Ali Smith - Autumn

Daniel has never known —

She drank the tea. She excused herself. She left the book on the table.

He came hobbling after her into the hall holding it out to her as she was unsnibbing the front door.

I left it on purpose, for you, she said. I thought you might like it. I won’t need it. I’ve handed in my dissertation.

He shook his old head.

You keep it, he said.

She heard the door shutting behind her.

It was one of the days of a week in one of the seasons in one of the years,maybe 1949, maybe 1950, 1951, in any case sometime around then.

Christine Keeler, who’d be famous just over a decade later, being one of the witting/unwitting agents of the huge changes in the class and sexual mores of the 1960s, was a small girl out playing down by the river with some of the boys.

They unearthed a metal thing. It will have been round at one end and pointed at the other.

A small bomb will have been about as big as their upper bodies. They knew it was a bomb. So they decided they’d take it home to show to the father of one of the boys. He’d presumably been in the army. He’d know what to do with it.

It was mucky from being buried so they cleaned it up maybe, with wet grass and jumper sleeves, first. Then they took turns carrying it back to their street. A couple of times they dropped it. When they did they ran away like crazy in case it went off.

They got it to the boy’s house. The boy’s father came out to see what all the kids outside the house wanted.

Oh dear God.

The RAF came. They got everybody out of the houses all up and down the street, then everybody out of the houses in all the streets around the street.

Next day those kids got their names in the local paper.

That story comes from one of the books she wrote about her life. Here’s another. When she wasn’t yet ten years old, Christine Keeler was sent to live in a convent for a while. One of the bedtime stories the nuns told all the little girls there was about a little boy called Rastus.

Rastus is in love with a little white girl. But the little white girl gets ill, and it looks like she’s going to die. Someone tells Rastus that she’ll be dead by the time the leaves have fallen off the tree at the front of her house. So Rastus collects up all the shoelaces he can find. Maybe he also unravels his jumper and cuts the unravelled wool into pieces. He’s going to need a lot of pieces. He climbs the tree outside the girl’s house. He ties the leaves on to the branches.

But one night a really wild wind blows all the leaves off the tree.

(Forty years before Christine Keeler was born, but presumably at a time when a lot of those nuns who apparently told stories like this one to the little girls in their care were growing up or were young adults, Rastus was a name popular in blackface minstrel shows. It became a character-name, a racist shorthand for someone black, in early films, in turn of the century fiction, across all the forms of early media entertainment.

In the States, from the start of the century till the mid-20s, a black figure named Rastus was used to advertise Cream of Wheat breakfast cereal. He wore a chef’s hat and jacket in all the photographs of him and in one particular illustration an old and white-bearded black man with a stick stops to look at a picture of Rastus on a poster advertising Cream of Wheat For Your Breakfast and the caption underneath reads: ‘Ah reckon as how he’s de bes’ known man in de worl.’

In the mid-20s, Cream of Wheat replaced the character-name Rastus with the character-name Frank L White, though the illustrations on the posters and in the adverts stayed much the same. Frank L White was a real man whose facial image, in a photograph taken around 1900 when he was a chef in Chicago, became Cream of Wheat’s standard advertising image. It’s not recorded anywhere whether White was ever paid for the use of his image.

He died in 1938.

It took another seventy years for his grave to be officially marked with a stone.

Back to Christine Keeler.)

There’s another story she tells about herself in the couple of books written by her and her ghostwriters.

This one is from another time in her childhood. It’s about the day she found a fieldmouse. She brought it home as a pet.

The man she called Dad killed it. He did this by standing on it, presumably as she watched.

Same as all the other times,Daniel is sleeping.

To the people here he is maybe just another shape in a bed they keep serviceably clean. They are still rehydrating him, though they’ve let Elisabeth know they’ll want to talk to her mother about whether to cease rehydrating or not.

I want you, my mother and I both completely want you, especially my mother does, to keep rehydrating him, Elisabeth said when they asked.

The Maltings Care Providers plc are very keen to have a conference with her mother, the receptionist tells her when she arrives.

I’ll tell her, Elisabeth says. She’ll be in touch.

The receptionist says they’d like to flag up as gently as possible with her mother their concern that payment provision for the accommodation and care package for Mr Gluck at The Maltings Care Providers plc is shortly going to fall into default.

We’ll definitely be in touch about it really really soon, Elisabeth says.

The receptionist goes back to her iPad, on which she’s paused a crime serial on catch-up. Elisabeth watches the screen for a moment or two. A woman dressed as a policewoman is being run over by a young man in a car. He runs over her on the road, then he does it again. Then he does it again.

Elisabeth goes to Daniel’s room and sits down at the side of the bed.

They are definitely still rehydrating him.

One of his hands has come out from under the covers and gone to his mouth. It has the rehydration needle taped into the back of it and the tube taped along the side of it. (A thin taut string breaks in Elisabeth’s chest at seeing the tape and the needle.) Daniel touches, still deep in the sleep, his top lip, but lightly, brushingly, like someone would if he were clearing away breadcrumbs or croissant crumbs. It’s as if he’s feeling, in the least conspicuous way, to test or to make sure he still has a mouth, or that his fingers can still feel. Then the hand disappears back down inside the covers.

Elisabeth sneaks a look at the chart clipped on to the end of Daniel’s bed, the graphs with the temperature and blood pressure readings on them.

The chart says on its first page that Daniel is a hundred and one years old.

Elisabeth laughs to herself.

(Her mother: How old are you, Mr Gluck?

Daniel : Nowhere near as old as I intend to be, Mrs Demand .)

Today he looks like a Roman senator, his sleeping head noble, his eyes shut and blank as a statue, his eyebrows mere moments of frost.

It is a privilege, to watch someone sleep, Elisabeth tells herself. It is a privilege to be able to witness someone both here and not here. To be included in someone’s absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.

No. It is awful.

It is fucking awful.

It is awful to be on the literal other side of his eyes.

Mr Gluck, she says.

She says it quiet, confidential, down near his left ear.

Two things. I’m not sure what to do about the money they need you to pay here. I wonder if there’s something you’d like me to do about it. And the other thing. They want to know about rehydrating you. Do you want to be rehydrated?

Do you need to go?

Do you want to stay?

Elisabeth stops speaking. She sits up again away from Daniel’s sleeping head.

Daniel breathes in. Then he breathes out. Then, for a long time, there’s no breath. Then it starts again.