A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  I never regarded myself as one person with her; I didn’t really consider that we inhabited the one space. The part of her that I occupied I considered my own domain.

  I was getting my arms in the way of my head, making the whole operation dangerous and somehow fucking everything up. My head felt tight, something gripped it fiercely and would not let me go.

  My parents didn’t seem to realize I was trying to supply something I thought they should have supplied, something they should have done, or said to me.

  I know I would have responded to a few directions, but they didn’t seem to think I was a party to the birth: I was a splinter to come out, and was only me when they saw me.

  I was a three-hour labor. By rights mother should have loved me madly, softly, gratefully till she died.

  They did it on the kitchen table. When the doctor came they had already got my head round and into position. They were surprised to see the caul on my head, which was patched and marked with uterine material, like a small spotted cub, Doctor Lal said.

  So began my aloneness, my separateness from others. Wednesday’s child has far to go, they say.

  A Note

  I can’t very well tell anyone this is a diary, it’s mostly papers I’ve kept, and things I’m remembering here in a terrible hurry, but if I manage to finish enough of it before my hand can no longer hold a pen, perhaps father will try to get it published.

  If people somewhere down the slope of the future read it, it may help them if I start with a note about the sort of society in which people like me are possible.

  Here goes:

  The common people have become redundant, though that word is never used. The serving classes study them, describe them; produce, provide and prescribe for them; analyze, diagnose, manage the machines that have replaced them as labor units; allowing them the dignity of life, costing that as an expense against the State; granting them the luxury of reproduction.

  The social classes have been reduced to two: Serving Class and Free; the battle between the two was decided when one class took Dostoyevsky’s advice and, tongue in cheek, became servants in order to be leaders. But of course they weren’t princes of ancient lineage: they were the bourgeois, who flourish in a meritocracy.

  At the end of school years the grading system diverts a small stream of young people toward the class of professionals, those named the Servants of Society. The rest are Free Citizens, proletariat. The trivial occupations of freedom are their whole life. They see the divisions of society, they see the success of others, they see their own failure; the seeing begins to interact with the seen, the eye with the object: aberrations blossom.

  My Father is an Actor

  My father was given the news of my arrival during a performance, and he was so excited he told the audience during one of his many curtain calls. Although he was the dead body on stage for most of the performance, he was one of the most popular players. He died beautifully, was dissected, and parts shown amongst the audience.

  Later he stood in the foyer, laughing and smiling, and moved through the press of people to the entrance, where there were three steps down to the street, still smiling and talking. When my father smiled, the whole of his face lit up, even his ears. He was the center, briefly—for he wanted to get away to the house where I was born—of the well-wishers, and since in those days it was only possible to get large crowds into the city in the daytime, he was coming out of the theatre in the peak traffic hour of five o’clock.

  A demonstration of grotesquely changed women was going past, marching ten abreast. He was smiling as he made to leave the theatre crowd, smiling as he turned to face the demonstrators, wondering who it was this time. Banners were approaching, he delayed a little to see them, waiting for a slogan in which the cause was mentioned.

  He was still smiling as a group of demonstrators detached from the main body and ran over screaming. He hesitated, not knowing if they recognized him and were wanting a word with him, or autographs.

  “It’s no laughing matter!” One small red-haired girl screamed. Her face was worked into a plasticine mask of hate, and she kicked him. He hardly had time to lift the injured shin to give it a cuddle when the rest descended on him, knocked him to the grey-black bitumen and kicked him with great enthusiasm and some precision. In a crisis the best protection is often plain cowardice: he stayed down, curled up.

  It was a long time, perhaps the best part of half a minute before some of the theater staff rushed over to see what was going on. The hand-shaking public stayed out of it.

  “What’s going on?” they asked. Carefully, for the ferocious women were not likely to care what else they kicked.

  “He was laughing!” they screamed. “As we marched past!” and carried on as before.

  Since it was a money demonstration, not merely a parade, and since money is what government is about, there were plenty of police in attendance, shepherding them. One officer left his bike and pushed enough women aside to show his uniform. The few punches he got were inexpert and glanced off his ample ribs; he stood over my father, and recognized him.

  “Bayard Hunt!” he exclaimed. “The actor!” He was obviously about to go on and talk about the performance he’d seen: every man, woman and child in the country had seen it at least once. Changes was deservedly famous, a blend of despairing philosophy, mindless optimism, and violent sexual action—but my father cut him short with a groan.

  “What did you do?” the officer said good-naturedly to the public figure.

  “Smiling as I came out, that’s all,” said father.

  “Dangerous to laugh,” said the cop wisely. “Specially women. Surveys show—”

  “I know the surveys. I was talking to fans, and trying to get away. Of course I was smiling. I got news of my baby. Baby girl. Born during the performance.”

  The policeman helped him to his cycle, put him on the pillion and roared off toward the parking station.

  On the wall of an old building a night painter had written:

  Consume

  Be Silent

  Die!

  The lettering was many years old. Once it had meant something.

  Above, the upturned bowl of sky—blue, uncracked—taunted him and all who crawl on earth’s surface with what is eternal.

  He told me later he was thinking that the silent majority is better silent; when they talk their voice is the voice of children: pathetically innocent, or cranky, uninformed and spiteful; there could be among them some fool with a weapon, who wanted to make history.

  The powerful Japanese bike stopped at the entrance to the station, and father, who had been thinking of some reward for the officer, fished some complimentary tickets from his pocket. He had about twenty, kept together with a rubber band. He intended to peel off a few, perhaps half a dozen. As he got them out he had mentally reduced his gift to two when he was so overwhelmed by the meanness of what he was doing that he handed the whole packet to the officer.

  Foreheads Have Bled Where No Wounds Were

  Mister Parkes, guest attendant at the parking station, was solicitous when he saw my father’s blackening and nearly shut eye—and the abrasions on his face where shoes had marked his forehead and cheeks and neck. Both ears bled.

  “Mister Hunt? You OK?” And when father hesitated, not having any lines ready, Parkes said, “They had a hard job killing you off today.” And stood back, head to one side, a dog waiting for a reward.

  “I don’t blame you. It must be tough getting the chop every day of your life, when it’s coming to us all whether or no.” And fingered his hole, a little down from his left clavicle. He didn’t care whether he got an answer; his hole was his life, his inner life, far beyond the reach of whether an employer chose to use his talents for directing vehicles to one parking floor or another. To be fair to his employers, they often gave him the chance of standing on different floors.

  His hole was an entry mark. He could put his finger in. There was no exit mark. Nothing had been dis
covered in him. All the tests had been tried. There was nothing in him, but that didn’t take away the hole.

  He hadn’t given up X-rays. He was always about to go for another. No medicines, probings, dietings could heal the hole.

  In some people it was the eyes or ears that interacted with the chemical environment on the planet to form unusual growths or manifestations, so he slept with his eyes bandaged and his ears stopped with earplugs. Nothing affected his hole, perhaps it wasn’t eyes or ears that caused the infiltration. He tried to form an association for those suffering from unexplained entries or invasions, but no one came.

  “A demonstration ran over me,” said my father. He had a permanent parking spot, and was soon on his way to see his beautiful daughter.

  The attendant didn’t hear a word, his mind was in his hole, but the look he gave father in that brief moment was the same as father always got from Frees: What you are I can never be; what I am, no one wants to be.

  Church Hill lies on one of many rounded, eroded hills extending north from the shallow depression containing Shoppingtown, Cheapley, the Mead, and on down the river. Father had thirty kilometers to drive, each way, each day. It was May 28; father and I were soon to meet each other.

  Birth of the Woman of the Future

  My head was out, part of the caul on my head like a cap, a lei of pubic hair round my neck. They laughed. “Isn’t it funny!” Notice the “it.” I felt cold. It was the air of this planet. My mouth, my eyes, my scalp were unbearably cold. I say unbearable, though I bore it.

  Then helplessness as my arms were pinned to my sides by the muscles of mother’s vagina. A little further and I whipped up my right arm. It gave me comfort to have it near my face, a protection. When both were up I felt defended, and relaxed a bit. At one stage I was out, from the hips up, arms waving jerkily in tight arcs, like a boxer, with fists.

  When they got me out of there they didn’t cut the cord right away and maybe it was just as well. My first breath of air was like breathing fire. It was like the “lungs on fire” feeling you have when you are suddenly called on to run a long way in an emergency when you are out of condition. Yet the air was cold.

  After my cord had stopped pulsing and they cut it, they put me on mother’s stomach. She touched me—first my face, my arms and legs, then all over my body. I fancy I shivered. It must have been then they put me in warm water. My hands and feet uncurled and curled. Mother never tired of telling me how she couldn’t take her eyes from the sight of my hands and feet curling and uncurling, clenching and relaxing, constantly moving.

  “Its eyes are open!” they exclaimed. There’s that “it” again.

  And all the time looking round, my eyes as far open as I could manage them. How I loved my bath! I splashed. Mother played with my feet. I was gurgling.

  Father took my head, molding it in cupped hands as if it were a lump of dough. It had become elongated on the way through.

  And then, they said, I began to grin. No one referred to it as smiling. Always grinning.

  “It was such a wide grin,” my father said. He was the first man to see my nakedness. “It began slowly, then got wider until it seemed to fill your whole face. And not a yell out of you, just your legs kicking, hands clenching, and this grin. Oh, and the eyes; the eyes all the time. Open and looking. And every time something moved, your eyes caught it. We put you down on the leopard skin, and you loved it.”

  It would be boring for me to go on to tell you that I had no problems with taking food, with constipation, with toilet training, with sleeping. Or that I never cried. I suppose you’re annoyed already.

  The Beginning of My End

  When they got me out of there and separated me from the entire past of the race, I was the end of a long chain of biological possibilities.

  The me that might have been any other thing, that might have been some marvelous mixture so far unknown, that had hesitated so long on the edge of becoming, that might have put off existence for another thousand generations, had been forced to arrive.

  My brief flowering had begun.

  She Bled a Lot

  To this day I have it on my conscience that mother lost a lot of her blood having me. Not that I saw the blood. I wonder what effect that might have had on me, particularly, as I have often imagined, if the world outside us is not outside. If the world is part of us, and perceived events and objects interact with one’s brain, then the eye is in chemical conjunction with the object. Seeing: a chemical process! (I wonder if there’s anything in it.)

  A Baby Born

  I was born a person, not just a limp babybag with suet brain. I had grown and listened in my fluid bath to the sounds of the world that came near mother’s abdomen. I had some idea of the alternation of light and dark, noise and quiet, and linked light with noise, quiet with darkness.

  I was born with desires, with a personality make-up that was clear, with drives discoverable to any organism or machine that knew what to look for.

  I was born with equipment that I have had all my life—abilities and capacity to absorb from my society things that will build on what I started with—so that others can not avoid calling me “intelligent” and “able”, and those with less speed and facility in gathering and adding to themselves cannot avoid looking up to me.

  I was a human from the moment I first spied daylight.

  The table I was born on is still honored above all other tables by my father, who sits and eats his food at it every day.

  The Babwe doll I was given, that wets and expresses tears and can be milked by her own tiny baby, is still on the mantelpiece father made.

  My father allowed me full humanity from the first day. I was the only girl I knew to have been loved by her father and close to him in the sense that he did everything for me, just the same as mother did. I had a real father, he thought I was beautiful.

  Change

  I was young when I first saw the ways people change. I trace it to the time when I was put down on my back in the blue bassinette and left to watch the world.

  Objects change. Our ceiling, for instance. Sometimes it got higher, and when dark, quite low.

  But also my cord. The cord on which were threaded my small plastic ducks came down in an arc from the eyelet at one side of my container. And it wasn’t straight! I had seen the angles of my room, the straight lines of the ceiling aiming inexorably at the corners where they met the straight lines up from somewhere below eye level. But the cord was curved. Curved most when strung with nothing but also curved when it carried one duck. When father moved the yellow duck along, the shape of the cord changed and the curve was less one side and more the other. When the yellow, blue, green, pink and white ducks were threaded on the cord, I looked carefully to find the small amount of curve that must remain in each section of cord. (You will understand the great pressure on me to look for curves in all cases, after I had found them in some.)

  Father believed I should have lots to look at; I was accordingly put into the largest room. No one thought to tell him that the objects seen so early have a great bearing on how one sees later. And what one sees.

  To My Reader

  I’ve always liked talking to one person at a time, probably to avoid the charge of seeming different to different people, so I’ll address myself to one reader. Not for me the multitudes who relished Sterne nor the hundred Stendhal promised himself, not even the modest five anticipated by the delicate Machado. I am quite satisfied with one: you, my reader. I will be talking always to you and the time will always be now.

  Another note on this strange and primitive society of ours:

  The people are redundant at a time when the children of the human community are just conscious enough of history to ask: Why are the dinosaurs gone?

  Others are undergoing cell changes as a result of consciousness of their own personal history, their profound and private failure, their need for punishment, their obsessive guilt.

  We react constantly with the atmosphere and
the substances that make up the earth and our bodies, and everywhere we go, even to outer space, we must take this atmosphere and those substances with us. We cannot escape them.

  The Room I Lived in Most

  The waterdrop machine sprayed its few lamplit drops out toward the collection of figurines and the small settlement of dwarf plants that congregated in pots like an audience round the glass parapet of its upper part. The tiny black earthenware men that sat round their campfire of painted red had their backs splashed by stray drops. Their spears, a millimeter thick, they had firmly in shiny knuckles. When drops fell on their red fire, it became shiny and cheerful. A porcelain willow tree, wet by the drops, had its trunk in human shape.

  The leaves of mother’s daphne bush were very still. When it was stirred by a breeze from the back door, its astringent perfume snaked through the house.

  On the mantelpiece a cigarette lighter, in the form of a brass cannon, stood pointed at the door, and the soldier standing by it melted into it, formed of the same metal. By the cannon was a hand-high stone statue of a boy peeing.

  A hole in the timber of the mantel, a hole with neat sides and no outlet on the other face of the timber, hooked my mind. Was it the hole of an animal, and was the animal inside?

  A group of porcelain figures that had come down through mother’s family and was one of the things she brought to this marriage—to any marriage she had—stood on its green and white base. Children of the Vine: the words etched into the border. Vine leaves sprouted from their ankles, arms, waists.

  Porcupine Man, a quilled side-show freak of twisted metal dipped in plastic, sat in a pose of despair, his arms lifted toward something in the sky. He sat near a tiny wooden coffin my father made from unpainted applewood. A curio pipe cut in the figure of a woman had the pipe stem going up into her body. Mother had made two figures in her craft class at high school; painted, glazed and fired them herself. A boy and his sister, hand in hand. To my eyes, so new to the world, their charm, their interest, lay in the way their feet joined the ground, which was an earthenware base common to both. And where their hands touched, their flesh flowed together. I always wanted to see the joins. Where did one end and the other begin?