Autumn (Seasonal, #1)

by Ali Smith

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

He’d imagined death would distil a person, strip the rotting rot away till everything was light as a cloud.

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

But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.

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

It was a hush, Hannah thought, related to the quiet that comes over wildlife, happens to the birdsong, in an eclipse of the sun when something like night happens but it’s the middle of the day.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

Words don’t get grown, Elisabeth said. They do, Daniel said. Words aren’t plants, Elisabeth said. Words are themselves organisms, Daniel said. Oregano-isms, Elisabeth said. Herbal and verbal, Daniel said. Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there’s even more language waiting to come up.

And anyway, why else are you always hanging round an old gay man? (That was her mother.) I don’t have a father fixation, Elisabeth said. And Daniel’s not gay. He’s European.

The receptionist says that it’s a good idea always to carry a utility bill around with you in case someone needs to be able to verify your ID.

It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.

Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren’t relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

Bullets are faster and stronger than tree costumes and will rip through and obliterate tree costumes, Elisabeth said.

There is no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there’s already a real world. There’s just the world, and there’s the truth about the world. You mean, there’s the truth, and there’s the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said.

So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion.

Think what it’d be like if everyone started wearing tree costumes, the man with the gun said. It’d be like living in a wood. And we don’t live in a wood. This town’s been a town since long before I was born. If it was good enough for my parents, and my grandparents and my great grandparents.

It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren’t yours let you see where you are, who you are.

We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

See how it’s deep in our animal nature, Daniel said. Not to see what’s happening right in front of our eyes.

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.

It was also quite exciting to be able, just by clapping your hands, to free someone from something.

It’s all right to forget, you know, he said. It’s good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.

What I do when it distresses me that there’s something I can’t remember, is. Are you listening? Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying. I imagine that whatever it is I’ve forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird. What kind of bird? Elisabeth said. A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You’ll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it too tight, and I let it sleep. And that’s that.

Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have huge beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde.

Half Belgian, half Persian, staunch British conservative, he’d seen the Himalayas and Harrogate and had chosen accountancy.