A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Universal Love of a Mother

  My mother loved.

  All sorts of mothers are remembered for all sorts of crazy things. Some grown men are proud of the way Mum used to knock them from one end of the house to the other.

  “Had a punch like Les Darcy. Lifted me off the ground,” they’ll say.

  Some mothers talk all day, some work like Trojans, some drink or play up or dream. My mother loved. She loved everything. She told me so.

  When my mother loved me; you know, turned the love-ray on me; I could go missing from it and the love didn’t miss me; she didn’t miss me; the love poured out whatever I did, wherever I went. It was as if once the love had been started, I wasn’t necessary.

  What did she love? Everything.

  Did she love rocks and birds and dead wood and plastic? She did. Did she love sunshine and rain, war and peace, sickness and health? Yes.

  She could be hungry, deprived, abused, unloved, but still she loved.

  Whom did she love? Everyone.

  How can there exist in our world someone who can love everyone and everything?

  Did she love Clag paste, IXL jam, Twinings tea, saucepans and socks? Yes.

  Did she love wooden desks, leaves of trees, concrete steps, electricity wires, old newspapers, typewriter covers, string bags, camera tripods, tubes of plastic glue, large paper bags, colored umbrellas, roomy slacks, high shoes, birdlime-spattered statues, department stores, the grey timber of wharves, the little waves at the top of the tide?

  She loved all these. And more than these, her love went through obstructions, rayed out and embraced all that was, all that had existence.

  She told me so.

  I Saw No Sign

  I saw no sign of this great love. No sign, that is, in action; no practical sign. The nuts and bolts area of love was, you might say, not greatly to the fore.

  I don’t think she loved father, though he loved her. (No one had ever treated father badly, so I suppose it was easy for him to treat mother well.)

  (I remember once he was referring with affection to something she said years before.

  “But don’t you remember? You said—‘You’re the only man I ever knew that could run to four in an hour—’ ” Four what? They didn’t say.

  “I was joking,” mother said shortly.

  “But don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “You really don’t?”

  “It didn’t happen,” said mother, putting an end to talk.)

  Yet she loved me when I was small. I have a wealth of mother-memories; she was round me, over me, everywhere there was her smile, her face, huge on my horizon, noting everything I did, touching and teaching me continually.

  When did she do her notes when I was a baby? That’s a question.

  It must be because of what she did once, that I grew up feeling that mother was love. How then, at twelve, could I say that I saw not the slightest sign of her great capacity for love? The very word love in connection with her was continually reinforced by father; he was the one who said the word. All my mother had left of this great love was the look she turned on you. There was no mistaking love in her great dark eyes as they rounded, fixing on you, and the gleam of reflected light on her iris fixed you—more, even than her velvet black pupils did—and somehow something in you was sucked toward her, toward the depths in those eyes, and you felt the first enveloping swirls of the power she had to project the feeling of love.

  I suppose that could be one of the nuts and bolts of love. Why am I so hard on her?

  The Fat Lady’s Story

  When she was on the lavatory I picked up one of the notes that snowed her table, and returned it later.

  Fat Lady in George Street. 1.51 pm

  Paddles. (then a gap) fatty approaches. Flapping legs all of a piece with stubby feet. Black coat, white fatshoes, balding. To have less. Hairy cover of the head. Head to foot shortly, receding feet, receding life, hair energy, breath, all receding. Baptist church with brick fence as it always did. Gestetner fiercens in the sun, fire texture bricks heating towards the north. s northern, lady southens in a shallow curve. Do you or I or anyone know what makes the gooseflesh southward go? Those fat feet have plunked down one after the other chasing kids and grabbing pots boiling over. All for others. Yet if they’re kids and family, it’s not so much others. And if it’s sick neighbors it’s not others or work for any others it’s not others. Others are not others. There are no people who can be thought of as others. All people are us. This fat woman my sister. The warm fence an old friend. The plaque outside Gestetner building a memorial to one of my brothers in bronze. The sun himself brought life to all of us. Dear dear sun. Lovely ugly shoes that carry cracked feet hurrying to serve others. They should be kissed. Where they slop over the edge of her shoes.

  The paper was yellowed like old newspaper. There was nothing to tell what year it was. The dashes were bits of words I couldn’t make out. It may have been last week or years ago when she, too, was twelve. I have no explanation. I cannot understand my mother.

  Fly Away Home

  My father had few close friends. But now and then he would meet people who obviously wanted to make friends, and, unaccountably, he would be the one to forget to return a call.

  I tackled him about it.

  “I cannot allow myself to stay in the company of people from whom I can get nothing,” he said.

  Why not? He was an actor, not a banker, accountant, businessman.

  “My hold on my own identity is so loose, so slippery—and I don’t really know what it is I am holding—that I feel if people get too close to me I may somehow melt into them or become them in some way so that I, whoever I am, may disappear. If my image of them gets too near me, if it takes up too much of my mental screen, I fear that my own outlines may blur and I won’t know where I am.”

  The sincerity in his voice had to satisfy me. I don’t understand father all that well. I went out into the garden and found a ladybird on a leaf of the jasmine.

  Ladybird ladybird, fly away home

  Your house is on fire, your children are gone.

  The sun felt faintly friendly. What did father ever actually get from other people? He never seemed to suffer from the trivial restlessness other husbands showed, but perhaps he had a deep need for change—having learned this house, this wife, this situation so thoroughly that it began to seem not quite true—and something was blocking him, something inside him.

  Why Do Men Like Girls?

  I asked my mother why men liked girls, at a time when I was sure she wasn’t thinking of her notes.

  When I was a year or two younger the stock answer seemed to be that they’re pretty, or strong, or good at lessons or they speak nicely, answers tailored to remedy specific disabilities in the child asking the question.

  But for some time I’d had an agreement—not exactly that, since it was something I’d laid down: whether she would agree to it was another matter—that she would answer me as if I wasn’t a child.

  She looked at me, turning her head slowly in my direction, picking me up in her visual field while her head was still turned well away and keeping her eyes glued on my face while her head completed its arc toward me. It was an uncanny performance; rather the sort of skill you would expect in good sportspeople, used to keeping their eyes on the ball, or good hunters keeping their eyes on the quarry.

  “It’s something unexplainable.”

  I waited. So did she.

  “That isn’t much, is it?” I said.

  “It’s their one great disadvantage.”

  I could see there could be disadvantages in liking.

  “It’s their hormones,” she added.

  Each time, between each oracular sentence, a pause.

  “It’s a trap females lay. Like perfume, or a trail of goodies.”

  Another pause. Any talk from me, would have given her an excuse to pick on something I said, and sidetrack me.

  “Because they’
re so bloody stupid,” impatiently, and she turned away to her writing.

  I went away to my room to practice saying No to mean Yes, as Aysha Kemal said she did.

  I didn’t have my heart in it: I was too much caught up in why men liked girls.

  Why did the pelican stand on one leg?

  Rosemary McDevitt

  As we started to bud in the region of the chest and some began to bear a different fruit elsewhere every four weeks, the boys seemed to want more than ever to play with us in the playground. They had always run around corners and tried to push us over or generally thump us, but now the out-of-class activities were more violent. Nothing they did hurt me. I was stronger than most of the boys, and much bigger.

  Rosemary would never join in. One single touch up the leg would give her hysterics.

  She was pretty, attractive, intelligent. When one boy ran up behind her in the paddock on the way home from school and lifted the back of her school skirt high up her back, she reared like a horse, sprang into the air, and when she hit the ground she broke her arm.

  She didn’t know it was broken until several days later, when the swelling didn’t go down. Her parents didn’t like X-rays, so she wasn’t sent for one straight away.

  Other times she dislocated her shoulder and chipped her right elbow in violent reactions from boys putting their hands up her dress when she wasn’t expecting it, or reaching up softly and tugging at her pants, or brushing against her in the crowded playground and getting a poor little nipple between finger and thumb.

  Rosemary kept up a sort of allegiance to an honorable way of behaving. She never told on the boys, just blew up internally, and fell over or banged against something.

  Her reactions were so exaggerated a copy of ours that we enjoyed having her with us. She made us feel better about the sudden alarm of feeling the pencil stuck up between the cheeks of our bottoms from between the slats of our chairs.

  The boys went to great lengths to get other kids blamed. One had an extended radio aerial so he could reach Rosemary from several desks away. Marie-Louise gave her hell with bits of string dangling softly on her legs.

  She was so sensitive she felt the fingers of the sun, and the wind’s cool lips.

  For fun we ganged up on Rosemary one day. I grabbed her from behind, she couldn’t move. Sherry Porter grabbed her legs, Serena Small lifted her skirt. Griselda Cadbury and Gloriana Doig approached Rosemary’s thighs with slow fingers.

  I say approached, for Rosemary’s fright was mostly in the anticipation.

  Rosemary screamed. We gagged her. Raina White held the gag in and the noise was reduced.

  Griselda and Gloriana gave her the tickles from the backs of her ankles up to her bottom seam—it was a bluish pink with small flowers embroidered on the edges.

  Would she come? Would she merely go off her head?

  It was the last time we ganged up on Rosemary. She slumped, and we couldn’t bring her round. We laid her down, arranged her uniform and left. She didn’t report us.

  Her full name was Rosemary Simone McDevitt. I looked it up in father’s book of names. Rosemary means Mary’s Rose. Simone means Heard by the Lord. In protecting her rose she certainly could have been, if we hadn’t gagged her. He might have told her what McDevitt means.

  Certainly her future was ahead, waiting for her to catch up; it spoke the language of pain.

  Empty Bodies

  The antiwork lobby that tried in class to muck up the whole operation were the ones that got nothing out of the system; no success, no pats on the head, no prizes. They reminded me of the old peasants in English history that touched the forelock and said:

  Lord bless the squire and his relations

  And keep us in our proper stations;

  except they were trying to ensure that none of the rest of us got above our proper stations. (No one told me this; it’s my own opinion, so don’t blame father: education is training to win, to leave the losers behind.)

  Q: What gets bigger the more you take from it?

  A: A hole in the ground.

  Ignorance does, too.

  Sometimes I imagined I was hundreds of meters high in the air, looking down; all I could see moving were the bodies of school-children walking in the grounds: empty bodies.

  The Tit Clash

  The tit clash was a horrifying invasion of privacy; it was a sudden demoralization, a personal shock; a triumph of male over female.

  They had to get their arms wide and bring their hands together quickly enough to take the girl by surprise, on the outside of the left and right breasts. In the same movement you clashed them together, trying to get the nipples to meet.

  In a good tit clash the nipples never met: instead, there was a satisfying sound of flesh, the inside flesh of each breast clashing together. So there were three sounds:

  1. The sound of the hands on the outer edges of the breasts.

  2. The sound of the tit clash.

  3. The sound of the outbreath of air from the victim’s lungs.

  We were aged twelve, in our group; we had no tits to speak of. Just the same, boys came round and tried to do it to us. Bigger boys looked down on us younger girls and wouldn’t be seen dead trying to give our little pimples a tit clash, but boys in first and second year attempted the impossible.

  For such imps, there was a range of reprisals. Bear in mind that while they were tit clashing their hands were together and in front of them—their sides and lower fronts were completely unprotected. You should have seen them spring back in fear when the area round their penis was attacked, and the little treasure bag in which they carried, as in a mobile factory, their dubious gifts to the future.

  The One Tit Crunch

  The one tit crunch was more of a hit and run attack. They kept the palm of one hand flat and crunched one breast quick against the rib cage. It was less spectacular than the tit clash, but more painful.

  I do not relate these clashes and crunches as a spectator; I was both cruncher and clasher, though I didn’t invent the game.

  Boys and girls could play, it made you wary and prepared to defend yourself. Whoever stopped and talked to you, even if only to jeer or stir you up, was a likely attacker, or recipient, of a tit clash or a one tit crunch. If it was a male person, you were under immediate threat because of your possession of female sex organs. This threat was better countered first than dumbly awaited.

  How many balls of string

  Does it take

  To reach the moon?

  I guess it depends on how big those balls are.

  Pistol Shots

  Marie-Louise Fienberg was her full name. Like the rest, we were sometimes whispering together, friends for a day, and sometimes talking about each other, apart in different groups: enemies for a day. She cared for nobody and nothing, and I admired her.

  In our school play, The Duel, she had to pause, listen, and say “Hark, I hear the pistol shots.” She rehearsed unwillingly and always in a dead voice, but Plumpton, the teacher, said that would have to do.

  On the night, Marie-Louise struck a pose, listened, and declaimed loudly, “Hark, I hear the shostal pits.” That was wrong. Her mouth formed “shit.” Her face screwed up, remembering. She remembered all right: she was acting. Spoiling the play.

  “Hark, I hear the shistal pots.”

  Audibly she said, “Oh Christ.”

  She gave it a third try, and roared, “Hark, I hear the postal shits!”

  Laughter filled the hall.

  The failed actress waited for a break in the noise and said clearly, “Oh fuck it,” and paused dramatically. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is my exit, and the end of my stage career.” And walked off stage and down to where her parents sat. They tried to get her to go away, out of sight, but she wouldn’t. She beamed and pointed at her Mum and Dad as if to say “I’m with them.” Nothing embarrassed Marie-Louise.

  Her Dad, Ezra Fienberg the newsagent, had the wound of a bullet below his right shoulder, a bullet wound t
hat didn’t heal. The sign of its going in was plain, but there was no place to show where it came out. No X-ray plate showed the bullet, though he’d had more than half a dozen done.

  Was it made of plastic? people said. They knew from recent wars that plastic fragments don’t show on X-rays.

  No, there was no plastic bullet in there, just an inward-lipped hole that didn’t bleed.

  He was proud of it, and it brought business his way. He had a double reason for pleasure. I daresay it was one of the peculiarities of our suburb that he didn’t say how the hole was made, and no one asked. Everyone was different, everyone was separate; there was no community shoulder to cry on.

  The Great Banded Bosom-Fly

  Outside our classroom the hill sloped down toward Hunter’s Creek. Slim trees stood straight, birds sang loudly. We watched out the windows when we could. Some birds were bullies, some sneak thieves, some tried to boss the others, but couldn’t get them to obey.

  Playtime, lunchtime, and sometimes for lessons we sat outside. Delivery men came into the school in their handy, well-used and often grimy vehicles. We—around eight of us in our gang—used to wonder aloud about the equipment they carried under the zips of their trousers. Were they just as handy, well-used and grimy as their vehicles?

  For most of us it wasn’t till a year or two later that we realized what care they took with their personal equipment; just how clean, pink, scrubbed and shiny—on the horn—they really were. Well-used, too. And handy.

  Let us return to our lessons in the lovely shade of the smooth-barked erect eucalypts that mostly had only a small crown of foliage above all that length of smooth pale trunk.