Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

The thing is, she can’t remember which of them it is she dislikes most. Or least. She decides to choose one of them and leave it all as incontestably as possible to the person of her choice. But which one?

So she writes and invites all five of her relatives to come and stay with her for a week. In that week, she thinks, she’ll be able to sort wheat from chaff. Because they all know she’s quite rich, and because they guess she might be dying, her relatives all write back immediately saying they’ve accepted her invitation and her offer of free plane tickets (they live in America or Australia, somewhere far away). The day approaches and she’s got everything ready for them, all the beds made up, all the food in the fridge. They arrive safely. One of them phones her from the airport to tell her they’ll be with her in a couple of hours.

Then the taxi they’re in on the way to her house crashes on the motorway and they’re all killed.

The old woman is more annoyed about her plan being ruined than that they’re dead. She arranges for a group funeral for them and doesn’t attend it. The week after that, she advertises in the papers and online for five actors. One of the conditions is that applicants must be able to sacrifice their Christmas holidays.

She turns on the radiators in the front room of her house and holds the auditions there. She provides each person auditioning with a list of attributes and characteristics. She chooses the five she imagines most resemble her dead family members.

Next, she hires a theatre director and tells him exactly what she wants the actors to do in the ten days they’ll spend with her.

For a week the director schools the five actors she’s chosen in the roles she’s outlined.

On Christmas Eve the five actors move into her house with her. The heating stays on in the front room throughout. On 2 January she pays them handsomely as promised and waves them all out of her house.

She turns the radiators in the front room back to their off positions.

As she goes upstairs, her house feels cavernous. She realizes she’s dying.

The doorbell rings when she’s halfway up the stairs. Two of her actor family members are at the door. They’d got as far as the bus stop. They’d looked at each other and they’d turned back to the house.

One of them says that they’d noticed their aunt isn’t keeping as well as she might.

They ask if they might move in with her.

In reality, it wasn’t my friend who died young who told me that story. It was told to me by a different friend, still as alive as you and me (well, me right now). The postscript to her telling me was funny. My (live) friend had heard half this story on the radio, come in halfway through and heard it, and she had loved it, and had congratulated the writer Angela Huth (who’s a friend of hers and who she thought she heard the announcer credit at the end) the next time she saw her at some function or other, on writing such a good story.

Thanks, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know that story. I didn’t write it, Angela Huth said.

Ah well, my (live) friend said to me when she told me it, never mind whose story it is, I stole it off the radio and now I’m giving it to you.

And now I’ve passed it on to you, whoever you are, reading this story. We’re all in receipt of stolen goods, which is probably the only conclusion I can draw in a story meant to be about death, a story which, when I sat down today to write it, I’d decided would be about the terrible beauty of a French woman dead in a ditch in 1940, after a German plane has sprayed a line of people walking along a tree-lined road trying to get away from bombardments in the city. I’d planned that it would be all about her, that this is what I’d write about, before my friends (dead and alive) intervened.

There she is, her coat flung open, her blouse still pristine, for five seconds or so, it’s not long after her death, on an episode of The World At War playing yesterday lunchtime on BBC2 (you can see it on iPlayer catch-up for the next fifty-three days). I stole her — well, or borrowed her; I’d thought this might be a story about how beautiful she was, and about how the realizing of the fact of her beauty, as I watched the programme, filled me with disgust at my being able to see, and so effortlessly, not one, not two, not three, but five whole seconds of her life and her just-happened death in a way that was so far beyond that woman’s power or choice — never mind my being able to have the luxury of any aesthetic response. Most obscene, though, is the knowledge that there was a future, and that I, or anyone, could so casually inhabit it after such a thing happening even to just one person of all the millions and millions and millions and so on whose ends were futile and foul in a war several wars back, seventy-five years ago.

And since we’re talking violent unfair death: is it easier to feel fury and hurt, or simply just to feel, about something like that woman’s death so long ago, than it is when it comes to the ubiquity of deaths, deaths on deaths, in the world in all the papers and on all the news sites right now in the form of the most up to date of our dead: a pilot burned alive, a poet shot by the police in the square where she was laying memorial flowers, the journalists and the aid workers filmed in the act of their dying, the students, the townfuls of kidnapped and casually executed people, all the hundreds of stolen lives just over the past ten days — and those are only the ones we know about?

What about you? There’s my dead friend again, nudging my arm. Hello. Yesterday, after I saw that episode of World At War, I was on a train reading in the paper all about the latest deaths and thinking how I’d like to kill the man behind me who kept coughing in that way that meant that probably he’d got a contagious cold and that my chair jolted every time he coughed since he had long legs, he was too big for the train seats, his knees were jammed up the back of my seat. To stop myself minding, I played the game on my phone, the one where you cancel all the dots of the same colour to win points, Two Dots, which ought to be called Thanatos, not Two Dots, being the perfect example of the stasis at the heart of the death-drive –

which reminds me. Here’s a story about death, etc. I once went to Greece with a friend (I don’t know whether this friend’s alive or dead. I could look on Facebook to try and find out — though there’s a chance I’d still be none the wiser since so many people on Facebook who are in reality dead still get happy birthday wishes year in year out from automated Friends on their automated birthdays). We stayed in a tiny village a couple of miles inland on an island, and on the second day there, having failed to find our way to a beach or even just to the sea, we started asking locals to point us in the right direction. It was a tiny island, a place there weren’t many other tourists, and no one we met in the street spoke English. My friend could speak a little Greek. But people kept treating us strangely. One woman took us to a church; it was very beautiful, full of freesias for Easter. An old man put his hand on my friend’s arm. He looked at us kindly, he patted us both on the back. By the end of the day the whole village was nodding at us as we passed, and people kept coming out of houses to give us gifts — halva; a picture of a saint with a blackbird bringing him things to eat; a collection of little tin rectangles, one with an eye imprinted in it, one with a heart, one with a leg.

At the airport in Athens, on our stop-off on the way home, the waitress who served us laughed out loud.

That’s not the word for sea, she said. You’ve been asking people the way to death and demise.