A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  There were little animal figures, too. A cat, a pig, and a shiny horse—but the horse was broken. Part of its head had cracked and come away, showing the white china underneath. Yet it still stood, one foreleg raised, pawing the ground. The piece lay on the mantel beside it, and before I was two, father had mended the horse’s head.

  For hours every day, day after day, for many months I lay on my back looking up at these objects, my eyes running over every curve, every detail, clinging to their surfaces; I moved my head and found they looked slightly different. I went to sleep looking at them; I woke, and there they were.

  My parents watched me look from object to object, and said I was remarkable. They noted my expressions, exclaimed when they changed, and marveled at my intelligence. I heard them congratulate each other on the brilliant future that lay ahead of me. I would be famous. No superlative was too extravagant for them.

  Up a Gum Tree

  My father had always wanted to put his baby in a tree, to hang there in a sort of sling. He rigged a hammock with a stretching piece each end and a baby blanket sewn both sides to the two ropes, and laid me in it.

  I have always liked the underview of trees. With a slight effort of memory—how does one exercise one’s memory?—I can see tree branches moving across my field of vision, the blue of sky with the fuzziness of white at its edges, and fingerings of fine cloud at the sides of the picture. Sometimes I can see the converging lines of the hammock ropes, going away.

  When I was older he made it into a swinging seat; my legs went through one side, and I held on to the front bar of the seat. Father pushed me.

  Later still, he converted it to a swing, just like those in the park. He used to swing there when he was thinking.

  We had a cocky in a cage on the back patio. His name was Pretty Cocky. Father used to talk to it.

  In those days time was unnoticeable, like air to the lungs.

  At Six Months

  Father photographed me bare-bottomed on the leopard skin in the lounge room—I was six months old. I was raised on my elbows, my head held up, my legs straight out behind me, my bottom high. Very jaunty indeed. My hair was a cloud of white that fluffed out, like Einstein’s or Leopold Stokowski.

  (What will happen to my memories when I’m no longer here?)

  One thing about visitors I didn’t like. They had expressions on their faces as if they were saying: It can’t talk so it can’t think. And looked down on me from higher than they really were.

  The First Mirror

  I remember the first time I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I lay on my back and mother was bending over me, her finger touching the suspended plastic ducks with the satin finish. The afternoon sun slanted in through the windows and must have caught her eyes at a tangent, for there, in the patch of light at the center of her two eyes, was a tiny scene. She stayed, still and smiling, looking right into my eyes and I into hers. I moved my right arm up toward the row of pierced ducks. My eyes caught a movement in mother’s right eye. I moved again, and again I caught the movement. I looked into her other eye and moved my arm: I saw a tiny white thing move on mother’s eyeball. I looked closer. I moved my head in case another position would give me a better look. I saw a movement. I checked it in the other eye. It was a sort of face. I wanted to say something, I made a sound. I saw the mouth move. Her face was very close. I smiled, and the face smiled back at me.

  I relaxed back into my soft pillow. I was there. In mother’s eyes.

  Her Fingers Touching Me

  My mother loved me.

  She played with me as I lay on the table after my bath, and I loved that. I enjoyed lying on my back with my knees drawn up and arms moving around, head turning from side to side, from one ear to the other, while she tickled me. I don’t mean that my head flopped from side to side, merely that the back of my head made it difficult for me to look straight up with my head vertical. I still am rather pointed at that part of my head, a pointedness relieved only by two smaller lumps further down at the back, closer to my neck. My mother called them my combative bumps when I held food in my mouth without letting it go down. When she finally had to put her hand under my chin and catch the finely-mixed mess, there was a look about her that meant that without the modern books on child care, I might have got an ancient box on the ears or a smacked botty.

  The tickling I remember still. It has bored every male I knew for any length of time, for my demands always included being touched. I called it touching, or stroking, but to me it was tickling. When they touched or stroked, under directions, very softly, then more softly still, more slowly and gently, they were tickling, just like mother did.

  “You laughed, and waved your arms, and your little toes and fingers curled and uncurled all the time. Never still,” she told me later.

  And to others, “Such a lovely baby, she was. Never cried. Never made a fuss. Beautiful. SSSShh, she’s listening, the little bugger.”

  I enjoyed the touch of her hands so much. Why would she never keep touching me as long as I wanted her to? Was there some correct time that she observed and I was ignorant of and so wrong about? Certainly I was a mere baby, but I was the one that knew how I felt and if I felt I needed and wanted more, who can say I was wrong?

  I was lying on a table on soft towels, being touched and fondled by a mother who released on to me all the affection of which she was capable. I lay looking up, my arms and legs spread and waving, her fingers touching me on every part of my white and pink skin. Every part. I know that I played up when she stopped, and controlled her to the extent that her goodwill allowed her to give me five or six repeats, which gradually got down to three or four, one or two, then at about two years she must have thought I was too old to be tickled.

  Cold and Blue

  Mother’s advanced ideas often led to simple opposites. The old custom was pink for girls and blue for boys, so I was dressed from my birth onward in blue.

  I never liked blue. I found it cool and depressing. Even now, whenever I see blue, I see grey in it, and something of ice.

  Mother thought that by taking the word, which represented a thing, and twisting the word, she was twisting the thing. Throwing out pink booties and substituting blue was overturning generations of sexist child-rearing. It was a new beginning. The past was abolished.

  It gave warm ladies the horrors.

  Mother kept all my clothes right from the first pair of booties and the bunny rugs relatives and neighbors gave her for me.

  At first, having far too many, she thought she’d keep them for other children, but as the years passed and more cupboards were filled with bibs, nighties, pajamas, jumpers, shoes not worn out, shirts, she simply found more space, put the cast-offs away, and forgot them.

  She could as little throw out an article of clothing as a word. And she kept every word.

  Toilet Training

  My chamberpot was blue. When I sat on it, my weight closed a switch and connected the battery. It was ON. When a cascade of pee or pooh hit the bottom surface, “Greensleeves” played.

  “I want to go and do ice cream,” I used to say, when I found it brought on laughter among parents and neighbors. Ice cream and gelati vans used “Greensleeves” as a Pied Piper tune.

  “We’ll have to change the tune,” father said, wiping his eyes. He was emotional, and loved to laugh.

  I had my own jokes with them, too, that started when mother was a little too insistent that she knew better than I did when I needed to go. I took a heavy book in with me, put it on the side of the seat so that it connected the battery, and there was a space left into which I could lob peas and other harmless things that kept the music alive.

  “Bullets, that’s what she’s doing,” mother said. “I wonder what she ate.” She was always ready with stories about picking them out of my bottom—small, pale yellow and ochre, pellets like marbles—when I had been constipated, and would release these bulletins to whomever happened to be near. I was embarrassed and had no weapon against
her.

  “Bullets?” said my father.

  “Yes. Listen, snatches of music. She’s doings bullets.”

  “Smart kid. Because I can see—” He was too good a sport to finish. He could see me behind the Chinese lantern bush, on tiptoe on the spare concrete blocks he’d made for some unfinished project, aiming missiles in at the window.

  The hose was best. After the first deluge, which alarmed them, I got the adjustment right, and the drips made it a happy, musical house, and my mother as content as if she were doing it.

  Once I left it on, it must have been hours, and mother was happy all that time, doing her notes, smiling, pleased, and she kissed me when I came in the house, not realizing that I had come in from outside and the music still going. Father had the job of dealing with the flooded toilet when he came home from acting.

  Two and a Half

  I was two years and half a year. My father was walking along holding my hand, which was raised high above my head. It’s not a comfortable way to walk.

  I had this thought come into me. I can still see the street with the paling fence alongside us and trees—oleanders, I think—coming over the top of the fence and brushing Daddy’s shoulder. I had the thought then, and didn’t think anymore about for a while. Then when we were sitting in this place, this big hall with the interesting roof and someone was talking, I remembered it.

  I had seen the ground and the fence and the trees, the cars, dogs, people gardening, kids playing, clouds fluffy in the evening sky, and I thought of myself walking and my tall father, and it seemed to me that everything was joined to everything else. Fences, trees, people, houses, flowers, dogs, cars: all belonged to the whole picture, all together.

  Later, as I grew, I never was without that feeling: that all things hang together, they connect by uncountable strings, good and bad together, the whole earth. It was as if I saw the particularity of all things, plus their necessary connection.

  Later still, I extended that opinion, to cover all acts people were capable of, to all the odd things I saw.

  Simple Prayers

  Father started me on:

  “Gentle Jesus meek and mild

  Look upon a little child

  Pity my simplicity …”

  and at the table it was:

  “Be present at our table Lord

  Be here and everywhere adored

  These mercies bless. …”

  and so on. Everyone knows them.

  “Matthew Mark Luke and John

  Bless the bed that I lie on.”

  But never at any age did I wish for a handsome prince to carry me off to his rich palace.

  I’ll Kill You

  At three I used to threaten kids and anyone who displeased me, however slightly, with death. I’ll kill you, my father will kill you, the police will come and kill you; pure, childlike, naked promises.

  But when Uncle John died—I can barely remember him: I think perhaps the memories I do have of him are the shadows and hints left over from descriptions of him that I heard then and later, and that I fleshed out with a fuller body in my head, to make him visible to myself and give him an identity—when he died, my father saw my puzzlement and gave me a fairy story to tell to myself.

  “He’s a nice old man that used to lift you up and say how pretty you were, and he got sick and died and went up to heaven in the sky, and that’s him now up there shining and twinkling like a star.”

  It side-tracked me from asking how he died and whether someone killed him, which was what interested me.

  A Hard Job

  Mother gazed impatiently and wistfully at the blue potty, secure in the knowledge that I was not being conditioned by pink to wifehood and mother-business. Underneath, the receptacle was in position, but there was no music. It was empty.

  They had been supervising me for a long time, and still my bowels had not moved an inch. I gazed, fascinated at their concern. Father marched up and down the hall and in and out of the little room where I squatted, knees apart, leaning on my elbows.

  “E-vac-u-cate. E-vac-u-ate,” my father chanted in the accents of a Dalek. He had a metronome on his head—bought in advance for my piano lessons—ticking aggressively. He had it clapped on his head with one hand and in the other an old spear-gun held at the ready like a rifle.

  From being interested, I became amused, then absorbed. I would have continued to refuse duty out of curiosity but my mother lost all patience and came in and abused my father so politely, so cuttingly, so put-downingly, for showing me a martial example and probably turning me toward violence and murder, that to pay her back I shit myself. The material came out in a funnel-shaped spurt and covered the whole inside of the lower receptable. “Greensleeves” started with a clash and sounded loudly as it always did when the batteries were fresh. There were some lumps the color of golden clay, hard and nearly exactly round, like marbles. They were first out, they had stoppered my works.

  As I got older, they got more brown, and I insisted on being allowed to do it all myself.

  “I want to do it mine self,” I said. “Nobody helping me.”

  Ping!

  In our house there was no such thing as a locked door. Mother and father showered in full view. When my father dried himself with one foot on the bath edge, I was fascinated, repelled, and fascinated again by the huge scrotum hanging down and the penis resting on it, not quite hanging down vertically. There were long, wild-looking hairs on the scrotum-bag, sticking out at right angles, some of them, others lying down and then shooting out at an angle like you first imagine a space vehicle taking off.

  When he put his foot down and stood up to dry his head and chest, keeping himself erect, I got in close there and watched the long thing swing.

  It was irresistible. I got my front finger, curled it up and let it go, like you flick at a piece of paper on the kitchen table, or a dead insect.

  Plip! went my finger, and knocked the head of it sideways so it swung back and forward as if it had jelly inside.

  “Hey!” commented my father. “What’s going on down there?”

  He reared back a bit, but there wasn’t very far to go, and he was still wet. I advanced on it with my finger curled threateningly, and looking up at him. He yelled, pretending to be afraid.

  As I plipped it again, I said, “Ping!”

  He went round later telling mother about the Ping. I heard him telling visitors for months about his daughter’s Ping habit. He was very proud of me and my finger and my Ping.

  I never forgot the long hairs on father’s scrotum. The white hairs among the darker ones—they were a lighter brown than the hair on his head—seemed much thicker than the dark hairs. Also I couldn’t see why they were so far apart; like an afterthought on a bald carry-bag.

  My own hair had changed from white to a little on the tawny side of straw-colored. My eyes were sometimes grey, but mostly green-over-grey.

  The Preservation of Memories

  My mother never would change anything. If the ornaments you saw on the mantelpiece over the dummy fireplace were several vases, three pictures, a pot plant with a plastic creeper growing and hanging over the side for half a meter—it had to be washed from time to time of the dust it accumulated, but it hardly faded—and an urn with the ashes of a relative, you could be sure they had always been there.

  The photos were very old. They had rested on her mother’s mantelpiece once and before that on grandmother’s dressing table. There was even a picture, high on the wall of the lounge, of the room in Islington where grandmother was born. We were all born in rooms; my father was a kitchen table birth.

  In a picture frame was a facsimile of Jane Austen’s handwriting, and a real life page of grandmother’s mother’s writing; faded now from black to a washed-out licorice color, so that the marks of the nib, which had spread on the downstrokes, were the most definite marks. I knew it off my heart, and later thought the sloping, graceful writing far more elegant than the modified cursive we had to do at
school.

  One of the photographs was of my mother’s grandfather on her father’s side, a Grossman, and the urn contained his ashes. He was a military man, and the photo showed him standing with great dignity beside a piece of furniture, an ornate sofa with a hand-carved cedar back. The urn stood beside the photograph. The sofa stood in mother’s parents’ house.

  That Word

  My father made out small cards and printed in large letters on them the names of objects round us in the house and outside. Fence, carpet, table, tree, wall, gate, leopard, piano, butter, vase, knife, plate, concrete, window, stove—had their cards stuck on or nailed. Getting used to the words and how they looked helped me when I got to school. I had no trouble with spelling because I reconstructed the words as my eyes remembered them, not bothering about rules.

  I was shown off to all our relations. Isn’t she bright? they said. Mother said: “She’s a genius. Look at that forehead. There’s greatness in that brow.”

  Father wouldn’t say that word, and looked as if mother was exaggerating mildly, but he nodded.