A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Inflatable Man

  In October the man came again from the river.

  Just as before he came up on the grass paddock and made his way slowly up to the road, where dogs barked at him. They were sleepy dogs, and there were plenty of children around, since it was Saturday morning, to take their attention and wake them at odd times with play and yelling, so the man didn’t get bitten.

  I watched as he got to the road, looked back at the river, then walked slowly along Heisenberg Close on his way to the sports oval on the hill. When he stood on the eastern end of the playing fields near the creek, he took out something to eat and while he was chewing, a blow-up object came from him. Don’t ask me where, none of us knew what he looked like close up. (There were stories of kids going to look at him, who came back saying that when they got where they thought they could see him he was still as far away as he had been in the first place.)

  A chair grew out, and inflated. A small table came. Then a continuous sheet, which he took with him as he walked round in a circle and let fall to the grass where it stuck. It then became a tent that he zipped from the top down to the grass level. A door was set in, with a small handle.

  I went around the street and looked at his tent from several points. Perhaps it was true that it looked the same from any angle, but there was a sort of pushing-you-away feeling about the whole thing that killed your curiosity. Persistence died when you got too close. I gave it up, and went home, accompanied by a peculiar feeling that somehow it was good to go away. As if something spoke directly into my mind, bypassing eyes and ears.

  Do you ever have the feeling that the ground is a thin shell, with caverns below?

  The Vulva Surprised

  Under her arms Rosemary McDevitt developed a tender spot. I found out about it when I grabbed her. (Sometimes I couldn’t resist grabbing her: she was so vulnerable.) I registered the soft squashy thing my fingers encountered under her school tunic.

  I spoke to her after school.

  “Rosemary.” I should have asked her if she forgave us. She needed to think you had some intellectual appreciation of your aggressor relationship with her.

  “Those funny things under your arms.” This gave her as great a shock as touching her. She ran.

  I caught her easily and twined my fingers in the loose of her tunic behind the right shoulder. She struggled, but with that hold I could control her easily.

  She wouldn’t cooperate, no matter what I said, so I took matters into my own hands and felt all round under her weak arms. I wasn’t wrong. There it was under one arm, and under the other. Two soft squashy places. I pressed inward, she choked back her scream, in more terror, I think, of my imminent discovery than of the violence on her.

  The feel of the thing was familiar. I grabbed her shoulder, turned her back to me, lifted one arm into the air and looked down her short sleeve. Sitting sleepily down there in her armpit was a small vulva. It smelled of sweat.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” pleaded Rosemary, when she could speak.

  “Very well, Rosemary,” I said. “But don’t be disobliging to me if I suddenly want something.”

  She cringed, but I was too involved in my discovery to feel the usual sleepy pride that I was the cause of her fear.

  The Creeping Vulva

  In the next few months Rosemary developed lumps under her arms, on her neck, on the lower side of her breast, on her heel, ankle and calf, and on the inner part of her buttock. The lumps rose, became scaly, then itchy, then flaked gradually off to show small, damp slits. The girl with the most sensitivity to touch had developed the creeping vulva.

  Poor Rosemary. She had wanted to be a surgeon.

  Some who failed took it as a blessing to have the uncertainty lifted, but not Rosemary. When later a remission occurred in her state, she lost all the creeping vulvas but those on calf and buttock; a fearful hope burdened her from that time on.

  Growing Pains

  My breasts have got a go on. They were small lumps for quite a few months, now they’re really developing. Today, in Maths, they hurt. Once, when I bent down to pick up a fallen pen, my left breast brushed the desk, and it hurt like mad.

  It’s rather exciting to be able to say the word “breast” about my two.

  I’m writing this at night, and I’m getting pains again. I go to put my hand up to ward off the pain; I remember in time and do not touch them. Last time I clapped my hands to them in pain I nearly screamed. Alethea Hunt screaming! I would never forgive myself.

  This is the next day. Griselda Cadbury and Marie-Louise looked meaningfully at my new breasts as I entered the schoolgate.

  International Nose Race of the Year Blot

  I won lots of trophies for sport at Primary and began to do the same at high school. In Primary I won races up to four hundred meters; the long jump; our team won the area basketball competition; there were softball cups and tennis trophies. In high school there was still basketball and athletics and in addition music—I played the piano and went in local eisteddfods and began to learn wind instruments.

  There were no prizes for schoolwork. If I wanted prizes it was no use me coming first in English, German, Science, Music, History—and sometimes Math—it didn’t even show up in the half-yearly report. They weren’t allowed to encourage one kid’s excellence against another’s. Equality forbade it. There were book prizes, though, from teachers who sneaked them to us privately.

  I didn’t like the system, naturally.

  We all had the same opportunities, apart from our genes. The idea of patently unequal people being treated as if they were the same was repugnant to me. Why have no medals for schoolwork, and yet have prizes for track and field? Why no winner for what we learned, when there was always a winner in everything else?

  Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,

  Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief:

  All equal.

  Mucking Up on the Teacher

  Monday morning, Mister Groundwater was trying to whip us into a frenzy of enthusiasm over intransitive verbs, when the kids received, from sources unknown, a burst of energy that started to show itself in smart remarks, jokes, tentative yelling, small quarrels between each other. Just as suddenly it focused on the teacher. I don’t know how it happened but suddenly we surged forward round him and he was hitting at us, his blows bouncing off our resilient heads and chests and faces. We weren’t hitting him, just crowding him backward to the wall. All pushing him back. The blackboard ledge received his old buttocks, his back against the chalky green of the board, our class a giant scrum; as football must have had such scrums hundreds of years ago when games traversed whole cities and the space between towns; before referees.

  He was besieged, frightened, yelling at us.

  He couldn’t move. None of us did for a while. When he stopped making a noise and was trying to get his breath in the crush, the absence of his monotonous voice had a curious effect on us. Slowly the interest went out of it. Kids at the outside peeled off, soon as we were all back in our seats, and Mister Groundwater still against the wall, still panting, getting his breath. He didn’t say a word. He was a relief teacher. We had five different English teachers that term.

  When there were missiles flying round the room, I joined in. From father I learned the way to make paper pellets, folding them over into thin tubes, giving them a bend in the middle and hooking them on to the middle of a doubled rubber band held in two fingers of the forward hand, pulling the pellet back with the aiming hand and letting go. I was soon as accurate as the boys and added a refinement of my own. I used a hard, thick paper, and my pellets hurt.

  Sometimes they hit the teacher. Mister Judson, our next English teacher, threw the duster once, and hit Stuart Regan. Stuart rose manfully in his place and threw it back. Mister Judson caught it on the chest.

  It was a foolish business, being so young. I was a double fool: I had so much to look forward to. What did it matter if Frees and failures fooled and danced all the way to their li
ghthearted graves?

  Blind Freddy

  I never did it, but a gang of really rough girls in school did things to the blind kids. Not things to hurt them, but things.

  We had kids blind and partly blind. They gave it a cheerful name, and instead of calling them partly blind called them partially sighted.

  I guess the best of us is only partly sighted, at the best, compared to what a camera can see in one blink, or what a small insect sees, or a bird stationary in the sky.

  “What do you see, Fred?” they’d ask him, because he always gave a strange answer. His name really was Fred.

  “I see—seven pints.” Maybe his parents didn’t know he was going to be blind.

  “What of?”

  “Anything. Seven pints.”

  “Why pints?”

  “I like pints. A good old word. Clean.”

  “How would you know what clean is?” one of the roughies said. She had huge thighs and no neck. The boys were afraid of her. She was afraid of nothing.

  “Dirty is sort of rough and gritty,” he said mildly. “A glass is clean. People are gritty. Except some parts.”

  I left then. I knew what he meant. Poor helpless Fred had his hand guided into certain places by the roughies, and at other times they held him while they investigated some of his physical properties. He never complained. They covered his tool and toolbag, as they called them, in boot polish one day. I guess his parents thought it was boys did it no matter what he told them.

  The biggest of the roughies, Celia O’Donnell, had a puffy face that hid her eyes. In a fight with other girls, they could never get to her eyes with their fingernails. She had a husky voice. She whispered in Freddy’s ear, and they took him round the corner. He would go home tired after they had amused themselves with him, but he never told tales as far as we knew. Parents were afraid of the girl gangs.

  I don’t think anyone liked Freddy. It was inhuman to take it all the time and never want to dish it out, even if you’re blind.

  I never watched what they did when they opened his trousers.

  Franka Bultovic

  She could never tell what I wanted with her. She thought of me as just another girl. She was tiny and pretty, like a flower with blue eyes.

  But when I looked at her I was no girl: she was the girl. I felt like a mountain, a ponderous mountain descending to touch with granite fingers the barely warm flesh of something new born. She fascinated me.

  It didn’t last long, just a week or two. In that time startling things happened when I masturbated. Once Franka floated above me—in my imagination—so that I could touch her and be touched, and put my face into all sorts of places, and when I came space opened in strips, and I heard the music of whales and tree stumps that were dead before we whites blundered ashore in the surf.

  The World Record

  Father and I saw Professor Henrietta D. Walden II at the shoppingtown when we went bowling together. She had gone from Freedom From to Freedom To: the dynamic part of freedom, the positive, what it’s all about.

  Her voice was frayed. That world record must have meant a lot to her.

  The Grizzle Game

  For a few months the whole school picked up a game the boys played, called Grizzle. You kept a check on your friends, and if someone chose to do a certain thing, or have a certain thing, or do something a certain way, and after that grizzled about it, the penalty was: no one took any notice of the next two things you said.

  If you grizzled twice, the next penalty was: no one took notice of the next four things you said. It doubled all the time: the next penalty was eight, then sixteen, and so on.

  There were kids in the playground that couldn’t expect to have any notice taken of them for years. When they went over a reasonable score—say two—they got impatient and wanted to change the rules or have the game banned, but their friends were implacable. They’d had to watch they didn’t complain, so they were going to see no one else did.

  Lifelong enmities that took weeks to dissolve were formed by the game. When little kids got to hear of a high score, they gave cheek from a distance, baiting the grizzler.

  The Alternative Society

  One of the woodwork teachers at school, Mister Adams, was at odds with society. He lived down our street. He was convinced that things around us, trees, flowers, bricks, bitumen, posts, fences, rubber, iron, were wrongly named. He went round booking everything he saw, entering its name in a notebook, sometimes hanging a ticket from it. He carried a box of bits of string ready for threading through the tickets and tying on to trees and fences. He had ticketed three suburbs, people said.

  “We’ve only been here on earth five minutes,” he said to my father. It was Sunday morning, and my father was apologetically mowing the grass with his machine. He was half-glad to turn the wretched thing off, and half-anxious about having to turn it on again. He didn’t know much about machines.

  “Yet we expect to be able to go ahead and name the fruits of the earth and the equipment God placed here for us,” Mister Adams continued.

  “I daresay it’s a legitimate aim,” my father said.

  “What we’ve done is take the first names that came into our heads, without doing research on the whole problem,” Mister Adams said.

  “What’s that, Mister Adams?” I asked, pointing to the two Eucalyptus Scoparia.

  “Shardik,” he said immediately.

  “And that?” I pointed to the letterbox.

  “Zoan.”

  “But I though Zoan was a tree,” I said. My father looked at me, saying shush with his face.

  “Is it?” said Mister Adams. He began searching through his book. He found the place. “There is a Zoan tree, yes. It’s a tree shaped like a letterbox.”

  “And what about that?” A mauve hibiscus.

  “An early-flowering Saldis,” he said without consulting his writ.

  “Is this just an alternative naming, alternative to what we’ve got?” father asked.

  “It is an attempt to find the real names,” the woodwork teacher said loudly.

  “We could find all sorts of alternatives,” I said, supporting father.

  Mister Adams was gone, saying words like, “Real names, not the first ones ancient savages thought of. Nothing has its real name.” His head was forward, well ahead of his body. He strode firmly, following it. He knew he was right.

  He was hopeless in class. The kids gave him a terrible time.

  Love of Home

  When he took us out driving, father was always pointing out scenes and vistas that seemed to come round the corner at us, particularly when he was there. A road west, that bore on toward the deep blue of the mountains, often surprised us with a sudden corner lined with poplars or almonds and a further receding field lowering itself gently down toward the river, a post and wire fence staggering under the weight of the sun, rotten at the base; the corn speading on the river flat green or golden, tall or just poking up toward the height it wanted; a log-grey shack propped up by weeds; a wheel or two and the remains of a harrow; an old dog sitting up on a post; things you see out among the fields and paddocks.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. Of course it was beautiful. So was the slow sag of the electric wires out in the street when you were in bed in the morning or just lying there on a wet day. So was the feel of the bedclothes, sheets cool and blanket rough and friendly as the hairs on father’s forearm. So was the fire in the back of the pub in Lithgow where we stopped on a winter night. Everything was beautiful.

  “Yep,” I answered in a businesslike manner.

  He looked across at me, said nothing.

  It wasn’t till I was older that I said those things first, without agreeing with what someone else told me. As if I fell more in love with the world the older I got.

  He must have had much the same thing in mind when he took me to have photographs taken: “Look at the camera as if you see for the first time the wonder of the universe and are on the edge of understanding.”


  I don’t know if that’s what I did or not, but he was caught up in his own lyrical attitude and went on, “Every moment is a subject for infinite art.” He made a natural pause after that, and went on thinking. Perhaps it was from a play he’d read.

  I prefer to think it was his own thoughts.

  My pause was respectful. He was saying something important, and wanted me to absorb it. I didn’t want him ever to think I thought he wasn’t as smart as he wanted me to think.

  In the mountains the grey-green and hazy bush covered every rise and choked every valley. (Humans will live here for ages to come, but not after the word “green” disappears.) Down to the edge of the dams and rivers it spread, just as it went right to the water’s edge in the harbors and on the coast.

  I thought, looking at it with a pleased feeling that this was my country, that if the world from far away was round and smooth like a ball, what delightful fur this forestland was. I could feel myself smiling at it. I knew its rocks and mossed stones, its courageous twisted trees pouring themselves over rock ledges, its sudden pools of white sand on bush tracks, its valleys opening with tall straight gums marching downward toward creek beds and up again the other sides. I loved it.

  I think it is the only real love I ever felt; except one that was special, and human, and brief.

  Sucking to the Teacher