A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  School

  At five, life spreads out so broadly and stretches so far.

  We’d passed the school often in the car, and there was plenty of talk about my going to school, talk that increased as my parents seemed to be urging me to say I wanted to go to school, talk that meant nothing to me. I had to go sometime, I knew that.

  One day I went along with my father to enroll. Mother got exemption from most trips if she was busy writing. Father had the understudy take his role.

  When the time came for father to leave, I waved to him where he stood outside the fence, put my schoolbag in the room they had shown me, and went outside to look over the other kids.

  There were several I knew from round about, but the most interesting were a group of larger kids that were sprinkled round playing in unattached ways. I wanted them.

  Boys

  I was introduced to boys on my second day. When the teacher on playground duty was looking the other way, our gang cascaded out of the white-lined area, past the grey lunch forms, over to the Corner to watch the big children. The Corner was where I found out what boys were.

  As we looked round, five heads at different levels, a boy face confronted us.

  “Girls,” he said, and his mouth went down at both ends and up on each side, just in from the end; it was an expression of distaste I had seen before only when Odia Watson said the word Communist. She lived opposite, lower than us, and she pronounced it “Commonist.”

  That boy face told us we were lower than insects. Not that we were upset: we were stronger than that; we could have stared at him if we wanted to and he would have curled up and died.

  It was not that boy that showed us boys; other girls could look at us even worse: it was the Corner-game.

  The face went, the cries of the playground sounded louder, but nothing prepared us for what came next. Kids older than us, with license to go into the bigger section where the six- and seven-year big kids played, passed round us with only a scornful look—but they ran into the Corner-game. One at a time, boys ran full pelt on a signal from another that meant the coast was clear of teachers; it didn’t mean there was no one coming round the corner. They weren’t allowed to let the runner know if there was or wasn’t someone coming: the runner had to go as close to the corner as he could. If no one was coming, he hit no one. If there was, he did. The lookout warned if a teacher was in sight.

  We rounded the corner. I was first, with the others in a loose wedge behind me. A boy hit me practically everywhere all at once. I was hurled back against the others, but didn’t hit the asphalt. Nor did I ever hit the asphalt.

  We went away, back to our section. This was something to think about. The others gabbled complaints, but I thought alone.

  The Corner-game was unreasonable. The boys were unreasonable to charge round a blind corner not knowing what they were going to encounter. Yet they were doing it. That was what I couldn’t understand. At home if a thing was unreasonable, it was unreasonable. You didn’t do it again, or if you did, you laughed at yourself. Yet I could understand the Corner-game. I could feel the joy of the full pelt run, the fierceness, the savage knowledge that some unwary kid was going to feel your full weight suddenly and be borne to the ground underneath his conqueror.

  And neither you nor he knew who it would be. It was a wild world of chance. Anything could happen. There may be someone there to hit or no one. You were no longer ruled by “I should” but by “I will.” And it was that part that fascinated my mind.

  I’m the king of the castle

  And you’re the dirty rascal.

  How Did These Monstrosities Filter into Time?

  Mister Cowan’s coffin grew, like grass and all living things grew, with no relenting; it thrust itself, as all other things thrust themselves, on the uncomplaining world.

  He decided, after many times of shaving it off and smoothing the end, and accidents in which he irritated and cut his own flesh, to leave it grow.

  He kept to the back of the shop, and as it became so heavy that it threatened to break off chunks of him, he rested it on a chair beside him, so the end could rest on it and not tear the flesh out of his side.

  “Are you sure it doesn’t hurt?” his wife asked.

  “No feeling at all,” he said.

  After the first week resting it on the chair she didn’t ask anymore. He just seemed to sit there, thinking.

  Sex was out of the question. Mrs. Cowan thought, in the first week, a little guiltily, that perhaps she ought to relieve her husband’s sexual feelings in some way that she had heard of but never done, but somehow the subject didn’t come up. He didn’t say anything, and she felt she might have the effect of spurring him to do things he didn’t have energy for.

  Little Boys’ Dicks

  I was six, and in the playground we found that the minor difference we knew to exist between us and boys, was not at all minor to them.

  Little boys’ dicks seemed to be the constant concern of little boys. They spoke about them to each other, they fiddled and scratched, their underpants scrunched them up so they had to put their hands down their fronts like headlong hands plunging into a lucky-dip, they noticed if their friends’ dicks were lumpier or sticking further out than usual, they hit each other there in moments of anger—which could come over them with no warning—and they got other kids down and played with theirs and made them cry. (I didn’t understand this, I thought playing with them would make them tickle, until I realized that unauthorized use of or access to the dick was a sign of hopeless inferiority on the part of the victim.)

  In class Everett Vaux had more latitude to scratch than the other boys, and he used his freedom to the full. The teacher wasn’t sure if it was going to grow on to something and she would get the blame if she didn’t allow him movement.

  What are little boys made of?

  Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails.

  What are little girls made of?

  Sugar and spice and all things nice.

  He May Have Been She

  My dolls were mostly boys; I had Katherine and Sylvia and Deirdre, but I was most motherly with Bradley, Timmy, Duke and Colin. Colin was the beautiful one. His skin was so fine it rippled in the wind. They were all provided with proper penial attachments, that is, a penis and testicles, which I made them wash as often as their faces. I couldn’t get little nuts the right shape for their testicles, so I used dried peas which you could feel with your fingers moving about in their little under-bags behind the penis.

  I daresay there was one main difference between my playing with dolls and, say, Susan Haynes’s playing with dolls: she had mostly girls, and did all the work herself. I was more like their platoon commander.

  If I accidentally hit them there and they doubled up in pain, I always apologized beautifully.

  My favorite girl doll was Deirdre. It is my recollection that I christened her, though I have a faint doubt-shadow. She had a receptacle for tears, and I loved to see her sorrowing.

  Teddy had no name. Just Teddy. He was born with short brownish fur, that felt rough at first, if you were a stranger, then when you knew him you realized it wasn’t rough at all, it was just the way he was. His arms moved up and down, he could put them round a person’s neck.

  He had nothing to do his wee-wees out of: I asked at the shop where he was born, but the girl only laughed at me.

  I called him Teddy, but he may have been she.

  A Marriage of No Importance

  Bradley had married Sylvia before they were half through their teens, then had affairs with Katherine and some of the straw offspring belonging to Graham Lasseter down the street. He was to be married to Graham’s Marmaduke, because they both got on better with other boys rather than girls.

  In ordinary life, as they came out of their solitude when I got home from school, they played a lot together and I enjoyed doing with them the experimenting that I imagined boys did with each other when they were alone, without girls watching or grown-ups.r />
  They played with each other’s bodies, naturally, and it was in such circumstances that I first realized the need for genital equipment for Bradley and the others. Colin had everything.

  Bradley and Marmaduke were married in the back garden, and their honeymoon began on the grass right away since I had been called for tea and they had to get a move on.

  Here comes the bride

  Fair, fat and wide.

  Nothing Was as They Told Me

  They told me I would love the surf. My first visit to the sea I had firmly in my mind, “I will love the sea.” And I didn’t. It was very cold. True, I soon forgot it and began to play violently, all the more violently for the first cold shock, and paid back my father for his laughing splashes by splashing him when his body had been out of the water for a while and the sun had warmed him. He leaped in the air, and the water took his breath away. I laughed, and he did. (I had noticed, before, that if you laugh after doing something regarded as naughty, or aggressive, the laugh makes it a joke. He’d done it to me often enough, specially when I was quiet and he thought I needed “bringing out.”) I learned to love the water later, on my own.

  They told me I would love the teacher. The truth is, I learned to manipulate the teacher just as I could feel her manipulating me, and influencing my behavior. But I never loved her. When I found that certain things I did made her show public favor for me, I began to learn my place in the world; but the familiarity—the power, dare I say it—of influencing her by what I did, gave me a superiority that, for me, cut out love.

  They told me I would love pumpkin and carrots. “The red vegetables are necessary, too,” my mother said—absently, a point I didn’t miss. They weren’t red, they were orange. And I was not going to like them. I loved potatoes, for some reason, and when my father mashed pumpkin and carrots in with them, they were spoiled, on principle. On the other hand, they didn’t serve me marrow, and chokoes, which I loved as soon as I put them in my mouth and they squidged up into smooth bits and slid down my red lane on a smear of butter.

  I was told that getting things would soon pall. It never did.

  I was told that winning wasn’t the main thing: the game itself was. I’m tempted to leave it like that, so you can see the idiocy of it. I grew to like most games, but who can say it was the game itself I liked, for I won at almost everything I did? I was luckier than some—actually than all the rest—in that I was good at everything. I was like that from the start, and never failed at any game I attempted. But the winning! If it isn’t the only thing, who can remember what the others are? I never reached the point that the casual, the sickly, the halfhearted reach, where after a win or two they lose the taste for winning. It never left me.

  The Lord loveth a cheerful loser, my father freely adapted an old saying, wasting his breath. “Yes, Daddy.” Parents spend such a lot of time digging for the correct response that they usually don’t hang about to see if the later actions line up with the response. I said “Yes,” but went ahead savagely, relentlessly, fiercely, confidently, to win—at lessons, in the playground, in the group. They must have hated me.

  Playing with myself was going to be a disappointment, they warned, and a source of shame. It never has been. One thing about masturbation: you don’t have to wait for anyone. Don’t forget that the thing that is supposed to be better—others playing with you—is often wide of the mark. What an apt phrase!

  And the beauties of reserve. Stand back and let others go first. This was one of my mother’s bits of advice. It was supposed to give you a glow that others of discernment could see. I did once or twice, but never again. It was an empty thing. If a volunteer was wanted for anything, I was that one. A message to the headmistress—who’ll stand up and make a speech of welcome—who can tell me a piece of overseas news right now and give its background—who will help me with this experiment—anything: I was first on my feet.

  Winning wasn’t important? Even at that age I knew the Hall of Failure was always full.

  When they told me of things to come, what to expect in the future, they were never exact. Perhaps they feared I couldn’t follow their detailed descriptions and would get flummoxed; but from as early as I can remember I was quite willing to listen to the most involved instructions—I always remembered them when the time came, but nothing was as they told me. The game’s the thing—what nonsense!

  The only difficulty I had in my first year at school was that I got b and d back to front. I was embarrassed when Mrs. Molong pointed it out, and never made such a mistake again.

  Don’t Tell Me I Was Never A Grandmother

  These are all stories bearing on my years of life. Bearing on, not following a timetable. There was no timetable. Sometimes at six I was a grandmother.

  You try and bring back your life, get it all back the way it came: you can’t do it. No more than you can tip up a bucket of apples and have them roll all over the ground, then get them back in the same order. And they don’t come marked with numbers, as years do. Even years don’t come in the right order. Not even when you’re living them.

  Maybe if you kept a record all the time of what happened . . . But then there’d be no time to do anything. Recording isn’t living. But how can you? Who knows what’s going on all the time? What’s your stomach doing? What are the nerves in the left corner of your mouth up to? Where’s your digestion at? What was your recording center recording when you were reading these words?

  Who says I was never a grandmother? What about the time my father came home and didn’t exactly burst into tears, but started slowly, like something heavy starting to move, then rolling down hill, picking up speed until people no longer try to stop it, they just get out of the way, and watch.

  “How can I go on making a living out of acting a dead man?” he said when he took a break in the sobbing. Mother comforted him, monosyllabically, then got it all down in her notebook. At least I assumed that’s what she was doing.

  I sat back, tearless, nodding now and then. In that family, at that moment, I was grandmother. When they stopped their fuss, they would turn to me to see what I had to say, and I would say something that would either fix everything or start the whole business off again. A perfect grandmother.

  This year my mother shut herself away and did nothing but write. She had a peephole set in the door to her room to make sure she didn’t want to see visitors. If, as usual, she wanted to be busy with her notes, the word came out that she was sick or busy.

  How she got on when I was at school I don’t know. Maybe the front door was shut, and they got no answer.

  Once we’d had a knocker, but mother hated it. She hated being summoned by anyone with strength enough to hit it against the timber of the door, and campaigned for a new door. She settled for one of those acid-proof (why acid?) door covers, that made the door proof against burglars. The one she wanted was covered with a lumpy decoration, I think it was a wild relief depicting some young artist’s brainscan; the point was that there was no place on it where you could knock hard without injuring your knuckles. If you were careful you could manage a one finger tap, but hard knocking seemed to jar the fine bones of your fingers.

  From inside the house, the knocking sounds that penetrated were humble indeed.

  So. Mother took her rings off, put them away, and stayed at her desk. Her love, which until then had been to me like a beacon filling the days and nights with bright warm light, switched off. Was I too boisterous; too like a boy for mother?

  Her retreat into her own world was not understood by the neighbors: anything out of the ordinary was to them madness. They had no conception of eccentricity, or the freedom to be different without a class change.

  I thought it was because she had discovered she was not beautiful.

  Not Exactly Lying

  Midget was the worst boy in the school. He rang the bell when it wasn’t supposed to be rung. He stuffed up the bubblers in the wash shed with paper and chewing gum.

  For a change he’d clim
b the big trees in the playground and wouldn’t come down. No use anyone trying to get up there after him, he was the best climber in the school, he was the best climber anyone had ever seen. When the kids took home stories about Midget, fathers would say, “I could climb trees like that when I was a boy,” but then they’d ask again how far the first branch was off the ground and they’d begin to look doubtful, then they’d end up trying to say Midget couldn’t have climbed that tree anyway. As if Midget threatened their whole boyhood, their whole treasure of a past.

  Midget grabbed the tree, hugged it and dug in. Then it was just a matter of how high. He always beat the teachers. When they got the fire brigade once, he climbed down just as they were coming in the schoolgate.

  He put dud refills in kids’ pens. He pulled hair. He ran around corners and tripped people. When they ganged up on him and cornered him, he suddenly ran at them, bent over double like a cannonball, and burst through their legs. Everyone was taller than Midget.

  One day at assembly there was a visitor. I think she was probably around nineteen or seventeen, it was hard to judge when you’re six. She was the world record holder for the fifteen hundred meters. Swimming. She was tanned, her legs glowed golden, she was pretty, her hair bleached by sun and the chlorine of pools, she caused the teachers, male and female, to gape. She came to say a few words to the school, because she’d been there when she was a kid. Midget was in the front row. He shouldn’t have been, he was in fifth class, and fifth was near the back of the lines.

  As she ascended the steps to the platform, she trod too near the edge. A piece of wood came away, and she fell sideways.