A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Just when I was considering whether to make myself tired enough for sleeping, by imagining the map of the world with mountains, rivers and coasts, towns, boundaries, seas, and whether four colors were all that were necessary to show the joining of any states of different political shades, I fell asleep.

  An Experiment

  My first experience of saying in a strong voice: “Come here!” to a male was illuminating. It was Wim van Heeren, and he turned, startled, then came toward me obediently, as if fulfilling a duty. What to do with him? He looked like a dog.

  “I want you to find out when the bus leaves on Wednesday for basketball,” I said, fixing my gaze in the center of his nose.

  He turned and went away toward the administration office, and I went over toward the edge of the playing fields. I didn’t see him again that day, but my experiment had worked: I had ordered and someone had obeyed.

  I looked over to the horizon at the distant vertebrae of the land, called hills, and it seemed pleasant that the land was prone while I stood upright.

  Behind Many Things

  Behind many things father said to me—in the house; when he was off-guard; talking off the top of his head—I thought I detected a connection he made between moral and emotional matters. That perhaps being unhappy caused one to be immoral in action. And of course happiness arises from within, so one’s internal balance becomes the spring of everything. Or did he mean being unhappy was immoral?

  Is there any truth in this? (Don’t forget these are notes, merely; you have work to do, my reader.)

  The Compassionate Crane

  In the mountains where we went for a short trip in the car we stopped near shops away from the towns.

  “I’ll get something to eat,” father announced, and mother didn’t object. The air was cool and felt crisp in your nose. He looked at some old people sitting on a seat as he went into the shop, then stopped and talked to them on the way back.

  He talked, listened; listened, talked. He handed over the things he’d bought, to the old folks. He came back to explain until mother reminded him he’d brought nothing back. He went away again with an unfamiliar misery in his eyes.

  In the car he said, “Poor old devils. Don’t know where they are. Inspection on today, so they’re paid to get out of the way. Too scared even to tell me the name of the institution. Dozens of them walking around lost in the mountains because the place is overcrowded according to official geriatric specifications. They haven’t even got money for a pie.” He drove away, we began to enjoy driving and looking and getting out of the car at lookouts and eating our snacks in the air that was so cool and clean you felt it was washing your face.

  Coming back near where we’d seen the aged wanderers, we saw a tall, kindly crane moving toward a house that was obviously going to be moved away on a large truck. At a side window we saw movement.

  Father stopped the car and we looked. Movements inside.

  “Some of the oldies have taken refuge in there!” I said.

  “We’d better do something,” said father.

  As he got out of the car the crane moved near the house like the tall bird it was named for, slowly. Then stopped as if it detected life, another brain in there.

  We ran to the house and the crane saw us, stopping. A shout was raised.

  Father banged on the door, two old hobo-men ran out the back. Others were inside. They weren’t institution people at all, but derelicts. One old lady lay on a bed, paralyzed. The four others looked dumbly at us as if we had guns. They did not move. The crane driver came and got his lunch to share with them. My father had tears in his eyes. He called a taxi and paid for it to take them back where they belonged. Which was nowhere.

  The cab driver knew. He was a local. He let them out on the other side of town.

  I asked father why they were homeless when there was money available for all. He explained that some people were so rooted in the old ways that they could not be persuaded to apply for free money: they were ashamed to, and would rather have nothing and pay to the full the penalty for their failure in not being born with the abilities required to survive.

  It was weird, somehow. No one else minded.

  When we got home that night we were in time to see Mister Grech—the juvenile alcoholics notifier—come home, drunk again. I didn’t have a clear idea of what drunk was, so I looked as attentively as I could to his antics. I’d seen people staggering on late shopping nights and clumsy at our parties, and Mrs. Simonetta, but I was young enough to think that anyone might stagger any time he felt like it.

  Mister Grech, trumpeting like an elephant on mash and water, made it through the two trees that served as the entrance to his driveway—we had no gates or front fences in Heisenberg Close—breaking bushes, falling to his knees, falling sideways, falling over backwards, but in general going forward.

  It was funny.

  “The ochna’s gone,” said father. Mother took a brief look, then turned to her notes.

  “We’ll hear it if he buries himself in the holly.”

  I watched. Mother went ahead, hearing nothing.

  The variegated pittosporum suffered a broken left wing, the Geraldton wax bent over without breaking, the Christmas bush was thick-trunked and pushed him off, he reeled over to embrace the bottle-brush tree. From there he did an erratic dance from acacia to melaleuca—father called them like a race commentator—and subsided into the grevillea. Second last of all he broke down to the ground the spider flower he’d not long before got from the bush and tenderly planted.

  Then when he should have chosen either to go round the back of the house or make for the front door, he hesitated. That was too much: the holly tree reached forward and made him fall backwards. Mister Grech fell back into it and turned round, within its embrace, to get a footing and rise to a humanoid position.

  “Wait for it,” said father. I waited. It wasn’t until he was halfway to the front door that Mister Grech let out a fine collection of piercing roars. They lasted until his wife pulled him inside the door and slammed it, taking a quick look around and spotting us.

  “Ah,” said father, with satisfaction. “Not a bad voice. Projects well.”

  Sex Education at School

  Sex Education was a thorough book, a great seller and the most popular manual of its time. It became a standard work through its popularity. It was what my parents read, and I’d had a look at it when I was nine. Now we had it at school, and as well as that I read it when I came home from school of an afternoon, sitting rapt in description of tender acts that I couldn’t quite imagine. Did my father really—intentionally, deliberately—get his penis to enlarge, take it to mother and tell her he wanted the “sexual relief” the book described? I had heard kids say at school, imitating their Dads: “Here, Mum, cop this!” (Other fathers apparently confused wives with mothers.)

  I knew animals had only set times to do it. The thing that lay unanswered in my mind was: why are humans so different that they can do it anytime, constantly, needing only opportunity?

  Well, not really. I could feel in me, though I hadn’t even had a bleed, the answer. And my answer was: female animals got so much less pleasure in it because they couldn’t face the person who wanted their body, who wanted to pour hot kisses into their mouths and sperm into their body. Human animals got the pleasure of being front to front.

  The manual told me about love. None of the stories of the girls at school did, and none of the words overheard from the boys, or the actions of the big kids who picked up their girlfriends in cars at three-fifteen. Or the poem about the vicar’s daughter, where she’s covered in white stuff.

  But how did father get his penis to enlarge. Was it thought? Did he concentrate? Was it the sight of mother, or the thought of her, or because he was her husband and he had to?

  I wondered whether I should ask them to show me how it was done.

  And how did you know the sperm was in you? Body temperature is a constant. Their penis, their sperm, would
be the same temperature as your vagina. Allowing for varying states of health, there would only be a differential temperature of a degree or two. It didn’t strike me as anything spectacular.

  I looked with a new interest at the boys in the school playground after the sex lessons. Imagine them having so many millions of spermatozoa to put into a woman at the one time. They—humans—were incredibly fertile. And I was part of this and, at twelve, not far from experiencing it.

  I wondered how much of it came in one go; would it fill you up? I mean are there buckets of it? A cupful? Does it make a lump in your abdomen. But no, it’s a form of liquid, I think, from the way the teacher was talking. But if so, why doesn’t it all pour out when you stand upright? And also, do you have to lie down with your head below your feet to keep it in if you want to have a baby?

  How much did it really take to fill you up?

  I thought, as I went to sleep that night, of father’s penis lengthening and going in search of mother. And at the same time mother’s words like wraiths streamed from her collected notebooks and entered his brain, eating him alive.

  The Feet of Angela Blunt

  On the harbor excursion I had been sitting in one of the long seats with a view over the ferry’s rail. Angela Blunt sat above me.

  I knew she liked me, she was always looking at me. Her feet fitted between my shoulders, on the top of the back of the slatted seat. It was perfectly natural that, out of consideration, she should take off her sandals so that her left foot could somehow curl round my shoulder. From time to time it passed lightly over the top hem of my tunic and I felt the whispering touch of it so very gently on the skin of my neck where it led toward my back. At such times I looked round carefully, but she didn’t seem to be looking when my head turned.

  After the lunch and the note-taking the kids were spread out a little more, and on the journey back I was caressed by two Blunt feet. They were very pretty, small and hardly veined, and since she was an indoor person, white. Several blue veins under the skin branched down toward her toes after they crossed the high bone on her instep, reappearing dimly under the skin like the random veins in marble.

  Once I casually leaned my arm back, and the feet didn’t go away. With a further, still casual, movement my hand touched one and rested on it as if I was unaware. I left it there for a minute or two. I think I could feel her breathing, all the way up from the foot, just by the contact of my first two fingers with that affectionate piece of her.

  A week later she sent me violets. I knew, though there was no note with the card. Perhaps she expected me to know and to do something about it. I did nothing.

  Often in the playground I felt her looking at me, but when I turned—naturally; at ease; doing something else; in command of the situation—she was always looking a little to one side of me. And never met my eyes. It must have been a test, and I failed.

  The Vegetables

  In Church Hill High School we got the idiots again, after being free of them for the last of primary school. They mucked up constantly to give themselves an excuse for not having sufficient brains to do the work. We called them “vegies”—vegetables.

  The trouble was, their attitude was catching. It became the thing to do as little work as you could get away with. I found myself doing two hours homework and saying I did five minutes, just to be thought normal.

  Take the Money and Run

  Part of the face of an old coin appeared on Drago Bulatovic’s skin, halfway up his right arm and on the inside, just where the division is between the outer line of hairs and the smooth inside-of-the-arm skin.

  What date would it be? Everyone was interested.

  As more of it appeared, we saw it was old for this country, where history is spread so thinly on the ground. The tails side was outward, so all we had to look at for a few months was GEORGIVS V D.G.BRITT: OMN: REX F.D. IND: IMP and the old king’s head.

  Then Drago was kidnapped. Right there after school. It made headlines.

  Three weeks later he was returned, the penny still where it had been. Fear inhibited its growth; the men had felt the bottom edge of the coin and satisfied themselves its growth stopped at the skinline.

  But their first instincts were right. When it grew again, and finally fell off, it was that rarest of Australian coins: a depression penny, 1930.

  Another one appeared. Drago was guarded every day at school and at home. His family got notes to say he’d be killed if he produced any more 1930 coins. A supply would kill the demand.

  The next two were 1952, very common. He wasn’t harmed, and his family were ten thousand dollars better off.

  Kids like Drago had been born apparently equal, but the underlying and innate defeat had shown itself.

  Other kids were taken away from school when their personal growths became visible, and allowed to have as much time off as they wanted. Mostly they were glad to get back into the company of other kids, but of course, although those of us with no differences didn’t at all mind playing and mixing with them, there was a social division into those who may end up in the Serving Class, and those who never would.

  Drago and his family didn’t care about social divisions: they had the money, the only safe thing.

  As Good As Any Male

  My attitudes hardened, my ambitions were forming, however vague they might be. I would be as good as any man: as brave, as strong, as ruthless, as independent, as benevolently contemptuous of others.

  I invented the Super Jump, and kids from the streets around competed to beat me at it.

  It was in a large English oak in the paddock past the end of the street, which used to be a dairy; the tree once shaded the backyard of the dairyman’s house, but now the house was gone, and the small square of land had been kept for a playground. The Super Jump was from one branch to another, and these were rather special branches: they radiated out from the central trunk, gradually getting further away from each other. They were almost level in height.

  I started by doing it myself, then showing other kids after school.

  Only one of the boys could do it first time, and he was a little shrimp who only hung on because he was so light. They all started from the place I did, and couldn’t hang on. I was already as strong as boys! They all thought—all of them, big and small, weak and strong—that the weakest of them could start from my best effort! They didn’t, and couldn’t, and they went away swearing and never referring to the Super Jump again.

  I didn’t miss the lesson contained in their way of learning what I showed them: their arrogance, their confidence, in dismissing defeat from their minds. Because it was a female that won, the contest wasn’t worth competing in.

  I don’t deny my own confidence that I would be as good as any male. The next step to consider was their arrogance; their unreasoning, their unthinking, their bashing-their-heads-against-a-brick-wall persistence, confidence, optimism in the other things they did. For somewhere in there was their secret, the secret that made miserable little boys think they could compete with a large, well-built, athletic girl and start, and expect to progress from, her maximum mark!

  The Shrimp Who Dared

  The shrimp who dared to try my best jump on his first go—and who succeeded—stayed in my thoughts while I got my jumps to a distance where none of the kids around about could reach. He was small, and dark, with brown eyes that seemed to dart at you. Hopeless at schoolwork, yet lively and likeable, like an active small dog. His name was Ahmet Mehmet.

  It happened one Friday night when I had to go to bed early to get up at dawn next day for a trip with father. I lay on my bed looking out across the shallow valley that went down to the smaller creek, rose again, dotted with houses, to the steep street that climbed up to the main highway. The clothes I had on were loose and fell about my limbs as if they liked me in a casual way, and my skin seemed a little tight for the blood and the life bottled up inside me.

  Without intending it my hands wandered over the smooth tanned parts of my legs that we
re within easy reach. It was as if another person caressed me. I didn’t watch my hands’ progress over the territory of my self, preferring to be surprised, feeling the new sensations my fingers were generating. New sensations? I remembered dimly, without knowing it, that these were the feelings my mother’s touches had given me when I was small. What I was doing was finding what feelings I liked and where one had to touch to produce them.

  The tips of my fingers were the most effective tools for enjoyment of my self. The ecstasy I had been given by these touches when I was a baby was completed now, the time was bridged, by my ecstasy now; something in me was being fulfilled.

  Should I have made a study of the reactions of the different topographical features of my body to the fingertip stimulus . . . maybe my mother had such feelings and her endless notes were records of ecstasy?

  It was my first orgasm. Ahmet Mehmet did it: they were his fingertips. The question I didn’t face then was: why the shrimp?

  I think now it was because even then I went for someone I could manipulate, while having some little respect for him.

  No one knows how it is going to be with someone you can’t control, in a situation not familiar, but I daresay I will experience that in the future.

  And I Often Did

  From masturbation I turned briefly to history.

  The Heroes of the World’s Wars became one of my favorites. It was a big, comfortable book. I read in my room, on the lounge, at the dining room table, or outside, sitting in the box tree.

  Greatness, Hitler’s for so long undiscovered manuscript, was another favorite, alongside The Prince, which I liked only because Hitler had it by his bed: the minute instructions bored me.