The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books. Elspeth Davie

anyway,’ the husband was saying. ‘Do I want it all in colour? Why not save something I can discover for myself.’

      ‘Such as …?’ his wife asked.

      ‘Well, let’s say the foothills of the Himalayas.’

      ‘You’ve left that pretty late,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re going to make it. And anyway I’m not worrying about what you might or might not discover. What about all the invalids who can’t get around at all? Don’t you want them to get the benefit of seeing the world in colour?’

      ‘Listen! That’s the first time she’s ever mentioned invalids and TV. It’s all a ruse to make me sound selfish. And talking of invalids, I may say it’s the operations she’ll go for first if ever we get the colour. I mean the open heart and the bisected brain are going to look quite something, don’t you think?’ They moved swiftly on their way towards home.

      Garrad remained looking around him for a while, then wandered slowly back along the way he’d come. The colour was beginning to go out of the streets and into the sky. Alleys, archways, back-courts were all a deeper grey, but the upper air was glowing. The open heart. He repeated it to himself. Now there was a phrase – a suggestive phrase if ever there was one. It had a life apart from the operating table. And there were some more prone to speak of hearts than others. Open hearts or broken hearts, warm hearts or cold ones – such words were easy for some people. But not to him. He never mentioned this heart to anyone, not even to himself. Yet it was real all right. In the world where he longed to put his hand on all real things – heart still had meaning. He slowed down. His heart was beating steadily as it had done for the last sixty years, as it would do for the next – how many more? ‘Well, I’m not so crazy about a long life,’ he had murmured out loud. In the doorway of his shop, near closing-time, James Byers heard him, heard the murmur ‘not so crazy’, and murmured very softly in reply:

      ‘Now who would ever call you crazy, Mr Garrad?’

      Garrad stopped abruptly, turned to the doorway and saw the spread of the evening newspaper, dark with disaster, and above it Byers’ impassive face with its spectacled, secretive eyes watching him. The shop had no need of billboards. Here, morning and evening in the doorway Byers spread and read the paper. Passers-by read snippets hungrily and went in for more.

      ‘I said I’m not all that crazy about a long life,’ said Garrad. ‘Look at old Peterson now, fumigated and isolated in that high-class nursing-home. I dread what I’ll become. In his own home, my father – if he’s anything to go by – was such a nuisance to himself and everyone else from his eighty-eighth to his ninety-first, poor man, that his funeral went like a regular jamboree. The surprise was there was no cavorting and singing.’

      ‘You might be interested in a longer life when you come to it.’

      ‘I doubt that. Ask me if you’re still around.’

      ‘I’ll do that. This isn’t your usual time for walking, Garrad – on a Wednesday evening.’

      ‘It’s not. I’m running from a sort of hole in our house.’

      ‘A plumbing job?’

      ‘No, not plumbing.’

      ‘Hole? If my sister heard it she’d think of mice before you could say “tail”. Even rats. There are rats behind those stinking old station sheds and plenty of them.’

      ‘The hole I’m thinking of is a squared off bit of empty space.’

      ‘Ah … so we’re on the metaphysical plane, are we?’

      ‘Maybe. Our colour’s gone. The box is away.’

      ‘And you with it. Are you destroyed?’

      ‘No, but it makes you think.’

      Byers folded his paper impatiently and held it together in one hand while he adjusted his glasses the better to see a clock some blocks further up the street. He was a reader. In the evenings, after listening for a certain self-specified time to the complaints of customers who rang him about his paperboys, he would go off to the library – the phone still buzzing behind him. Once there, he would go through a further set of papers and magazines and return near closing-time with a pile of books under his arm. Garrad sensed the impatience of this man, but he went doggedly on: ‘It makes you wonder about what’s real and what isn’t. Or whether it’s all one. A TV tree and one outside the window, for instance. Would it matter if you never saw the outside one again? Or is it better?’

      ‘So we’re on morals now,’ said Byers. ‘Good, bad and better has nothing to do with it.’

      ‘Maybe not. But I want to make sure I feel the difference between them.’

      ‘Pleasure’s the only thing that matters. The thing that gives you most – that’s the one to go for.’ There was a silence. Byers held his paper up again and they were joined by an old woman who scanned the headlines for a moment, decided against the full version, and shuffled off.

      ‘Women have this way of skimming the cream off everything,’ said Byers. ‘It seems to satisfy them and at the same time they get it for nothing. But you were saying . .?’

      ‘Real and unreal. One day at lunchtime, a while back, coming out of a restaurant I bent down to a table near the door and tried to smell a vase of those small, red artificial roses. Oh, very real they were! As I sniffed several people sitting near saw me, and guffawed.’

      ‘But did you get no pleasure?’

      ‘None. It was a very unpleasant sensation. What next? Maybe next time I’ll be asking the way of a scarecrow. I was afraid it would grow on me – mixing up real and unreal. I didn’t feel one hundred per cent human.’

      ‘Well who is? Don’t worry. And concentrate on pleasure.’