Autumn

by Ali Smith

  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 distillery.

  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.

  The white orange in his hand becomes its natural colour.

  He nods.

  He pulls the colours green and blue like a string of handkerchiefs out of the centre of himself. The orange in his hand turns Cézanne-colours.

  People crowd round him, excited.

  People queue up, bring him their white things, hold them out.

  Anonymous people start to add tweet-sized comments about Daniel beneath Daniel. They are commenting on his ability to change things.

  The comments get more and more unpleasant.

  They start to make a sound like a hornet mass and Elisabeth notices that what looks like liquid excrement is spreading very close to her bare feet. She tries not to step in any of it.

  She calls to Daniel to watch where he steps too.

  Having a bit of time out? the care assistant says. All right for some, huh?

  Elisabeth comes to, opens her eyes. The book falls off her lap. She picks it up.

  The care assistant is tapping the rehydration bag.

  Some of us have to work for a living, she says.

  She winks in the general direction of Elisabeth.

  I was miles away, Elisabeth says.

  Him too, the care assistant says. A very nice polite gentleman. We miss him now. Increased sleep period. It happens when things are becoming more (slight pause before she says it) final.

  The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

  Please don’t talk about Mr Gluck as if he can’t hear you, she says. He can hear you as well as I can. Even if it looks like he’s asleep.

  The care assistant hooks the chart she’s been looking at back on the rail at the end of the bed.

  One day I was giving him a wash, she says as if Elisabeth’s not there either and as if she’s quite used to people not being there, or equally to having to function as if people aren’t.

  And the TV was on in the lounge, loud, and his door was open. He opens his eyes and sits straight up in the bed in the mi
ddle of. Advert, a supermarket. A song starts above the people’s heads in the shop and all the people buying the things, dropping them on the floor instead and are dancing everywhere in the shop, and he sat straight up in the bed, he said this one is me, I wrote this one.

  Old queen, Elisabeth’s mother said under her breath.

  Why him? she said at the more normal level of voice.

  Because he’s our neighbour, Elisabeth said.

  It was a Tuesday evening in April in 1993. Elisabeth was eight years old.

  But we don’t know him, her mother said.

  We’re supposed to talk to a neighbour about what it means to be a neighbour, then make a portrait in words of a neighbour, Elisabeth said. You’re meant to come with me, I’m meant to make up two or three questions and ask them to a neighbour for the portrait and you’re meant to accompany me. I told you. I told you on Friday. You said we would. It’s for school.

  Her mother was doing something to the make-up on her eyes.

  About what? her mother said. About all the arty art he’s got in there?

  We’ve got pictures, Elisabeth said. Are they arty art?

  She looked at the wall behind her mother, the picture of the river and the little house. The picture of the squirrels made from bits of real pinecone. The poster of the dancers by Henri Matisse. The poster of the woman and her skirt and the Eiffel Tower. The blown-up real photographs of her grandmother and grandfather from when her mother was small. The ones of her mother when her mother was a baby. The ones of herself as a baby.

  The stone with the hole through the middle of it. In the middle of his front room, her mother was saying. That’s very arty art. I wasn’t being nosy. I was passing. The light was on. I thought you were supposed to be collecting and identifying fallen leaves.

  That was like three weeks ago, Elisabeth said. Are you going out?

  Can’t we phone Abbie and ask her the questions over the phone? her mother said.

  But we don’t live next to Abbie any more, Elisabeth said. It’s supposed to be someone who’s a neighbour right now. It’s supposed to be in person, an in-person interview. And I’m supposed to ask about what it was like where the neighbour grew up and what life was like when the neighbour was my age.

  People’s lives are private, her mother said. You can’t just go traipsing into their lives asking all sorts of questions. And anyway. Why does the school want to know these things about our neighbours?

  They just do, Elisabeth said.

  She went and sat on the top step of the stairs. She’d end up being the new girl who hasn’t done the right homework. Her mother was going to say any minute now that she was off to do shopping at the late-night Tesco’s and that she’d be back in half an hour. In reality she’d be back in two hours. She would smell of cigarettes. There’d be nothing brought back from Tesco’s.

  It’s about history, and being neighbours, Elisabeth said.

  He probably can’t speak very good English, her mother said. You can’t just go bothering old frail people.

  He’s not frail, Elisabeth said. He’s not foreign. He’s not old. He doesn’t look in the least imprisoned.

  He doesn’t look what? her mother said.

  It has to be done for tomorrow, Elisabeth said.

  I’ve an idea, her mother said. Why don’t you make it up? Pretend you’re asking him the questions. Write down the answers you think he’d give.

  It’s supposed to be true, Elisabeth said. It’s for News.

  They’ll never know, her mother said. Make it up. The real news is always made up anyway.

  The real news is not made up, Elisabeth said. It’s the news.

  That’s a discussion we’ll have again when you’re a bit older, her mother said. Anyway. It’s much harder to make things up. I mean, to make them up really well, well enough so that they’re convincing. It requires much more skill. Tell you what. If you make it up and it’s convincing enough to persuade Miss Simmonds that it’s true, I’ll buy you that Beauty and the Beast thing.

  The video? Elisabeth said. Really?

  Uh huh, her mother said, pivoting on one foot to look at herself from the side.

  In any case our video player is broken, Elisabeth said.

  If you persuade her, her mother said. I’ll splash out on a new one.

  Do you mean it? Elisabeth said.

  And if Miss Simmonds gives you a hard time because it’s made up, I’ll ring the school and assure her that it’s not made up, it’s true, her mother said. Okay?

  Elisabeth sat down at the computer desk.

  If he was very old, the neighbour, he didn’t look anything like the people who were meant to be it on TV, who always seemed as if they were trapped inside a rubber mask, not just a face-sized mask, but one that went the length of the body from head to foot, and if you could tear it off or split it open it was like you’d find an untouched unchanged young person inside, who’d simply step cleanly out of the old fake skin, like the skin after you take out the inner banana. When they were trapped inside that skin, though, the eyes of people, at least the people in all the films and comedy programmes, looked desperate, like they were trying to signal to outsiders without giving the game away that they’d been captured by empty aged selves which were now keeping them alive inside them for some sinister reason, like those wasps that lay eggs inside other creatures so their hatchlings will have something to eat. Except the other way round, the old self feeding off the young one. All that was left would be the eyes, pleading, trapped behind the eyeholes.

  Her mother was at the front door.

  Bye, she called. Back soon.

  Elisabeth ran through to the hall.

  If I want to write the word elegant how do I spell it?

  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 p
ast. 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.