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July dark as we drive back to the caravan site, the man from The Spinners singing the words
and from her heart grew a red red rose. And from his heart grew a briar. They grew and they grew on the old church wall. Till they could grow no higher.
When
we get back to the caravan and get into our beds in the smell of toothpaste and soap-bags, when the breathing of all the others regulates and becomes rhythmic, I will be wide awake thinking about the dead lovers, they are wearing football strips, bright red, and their hearts are a tangle of briars and thorns, and one of my brothers shifts in his sleep and turns to me in the makeshift bed and says from somewhere near sleep, are you having a bad dream? and then though I don’t say anything at all he takes me and turns me round, puts one arm under me so my head is on his shoulder and his other arm across my front, and that’s how he holds me, sleeping himself, until I fall asleep too.
    Every flower open on me nods its heavy head.
    I lie in my bed in a home I’m learning to let go of and I listen to my neighbour playing the drums through the wall in the middle of the night. He’s not bad. He’s getting better, getting the hang of it.
    Every rose opens into a layering of itself, a dense-packed grandeur that holds until it spills. On days that are still I can trace, if I want, exactly where I’ve been just by doubling back on myself and following the trail I’ve left.
    But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across
the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards.

York City Children’s Library made me the writer I am, Kate Atkinson told me. Then she told me about the adult ticket they decided they’d issue her there at the age of six because she was taking out so many books.
    She went on to describe how the quite small area in that City Library which was originally the children’s section is the place where
all
the library’s books are now, that everywhere else is filled with computers or space dedicated to genealogy, and how it’s not called the City Library any more, how now it’s called the York Experience.
    Her daughter Helen Clyne interrupted to say that the important thing about the notion of a public library now is that it’s the one place you can just turn up to, a free space, a democratic space where anyone can go and be there with other people, and you don’t need money –
    a clean, well-lighted place, Kate said –
    whose underlying municipal truth is that it isn’t a shop, Helen said. And you can just go. It’s somewhere you can just be. People of all ages all round you. It doesn’t have to be educational. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing. Young or old. Rich or homeless. It doesn’t matter. You can just go there.
    So it’s not about books any more? I said. Or it’s about more than books?
    It maybe always was, Helen said.
    In that books have always been about people? I said.
    Well, of course. But there was a culture that encouraged us, and now it doesn’t exist, Kate said. I bought very few books when the girls were young. We went to the library. And nobody bought books when I was young either. I went to the library.
    It was what we did, Helen said. It was a habit, a ritual. You borrowed it, you read it, you brought it back and chose something else, and someone else read whatever you read after and before you. It was communal. That’s what public library means: something communal.

The poet
    So she’d taken the book and she’d thrown it across the room and when it hit the wall then fell to the floor with its pages open it nearly broke, which was one