A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  “Liberal-minded people just don’t care for their country,” my father lamented. “They’re a rabble,” he said.

  Tibby and Tiger

  We got them from people in Einstein Crescent. They were both morose, and inclined to long periods thinking. Father never used to call me when they were doing things to each other, but I watched when I came home from school.

  Tiger had duplicates of himself running around all over the district, so he wasn’t anchored to homosexuality. He was a great jumper, and superficially friendly, but although he would fight when females were in heat, he wasn’t a good fighter.

  Tibby had longer fur, almost like a Persian, and was a darker homosexual, an exclusive. A baby’s foot protruded from underneath his chest. We noticed it growing when he was sitting down alone on a patch of dead couch in early winter and he was licking himself. Perhaps Tiger and he weren’t speaking. But there it was, the sole showing through.

  We watched while it grew to be a complete foot, then it stopped growing. Tibby wasn’t a jumper, like Tiger, who could spring on to two-meter fences, but when aroused he was a fierce fighter. Yet, often he wouldn’t eat. He was finicky, and made a fuss over nothing. Sometimes he wouldn’t come near us, even me. Yet we’d done nothing to him. During the energy crises he was unbearable.

  Tibby licked the foot, but in fights Tiger would go for it and scratch it. Often it had deep scratches, bleeding red blood.

  (Was it baby blood or cat blood?)

  Every morning, if it was fine—or in the wet, in a safe dry corner under the bushes near the cigarette plant—you would find him doing his usual brush-up, cleaning himself, sharpening his claws and cleaning between the toes and fingers, getting his penis out and making it shiny and red, and licking his baby foot. Why does an animal change? Animals are failures to start with.

  Cats and dogs rest a lot. Where they come from it must be a shorter day. Ours is too much for them.

  Lucky Number Seven

  On the day before my seventh birthday I saw my parents doing sex.

  She was lying on her back and her legs were drawn up. He was on top of her and I thought: that must be heavy. It would be hard for her to escape.

  She didn’t seem to want to, though. She was yawning. Father was pushing forward, then going back a bit; forward again, and her head moved back against the pillow. That was all I saw.

  I wondered if it hurt the part he was pushing against. It seemed a bit rough, yet not very. I went back to bed.

  I never saw them do it again. There were many times later when their door was shut and I heard the bed, but I didn’t sneak up to look, it didn’t seem important enough.

  In the morning the rooster next door was blowing his own trumpet, and woke me. The hens, though, were getting on with production.

  I don’t know why I thought of it like that.

  Mother’s Love

  This is a short interruption while I think of it.

  It is about my mother and the fact that she loves.

  She is capable of great love, and expresses it.

  But she does nothing.

  She writes of it. (I think.)

  She talks of it.

  She has loving expressions on her face.

  Her voice is full of love.

  But she does nothing.

  I wonder if I am being critical without cause.

  Am I too practical? Is this why mother has turned away?

  My Investigation of Sex-Directed Learning

  Little girls are in no position to question the things they’re told, or the objects they’re given to play with. If you were put into a pink blanket, if pink plastic toys were hung on a string above your eyes, you’d touch them, wouldn’t you?

  You’d also come to expect to have pink things, and softness.

  The advantage I had was that I got any color but pink; and where, in a family of boys and girls, the little jobs that crop up are given out, the manly ones to the boys, the soft jobs to the girls, I got any that were going. I washed dishes. I helped father as he mattocked the backyard, I painted a small piece of wall when he painted, I climbed our trees to escape my mother, taking books and drinks and sandwiches up with me to share with the ants and mosquitoes. I played cricket with father, hard ball and all, and kicked a football with him just as if I were a boy. He was pleased with me.

  He told me things like:

  “The boy stood on the burning deck

  Melting with the heat

  His piggy eyes were full of tears

  And his shoes were full of feet.”

  and

  “Mary felt a little queer

  She took some castor oil

  And everywhere that Mary went

  She fertilized the soil.”

  Mother didn’t know until I recited them in the house.

  An Interesting Speculation

  Odia Watson lived in one of the houses opposite. She was a huge woman with heavy opinions and strong breasts like muscular footballs. I think her name may not have been Odia: that may have been father’s christening.

  “No pensions,” she said to father, as she borrowed the large scissors. “Pensions, government spending, they’re the beginnings of communism.”

  “Oh dear,” said father. I think that’s where her name began. “And what about child endowment?”

  “Same thing,” she said. “Let the government feed you and look after you, and freedom’s gone.”

  She didn’t know it, but this was where she had father. He could never make up his mind where the citizens’ right to tax money ended and where freedom from bureaucratic control began; all his life, as long as I knew him, he gave out strong opinions on both sides but always hesitated as to where the opposing sides met.

  On the other hand, Odia Watson, believer in freedom, called the police on her telephone every time she heard neighbors arguing.

  “Every argument is violence. We must have order. Words of conflict are only one step away from blows. We must live in peace with one another, without asking for repressive communist government to step in and give us peace and order.”

  Every time she heard a child crying, she called the welfare department. She hated cruelty. She was a religious person, attracted by the sort of God that wipes away all tears.

  Odia earned her fame in the district, fame that lasted long after the police and the welfare had ceased to answer her urgent calls, with a careless dive into her backyard pool. This pool was placed so that the shallow end was just past the back of the house and the deep end took advantage of the slope of the ground. It still had to be built up from the ground, there was a drop of four meters from the far end of the pool to the rock below. She dived after a run down the yard, aquaplaned half the length before her two bosom-floats would allow her to go below the surface, went under, barely had time to get her prow out, and cannoned into the far end where the concrete was a mere ten centimeters thick. The concrete broke, opened up like a dam wall, and Odia rode the wall of water out into the valley. When the flood passed over her she was pressed, in a surfing position, into the top of a tree. Both arms, both legs, her neck and her waist were caught in forking branches. Her bosoms hung down a long way, out of her costume, swinging like pendulums.

  The neighbors speculated for some time on the best method of getting her down.

  I Had a Weak Thought

  I had a weak thought in the playground. They—the boys—were playing Pushings. Pushings was when two crowds of them ranged up on both sides of a crack in the asphalt of the playground and put their shoulders down like a giant scrum, and pushed.

  Perhaps I was feeling gentle that morning. I had been walking along in the sun, keeping away from the Corner, then going toward it, surprised to find no bodies hurtling round it. I had wandered away from the others, who were quarreling and spiteful.

  I kept out wide near the Corner. Nothing. No boy was there. Instead, the main playground was packed with them. Suddenly, with no signal that I saw, the ants of this big heap of
them formed up into two sides. There was a cry of “Pushings!” and the push began.

  In the middle, some went down, some trod on others, but the main lines stayed as they bent forward, shoulder crunching against shoulder, with the ones at the rear bending down, seeing nothing, pushing for their side. The ones in the middle must have been taking a terrible weight.

  I stood watching. I don’t know how long, perhaps I was in a dream. My eyes saw them as a mass, not as particular ants. I began to think of dresses—such as I’d seen in the shop windows on the weekend when father took me out in the car to the shops—and nice things, and ribbons, and plaits at the side of your head like some kids have, and the dolls my relatives brought for my presents and which my mother put away, and the sewing machine father was teaching me to use (I loved to watch as his big thick finger-ends touched the thin cotton and gently pushed it toward the needle’s eye) and pinafores such as the Lutherburrow girls had, and party dresses like the Headen girls wore with their noses in the air, and all the pretty, graceful girlish things.

  Then I caught myself. I shook my head. Some of Them came in focus. Barry Lutherburrow, two of the Vauxs, and leaning over the school fence the fifty-nine-year-old idiot son of Mrs. Brown. I had been weak. The shoulder crunches had been a push in the face. I was ashamed.

  See my finger

  See my thumb

  See my fist

  And here it comes!

  Don’t Touch Me!

  Audrey Major who lived in Joule Street had a different problem from the Vaux children. Where their toes grew to the ground, she wasn’t allowed to touch others for too long. She and people grew together.

  Her mother had the itch, the seven minute itch, and needed people to touch her in places, or to take her clothes off. She got hysterics if no one helped her.

  It was a game in the playground, touching Audrey lightly; daring her processes to hold us fast by a finger. She ran away crying: “Don’t touch me! I’ll tell on you!” So we all chased her.

  I never saw anyone joined to her. Perhaps her parents spread a nonstick ointment over her surfaces. But she told of having a doctor separate her from one of her uncles when she was small. Down there, too.

  The Scarecrows’ Lament for the Wild Birds

  Grandfather Grossman was a domestic, ordinary old man, held in subjection by Grandma; he had drinking habits that got in her way when they were much younger, but she had long since curbed him. Now, in their twilight, she hardly ever needed the reins. He went naturally in the direction he had been trained, like a good old carthorse that stops at all the stops he’s got used to on his rounds, and if there’s a vacant house and no need to stop he’ll still stop, indeed insists on stopping, just as he was trained to do, outside every stop on the way.

  He’d had work habits that annoyed her, too. On the farm he worked hours she considered far too long, and on household repairs and tasks far too little. She adjusted this balance by a system of rewards and sanctions that Skinner, if he had known, would have adopted immediately.

  They lived in a valley, on the MacDonald river. We visited them twice a year. They said I was marvelous.

  Father looked sideways at me when grandfather began one of his monologues. “Weaken the tyranny of the family at your own risk,” he said, settling his glass one ring further on the shiny table so the new ring linked with the last. “The result will be an increase in the tyranny of the state.”

  As usual, mother wasn’t listening.

  I was seven; my father listened and watched; the sun shifted a tiny bit west and the shadow on the carpet approached the east. Soon we would get in the car to go home. A magpie sang its long rubbery notes.

  “Collectivization is not for your good and my good but for our good.” He underlined the word. “And the good, the comfort, the ease of our rulers.”

  There must have been something safe in my expression; my father relaxed, as he always did. I always watched to see him relax, then listened just as I did before. I needed no special guidance to know how to treat grandfathers. Years before, I had noticed how he couldn’t get around as well as mother, let alone father; and as for dashing about quickly, as I did, he simply wasn’t in it. A child can see that a person that can’t move around quickly is at a serious disadvantage. Even cats and dogs know things like that.

  “In 1901 we hadn’t looked. In 1975 we hadn’t looked for three-quarters of a century. You must look closely at all things. No, my Australia exists only in museums. They gave the vote to people who can’t be bothered thinking about politics.”

  When we were climbing, in the car, I looked around and could just see their house with its trees kneeling protectively around it. It looked lovely from a distance.

  Once we passed a big paddock, and up in one corner there were lots of gloomy cows.

  And in fields where vegetables were planted scarecrows stood up looking sorry for themselves, and lonely. No birds bothered to come and sit on their shoulders. Not even the wild birds that didn’t give a damn for anyone.

  Freedom

  At the local shoppingtown a rival long distance lecturer set up. Professor Henrietta D. Walden II had freedom as her subject and intended to spend alternate years on Freedom From and Freedom To; she was now on Freedom From. Freedom from poverty, from riches, from sickness, from health, from light and darkness, from war and peace, sorrow and joy, miracles, disappointments, frustrations, ignorance and knowledge, hunger and fullness, ambition and sloth, success and failure. She had a board showing the program, her name and degrees, university posts, her publications in learned journals and her two books, and the names and specifications of the two children she had borne into the world.

  “New jargon; new bondage,” she was saying. “Every new theory oppresses.”

  Her voice was harsh, and didn’t care for its audience, like a prime minister’s voice when he has a record majority.

  The shoppers had blank faces and moved toward the mouths of shops looking for things to exchange for the money in their pockets, not even conscious the economy was on their shoulders.

  The message of Henrietta D. Walden II beat against the shores of their collective mind with all the fury of a caramel milkshake.

  My father said, “Freedom’s great, for a holiday. You wouldn’t want to spend all your life there.”

  Coming home in the car I thought all the night shadows far too long, but father assured me everything was normal.

  Jerusalem the Cocky

  To say I was happy as a little girl is perhaps too strong. I was cheerful, lively; I was vigorous. These manifestations of health are often taken for signs of happiness when you’re young. You’re at the mercy of all sorts of unqualified diagnosticians. But how do you get to be qualified to make a diagnosis about happiness? By being happy?

  No, that won’t do. You might find out how to play football by watching footballers, but don’t ask them how. Words, and people’s control of words, can’t encompass actions. There’s a sort of mystery surrounding actions. Words try; but finally fail and break off, leaving shreds of their flesh. Actions stand entire.

  Every morning the world was fresh. The milk came: fresh from the factory. The sun came up fresh on the dew in the cool months, and the grass was fresh. Except for places where it was bent over and crumpled and disappointed looking; you can bet I had been lying and jumping up and down there the day before.

  Jerusalem, the cocky, looked very wisely at me, even if I said something to him that didn’t require wisdom in reply. He was old, and his name wasn’t always Jerusalem. Once he was Pretty Cocky, and he was happy with that name, but I guess that I—I’m ashamed of it now—got tired of having him around.

  Maybe it wasn’t that so much as wanting a different sort of bird, perhaps I wanted a different pet as well as the cats and Pretty Cocky.

  The different pet I wanted was a white rabbit.

  “When Cocky goes you can have a rabbit,” father said. It usually fell to mothers of families to do all the feeding and makin
g sure pets had water in their cages, but since my mother was pretty well taken up with making notes, that work passed along to my father. When work passes along like this, it doesn’t get any easier. It grows. The getting of a rabbit seemed like a mountain we all had to cross, on account of the extra work that would have to be passed along. I had to wait for Pretty Cocky to die.

  He had no intention of going anywhere. If you opened his cage he didn’t escape, just looked at me wisely. (I opened his cage hoping he’d embrace freedom.)

  “I’m going to call him Jerusalem,” said my father at last. “Because he will not pass away.”

  One morning we found his feathers, and his yellow crest. The cats had got him in the night. I must have not fastened the catch properly.