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

was. The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass. That was the poem Keats had written, about her birthdate, 20 January, four long months ago her birthday, and one thing certain, time meant something more than the face of a wee gold watch, aye they could send a watch fine, even one that’d obviously cost a fair bit, but if they saw her in the street they’d look right through her, her father too. Since she was a quite wee girl he’d been back and as close as Flemington right up the road, so close a bird would hardly notice it, hardly have to use its wings if it crossed the sky from here to there.
    But he may as well still be in Australia with the sheep for all the difference his coming back made to his daughter, in fact she wished he were, so there’d be no danger of seeing him, no chance of him and his not-seeing her, in a street so close to home. She wished him thousands of miles away from here,
truthfully she wished him on Algol, the bad most evil star in the sky, and her mother too, they could go and live there just the two of them and happily never exchange a word to each other for as long as they lived and nobody else would have to care. They could just go, the both, and take all their unsaying with them. For if a flower grew near them, even just the air that came from them would wither that flower.
    But did that mean she would wither things too?
    Did a badness pass from them to her?
    Would it ruin the feel of the mouth of the hill pony on the palm of her hand when she went the hike by herself and gave it the apple she had for her lunch, the bluntness of the mouth, the breath of it, the whiskers round the mouth she could feel, the warm wet and the slaver on her hand that she wiped on her skirt and got into the trouble about?
    And the nest shaped like a dome, something that the bird just made without needing to know, without reading in a book how to make, and made it so solid and hung it so firm in the thinnest of the branches over the river?
    There was the word gorgeous, and there was the word north, and there was a sound that went between the words that she liked. Could you wither a word?
    There was the orchard nobody went to. How could anything touch it? It was all blossom right
now. There was the whole meadow full of flowers, wild ones, all the bright faces, out that window beyond this house only a couple of streets away. She sat low on the old nursing chair and the Fraser books sat on the shelf right next to her eye. Fraser. Olive. O LIVE. I LOVE. O VILE. EVIL O.
    She reached and took out the first book. She didn’t even look at it, she threw the book. She just threw it.
    And that’s how, when the spine fell off it and she picked it up to look at the bad damage she’d done, she saw – music.
    Inside, behind the spine, the place where the pages were bound was lined with it, notes and staves all the way down the place where the name of the book had been. There’d been a music inside it all the years the book had been in the world. And that was a fair few years, for on one of its first pages was the date 1871. So that made it fifty-four years, near sixty, there’d been music nobody’d known about in the back of – she looked at the broken piece of spine – Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. And the paper with the notes on it looked like it might be a good bit older than the book whose spine it was hidden in, for there was a quality to the way the staves and notes were formed that didn’t look like these things looked nowadays.
    That was an e, but she didn’t have the beginning of the stave so she didn’t know what key. C#, f, e, c#, b, b, f#, a. Then the piece of music ended
where the paper had been cut to fit the spine. On the surviving bit of stave below: a, a, e, g, b, e, b.
    She went to the space on the shelf that Ivanhoe had left empty. She put her finger to the top of the spine of the book next to the space, tipped the book out, watched it balance on its