A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

At school I was doodling during maths while the teacher was going on about sets and paradoxes.

  “ . . . Paradoxes have played a vital part in the development of logic and the philosophy of mathematics. There came a day when Russell asked himself:

  “Is the class of classes

  That are not members of themselves

  A member of itself?

  If it is: it isn’t

  And if it isn’t, it is.”

  He went on about self-reference, and whether it should be banned from significant speech. It was the sort of mind-stretching that gives you a workout but doesn’t mean a thing in the syllabus. Educational, but not markable: our assessments wouldn’t show its value. I doodled.

  Here for you, my reader, is that doodle, preserved these few years as an extra dimension of me that you can approve or deplore:

  Sometimes in the now when may is at an end

  And when will be tomorrow while but is at an end

  And and is in the wings though if is at an end –

  Then is is imminent for was is at an end.

  Belinda Lachman looked over my shoulder and was going to tell on me, but I moved my right leg in a swinging arc and scraped the edge of my sole down the shin of her right leg from near the knee to the big vein on her anklebone. I have good vision from the sides of my eyes so I was able to perform this feat (pardon me) without moving my head, and my leg was still and back in place before her awful gasping shriek. The first thing the class knew she was upon me, cursing and spitting and striking at me with her nails.

  I shrugged off her attack and backed away in distaste, as if I was so absorbed in paradox that I hadn’t had time to react properly.

  Then I reacted. “Help!” I called, reasonably. Arms pulled her away. The teacher came up the aisle to discipline her, while I watched her with the horror that only an educated person can affect with any degree of believability.

  In English I continued my whimsical mood, and wrote out something on the different meanings of words that had Mister Patel full of admiration and the other kids wrinkling up their mouths at me in disgust. Which gave me the opportunity to smile gently, and look like the only civilized person present.

  “She tried to shy the flint at the fishpond

  Since there was no coconut shy handy,

  But it landed a few meters shy.

  Some said: she’s a bit shy of hitting it.

  Others: It’s the only time she’s ever been shy.”

  “Very good, Alex. You are being a very inventive girl,” he beamed. He looked at peace with the world. I hoped I would never be. His brown unlined face and white teeth and yellow eye-whites glowed at me, they were something to see. He gave us a whole period to write two pages on a subject of our choice.

  English Expression: River

  River did not know where he came from. There was talk at the crosswaters and the meetings of subsidiary creeks, but the river you talked to one day had a different expression from yesterday’s river. It seemed to River that he alone had a coherent self. He never changed, though others did.

  River had always felt that wonderful things—strange, mysterious things—were going to happen. He was eager for the future, which he felt was going to bring him something better than he had ever known.

  We called him Po River. He came from the western hills, and lost himself in the salt of the upper reaches of the harbor. But before he got near the salt the runoff from backyards and factories and institutions thickened him like a soup, a green soup. River didn’t know we called him Po. Life had always been easy, yet if you talked to him you’d imagine he was the hardest-done-by river in existence.

  The persistence of deep rivers that have worn away thousands of feet of rock and in old age are narrow watercourses had been told in stories rivers tell when they meet, and River knew them. His complacence was differently based. He in ages gone had worn down a valley many many kilometers wide, so his landscape was almost flat. His flow was often so sleepy that it couldn’t be seen. He rushed only when the hysteria of flood got the better of him.

  One day a young person came and looked at River and learned and listened. She looked and saw how he had flowed for only a short geological time and smiled at River’s simplicity in thinking of himself as age-old. Then she remembered, and she remembered like this: Our time, our scale of the passing of moments, isn’t geological time. Our time elevates even River’s time to eternity, for River always flows. We can conceive of River being not-there, then with us, then gone; but can we conceive of the actions we ought to live by, in harmony with this conception of time?

  When River says he flows past and is always present, he is suffering from a word-blindness that sees the object equivalent to a word that is not itself equal to the full description of River’s being. For there are things we will never know.

  Mister Patel gave me 18½ out of 20, and it counted toward my assessment. He omitted to ask me what my last paragraph meant. I knew what it meant when I wrote it, but I can’t make it out at all, now.

  The Impossible Game

  We played it on the first school day of every month in the winter. The game was not student against student: it was student bodies against masonry.

  There was a brick wall, a quirky wall put up to shield the fire hoses and spray nozzles for school security against fire down at the very lip of the creek, and the idea was to push it over. It looked like a very ordinary wall, and as such it should have been unable to resist several tons of human body straining against it, but it was not as ordinary as it seemed. Its brickwork had been rendered over with cement, and painted white. We did not know the bricks were those patent bricks with holes up through them and that reinforcing rods had been poked up them and bedded into the concrete foundations that went down half a meter under surface level.

  We developed a war cry from this game:

  Play the impossible game,

  Learn the impossible.

  Be impossible.

  It’s possible.

  Try harder,

  Try now.

  Go!

  We huddled and punched our fists downward in time, until “It’s possible.” The next two phrases we punched upward, and for “go!” we punched both hands up into the air and jumped as high as we could. Then all backs bent to the task, pushing and straining.

  It’s still there.

  Reverence for the Past

  Under the moon at night the suburbs of the poor spread out flat for miles around like mud huts in the dark, populating a desert. If only the place was hilly, and there were avalanches.

  The Carraways, searchers for Australia’s past, came round from house to house asking, looking, photographing, noting, giving catalogue numbers to the relics of the past. Not much over two hundred years, yet to them it was precious.

  Useless to talk to them of the ever-extending past that prehistorians were constantly uncovering: the Carraways were concerned only with traces of white civilization. Show them old Bibles with family names, fire irons, pots and kettles, smoothing irons, bridles and chains and bits, drays, mining equipment and so on, and they were in their element.

  Mr. and Mrs. Carraway had a legion of helpers: young people converted to the religion of the country’s past, older Australians dedicated to the idea that there might be something worth preserving, something the rest of us had overlooked, something hidden somewhere that would make sense of our being here and what we had done to the land.

  My father joked about it. At school we were told to take it seriously, but his laughter stopped me from taking it the way the schoolteachers wanted.

  The idea that the timber and fibro and brick veneer places spreading for miles around could have anything in them of value besides the people, was enough to get him going.

  “Look at that,” he said to me as we stood on the front patio. With his arm he indicated the sweep of dozens of suburbs down below us, and the thousands of lighted windows.

  “In the morning we’ll find it is an encampment of
soldiers, and they’ll wake with bugles and clashing of arms, a bit of gunnery practice and a few executions to keep morale high.”

  When my parents first got to our house and began a little gentle digging to get the ground in order for planting grass, he found a glass bottle stopper. It was in the days when bottle collecting was starting, an old Eno’s bottle top from the century before, and the Carraways went mad over it. They sent collectors every week to try to get it off him, but they didn’t win until they sent an old guy who talked and talked and wouldn’t stop. My mother threw it at him.

  Confession

  It was shortly after I turned thirteen. Little Robert Haycock was left with me for a few minutes after an accident outside the Primary school. Three kids were injured when one of our seniors skidded his car the length of the gravel that lies on Fermi Street that T-joins Euclid Way at the school front gate. I comforted him as best I could with my presence. I put an arm around him, stooping, finally bending at the knees and crouching near him to take his attention from the blood. His legs were extremely thin and white and his school trousers large. Without thinking enough about it to want to stop myself, almost in the style of a mother checking up on the condition of her handiwork, I let my hand slip up the wide trouser bottoms and glide straight to his penis. I knew I couldn’t have two tries—boys get very impatient when they’re fiddled with. My hand encountered a tiny projection and a small round lump: the penis and scrotum of Robert Haycock. It was a cool day, and it seemed reasonable that both items were small and hard.

  I had never had a small brother to explore. Only a tall father to go Ping! with my forefinger.

  Robert didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t let my hand move in case it tickled him and his giggles drew attention, just let both stiff items lie in my palm. He looked at my face, but I was looking away, so I guess he thought I wasn’t focusing on him. After a minute I took my hand out, and said sensible things to him, and took him up the Fermi Street hill a bit, for his house was that way.

  I brushed my hand past my nose to see, but there was no odor.

  I don’t know why I did it, I just did. Normally I’d be dubious about brandishing such a private experience, but it happened, so I’m including it.

  While I’m Confessing

  While I’m confessing, I might as well tell about little Terry, my cousin on father’s side. Their family was passing through on the way south to visit some of their relatives—on father’s brother’s wife’s side. And since all our accommodation was taken little Terry was put in with me.

  It was cold and he was soon asleep. When I got to bed I was peculiarly sleepless, and though I felt my breathing coming regularly and perhaps deeply, the way I felt sleep coming when it wasn’t the usual head-on-pillow-fast-asleep drill, I didn’t go to sleep as soon as I had expected. Instead, I amused myself by taking Terry’s trousers down and sentimentally pressing him to my warm body. With an unusually dry mouth, I took off my pants and lifted my old-style nightie, which was the rage then. His little excrescence pressed against me. I tried to massage the short businesslike member to an interesting size, but it only came out a short way. On an impulse I widened my thighs and pressed his little thing in toward my wetter part, but only its tip touched and on the slidy surface. I rubbed it back and forth, as if it were a blotter. I couldn’t stop. I rolled him on top of me and widened my legs more, and with my arm round behind his botty I pushed all his equipment into that place; I found that to get any contact at all I had to lift my knees in much the same way as women did when I’d seen them on the education films giving birth.

  He came awake, I thought. I put him down and breathed regularly. My eyes were shut. My chest beat against the blanket. Guilt made me keep my hands off him. I stayed awake for many minutes, it seemed. My mouth was still dry. If only I had a little brother.

  In the morning I chided him for having his pajamas undone and tied the cord myself in a nice bow.

  Outlets

  I could bring up my foot when I was little and put my big toe in my mouth. I wondered tonight if I’d grown too big to bend my head over like that anymore. I tried, sitting on my bed. My head reached only to a place level with my navel: I couldn’t get my head down to, say, between my legs.

  So it’s no use thinking of that.

  In the bath I was attracted by the look of the spout in which the streams of hot and cold water were married. I had an impulse to put my under parts in contact with that spout, but though I tried hard I could not manage it. Instead, I lay on my back, legs up against the wall on either side of the spout, and with the water adjusted to a nice warmth and a good strong flow, I let the torrent wash down on the crucial parts. The plug was out, the water ran down the drain, and the steady throbbing pressure on and around my clitoris brought me to a wonderfully satisfying and exciting climax.

  A Naughty Thought

  One very cold morning the neighborhood dogs were running about to warm themselves, and in their game they chased the small spaniel from the end of the street, where Rutherford Road crosses it, and as they passed our house their breath shot out before them in puffs. I thought how much more assistance it would have been to them if the jets of their breath discharged from the other end.

  The End

  The cicadas that spent years underground and came up in summer into the light and spent a month or so flying about and making a noise and mating, then were nothing, had nevertheless passed on the future of cicadas to others during their mating flight.

  The future of humans was in me, in small part: it’s no wonder I was oriented toward the future. Tomorrow was important, I was young still, tomorrow would be my day.

  But when you sit down and think about it, tomorrow is different from that. Tomorrow is the time to be born. It’s better not to be here now, rather to remain a possibility in the loins of the present, so that the eventual dissolution and the end of everything could be postponed. Is that what the Greeks meant by “Better never to be born”? To remain a possibility forever, to stay asleep in the seeds of the eternal present. For if the meaning of God is the state of death-union with the elements—then God is to be feared above all, and union with God a miserable end of everything.

  End: a dreadful word. Before my own end, would I be able to do something heroic: something to distinguish myself?

  Father’s

  Father was having a nap. It was a July Sunday, after lunch. The couch was in the sunroom, the window came down to the floor, and the room was bathed in light.

  I had been reading to him from Ecclesiastes, which he said was his favorite poem, and was not very far into the last chapter when he dozed off. He didn’t snore, but with his head slightly forward on the sun-couch he made a rumbling in the back of his nose that was very like a snore.

  His sun-shorts were loose at the leg, and his thick thighs with the brown skin and shiny black hairs and the two small patches of broken purple thread-like veins just above the knee on the inside of the leg, were on view. Also the tip of a certain organ associated with Ping! in my younger days.

  I went on reading about the silver bowl and put out a few fingers of my right hand to touch that tip. It had been many years since I had Ping!-ed it. It was less proper for a girl aged over five years, somehow.

  I put my fingers on its broad spade-shaped head, still reading aloud, testing the feel of it, also the contrast between my temperature and its temperature. They were near enough to the same.

  I put my whole hand round it, surprised by the weight in its head. It rolled over indolently in my fingers when I relaxed my grip, and the mouth, redder than the rather blue-pink head, looked straight at me as if it were an eye. The lips relaxed and parted, showing a dark pink gullet, smooth and shiny with the shine of flesh like the inside of your lip.

  I wanted to grip it tightly and laugh about it, happily, with a comradely sense of togetherness, but I dared not. I kept talking, saying, “Remember now thy creator in the days of your youth, remember now your creator in the days of thy youth,�
�� over and over, because I didn’t have the wit to go on, when he began to stir. He opened his eyes. My hands were back where they belonged.

  “You said that. Why did you say that twice?”

  I’d said it thirteen times.

  Phew . . . close.

  Lessons

  Teachers weren’t supposed to give you class positions, but we all compared marks. Three of us stayed at the top, each year. We were smart enough not to be contaminated by the antiwork ethic of the blobs, knowing full well they’d never make it and we would, provided no changes came to us.

  That didn’t stop us pursuing the teachers that could be pursued, sensing their weakness and aiming at it every chance we got. The ones that got excited by their subject were the easiest marks. They forgot everything in the heat of history, or German, and we could do anything to them as long as when they turned to look at us we were attending. Like hunters we were, mastering our environment, just as in later years the salesmen among us would sense the vanity, the indecision, the awe, the greed, the desire for status in the “marks” that wandered into range, and would play upon those weaknesses and achieve success in terms of sales volume; or the public service politicians that would snake their way by any means until they achieved the desk they wanted, all the while using the invaluable lessons learned, though not knowingly taught, at dear old school.

  Out in the open air some birds look mainly down, for meals; others look mainly up, in fear of the birds looking down.

  What I learned at school was the ability to respond to hints and commands, or “stimulus,” the desire to compete to do things better or arrive somewhere before others, the satisfaction of getting rewards, the horror of being among the blobs: I didn’t know I was smart till I got to school and found out what a dill was.