Ali Smith - Autumn

She writes in ballpoint on Elisabeth’s receipt: customer choosing to send photos at own risk .

Elisabeth stands outside the Post Office. She feels better. It’s cool, rainy.

She’ll go and buy a book from that second-hand shop.

Then she’ll go to see Daniel.

It takes a fragment of a fragment of a second for Elisabeth’s data to go into the computer.Then the receptionist gives her back her scanned ID.

Daniel is asleep. A care assistant, a different one today, is swishing round the room with a mop that smells of pine cleaner.

Elisabeth wonders what’s going to happen to all the care assistants. She realizes she hasn’t so far encountered a single care assistant here who isn’t from somewhere else in the world. That morning on the radio she’d heard a spokesperson say, but it’s not just that we’ve been rhetorically and practically encouraging the opposite of integration for immigrants to this country. It’s that we’ve been rhetorically and practically encouraging ourselves not to integrate. We’ve been doing this as a matter of self-policing since Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there’s no such thing as society .

Then the other spokesperson in the dialogue said, well, you would say that. Get over it. Grow up. Your time’s over. Democracy. You lost .

It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue.

It is the end of dialogue.

She tries to think when exactly it changed, how long it’s been like this without her noticing.

She sits down next to Daniel. Sleeping Socrates.

How are you doing today, Mr Gluck? she says quietly down by his sleeping ear.

She gets her new/old book out and opens it at its beginning: My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. You heavenly powers, since you were responsible for those changes, as for all else, look favourably on my attempts, and spin an unbroken thread of verse, from the earliest beginnings of the world, down to my own times .

Today Daniel looks like a child, but one with a very old head.

As she watches him sleep she thinks about Anna Pavlova, not the dancer, the scammer, who registered a NatWest bank account at Elisabeth’s address.

What kind of scammer names herself — assuming it’s a her — after a ballet dancer? Did she really think people working at NatWest wouldn’t question someone using the name Anna Pavlova? Or are accounts all set up by machine now and machines don’t know how to quantify that stuff?

Then again, what does Elisabeth know? It’s possible that it’s not that unusual a name. Maybe there are a million and one Anna Pavlovas right now in the world. Maybe Pavlova is the Russian equivalent of Smith.

A cultured scammer. A sensitive scammer. A prima ballerina light on her feet brilliantly expressive prodigiously talented legendary scammer. A sleeping beauty dying swan kind of a scammer.

She remembers her mother believing at some point, way back in the beginning, that Daniel, because he was so thin, so Puck-like and lithe — so much so that even in his eighties he was better at getting up the ladder into their loft space than her mother, then in her forties, was — had once been a ballet dancer, was perhaps a famous dancer grown old.

Which would you choose? Daniel had said once. Should I please her and tell her she’s guessed right, and that I’m a recently retired Rambert? Or should I tell her the more mundane truth?

Definitely tell her the lie, Elisabeth said.

But think what will happen if I do, Daniel said.

It’ll be brilliant, Elisabeth said. It’ll be really funny.

I’ll tell you what will happen, Daniel said. This. You and I will know I’ve lied, but your mother won’t. You and I will know something that your mother doesn’t. That will make us feel different towards not just your mother, but each other. A wedge will come between us all. You will stop trusting me, and quite right, because I’d be a liar. We’ll all be lessened by the lie. So. Do you still choose the ballet? Or will I tell the sorrier truth?

I want the lie, Elisabeth said. She knows loads of things I don’t. I want to know some things she doesn’t.

The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless. But how is my being a retired dancer going to help in any real way with your feelings of powerlessness?

Were you a dancer? Elisabeth said.

That’s my secret, Daniel said. I’ll never divulge. Not to any human being. Not for any money.

It was a Tuesday in March in 1998. Elisabeth was thirteen. She was out for a walk in the newly light early evening with Daniel, even though her mother had told her she wasn’t to.

They walked past the shops, then over to the fields where the inter-school summer sports were held, where the fair went and the circus. Elisabeth had last come to the field just after the circus had left, especially to look at the flat dry place where the circus had had its tent. She liked doing melancholy things like that. But now you couldn’t tell that any of these summer things had ever happened. There was just empty field. The sports tracks had faded and gone. The flattened grass, the places that had turned to mud where the crowds had wandered round between the rides and the open-sided trailers full of the driving and shooting games, the ghost circus ring: nothing but grass.

Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren’t relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

Past the field there was another field. Then there was the river.

Isn’t it a bit too far, to walk as far as the river? Elisabeth said.

She didn’t want him to have to go so far if he really was as ancient as her mother kept saying.

Not for me, Daniel said. A mere bagatelle.

A what? Elisabeth said.

A trifle, Daniel said. Not that kind of trifle. A mere nothing. Something trifling.

What will we do all the way there and back? Elisabeth said.

We’ll play Bagatelle, Daniel said.

Is Bagatelle really a game? Elisabeth said. Or did you just make it up right now on the spot?

I admit, it’s a very new game to me too, Daniel said. Want to play?

Depends, Elisabeth said.

How we play is: I tell you the first line of a story, Daniel said.

Okay, Elisabeth said.

Then you tell me the story that comes into your head when you hear that first line, Daniel said.

Like, a story that already exists? Elisabeth said. Like Goldilocks and the three bears?

Those poor bears, Daniel said. That bad wicked rude vandal of a girl. Going into their house uninvited and unannounced. Breaking their furniture. Eating their supplies. Spraying her name with spraypaint on the walls of their bedrooms.

She does not spray her name on their walls, Elisabeth said. That’s not in the story.

Who says? Daniel said.

The story is from really long ago, probably way before spraypaint existed, Elisabeth said.

Who says? Daniel said. Who says the story isn’t happening right now?

I do, Elisabeth said.

Well, you’re going to lose at Bagatelle, then, Daniel said, because the whole point of Bagatelle is that you trifle with the stories that people think are set in stone. And no, not that kind of trifle –

I know, Elisabeth said. Jeez. Don’t demean me.

Demean you? Daniel said. Moi? Now. What kind of story do you want to trifle with? You can choose.