A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Where’ve you been, Everett?

  There and back to see how far it is.

  Who with?

  Me, myself and I.

  Where’s your sister?

  In her skin.

  If You Yell Before You’re Hurt

  If you yelled before you were hurt, you were out. That was the rule of Befores.

  They held a big stick or a rock over your hand, which you held, knuckles up, on the asphalt, and brought it down hard, pretending to crush the hand.

  A centimeter above the hand they stopped, usually. There was the odd accident which we all knew was more than an accident: it was to make us believe in the power of the threat, and the bigger boys made sure there was a slip often enough.

  The Befores game worked beautifully with my fellow females, and that was part of its purpose. They—the boys—felt they were so different, they wanted us to feel they were different, and more powerful, and always to be feared; they were preparing us to fear them and be nudged into position easily when they and we were grown into adults, and out of the machine of childhood.

  Cowardy, cowardy custard

  Can’t eat mustard.

  Love

  Today I saved the Sunday boy. I only ever see him on Sundays when he goes to church and comes home past our house; I think he lives down in Pascal Place. With me helping him, he just managed to get past two savage girls who attacked him in the waste land where the big pipes are for the drainage. I held them off while he ran down the street. I hope he makes it next week, I can’t be out helping people all the time.

  It was a quiet day and I stayed inside, reading.

  I found out just how it is that babies and love are made. The female opens herself and the male puts part of him into her. It is much the same sort of thing I saw father doing with mother on the bed on the day before my seventh birthday.

  As I was looking at the series of pictures that showed the male and female right from undressing their bodies until it was finished, I was filled with such a warm feeling—like a tide of soft liquid feelings of love—that I couldn’t help saying to myself how beautiful it was, and how wonderful to have that to look forward to. I wonder when it will happen to me.

  I found the book in the high part of the bookshelves. I stood on a chair.

  There was dust on the top shelf. I disturbed some, and it settled back down. Perhaps the same dust was here in this room—getting disturbed, then settling again—right from its beginning.

  Seventeen Years Underground

  I was amazed when I learned from father at breakfast that some of the cicadas that entertained us in the hot weather had been in the ground for up to seventeen years before their brief entry into the daylight world from their round holes in the ground, to fly about and be caught by children or birds and fill the air well on into the night with their steady machine-buzz.

  Seventeen years; a short time flying; then nothing. Bare husks clinging to trees was all that remained of their larval stage, brown and light as feathers, then when they were dying and dead they too became light as their chrysalis, their overcoat, and ceased to be. They passed on the future to others.

  What a length of time to be a possibility!

  I think now how much better not to be born, but to remain a possibility. To have emerged when I did was not just the beginning for me. I was like the cicada: emergence into the breathing world of daylight was the beginning of my end.

  When I think thoughts like this my food begins to have no flavor.

  Revenge of the Slaughtered and Sliced

  On our West Australian weeping peppermint, the lowest, widest branch relaxed softly at the ends and fine leaves hung down to my face. A growth on the thinnest piece of branch fascinated me. It was no more than a swelling at first, thickening into a bulb-like growth about ten centimeters from the tip. The growth took the color of the brown pieces of tree where the sap no longer traveled, for they were dead: a darker, stringy brown.

  With that growth in my eyes, I looked for others every time I went near that tree. It was in the far corner of our yard and the cricket ball rolled up that far when I made a big hit.

  Other trees had thickened growths. I saw leaves with knobby, fibrous lumps in their middles. Not the lumps that meant a burrowing or house-building insect, but a lump that was part of the flesh of the tree.

  The red-flowering gum out the front had lots. Its leaves, too, were often misshapen. And the pittosporum, too, with its infected, wavy leaves, and its borers that suddenly came into the light at a joint of the tree and the rest of the branch first died, then hung down and grew brown, waiting for a wind to blow it off and away.

  I took some to school for the nature table. In fact I took a project of them, so many that the teacher made a fuss of it. I did the same thing with various grasses that I found in the paddocks down from the other side of the road: one for branches, one for leaves, one for grasses.

  I wondered if there were other deformities in the things we ate.

  “Do the people at the slaughteryards look specially for lumps in the animals they cut up?” I asked father.

  “Of course they do,” he said. I knew he didn’t know.

  “I mean, in the muscles themselves. Inside,” I persisted.

  My mother told me not to make people sick. No one knew, in our family.

  It was disappointing, but there was some satisfaction in my having thought of it, when they hadn’t.

  I think people could consider more closely the animals in abattoirs. When their heads are off and their bodies drained of blood and they’re split up the middle, does anyone have a look for tumors? Well, do they?

  Are you sure? Or do you just leave it to some Free on the spot who is lucky to have that job?

  How does anyone know that cancers in animals won’t spread into the bloodstreams of us that eat their bodies? Cancers on their eyelids, round their eyes and eyeballs, can be seen by the growers of the meat, and I guess they do something about it, but I don’t know what.

  But cancers and tumors within the muscles, attaching to arteries; the bits of lung, the cancerous liver, the kidneys with tumors inside: who looks for them? Does anyone actually know that animal cancers can be cooked and eaten and are a help to good health?

  And all you vegetarians, don’t laugh. Trees get tumors; so do their leaves; so do grasses. Are there any in wheat? Beans? Peanuts? Cancer in carrots? Cabbage carcinoma? How about the grains that go to make your breakfast cereals? What do you know of them? Or do you leave all that to the authorities?

  Humans love to have their revenge: wouldn’t it be understandable if sheep had their throats slit, cattle stunned and pigs left hanging screaming, all with the knowledge that they would have a little revenge on their consumers?

  And in the killing, who knows if there is or there isn’t a death change, a chemical suffusion through the meat in the instant of death, a compound of fear, that takes its toll of the eater?

  (I wonder if they have satellites in outer space monitoring our thoughts.)

  Thoughts You Never Have Again

  Kids have plenty of thoughts, but not always the words to dress them up in. They stay, the undressed ones, in you somewhere, then maybe you remember them later. I’m remembering now a thought I had when I was ten. It floated round in my head, but never got said.

  The thought is this: Everyone is unique and important. And every thing is, too. Yet without any single thing or person the world still goes. The planet still drives on round its circuit. The machines that serve us, drive on through the night, unresting. Yet when you look back to each single thing the world can do without, you are faced with the conviction that it is important. And nothing like it—or like that person—has ever existed.

  Maybe the word I’ve left out is “now.” Maybe everything is unique and important now.

  It’s not much of a thought to bring back from childhood, but it’s a genuine thought, and when I was young it was one I often had, without putting it into words.


  I guess that’s one for the scientists, having a thought for so many years. I bet they don’t know where it hides, or if it’s there for all those years as a bundle of words, or some other thing—chemicals maybe—waiting to be reconstituted.

  But the good thing is, though we don’t know where the thought is, we have it. Unaware of the process involved, I lay in my bed all those years ago, listening to the sound of the wind in the electricity wires and thinking of the creek muttering and clinking at the bottom of our valley and how the creek was the brother I never had.

  But thoughts you never have again: are they still in there somewhere?

  We Had a Zoo Excursion

  I loved the deer. Their yard wasn’t big, and they seemed to crowd together a lot of the time, but I liked their dappled backs, fine legs, their sensitive noses, big eyes, the quick movements they made, the lovely soft curve of their throats.

  The lions were limp and lazy, the tiger neurotic, walking round his yard in endless ellipses, the panther seemed like a theatrical animal with its light green eyes, but the leopard looked at me. She looked at me with a sarcastic pair of eyes, and even turning she looked at me from the corner of one eye. I thought she was saying we had secrets, she and I. She was the nearest one, in appearance and mood (on a far larger scale, of course), to the cats I knew from Heisenberg Close. It was noticeable that the keepers had taken more precautions with her than with the other cats; they knew she could jump high and climb practically anywhere. I loved climbing too.

  I went home with the aquarium fish swimming in my memory; the brilliant birds making short flights in my eyes; the proud, tenacious, clever leopard in my heart.

  Next Day At School

  It was the first time we’d been invited to do a composition on just anything. I sat at my desk and tried to think, but nothing came. What? What? I dare say I ought to have thoughts, but after all, who was I? It seemed in those moments that I was only a short step away from being a toddler and a baby, with father taking photographs of me on the leopard skin rug. The rug. The rug? The leopard skin—the leopard!

  Once upon a time that leopard skin had a leopard in it, a real live animal that hunted, and though not as fast as a cheetah, was much stronger, and able to take its prey up into the branches of trees.

  I didn’t know all that then. I wrote about a gentle leopard that loved to walk to school on a path that led between the tall silent trees of the forest, across a wooden bridge, and up a hill to the school with the shady trees and the grass trying to grow near the flagpole and a big bronze bell hung in the playground, and at the end of the day went home to a nice mother leopard and waited for father leopard to come home from the theatre.

  Celts Never Forget

  The Campbells were subject to a specific and original disability, and in the school it was referred to as McDonald’s Revenge.

  Acky Campbell had a bulge below his belt for months in fourth grade, and it was only at swimming that anyone discovered what it was. Astrid Wagner raced along from the end of the dressing sheds at the pool and told us Acky had something red coming out of his stomach.

  “His guts are coming out,” she said. “Sticking out of his guts.”

  Several of the girls, like Clandra Webb, said bullshit, but it was sufficiently likely for the rest of us to listen.

  “How red is it?”

  “Pinky red. Sort of shiny.”

  “Bullshit,” said Griselda Cadbury.

  “Bum,” said Rebecca Shatley.

  “Knackers,” said Aysha Kemal.

  “Knickers, knockers and knackers,” added Emma Castleford. My friends Shanthi and Chrismi didn’t use those words. I was glad they weren’t there.

  “Show me,” I said to Wagner.

  She ran back to the end of the sheds, climbed up on the seats, then higher on the clothes hooks to look over the top of the brick wall.

  Acky was drying himself, and kept himself turned to the wall, away from the other boys. He was turned at right angles to us. Some of his guts were indeed outside his abdomen. I couldn’t tell what it was. In class next day I asked Miss Mullock about the organs of the lower stomach and what they looked like. I caught her give a sudden look toward Acky, and I knew his parents had set it up with her to protect him. It was going to be hard to get any angle or crack in the defense to get at Acky, and after I’d thought about it, I suppose I was glad. He was a snivelly kid then, the sort that never seems to notice the rounded end of the greeny-yellow blob of snot that came down out of his nostrils in fits and starts, sometimes disappearing back inside when he took a breath, other times hanging desperately out near his top lip and getting thinner in the middle. Once you got over the horror of the slime, it was interesting.

  I held him with a knee and my left hand against the brick wall of the toilets, and squeezed his appendage once myself, but he didn’t yell. He watched me to see if I was going to tell anyone, and was glad to be released.

  Joy of Flying

  I have told you how my mother insisted on my beauty, my health, how bright and clever I was. How I could do anything: I had only to try. All success could be mine, I could do whatever I wanted. All I had to do was choose.

  Choose . . .

  Never mind that I didn’t believe it completely. (And yet I did.) Her outrageous enthusiasm contaminated me with a recurring emotion that carried me up above the heads of all around me. I was a higher being than other children, other races; higher than all who lived before.

  There was great power in the emotion that got into me, enough to carry people who have it off the spot where they stand and transport them some distance away—to triumph, to revolution, to lovers; perhaps to disgrace.

  Stirring music sounded within my tunic-covered breast. And I could fly. I flew off the top of the assembly steps. I had to go up before the whole school and be punished for bullying. Acky Campbell had complained.

  The power in my mother’s emotion worked against the usual force of gravity, filled me like a wind, and carried me off into the air. I didn’t need to listen to the stupid headmaster or look at the stupid teachers or the stupid kids.

  From a standing position all I need to do is lift my arms and bring them down hard on to the resisting air, which then lifts me up. A few more flaps and with my head leaning forward and body nearly straight up and down, I move off through the air, above their heads.

  Way above. But:

  The higher up the mountain

  The greener grows the grass

  The higher up the monkey climbs

  The more he shows

  And it was cold up there. Cold as Calvary after closing time. Never mind. If I was different I had to endure the difference.

  The Thieving, Murderous Sea

  I got a lot of appreciation when I drew a picture in Craft of a phrase the teacher used in social science.

  “On the edge of affluence,” she had said, and I drew that.

  A fertile land extended back from the cliff edge, it was green with living things, colored with the many shapes of life. At the edge, the brink was sheer. Rocks had tumbled down and smashed to pieces at the bottom, and the roaring surf and breakers crashing on the rocks were specked with blood. Pieces of limbs rose and fell on the waves and the mouths of fish and sharks were full. The sea of poverty and defeat lay under the green and pleasant land, and bit by bit, rock by rock, the sea was reducing affluence to its level.

  I was congratulated. It was hung on the wall. Miss Mullock said I had vision. Father kissed me with pleasure when I told him, and praised my originality.

  To tell the truth, I didn’t know what it meant. If it meant anything. Though now I think about it a little more it does remind me of a thought that has chased through my mind in such a way that I’ve sort of seen the thought but never had the words to catch it in. And the thought? It occurred to me when the teacher spoke of the sea ebbing. It’s the land that’s ebbing, not the sea. Ebbing continually.

  Changes

  My father had one of the curiosit
ies made available by an economy that left no stone unturned in its search for the new, the original, the weird. It was a small book made from a collection of his family photographs, rather like the flip-through books in which sporting figures demonstrate cricket shots or football maneuvers. This flip-through book showed my father’s progress from babyhood. You flipped the leaves of the book and his face and body changed before your eyes. Very quickly, too. It was funny at first.

  When you looked, though, at an adolescent picture, then at a recent one, reduced photographically to a common size, it was hard to see why he had changed so much. Of course I knew why—it was the chemical effect of the years. But really, why those changes? And if you went right back to his wizened little old face at three days old and compared it with his face at eleven or nineteen or thirty—the change was not a fraction less than astounding.

  There were other compilations which showed the whole process from the cell division to the foetus to baby to toddler to schoolchild, adolescent, young person, adult, right through to old age and finally to the repose of the face in death. These were made up from many contributors and were used for instruction purposes. From time to time bans were placed on books showing the deterioration after death through to final decomposition and skeletal appearance, according to whether death was considered taboo at the time or a proper subject for public scrutiny.

  Our Culture

  Around the large shoppingtown center a few kilometers away, was a lot of Australia’s culture: car cleaning, car tinkering, car selling, car insurance, life assurances, printing, young girls in ballet tights, wealthy shift-workers, big plumbers, the knighted rich, knighted public servants, the subservient poor, working-class conservatives, fugitive policemen trying for a lower profile behind a mower, convalescent home chains, enlightened prisons where labor was cheap and laundry mass-processed, electronic engineers, cosmetologists, ambitious music teachers, towing engineers, automotive suppliers, hairpiece designers, swimming pool repairers, pizza huts, real estate agents, packaging manufacturers, riding schools for young ladies, steakhouse proprietors, taverns, boatmakers, panelbeaters, nurseries, optometrists, finance consultants, drug suppliers, professional games players, pigeon fanciers, unreliable actors, racing touts, mechanics, brick cleaners, park watchers, environmental midwives, auctioneers, thieves, butchers, nurses, bricklayers, clerks and carpenters, managers and married men, cashiers and cooks, builders and typists, limb fitters, waste analysts, industrial spies, thought detectives, behavior modifiers, shading off into the growing limbo of the token job and the supported poor.