Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)

by Ali Smith

I’ll look it up for you, Sacha says. No. Don’t, her mother says. The don’t is said with all her mother’s fierceness in it; these days her mother is constantly forgetting things and constantly trying not to look up online the things she’s forgotten. I’m so menopausal. It’s the menopause. Like you can defy the inevitable by shouting its name at it. She is trying to make herself remember things rather than look them up. In real terms, what this means is her mother annoys everybody for half an hour then goes online and looks up whatever it is she can’t remember.

But why would anyone anyway ever eat any creature that has to be killed just so that someone can eat it, when there’s so much you can eat in the world without killing anything? The longer Sacha lives the more insane she realizes the species she belongs to is.

He has been washed clean in light. He understands now why porn isn’t at all the same thing as love. You could never do those things so unthinkingly, so humiliatingly, to someone so, so – truly adored. Adored! Did he ever think in his life he would have a use for such a word?

Why not? the man says. You only live once. Or twice in your case. Every second night for a fortnight. Everybody laughs. The man looks very surprised then pleased.

One of the best things ever, to be able to make your sister laugh like that.

remember when she wrote to him after their mother died and said that the people left behind after someone has died are liable to become inhabitants of Grief Island and must be sure to carry an inflatable life jacket with them to help them swim away if the weather roughens and they haven’t got access to a boat.

We said we’d write and we’d burn what we wrote. You remember? The heat that will come off this note when I burn it will alter the balance of heat and cold in the world in its own way. That energy I send your way.

I’m also quite worried for someone else I know, who is homeless. The news says homeless people have been give rooms in hotels. I’ve no idea if he got one or not. Why would we do these things for people only when there is a virus and not all the time?

The swifts have come across the world singly not with their mate. They meet up when they get back to the nesting place. They stay together for life when it comes to having their babies here. Then when they’ve had them they split up till they meet again next year for more mating. It seems to me it might save a few marriages if human beings did this too for 3/4 of the year.

Soon their babies will be doing push ups in the nesting place with their wings, strengthening themselves for the long flight back to Africa. What is really astounding is that when they fledge and leave the nest it’s the first time that they actually fly anywhere, and as soon as they hit the air they won’t touch down again for at least a year, more usually a couple of years.

Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that’s rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That’s what it’s all about.

But that’s summer for you. Summer’s like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness. And summer’s surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We’re always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it’s not just possible but assured, there’s a natural harmony that’ll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you. As if what it was always all about, your time on earth, was the full happy stretch of all the muscles of the body on a warmed patch of grass, one long sweet stem of that grass in the mouth. Care free. What a thought. Summer. The Summer’s Tale. There’s no such play, Grace. Don’t be fooled.

The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won’t be held to account – because summer won’t be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.

She is close to tears. Why is she nearly crying? Because of something quite unexpected. The bright sides of graffitied trains and the smudges on the insides of train and bus windows where people have pressed their noses. She is now crying because she is missing these things so much.

When she got downstairs in the hotel that night, no idea what to do with herself, no idea where she was off to or where she’d end up, only knowing she had to start out on a path for herself or there’d be no path, she saw that the Greenlaw family was still sitting in the pub part of the restaurant.