Autumn

by Ali Smith

  The fence has doubled since she last saw it. Unless her eyes are deceiving her, it’s now not just one fence but two in parallel.

  It’s true. Beyond the first layer of fence, about ten feet away from it, with a neat-flattened space in between the two fences, is another identical chainlink fence topped with the same foully frivolous looking razorwire. This other fence is electric-clipped too, and as she walks alongside them both the experience of the diamond-shaped wirework flashing next to her eyes is a bit epileptic.

  Elisabeth takes a phone photo of it. Then she takes one or two images of the weed-life reappearing already through the churned-up mud round one of the metal posts.

  She looks around. The weed and flower comeback is everywhere.

  She follows the fenceline for half a mile or so before a black SUV truck rolling along in the flat space between the layers of fence catches up with her. It passes her and pulls up in front of her. The engine stops. When she draws level with the truck its window slides down. A man leans out. She nods a hello.

  Fine day, she says.

  You can’t walk here, he says.

  Yes I can, she says.

  She nods to him again and smiles. She keeps walking. She hears the truck start up again behind her. When it draws level the driver keeps the engine dawdling, drives at the same pace as her walking. He leans out of the window.

  This is private land, he says.

  No it isn’t, she says. It’s common land. Common land is by definition not private.

  She stops. The truck overshoots her. The man puts it into reverse.

  Go back to the road, he calls out of the window as he reverses. Where’s your car? You need to go back to where you left your car.

  I can’t do that, Elisabeth says.

  Why not? the driver says.

  I don’t have a car, Elisabeth says.

  She starts walking again. The driver revs his engine and drives beyond her. Several yards ahead of her he stops, cuts the engine and opens the truck door. He is standing beside the truck as she comes towards him.

  You’re in direct contravention, he says.

  Of what? Elisabeth says. And whatever you say I’m in. Well. It looks from here like you’re in prison.

  He opens his top pocket and takes out a phone. He holds it up as if to take her picture or start filming her.

  She points to the cameras on the fenceposts.

  Don’t you have enough footage of me already? she says.

  Unless you leave the area immediately, he says, you’ll be forcibly removed by security.

  Are you not security, then? she says.

  She points at the logo on the pocket he’s taken the phone out of. It says SA4A.

  And is that an approximation of the word safer or is it more like the word sofa? she says.

  The SA4A man starts typing something on his phone.

  This is your third warning, he says. You are now being warned for the last time that action will be taken against you unless you vacate the area immediately. You are unlawfully trespassing.

  As opposed to lawfully trespassing? she says.

  – still anywhere near the perimeter the next time I pass here –

  Perimeter of what? she says.

  She looks through at the fenced-off landscape and all she can see is landscape. There are no people. There are no buildings. There is just fence, then landscape.

  – lead to legal charges being implemented against you, the man is saying, and may involve you being forcibly detained and your personal information and a sample of your DNA being taken and retained.

  Prison for trees. Prison for gorse, for flies, for cabbage whites, for small blues. Oystercatcher detention centre.

  What are the fences actually for? she says. Or aren’t you allowed to tell me?

  The man dead-eyes her. He keys something into his phone, then holds it up to get an image of her. She smiles in a friendly way, like you do when you’re having your photo taken. Then she turns and starts walking again along the fenceline. She hears him phone somebody and say something, then get into his SUV and reverse it between the fences. She hears it head off in the opposite direction.

  The nettles say nothing. The seeds at the tops of the grass stems say nothing. The little white flowers on the tops of their stalks, she doesn’t know what they are but they’re saying their fresh nothing.

  The buttercups say it merrily. The gorse says it unexpectedly, a bright yellow nothing, smooth and soft and delicate against the mute green nothing of its barbs.

  Back then at school a boy was hellbent on making Elisabeth, who was sixteen at this point, laugh. (He was hellbent on just making her, too, ha ha.) He was pretty cool. She liked him. His name was Mark Joseph and he played bass in a band that did anarchic cover versions of old stuff from back at the beginning of the 90s; he was also a computer genius who was ahead of everybody else, and this was back when most people still didn’t know what a search engine was and everyone believed that the millennial new year would crash all the world’s computers, about which Mark Joseph made a funny spoof and put it online, a photo of a veterinary surgery up the road from the school, caption underneath saying Click Here for Protection Against Millennium Pug.

  Now he was following her about in school and trying to find ways of making her laugh.

  He kissed her, at the school back gate. It was nice.

  Why don’t you love me? he said three weeks later.

  I’m already in love, Elisabeth said. It isn’t possible to be in love with more than one person.

  A girl at college called Marielle Simi and Elisabeth, when Elisabeth was eighteen, rolled about on the floor of Elisabeth’s hall of residence room high on dope and laughing at the funny things that backing singers sometimes sing in songs. Marielle Simi played her an old song where the backing singers have to sing the word onomatopoeia eight times. Elisabeth played Marielle Simi a Cliff Richard song in which the backing singers have to sing the word sheep. They cried with laughter, then Marielle Simi, who was French, put her arm round Elisabeth and kissed her. It was nice.

  Why? she said, months later. I don’t get it. I don’t understand. It’s so good.

  I just can’t lie, Elisabeth said. I love the sex. I love being with you. It’s great. But I have to be truthful. I can’t lie about it.

  Who is he? Marielle Simi said. An ex? Is he still around? Are you still seeing him? Or is it a her? Is it a woman? Have you been seeing her or him the whole time you’ve been seeing me?

  It isn’t that kind of relationship, Elisabeth said. It isn’t even the least bit physical. It never has been. But it’s love. I can’t pretend it isn’t.

  You are using this as denial, Marielle Simi said. You’re putting it between yourself and your real feelings so that you don’t have to feel.

  Elisabeth shrugged.

  I feel plenty, she said.

  Elisabeth, who was twenty one, met Tom MacFarlane at her graduation. She was graduating in history of art (morning), he was business studies (afternoon). Tom and Elisabeth had been together for six years. He’d moved into her rented flat for five so far of those years. They were thinking of making their relationship permanent. They were talking marriage, mortgage.

  One morning when he was putting breakfast things out on the kitchen table Tom asked out of nowhere,

  who’s Daniel?

  Daniel? Elisabeth said.

  Daniel, Tom said again.

  Do you mean Mr Gluck? she said.

  I’ve no idea, Tom said. Who’s Mr Gluck?

  Old neighbour of my mother’s, Elisabeth said. He lived next door when I was a kid. I haven’t seen him for years. Literally years. Ages. Why? Has something happened? Did my mother phone? Has something happened to Daniel?

  You said his name in your sleep, Tom said.

  Did I? When? Elisabeth said.

  Last night. It’s not the first time. You quite often say it in your sleep, Tom said.

  Elisabeth was fourteen. She and Daniel were walking where the
canal met the countryside, where the path peels away and goes off up through to the woods on the curve of the hill. It was suddenly freezing though it was only quite early in autumn. The rain was coming, she could see it when they got to the top of the hill, it was moving across the landscape like someone was shading in the sky with a pencil.

  Daniel was out of breath. He didn’t usually get this out of breath.

  I don’t like it when the summer goes and the autumn comes, she said.

  Daniel took her by the shoulders and turned her round. He didn’t say anything. But all across the landscape down behind them it was still sunlit blue and green.

  She looked up at him showing her how the summer was still there.

  Nobody spoke like Daniel.

  Nobody didn’t speak like Daniel.

  It was the end of a winter; this one was the winter of 2002–3. Elisabeth was eighteen. It was February. She had gone down to London to march in the protest. Not In Her Name. All across the country people had done the same thing and millions more people had all across the world.

  On the Monday after, she wandered through the city; strange to be walking streets where life was going on as normal, traffic and people going their usual backwards and forwards along streets that had had no traffic, had felt like they’d belonged to the two million people from their feet on the pavement all the way up to sky because of something to do with truth, when she’d walked the exact same route only the day before yesterday.

  That was the Monday she unearthed an old red hardback catalogue in an art shop on Charing Cross Road. It was cheap, £3. It was in the reduced books bin.

  It was of an exhibition a few years ago. Pauline Boty, 1960s Pop Art painter.

  Pauline who?

  A female British Pop Art painter?

  Really?

  This was interesting to Elisabeth, who’d been studying art history as one of her subjects at college and had been having an argument with her tutor, who’d told her that categorically there had never been such a thing as a female British Pop artist, not one of any worth, which is why there were none recorded as more than footnotes in British Pop Art history.

  The artist had made collages, paintings, stained glass work and stage sets. She had had quite a life story. She’d not just been a painter, she’d also done theatre and TV work as an actress, had chaperoned Bob Dylan round London before anyone’d heard of Bob Dylan, had been on the radio telling listeners what it was like to be a young woman in the world right then and had nearly been cast in a film in a role that Julie Christie got instead.

  She’d had everything ahead of her in swinging London, and then she’d died, at the age of twenty eight, of cancer. She’d gone to the doctor because she was pregnant and they’d spotted the cancer. She’d refused an abortion, which meant she couldn’t have radiotherapy; it would hurt the child. She’d given birth and she’d died four months after.

  Malignant thymoma is what it said in the list of things under the word Chronology at the back of the catalogue.

  It was a sad story, and nothing like the paintings, which were so witty and joyous and full of unexpected colour and juxtapositions that Elisabeth, flicking through the catalogue, realized that she was smiling. The painter’s last painting had been of a huge and beautiful female arse, nothing else, framed by a jovial proscenium arch like it was filling the whole stage of a theatre. Underneath, in bright red, was a word in huge and rambunctious looking capitals.

  BUM.

  Elisabeth laughed out loud.

  What a way to go.

  The artist’s paintings were full of images of people of the time, Elvis, Marilyn, people from politics. There was a photograph of a now-missing painting with the famous image of the woman who caused the Scandal scandal, whose sitting nude and backwards on a designer chair had had something to do with politics at the time.

  Then Elisabeth held the catalogue open at a page with a particular painting on it.

  It was called Untitled (Sunflower Woman) c.1963.

  It was of a woman on a bright blue background. Her body was a collage of painted images. A man with a machine gun pointing at the person looking at the picture formed her chest. A factory formed her arm and shoulder.

  A sunflower filled her torso.

  An exploding airship made her crotch.

  An owl.

  Mountains.

  Coloured zigzags.

  At the back of the book was a black and white reproduction of a collage. It had a large hand holding a small hand, which was holding the large hand back.

  Down at the bottom of the picture there were two ships in a sea and a small boat filled with people.

  Elisabeth went to the British Library periodicals room and sat at a table with Vogue, September 1964. FEATURES 9 Spotlight 92 Paola, paragon of princesses 110 Living doll: Pauline Boty interviewed by Nell Dunn 120 Girls in their married bliss, by Edna O’Brien. Alongside adverts for the bright red Young Jaeger look-again coat, the Goya Golden Girl Beauty Puff and the bandeau bra and pantie girdle cut like briefs to leave you feeling free all over, was: Pauline Boty, blonde, brilliant, 26. She has been married for a year and her husband is inordinately proud of her achievements, boasts that she makes a lot of money painting and acting. She has found by experience that she is in a world where female emancipation is a password and not a fact – she is beautiful, therefore she should not be clever.

  The full-page photo, by David Bailey, was a large close-up of Boty’s face with a tiny doll’s face, the other way up, just behind her.

  P.B. I find that I have a fantasy image. It’s that I really like making other people happy, which is probably egotistical, because they think ‘What a lovely girl’, you know. But it’s also that I don’t want people to touch me. I don’t mean physically particularly, though it’s that as well. So I always like to feel that I’m sort of floating by and just occasionally being there, seeing them. I’m very inclined to play a role that someone sets for me, particularly when I first meet people. One of the reasons I married Clive was because he really did accept me as a human being, a person with a mind.

  N.D. Men think of you just as a pretty girl you mean?

  P.B. No. They just find it embarrassing when you start talking. Lots of women are intellectually more clever than lots of men. But it’s difficult for men to accept the idea.

  N.D. If you start talking about ideas they just think you’re putting it on?

  P.B. Not that you’re putting it on. They just find it slightly embarrassing that you’re not doing the right thing.

  Elisabeth photocopied the pages in the magazine. She took the Pauline Boty exhibition catalogue to college and put it on her tutor’s desk.

  Oh, right. Boty, the tutor said.

  He shook his head.

  Tragic story, he said.

  Then he said, they’re pretty dismissible. Poor paintings. Not very good. She was quite Julie Christie. Very striking girl. There’s a film of her, Ken Russell, and she’s a bit eccentric in it if I remember rightly, dresses in a top hat, miming along to Shirley Temple, I mean attractive and so on, but pretty execrable.

  Where can I find that film? Elisabeth said.

  I’ve absolutely no idea, the tutor said. She was gorgeous. But not a painter of anything more than minor interest. She stole everything of any note in her work from Warhol and Blake.

  What about the way she uses images as images? Elisabeth said.

  Oh God, everybody and his dog was doing that then, the tutor said.

  What about everybody and her dog? Elisabeth said.

  I’m sorry? the tutor said.

  What about this? Elisabeth said.

  She opened the catalogue at a page with two paintings reproduced side by side.

  One was of a painting of images of ancient and modern men. Above, there was a blue sky with a US airforce plane in it. Below, there was a smudged colour depiction of the shooting of Kennedy in the car in Dallas, between black and white images of Lenin and Einstein. Above the head of the dyin
g president were a matador, a deep red rose, some smiling men in suits, a couple of the Beatles.

  The other picture was of a fleshy strip of images superimposed over a blue/green English landscape vista, complete with a little Palladian structure. Inside the superimposed strip were several images of part-naked women in lush and coquettish porn magazine poses. But at the centre of these coy poses was something unadulterated, pure and blatant, a woman’s naked body full-frontal, cut off at the head and the knees.

  The tutor shook his head.

  I’m not seeing anything new here, he said.

  He cleared his throat.

  There are lots and lots of highly sexualized images throughout Pop Art, he said.

  What about the titles? Elisabeth said.

  (The titles of the paintings were It’s a Man’s World I and It’s a Man’s World II.)

  The tutor had gone a ruddy red colour at the face.

  Is there, was there, anything else like this being painted by a woman at the time? Elisabeth said.

  The tutor shut the catalogue. He cleared his throat again.

  Why should we imagine that gender matters here? the tutor said.

  That’s actually my question too, Elisabeth said. In fact, I came to see you today to change my dissertation title. I’d like to work on the representation of representation in Pauline Boty’s work.

  You can’t, the tutor said.

  Why can’t I? Elisabeth said.

  There’s not nearly enough material available on Pauline Boty, the tutor said.

  I think there is, Elisabeth said.

  There’s next to no critical material, he said.

  That’s one of the reasons I think it’d be a particularly good thing to do, Elisabeth said.

  I’m your dissertation supervisor, the tutor said, and I’m telling you, there isn’t, and it isn’t. You’re going off down a rarefied cul-de-sac here. Do I make myself clear?

  Then I’d like to apply to be moved to a new supervisor, Elisabeth said. Do I do that with you, or do I go to the Admin office?

  A year on from then, Elisabeth went home for the Easter holidays. It was when her mother was thinking of moving, maybe to the coast. Elisabeth listened to the options and looked at the house details her mother had been sent by estate agents in Norfolk and Suffolk.