Autumn

by Ali Smith

  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.

  3

  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.

  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 o
ldest 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.

  He doesn’t hear what she’s said until a moment after she’s said it. When he does he blushes to the roots of his hair. His whole body blushes. She sees him redden and she smiles.

  Because I’m not meant to say that word, am I? she says. Even though that’s what the story’s really about. Even though hundreds of years of disguise are meant to keep me away from what the world’s stories are really all about. Well, foreskin. Foreskin foreskin foreskin.

  She dances round the room shouting the word he could hardly say in her presence out loud himself.

  She is mad.

  But she is uncannily right about that story.

  She is brilliant.

  She is a whole new level of the word true.

  She is dangerous and shining.

  She comes over to the window and pushes it wider. She shouts into the street, into the sky (in English, though, thank God), foreskins come and foreskins go! But Mozart lasts forever! Then she skips back over to her seat at the desk, picks up the book she is reading and starts back into the middle of it again like nothing has happened.

  He waits a moment then glances out and down to the street. A lady with a little dog has stopped and is standing there looking up, hand shielding her eyes; apart from that the street continues as ever, with no idea that his little sister is that mad, that brave, that clever, that wild and that calm, and that he now knows for sure that when she grows up she’s going to be a great force in the world, an important thinker, a changer of things, someone to be reckoned with.

  Summer brother.

  Old man in a bed in a care facility.

  Little sister.

  Never more than twenty, twenty one.

  There are no pictures left of her. The photos at their mother’s house? long burnt, lost, gone, street litter.

  But he has some pages, still, of the letters from when she was nursing their mother. She is eighteen. The clever forward-slope of her.

  It’s a question of how we regard our situations, dearest Dani, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all. But in that Augenblick there’s either a benign wink or a willing blindness, and we have to know we’re equally capable of both, and to be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it. So it’s important – and here I acknowledge directly the kind and charming and mournful soul of my dear brother whom I know so well – not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.

  Dearest Dani.

  What has he done with the time?

  A few trivial rhymes.

  There was nothing else for it, really.

  Plus, he ate well, when the rhymes brought in the money.

  Autumn mellow. Autumn yellow. He can remember every word of that stupid song. But he can’t remember,

  dear God, he can’t.

  Excuse me, dear God, can I trouble you to remind me of my little sister’s name?

  Not that he thinks there’s a God. In fact he knows there isn’t. But just in case there’s such a thing:

  Please, remind me, her name, again.

  Sorry, the silence says. Can’t help you.

  Who’s that?

  (Silence.)

  Who’s there?

  (Silence.)

  God?

  Not exactly.

  Well, who?

  Where do I start? I’m the butterfly antenna. I’m the chemicals that paint’s made of. I’m the person dead at the water’s edge. I’m the water. I’m the edge. I’m skin cells. I’m the smell of disinfectant. I’m that thing they rub against your mouth to moisten it, can you feel it? I’m soft. I’m hard. I’m glass. I’m sand. I’m a yellow plastic bottle. I’m all the plastics in the seas and in the guts of all the fishes. I’m the fishes. I’m the seas. I’m the molluscs in the seas. I’m the flattened-out old beer can. I’m the shopping trolley in the canal. I’m the note on the stave, the bird on the line. I’m the stave. I’m the line. I’m spiders. I’m seeds. I’m water. I’m heat. I’m the cotton of the sheet. I’m the tube that’s in your side. I’m your urine in the tube. I’m your side. I’m your other side. I’m your other. I’m the coughing through the wall. I’m the cough. I’m the wall. I’m mucus. I’m the bronchial tubes. I’m inside. I’m outside. I’m traffic. I’m pollution. I’m a fall of horseshit on a country road a hundred years ago. I’m the surface of that road. I’m what’s below. I’m what’s above. I’m the fly. I’m the descendant of the fly. I’m the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the fly. I’m the circle. I’m the square. I’m all the shapes. I’m geometry. I haven’t even started with the telling you what I am. I’m everything that makes everything. I’m everything that unmakes everything. I’m fire. I’m flood. I’m pestilence. I’m the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I’m the vein in the leaf. I’m the voice that tells no story.

  (Snorts.) There’s no such thing.

  Begging your pardon. There is. It’s me.

  Leaf, did you say?

  I did say leaf, yes.

  You? the leaf?

  Are you deaf? I’m the leaf.

  Just one lone single leaf, are you?

  No. To be more exact. As I’ve already said. As I’ve already made clear. I’m all the leaves.

  You’re all the leaves.

  Yes.

  So, have you fallen? Are you still waiting to fall? In the autumn? In the summer if it’s stormy?

  Well, by definition –

  And by all the leaves you mean, you’re last year’s leaves?

  I –
>
  And next year’s leaves?

  Yes, I –

  You’re all the old long-gone leaves of all the years? And all the leaves to come?

  Yes, yes. Obviously. Christ almighty. I’m the leaves. I’m all the leaves. Okay?

  And the falling thing? Yes or no?

  Of course. It’s what leaves do.

  Then you can’t trick me, whoever you are. You don’t fool me for a minute.

  (Silence.)

  There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is.

  (Silence.)

  It’s the never-ending leaf-fall.

  (Silence.)

  Isn’t it? Aren’t you?

  (Silence.)

  Now that the actual autumn isn’t far off, it’s better weather. Up to now it has been fly-fetid, heavy-clouded, cool and autumnal all summer, pretty much since the first time Elisabeth went to the Post Office to do the Check & Send thing with her passport form.

  It’s now that her new passport arrives in the post.

  Her hair must have passed the test after all. The placing of her eyes must also have passed the test.

  She shows the new passport to her mother. Her mother points to the words European Union at the top of the cover of the passport and makes a sad face. Then she flicks through it.

  What are all these drawings? she says. This passport has been illustrated like a Ladybird book.

  A Ladybird book on acid, Elisabeth says.

  I don’t want a new passport if it’s going to look like this, her mother says. And all these men, all through it. Where are all the women? Oh, here’s one. Is that Gracie Fields? Architecture? But who on earth? and is that it? Is this woman wearing the funny hat the only woman in the whole thing? Oh no. Here’s another one, but sort of folded-in at the centre of a page, like an afterthought. And here’s another couple, on the same page as the Scottish pipers, both ethnic stereotype dancers. Performing arts. Well, that’s Scotland and women and a brace of continents all well and truly in their place.

  She hands it back to Elisabeth.