Ali Smith - Autumn

The Judge advises her to take the time overnight very carefully to consider the version of things she’s choosing to tell to the court today.

Blink of an eye.

Next day.

The girl’s in the box again. Today she is almost all young tree. Now only her face and her hair are unleafy. Overnight, like a girl in a myth being hunted by a god who’s determined to have his way with her, she has altered herself, remade herself so she can’t be had by anyone.

The same men shout at her again. They’re angry with her for not lying about lying. The prosecutor asks her why she told her story about lying to a newspaper reporter, not to the police. He suggests this was improper, an improper thing to do, the sort of thing an improper woman like this woman would do.

What would be the point, she says, in me going to tell the truth to the very people who’ve told me to lie?

The Judge sighs. He turns to the jury.

Dismiss this evidence from your minds, he says. I instruct you to disregard it altogether.

There’s a song in this too, Daniel thinks as he watches the white bark rise up and cover her mouth, her nose, her eyes.

Ballad of the Silver Birch.

High church. Lurch. Besmirch. Soul search.

Himself, he goes straight from that courtroom to the house of the girl he’s in love with.

(He’s in love with her. He can hardly say her name to himself. He’s in love with her so much.

She isn’t in love with him. Only a few weeks back she married someone else. He can say her husband’s name all right. His name’s Clive.

But he’s just seen a miraculous thing, hasn’t he?

He’s seen something that changes the nature of things.)

He stands in the rain in the back yard. It’s dark now. He is looking up at the windows of the house. His hands and forearms, his face, his good shirt and suit are smeared from the dustbins and climbing the fence, as if he’s still young enough to.

There is a famous short story, The Dead, by James Joyce, in which a young man stands at the back of a house and sings a song on a freezing night to a woman he loves. Then this young man, pining for the woman, dies. He catches a chill in the snow, he dies young. Height of romanticism! That woman in that story, for the rest of her life, has that young man’s song always riddling through her like woodworm.

Well, Daniel himself’s not a young man. That’s partly the problem. The woman he’s pretty much sure he loves more than anyone he’s ever, the woman he will pine away to nothing without the love of, is twenty years younger than him, and, yes, not that long ago, there is that, married Clive.

And then there’s the extra other matter, the matter of not being able to sing. Well, not in tune.

But he can shout a song. He can shout the words. And they’re his words, not just any old words.

And she only knew him for ten days before she married him, Clive, that is. There’s always hope, with this particular girl.

The Ballad of the Girl Who Keeps Telling Me No.

Fast little number, witty, to meet her wit.

Throaty. Gloaty. Wild oat(y). Grace-note(y). Misquote(y). Anecdote(y). Casting vote(y). Furcoat(y). Petticoat(y). Torpedo boat(y).

(Terrible.)

I’m billy goaty.

Don’t be haughty.

But no light comes on in any of the windows. It takes about half an hour of standing in the rain for him to admit there’s nobody in, that he’s been standing in a yard shouting bad rhymes at a house where nobody’s home.

That fashionable swing-seat they’ve got in there hanging from the ceiling in the living room will be slowly turning this way and that by itself in the dark.

Ironic. He’s a sap. She’ll never even know he was here, will she?

(True enough. She never knew.

And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.

Riddled. Woodworm. All through him.)

Then the old man confined in the bed in the tree, Daniel, is a boy on a train that’s passing through deep spruce woods. He is thin and small, sixteen summers old but he thinks he’s a man. It’s summer again, he is on the continent, they are all on the continent, things are a little uneasy on the continent. Something’s going to happen. It is already happening. Everybody knows. But everybody is pretending it’s not happening.

All the people on the train can see from his clothes that he’s not from here. But he can speak the language, though none of the strangers round him on the train knows he can, because they don’t know who he is, or who she is, his sister next to him, they don’t know the first thing about them.

The people round them are talking about the necessity of developing a scientific and legal means of gauging exactly who’s what.

There is a professor at the institute, the man sitting across from him says to a woman. And this professor is engaged in inventing a modern tool to record, quite scientifically, certain physical statistics.

Oh? the woman says.

She nods.

Noses, ears, the spaces between, the man across from Daniel says.

He is flirting with that woman.

The measurement of parts of the body, most especially of the features of the head area, can tell you quite succinctly everything you need to know. Eye colour, hair colour, the sizing of foreheads. It’s been done before, but never so expertly, never so exactly. It’s a case in the first place of measuring and collating. But a slightly more complex case, in the long run, of the sifting of the collected statistics.

The boy smiles at his little sister.

She lives here all the time.

She is assiduously reading her book. He nudges her. She looks up from it. He winks.

She speaks it as her first language. She knows the flirting is the thinnest layer. She knows exactly what they’re saying. She turns the page in her book, glances at him then at the people opposite over the top of it.

I hear them. But am I going to let it stop me reading?

She says this in English to her brother. She makes a face at him. Then she glances her whole self back down into the book.

Out in the train corridor, when the boy Daniel goes to relieve himself, there’s a capped and booted man blocking the way. His front is all pockets and straps. His arms are stretched in a leisurely way from one side to the other of the passage through to the toilet and the other carriages. He is swaying with the movement of this train as it moves through the spruce woods and farmland almost as if he’s a working part of its mechanical structure.

Can the sheer breadth of someone’s chest be insidious?

Oh yes it can.

Lazy, sure, he smiles at the boy, the smile of a soldier in repose. He lifts one arm higher so the boy can pass under. As Daniel does, the soldier’s arm comes down just far enough to brush, with the material of his shirt, the hair on the top of his head.

Hopla, the soldier says.

Boy on a train.

Blink of an eye.

Old man in a bed.

The old man in the bed is confined.

Wooden overcoat

(y).

Cut this tree I’m living in down. Hollow its trunk out.

Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides.

Slide the new me back inside the old trunk.

Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year’s crops to grow.

Birth me all over again

Burn me and the tree

Next summer’s sun

Midwinter guarantee

It is still July.Elisabeth goes to her mother’s medical practice in the middle of town. She waits in the queue of people. When she gets to the front she tells the receptionist that the GP her mother is registered with is at this practice, that she herself isn’t registered with a GP here but that she’s been feeling unwell so she’d like to talk to a doctor, probably not urgent, but something does feel wrong.