Ali Smith: Autumn

The front door closed.

Next evening after supper her mother folded the Newsbook jotter open at the page and went out the back door and down the garden to the still-sunny back fence, where she leaned over and waved the jotter in the air.

Hi, she said.

Elisabeth watched from the back door. The neighbour was reading a book and drinking a glass of wine in what was left of the sun. He put his book down on the garden table.

Oh hello, he said.

I’m Wendy Demand, she said. I’m your next door neighbour. I’ve been meaning to come and say hi since my daughter and I moved in.

Daniel Gluck, he said from the chair.

Lovely to meet you, Mr Gluck, her mother said.

Daniel, please, he said.

He had a voice off old films where things happen to well-dressed warplane pilots in black and white.

And, well, I really don’t want to bother you, her mother said. But it suddenly struck me, and I hope you don’t mind, and you don’t think it’s cheeky. I thought you might like to read this little piece that my daughter wrote about you for a school exercise.

About me? the neighbour said.

It’s lovely, her mother said. A Portrait In Words Of Our Next Door Neighbour. Not that I come out of it very well myself. But I read it and then I saw you were out in the garden, and I thought, well. I mean it’s charming. I mean it puts me to shame. But it’s very fetching about you.

Elisabeth was appalled. She was appalled from head to foot. It was like the notion of appalled had opened its mouth and swallowed her whole, exactly like an old-age rubberized skin would.

She stepped back behind the door where she couldn’t be seen. She heard the neighbour scraping his chair on the flagstone. She heard him coming over to her mother at the fence.

When she came home from school next day the neighbour was sitting crosslegged on his garden wall right next to the front gate she needed to go through to get into the house.

She stopped stock still at the corner of the road.

She would walk past and pretend she didn’t live in the house they lived in.

He wouldn’t recognize her. She would be a child from another street altogether.

She crossed the road as if she were walking past. He unfolded his legs and he stood up.

When he spoke, there was nobody else in the road, so it was definitely to her. There was no getting out of it.

Hello, he said from his own side of the road. I was hoping I might run into you. I’m your neighbour. I’m Daniel Gluck.

I am not actually Elisabeth Demand, she said.

She kept walking.

Ah, he said. You’re not. I see.

I am someone else, she said.

She stopped on the other side of the street and turned.

It was my sister who wrote it, she said.

I see, he said. Well, I had something I wanted to tell you, regardless.

What? Elisabeth said.

It’s that I think your surname is originally French, Mr Gluck said. I think it comes from the French words de and monde, put together, which means, when you translate it, of the world.

Really? Elisabeth said. We always thought it meant like the asking kind of demand.

Mr Gluck sat down on the kerb and wrapped his arms round his knees. He nodded.

Of the world, or in the world, I think so, yes, he said. It might also mean of the people. Like Abraham Lincoln said. Of the people, by the people, for the people.

(He wasn’t old. She was right. Nobody truly old sat with their legs crossed or hugged their knees like that. Old people couldn’t do anything except sit in front rooms as if they’d been stunned by stun guns.)

I know that my — my sister’s — Christian name, I mean the name Elisabeth, is meant to mean something about making promises to God, Elisabeth said. Which is a little difficult, because I’m not completely sure I believe in one, I mean, she does. I mean, doesn’t.

Something else we have in common, he said, she and I. In fact, according to the history I’ve happened to live through, I’d say that her first name, Elisabeth, means that one day she’ll probably, quite unexpectedly against the odds, find herself being made queen.

A queen? Elisabeth said. Like you?

Um —, the neighbour said.

I myself think it would be really good, Elisabeth said, because of all the arty art you get to have all round you all the time.

Ah, the neighbour said. Right.

But does the name Elisabeth still mean that thing even if it’s spelt with an s not a z? Elisabeth said.

Oh yes, indubitably, he said.

Elisabeth crossed to the same side of the road as the neighbour. She stood a little distance away.

What does your name mean? she said.

It means I’m lucky and happy, he said. The Gluck part. And that if I’m ever thrown into a pit that’s full of hungry lions I’ll survive. That’s the first name. And if you ever have a dream and you don’t know what it means you can ask me. My first name also designates an ability to interpret dreams.

Can you? Elisabeth said.

She sat down on her own piece of kerb only slightly along from the neighbour.

Actually I’m extremely bad at it, he said. But I can make up something useful, entertaining, perspicacious and kind. We have this in common, you and I. As well as the capacity to become someone else, if we so choose.

You mean you have it in common with my sister, Elisabeth said.

I do, the neighbour said. Very pleased to meet you both. Finally.

How do you mean, finally? Elisabeth said. We only moved here six weeks ago.

The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.

He held his hand out. She got up, crossed the distance and held her own hand out. He shook her hand.

See you later, unexpected queen of the world. Not forgetting the people, he said.

It is just over a week since the vote.The bunting in the village where Elisabeth’s mother now lives is up across the High Street for its summer festival, plastic reds and whites and blues against a sky that’s all threats, and though it’s not actually raining right now and the pavements are dry, the wind rattling the plastic triangles against themselves means it sounds all along the High Street like rain is hammering down.

The village is in a sullen state. Elisabeth passes a cottage not far from the bus stop whose front, from the door to across above the window, has been painted over with black paint and the words GO and HOME.

People either look down, look away or stare her out. People in the shops, when she buys some fruit, some ibuprofen and a newspaper for her mother, speak with a new kind of detachment. People she passes on the streets on the way from the bus stop to her mother’s house regard her, and each other, with a new kind of loftiness.

Her mother, who tells her when she gets there that half the village isn’t speaking to the other half of the village, and that this makes almost no difference to her since no one in the village speaks to her anyway or ever has though she’s lived here nearly a decade now (in this her mother is being a touch melodramatic), is doing some hammering herself, nailing to the kitchen wall an old Ordnance Survey map of where she now lives, which she bought yesterday in a shop that used to be the local electrician’s business and electrical appliances store and is now a place selling plastic starfish, pottery looking things, artisan gardening tools and canvas gardening gloves that look like they’ve been modelled on a 1950s utilitarian utopia.

The kind of shop with the kinds of things that look nice, cost more than they should and persuade you that if you buy them you’ll be living the right kind of life, her mother says between lips still holding two little nails.

The map is from 1962. Her mother has drawn a red line with a Sharpie all round the coast marking where the new coast is.