that from the outside I had at some unknowing point looked thoughtful, made me feel strange, better. The idea that I had found anything filled me with wonder. As the boys took turns trying to throw single cigarettes up in the air and through the open window, I felt myself become substantial. Now the boys were scrabbling about on the ground trying to find the fallen cigarettes, arguing about picking the cigarettes up off the ground and not crushing them. They shouted with happiness when one went through the high window and landed on the woman’s lap. They argued about whose aim was truest, who would be best to throw the little red plastic lighter.

Inside the train the woman waved her hands to get their attention.

She tossed the cigarette up at her mouth and caught it the wrong way round, like a minor circus trick. The three boys shouted their admiration. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, put it the right way round, then got herself ready to catch the lighter, which she did, with one hand. She lit her cigarette. The tallest, the shyest of the three, tapped on the sealed window with the stick he was carrying and pointed it at the No Smoking logo. He blushed with pleasure at the way his friends laughed, the way the woman laughed behind the window, the way I was laughing too.

I stood directly under the open window and shouted up through it that I was off to find someone to unlock the train and let her out.

The smallest boy snorted a laugh.

Don’t need to go nowhere, he said. We’ll get your friend out.

All three boys stood back from the train carriage. The smallest scouted about for a pebble. The other two bent down and picked up large stones. The dog started to bark. It was almost immediately after they began throwing the stones at the side of the train that the men in the luminous waistcoats came running towards us.

Shortly after this the afternoon came to an end. We said our goodbyes. We went our different ways. I myself went back to the station and bought a ticket home. What was it you were telling me down there? the woman asked me when she’d finally got off the train, after they’d backed it to a platform, opened its doors, brought the sloping ramp they use to help people in wheelchairs to get on and off and allowed her to wheel herself out. There were many apologies from people in suits and uniforms. Well, that’s the last time I take the train! is what she said, with some campness and a great deal of panache, when the doors finally automatically hissed open on her like the curtains of a strange tiny theatre. The people on the platform laughed politely. She didn’t mean it, of course she didn’t.

In Shakespeare, the word stone can also mean a mirror.

The word pebble has, in its time, also meant a lens made of rock crystal and a sizeable amount of gunpowder.

The word mundane comes from mundus , the Latin word for the world.

At one time the word cheer seems to have meant the human face.

The word last is a very versatile word. Among other more unexpected things — like the piece of metal shaped like a foot which a cobbler uses to make shoes — it can mean both finality and continuance, it can mean the last time, and something a lot more lasting than that.

To conclude once meant to enclose.

To tell has at different times meant the following: to express in words, to narrate, to explain, to calculate, to count, to order, to give away secrets, to say goodbye.

To live in clover means to live luxuriously, in abundance.

For the past month or so, while I’ve been editing and readying this book, I’ve been asking the friends and the strangers I’ve chanced to meet or spend time with what they think about public libraries — about their history, their importance and the recent spate of closures. Here’s a transcription of one of the earliest responses I had, from Sarah Wood:

This is what I think of when I think of school holidays, me and my friend Lisa cycling at full speed on our bikes and the route is always to the library.

It started before the time they’d let us walk to school by ourselves. But for some reason we were allowed to do this. First it was the branch library. We were eight or nine years old and we went most days. We’d get out our books, cycle home and read them in the garden in one go. It was an independence thing for sure — we went, chose, borrowed, pedalled home, read what we’d got, then went back again, chose again, came home again and read. We’d throw our bikes down outside its doors — I remember that like it was a part of it, and that we didn’t have any money, but that we didn’t need money: here transaction was a whole other thing. There was a scheme where you got points for taking out books and when you’d reached a certain number of points the prize was that you got to help the librarian tidy up the shelves. We all wanted to do that. We read as much as we could so we could win that prize. The librarian was canny.

Then the new library was built, a terribly stylish five-storey building, a giant addition to the borough where we lived. A real frisson came off the place, it still does when I remember it opening. It was cleverly imagined, beautifully designed. Inside the children’s library there was a sunken reading space that went down into the floor, a small-scale amphitheatre where we sat, citizens of thought, books open on our knees. Across from us there was a window into the place where adult readers could go and listen to records on a great big semicircular sofa — the librarian, momentarily transformed into DJ, would put the record on a turntable on the librarian’s desk and the people listening would plug in a set of headphones behind them on the sofa to hear it, music for free.

Art too: this was also the floor where you could borrow paintings and prints; you could take home a work of art to make your own home as stylish and modern as the library. Downstairs was fiction. Above us were the study carrels where the older children did their homework and all the pupils from different schools met and hung out together. It was exciting. It was like the future would be. In fact I got my first Saturday job there, which was the first time I saw the amazing off-floor facilities they had, the modern stacks full of — well, everything.

I can’t tell you what the opening of that library was like where we lived — it was an event. It was a really fantastic moment in my life, in our lives, a moment of real change. The brand new building brought with it the idea that our local history was important — that books were important, but also that we were too, and that where we lived was, that it had a heritage and a future that mattered. There was something very grounded about that beautiful new build. I’m pretty sure that’s why we were allowed to go there, on our bikes by ourselves like we did, so long as we cycled on the pavement there and back and were careful about the traffic.

There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.