Ali Smith - Autumn

She stops to make a note on her phone: abandon and presence , she writes.

It’s the first time she’s felt like herself for quite some time.

calm meets energy /

artifice meets natural /

electric energy /

natural livewire /

She looks up. She sees she’s only yards from the fence across the common, the other kind of livewire.

The fence has doubled since she last saw it. Unless her eyes are deceiving her, it’s now not just one fence but two in parallel.

It’s true. Beyond the first layer of fence, about ten feet away from it, with a neat-flattened space in between the two fences, is another identical chainlink fence topped with the same foully frivolous looking razorwire. This other fence is electric-clipped too, and as she walks alongside them both the experience of the diamond-shaped wirework flashing next to her eyes is a bit epileptic.

Elisabeth takes a phone photo of it. Then she takes one or two images of the weed-life reappearing already through the churned-up mud round one of the metal posts.

She looks around. The weed and flower comeback is everywhere.

She follows the fenceline for half a mile or so before a black SUV truck rolling along in the flat space between the layers of fence catches up with her. It passes her and pulls up in front of her. The engine stops. When she draws level with the truck its window slides down. A man leans out. She nods a hello.

Fine day, she says.

You can’t walk here, he says.

Yes I can, she says.

She nods to him again and smiles. She keeps walking. She hears the truck start up again behind her. When it draws level the driver keeps the engine dawdling, drives at the same pace as her walking. He leans out of the window.

This is private land, he says.

No it isn’t, she says. It’s common land. Common land is by definition not private.

She stops. The truck overshoots her. The man puts it into reverse.

Go back to the road, he calls out of the window as he reverses. Where’s your car? You need to go back to where you left your car.

I can’t do that, Elisabeth says.

Why not? the driver says.

I don’t have a car, Elisabeth says.

She starts walking again. The driver revs his engine and drives beyond her. Several yards ahead of her he stops, cuts the engine and opens the truck door. He is standing beside the truck as she comes towards him.

You’re in direct contravention, he says.

Of what? Elisabeth says. And whatever you say I’m in. Well. It looks from here like you’re in prison.

He opens his top pocket and takes out a phone. He holds it up as if to take her picture or start filming her.

She points to the cameras on the fenceposts.

Don’t you have enough footage of me already? she says.

Unless you leave the area immediately, he says, you’ll be forcibly removed by security.

Are you not security, then? she says.

She points at the logo on the pocket he’s taken the phone out of. It says SA4A.

And is that an approximation of the word safer or is it more like the word sofa ? she says.

The SA4A man starts typing something on his phone.

This is your third warning, he says. You are now being warned for the last time that action will be taken against you unless you vacate the area immediately. You are unlawfully trespassing.

As opposed to lawfully trespassing? she says.

— still anywhere near the perimeter the next time I pass here –

Perimeter of what? she says.

She looks through at the fenced-off landscape and all she can see is landscape. There are no people. There are no buildings. There is just fence, then landscape.

— lead to legal charges being implemented against you, the man is saying, and may involve you being forcibly detained and your personal information and a sample of your DNA being taken and retained.

Prison for trees. Prison for gorse, for flies, for cabbage whites, for small blues. Oystercatcher detention centre.

What are the fences actually for? she says. Or aren’t you allowed to tell me?

The man dead-eyes her. He keys something into his phone, then holds it up to get an image of her. She smiles in a friendly way, like you do when you’re having your photo taken. Then she turns and starts walking again along the fenceline. She hears him phone somebody and say something, then get into his SUV and reverse it between the fences. She hears it head off in the opposite direction.

The nettles say nothing. The seeds at the tops of the grass stems say nothing. The little white flowers on the tops of their stalks, she doesn’t know what they are but they’re saying their fresh nothing.

The buttercups say it merrily. The gorse says it unexpectedly, a bright yellow nothing, smooth and soft and delicate against the mute green nothing of its barbs.

Back then at school a boy was hellbent on making Elisabeth,who was sixteen at this point, laugh. (He was hellbent on just making her, too, ha ha.) He was pretty cool. She liked him. His name was Mark Joseph and he played bass in a band that did anarchic cover versions of old stuff from back at the beginning of the 90s; he was also a computer genius who was ahead of everybody else, and this was back when most people still didn’t know what a search engine was and everyone believed that the millennial new year would crash all the world’s computers, about which Mark Joseph made a funny spoof and put it online, a photo of a veterinary surgery up the road from the school, caption underneath saying Click Here for Protection Against Millennium Pug.

Now he was following her about in school and trying to find ways of making her laugh.

He kissed her, at the school back gate. It was nice.

Why don’t you love me? he said three weeks later.

I’m already in love, Elisabeth said. It isn’t possible to be in love with more than one person.

A girl at college called Marielle Simi and Elisabeth, when Elisabeth was eighteen, rolled about on the floor of Elisabeth’s hall of residence room high on dope and laughing at the funny things that backing singers sometimes sing in songs. Marielle Simi played her an old song where the backing singers have to sing the word onomatopoeia eight times. Elisabeth played Marielle Simi a Cliff Richard song in which the backing singers have to sing the word sheep. They cried with laughter, then Marielle Simi, who was French, put her arm round Elisabeth and kissed her. It was nice.

Why? she said, months later. I don’t get it. I don’t understand. It’s so good.

I just can’t lie, Elisabeth said. I love the sex. I love being with you. It’s great. But I have to be truthful. I can’t lie about it.

Who is he? Marielle Simi said. An ex? Is he still around? Are you still seeing him? Or is it a her? Is it a woman? Have you been seeing her or him the whole time you’ve been seeing me?

It isn’t that kind of relationship, Elisabeth said. It isn’t even the least bit physical. It never has been. But it’s love. I can’t pretend it isn’t.

You are using this as denial, Marielle Simi said. You’re putting it between yourself and your real feelings so that you don’t have to feel.

Elisabeth shrugged.

I feel plenty, she said.

Elisabeth, who was twenty one, met Tom MacFarlane at her graduation. She was graduating in history of art (morning), he was business studies (afternoon). Tom and Elisabeth had been together for six years. He’d moved into her rented flat for five so far of those years. They were thinking of making their relationship permanent. They were talking marriage, mortgage.

One morning when he was putting breakfast things out on the kitchen table Tom asked out of nowhere,