Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

Em —, the voice said.

Then there was a pause.

The other thing about Milton, I said, is that he was a great maker-up of words, and one of the reasons they named a rose after him, not just because it was an anniversary of his birth or death, I can’t remember which, in 2008, is that he’s actually the person who invented, just made up, out of nothing, the word fragrance. Well, not out of nothing, from a Latin root, but you know what I mean.

I waited but nobody spoke, so I went on.

And gloom, I said. And lovelorn, and even the word padlock we wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for him just making it up. I wonder what we’d call padlocks if we didn’t call them padlocks.

Then the voice began saying something serious-sounding about something. But I wasn’t listening, I had seen a bird above the green of me, a swift, I saw it soar high in the air with its wings arched and I remembered as if I were actually seeing it happen again in front of my eyes something from back when we were first married, on holiday in Greece having breakfast one morning in our hotel.

It’s a warm windy morning, it must be very windy because the force of the wind has grounded a swift, the kind of bird that’s never supposed to land, a young one, still small. In a moment you’re up on your feet, you drop your knife against your plate, cross the courtyard and scoop the bird up in both hands; it struggles back against you and a couple of times nearly wings itself free, but you cup it gently back in again, its head surprisingly grey and its eyes like black beads in the cup of your hands; I have never seen and am unlikely ever again to see a swift so clearly or so close. You carry it up the several flights of stairs till we get to the open-air roof of the building, you go to the very edge of the roof with it and then I see you throw your arms up and fling the bird into the air.

For a moment it rose, it opened its wings and held the wind. But then it fell, it was too young, the wind was still too strong for it. We ran down all those stairs as fast as we could and went out into the street to look for it, we looked all up and down the street directly below, but we couldn’t find it. So God knows whether it made it. God knows whether it didn’t.

Hello? the voice was saying more and more insistent, more and more officious in my ear, hello? but I was looking open-mouthed at the first burst of colour, a coiled whorl of deep pink inches away from my eyes, rich and layered petal after petal in the unfold of petal.

The scent was, yes, of roses, and look, four new buds round this opened flower had appeared too, I’d not noticed them till now and they looked as if they were really ready to open, about to any minute.

Yes, I said into the phone. Sorry. Hello.

Urgency, update, condition? the voice said.

Fine, I said. Life’s fine. Life has definitely improved.

Yes, but. Results, hospital, inconclusive, the voice said. Urgent, immediate, straight away.

The voice had become implacable.

Surgery policy, the voice said.

Then it softened.

Here, it said. Help.

Well, I said, for now I’m okay though at some point soon I might need a bit of a hand with some trellising.

With —? the voice said.

I’m so sorry, I said, but I’m on a train and we may lose reception any mo –

I pressed the End Call button then switched my phone off because all four of those new buds had opened right before my eyes and I was annoyed that because I had been talking on a phone I had not seen a single one of them do it.

I have never yet managed to see the moment of the petals of a bud unfurling. I might dedicate the rest of my life to it and might still never see it. No, not might, will: I will dedicate the rest of my life, in which I walk forward into this blossoming. When there’s no blossom I will dead-head and wait. It’ll be back. That’s the nature of things.

As it is, I am careful when kissing, or when taking anyone in my arms. I warn them about the thorns. I treat myself with care. I guard against pests and frost-damage. I am careful with my roots. I know they need depth and darkness, and any shit that comes my way I know exactly what to do with. I’m composed when it comes to compost.

Here’s my father, a week before he died. He’s in the hospital bed, hardly conscious. Don’t wake me, he says, whatever you do. He turns over away from us, his back to us. Then he reaches down into the bed as if he’s adjusting one of the tubes that go in and out of him and, as if there’s nobody here but him — can he really be — the only word for it isn’t an easeful word, it’s the word wanking. Whatever he’s doing under the covers for those few seconds he takes, it makes the word wank beautiful. He’s dying. Death can wait.

A branch breaks into flower at the right-hand side of my forehead with a vigour that makes me proud.

Here we all are, small, on the back seat, our father driving, we’re on holiday. There’s a cassette playing: The Spinners; they’re a folk band from TV, they do songs from all over the world. They do a song about a mongoose and a song about the aeroplane that crashed with the Manchester United team on board the time a lot of them died. That’s a modern ballad, our father has told us, and there’s a more traditional ballad on that same cassette too, about two lovers who die young and tragically and are buried next to each other in the same graveyard, that’s the song playing right now in the car in the July dark as we drive back to the caravan site, the man from The Spinners singing the words and from her heart grew a red red rose. And from his heart grew a briar. They grew and they grew on the old church wall. Till they could grow no higher. When we get back to the caravan and get into our beds in the smell of toothpaste and soap-bags, when the breathing of all the others regulates and becomes rhythmic, I will be wide awake thinking about the dead lovers, they are wearing football strips, bright red, and their hearts are a tangle of briars and thorns, and one of my brothers shifts in his sleep and turns to me in the makeshift bed and says from somewhere near sleep, are you having a bad dream? and then though I don’t say anything at all he takes me and turns me round, puts one arm under me so my head is on his shoulder and his other arm across my front, and that’s how he holds me, sleeping himself, until I fall asleep too.

Every flower open on me nods its heavy head.

I lie in my bed in a home I’m learning to let go of and I listen to my neighbour playing the drums through the wall in the middle of the night. He’s not bad. He’s getting better, getting the hang of it.

Every rose opens into a layering of itself, a dense-packed grandeur that holds until it spills. On days that are still I can trace, if I want, exactly where I’ve been just by doubling back on myself and following the trail I’ve left.

But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards.

York City Children’s Library made me the writer I am, Kate Atkinson told me. Then she told me about the adult ticket they decided they’d issue her there at the age of six because she was taking out so many books.

She went on to describe how the quite small area in that City Library which was originally the children’s section is the place where all the library’s books are now, that everywhere else is filled with computers or space dedicated to genealogy, and how it’s not called the City Library any more, how now it’s called the York Experience.