Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

(When I’m him in the dream I know, as he throws himself and his story headlong up the stairs, how full his own heart is with bringing home the story.)

And there were a lot of people there from the Daily Mirror, he says, a photographer and people, and there must have been lights, because the graveyard was lit up and she was standing way back in among all these old graves and overgrown grass and plants and suchlike, and she was wearing a bright pink suit, bright pink trousers and a bright pink jacket with her hair all yellow and up like it is, and she had her arms out like this.

The father flings his one arm that’s not in a sling out wide. At the same time, because he’s forgotten, he tries to fling the arm in the sling out too.

Ouch! he says like it really hurt to, then the mother starts to laugh, then he laughs too.

And that, each time, is where the dream ends and I wake up.

Anna James put it like this:

Public libraries were hugely important to me growing up, as we lived in a fairly small village on the outskirts of Newcastle with minimal sources of entertainment. Without access to that library, as small and stern as it was, I don’t think I would be the reader I am now. That tiny library gave me access to worlds and lives that a child growing up in rural Northumberland could never have hoped to experience anywhere else. And so when I left university becoming a school librarian was the obvious choice for me, and I spent nearly five years working with 11–18-year-olds in Coventry, trying to give them that same access to the infinite possibilities of libraries.

This is what Richard Popple said:

The spectre of library closures in the current financial climate of austerity is, to a limited extent, understandable. Of course councils are looking to save money where they can, and, while libraries do have several sources of income, they are not set up to be profit-making themselves. Libraries are, at heart, helpful and kind providers. It is hard for those who perhaps don’t feel the need to visit their local libraries to understand what a vital service they provide for communities and individuals who do — and those who do are often the most vulnerable.

Libraries provide free access to computers, and help with using them. This is so important as more and more services — job-searching, flight bookings, bus pass applications etc — now prefer or even require internet access. So for those who can’t afford a computer and are trying to find a job, or for those who did not grow up with the technology, the free access to technology and human assistance is becoming increasingly essential. Libraries provide this for everyone.

They also provide access to (generally free) entertainment and activities for children and adults. These can help individuals and communities not to be isolated.

And — books! Free books! Entertainment, knowledge, ideas, imagination, and all with the liberty to try book after book at no cost. And even if you’re housebound and unable to get to the library, they’ll usually have a service to choose and bring the books for you.

It is the poorest, most isolated and the least able in our society who suffer most if they are gone. So if our society does not care for libraries, then it is not caring for its most vulnerable.

Tracy Bohan told me a little of what’s happening to the public library in her neighbourhood:

The council intend to offer it up to developers and presumably just go with the highest bid. It will undoubtedly become flats. The council has also cut the 2016 park budget in half. And they just razed an entire housing estate to make way for a private development.

And finally, Sarah Wood told me this:

After my mother died, I was clearing out the little compartments in her purse — the reward cards, credit cards, driving licence, they’d all become meaningless. The one thing I couldn’t bring myself to throw away was her library card.

Every time I sit down to try to write this story — which is a commission for a short story anthology where all the stories have to be about death — life intervenes.

What I mean is, I have a friend who died far too young. In one of the fevers she was in, in hospital, she thought she was being abducted by art thieves. She believed that what was happening to her wasn’t that she was so ill she was hallucinating, but that she was a work of art and she was being stolen by unscrupulous people.

When she was recovering — before she caught an infection, became gravely ill all over again then, weak from having been ill for so long, died — she sent me a very funny text about thinking she was art and was being stolen and how deluded she’d been. She couldn’t eat or drink at this point but she could send texts. The texts were very much in her voice, and now that she’s dead I hear that voice in my ear a lot, what about you? that was her way of saying hello; she was Irish; and more and more I’m coming to understand that she was a work of art and that she has, after all, been stolen by art thieves who are keeping her hidden until they can work out how to make a fortune from her, or maybe they already have, maybe she’s been sold already to a massively rich art collector who keeps her out of the public eye, shows her only to a select number of extremely rich and equally unscrupulous colleagues.

That art collector’s lucky to be anywhere near my friend. My stolen friend will enhance that collector’s life. She will also alter his or her library shelves for the better; she will add a stack of bent old paperbacks, so well read that they barrel like accordions, to the shelves of stolen first editions and filched rare texts; she will add books by people that that collector’s never thought to read. She will fill the collector’s house with unimagined resonances, unexpected mythological, cultural, ancient and contemporary information and understanding, about which she was a walking library of rare things herself. She’ll change that person’s heart, whoever stole her, so that simply by dint of being in her presence he or she will soon be showing all the dodgily come-by artworks in the palazzo or mansion or wherever the collector lives to the public for free, and letting homeless people sleep in the forty-nine extra rooms that nobody else uses in that house — even sleep at the foot of his or her own bed.

Or if she’s been filched by amateurs, then right now somewhere in Europe an old woman is swearing to the prosecutor that she never saw her son do anything wrong, she knows he hasn’t, she’ll swear on her life he hasn’t, he never brought home anything or anyone untoward, and that those long rolled-up canvas things she burned in the brazier weren’t precious original artworks at all — and all the time she’ll be longing to get out of the police station and home again simply to sit by the empty brazier with my dead friend who, having saved the da Vincis and Matisses and Cézannes and Munchs from any such fate by persuading her not to burn them, is sitting alongside her and distracting her with story after story, stories maybe a bit like this one:

listen to this, an old woman who’s been fighting with all her closest relatives almost all her life, in fact hasn’t spoken to or had any contact with any of them for more than a decade, goes to the doctor and finds out she’s got terminal something. She comes home from the doctor’s and she’s troubled. Not about her death, she doesn’t think about that for a moment, she doesn’t give a toss about dying — except when it comes to who’s going to inherit her considerable wealth and belongings and estate. More than anything she wants to make sure none of what’s hers is going to go to any relatives she particularly dislikes.