Ali Smith - Autumn

One of the care assistants comes in. She starts wiping at the bedrail then the windowsill with cleaning stuff.

He’s quite some gentleman, she says with her back to Elisabeth.

She turns round.

What did he do in his good long life? After the war, I mean.

Elisabeth realizes she has no idea.

He wrote songs, she says. And he helped out a lot with my childhood. When I was little.

We were all amazed, the care assistant says, when he told us about in the war, when they interned them. Him being English really but going in there with his old father the German, even though he could have stayed outside if he’d chosen. And how he tried to get his sister over, but they said no.

In-breath.

Out-breath.

Long pause.

Did he tell you that? Elisabeth says.

The care assistant hums a tune. She wipes the doorhandle, then the edges of the door. She takes a long stick made of white plastic with a white cotton rectangle on the end of it and she wipes the top of the door and round the lampshade.

He’s never talked about any of that, not to us, Elisabeth says.

Family for you, the care assistant says. Easier to talk to someone you don’t know. He and I had many a chat, before he went off. One day he said a very fair thing. When the state is not kind, he said. We were talking about the vote, it was coming up, I’ve thought about it a lot, since. Then the people are fodder, he said. Wise man, your grandad. Clever man.

The care assistant smiles at her.

It’s a lovely thing you do, coming to read to him. A thoughtful thing.

The care assistant wheels her little trolley out. Elisabeth watches her broad back as she goes, and the way the material of her overall stretches tight across it and under her arms.

I know nothing, nothing really, about anyone.

Maybe nobody does.

In-breath.

Out-breath.

Long pause.

She closes her eyes. Dark.

She opens her eyes again.

She opens her book at random. She starts to read, from where she’s opened it, but this time out loud, to Daniel: His sisters, the nymphs of the spring, mourned for him, and cut off their hair in tribute to their brother. The wood nymphs mourned him too, and Echo sang her refrain to their lament.

The pyre, the tossing torches, and the bier, were now being prepared, but his body was nowhere to be found. Instead of his corpse, they discovered a flower with a circle of white petals round a yellow centre.

I’m thirteen years old in that one,her mother was saying. Seaside holiday. We went every year. That’s my mother. My father.

The next door neighbour was in their front room.

It was just after Elisabeth had told him she had a sister. Now she was worried the neighbour would give the game away and ask her mother where the other daughter was.

So far he hadn’t said anything about it.

He was looking at the family photographs of her mother on the wall in the front room.

Now those, he was saying, are completely fantastic.

Her mother hadn’t just made coffee, she’d made it in the good mugs.

Forgive me, Mrs Demand, the neighbour said. I mean, the photos are lovely. But the tin signs. The real thing.

The what, Mr Gluck? her mother said.

She put the mugs on the table and came over to have a look.

Call me Daniel, please, the neighbour said.

He pointed at the picture.

Oh, her mother said. Those. Yes.

There were hoardings advertising ice lollies in one of the old photographs, behind her mother as a child. This was what they were talking about.

6d, her mother said. I was still a very small child when decimalization came in. But I remember the heavy pennies. The half crowns.

She was speaking in a slightly too loud way. The neighbour, Daniel, didn’t seem to notice or mind.

Look at that wedge of dark pink on the bright pink, Daniel said. Look at the blue, the way the shadow deepens there where the colour changes.

Yes, her mother said. Zoom. Fab.

Daniel sat down beside the cat.

What’s her name? he said to Elisabeth.

Barbra, Elisabeth said. After the singer.

The singer her mother loves, her mother said.

Daniel winked at Elisabeth and said, but quietly, down towards her like it was a secret so her mother, who’d gone to the CD shelf now and was going through the CDs, wouldn’t hear, as if he didn’t want her to know,

after the singer who once, believe it or not, sang a song I wrote the words for, in concert. I was very handsomely paid. But she never recorded it. I’d be a trillionaire, had she. Rich enough to time-travel.

Can you sing? Elisabeth said.

Not at all, Daniel said.

Would you actually like to time-travel? she said. If you could, I mean, and time travel was a real thing?

Very much indeed, Daniel said.

Why? Elisabeth said.

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

He opened his eyes wide at Elisabeth. Then he put his hand in his pocket, took out a twenty pence piece, held it in front of Barbra the cat. He did something with his other hand and the coin disappeared! He made it disappear!

The song about love being an easy chair filled the room. Barbra the cat was still looking in disbelief at Daniel’s empty hand. She put both paws up, held the hand, put her nose into it to look for the missing coin. Her cat face was full of amazement.

See how it’s deep in our animal nature, Daniel said. Not to see what’s happening right in front of our eyes.

October’s a blink of the eye.The apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone and the tree’s leaves are yellow and thinning. A frost has snapped millions of trees all across the country into brightness. The ones that aren’t evergreen are a combination of beautiful and tawdry, red orange gold the leaves, then brown, and down.

The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn’t feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren’t for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.

On the warm days it feels wrong, so many leaves falling.

But the nights are cool to cold.

The spiders in the sheds and the houses are guarding their egg sacs in the roof corners.

The eggs for the coming year’s butterflies are tucked on the undersides of the grassblades, dotting the dead looking stalks on the wasteland, camouflaged invisible on the scrubby looking bushes and twigs.

Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening,writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it’ll end. An old man is sleeping in a bed in a care facility on his back with his head pillow-propped. His heart is beating and his blood’s going round his body, he’s breathing in then out, he is asleep and awake and he’s nothing but a torn leaf scrap on the surface of a running brook, green veins and leaf-stuff, water and current, Daniel Gluck taking leaf of his senses at last, his tongue a broad green leaf, leaves growing through the sockets of his eyes, leaves thrustling (very good word for it) out of his ears, leaves tendrilling down through the caves of his nostrils and out and round till he’s swathed in foliage, leafskin, relief.

And here he is now, sitting next to his little sister!

But his little sister’s name escapes him for the moment. This is surprising. It’s one of the words he’s held dear his whole life. Never mind. Here she is next to him. He turns his head and she’s there. It’s unbearably lovely to see her! She’s sitting next to the painter, the one that turned him copiously down, well, that’s life, he can even smell the scent the painter wore, Oh! de London, bright, sweet, woody, when he first knew her, then she got older and more serious and it was Rive Gauche, he can smell it too.