Public Library and Other Stories (5 page)

1956 in London: onset of severe mental illness.
I was walking along and I just blacked out and when I came to, I found myself up a tree.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospitalized.
I cannot write any literature. It is as though I had lost a limb
. Medication: chlorpromazine. Like she's been
hammered down in a box and dropped below the Bermuda Deep
. Unrecognizable,
changed from the gallant, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked girl. Grossly overweight, disfigured
. Medication brings on painful sensitivity to sunlight. Puffy eyes. Skin grey, leathery. Stuffs enough hospital teddy bears (paltry sum per bear) nearly to ruin her hands. Buys herself ticket north.

1960s: moves from house to uneasy house, renting in Inverness, Capital of the Highlands, sixteen miles from Nairn. Hospitalized again. Seen in grounds of Craig Dunain, Inverness mental hospital, wandering about holding beaten-up typewriter. Moves back to Aberdeen, this time to Cornhill Hospital.
Percipient woman doctor
thinks schizophrenia might be misdiagnosis and medicates
for hypothyroidism, myxoedema.
As if by disenchantment
herself again.

Sunlight.
Three wonderful years of good health.

Cancer. Two operations. Dies in December 1977. Penniless at time of death. Friends gather in snow for funeral that never takes place: bad weather, mishap, misinformation, accident.

Winner, over the years, of twenty-two literary prizes and two gold medals. Very little work published.
When I send a poem to a publisher with ‘Royal Mental Hospital' at the top
…

I have forgotten how to be / A bird upon a dawn-lit tree, / A happy bird that has no care / Beyond the leaf, the golden air. / I have forgotten moon and sun, / And songs concluded and undone, / And hope and ruth and all things save / The broken wit, the waiting grave.

*

In her gold medal-winning early poem, The Vikings, the dead are simultaneously ancient and young,
younger than death and life
. The poem's narrator asks them how it's possible that they're so very beautiful:

Here are three of her poems, the first from 1943, the second circa 1954, the third 1971.

The story about her finding the music in the spines of the books is made up by me.

But that 1871 edition of Scott, like many books over the centuries, bound with recycled old paper stock, really is lined and pasted with staved manuscript at the back of the pages, at least, the ones I've got on my desk are. And she really could, as a girl, hang from the parapet of a Nairn bridge by her arms, and pretty much everything else here can be found and is sourced in the collections of her poems which her good friend from her university years in Aberdeen and Cambridge, the Medieval and Renaissance academic Helena Mennie Shire, edited after Olive Fraser's death, The Pure Account (Aberdeen University Press, 1981) and The Wrong Music (Canongate, 1989).

Think of the Waverley collection on the shelves, the full twenty-five novels, their spines sliced back and open and the music inside them visible.

In a poem pamphlet by Sophie Mayer called
TV GIRLS
, full of poems about contemporary
TV
heroines, Mayer lists the weapons that Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses throughout the show's seven
TV
seasons to keep the vampires, demons and various forces of evil at bay. On her list, in among the stakes and swords and sunlight, is ‘library card'.

I wrote and asked her about the library card as weapon. This is what she replied:

Libraries save the world, a lot, but outside the narrative mode of heroism: through contemplative action, anonymously and collectively. For me, the public library is the ideal model of society, the best possible shared space, a community of consent – an anarcho-syndicalist collective where each person is pursuing their own aim (education, entertainment, affect, rest) with respect to others, through the best possible medium of the transmission of ideas, feelings and knowledge: the book.

I believe that within every library is a door that opens to every other library in time and space: that door is the book. The library is what Michel Foucault called a ‘heterotopia', an ideal yet real and historically delimited place that allows us to step into ritual time (like the cinema and the garden). It is a site of possibility and connection (and possibility in connection).

Without public libraries, I would not have known there was a world outside the conservative religious community in which I grew up (and of which I would probably still be a part without the heroic librarians in our small suburban library who faced out work by Jane Rule and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Leslie Feinberg even after the passage of Section 28). I believe libraries are essential for informed and participatory democracy, and that there is therefore an ideological war on them via cuts and closures, depriving individuals and communities of their right to knowledge and becoming on their own terms.

I had been planning to write this story about the ashes of DH Lawrence. I hadn't known what had happened to him after he was dead. Now that I did – at least, if what the biography I'd been reading claimed was true – I couldn't get it out of my head. On the train home that night, even though it was a couple of months since I'd finished reading it, I'd got my notebook out of my bag and made some notes about it and about some other things too that the biography said had happened to him.

For instance, he'd be walking past a theatre or picturehouse in London in the First World War and the crowd would jeer at his beard, which marked him out, made him a visible slacker, a refuser, not enlisted, maybe even a conscientious objector. Then, the cottage he'd taken for some of the war years had been raided by the Home Office or the
military authorities who'd confiscated not just some letters in German (his wife, Frieda, was related to the German military) but also a copy of a Hebridean song, because they thought it was secret code, and some drawings Lawrence had made of the stems of plants which, the biographer said, they'd decided were secret maps.

I'd thought I knew quite a lot about Lawrence's actual life. I've been reading him since I was sixteen, when I chose a dual copy of St Mawr / The Virgin and the Gypsy for a school prize, mostly because I knew it would discomfit the Provost and his wife, who annually gave out the prizes; Lawrence was still reasonably notorious in Inverness in the 1970s. (It makes me laugh even now that the prize sticker inside my paperback says I'm being awarded for Oral French.) Now I was six years older than he'd been when he died. I'd felt for him all through reading this fine and thoughtful biography. Sitting on the train weeks later I was still preoccupied with him, his little red beard jutting in fury at all the patriotic clichés. All these weeks later it still made me laugh with real satisfaction that the authorities had been stupid enough to think Gaelic was some kind of secret code.

Above all, though, it was the story of what may have happened to his body five years after his death that I couldn't stop thinking about. I was still
amazed by it now, cycling my bike home from the station.

But then I got home and opened my mail and I stopped thinking about anything because there was a Barclaycard statement waiting for me which claimed I'd spent a fortune.

I only very rarely use that credit card, or any of my credit cards. I'm quite good credit-wise, honest. In fact, that card had actually been a hundred pounds
in
credit for months, which is why I'd recently used it to buy some shirts for Christmas in a clothes shop in London called Folk.

I looked at the total again. £1,597.67. Had I really spent that much money on four shirts?

I turned the statement over.
Previous balance from last statement
£100.37. 11 Dec Folk, London £531.00. 21 Dec Lufthansa, Koeln £1,167.04 1,840.70 U. S. Dollar, USA, Exch Rate 0.6340 Incl Non Sterling Trans Fee of £33.88
03 Jan New Balance £1,597.67
.

Lufthansa.

I hadn't bought anything from Lufthansa ever.

I phoned the Barclaycard number at the top of my statement.

Hi there!

An automaton instructed me that I could answer its questions either by pressing the buttons on my phone or by speaking into the gaps it would leave for me. It had been recorded by someone with a
north-of-England voice, friendly, like a not too abrasive stand-up comedian. I gave this matey automaton my card number and it offered me some options. When none of these involved speaking to someone about a fraudulent claim and I didn't answer quickly enough either with button pushing or by saying something, the automaton asked me to tell it out loud what I wanted.

I'd like to speak to someone, I said.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that, the automaton said. Try again.

I'd like to speak to someone, I said again.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that, the northern automaton said. Try again. Try saying something like:
Pay my bill
.

Speak to someone, I said.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that, the automaton said.

I stayed silent.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that, the automaton said. Hold on. I'll just put you through to a member of our team who'll be able to help you. Just so you know, all our calls are recorded for training and legal purposes.

I listened to the muzak for a bit.

Hello, you're speaking to indecipherable, how can I help you? a real person said to me down the phone from somewhere that had the sound of very far away.

He asked me some security questions, to check it was really me.

There's a transaction on here, I said, that I didn't make and I didn't authorize.

Don't worry, Ms Smith, he said. Thank you, Ms Smith. I can see that, Ms Smith. Yes, Ms Smith, thank you.

He put me through to some more muzak. Some minutes later a woman answered. She also had the slight delay round her voice which signalled that although she was here in my ear, I was maybe on the phone to somebody on a totally different planet. She asked me the same security questions. Then she told me that this card had been presented for use yesterday for a transaction costing two pounds –

Two pounds! I said and this is what went through my head as I said it:
I'd never use a credit card for something so small
. It was as if
I
needed proof that I hadn't used my credit card even though I knew full well that I hadn't.

Meanwhile, the woman was still speaking.

– card was then withdrawn just before the transaction went through, she said.

It wasn't me, I said. I'd just like to make that really clear.

She told me Barclaycard would be in touch with me, that I'd hear from them over the next three weeks and that I was to be sure to reply within the
requested timeframe or they would consider the matter resolved and charge my card accordingly.

For a transaction that I didn't make? I said.

Be sure to reply within the requested timeframe, Ms Smith, she said.

And look – it's in dollars, I said. I haven't been to the States since 2002. I want it noted right now that I made no such transaction and that my card has been defrauded. I want this sum of money, for a ticket I never bought and a transaction I never carried out, wiped off my account. And I want you to stop this card this instant.

Yes, I can do that, Ms Smith, the woman said. There. Just a moment. Now. The card is now stopped. Please now destroy this card, Ms Smith. Barclaycard will send you a new card within the next five days or so.

I don't want a new card, I said. Someone'll probably just get its details and defraud it too. And how did Lufthansa get my details? Why did Lufthansa believe that this was me buying a ticket when it wasn't?

It will now go forward for further investigation so that we can ascertain the facts of this situation, thank you, Ms Smith, the woman said.

It wasn't me, I said again.

I sounded petulant. I sounded like a child.

Thank you for being in touch with Barclaycard, Ms Smith, she said. Have a lovely evening.

I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and found I was in my front room.

What I mean is, even though I'd been there the whole time, I'd actually just spent the last half hour somewhere which made my own front room irrelevant, even to me.

I stood by the fireplace and it was as if I had been filled with live ants. I went antsily around the house from room to room for about half an hour. Then I stopped, stood by the dark window, sat down on the edge of the couch. I told myself there was nothing to do about it but laugh it off. It happens all the time. People are always getting scammed. That's life.

I picked up a book but I couldn't concentrate to read.

I began to wonder instead who the person was, the person who'd pretended, somewhere else in the world, to be me. What did he or she look like? Was he or she part of a group of people who did this kind of thing? Or was it a single individual somewhere in a room by him- or herself? Somewhere in the world this person knew enough about the numbers on a card in my wallet in the dark of my pocket to fool a respectable airline company into selling an expensive ticket.

I looked at the statement again. It didn't say anything about where the ticket was from or to. Dec 21. Maybe this other me had been going home
for Christmas. Did she have a family? Did the family know she was a fraudster? Were they maybe a family of fraudsters? I could see them all round a long table set for Christmas; I stood ghost at their feast and watched them with their arms round their shoulders as Hogmanay gave way to New Year. How could she be me? I hadn't sat in Departures with a print-out ticket paid for by me. I hadn't walked down the tunnel that led to the door of the aeroplane, or climbed the steps out in the cold of the winter airport air.

Oh Christ. Passport.

I ran upstairs. I pulled open the cupboard door. But my passport was safe there on the underwear shelf.

I put it back. I closed the door. I laughed. Oh well. I came downstairs and put the kettle on, thought about making something to eat. But it was after nine o'clock and if I ate now I'd not sleep.

So I sat on the kitchen stool until the kettle boiled and I thought about how once, years ago, I had been really well pickpocketed in an Italian seaside resort by a child. The child, a dark-haired girl with a miniature accordion slung on her shoulder, had been walking up and down outside the restaurant we'd decided to eat at, playing the opening riff of Volare. I must've looked an easy touch; she had approached me and asked for money and when I'd said no she had talked to me briefly and shyly while
thieving from me with such sleight of hand that it wasn't till I'd put my hand in my pocket half an hour later for the roll of cash I was carrying so I could pay the bill and found the pocket empty that I knew. She'd done it with such artistry that I almost didn't regret what she'd taken. On the contrary, I'd felt strangely blessed. It was as if I'd been specially chosen.

How was this different? It felt different. It felt like it had been nothing to do with me. There'd been no real exchange. More, it somehow made
me
the suspect. No amount of speaking down a phone to someone in a call centre could restore my innocence.

I got my Barclaycard out of my wallet and folded it in two. I folded it back on itself the other way. I did this several times very fast until the fold gave off heat. When I could no longer put the tip of my finger on it because it was so hot, I ripped the card in two, one half
valid from
, the other
expires end
.

Five days later a new card with a new number and my name on it arrived from Barclaycard.

Ten days after that, a form arrived. It asked me to tick a box which confirmed whether I agreed or disagreed that I had made the transaction in question with Lufthansa.

I ticked the box which disagreed. I wrote underneath in capitals: I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE CARRIED OUT ANY TRANSACTION WITH LUFTHANSA WITH THIS OR ANY OTHER CARD and I signed the form with my name.

Two weeks after that, a letter arrived from Barclaycard which said they'd
credited my Barclaycard with the amount involved
while they made
further enquiries
.

Meanwhile, here's the story of what maybe happened to the remains of DH Lawrence.

After he died in 1930 at the age of forty-four, his wife, Frieda, married her lover, Angelo Ravagli, and they moved to New Mexico. In 1935 she sent her husband back to Vence in France, where Lawrence had died and was buried, with the instruction that he have Lawrence's body exhumed and cremated so that she could put his ashes in a beautiful vase.

Ravagli took the vase to Vence. He came back to New Mexico with the vase full of ashes. Frieda sealed the ashes up in a resplendent memorial shrine inside a block of concrete in case of thieves. When she died in 1956 she was buried next to this shrine. There's a photograph of the shrine on Wikipedia. It has a risen phoenix carved in stone or concrete above it and the letters DHL surrounded by bright painted sunflowers and foliage on the front.

But in the biography I'd been reading, which is by John Worthen, Worthen says that after Frieda died, Ravagli announced: ‘I threw away the DH cinders.' He'd had him exhumed and burned as instructed,
he claimed, but then he'd dumped the ashes – maybe in Marseilles, Worthen thinks, maybe at the harbour, into the sea. When he got back to New York, Ravagli filled the vase with the ashes of God knows what or who. He gave it to Frieda, who buried it with honours and died believing she'd be being buried next to what was left of Lawrence.

Wikipedia, too, seems to suggest that the ashes in that shrine are actually Lawrence's.

Who knows? Maybe they are.

But whether they are or they aren't, imagine the husband, faithful and lying, seething, triumphant, steady in deception for twenty whole years till she dies. Imagine his foul understandable need, his satisfaction, changing DH Lawrence to DH cinders.