A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Someone Always Tries to Stop a Suicide

  Marie-Louise and I looked like religious symbols standing on the eastern cliffs of Australia with the sun behind us. We held our arms out straight beside us, and our shadows on the afternoon sea were two crosses. They reached a fishing boat bobbing up and down in large waves that played with it as with a toy.

  We’d got tired of playing on the grass in sight of the adults and decided to climb the hill to the cliffs and the Gap. We picked up stones and tried to throw them in the sea.

  “It’s no use.” Marie-Louise was my friend from school. She lived in Malthus Parade. Her parents and mine were having a picnic at Watson’s Bay.

  “They’re only hitting the rocks,” I said, confident rocks couldn’t be hurt. Did we want to hurt the sea or its neat waves?

  Boats far out went north and south. Some yachts and fishing craft on our left were entering and leaving the Heads. The Gap was a steep amphitheatre hacked clumsily by the sea out of the cliffs. Spoil was tumbled at the base, there was no order, no regular tiers of seats.

  Marie-Louise and I stood at the guard fence, arms down, no longer symbols. Hypnotized by the rhythm and voice of water.

  A voice said to us from a distance, “Girls, wouldn’t you like to go and find your Mummy and Daddy?” We looked at each other. We felt strange being taken for sisters. I wondered what Marie-Louise thought of me as a sister. We stayed like that for a while, thinking.

  “It’s getting late,” the woman said. We said nothing, just dreamed away.

  “They might worry if you’re not there.” And she smiled at us.

  We’d been smiled at by pros, smiles meant nothing to us. Teachers, parents, faces trying to sell something—we could resist the world. Besides, we didn’t have to be polite to strangers if our parents weren’t around.

  “I think you’d better go.”

  We were the only people there. We looked softly away, admiring an old tired boat on the edge of the world. It looked rusty and slow, staying afloat was an effort, it was low in the water; far, far out.

  Next time we looked, the woman had climbed between the rails of the fence and stood on the sun-warm rock. She didn’t look at us. We watched with interest. Maybe she was after one of the tiny flowers that grew between the cracks of the rock. Maybe she was a spy for a foreign power about to send a signal and she wanted us out of the way but it was the deadline for the signal and she had to take the risk of us handing her over to the authorities and being the cause of her execution. Maybe she was one of our spies. A double agent, even.

  They were barefoot. That’s why we didn’t hear them, I guess. Three boys, at the railing where she’d been standing. If she wanted to get back she’d have to get past them. I wondered if women spies had guns. If so, where would she hide it?

  “Hey, Missus!” one of the boys yelled. She didn’t look round. The three boys didn’t like her not looking round. It was as if she thought their voices meant nothing and the three of them didn’t exist. Perhaps the gun was in her handbag.

  “Maybe she can’t move.”

  “Rooted to the spot.”

  “Ought to be rooted.”

  “Seized up.”

  “The old gear box clapped out.” They were much older than us.

  “Hey, para!” Para was the word for paraplegic. Kids shouted it at football matches if someone missed the ball, or just for the sound of it. The other word like para was spaso, short for spastic.

  “Para!” they yelled.

  “Get on with the act,” one advised.

  “The show must go on!”

  “It’s got stage fright.”

  “Gunna walk on the water, lady?”

  “Yeah, she’s women’s lib. Wants to be JC.”

  “The para needs a parachute.”

  “Call Evel Knievel. He had a chute.”

  “Shoot, baby!”

  The woman looked round at last. She had been weeping. She looked at us all for a long time then looked back at the sea.

  She wasn’t watching the horizon, she was looking down. She didn’t even glance at the ladylike yachts, with the colored spinnakers swelling out in front like maternity dresses that had ventured into blue water.

  “What’s going to happen?” I whispered to Marie-Louise.

  “How would I know?” she said loudly. I was glad she wasn’t my sister.

  The woman looked around again. The despair on her face looked as if it had been stamped in there with something heavy. It was never going to leave. I felt sorry for her. Uncomfortable. I didn’t know why. Were the boys right? Was she going into the water? But there were no steps down. Nothing to hold to.

  “This is a lousy show,” one boy said.

  “The script’s up to shit.”

  “Bloody local content again.”

  The woman turned again. Her face wet. “Please go away, all of you. Please.”

  “Balls,” said the boys as one.

  “Won’t you please go,” she said to us. “You’re girls. Someday—”

  We waited, but she wouldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Listen, lady,” one of the boys said. “If you’re gunna jump, for Christ’s sake jump. We’ve gotta go. We can’t waste time watching nothing.”

  The woman looked them up and down. That was old-fashioned: it didn’t work. “People are allowed to sleep in private. Why won’t you let me do this in private?”

  “You’re not in private, you para. We’re the public.”

  “Shouldn’t we get someone to help?” I said to Marie-Louise.

  “She won’t take help from anyone. She’s an adult,” my friend said. She pronounced it “addult.”

  “If you don’t go now, we’re pissing off,” one said.

  The woman put her hands to her ears. This time she seemed to look at the horizon. I saw a drop fall to the rock, where it soaked in immediately and was gone. The woman took a few clumsy steps, ran to the edge and went over. I like to think she was looking right out to the horizon as she fell, rather than down at a lot of tumbled rocks. She took her handbag, still clutching it.

  On the way down she didn’t yell or make a fuss. We listened. She didn’t make a sound, hitting. But any splat she made wouldn’t have carried up to us.

  The boys crowded through the fence to see.

  “Where’s she gone?”

  “Can’t see hide nor hair of her. Must have bounced back under the foot of the cliff.”

  “Should have kept her talking and got a photographer.”

  They looked some more and turned to go.

  “If these kids were a bit older we’d have some chicks.”

  They looked over us with serene contempt. We were so young we didn’t count as human.

  They went off whistling. The tune they whistled was an advertising jingle for an old brand of cigarettes. The cigarettes were off the market, but the jingle was alive and well in the heads of boys.

  Marie-Louise and I enjoyed the afternoon a bit longer and picked two blue flowers growing in a crack in the gold sandstone. Holding one each, we went back to where the fathers and mothers were talking.

  “A lady ran off the edge up there,” my friend said, but no one heard.

  “She was crying. Three boys gave cheek,” I said. They unheard me, too.

  Later my father said, as if he had partly heard us but had forgotten who spoke, “Isn’t it funny how when people want a place to jump they choose the Gap? Just because it’s the place and every suicide goes for the high jump there.”

  “Don’t,” said my mother. “Kids have ears.”

  “Well,” said father defensively. “It’s nothing but rocks. No chance of even landing in the water,” and they talked of something else.

  Marie-Louise and I ran into the setting sun down to the water’s edge. We took our shoes off and paddled in the water. It was very clear. Three gulls held their heads to one side, standing in the shallows, listening to the lost music of the waves.

  In the distance the t
all buildings of the city stood close together as if they felt cold as the light got weaker.

  Once, I said:

  “Stare, stare, like a bear,

  Then you’ll know me anywhere.” To a seagull.

  I found a lucky stone, too, and took it home and put it under my pillow.

  We got home just on dark, and I had to go outside to bring in my tricycle; I’d left it across near our neighbor’s ground. I came back a slightly different way; a black spider hung down below the phone wires just on a level with the top of my head. It did not sway. Not at first. As I moved toward it in the blackness against the tall bushes it began to move. Side to side, a huge blob. Was it warning me to go back? I wouldn’t go back. The swaying stopped and, motionless, it was more terrible, hanging there; as if it had climbed out on one of the spokes of the dark wheel of night, in the same way as we were out on one of the bent arms of the galaxy itself.

  Inflatable Man

  My father said, looking at mother’s bent head, “One day not long ago a man came up from the river out there,” and he looked from the window downhill to the creek that wound around between the bottoms of the hills that converged on it. It was a wide creek, no more. Only in the country could a creek which was at the most ten meters wide be considered a river.

  “Up from the river carrying a baby in a baby chair. That’s it, the baby sitting in the baby chair, he was carrying the lot. No one saw where he took them, but day after day, around half past nine or a quarter to ten in the morning, up he came from a gap in the tea-tree on to the flat where the grass is, near the scout camp, and made his way to the rocks and the steep ground just below the houses on the other side of the street. People all round were looking out for them. The easement nearly opposite was the place between houses that he was looking for and sure enough he came walking up the last steep slope where old Jack mows to keep the fire danger down and so you can see what the kids are up to, and then they walked along the road, round the bend and out of sight. But others round at the outlet of Heisenberg Close saw them cross Newton Crescent, go up Galton Grove, and round Velikovsky Lane to the oval on the hill. And there on the pitch, under the goalposts they watched him with binoculars. He did something to them so you lost sight of them for a while, then the baby appeared again and he nursed it. People like the Maguires went creeping round in their cars. What they found was the whole thing was a blow-up.”

  “What’s a blow-up?” I said.

  “He let the air out and put them in his pocket while he made a drink on the barbecue grate, then blew them up again, detached the baby and nursed it. Finally he went back round the streets to the river.”

  “Did he go toward the Lutherburrows?” I asked. Lil Lutherburrow was in my class. They lived in the bush.

  “I don’t know where they are these days. But he went off toward the thick bush past the big new bridge.”

  “He could be one of them.”

  “I don’t know. Anyway no one liked that baby. People tried to prick it. Kids shot BBs at it. Arrows with nailheads in. They didn’t get it. It was tough, like life-raft material.”

  He said nothing, and for once my mother filled in the empty space.

  “To the river, you say.”

  “Not just to. Into.”

  “He went swimming?” I said.

  “Into the river,” looking across at me. I had been painting with big round bowls of primary colors on coarse, absorbent paper. The paint ran along the fibers of what had once been wood.

  “Into the river. Into the water. Not out again. Into.”

  My mother shrugged and went on writing. The whole story was a waste of time, to her.

  Why Do Fish Swim in the Sea

  In my room at school, we had a big poster: Why do fish swim in the sea? Every so often Miss King would take answers to the question. After each answer, no matter how cute or clever or downright cretinous, she gave no indication whether the answer was right. Because it’s wet, Because they’re hot, Because they haven’t learned to walk. She noted the answers in a book, with our names.

  Miss King wore a wig. Anthony Curran saw her take it off in the staff room.

  There were drawings and paintings and fingerwork, and collages of wool strips on breakfast-cereal-in-paint, and charts and demonstrations of how letters and numbers were written, and saucers in which carrot and onion ends were sprouting in a film of water, and drinking glasses and honey jars and proper vases with flowers in. And sometimes they would have roses.

  The roses. Ah . . .

  Even at six I devoured with my mind the downy red tightly wrapped buds that held such beauty within them, round them, and made beautiful the patch of painted ledge on which they stood and the window behind them that was slightly dry-misty with the natural accretions of dust and lit by the incoming sun. Something arose in the top and the back of my throat that had to be swallowed when I looked at the bud of a rose, and I held my eyes wider to give more surface area for the small flood of wetness that gathered there so no one would notice it gather at the bottom of my lids.

  Red roses. To me, the words themselves are pictures.

  Can you, my reader, get a picture in your mind of a small girl standing up with the others, doing the actions, and singing:

  “I’m a little teapot, here is my spout,

  Fill me up, and pour me out,”

  in her first years at school, having turned six, and it’s October and a glorious spring after a dry warm winter, looking sideways at roses on the ledge in water in a common glass, and the tears dripping and sliding down her face, some into the corner of her mouth and others dropping and wetting her school tunic? Can you?

  Not Exactly Pretty

  I saw him once, that was all. I was six, and my mother hadn’t mentioned Uncle Rory before.

  He was hideously rich, I heard Daddy say. But the sight of him was the thing. If his riches were hideous, his deformity was beautiful to a child avid for newness and variety.

  His face was twisted by a muscular disease so that it was longer than proportion would allow, and bent to his left underneath the cheekbones. The mouth was further bent in the same direction, so that it was within fifteen or twenty degrees of being at right angles to his brow line.

  His spine had two bends, from another kind of wasting disease. One was near the shoulder blades, and bent him forward as if a hump was forming; the other was where his trouser belt was, and bent him back. He looked from the side as if he was perpetually in two minds as to whether to tie his shoes or rear back in surprise from a sudden attack. Although horribly deformed, these weren’t changes: his wealth did not depend on employment.

  I never saw him below the waist.

  When he left, father said, “The body wears out, Al. With everyone. You, too.”

  It seemed a funny thing that after all the efforts of chance down so many years to bring me about, I was no sooner in the world than I began to wear out.

  “Dying begins now,” he repeated.

  I looked at myself to see what was wearing out. When I closed my hands there were lots of wrinkles, and when I saw Mrs. Bassett’s new baby its feet were quite old, with lines all over them.

  Cocky was awfully old, he’d been wearing out for fifty years, father said, but he was still there in his cage.

  I tried to teach him “Same to you with knobs on,” so he could answer anyone who talked to him, but all he got was “Knobs on, knobs on, knobs on.”

  I was too young to be sad at the thought of all the future time when the memory of me would inhabit nothing but random breezes.

  Word and Object

  In the course of Changes my father was murdered. Public statements were regularly made that father was not the murderer in the play, but the conjunction of the word “murder” and my father’s name and picture were enough to ensure that a significant number of the Free population would turn on him like wild animals, as if he were an animal that must be destroyed. The conjunction of a face and a word. Their disbelief could not be suspen
ded: they had none.

  Attackers who had been questioned revealed a depressing similarity of response. “Murderer,” they said. “Murder.”

  Questioned further, they repeated the two words as if they were interchangeable. “Murder, murderer.”

  Faced with the proposition that my father was an actor, they showed no confusion, merely said firmly, “Murder.”

  Told that he killed no one but was himself killed, they repeated, “Murder.”

  Asked why they blamed him if he was murdered, they said, “Murder.” And without the slightest change of expression said, “Murderer.”

  No amount of expostulation made an impression. Expressionlessly, even with a pitying expression, they shook their heads, “Murder.”

  There was no comprehension that he was acting. Even his repeated death and occasional appearance in the streets did not disturb this opinion.

  In their minds he was the one who should be destroyed.

  He was unable to get out of the car in any place where large numbers of people might be gathered. He had been beaten up so many times that he had resigned himself to suburban seclusion.

  Nonetheless, in spite of the fury of the Frees, his attitude was: I have a country; this is my country—Australia, the great south land. I love my country. And this sentiment was part of my earliest education.

  By contrast, among the liberal humanists Internationalism was a cold superior mood, warmed by the glowing words in which its ideal was expressed, but still cold, like a metal. And like metal it was a favorite weapon for bludgeoning the hydra-headed nationalism that sprang up like a weed from the ground. A weed, that is, to its enemies: to those who ate of it, it was wonderfully nourishing; it gave a superhuman strength to those addicted to it.

  My father, though his ideas and philosophies were patched together out of bits of dialogue and the more learned theater reviewers’ ideas, nevertheless wasn’t blind to the picture of a small, weak country professing internationalism, thus stabilizing the great powers in their pride and strength by its effect on that small country’s actions. And the effect? To make it choose to keep out of competition, to be mild and good-mannered, to be on good terms with everyone, never to play power politics, never to try to gather its strength and push forward in wealth and power to a more prominent position, as those “emerging” countries did whose memory of subjugation and slavery and the wrong end of empire was so strong that they would risk life and limb and wholesale destruction to get their turn in the ruler’s chair. At that stage the impotent cry of Peace meant one obvious thing: the stabilization in pre-eminence of those nations already there, those nations who had never wavered from the extreme, single-minded, aggressive nationalism that had got them where they were. They preached internationalism and peace: they were on top. Peace would keep them there. Internationalism, if it came, would give them first choice of seats at the banquet.