Public Library and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

Instead:
    People aren’t stupid. It’s that song that’s stupid, he says.
    It’s not a stupid song, I say.
    You got that Wilfred Owen book as a school prize, he says.
    Oh yes, so I did, I say.
    You chose it yourself at Melvens, he says. 1st prize for German. 1978.
    How do you remember all this stuff? I say. And really. What does it matter, what prize I ever got for anything?
    You were good at German, he says. Should’ve kept on with your languages. Should’ve learned them all while you had the chance, girl. You still could. I wish I’d had the chance. You listening to me?
    No.
    No, cause you never listen, he says. And you were learning Greek last year –
    How do you even
know
that? You’re supposed to be dead, I say.
    – and gave it up, didn’t you? he says. As soon as it got too difficult.
    The past and the future were hard, I say.
    Start it again, he says in my ear.
    Can’t afford it, I say.
    Yes you can, he says. It’s worth it. And you don’t know the first thing about what it means not to afford something.
    I’m too old, I say.
    Learn anything, any age, he says. Don’t be stupid. Don’t waste it.
    While I’m trying to think of other songs I can sing so I don’t have to listen to him (Broken English? Marianne Faithfull?
It’s just an old war. It’s not my reality) –
    here, lass, he says. Culture Club!
    What about them? I say.
    That fungus! In that hospital, he says. Ha ha!
    Oh – ha! I say.
    And you could write your war thing, he says, couldn’t you, about when you were the voice captain.
    When I was the what? I say.
    And you had to lay the wreath at the Memorial. With that boy who was the piper at your school. The voice captain for the boys. Lived out at Kiltarlity. His dad was the policeman.
    Oh,
vice
captain, I say.
    Aye, well. Vice, voice. You got to be it and that’s the whole point, he says. Write about that.
    No, I say.
    Well don’t then, he says.
    It was a bitter cold Sunday, wet and misty, dismal, dreich, everything as dripping and grey as only Inverness in November can be; we stood at the Memorial by the river in our uniforms with the Provost and his wife and some people from the council and the British Legion, and we each stepped forward in turn below the names carved on it to do this thing, the weight of which, the meaning and resonance of which, I didn’t really understand, though I’d thought I knew all about war and the wars, until I got home after it and my parents, with a kindness that was quiet and serious, sat me down in the warm back room, made me a mug of hot chocolate then sat there with me in a silence, not a companionable silence, more mindful than that. Assiduous.
    Damn. Look at that. I just wrote about it even though I was trying not to.
    Silence,
    silence,
    silence.
    Good. It’s a relief.
    That image of the soldiers on the railway tracks is still on the screen of my computer. I click off it and look up some pictures of Inverness War Memorial instead. Red sandstone, I’d forgotten how very red. I never knew before, either, that this
Memorial was unveiled in winter, 1922, in front of a crowd of five thousand. Imagine the riverbanks, the crowd. I’m pretty sure I never knew either till now, and it’s a shock to, that one in every seven men from Inverness who fought in the First World War died, or that the Scottish Highlands had the highest casualty rate, per capita, of the whole of Europe. Then from God knows where my father says:
    and do you remember, girl, when we drove around all that Sunday for the project you were doing at university, and you needed to record people speaking for it, but no one would stop and speak to you?
    Yes! I say. Ha ha! It was for a linguistics class. I’d wanted to test out something I’d been told all through my growing up, that the people in and around Inverness spoke the best English. I’d made him ferry me round the town and all the villages between Ardersier and Beauly, trying to stop random people and get them to speak sentences