A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  People in People

  At three I liked making a trampoline of father’s stomach, jumping up and down. But the thing I loved best was to stand on him, pull up my legs suddenly and land on him on my bottom.

  I think he was rather proud of being able to withstand my weight in front of visitors. And when I ran at him, head down, and collided with him again and again, never grizzling or being in pain, he was as proud of me as if I’d been a footballer.

  At three and a half—I remember it because from the age of two and a half when my mother referred to me in extravagant terms in front of neighbors or relatives and to what I was like at one and a half, I could never be quite sure I understood what the half meant, and I always remember not being sure—I heard the mysterious words, God is in man. Already I knew from the way they spoke that man could mean any of us, even small girls. But where was God? Was He in places where I had a pain? Was He where I usually felt nothing, such as in my head?

  At four I began my childhood habit of embracing. I ran up to people, flung my arms round them and hugged on tight. I don’t know that it did a great deal for them, but it was a great thing for me. Perhaps it was much the same as others yawning or stretching—it was a relief for highly compressed feelings. I stopped when I was six.

  “My arms can’t hold you, but

  You’re in my heart

  Part of me is you

  Can’t you see, oh

  It’s so difficult to love.”

  Father sang it as he worked round the house. Usually the words said themselves in my head and I didn’t listen, but sometimes I stopped doing something and wondered if people borrowed parts of each other. And if God was in people, did the doctor find Him when she operated?

  Behold the Lamb of God

  Religion gives stability: it has you saying the same words all your life. But my parents weren’t religious, they went to church when I came along just to let me know churches were there, and it was OK to go along to sit in them if you felt like it. I had seen a woolly lamb in one of my picture books, its fluffiness, its capacity to spring about lightly, the pretty sight it made all snowy on a green page.

  There I was listening to a preacher talking familiarly of the Lamb of God. I didn’t get the implication of the use to which the lamb was put. The wisdom of cutting a lamb’s throat for the spiritual health of the people had not been explained. I knew nothing of the Lamb pointing the way to death, of the Lamb being a sacrifice, an inducement to a savage god to show mercy to a weak and credulous people, as we learned later in Primary.

  As the preacher’s voice rose and her face became more piercing, so that it seemed she wanted to get down off her perch and shake us in her exasperation and urgency, I got more and more restless, and began to make disturbances, until they took me out.

  Outside, old Mister Scully waited in a heap. He was the keeper of the door, handing out hymn books, and was taken ill that very Sunday. He was coughing too much to stay inside. I saw a complicated diagram in blue, of veins on the old man’s ankle.

  This was the church where I heard about God being in man.

  They took him home but he was still very sick and the ambulance came for him at four.

  I asked where they were taking him.

  “To a convalescent home, Al,” father said.

  “What does it mean to convalescent?”

  “Convalesce. Mister Scully will convalesce.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Convalesce means get better.”

  “Oh, good. When will he get back?”

  “He’ll never be back, darling,” my father said kindly, looking at me as if I was sick. I mean a loving look, sympathy.

  “Where’s he going? Why can’t he come back? We’ll have no old people at all if he doesn’t come back!” I said. Mister Scully was the only person you could rely on to see in his garden if you went for a walk. Everyone else was inside, or gone out.

  “I don’t think he’ll be back. I think he’s going to die.”

  “Die? You said it meant get better!”

  “Well, they use it sort of to be kind to the old people.”

  “Kind? To die them?”

  “The name, Al. They give them hope that they’ll get better.”

  “Do they tell them they’re going to get better?”

  “No. The name does that for them. They say nothing. They let them think because it’s that sort of place, that’s what’ll happen. It’s to keep them cheerful.”

  “Would they cry if they knew?”

  “No. They’re too old to cry.”

  “And they’ll never come back?”

  “Never.”

  “That’s the end?”

  “The end.”

  “Is it dark there?”

  “Nothing but dark.”

  I kept quiet for a while. There were two large tears, one either side of my face, the right one further down than the left side one, about on the round part of my cheek, in no hurry. Then I said, “Will we get another old man round the district?”

  “I hope so.” He looked at me. “I certainly hope so.”

  “And I can take round things—flowers, and scones?”

  “You bet you can, darling.” And he lifted me up, his big arms around me, and my face was pressed into his shirt near the shoulder.

  Already I was thinking of Mister Scully’s destination—a place no path leaves, immersed in a dark no light can touch.

  The Long Distance Lecturer

  No matter where you were in Shoppingtown he seemed to be looking at you. He sat in a window, his head slightly on one side, but looking straight ahead, talking. Relayed to the shoppers and outside to the street, his voice came at the level of conversation.

  Kids talked back at him, but he couldn’t hear. His friends communicated with him on bits of paper: Time For Lunch, and Do you want to use the Toilet.

  His name was Doctor Buckman, and he was going for the world record at lecturing. The subject “The end of the world.” He started before I was born.

  For his record he had to beat thirty years and ninety-eight days, set in Los Angeles by a Professor Kingsley, who died in mid-sentence, his topic “The rights of man.” The rules were they had to begin at nine every morning and go to five in the afternoon, they had to stay in the same place and keep to the same subject.

  Kingsley died when his heart blocked, Daddy told me, and stopped beating; earlier record holders had given up, been shot, strayed off the topic, gone mad, developed throat cancer.

  Around the world there were others going for the record; it was a matter of having judges on hand to keep track of them, ready to disqualify offenders against the rules, and to coordinate the performances of those who were newly started and those who stopped. People bet on the result. Doctor Buckman failed when he chose to retire from the Servants’ ranks.

  He had charts, books, maps, and a large black moustache and beard. I stood in front of him on the first day and pointed at it, asking what it was. It was a moustache, darling, they said. My Mummy’s got one of those down there, I said. It can’t be one of those, they said. Well, it’s the same color hair, I said.

  Changes

  My father had been dying on stage for years. Changes was the longest running play in the history of the theatre. It had been going long before I was born, and there was a constant demand for seats. Everyone has heard of Changes. Not only is it the longest running show, but the longest in running time. At six hours, with rests and lunch breaks and discussion and participation pauses, it takes an entire day. Factory staffs, office staffs, people working in the new labor-intensive industries, don’t have to conceal their delinquency by pleading a “sickie.” Managements have long regarded the play as therapy, helpful—necessary, even—for the re-creation of good attitudes at the work place. Changes had come into its own.

  Father died at the 243rd minute, and was dead on stage for the rest of the working day. When I was little he hadn’t developed the stiffness that he later suffere
d from—and still has—that affected his lower back, left side.

  You might think it was a sleep break for him, but there was a lot more to it than that. Being dead throughout the greater part of the play, he was still subject to all sorts of investigation. His body was exhibited dozens of times; the audience, in the participation episodes, handled it to feel the appropriate stiffening and relaxing. Then there was an autopsy and bits of him went on display on microscope slides for cell examination, pictures of the corpse in all stages of undress were taken on stage, enlarged and displayed. Some were distributed to the audience. It was calculated that everyone in Australia had at least one picture of part of his body, or one tissue slide. (Pretending, of course.)

  There were doze breaks for the audience. At the rear of the theatre were living quarters for the actors. My father lived in a flat there before he was married.

  Sometimes, at home in Heisenberg Close, my mother and father would say, “Don’t you wish we could be back there with the cast?” And they’d look at me. I was the stumbling block. Other kids allowed themselves to be tranquilized, so they could stay with actor parents, but I wouldn’t.

  The neighbors didn’t treat me with envy. They didn’t care that he had a part in Changes, he was just a neighbor.

  Grow Your Own

  It was the sort of spring that’s nothing more than a few new leaves on an old tree.

  Mister Cowan, in Edison Avenue, noticed a swelling in his side, then a thickening, a lump; the skin broke one Saturday afternoon as he was discontentedly looking out at the spring yard that needed attention, and scratching his side. What appeared—he didn’t look at it until he was in the garage messing about with the mower unused since autumn—was an unpainted piece of smooth wood.

  “I’ve never even been inside an undertaker’s workshop,” he explained to his wife. Mrs. Cowan was an attractive woman, though not to him.

  The unpainted end of a coffin grew slowly outward from his side. Beveled edges, beautifully made, ready for varnishing. He sat watching it, couldn’t see it growing, but from morning to night there was a visible difference. He insisted death was not an obsession with him.

  After his natural interest in it, such as you might have in an outstanding pimple, he was ashamed. This was a difference that would set him apart from everyone, and though he was pleasantly aware of differences between him and other men, to his advantage—he could see them himself, they were obvious—this was a difference that climbed to another degree of difference. He cut it off.

  Whittling it with a penknife caused him no pain, though he was wary of the blind feeling it gave him when he twisted it to one side against the flesh with the pressure of his blade.

  He cut it to skin level, put his shirt back over it, and got on with his work at the shop. In addition to the newspapers, he had gifts, toys, wool and knitting patterns. The magazines made the money, and the nearby school made stationery worthwhile. He had plenty to do, but it was mostly automatic. Once you slip a paper bag on something, take the money and make up change, there’s not much to think about. He thought of his coffin, he thought a lot, but as with these thoughts and being the man he was, he didn’t get far. Each time it protruded far enough to bother him, he cut it off. Not that he didn’t get to like it: he did. He sandpapered it to make it smooth, blowing the sawdust carefully away at first, then later gathering it in a paper bag.

  (An observer from a strange place might have noticed that these growths and changes, though they provoked some interest, produced no wonder.)

  Many times he cut it off, each time leaving it a little bigger before he brought himself to do it. Not once did it hurt. As far as he could see the sawdust was genuine sawdust.

  I was still four. I only heard about it, until hearing father telling my mother about this manifestation of novelty in the neighborhood, I asked to see it.

  Saturday I was taken in the car to a back street where it was possible to park, and my father and I walked to the shop.

  Mister Cowan didn’t let me see it. He showed my father the respect due to a famous actor, but looked very possessive when my request was whispered to him.

  After the word of his coffin had been abroad in the district for some months it leaked to the metropolitan news machine.

  People took up the debate. Nonsense, that sort of outgrowth does not exist; that sort of thing can’t exist; more exotic things are happening to people in other cities: these were some of the things said by the people, who had a great voice in the news in those days.

  “You are the outgrowth on that coffin,” said a wise correspondent to the morning papers.

  Mister Cowan retreated into himself and refused to talk about it. The difference between him and other people was becoming precious to him. There were news agents in every suburb, but none with a cell change like his.

  It wasn’t necessary for him to get fired or resign: his wife could do the work in the shop. Since it wasn’t productive, but merely a form of booster pump to force manufactured products out along the finer capillaries of the suburbs, far from the centers of making, his shop and the work it entailed were outside the scope of the Serving Class: he was a prole.

  The Creative Proletariat

  In the westernized world for many decades no new political ideas have come; present ideologies are those based on nineteenth-century theories, altered and patched to suit circumstances and problems, contradictions and failures; revised ad infinitum.

  In Europe, it is true, those aged and tyrannical and still ambitious old courtesans—communism and marxism—are being passionately embraced with more fervor than ever before, precisely as they are on the point of death. Perhaps it is a religious ardor.

  There still exist also the intellectually limp, but cunning and adaptable traditional ways which are not political theories at all but derisive names given by their more earnest opponents.

  Into this empty space events have pushed their way. Work has become the desirable and rewarded occupation of an elite. The concerns of the proletariat have forever changed.

  The Free can be idle if they wish, or can fill the hosts of supportive positions that grow up round the fringes of a complicated society.

  Nothing time-consuming is despised: the consumption of time is the chief object of mock-work done by the free; as consumers of time they are safely occupied until they safely die.

  In earlier times they would have been called unemployed, their condition a matter of shame to themselves and reproach to their society.

  Now the stigma of having no profession is officially abolished, abject poverty done away with. It is as if the proles, having escaped poverty, have become creative, as early political idealists prophesied: creative in finding mildly useful work; or creative deep within their own cells.

  Once, some thought the need to produce alienates the passion to create. But now, when the passion to produce is alienated, there is a need to create.

  Or is the promise of freedom too much to resist? Do they change, to be sure of grasping freedom?

  My Noticeable Lack of Penis Envy

  I didn’t meet penis envy until I was five. I picked it up from a visitor, shouting to make herself heard at one of father’s Friday night parties.

  I went round chanting, “Penisenvy! Penisenvy!” until they took notice of me. The grown-ups were amused, and wanted me to go on chanting. But mother, as usual those days, was direct and efficient.

  “Shut up, darling,” she counseled above the din. Small people were out.

  I followed father into the bathroom and as he was doing wee I stood there, my head on a level with it, and flicked at it.

  I hit it, and said, “Ping!” But the wee went spraying from side to side onto the tiles, and he didn’t laugh. When he’d finished, he didn’t like it when I tapped it from side to side with both hands, either.

  I didn’t touch the big fat bag hanging behind it, with the hairs sticking out. It looked too funny. (Once when he was sitting in a chair with nothing on and the long
thick hose thing was over to one side, I saw the big bag move within itself. Parts went further away from other parts, then moved closer. The hose thing moved, too. Do you know what I mean? It can turn its head from side to side, slightly, and come forward and go back as if it’s a tortoise head going back into its shell. But it never goes right back.)

  “She certainly seems to have none,” auntie said. I knew she meant penisenvy. They looked at each other’s faces.

  “She has a definite penis interest,” said my father mildly, lifting me up into his arms.

  The rest of what I heard was only word-fragments, murmured by adults.

  Origins

  Mrs. Bassett, who lived in Faraday Place, had a lump on her stomach. A very big lump.

  “What’s that lump on the lady?” I asked father.

  “I think that’s a baby,” I was told.

  “I can’t see it, is it inside her or is it under her dress?”

  “Inside her, darling.”

  “Did she swallow it?” I asked.

  “No, Mister Bassett put it in her.”

  “How did he get it in?”

  “Well, it was very small then.”

  “It’s grown a lot, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, by the time it’s ready to come out it will be a full-size baby.”

  “Will it cry?”

  “All babies cry, except you, darling.”

  “Where does it come out?”

  “Down there.”

  “Where? Here?

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Do they wash it?”

  “Straightaway. As soon as it comes out.”

  “That’s good. Otherwise it would smell, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. I could see I had puzzled him. It was much later that I realized where he meant. I thought he meant it came out of the bottom.

  It was at this time I heard mother and father talking about when I came to be started. I’d gone to bed and been tucked in: they talked in the lounge room. I’m not sure I remember if father raised his voice, but I’m sure mother raised hers. What I heard then was confirmed much later by something I read for myself.