A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Reasons Why Mother Cannot Be Interrupted:

  Mother is having a cuddle.

  Mother is eating.

  Mother is on the toilet.

  Mother is concentrating.

  Mother has a headache.

  Mother is having a shower.

  Mother is putting on her face.

  Mother is taking off her clothes.

  Mother’s trying on her new dress.

  Mother’s teeth hurt.

  Mother is in a bad temper.

  Mother has a poisoned finger from a bindi.

  Mother is writing.

  Mother is talking to herself.

  Mother is making birds’ nests.

  Mother is composing a Rondo for string and hairpins.

  Mother is limbering up for the fencing season.

  Mother is talking to a wallaby.

  Mother thinks it is Walpurgis-night.

  Mother has shriveled up to nothing.

  Mother is studying metapolitics.

  Mother is preparing a paper for a conference against low-cost technology.

  Mother is pulling a hair from her head: if it curls she will know she is jealous.

  Fading Echoes of the Boy That Cried

  The cruelty of the world made less impression on me as I became part of the cruelty. I grew up, I became acclimatized.

  The cruelty that Crying Clive introduced me to lived on as echoes that bounced off episodes in my life. If you imagine a body moving through a stationary landscape with each episode a rock or solid object, then you have a picture of the way I felt, moving through my life. (Not that I’m sure it was I that moved.)

  The way the people lived who made the clothes I wore, the food I ate; these things occurred to me occasionally. (Don’t you like that—occasionally? Luxurious, isn’t it?) And when I heard of price rises and pay rises, and saw the free persons’ costs and pitiful expenditures itemized to the last cent in public, I looked for the costs and expenses of the professionals to be shown in public. I didn’t see them.

  Waste. Profit and theft. Unkindness, killing. These aroused small sighs. Quite small. Tiny, in fact. Even the meanness of copyright and patents aroused only small reflexes.

  But a window on the world of cruelty and callous disregard for the existence of others was opened for me by poor Clive.

  The Dog Family

  We were in the car, winding along the expressway, and pulled over to the verge. Daddy said he wanted to put up the car bonnet, and when we stopped, that’s what he did. He left it propped up.

  By chance there sat below us a lovely panorama of waterways and darkly green bush, thickly growing to the water’s edge.

  Out of propriety, I think, we stayed in the car. The traffic near us was fast. And when I say near, I mean about two meters from the side of our car. No stopping, the green sign said.

  On the other side of our road, at a lower level, the returning half of the expressway had a similar verge, where tame grass grew quietly and would no doubt be mown by Main Roads workmen when it began to look ambitious.

  Father and mother gazed round at the view. I watched idly the zipping traffic on the returning highway. As the vehicles passed, I kept my eyes fixed on one spot and the blurs had a hypnotic effect. Not unpleasant.

  A lull in that traffic unsettled me, and I noticed a car slow down. Nothing either way in sight. From it were pitched four or five things that skidded and tumbled over and over. The car revved its engine and was off like mad. The tumbling objects consisted of a lady dog and four small puppies.

  The people who dropped this live litter hadn’t been fussy where they did it; the mother dog had three lanes to cross to get her family to safety. Safety was the far edge of the expressway, where grass gave way to the surrounding bush. Maybe there would be water, and if she got them to a house hidden in the bush, well, maybe . . .

  She picked up one puppy and tried for the far side. But an overtaking car got one of her back legs. She yelped and dropped the baby, then quickly picked it up again and made it to the opposite verge. She tried to will the baby to stay there, then limped back with her crushed leg lifted, to reach the others.

  “Al,” said mother, probably wanting to point out something. Then she saw the horror show I was watching, and fell silent. (I saw a poem lately about the wild beauty of a street accident, but this was different.)

  “Al,” said my father absently. “Answer your mother.” He thought he might be having a mild disciplinary problem with me.

  He saw the dog family, then.

  It took him only a few seconds to take in what was happening, jump out of the car, close the bonnet and drive back into the traffic.

  In that time Mother Dog had taken another of her babies across the three lanes, the rescued one had wandered back on to the roadway and been stamped flat, and while she was taking the second, the third stumbled on to the fast lane and was pasted. She looked back and took the second far off the verge into the edge of the trees and started back for the fourth.

  We were out of sight then.

  Several times on the trip we were in the middle lane passing a large load on our left while another huge vehicle overtook us. Looking up at the height and size of the trucks on both sides, I looked at my mother and my father and the interior of our car with its fragile roof that my father—at home—forbade me from climbing on, and I thought of how close the traffic was to its neighbors, and how easy a collision must be, and how miraculous it was that there were so few. Perhaps I could make a composition out of it for school.

  We cut the outing short. The sandwiches weren’t as good as father’s food usually was, the Esky hadn’t kept the drinks cold enough, the car wasn’t running smoothly enough, and the view wasn’t as good as it had been.

  When we got back to the place, the dog family was gone. Well, dead. One small flat shape was in the fast lane, a large and a small were in the middle lane, and the first one to be flattened was in the far lane.

  There was no way of missing them. I saw it coming, my mother did, and my father said, “I can’t swerve, I can’t swerve,” in a high voice as we saw the cars in front go over all four and as we in our car ran over the bodies of the mother and her fourth baby in the middle lane. As the ker-thump of the front and rear wheels sounded I brought up the half sandwich I’d eaten, plus the cornflakes I’d had for breakfast. Oh yes, and the three slices of tinned peach father had put on the cornflakes before pouring the milk.

  The peaches came out in lumps, still the same bright orange.

  “I’m sorry,” my father muttered to no one in particular. He didn’t know what to say. Shortly after, he wound his window down more, and my mother did the same. I suppose they thought they’d leave the smell in the back with me, but you know cars. It was everywhere. Mother got us to stop off the expressway, and they tried to clean up the mess.

  I was useless. I couldn’t get out of my mind the sight of the limping mother trying to save the baby dogs with her last effort. I can see even now the four flat shapes pasted on the roadway. I can still feel the double thump as we rode over the poor lady dog.

  Night, and as he kissed me goodnight, father said, “Don’t forget the other one, darling. The little one in the bush didn’t get run over.”

  That was something. But in the night I was wakened by the tailend of a nightmare. I saw the whole thing again, this time the motherless puppy struggling helpless through the bush and I stumbling in the dark after it, calling, “Here, pup! Here, pup!”

  After trying to go back to sleep again to bring the dream to a happier conclusion, I lay awake for hours.

  When I went back to sleep all I could dream of was standing still in the blackness of the bush willing the pup to find its way back to the road. I willed it to sit patiently by the verge so passersby could see it, not to take any steps on to the road, and preferably fifty meters past the skins—they would be flat by then: no ker-thump—so a kind-hearted motorist would see what had happened and stop to pick it up, traffic permitti
ng.

  When I had adjusted all the conditions for the safe return to a civilized home for the puppy, I woke. Immediately I remembered that the puppy hadn’t been seen as we passed the spot, that it was miles from the smallest township, and I began to cry. It seemed to me then that all the sorrow in the world was concentrated in that small bundle of fur. I imagined lifting it in my arms, its little stomach bulging, and all its bones soft under its fur.

  “Make it safe,” I whispered, but I didn’t know who I was whispering to.

  The following night I dreamed of them again, but this time all were alive and they were mine and I had them on my bed and I fell asleep stroking the littlest one, then the others in turn, then the mother with warm eyes.

  The Man From the River

  The man who disappeared into the creek with his blow-up baby in its baby chair came back on the King’s Birthday that year, at eleven in the morning. This time he ascended to our street, the first above the bushland reserve, and carried floppy plastic bundles that he took round the streets until he found undeveloped ground, where he blew up his house and bed and chairs and settled down there.

  Kids shot at him with guns, but didn’t collapse his constructs. Father said they were made of self-healing plastic. He was there until the beginning of July. We didn’t have a community in any ancient sense of the word, but bit by bit, information was passed around. It was mother’s birthday before we heard that the blow-up man had gone. He deflated his house, went back to the creek and disappeared.

  The Wandering Crowd

  They had never been along our street, never even within sound of our place. We’d heard of them occasionally in the next suburb.

  It was Sunday, I was standing around while my father did things in the rockery bordering the front of our place. I called it helping.

  The sound came from several valleys away, it rose and fell; it was the sound of an unknown beast. Round that way the streets were bitumen and the footpaths concrete. The tramp of feet was the dominant sound of the beast, and mixed with it a low sound, the sum of many voices. Every few minutes, the voices were raised in what was a howl and a roar from the distance, but which we knew, from others, was shouts and angry bellowing.

  Most of the time they walked, and when police came they crowded on to footpaths, but the police didn’t often worry them. It would have been a twenty-four hour a day job, and everyone had a relative in the crowd.

  I watched in the direction of the fitful din. I saw it turn a corner a kilometer away, and go up a steep hill obscured by houses. By the time the leaders disappeared, the sound came to us of the beast with a thousand heads and no brain. My father, though he was stooping over some tufts of grass—or valuable plants—straightened and stood, as if he’d heard it a fraction before I did.

  It went away for minutes, then it must have turned along the highway and passed some cross streets which channeled the sound toward us, for a great tumult hit us for several seconds, then was cut off. The highway was level at that place, and shortly I heard the sound of running feet on concrete, like gunfire.

  “Dreadful sound,” father said.

  I was listening.

  “Can we take the car and go to watch?” I asked after a bit.

  “No use. They’re on the highway. You never know where they’ll turn off.”

  “I’ve never seen them,” I said wistfully.

  “Keep it like that. When they turn they’re likely to charge. Sometimes that crowd grows to ten thousand. Ten thousand directions average out into something like a liquid, with density and viscosity, pouring through the streets.” That’s how he spoke, sometimes.

  Another time he defended them, saying the description of the wandering crowd as superfit idiots was unjust; in this mood he allowed them some individuality.

  “Some run for philosophical reasons,” he said. “Some see themselves as joggernauts. Most are filling time, killing time. It’s an outlet for the Frees. Some do it for the knee rot or the calf slump.”

  Looking back now I think they were running in fear of time.

  A Man in Malthus Parade

  A Mister Amundsen, descendant of the explorer, had joined the wandering crowd when he was younger and been caught up in its depredations. In those days the crowd did bad things; it was common for them to go through shopping centers and lay waste anything in their path. Amundsen had been a leader then, for a brief six months. He lost his speed and his originality, and one day the crowd kept going straight when he’d turned off. He noticed the different direction of sound, and joined in the back of the crowd. A month later he retired.

  After that he put on so much weight that he lost all thought of going back to wandering. He developed a bear-like shamble, with head inclined; his shaggy auburn hair spread all over his body, thick on his chest and back and thighs, but it was rubbed off his kneecaps by his working trousers and only grew again in summer when he went about in shorts.

  He became more bear-like, his employer moved him away from the public view at first, then when people sought him out to look at him, moved him back to the enquiry counter. It was a timber yard, and apart from contractors, they supplied weekend carpenters with the pine that grew like a weed through the land.

  Harold, one of his sons, was in the same year as I was. He had to repeat first class.

  Diggers

  The Australian digger had been given a new meaning by the system of declaring areas free for archaeological investigation. People were digging everywhere. Holes appeared in the city, holes not meant for the foundations of buildings; building sites were invaded at weekends by people licensed to dig. Everywhere, Australians were digging, searching for evidence of the past.

  In the ground that swept away below our street, and formed a valley with only one side, people were dotted about. It seemed they preferred to dig in places where they thought no one had been. Students used core methods, others gelignite. Dogs stood around, puzzled, children enjoyed the play with dirt, while the serious business went on of looking for the past.

  (Wouldn’t it be good if humans took the next step, and tried hard to think with goodwill of the future of the race?)

  In the old days of what was called full employment, work had become a ritual observance, so that one’s energy was taken up mostly with one’s weekend relaxation and the re-creation of the body, and very little with work, which was often little more than a matter of reacting, recognition and habit, and doing the damned thing as quickly as possible to get away from it.

  Now, of course, the emphasis has shifted. Work, so long despised, is become a privilege; people scratch their heads for something useful to do.

  Moses Betts and Ermelinda

  I took Ermelinda Betts home on Monday when she fainted in the schoolyard. They allowed her to rest in the teachers’ room, then when she got up she caused such a noise in class that they got rid of her, giving her to me to take home. She lived in Newton Crescent.

  Her father was working in the front garden, picking out small plants that didn’t fit his idea of flowers. He looked at me with two round eyes that blobbed at me from the muzzle of a bulldog, then waddled toward his daughter, caught her by the shoulder and—I thought—was about to hit her. He didn’t, but all the while he held her he seemed to be torn between violence and moderation, holding her hard enough to make her cry out, but not yet hitting her with his outstretched other hand. He didn’t seem able to let her go.

  I pulled her other arm, intending to take her inside to her mother. I was supposed to get a piece of paper signed to say Ermelinda had been delivered and received, then I could go back to school. I pulled her, sensing her father had finished with her and was not going to punish her by hitting. He was playing, surely. I pulled, and pulled, then suddenly his hand slipped from her shoulder and I had Ermelinda, but some of her dress stayed in the bulldog’s hand.

  I took her with me to her mother.

  “A bulldog outside did that,” I said, to get Ermelinda off the hook with her mother.

/>   Her mother made no sign that she understood. She looked sad, and signed the paper, and gave me a slice of bread spread with hundreds and thousands.

  Ermelinda Betts always helped hurt things, the more so if they were little. Once she chased a hurt bird for three hours before she caught it and ministered to it. She fixed it up, exhaustion and all. Animals too large seemed to lack the necessary cuteness for her; those too small, such as insects, weren’t large enough for her affection to be given full play.

  If a bird, an ideal size, was hurt too badly to be helped back to normal flying, she put it to sleep. Kids who lived near Einstein Crescent had stories about her wielding the spade or Moses Betts’s pruning shears to stamp the suffering mercifully out of a crippled mynah or shot sparrow.

  “Watch out for Mister Betts!” called Ermelinda, as I left, skirting the bulldog, who looked after me with his nose wrinkled in the air.

  “Yes,” said the mother half-heartedly. “Don’t speak to him.”

  I knew more than that. If you spoke to Moses Betts, and he spoke in a certain way back to you, cuts would appear. Bruises. Once he wounded a salesman at a distance with a look. If he spoke with a fierce emphasis, a jerk of the head, a viciousness, he could cut.

  A hole appeared in the side of his maths teacher’s neck the first time he used this power, which he hadn’t known he possessed. The maths teacher was rushed off to the staff room, the kids were searched—but Moses Betts was not uncovered.

  If he wasn’t feeling well, all he could produce was a scratch. No stray cats or dogs lasted long near his house.

  His power didn’t work on his family, but when he abused himself for some mistake or stupidity, as some do, it worked on him. His face was pocked with old scars from self-criticism and annoyance.

  Testicles

  The day I saw Challenger Lutherburrow come down hard on the bar of his friend Gay Donohue’s bike, was a clear, grass-smelling day. There had been rain; it had run off our blocks onto the nature strip running by our rockery, where water lay in pools, unmoving.