A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  The Open Society

  Unlike earlier societies, ours had no need of a priestly secrecy. The information on how to run the society and its machines was freely available; examinations were open to all at whatever age. Initial grading could be challenged at any time in a person’s life, but there were few later admissions. The point was that no matter how available the information, the knowledge, the circuitry, the logic, the Free Class was unable to grasp it. They simply were not up to it. No matter how the grading tests were changed, the same kind of people succeeded. The justice of the position where the able had entry and others had not, was accepted. It seemed as natural as breathing to reward ability and penalize the less able.

  Even as a child I felt it remarkable that they seemed to feel no resentment; neither the Free Citizens, nor the Servants on their behalf. I guess they saw clearly the failure of others and how absurd it made them and so weren’t willing to look absurd themselves by objecting to what was inevitable.

  It wasn’t even a secret that nuclear shelters were available for less than a tenth of the population.

  A Family of Idiots

  The Lutherburrows might not have been smart, but neither were they soft. They lived in the bush doing no harm to anyone. In tents. When well-meaning people came into the bush to move them out and into the clutches of the mortgage companies, they moved to another part of the bush. If the authorities were stupid enough to descend on them in force, the Lutherburrows told tales to the environmental guerrillas, who manned all entrances to the bush and stopped intruders mucking up the bush tracks with vehicles. The authorities could not conceive of a deputation on foot, they had to come equipped with the might of engines and shiny paintwork, and this cavalcade did no sort of good for the bush tracks that the Lutherburrows traveled on foot. They simply moved away, dug cute dunnies and were so stupid that they didn’t mind carrying water by hand. They didn’t mind boiling it, they didn’t mind getting wet when it rained.

  Sometimes they were seen sitting out in the rain, in a circle, as quiet and still as leaves thinking. People took photographs.

  They had two dogs, so beautifully trained that they knew when to disappear, and did it quietly. They alerted the family to intruders, usually boys, but it wasn’t all that necessary. The Lutherburrow boys were hard as nails, they knew every inch of the bush in the dark, and never hurt the boys badly.

  While not one of them was actually mad, the family as a whole was crazy. There were some well-off people in the district who thought they ought to be preserved and not harassed, the Lutherburrows being an example to the rest of us of one of the lost arts of living. They had a word in the ear of the politicians, who spoke to the police, and so it goes.

  They stayed.

  They were different from us, with our appliances and debts. The old man and the boys had casual jobs, they worked well, they had money enough for clothes and soap and food. That’s all they seemed to need.

  If civilization tends toward softness in its captives and softness was the enemy, the Lutherburrows had it licked.

  When Doctor Wise was called to the Lutherburrows by one of their anonymous friends—they tended to delay calling the doctor to give sickness a chance to develop and when it did, they tended not to call the doctor, to give themselves a chance to get well—people thought he was doing something very like charity, and charity was one thing the authorities had tried to eradicate. The boys of the idiot family always repaid a favor and appeared very early in the morning on the weekend and did the doctor’s garden like the fairies. The eldest, Challenger, knew which weeds to leave in, to make the other shrubs and flowers grow better.

  That was our lore, at school. Challenger’s name got round in circles where there was some reverence for this simple knowledge, and he was in demand to tend garden beds and to give advice. He did what he could, but couldn’t keep up with the demand for his talent; as for putting what he knew into words, he was a failure. People didn’t understand that you could know something and not be able to use words to encapsulate it.

  The idiot family had a natural tact. They never mentioned the name on Doctor Wise’s arm. They were the only ones to know his secret, and his status was safe with them.

  In raised flesh on the side of his right arm stood part of a name. The letters “r Woodbur” stood up enough to be made out. Was the “r” the end of a first name? Was a “y” or an “n” missing from the surname? Lil told me about it. She trusted me. I suppose when people read this he’ll be prosecuted. We went into it all at school in the playground, standing around under the angophoras, watching as the leaf-shadows strayed from here to there in the slight breeze at the treetops that we could not feel on the ground.

  The Drunkard

  When I took Anthony Simonetta home, his mother was there. He had been sick in class.

  I could see her inside the back door bent over the table, head loosely on her arms which lay on the table, flat and uninterested, her face and mouth out a little from the table edge so that when she felt like having a spit, the material went on the floor, not the table.

  She came out of her daze a bit later and I heard her give this foolish snuffling laugh, saw the hunching of the shoulders and upper arms, the sinking back into the chair, the lifting of the head, giving her audience a sight of vacant, drunken eyes.

  I had never seen a drunk person before.

  When I got home mother was sitting perfectly still in her chair, hunched over the desk. As if she had died sitting up. I called, and she began writing. She wasn’t drunk and she wasn’t dead: she’d been thinking.

  They Told Me About the Place of Skulls

  Why is a skull such a menacing object? The Place of Skulls, commonly called Golgotha at Sunday School, must surely have been only one, and a tiny one, among all the other places of skulls in the recently ancient world.

  But in Sunday School there was a passion for descriptions of the torture and death of Jesus that brought the blood and thorns and whipping right before my eyes. I saw the cruel men putting their backs into the scourging, and the more experienced ones using the wrist artfully, like the boys at school who knew how to hurt, getting the flick of the thong at the end of the stroke and not having to use up energy. I saw the blood run down the Lord’s forehead and through his hair down the back of his neck, mixing with the sweat on his shoulders and back. He had a little hair down in the lower part of his back on both sides of his spine, which was indented there and was only a deep channel between the two stiff muscles supporting the back. His waist was covered lower down, preventing my imagining eyes from proceeding further, but in general you could say his back was rather like my father’s. Not like Odia Watson’s man, who was covered in black hair, front and back.

  And which bones did the nails pass between? I touched my own hands, feeling for the most painful spots, wondering. The flesh must be very strong, I thought, to hold together, supporting a man’s weight without tearing. If it tore, he’d just slide down to the ground, because the finger bones are separate nearly up to the wrist. But no, there were the feet. How did they get the nails in someone’s feet? I felt my own, the bones were quite close together. They must have hammered hard. Did they have hammers like Daddy’s hammer? With two flattened bits hooked over on the other side of the head to pull nails out with?

  And in the hot sun, with blood running down—why, of course! He’d have fainted after a bit, so maybe he didn’t feel it. And if executions were regular things, there were plenty who suffered. I was glad he didn’t have his legs broken, like the others. But how did they break legs, at that height, at that angle? With a hammer? Or did they break the leg backwards at the knee, like the terrorists except that they shoot a bullet out through the kneecap from behind. It terrified me, for a little while.

  A Vale of Tears

  I often wanted to be with people. With anyone, just to keep the aloneness away, the aloneness I first felt when my childish mind grappled with the awful details of the crucifixion. To me it seemed that it wa
s far more terrible to kill a good man than a bad.

  And did they really leave him some clothes around that part like the statues show? And how did it stay up? I didn’t know whether the Hebrews had belts or not. I knew the Romans did. I knew that when my arms were raised my waist seemed to be thinner, but of course I had hips for things to rest on, and he was a man. Men are thinner there.

  These speculations made me sad, and the cruelty involved. I had quite a lot of sadness around that time. Mother said it was a stage.

  The Sorrowful Death of the Prince of Glory

  It was enough for my father that I had some religious tuition so that I knew at least the names of the officials in our local branch of the world-religion. We were nominally Christians, though all around were Eastern branches, and new-founded religions, which started, dwindled, but rarely disappeared entirely, so that there were, scattered about, many shells of once fashionable sects, still with their faithful few.

  Father didn’t protest when I wanted to take part in a school production of the Easter play, and came along on the night. I was an angel outside the tomb. But where I should have enjoyed being in the play, since it was a combined effort of Junior Primary, I was more affected by the message of the play.

  It struck me that something was wrong in the world if the Prince of Glory had to die. Not that he was said to die for others, but that he died at all. Roger Hardy, two classes above me, was the Prince.

  “Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?” the chorus asked us all, and I was so wrapped up in the feel of the thing that in the pause after that haunting question I said in a small voice, “Yes.” The whole church turned and looked at me as if I had lied.

  My father didn’t encourage me to go after that, but he taught me to say:

  Hot cross buns

  Hot cross buns

  One a penny

  Two a penny

  Hot cross buns.

  We had them every year at Easter. I had to ask him what a penny was.

  My Uncle in the Soil

  My uncle Maurice, mother’s brother, died years ago at the age of eighteen months of what in those days was called cot death. My father suspected Maurice died because he wasn’t fit to live.

  “Something wrong, a child that age suddenly dying. Maybe it was one of those kids that just scraped through getting born. There’s so many combinations, darling, of sickness and health, of fitness and unfitness, there’s bound to be lots that just scrape through and die sooner or later. Maurie was sooner. Others die at eleven, or twenty-five, or forty. There’s no natural age to die. He’s at rest.”

  He was calming me. All I could think of was how I had an uncle of eighteen months, who would always be my uncle Maurie, always eighteen months, and here I was: seven.

  His grave was the first in line as you turned from the straight-in cemetery road at the fourth row. It was a new cemetery. His memorial plate was set flat in the earth and the grass mown all round. It was an act of faith to believe there were dead people underneath.

  Over in the section that wasn’t lawn the earth was pastel-colored where the clay—white, grey, pinkish and some lumps almost blue—from deep down, had not been put back first and there wasn’t enough brown dirt to cover the clay and it drew your attention because it looked so like a scar, almost violent, and death violent, too. Not peaceful at all.

  And all those jars and receptacles on the graves. Were they to catch the tears of the mourners?

  My Uncles, In Memory and in the Flesh

  All we had were photographs. My uncle Maurice was a fat boy with a pale face, and stood awkwardly hanging on to the seat of a chair. His age when the best photo was taken was thirteen months. The others were baby ones and little-tot-walking photos. I thought about my uncle a lot. Whatever age I attained, he would always be eighteen months. And he was in a place at which one’s hitherto mysterious existence after death arrives, continues for a while, then fades. It corresponds to the existence in memory of memorable persons. (And when those who remember die, their last hold on existence is gone.)

  If he had grown up to be a man, my uncle Maurice might one day have said, as I heard my uncle Ken say to my father as they were opening beer on the back patio, “There’s nothing really—nothing much—” (he looked for a place to throw the rings, then remembered and put them on the table) “to interest a man,” he said, and paused. My father lifted his glass, looking at the bubbles on the side of it, and listened. “In a woman,” my uncle said. “They don’t actually—well, do anything; nothing, apart from their basic attractiveness; they sort of play around, they groom themselves in front of mirrors for hours, they check to see their eyelashes are on, their skin is wrinkled, their this is so-and-so and their that is whatsit. There’s nothing in ’em, to ’em.”

  He saw me listening to him.

  “Little people have big ears,” he said. And tried to take the edge off his words by holding up his glass and smiling at me. But all I could see were his teeth that were worn down and had brown on them from the time when he used to smoke tobacco. There are two types of people as there are two social classes, and Uncle Ken was a loser.

  Not long after this, he began to get pains. Shortly after, he got religion. Their family lived in one of those terrible suburbs where no one speaks the truth.

  Death May Come

  “Death may come anytime,” my father said. “So confront it. After all, what is death?”

  I thought it was the end of everything, and inconceivable. In the normal order of things he would die before me, so talking about it showed a certain courage.

  He recited:

  “The crematorium in the sun

  Implies that life and death are one.

  I wonder what else would be the same

  If I gave death another name.”

  From my earliest years he threw the word death around; all the other kids I knew were familiar with death and the idea of killing people from very early on, so their fathers probably did much the same.

  I didn’t know what would be required of me when death came. I thought of it as something that suddenly happens. I didn’t know what mine would be like. It was a word that I had to fill with whatever meanings I cared to.

  It would bring peace, plenty of it. Forever. Perhaps that’s why I don’t think too highly of peace before I die.

  Did they know the thoughts their words gave rise to in me? Surely not.

  My dear parents: may dreams, like sentinels, forever guard your sleep.

  The Reverend Buggiar

  The Reverend Buhagiar was a visiting preacher who took it on himself to visit the houses where kids dropped attendance at church. His explanation to my father when he was tackled about the words raised up in flesh on his head, was that the words had run through his mind for years and now were manifest in the flesh.

  My father looked at him. Was it a joke? There was no way of telling. The Reverend Buhagiar fingered the words. The first two were mere patches, lumps under the surface; “the Cross turns” was the only visible readable phrase.

  “What’s the whole sentence?” said father. I guess he felt, as I did, that it didn’t matter what you asked of a person committed to the truth. Fibs are usually more interesting.

  “‘Call me when the Cross turns over,’ that’s the sentence,” said the Reverend. His black socks ran smoothly up his ankle and where they stopped there began a marble-white leg, populated by a few weary hairs that pointed this way and that, not like the hairs on the legs of the big high school boys that passed outside our fence. Theirs were thick and black—or blonde or ginger—and seemed to go all the same way as if they’d climbed out of the water and the hairs had dried as they were swept by the current of water.

  His favorite sermon was on gravity. The force of gravity. Time—or life or love or anything that could be represented by a word that meant lots of things—was earnest, passing by. Too much in life was trivial and unserious.

  Everyone—that is, all the kids—called him the
Reverend Buggiar.

  Rain

  “Rain rain go away,

  Come again another day!”

  sang my father and I as we danced round the lounge room while the rain pelted down. He was teaching me to box. He had big fat boxing gloves on. Mine were smaller, but they still made your arms tired. The venetians were right up so when we stopped for a break we could see the white columns of rain striding across the low ground beneath us falling away to the flat river plain that extended to the hills on the horizon. Rain spattered up from the roofs of the houses on the low side of Heisenberg Close and poured into guttering channels and out into the street.

  He had a wonderful ability to enjoy himself and be happy. I wanted to be like him: smiling, alert, strong, attractive.

  “It’s raining, it’s pouring

  The old man’s snoring

  Six o’clock in the morning.”

  The wind had come up. It beat bitterly on the windows, pushing branches and shrubs against the house. Elsewhere houses were unroofed, and in the morning we heard that another cliff had fallen into the sea, and the land was less. When I went outside after breakfast the only sign of the storm I could see were the many fat diamonds of dew gathered in the hollows of nasturtium leaves.

  To My Father I Owe

  To my father I owe my ability to organize myself. He allowed me to keep my room shabby and disordered, he was never sarcastic about my rare bursts of energy when I would clean everything up and have it looking like mother’s room. But of course she used nothing, only her pen and writing pads, no cosmetics, no perfumes, no aids of any sort. Her room was still as tidy at the end of the week as it was on Sunday when my father did it. And yet, despite him, it smelled of negligence. Only the fine layer of whitish dust over everything was different, and that was unavoidable, unless we’d had air conditioning. My father didn’t understand how air conditioners worked, and all he would say was he didn’t want to breathe dead air or burn fossil fuels just to avoid the weather.