Free Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith

completely curable so few years later.
    Meanwhile, a little less than a hundred years later, I was sitting at my desk on the one hand pondering hopeless fury and in the other literally holding my latest letter from Barclaycard.
    According to Barclaycard, Lufthansa claimed that I
had
reserved a ticket with them and that they had issued me this ticket, as yet unused, on 21 December last year. So, did I agree with the merchant (Lufthansa) that I had bought this ticket? If I didn’t, I was to write back and tell Barclaycard
and I was to do this within ten days of the date at the top of this letter.
    The letter had taken eight days to arrive. I had two days left to reply and one of them was a Sunday.
    Phish, oh phish. So little matters! Was there even any connection here, between the life, death and dissemination of Lawrence and me battling a fraudulent claim on a credit card statement? All I knew was, it cheered me up to think of Lawrence, whose individualism meant he’d fight anyone with both hands tied behind his back and whose magnetic pull always towards some kind of sympathy meant he’d grant a mosquito formal address in French and even compare it to an ancient work of art in the Louvre before he swatted it.
    Imagine Lawrence in the virtual world. The very thought of him railing at an internet porn site, yelling at the net and all its computer games for not being nearly gamey enough, meant I forgot for a moment the letter in my hand from Barclaycard.
    But back to Google Earth. I googled the address for the Lufthansa Office in London. I was thinking I could maybe go in, in person, and explain to them personally that it hadn’t been me who’d bought or reserved any ticket with them, used or unused, on 21 December or ever. Google told me that the London office is in Bath Road, at the postcode UB7 0DQ. I looked it up on Google Maps. It’s near Heathrow; Google Street View indicates it’s a huge
warehouse or hangar at the back of the airport, off the kinds of street that are practically motorway, the kinds almost nobody walks along.
    The photos on Google Street View had been taken in the early summer; the trees were leafy and the may was in bloom on the low dual carriageway bushes outside the Holiday Inn. At one point you could see right inside people’s cars. Google Street View had protected privacy by pixellating the numberplates of the cars. But at one point two cars were level at a junction and a man was in one, a woman in the other, and a lone pedestrian was waiting behind them at a bus stop. It was good to see some people coinciding, even unknowingly, just going somewhere one day, caught by a surveillance car and immortalized online (well, until Google Street View updated itself). Seeing them made me wonder briefly what was happening in their lives on the day this picture was taken. I wondered what had happened to them since. I hoped they’d been okay in the recession. I hoped they’d arrived safely wherever they were going.
    Then I wondered if any of them was going to Lufthansa to complain about being charged for a ticket he or she hadn’t bought.
    Of course in the end I wasn’t going to go there and explain anything. Of course it would make no difference. Of course it was impossible anyway to see anything of Lufthansa’s London Office on Google
Street View since it was on a bit of the map to which the little virtual person couldn’t be dragged.
    So instead I skimmed along Bath Road for a bit, first one way, then the other, until at one point the address label at the top of the photograph told me that though I was still on Bath Road I was no longer in West Drayton and that I was now in Harmondsworth.
    Harmondsworth. Something inside me chimed a kind of harmony. It took me a moment, then I remembered why: Harmondsworth is the place all the old Penguin paperbacks declare their place of issue. It was where the original Penguin copies of, for instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which caused all the excitement and