Before she hit the ground, Midget was under her. She landed on him and rolled, but didn’t hurt herself. She got up and bent down to thank Midget. She had to help him to his feet, his leg hurt. He grinned at her, and we’d never seen him embarrassed before. He was almost shy.
A teacher rushed forward, to try and stop him doing something nasty to the prize visitor, but Midget was too overcome to do anything like that. He went back to the wrong place in the lines, where he could watch her. He watched with his eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth—which hung open—and his hands. His hands twitched.
There were two big scrapes on his knees, and one hand had a piece of gravel embedded in the round part at the base of his thumb. He didn’t notice. When the goddess went, he was still in a daze.
He came in for a lot of congratulations from the teachers. The kids, too. A world champion is a big deal to primary school.
That was Friday. Monday when he came back to school again he was different. He didn’t trip people, pull hair, climb trees; he didn’t do anything. He picked up an exercise book the teacher of KA dropped, he turned up for cricket practice, and when winter came, for football. (Later, in sixth class he represented the state for football.) He was smiled on by teachers, got prizes for sport at speech day (there were no prizes for schoolwork: something about equality. Merit was only rewarded where it mattered.) and was in every way a successful citizen.
The thing I noticed was, he was better thought of than all the kids that had never played up.
(I started this chapter with the words Not Exactly Lying, but in the space between I got lost. All I was going to say was about a habit I had of not saying all the truth. I’d say some of it—the acceptable part—and finish saying the rest in my head. It wasn’t exactly lying.
Do you think it was? It still troubles me.)
On weekends Midget came back to look at the spot where his goddess fell. Even when he went to high school and came past Primary every day, he looked at that spot. She changed him.
A Hot Bath of Something Nasty
My father denied me nothing, his theory of child-rearing had all faith in the goodness of the child. This was a long way from born in sin and shapen in iniquity, but nothing I did was seen by him in such a graceless light.
He hated wasting water, consciously a member of a dry continent, but when mother insisted on my bath being full of warm, comforting water, he did nothing against her wish.
Surrounded by the sensual warm, I would lie in the bath with only my chin above water. Mother came in if I seemed to be taking too much time. I suspect she didn’t want me to start playing with myself too early. They both seemed to love drying me with towels taller than I was.
Naive, childlike, trusting, I was soon lying warm in bed. In summer, only a sheet was necessary, in winter, a blanket. Always these were crisp, spotless, and smelled of the sun in which they’d dried.
Light came through the crack at the edge of the closed door, which they would open when they both went to bed so I could run in and be comforted on their bed if the dark or ghosts troubled me. Nothing troubled me, but I ran in, anyway.
Suddenly one night I was shoved back from the edge of sleep by the sound of voices. It took only a moment’s orientation to know they weren’t ordinary voices. My parents were shouting. Accusations clattered back and forth, distrust and anger, they were yelling at the tops of their voices.
I huddled at first under the sheet, worried. I thought I should get up, run in to them and separate them. Then I thought—maybe they’re rehearsing something, she’s helping him with his lines.
Again I sank into fear and the deep thought that my parents were deadly enemies who managed to hide their enmity while I was awake, but whose hate was so great that sometimes it must overwhelm their good intentions. I waited for murder to happen, then must have drifted off.
Some time later I woke fully and told myself it was all a dream. The house was quiet. I didn’t go out to see, just lay there, waiting for more shouts. They didn’t come. It was a dream.
In the morning I couldn’t be sure. Yet they might have been rehearsing after all. I didn’t feel like asking. Sometimes when I ask questions I see a sudden expression in their eyes, as if I was something that fell into their wineglass.
One of Father’s Sayings
“Don’t be afraid to take a risk. For something you believe in, risk everything.” And he went on, as if quoting: “To the dangerous element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet make the deep deep sea of life keep you up.”
I think it came from the play he’s in. I went out and told Pretty Cocky. Somehow that took the pressure off me.
In the backyard several jasmine blossoms collapsed and fell to the ground.
Old Mac
Old Mac in happier days had been a slaughterman at the abattoirs. Albert James Conachy McCarthy was his full name.
He often took walks down into the reserve, the valley beside the old creek that he had known as far back as his boyhood. Once he walked everywhere in this “bush,” as he still called it, but the building of houses on a few blocks thirty years before trimmed his walk of some of its extent; in the next ten years a lot more bush was covered with the smooth plots that had houses supported on their thin carpety grass. It was hard to resist the feeling that the ground was not so much cleared and smoothed, as that the new plots with their borders and paths and shrubs had been laid down on the old bush soil, for there was no resemblance between the latter state and their untouched, blackboy-spear, mossed rock, twisted scribbly-gum former existence.
Old Mac always wore a hat. If he lifted the hat forward and sideways to his right you could see a patch of old, greying timber set into his head, like a weathered tree stump. He had no conversation, but neither did he smoke.
Talking to my father one afternoon—his walks round what used to be his bush so sadly circumscribed that he had to walk on roads for a mile before he got to the easement opposite and could make for the remaining trees and battle his way through the horrors of unbridled privet—Old Mac said, “This world could support constant rain.” Out of the blue. “Sunshowers’d be nice.”
My father agreed. The stump showed under the side of the old felt hat. “The sort of clouds where the sun comes through, most. Warm. Wet, too.” The grass below us was biscuit-dry. The trees limply stirred their tops. A leaf fell, spinning.
The whole district heard about it when a shoot appeared below the inset dry timber part, where the living bark rolled like a thick firm porridge over the hard dead wood that greyed and split. Some variety of spiritual rain had watered him from within and powered the small pale green shoot that showed between the hairs of his head.
Old Mac makes me think of bones, old campfires, flints.
What Causes Such Changes?
Opinions vary:
1. Events or ideas not assimilated in a time of rapid change.
2. Fragmentation of personality following on the fragmentation of society.
3. Preoccupations of the person, obsessions.
4. The shaping power of society.
5. We shape ourselves.
6. The body’s interaction with the eco-system.
7. Genetic manipulation by the professional class.
8. Ineffective social adjustment.
9. The stars.
10. Guilt at failure, and craving for punishment.
11. People treated as objects becoming objects.
12. The chemistry of sight.
13. The chemical nature of time.
Some Boys Have Thick Skin And You Can’t Get Through
He was a nice shape for a boy, and he had a skin nothing could get through. It didn’t look thick on the outside, since it was shiny and smooth and took a tan, but it reached right inside and wrapped round his bones. Crying Clive was always crying. His parents couldn’t get through to him. If a hand covered his mouth, the sounds poured through the fingers. They began everyday after breakfast to thrash him, and co
ntinued on into the day. His cries went straight to the hearts of strangers. We were four houses away and could hear him clearly, but when you got used to the crying it went on without you noticing. My parents had lost the art of hearing poor Clive; even when he ran his voice up to a top note they gave no sign they’d heard. Once, father said, “A kind man is one who never hits a child except in retaliation.” That was all.
Sometimes it was eight hours a day. The education authorities had got used to Clive’s absences; they knew it was impossible to get through to him. Pills didn’t work, but then prescribing a pill is often no more than helplessness and ignorance hiding behind weird handwriting.
He was twelve then, and they’d been thrashing him solidly for six years. At the age of six he changed from being a nice little boy to a roaring uncontrollable something-else. Not that the treatment diminished the roars, the roars went on the same. But they had hope that the treatment would begin to help them control him. At night I used to laugh at this—I thought of him being thrashed until he was old enough to take the stick off his mother, then off his father, and going his own way, roaring through the world. His father took time off from his work as Voting Behavior Sampler and Opinion Poll Designer to help Mum with the treatment. She had to take strong powders to combat the headaches she got from having to administer the thrashing. But she kept in good general physical condition.
Crying Clive, I guessed, had no him inside the thick skin. There was only bone inside, nothing to hurt. No actual flesh. That makes the whole thing take on a better complexion, doesn’t it?
Perhaps when he died surgeons would pick into his body looking for reasons.
Obedience Training
The Vaux children had to have special consideration at school. There were lots of times in class when we were expected to keep perfectly still. Little boys were still given encouraging nods—and gold stars stuck on their foreheads—for sitting up straightest. But this enforced slowing down of our natural activity was neatly dodged by the Vauxs. If they stopped too long in one place their toes grew to the ground.
Everett Vaux was in my class. Arabella Vaux was older and in 1K, Miss King’s class. We envied their freedom to move around while we were given obedience training. Everett’s freedom especially suited him; he liked to sit straight up for a very short time, then get up and move, break into a trot, dart around, sit, then jump up again. We looked at his freedom with longing. Our freedom from his dangerous condition made us liable to the confinement of silence and enforced stillness.
Father wouldn’t believe that we still had to do this; he thought that since he’d had to when he was a child, it was a harmful or at least old-fashioned oppression and would now be gone. All I could do was say it was so, we did it, and he could come and see for himself. Actually this last wasn’t true. If a visitor came, any visitor, there was no way our class could be said to go on in the usual way. The teacher super-kindly said, “Now feel free to draw in your books, or read your reader, or practice your writing. But no running around, and talk as little as possible while your visitor is here.” And that was what happened when the headmistress came, or a parent, but not while we were alone with her.
What is it that runs, but never walks?
When Screaming Last in the Neighborhood
Flourished And Bloomed
I didn’t notice Clive until I was in my sixth year, and when it dawned on me that no one ought to be screaming, they couldn’t stop me crying in sympathy. I could hear his screams in my ears late at night, long after his parents had finished for the day.
I took only the usual few weeks to lose my hearing for Clive-cries, but the time it took was full of voluptuous misery. I cried and cried, nothing would pacify me. My father got through to me with his tenderness, and with sweets, but it made little difference to the length of time I cried.
That such cruelty could be in the world, near me, when I was so happy and comfortable . . .
“You mustn’t think of it as cruelty,” my mother said. “Think of it as treatment they have to give that poor boy, and you won’t feel nearly so bad about it.”
“Can’t Daddy do anything about it? Can’t he stop them?”
“People can’t mix in other people’s business,” she said.
And father said, “The people of the world aren’t our family, darling. They’re not your brothers and sisters.”
When I got over it and no longer noticed Crying Clive’s anguish, I didn’t reproach myself. Was I healthy?
In the middle of a rowdy game on our front lawn he could sometimes be heard, a bagpipelike wail in the distance, there and not there, coming and going on the wind.
Amid cries of:
“Giddy giddy gout
Your shirt’s hanging out
Five miles in and ten miles out!”
it was even funny, and we all stopped and laughed.
But later I began to resent his screams and wished I could do something to make him stop.
If he was hurt bad enough, perhaps.
Mister Inman, Tea-Boy
Over the years, a snout appeared on the old man’s face. The shape of bluntness had always been there. Then the nose flattened, and the nostrils seemed to shift: instead of facing down they looked forward. Long hairs came from them—perhaps in real pigs the snuffling round on the ground and in troughs wears away the nostril hairs—the hairs came out boldly and curled round once they were outside. They were thick and shiny, and several were thick and silver.
On weekends he tended banks of pigface that grew lustily in the yellow clay and managed to strangle even the couch grass that intruded on its empire. Pigface needed no tending, my father said.
At mealtimes his children put out his food, and as he made a sudden heavy run at the small trough containing his chop and vegetables, they played the hose over him.
“He’s very dirty if you don’t hose him down,” his eldest son explained, and thoughtfully played a jet on the parental snout to wash away gravy. But even their faces had a certain bluntness.
Their lodger brought out the footbath, scented with disinfectant.
“For the footrot,” she said confidentially to the passersby.
Lady Inman was a very clean individual; she seemed unaware that she lived with pigs and potential pigs.
To be fair, though, most men work when they can and are plain: he was just plainer than most.
It’s No Secret These Days
It’s no secret these days that lots of people have the beginnings of animal features; those who feel they are free of this hazard often speculate on the faces round them, and speak not always kindly of those who may turn out at any time to be more plainly animals than the rest of us are.
Look around. One sees snouts, beaks, huge thin flapping ears, the long sad muzzles of horses, deer and collie dogs; the short rounded mouths of snakes, the tentative noses of mice and bandicoots, the placid features of cats, the fat buffoonery of the hippo, the spread limbs and sinister aspect of spiders.
Some Frees think they may have been like these people in the last birth before this, or that the rest of us may end up perhaps as real animals in the next rebirth.
When Mister Cowan’s Coffin Grew
When Mister Cowan’s coffin grew to its full length, after months of sitting in the back of the shop with it supported on a chair, it came to an end and fell off. There was a raw pink rectangular patch where the coffin finished; it soon faded and became much like the surrounding skin.
He waited for another lump to appear, for the skin to break, for the planed bare timber to show, but nothing came. He would have settled for anything: a china cabinet, a bar. Nothing. After six months nothing.
He decided to use the coffin himself, taking it rather as a joke at first, then getting seriously involved in preparing it.
There were no books on coffin preparation outside the industry itself, and like anyone, he’d always had his doubts about the solidity, the waterproof qualities, the lasting strength of the rather light
-looking timber that one can see at a funeral where the square deal shows through the scratches, and the patches of rosewood or mahogany varnish knocked off in the hustle and bustle of the mortician’s workroom. Some even look as if they’ve been used over and over, as why shouldn’t they be?
He decided on proofing it against damp, lining it with lead, putting pictures in it, some of his treasures, keepsakes, sentimental items . . . He began to serve again in the shop, using all his spare time for the preparation and care of the one thing that he had produced, all by himself, in his life.
His wife didn’t interfere. She began taking sessions with a healer, not being able to afford a psychiatrist.
The Grading Gate
Change was confined to proles. Change transformed a pro to a prole. A change in childhood was an instant, permanent demarcation. Some who at the end of schooling were graded Free citizens never changed at all; their failure was obvious: it was their own selves, the way they were formed in the womb. To be fair, some late starters were admitted at a mature age.
To the Serving Class, the professionals, who loved peace and order and the continuance of things as they were too much to talk publicly about the less fortunate, the changes were always and only a signal of failure. Servants of Society could retire at any age, but few did.
For those who failed the Grading, failure reached deep into their bodies; either to the cells themselves, which grew confused, their recognition systems faltering and forming, in a panic, some strange new thing; or to the heavy knob of conviction inside them that they were as they were and where they were in society for the term of their natural lives.
But none of these things should be surprising in classes of individuals within a society, who are being turned over like sods by the plough, products of processes they cannot control, at the mercy of processes they can never understand.
A Woman of the Future Page 6