Public Library and Other Stories

Grass

I am no longer as young. But it’s May, chilly and damp but May. That sound above the far-off noise of traffic is birds. That smell is cow parsley. It’s rife in the hedgerow all round me now. A couple of hours ago when I was stuck on the motorway and hedgerows weren’t even imaginable, the air that came into the car was high with the smell of something, and when I finally got off the main road and on to the back roads I found out what.

My car is near worthless. It’s worth so much less than I imagined that the fact that it still works at all is now surprising to me. I’d taken it to the dealership two towns away, took it to market like in Jack and the Beanstalk when he takes the cow to sell because they’re so poor they have to give up the last thing of value they own. I’d been in a traffic jam all the way back: a pile-up further along the motorway; it wasn’t the accident itself that was causing the crawl but the fact that everybody who drove past it slowed up to take phone footage. Nothing was moving. So I pressed the window button, which works very well in my worthless car, and I leaned out. I played with the channels on the radio and the button that makes the surroundsound happen. I switched the radio off. I checked my eyes in the mirror. I checked my teeth. I checked my phone. I noticed that the car clock was still on winter time. (This explained why I’d been exactly an hour late for a couple of meetings over the past few months.) I pressed the button that changes time. Summer at last. We inched forward then came to a standstill. I yawned. I sniffed the air. I looked to see what the stuff was in the pocket in the car door and I found this book in there.

It must have been one of the books I’d boxed up for the charity shop. I had no idea how it’d got into the door pocket; it must have fallen out of the box. Maybe the mechanic who’d just looked the car over had found it under a seat and put it in there. Selected Herrick. It was a book I didn’t remember at all. Was it even mine? When I opened it, it was full of notes in my writing, the writing of my much younger self, so I must’ve read it at some point.

My younger writing is narrow and pinched. My name, which I’d written on the first page, is squeezed up against itself as if determined to take up as little room as possible. I’d written things in pencil in the margins. Carpe diem. Greek mythological nymphs who took care of beautiful garden. On the inside back page I’d made a list of words I clearly thought were of use, bunch assortment tussock shock sheaf truss heap swathe bouquet nosegay posy skein hank. In the poems, I had underlined things; the phrase wild civility, the words and every tree / Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.

Leafy gallantry. The words filled me with unease. Then they made me think of flowers in among, of all things, lightbulbs, batteries, hairdryers, curling tongs, irons, the stuff my father used to sell in his shop.

I laughed out loud, I laughed so loud that the person in the Audi in front of me reached to adjust his or her mirror to get a look at where the laughter was coming from.

It’s over two decades, a quarter of a century ago, the day the child with the flowers came into my father’s shop.

I was looking after the shop for my father while I was home on holiday. I was doing this for almost no salary because three electrical goods chainstores had recently come to our town. This meant people didn’t bother bringing things in for repair because it was equally as cheap to throw things away and buy new ones outright (except not from my father’s shop). Christmas was the time of year my father usually made most in the shop. This most recent Christmas he’d barely scraped through. One of the new chainstores was twenty yards from the front door of the shop and lit up like Christmas all the year round.

Now, though, it was Easter. I sat on the old kitchen stool at the counter every day that Easter holiday and read books for my Finals. It was literally quieter in there than a library. I picked at the sellotape over the rip in the cushioned seat of the stool and turned the page and the next page and nobody came in to buy anything.

The book I was reading was about the life of a poet. There wasn’t much known about this poet’s actual life, the book said, other than that his father killed himself by jumping out of a fourth-floor window, so the book was a lot about what it was like to be on the edge of poverty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the part of London called Cheapside, and about how the houses jutted out from themselves above their first floors, overhung themselves like mushrooms, or galleons, and how until 1661 the people in London had been duty-bound to see to the lighting of their own streets, required by law to hang out lit candles on dark nights. There were seventeenth-century line drawings of places called Fynnesburrie Field and Moor Field, great grassy flat expanses with a few peasants selling things drawn on them, drawings of women drying clothes flat on the grass, soldiers practising archery. The shop door opened and I looked up. A child came in, nine or ten, arms full of bluebells and primroses and sticking up in the air high above the child’s head like radio aerials or butterfly antennae a couple of broken branches covered in blossom.

The child’s long dark hair was girl-length and wavy, held back from falling across the eyes by two hairclips, one on each side of the head above the ears. Hairclips equalled girl. But it was something about the hairclips being so plain and then the face, a different kind of beautiful between them, that made me suspect that the child maybe wasn’t what I’d first thought.

Where’d you get your flowers? I said.

Canal banks, the child said.

Up the canal was where the rougher girls at school tended to go to have sex with people. It was illicit no matter what you did up there. As children we weren’t, ever, supposed to go up there. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t grass about where we were. So the child was suspect as soon as I heard the word canal.

It was true that the canal banks were often lined with bluebells at that time of year. But the branches, more likely they’d been snapped off trees like the ones in the front gardens of the houses in the Crown where the people who had money lived, closer to the town, far from the canal. I myself had grown up very close to the canal, which meant that anyone I told my address, if they knew the town at all, would be able to decide what sort of person I was and what kind of people my parents were — just like I was deciding stuff about this child, because something about him made me think of the woman who pushed the pram full of rags through the long grass of the fields at the backs of the houses, to whom my mother was always exceptionally polite and kind when this woman knocked on our door, and for whom she always saved our old clothes, done things, folded neatly in the cupboard at the back door where we kept the old newspapers.

It was with one of the twigs, with its roughly split greenwood end rather than its bud end, that the child pointed at the row of toasters in boxes on the shelf behind me — as if pointing the broken stick back not at the toasters at all but at himself.

That one please, he said.

I closed my book. I looked up at the toasters.

This one? I said.

The one next to it please, the child said.

That one’s exactly the same as this one, I said.

It isn’t, the child said.

They’re all exactly the same, I said. It makes no difference which one I get down.

They look the same. But they are different individual toasters of the same make and model, the child said.

It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I grew haughty.

Pff, I said.

I climbed up two steps of the stepladder and picked up the first box I came to. I got down off the stepladder, put the box on the counter and told the child the price.

The child put the long twigs down on the counter next to the box and began peeling bluebell stems free of each other and laying the flowers separately out in front of me.

Is ten enough? the child said.

What for? I said.

The toaster, he said.

You’re joking, I said.

How many do you need? the child said.

I pointed to the price sticker on the box. Then I picked up the box as if to put it back on the shelf. But the child looked panicked. So instead, with the toaster box under my arm, I came round the side of the counter and out into the front of the shop because it had struck me that maybe that child had pocketed something while I’d been up on the stepladder with my back turned.

But the child had no bag and only the thinnest grass-stained tee-shirt and shorts on, so I pretended to have gone out there especially to tidy the top layer of the rack of battery-powered mini-fans with the picture of the ecstatic woman cooling herself, a blur of little fan blades close to her delighted face. Not that anyone was ever likely to buy a mini-fan from an Inverness shop. The very existence of such an appliance was like a kind of highland Scottish joke. My father, an optimistic man, had ordered in fifty of them a couple of years ago plus this large display rack. Nobody had bought a single one.

Meanwhile the child, who was nearly as thin as those broken-off branches, as thin and sharp as a sapling whip, and whose eyebrows, as I saw when I came back round to my side of the counter, were low and troubled, was passing a single many-headed cowslip from one hand to the other.

Okay, this one too, he said putting the cowslip beside the other flowers next to the toaster.

You can’t buy a toaster with these flowers, I said.

Which flowers can I buy it with? the child said.

If you want this toaster I’ll need actual money, I said.

The child pointed again at the row of boxes above me.

That one instead? he asked.

This is a shop, I said.

Please? he said.

Don’t be stupid, I said.

The child sighed. He looked me straight in the eye and dropped all his flowers out of his arms on to the counter. They lay there in a heap next to the petalled twigs and the toaster in its box. I shook my head.

No, I said.

I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember the child leaving. I presume he gathered up his flowers and left. Now, all the years later, I can’t remember for the life of me the price of those toasters. What I can remember is the bruised look of the bluebells, the green of their stems against their own blueness next to the photo of the toaster on the side of the box. I remember the way the blossom on those flowering branches on the counter was giving way to the green of the leaves behind it.

The other thing I remember is that a month or so after that child came into the shop and tried to buy the toaster with sticks and bluebells, I was sitting an exam. It will have been a May morning, dust-motes lazy in the air in the sunlight above us coming through the high glass in the senate hall. I wrote down a quote from the poet I was answering on. As I did so I was filled with shame. Shame filled me literally, as if I were a jug held under a cold water tap.

The question was something about gallantry.

I bowed my head in the exam room with all the other heads bent over their papers in front of me, round me and behind me, all of us answering questions about poetry, and I felt like I had been found out. But about what, exactly, or what exactly it was I’d done to feel like that, I hadn’t a clue.

A toaster.

A cowslip.

It makes me laugh now, sitting on the verge along from my still-ticking car, so long after. It makes me fond of my much younger self. I was moral, me, then. Decades it’s taken me, finally to understand why I felt shame that May morning.

Here’s one of the poems Robert Herrick wrote; it’s called Upon a Child: An Epitaph.

But born and, like a short delight,

I glided past my parents’ sight.

That done, the harder Fates denied

My longer stay, and so I died.

If, pitying my sad parents’ tears,

You’ll spill a tear or two with theirs,

And with some flowers my grave bestrew,

Love and they’ll thank you for it. Adieu.

He was born in 1591 and died in 1674. When he was an infant, it says in the introduction, which I’ve been reading sitting here in this long grass with the May cold coming through my clothes, his father, Nicholas, either threw himself out of or fell out of the fourth-floor window of the house they lived in, leaving his widow not just with six children to feed, of whom the youngest was Robert the poet, but also pregnant with the seventh. Robert Herrick himself was apprenticed young to his uncle, a goldsmith, then went on to become a churchman. He is most famous, it says here, for his poems about girls, love, spring, flowers. Fair daffodils, we weep to see / ye haste away so soon. Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes. How Roses Came Red. To a Bed of Tulips. To Violets. To Meadows. To Primroses Filled with Morning Dew. To Daisies, Not to Shut so Soon.

The car door is hanging open, the car parked as far up the verge as I can get it, but there’s nobody on this road but me, there’s been nobody for the last half hour. It’s a while since I got out of the traffic and followed my nose through a couple of rough-looking villages whose high streets were boarded-up shops, past some well-to-do houses and barn conversions; I have no idea where I am right now but there are five or six different kinds of long grass here where I’m sitting. They must be different kinds because they have different shaped seed-heads. This one has a smooth stalk, dark green, and a head with long branching clumps of flowering seed on it. This one’s seeds are much smaller and bushier. Its stalk is much lighter green. The core of the second one is sweeter, when I put it in my mouth, than the first.

I have no idea what the grasses are called. I recognize some of the flowers. That’s ragwort. Those are cornflowers. That’s red clover. Those are ox-eye daisies.

Swear on your mother’s life. Nearly three decades on and my mother is dead, my father too. The place where the shop was is still there, though now it’s a place selling highland clan souvenirs. That old woman who used to wheel the pram of rags; she must be long dead too.

I’d cover them with flowers. My mother, folding done things into neat piles for a poor woman; my father, imagining heatwaves for the Highlands: I’d gather up all the seasonals, the wild and the cut and the cultivated, the old roses, the new, the bluebells and primroses, the columbines and woodbines, the meadow cranesbill, the ragged robin, the jasmine, the honeysuckle, the poppies and cornflowers, the everything else, yellow cowslips, the cowslips particularly. I’d knock on the door of the house I grew up in and when they answered, my much younger parents, I’d cover the step with the wealth of them, and when that old woman knocked on the door with her rag pram I’d fill it till they came over the sides and filled the torn black hood, spilling on to the pavement behind her as she wheeled it off down the road.

I empty the change from my pockets into the long grass. The money disappears as I watch. I can still just see the edge of the fifty pence piece, so I pick it up again, turn it over, tails, heads, and check the date. 1997. It was a year I lived through. Britannia is sitting on a lion’s flank holding a sprig in her hand. Olive? Laurel? I stand up. I throw the coin as far as I can into the thick new growth in the coppiced wood behind me.

Ha! It goes quite far.

I’d fill every toaster that ever stopped working, got thrown out, got buried in landfill. I’d fill all their slots with wild colours and flowerheads. I’d fill that old shop with the smell of this earth.