Autumn (Seasonal, #1)

by Ali Smith

He wrote on the back of it, with love from an old child. He is always looking out for that picture. He has never found it again. He has always regretted not keeping it. Regrets when you’re dead? A past when you’re dead? Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

But the sea? Silent, like sea in a dream. The girl? No sign. The ring of dancers round her? Gone. On the shore, though, there’s a washed-up body. He goes to look. Is it his own? No. It is a dead person.

living the dream, her mother says, and she is, if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do and that you’re still in the same rented flat you had when you were a student over a decade ago – has

This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it.

I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful. I’m tired of animosity. I’m tired of pusillanimosity. I don’t think that’s actually a word, Elisabeth says. I’m tired of not knowing the right words, her mother says.

All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the haves and the have nots stayed the same.

Or if he is, Elisabeth said, then he’s not just gay. He’s not just one thing or another. Nobody is. Not even you.

The receptionist smiles a patient smile. (A smile especially for patients.)