Free There but for The by Ali Smith Page A

split up with David, had made sympathetic noises throughout the many drunken telephone calls and had even let her move into his spare room for some of their time apart, all of which left her feeling humiliated at encountering Mark in any way after she and David got back together again.
    Regardless of time, memory, family, history, loss, it was an October mid-morning in Greenwich Park today. The sky held the mild threat of rain and the day was warm, about nineteen or twenty degrees, far too warm for this time of year, a flaunting of warmth before the battening-down for winter. How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other banal philosophizing for God sake / how long’s this sermonizing going to take / you sound like an old vicar on the make he blocked her by thinking hard of the beautiful image he’d sourced back in the spring for the autumn-winter edition of Wildlife. He’d suggested it for the cover, but no one ever listened to mere worker-bee picture researchers (they’d gone with penguins, again). It was a picture of a little gold-coloured bird singing in a field in winter somewhere in Italy. It was a close-up; the field frosty, the bird the colour of summer and so lightweight that it could balance itself on the bend of the stalk of a dead flower. But the really interesting thing about the picture was that you could see the song coming out of the bird’s mouth. You could actually see birdsong. Because the air was frosty the notes the bird had just sung hung there momentarily in the air like a chain of smoke rings and the camera had simply caught them before they disappeared.
    Winter. It made things visible.
    But today on this balmy day, even though he knew winter was so close, winter was actually unimaginable if I had known, when I was twenty-four / that you’d grow up such a godawful bore / well—what rhymes with back-street abortionist never mind winter, autumn itself was unimaginable, even though this was actually meant to be autumn, even though the leaves had already, this early in October, left the first of their gold-coloured edgings along the pathways down there yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawnyawn yawnyawn yawn / YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN but could you call it autumn if it was as warm as May? Could he really be nearly sixty, and still feel so like thirty? Yes, he felt thirty at the most, like someone trapped at the age of thirty inside the body of an old horse, at any rate trapped inside a slower body, a slowing brain, a newly paper-thinning skin, a maddeningly failing eyesight you self-indulgent bastard take a hike / at least you know what failing eyesight’s like / look at me I’m about three minutes long / like the way a whole year gets rammed into three minutes in that irritating I Just Called To Say I Love You Stevie Wonder song.
    That didn’t scan at all well. She was upset. Interesting, though, that she’d taken to iambic pentameter. A very cultured lady, Faye. She’d been making her bed in his ear, pouring her lovable poison into it now, for longer than she’d actually lived on this earth.
    Ironic, Mark said out loud. Actually very sad.
    The couple along the railings exchanged worried looks and shifted a little further off. It didn’t do to speak to yourself, or your dead, out loud. It was inappropriate. Mark turned towards the grassy slope where, historically, for centuries, the boys had dragged the girls up to the top only to drag them down the steepness of it at the kind of full speed that threw clothes and modesty into disarray and called for a lot of screaming. Over the centuries spectators had gathered at the top and the