Free Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith Page A

led to the obscenity trial, will have issued from in 1960, the place where the thousands of copies sold after the trial will have been issued too. And all the other Penguin Lawrences. I looked across at where L was, on my shelves. Almost all my Lawrence books were Penguin books. Pretty much all the Lawrence I’d ever read had come, one way or another, from this very place I happened to be looking at.
    I stood up, pushed back my chair. I got my old copy of St Mawr / The Virgin and the Gypsy off the shelf. Oral French. I turned the page. Harmondsworth.
    It was a ridiculous, glorious connection, and one that somehow made me bigger and truer than any
false claim being made against me. It also made me laugh. I laughed out loud. I did a little dance round the room.
    When I’d stopped, I closed the book and put it back in its place on the shelf. I stood at my desk for a moment. I reread the letter. I girded my loins. I sat down to reply.
Dear Barclaycard,
    This is just to thank you and Lufthansa for the reminder that nothing in life is ever secure.
    Thank you also for allowing me to find out how easy it is to be made to seem like a liar when you aren’t one.
    Thank you, too, for introducing me to a whole new kind of anxiety, a burning and impotent fury which I truly believe has helped me understand, just for a moment, a sliver of what it must have felt like for a couple of writers I like very much from the first half of the twentieth century to have suffered from consumption. The experience has certainly brought a new layering of meaning to the word consumer for me.
    Yours faithfully,
    A. Smith.
    PS
. If Lufthansa ever tell you where that ticket I didn’t buy was for, just out of natural curiosity, I’d love to know.
    It felt good when I wrote it.
    When I read it half an hour later I knew it was too anal, like an awful comedy letter someone would send in to a consumer rights programme on Radio 4.
    I deleted it.
    I wrote the kind of letter I was supposed to write, in which I simply denied knowledge of the transaction Lufthansa claimed I’d made. I sealed the envelope and I put it on the hall table for recorded delivery tomorrow.
    Then I went to bed, put the light out, slept.
    Meanwhile, in my sleep, the freed-up me’s went wild.
    They spraypainted the doors and windows of the banks, urinated daintily on the little mirror-cameras on the cash machines. They emptied the machines, threw the money on to the pavements. They stole the fattened horses out of the abattoir fields and galloped them down the high streets of all the small towns. They ignored traffic lights. They waved to surveillance. They broke into all the call centres. They sneaked up and down the liftshafts, slipped into the systems. They randomly wiped people’s debts for fun. They replaced the automaton messages with birdsong. They whispered dissent, comfort, hilarity, love, sparkling fresh unscripted human responses into the ears of the people working for a pittance answering phones
for businesses whose CEOs earned thousands of times more than their workforce. They flew inside aircraft fuselages and caused turbulence on every flight taken by everyone who ever ripped anyone else off. They replaced every music track on every fraudster’s phone, iPad or iPod with Sheena Easton singing Modern Girl. They marauded into porn shoots and made the girls and women laugh. They were tough and delicate. They were winged like the seeds of sycamores. There were hundreds of them. Soon there would be thousands. They spread like mushrooms. They spread like spores. There would be no stopping them.
    Meanwhile, that snake that Lawrence threw the log at disappeared long long ago into its hole unhurt, went freely about its ways, left the poem behind it.
    Meanwhile, right now, the ashes of DH Lawrence could be anywhere.

Local councils, under the pressure of draconian and politically expedient cuts, don’t like to say that the libraries they’re closing are closing. They say they’re