Ali Smith: Autumn

He’d shake his head.

Genius, he’d say.

Then he’d squint at Elisabeth.

Oh, hello, he’d say.

He’d look at the book in her hands.

What you reading? he’d say.

Elisabeth would hold it up.

Brave New World, she’d say.

Oh, that old thing, he’d say.

It’s new to me, she’d say.

That moment of dialogue?Imagined.

Daniel is now in an increased sleep period. Whichever care assistant chances to be on duty always makes a point of explaining, when Elisabeth sits with him, that the increased sleep period happens when people are close to death.

He is beautiful.

He is so tiny in the bed. It is like he is just a head. He’s small and frail now, thin as the skeleton of a cartoon fish left by a cartoon cat, his body so near-nothing under the covers that it hardly makes any impression, just a head by itself on a pillow, a head with a cave in it and the cave is his mouth.

His eyes are closed and watery. There’s a long time between each breath in and out. In that long time there’s no breathing at all, so that every time he breathes out there’s the possibility that he might not breathe in again, it doesn’t seem quite possible that someone could be able not to breathe for so long and yet still be breathing and alive.

A good old age, he’s done very well, the care assistants say.

He’s had a good innings, the care assistants say, as if to say, it won’t be long now.

Oh really?

They don’t know Daniel.

Are you next of kin? Because we’ve been trying to contact Mr Gluck’s next of kin with no success, the receptionist said the first time Elisabeth came. Elisabeth lied without even pausing. She gave them her mobile number, her mother’s home number and her mother’s home address.

We’ll need further proof of identity, the receptionist said.

Elisabeth got out her passport.

I’m afraid this passport has expired, the receptionist said.

Yes, but only a month ago. I’m going to renew it. It’s obviously still clearly me, Elisabeth said.

The receptionist started a speech about what was and what wasn’t permitted. Then something happened at the front door, a wheelchair wheel jammed in a groove between the ramp and the edge of the door, and the receptionist went to find someone to free the wheelchair up. An assistant came through from the back. This assistant, seeing Elisabeth putting her passport back into her bag, assumed that the passport had been checked and printed out a visitor card for Elisabeth.

Now, when Elisabeth sees the man whose wheelchair wheel got caught in the groove, she smiles at him. He looks back at her like he doesn’t know who she is. Well, it’s true. He doesn’t.

She brings a chair in from the corridor and puts it next to the bed.

Then, in case Daniel opens his eyes (he dislikes attention), she gets out whatever book she’s got with her.

With the book open in her hands, Brave New World, she looks at the top of his head. She looks at the darker spots in the skin beneath what’s left of his hair.

Daniel, as still as death in the bed. But still. He’s still here.

Elisabeth, at a loss, gets her phone out. She keys in the word still on her phone, just to see what’ll come up.

The internet provides her instantly with a series of sentences to show usage of the word.

How still everything was!

She still held Jonathan’s hand.

When they turned around, Alex was still on the horse.

Still, it did look stylish.

The throng stood still and waited.

Then Psammetichus tried still another plan.

When he still didn’t respond, she continued.

People were still alive who knew the Wright Brothers.

Ah yes, Orville and Will, the two flighty boys who started it all, Daniel, lying there so still, says without saying. The boys who gave us the world in a day, and air warfare, and every bored and restless security queue in the world. But I will lay you a wager (he says/doesn’t say) that they don’t have the kind of still on that list which forms part of the word di still ery.

Elisabeth scrolls down to check.

And that word scroll, Daniel says without saying, it makes me think of all the scrolls still rolled up, unread for two millennia, still waiting to be unfurled in the still-unexcavated library in Herculaneum.

She scrolls to the bottom of the page.

You’re right, Mr Gluck. No whisky still.

Still, Daniel says/doesn’t say. I do look stylish.

Daniel lies there very still in the bed, and the cave of his mouth, its unsaying of these things, is the threshold to the end of the world as she knows it.

Elisabeth is staring up at an old tenement rooming house,the kind you see being bulldozed and crashing down into themselves on old footage from when they modernized British cities in the 1960s and 70s.

It is still standing, but in a ravaged landscape. All the other houses have been pulled out of the street like bad teeth.

She pushes the door open. Its hall is dark, its wallpaper stained and dark. The front room is empty, no furniture. Its floor has boards broken where whoever was living or squatting here ripped them up to burn in the hearth, above the old mantel of which a shock of soot-grime shoots almost to the ceiling.

She imagines its walls white. She imagines everything in it painted white.

Even the holes in the floor, through the white broken boards, are painted white inside.

The house’s windows look out on to high privet hedge. Elisabeth goes outside to paint that high hedge white too.

Inside, sitting on a white-painted old couch, the stuffing coming out of it also stiff with white emulsion, Daniel laughs at what she’s doing. He laughs silently but like a child with his feet in his hands as she paints one tiny green leaf white after another.

He catches her eye. He winks. That does it.

They’re both standing in pure clean white space.

Yes, she says. Now we can sell this space for a fortune. Only the very rich can afford to be this minimalist these days.

Daniel shrugs. Plus ça change.

Will we go for a walk, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth says.

But Daniel’s off on his own already, crossing the white desert at a fair rate. She tries to catch him up. She can’t quite. He’s always just too far ahead. The whiteness goes on forever ahead of them. When she looks over her shoulder it’s forever behind them too.

Someone killed an MP, she tells Daniel’s back as she struggles to keep up. A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn’t be enough. But it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.

The back of Daniel’s head nods.

Thomas Hardy on speed, Elisabeth says.

Daniel stops and turns. He smiles benignly.

His eyes are closed. He breathes in. He breathes out. He is dressed in clothes made of hospital sheets. They’ve got the hospital name stamped on the corners, occasionally she can see it, pink and blue writing on a cuff or at the corner in the lining at the bottom of the jacket. He is peeling a white orange with a white penknife. The scroll of peel falls into the whiteness like into deep snow and disappears. He watches this happen and he makes an annoyed noise, tch. He looks at the peeled orange in his hand. It’s white. He shakes his head.

He pats his pockets, chest, trousers, as if he’s looking for something. Then he pulls, straight out of his chest, of his collarbone, like a magician, a free-floating mass of the colour orange.

He throws it like a huge cloak over the whiteness ahead of them. Before it settles away from him he twists a little of it round a finger and binds it round the too-white orange he’s still holding.