Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online

of the worst things you could do, maybe a worse thing even than saying a blasphemous curse, no, than saying a blasphemous curse in a church, or near a church, to break a book.
    And she was a strong lass and she had a good throw on her, as good a throw as a boy any day, easily as good as thon holiday boy she’d shoved into the river. For he might be at school down south but that didn’t mean no folk knew Latin north of Edinburgh, did it, they had the Latin up here as well, not that he even knew what he claimed to anyway.
Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit
she’d said and he’d looked at her blank-like, the so-called boy scholar who’d never heard of Horace, who said
pater
and
mater
to rhyme with alli
gator
, with the
mater
and the
pater vacat
ioning in
Nairn
shire, so
taken
with the
area
, and then he’d said the thing about highland girls and looked at her to let her know he’d a liking, the cheek of it. For he might have a father a famous surgeon but that meant nothing when you’d no need of a surgeon, aye, and no need of a father either, or a mother. And were all Edinburgh boys that feart to hang off the parapet of a bridge by their arms? He was too feart even to try, him and his sister afraid to climb even a tree, and a girl afraid of a tree was one thing, but a boy?
Oh no, his clothes
he said and his sister with her painted face and her talk of
boyfriends
, standing doing a dance,
everybody’s
doing it back at home, don’t
you know it, Olive, really truly don’t
you up here och dear me that’s too too
, then she started doing it, a mad thing with her shoulders and her legs, right there in the long grass at the river, the midges jazzing up and down in a cloud above the sister’s head, and then the brother joined in, he knew the steps too, he shimmied up the riverbank away from the sister, took her own arm as if to make her do it too and then – Well, then he’d found himself in the river, and his good clothes too.
    Then she’d run for home, blasphem-o blasphem-as blasphem-at, over and over under her breath to the sound of her own feet hitting the path past the ruined church, blasphem-amus,
blasphem-atus, blasphem-ant, it wasn’t grammatical or real Latin like but it made a fine sound. She was laughing some, though she was shocked a bit at herself for doing it, in her head she could see the shock on the face of the boy from the cold of the water when he scrambled to his feet on the slippy stones, the water had darkened his good trews and his jacket too all up the side of himself he’d fallen on.
    But it was when she was blasphemating up the High Street she saw the father of the man who was her father. He had his back to her, he was looking in the windows of the butcher’s. And when she got back to the house her Aunt was out and her mother she could hear shifting about upstairs like a piece of misery as usual, and something, a badness, had come over her right then and she’d hated them all (except her Aunt, she’d never hate her Aunt) and she’d gone to the shelf where the books were kept and she’d taken the first one off the shelf her hand had come to and she’d thrown it.
    And the book had broken right open and that’s when she’d seen there was a music inside it, one nobody knew about, one you could never have guessed at, that was part of the way that the book had been made.
    They were Fraser books. They’d sent them, the Frasers. There were books, and good new clothes too came to the house sometimes, and one day last
month – it wasn’t a birthday, it was well past her birthday, but Aunt said it would be meant for her sixteenth – there was even a watch, Aunt said a real gold one and put it away upstairs in its velvet in its hard box still in the shop wrapping from Aberdeen, for they knew otherwise it’d end in the river or buried in sand on the beach, sand choking its dainty face and nobody finding it for who knows how many summers or winters, if ever.
    St Agnes Eve! Ah, bitter chill it