Public Library and Other Stories Read Free

had at some unknowing point looked thoughtful, made me feel strange, better. The idea
that I had found anything filled me with wonder. As the boys took turns trying to throw single cigarettes up in the air and through the open window, I felt myself become substantial. Now the boys were scrabbling about on the ground trying to find the fallen cigarettes, arguing about picking the cigarettes up off the ground and not crushing them. They shouted with happiness when one went through the high window and landed on the woman’s lap. They argued about whose aim was truest, who would be best to throw the little red plastic lighter.
    Inside the train the woman waved her hands to get their attention.
    She tossed the cigarette up at her mouth and caught it the wrong way round, like a minor circus trick. The three boys shouted their admiration. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, put it the right way round, then got herself ready to catch the lighter, which she did, with one hand. She lit her cigarette. The tallest, the shyest of the three, tapped on the sealed window with the stick he was carrying and pointed it at the No Smoking logo. He blushed with pleasure at the way his friends laughed, the way the woman laughed behind the window, the way I was laughing too.
    I stood directly under the open window and shouted up through it that I was off to find someone to unlock the train and let her out.
    The smallest boy snorted a laugh.
    Don’t need to go nowhere, he said. We’ll get your friend out.
    All three boys stood back from the train carriage. The smallest scouted about for a pebble. The other two bent down and picked up large stones. The dog started to bark. It was almost immediately after they began throwing the stones at the side of the train that the men in the luminous waistcoats came running towards us.
    Shortly after this the afternoon came to an end. We said our goodbyes. We went our different ways. I myself went back to the station and bought a ticket home. What was it you were telling me down there? the woman asked me when she’d finally got off the train, after they’d backed it to a platform, opened its doors, brought the sloping ramp they use to help people in wheelchairs to get on and off and allowed her to wheel herself out. There were many apologies from people in suits and uniforms. Well, that’s the last time I take the train! is what she said, with some campness and a great deal of panache, when the doors finally automatically hissed open on her like the curtains of a strange tiny theatre. The people on the platform laughed politely. She didn’t mean it, of course she didn’t.
    In Shakespeare, the word stone can also mean a mirror.
    The word pebble has, in its time, also meant a
lens made of rock crystal and a sizeable amount of gunpowder.
    The word mundane comes from
mundus
, the Latin word for the world.
    At one time the word cheer seems to have meant the human face.
    The word last is a very versatile word. Among other more unexpected things – like the piece of metal shaped like a foot which a cobbler uses to make shoes – it can mean both finality and continuance, it can mean the last time, and something a lot more lasting than that.
    To conclude once meant to enclose.
    To tell has at different times meant the following: to express in words, to narrate, to explain, to calculate, to count, to order, to give away secrets, to say goodbye.
    To live in clover means to live luxuriously, in abundance.

For the past month or so, while I’ve been editing and readying this book, I’ve been asking the friends and the strangers I’ve chanced to meet or spend time with what they think about public libraries – about their history, their importance and the recent spate of closures. Here’s a transcription of one of the earliest responses I had, from Sarah Wood:
This is what I think of when I think of school holidays, me and my friend Lisa cycling at full speed on our bikes and the route is always to the