Ali Smith - Autumn

They’re both, his sister and the painter, ignoring him. Nothing new there. They’re conversing with a man he doesn’t recognize, young, long hair, earnest looking, wearing old clothes from the past or maybe from a heaped-up pile of old costumes below a stage in a theatre; the man straightens a wide cuff at his wrist, he is speaking about how he likes a stubble field better than the chilly green of the spring , he says. His sister and the painter are agreeing with him and Daniel finds himself becoming a bit jealous, stubble-plain looks warm , the young man turns to the painter, in the same way some pictures look warm , the painter nods, without my eyes , she says, bright and glittering the pieces of her voice, I don’t exist.

He tries to get his little sister’s attention.

He nudges her elbow.

She ignores him.

But there’s something he’s been waiting to say to his little sister, he’s wanted to for more than sixty years, since he thought it, and every time he’s thought it again since, he’s wished she were alive even just for half a minute. How interesting she’ll find it. (He wants her to be impressed, too, that he’s thought it at all.) Kandinsky, he says. Paul Klee, I’m sure. They’re making the first pictures ever made of it. A whole new landscape painting. They’re picturing the view from the inside of the eye, but precisely when the migraine is happening to it!

His little sister is prone to migraines.

I mean, all the bright yellow, the pink and black triangles pulsating along the curves and the lines.

His little sister sighs.

Now he is sitting on the windowsill of her room. She is twelve. He’s seventeen, much older than she is. So why does he feel so junior? His little sister is brilliant. She is at her desk deep in a book, half-opened books all over her desk, all over the floor and the bed. She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension. They’ve been at each other’s throats all summer long. He and his father are off back tomorrow, school, England, where he also doesn’t quite belong. He is trying to be nice. She is ignoring him. The nicer he is, the more she despises him. This being despised by her is new. Last year and all the years before it he was her hero. Last year she still liked it when he told the jokes, made the coins vanish. This year she rolls her eyes. The city, old as it is, is also somehow new and strange. Nothing’s different, but everything is. It’s scented by the same old trees. It is summer-jovial. But this year its joviality is a kind of open threat.

Yesterday she caught him in tears in his room. She opened the door. He ordered her away. She didn’t go. She stood in the doorway instead. What’s wrong? she said. Are you scared? He told her no. He told her a blatant lie. He told her he had been thinking about Mozart and how young and broken he’d been when he died, and how light the music, and that this had moved him to tears. I see, she said in the doorway. She knew perfectly well he was lying. Not that Mozart isn’t capable of making him cry, and often does, with the high sweet notes which feel, though he’d never say such an unsayable out loud thing to anyone, let alone his little sister, like tiny orgasms. But truly? It wasn’t what was making him cry right then. Come on, summer brother (it’s what she’s taken to calling him, like he’s not always her brother, he’s just her brother in the summer), she said drumming her fingers on the wood of the door panelling. That’s nothing to cry about.

Today she looks up from the desk and feigns surprise that he’s still here.

I’m just going, he says.

But he stays sitting there on the windowsill.

Well, if you’re going to sit there emanating such melancholy, she says, can you make yourself more useful? Instead of sick?

Sick? he says.

Transit gloria mundi, she says. Ha ha.

She is unbearable. He hates her.

Don’t just sit there like an unstrung puppet, she says. Be here. Do something. Tell me something.

Tell you what? he says.

I don’t know, she says. I don’t care. Anything. Tell me what you’re reading.

Oh, I’m reading so many things, he says.

She knows he’s reading nothing. She’s the one who reads, not him.

Tell me something from one of the many things you’re reading, she says.

She is trying to humiliate him, first for feeling, second for not reading like she does.

But there’s a story they were made to read, school, French lessons. That’ll do.

I’ve actually been reading, he says, the world-renowned story of the ancient old man who happens to be in possession of a magic goatskin. But being so old, nearly as old as legend itself, he’s going to die soon –

Because human beings can’t be legends, being mortal, she says.

Uh huh, he says.

She laughs.

And he wants to pass on the magic goatskin to someone else, he says.

Why does he? she says.

His mind goes blank. He has no idea why.

So the magic won’t get wasted, he says. So, uh, so that –

Where did he get the magic goatskin in the first place? she says.

He has no idea. He wasn’t really listening in the class.

Was there once a magic goat? she says. On the ledges of a cliff? One that could jump any height and any angle and still land on its delicate little hoofs? Or did it have to be skinned and then the skin became magic after the sacrifice, because of the sacrifice?

She doesn’t even know the story and she’s made up a better one than the one he’s trying to remember.

Well? she says.

The magic goatskin, he says, was, well, it was the cover on one of the ancient old man’s oldest most powerful books of magic, and therefore had been saturated in magic for hundreds and hundreds of years. So he removed the skin from it precisely, in fact, so that he could pass it on.

Why doesn’t he therefore pass on precisely in fact the whole book? his little sister says.

She’s turned at her desk towards him, her face half mockery, half affection.

I don’t know, he says. All I know is that he decided to pass it on. So he, uh, finds a young man to pass it on to.

Why a young man? his little sister says. Why doesn’t he choose a young woman?

Look, he says. I’m just telling you what I read. And the old man said to the young man, here. Have this magic goatskin. Treat it with respect. It is very very powerful. What you do to get it to work is, you put your hand on it, and you make a wish. And then your wish comes true. But what he didn’t tell the young man was that every time you wish on the magic goatskin, the magic goatskin gets smaller, it shrinks in size, in a small way or a big way, depending on how small or how vast the wish you wish on it is. And so the young man wished, and his wish came true, and he did it again and his wish came true. And he went through his life full of good fortune wishing on the magic goatskin. But the day came when the magic goatskin had shrunk so small it was smaller than the palm of his hand. So he wished for it to be bigger, and when he did it grew bigger, bigger, bigger, every bit as big as the world, and when it reached the size of the world it disappeared, thin air.

His little sister rolls her eyes.

And that’s when the young man, now a slightly older man, though not as old, I don’t think, as the original ancient old man, died, he says.

His little sister sighs.

Is that it? she says.

Well, there’s other bits of it that I haven’t remembered, he says. But yes, that’s the gist of it.

Fine, she says.

She comes over to the window and kisses him on the cheek.

Thank you very much for telling me the story of the magic foreskin, she says.