A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Marie-Louise is drawing. I am beginning the set essay, “Tigers of the Sea.”

  I glanced across at her work. She drew two large breasts that sprouted wings and trailed a thick body crossed laterally with stripes, like a hornet. Underneath she wrote, “The Great Banded Bosom-Fly.”

  “What about ‘Tigers of the Sea’?” I said. She was supposed to do the essay too. “You pick your fucking nose, I’ll pick mine,” she said rudely. . . . fucking nose?

  Plumpton cheered up when she saw my essay. She put it aside to read to the class. Leafing though the pile she passed the bosom-fly, unsigned, and came to Marie-Louise’s “Tigers of the Sea.” We were reading something while the teacher looked through the essays. As I watched her face I knew ML had done it again. We called her ML to save time.

  “Do you really think, Fienberg, that any body of sailors that ever inhabited the globe and sailed the seven seas could possibly fight—never mind fight well, but fight at all—with names on the bows of their boats—”

  “Ships,” corrected Fienberg.

  “Ships, then, and on their lifeboats and equipment—”

  “Get to the point, Plumpton.”

  “Respect, Fienberg. Mrs. Plumpton.”

  “Never mind the self-pity. Call me Miss Fienberg.”

  “All right, Marie-Louise. All right. You tell me how men could fight for their country in ships with names like Vulnerable, Movable, Vincible, Domitable, Fatigable? And this? The frigate Pitiful!”

  “Frigate, yes,” repeated ML.

  “Frigate indeed,” added Plumpton. “Well, Miss Admiral Fienberg?”

  “Think back a bit, my dear respected Mrs. Plumpton. I wouldn’t lay this on you without good historical backing. Remember the Old Contemptibles?”

  She remembered. The class waited, yawning delicately on the brink of sleep.

  “Their enemies christened them that. And they wore it. Insisted on it. Did they fight lousy?”

  “Lousily. It’s an adverb.”

  “Same thing. So why shouldn’t sailors have a sense of humor?”

  “Don’t be impertinent.”

  “I think it’s pertinent,” said ML. Plumpton was pleased she knew the word.

  Plumpton looked back at ML’s essay.

  “You have imagination, Fienberg. Ships that move on the sea, over it, under it. You can’t have things like that.”

  “The creatives put imagination into words; scientists then know what to invent. Buck Rogers . . . Leonardo.”

  Plumpton screwed her nose. “Straight off the sci-fi shows, Fienberg. But these places: Tokyo, Alabama; Budapest, Illinois; Berlin, Saskatchewan. Are you making fun of the Americans again? And I suppose this is yours too?” She held up the bosom-fly. “May I ask what this is?

  “The great banded bosom-fly,” orated ML. Plumpton showed it round.

  “Go on, Fienberg. Explain. We’ll wait.”

  Marie-Louise began to sing:

  “Jesu lover of my soul,

  Let me to thy bosom-fly.”

  “That’ll do, Fienberg. We get the idea.”

  She liked Marie-Louise. Liked her a lot. Often we noticed her looking at ML in the playground, if you can imagine a wistfully predatory look

  I can.

  One Good Feature

  None of the rest of us thought it was much of a poem, but the English master, Mister Jagarnath, had a very high opinion of it, and put it in the school magazine.

  Here it is:

  I am the sister of a motor mechanic.

  I am the daughter of a bush carpenter.

  Maybe I will marry a plumber

  And be the mother of a civil engineer.

  When the magazine came out, with the poem proudly at the bottom of a page on the basketball team, she bore her poem proudly home and showed it to the Lutherburrow family, several of whom could read.

  The poems we wrote were far more inwardly directed.

  Lil had one good feature. Her fingers, from where they joined her hand, down to the nails, were a milky color tinged with pink. But already the dark hairs were hinting on the backs of the third joints, as they were apparent on her forearms and shouting on her shanks, between ankle and calf. I hoped she would keep one good feature when she was grown-up and hairy.

  The Thoughts of Mukami

  Zekia Mukami played soccer in one of the school teams, and cricket in summer, and had no fights in the playground; he was aloof, self-possessed and looked superior.

  One day his superior expression cracked, and his aloofness was abandoned and the anger in him came out with a rush. It was after the social science class; we had been discussing antidiscrimination laws of the past.

  “You can’t see you are insulting the people you make laws to protect!” he shouted in the playground at a group of us, as if history were in the present tense.

  “You are saying they’re helpless! But I tell you this: the black races have no intention of passing antidiscrimination laws to protect whites when they get in front of the whites! There are no gentlemanly feelings then! When the black races hold the whip firmly, they will give it to the inferior whites, I can tell you. One day, my father says, the white man will be the colored world’s Jew! Whites are animals, they are degenerate, my father says!”

  We didn’t know what to say. I’d heard father talk of the recurring speculation about the white races being overwhelmed by the colored, and the colored having no love for the white, and when I mentioned it to him that evening, he said, “The world’s Jew, eh?” And nodded his head, but didn’t say any more. I guess he was getting his opinions in order, or thinking about it.

  Zekia Mukami hated us. For him, history wasn’t past at all: the hundreds of years of crimes against blacks were against him, and they were now. The rage of history was on our doorstep.

  Zekia was a very good boxer. I was one of four girls who were allowed to box at school, but although we sometimes fought boys, we didn’t box with Zekia.

  Nipple-Napping

  It wasn’t a special game like the one tit crunch or the tit clash—anyone did it, including much bigger girls; especially the gang-girls of year eleven and year twelve, big-thighed bruisers who intimidated shopkeepers and received warnings from the police not to go round in large groups on late-shopping nights.

  Anyone could be a nipple-napper. You simply made a sudden grab for the edge of the breast, and since the fashions made the nipple conspicuous, it was rarely that you grabbed the wrong place. The best method of escape was movement. If you saw a female walking along and suddenly making a waltz step sideways, you could bet she’d evaded a nipple-napper.

  It wasn’t completely one-sided: we did the same to boys. Theirs were harder to grab hold of.

  One of the boys that gave the best reaction to nipple-napping was Anthony Yuen.

  His nipple was hard to find for the first two terms of high school, but it grew with constant attention, and became as big and outstanding as most of the girls’. He squawked every time, and went round clutching it, swollen and painful.

  Anthony had deer-like features. A few meters away, he would turn his head, and stay still, not so much watching you, as regarding. His thin shanks narrowed to fine ankles. He would stand still, for a long time perfectly still, then canter off, gently, lightly, a few meters, then if any threat or alarm disturbed him he was off like a shot, lightly, on his toes, his legs twinkling as if they had no weight. Or he would stop, and turn again, twitch his ears together, and sometimes one at a time, then if any nipple-napper appeared, he broke into an immediate gallop. He would dash right on into the playing field until he was nearly a hundred meters away, then partly turn, watching, perfectly still again, ready for flight.

  If he’d been nipple-napped, he would be holding his chest with one narrow hand that was as close to the fine bones of a paw as you’d want to see.

  Always the one nipple, the left one. The big one.

  I could make him run just by looking at it hard.

  Buck was our name
for him. His parents thought of him as Anthony, which was absurd.

  Once I saw him backed against a wall. His eyes were stark, but something looked out. Something; and I had thought that place was empty.

  Coming Ready or Not

  Fulvia Strickland had an older sister and knew more than we did about boys. We gathered round in the playground, eager to learn.

  “When they’re about to blow,” Fulvia told us, “that’s when you’ve got the power. They know if you wriggle free or pull away they get nothing. But that’s when you’re liable to get hurt. They hang on real tight so you can’t dislodge ’em. Animal reflex.”

  “How can you tell when it’s happening?”

  “They start to get very sincere—facial expression, hard muscles, more powerful thrusts—”

  “What sort of thrusts?”

  “Back and forward. They’re not going anywhere, but they go back nearly to take it out, then jam it in as far as it will go.”

  “But their bones must stop it—”

  “Naturally. There’s nowhere to go, but they take it very seriously. Ever seen dogs?”

  “Yes, horses too,” I said. “But it never seems to take long.”

  “Listen, kid.” She was forgetting we were the same age. “Some of the older ones, they know how to hold it, they’ll stay in all day. The only way to get round it is to relax, but even then your skin gets so tired of being jammed between their bone and yours that you wish you had a gun to put ’em out of their misery. Say, that would be an experience!” She was lost briefly in her own dreams, and we looked at each other, and away.

  We all knew of Stuart Regan after school beating the other boys in a race to get it to come, and I looked at the faces of the other girls. Were they scared? Were they thinking privately that if they got part of a boy in they could control the rest of him, and wondering if it was true? And were they wondering if it was true that some could shoot it so hard that you could feel it hit the sides, or bounce off the back wall?

  The Social Science Class

  “Australia has an empty belly,” said jolly Mister Chandragar. “Look at the map and you will see that the ocean and the coastal strip contain emptiness. That is the first impression Australia makes. When you get to know it, it is strange how that motif repeats itself. No ghosts, all is plain and above-board, you see. Not even a bunyip. . . .”

  He began to laugh.

  “Supposed to be a bunyip!” he spluttered over a pile of our exercise books. “A bunyip.”

  “And what happens?” he asked rhetorically.

  “No blooming bunyip!” he squealed. For some minutes he was out of action.

  We didn’t understand why he laughed but we knew he was laughing at us. Whatever emptiness the land had, we were born to: we shared it.

  It was soon the end of the period, and when the siren went we rushed for the door, and he gathered up his papers and things, but couldn’t resist shouting after us, “Not even a blooming haunted house! No jolly bunyip! No jolly ghosts! Jolly nothing!”

  The next time we had Mister Chandragar he was more serious. He was still on his favorite topic, though, and we had to wear it.

  “Australia does as the world does, it sits on the comfortable coast of life, where its settled nature is steeped in the past. The future is the greatest problem. The future is at the center of Australia’s problems.”

  It made a big impression on me, for of all things the future was the most mysterious, the most inviting. And the idea of a useless existence, dragging on till I was old and worn out, repugnant as it was to me, seemed to apply to my country as well. What a future it would be for the land of my birth if Frees and Servants of Society could both be living their lives so that no day is futile and no hour bored!

  The Apple Time Bomb

  On the way home from school my case was light, and I felt like running. As I passed the shops at a run I lifted an apple from a stand outside the greengrocer’s shop and kept going. A few dogs came out to bark at me when I went past their houses, but these encounters came to nothing.

  I showed it to my father.

  “Why a Democrat?” he said. “You’ll have a mouth full of skin—in your teeth, everywhere. They’re only good for transporting. They’re good travelers, they’re so tough.”

  I put it in a drawer where some of my winter things were kept. The thing about winter clothes is that a lot of them never get worn. You always think you’re going to need warm things in the cold weather, but you never do. There might be a few cold days, but that’s about it.

  I put the apple at the back of the drawer and forgot it. As I got into bed it occurred to me that no one even saw me take it. But lying there waiting for sleep to come I thought: some people are ordinary and have ordinary desires and ordinary rights, but the extraordinary have a right to transgress with impunity.

  That wiped the apple off my conscience as if it had never been.

  Dizzy

  We had a craze for a while, us girls, saying “I love you” to each other as if we were beginning a romance. From there it developed into saying “I love you” in as many different ways as we could think of.

  We didn’t necessarily do it with the idea of practicing for males later on. Though I daresay it would come in handy, because though we expected nothing much from them, they, romantic creatures, expected of us something comparable to what they saw on their screens and in their magazines, the poses and mouthings of trained actors.

  I could say “I love you” hatefully, casually, sincerely, belligerently, laughingly, at the top of my voice, commercially, stupidly, in a sneaky whisper, derisively, lovingly, commandingly.

  Has anyone said to you: “I love you,” commandingly?

  Another thing we did was look in each other’s eyes for as long as we could, and no wavering, then when you got dizzy with keeping it up for minutes and minutes, you said: “I love you!” This combination of dizziness and emotional declaration was overpowering, and once Angelika Wiedemann and Jessica Spruiyt nearly fainted doing it.

  Yet another game within our group was to ignore boys; a later variation was: first one to show she likes a boy is out.

  What are big boys made of?

  Dead dogs’ guts and dead cats’ eyes

  Scab and pus custard

  Green snot pies.

  Why Do Fish Swim in the Sea?

  “Why do plants live?” I asked my father.

  He looked at me, wanting to get on with reading a play he’d love to have acted in, but not wanting to refuse his daughter.

  “You’ve done biology. Tell me why they live.”

  He’d misunderstood.

  “I mean, they don’t go anywhere, do they? If they’re alive in some garden of eden and there’s no one there to pick the fruit, what do they do with it? A tree doesn’t eat the fruit itself.”

  “I think I know what you mean. But you’re thinking from within your present circumstances. You’re in a human-centered world; you think the trees are too.”

  “Yes, but they were here before man. What did they do with their fruit? What did it do for them? I mean, what did it actually do?”

  “Put seeds back into the ground, darling.”

  Oh. What an idiot I was. But what about the flesh of the apple? Double idiot. Of course, the flesh of the apple was nothing to the tree; it was just the seed-case. We merely happened to find it delicious.

  “Didn’t they give you that in biology?”

  “I remember now. Seed-cases. It just didn’t make an impression then, until I thought of it myself. When I’m told, things are further away than if I see and feel them.”

  But if that was the case with apples and plums and things, what about us? Was there no actual purpose in the outer case of us? Was it all just a seed-case to drop seeds into the ground? Were we all here just in order to go on being here?

  The phone rang. It was Rosemary. The wandering crowd had been up her street, and I had to listen for twenty minutes solid. After being awful to her at sc
hool, I felt I owed her something.

  Stacks on the Mill

  One mad day in spring someone yelled “Stacks on the mill!” Six or seven kids had been playing some game and had all fallen over in a heap, laughing helplessly. “Stacks on the mill!” The yell was taken up. Kids swarmed to the spot. Hundreds. “More on still!” And the heap grew rapidly, spreading wide, and kids climbed on kids, were pushed over, and more came for the magic moment of standing upright on all those bodies, to call: “I’m the king of the castle! And you’re the dirty rascals!”

  The teachers had to pull the top ones off to rescue the kids on the bottom of the stack. We didn’t mean it to get savage, it just turned out that way. I know when I ran in and jumped from about three meters onto the backs below me I felt a great joy, a sort of jaw-firming joy, as my feet landed on flesh, and I took care to press down as hard as I could, taking my eyes off just exactly who it was down there under me—I didn’t want to know—but trying to be heavier than I was to put more pressure on the anonymous squodge that was rightly beneath me.

  It was an exhilarating feeling, one that you allow yourself rarely and only a bit at a time, rationing it. It was a recognizable me enjoying the oppression I was part of, but I had stripped away other parts of me that normally didn’t let me do this. But it was me all right.

  My mouth was smaller and tighter, my eyes squenched up so as only to see that object I had in view, the backs and awkwardly crushed legs and arms beneath me. That was it: beneath me!

  If I could, I would in that moment have crushed those other stupidly existing semihumans to a porridge.

  For one second of a fearful joy or escape from pain

  I’d smash them down and if they rose I’d smash again.

  The teachers came in a body, making a concerted rush to this heap of writhing animals. I was still pulling others down on me to make more weight for those beneath when the teachers were pulling us off. Miss Goff and I had a tugging match with Lewis Manotta. I had his arm. She won, but only because Mister Sanders came and pressed a knuckle into the back of my hand, on the nerve.