Ali Smith - Autumn

The man with the gun raised it and pointed it. The person dressed as a tree braced him or her self inside the thick cotton. The little grassblades painted round the bottom of the costume shivered round the painted roots. The man looked down the sights of his gun. Then he lowered the gun away from his eyes. He laughed.

See, the funny thing is, he said, it just came into my head that in war films, when they’re going to execute someone, they stand them up against trees or posts. So shooting you is a bit like not shooting anyone at all.

He put the gun to his eye. He aimed at the trunk of the tree, at roughly where he guessed the heart of the person inside the costume was.

So. That’s me done, Daniel said.

You can’t stop there! Elisabeth said. Mr Gluck!

Can’t I? Daniel said.

Elisabeth sits in the anodyne room next to Daniel, holding the book open, reading about metamorphoses. Round them, invisible, splayed out across the universe, are all the shot-dead pantomime characters. The Dame is dead. The Ugly Sisters are dead. Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother and Aladdin and the cat with the boots and Dick Whittington, mown down, a panto corncrop, panto massacre, a comedy tragedy, dead, dead, dead.

Only the person dressed as a tree is still standing.

But just as the man with the gun is finally about to shoot, the person dressed as a tree transforms before the gunman’s eyes into a real tree, a giant tree, a magnificent golden ash tree towering high above waving its mesmerizing leaves.

No matter how hard the man with the gun shoots at this tree he can’t kill it with bullets.

So he kicks its thick trunk. He decides he’ll go and buy weedkiller to pour on its roots, or matches and petrol, to burn it down. He turns to go — and that’s when he gets kicked in the head by the half of the pantomime horse it’s slipped his mind to shoot.

He falls to the ground, dead himself on top of the pantomime fallen. It’s a surrealist vision of hell.

What’s surrealist, Mr Gluck?

This is. There they lie. The rain falls. The wind blows. The seasons pass and the gun rusts and the brightly coloured costumes dull and rot and the leaves from all the trees round about fall on them, heap over them, cover them, and grass grows round them then starts growing out of them, through them, through ribs and eyeholes, then flowers appear in the grass, and when the costumes and the perishable parts have all rotted away or been eaten clean by creatures happy to have the sustenance, there’s nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which is what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we’re here or we don’t. So. While we’re here. I mean, while we’re still here.

Daniel sat on the bench with his eyes closed for a moment. The moment got longer. It became less of a moment, more of a while.

Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. Mr Gluck?

She jogged his elbow.

Ah. Yes. I was, I was — What was I?

You said the words, while we’re here, Elisabeth said. You said it twice. While we’re here. Then you stopped speaking.

Did I? Daniel said. While we’re here. Well. While we’re here, let’s just always hold out hope for the person who says it.

Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said.

Sure you want war? Daniel said.

Elisabeth’s mother is much cheerier this week,thank God. This is because she has received an email telling her she has been selected to appear on a TV programme called The Golden Gavel, where members of the public pit their wits against celebrities and antiques experts by trawling round antiques shops on a fixed budget and trying to buy the thing which in the end will raise the most money at auction. It’s as if the Angel Gabriel has appeared at the door of her mother’s life, kneeled down, bowed his head and told her: in a shop full of junk, somewhere among all the thousands and thousands of abandoned, broken, outdated, tarnished, sold-on, long-gone and forgotten things, there is something of much greater worth than anyone realizes, and the person we have chosen to trust to unearth it from the dross of time and history is you.

Elisabeth sits at the kitchen table while her mother plays her an old episode of The Golden Gavel to show her what they expect. Meanwhile she thinks about her trip here, most of all about the Spanish couple in the taxi queue at the station.

They’d clearly just arrived here on holiday, their luggage round their feet. The people behind them in the queue shouted at them. What they shouted at them was to go home.

This isn’t Europe, they shouted. Go back to Europe.

The people standing in front of the Spanish people in the taxi queue were nice; they tried to defuse it by letting the Spanish people take the next taxi. All the same Elisabeth sensed that what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic.

This is what shame feels like, she thinks.

Meanwhile on the screen it’s still late spring and the junk from the past is worth money. There is a great deal of driving about in old cars from earlier decades. There is a lot of stopping and worrying at the side of the road about the smoke coming out of the bonnets of the old cars.

Elisabeth tries to think of something to say to her mother about The Golden Gavel.

I wonder which make of vintage car you’ll get to go in, she says.

No, because the members of the public don’t get to, her mother says. It’s only the celebrities and experts who get to do that. They arrive. We’re already there at the shop waiting to meet them.

Why don’t you get to go in a car? Elisabeth says. That’s outrageous.

No point in devoting airtime to people who nobody knows from Adam driving about the place in old cars, her mother says.

Elisabeth notices how truly beautiful the cow parsley is at the sides of the backroads in the footage of The Golden Gavel, which is playing on catch-up, from an episode set in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, filmed, her mother tells her, last year. The cow parsley holds itself stately and poisonous in the air while the celebrities (Elisabeth has no idea who they are or why they’re celebrities) maunder about. One sings pop songs from the 1970s and talks about when he owned a gold-painted Datsun. The other chats chummily about her days as an extra in Oliver! The vintage cars fume along through England; outside the car windows the passing cow parsley is tall, beaded with rain, strong, green. It is incidental. This incidentality is, Elisabeth finds herself thinking, a profound statement. The cow parsley has a language of its own, one that nobody on the programme or making the programme knows or notices is being spoken.

Elisabeth gets her phone out and makes a note. Maybe there’s a lecture in this.

Then she remembers that probably pretty soon she won’t have any job to give any lecture in anyway.

She puts her phone down on its lit front on the table. She thinks about the students she taught who graduate this week to all that debt, and now to a future in the past.

The cars on the TV programme draw up outside a warehouse in the countryside. There’s a lot of getting out of the cars. At the door of the warehouse the celebrities and the experts meet the two ordinary people, who are wearing matching tracksuits to show that they’re the ordinary people. Everyone shakes hands. Then they all set off, the celebrities, the experts and the ordinaries, in different directions round the warehouse.

One of the ordinary members of the public purchases an old till, or what the shop owner calls a vintage cash register, for £30. It doesn’t work but its bright white and red buttons bristling off the curved chest of it remind her, the ordinary person says, of the regimental coat her grandfather wore when he was a cinema doorman in the 1960s. Cut to a celebrity who’s spotted a cluster of charity boxes in the shapes of little life-sized figures — dogs and children — standing together at the door of the warehouse like a bunch of model villagers from the past, or from a sci-fi vision where past and future crash together. They’re the boxes that used to sit outside shops for passers-by to put change into as they left or went into the shops. There is a bright pink girl with a teddybear; a dowdy looking boy mostly painted brown and holding what looks like an old sock; a bright red girl with the words thank-you carved into her chest and a brace on her leg; a spaniel with two puppies, their glass eyes pleading, little boxes round their necks, coin slots in the boxes, alternative coin slots in their heads.