A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  I learned to read at home; my general knowledge came from home; my attitude to the future, to myself, to others, came from home; my personality, my love of independence, my social skills, my ability to talk easily with strangers and adults, all came from my home and my father. And mother too. At least she surrounded me with love for my first six years.

  It occurs to me now that at school they tested us on what we learned at home.

  Here’s an old year seven report father made a fuss of; I remember it because he was so pleased. I did better at other times, but this one I still have.

  And the Head’s comment: Congratulations, etc.

  After year seven they cut down on giving us marks, but we three were able to get them: not all the teachers agreed with the policy edicts imposed from above.

  Father’s Penis Revisited

  Father was asleep and mother safely writing. He had spread his body along the black couch in the sunroom, and since it was a hot day he had his old shorts on and nothing else. I knelt by the couch and looked all round to see if someone was looking, but though I felt I was being watched I was sure there was no one there. His feet were bare, and the tops were brown with the sun he so enjoyed. I ran my hands over the skin where it was smooth, on the fronts of his thighs where no doubt trousers wore off the hair.

  Moisture in my throat seemed an obstacle: I swallowed it so it would not prevent me. Would he wake up? I watched and held my breath. He didn’t move. I touched the penis, soft and limp and biscuit brown. If my existence was sacred to me then surely this sluggish lump of flesh was; through it I was introduced to my mother; or part of me was introduced, through my mother, to the remaining part. This body was therefore sacred too.

  I leaned forward and bent my head over it, keeping my eyes open, and let my lips touch it, just the neck of it. It was the same temperature as my lips. The head was turned up into a fold of the shorts. I put a finger against the shorts and brought it against the hidden head, and gently eased it down out of its confinement. It fell the last bit, straightening lazily.

  Suddenly his large body moved, and I was on my feet and at the door before his movement had settled. He had turned over. My heart beat quickly so that I was aware of it. I ran guiltily back to my room to read Jane Austen. What if that wasn’t the origin of my life? Was it still wrong if he wasn’t really my father? I had to force myself to look at the page before I could silence such thoughts.

  Oh, cried Elizabeth, I am excessively diverted. But

  it is so strange.

  Cheats Never Prosper

  I won the painting prize for the whole school in year eight. I used a lot of titanium white and a tube of glistening gold together with lots of colors and painted Jesus Christ as an Eastern mystic and teacher dying on a jewel-encrusted cross. I think they gave me the prize as much for the rather literary conception as for technique, though here I got right away from the impasto that was popular then and made the work as flat and traditional as a Dali. I cheated by drawing all the objects faintly in pencil first so I wouldn’t lose sight of the details after I’d got all the background in.

  I consider it cheating, anyway.

  When I went up to collect the prize there were three great roars overhead, three formations of airplanes were organizing the air. The prize was a certificate, but the art teacher slipped me a personal gift of a black-covered edition of Baudelaire later.

  Standing on the platform with the assistant Head, my destiny seemed to arch high above me; but was it honor, or threat?

  Is the Verb to Orgas Or Orgase?

  Marie-Louise wasn’t bitter about her family. They were always out or busy or away, and she got practically no mothering. No fathering, either. Actually her parents weren’t up to much, and it might have been for the best. She didn’t complain. They had their life to live.

  “When I get out of the machine, I’ll have a smashing time,” she said. Childhood was the machine.

  “Buggar lessons,” she said. She kept to around a middle mark in everything, her assessments were just short of good. The teachers used to get worked up about it, but couldn’t make an impression.

  “I’ll tell you something if you promise to tell no one else,” she said during the scripture period. I knew what that meant: half a dozen knew already, but she hadn’t got around to telling everyone in the school.

  “I’ve read books on it.”

  “On what, ML?”

  “Sex. That’s the key to everything once you get out of this shit.”

  I was younger than Marie-Louise. The nipple areas on her chest had started to swell, and the first bumpiness had appeared round them.

  She practiced whenever she could—in class, on sports day, all weekend.

  What was she practicing? Her orgasm.

  “At home and weekends I hang around reading a book when wrinklies are talking, specially men, and they see me reading and don’t hunt me away. You know what I found? Men like a woman that can come quick. The women think they’re clever because they just lie there and criticize when the men can’t do the second one quickly, or want to rest, but they’re missing the point. All you have to do is please men, and they’ll do anything for you. And you have to practice.”

  “Don’t we all?” I said.

  “You don’t understand. I mean to do it quick and often. I’m trying for ten seconds.”

  “Ten seconds?” I squeaked, thinking of my laborious efforts, my aching finger, my spit. And the air about me pounding like a heartbeat.

  The English Lesson

  Mrs. Plumpton was taking us for English. Suddenly there was a loud gasp.

  “I’ve done it!” ML burst out, and stood up all pink.

  “Did what?” said Plumpton.

  “Split the gerundial infinitive.” And sat down.

  “We don’t do gerunds. How do you know what a gerund is? Have you been listening to your parents?”

  “I want to do extra work, to keep ahead.” That was a laugh.

  “There’ll be no questions on gerunds, Fienberg. You’re wasting your time.”

  “I thought you’d say that. But my knowledge of grammar has nothing to do with English, Mrs. Plumpton. I find I have to learn some grammar,” apologetically, “to understand the foreign language I’m doing.” You could always beat the more conscientious teachers like that. They knew there were recurring times when you were allowed to learn grammar.

  During recess we asked ML how.

  “Sat still and worked the muscles.”

  “Did you really break ten seconds?”

  “Course I did!”

  We didn’t believe her, but she didn’t mind. I was never present, later, when she made love with males, but I knew even then that they wouldn’t know if it was real or not. They had to take your word for it, you could fool them anytime. If you started out saying you weren’t easily aroused, they went away very bushy-tailed if you came quickly.

  After two years of high school ML had a collection of busts, plaster casts of famous historical heads. Ned Kelly, Beethoven, Einstein, Churchill, Stalin, Mozart. Criminals and artists. She used to say hello to them in the morning and kiss them goodnight when she went to bed.

  Her father bought her busts of famous women. Sylvia Plath, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie Curie, Marilyn Monroe—people like that. For company, no doubt.

  She kissed them too.

  After the English lesson, I watched Plumpton in the playground. I liked her because she was capable of liking ML.

  She arrested one’s eyes, walking with a slight lean forward, thrusting against the atmosphere, wanting to go faster and more powerfully than constraints would let her. Striding forward toward the science block—to see Miss Grundweise, though I didn’t know this then—she had such a masculine walk that she was the focus of hundreds of female eyes. She had a face like a cantata—long and a funny shape.

  However, since I had to do history just then, I decided to save up that feeling about her, and think about it later.

  This P
en Has So Much More Story I Could Write

  This time I was bolder. The drinking father had done had left him good-natured, but he went straight to the lounge, and almost immediately passed out. His head was propped forward as he lay on his back and began to snore. I carefully pulled away the cushions his head rested on, managing his head with my left hand, and settled him down flat. That way, I didn’t feel he was looking at me. Besides, being level stopped his snoring, and mother would have no reason to leave her work.

  I undid the zipper down the front of his trousers, kneeling before him, searched for the slit in his underpants, and felt for the penis. This time there was no hurry or thumping heart, I was determined to learn as much about it as I could.

  His hand made a movement and came over onto his front, touching mine. I didn’t let go his penis, but neither did the contact disturb him. I moved my hand slightly away, then with my left hand gently lifted his and put it beside his thigh.

  I pulled the penis out of the gap in his clothes. As I had known since I was a small girl he was circumcised, and the head was covered in tiny glistening wrinkles, no doubt for expansion.

  A noise! I dropped it. It was only mother, shifting her chair in the other room. The penis had fallen back into a nest of underclothes, and it moved. I reached in and pulled up the entire scrotum gently so it was propped on the underpants’ folds, and the head settled back on a bed of flesh and moved again. The head made small, slow movements forward, as if advancing, then stopped, and retracted. It was quite short and thick, the head was as long and as broad as the length of the rest of it. Wrinkles in the brown flesh behind the head were so plentiful it would be impossible to count them.

  I wished I had my camera.

  The head itself was a study. I pulled it out from its wrinkled bed and from the thin brown scar of his circumcision. It felt as if it was made of muscle, reminding me of the sheep’s heart I had cut up at school, though it was not red. There were so many colors in it I despair of describing them. Round the base, where a sort of collar broadens out, it was a mauve or mauve-red; this shaded, getting narrower, into a pleasant pink, and it was pink all round its slit of a mouth. I lifted up the head and looked at the mouth. It seemed about a centimeter and a half long, and quite fallen together as if asleep. But when I squeezed the mouth at both ends, it opened crazily so that when I looked at it sideways as you would a mouth, it wore a disapproving expression. I got both hands and put a finger lightly on both sides of the mouth and gently opened it. Every time I touched it I had a compulsion to be gentle that surprised me. The pink and wet and glistening surfaces of the inside of its mouth delighted me; when I let the lips come together there was a clearly defined round craterish part that was the mouth proper and at the other side a film of thin skin, on the underside, that looked as if it could tear apart. Were there two channels inside it? When I opened it and looked down its throat, it seemed so, and one channel went on the underside of the penis where the thinner membrane was. But I knew from school there was one channel only, for sperm and pee.

  It slipped out of my fingers and went straight back to its bed of scrotum, which hollowed itself out slightly to receive its companion. Then it lengthened and retracted, this time shrinking back and at the same time turning on one side with the cuteness of a baby’s movements. And when it shrank to its furthest—I had a stray idea that perhaps it might keep going—it stopped there for a little, then nosed forward again. Almost like breathing.

  I had never properly seen the scrotum. I inserted the fingers of both hands under and around it, watching that the fine, soft skin was not pinched, and when I was under it and could feel the join with the rest of him I lifted and heaped it all above his underclothes, so that I could get at all of it.

  It lay heaped there—heaped is the word—and I saw the long hairs, some brown, some white, and all with curl in them; they entered the bag itself at an acute angle, and I could see the hair under the skin as it approached its roots. There were veins branching just under the surface; I held it up and could feel two large oval things like large nuts, that slid around inside the bag; one of them had a softish appendage beneath it; and when I held the skin out with two hands I was fascinated by the thinness of this bag, the way it was round and wrinkled and compact at one time, and at another stretched and pink with red veins and slanting hairs, having lost the dull brown color it had when it was all together in a heap.

  From the heap I lifted the penis and held it straight up, and the bag moved! The incredibly wrinkled skin on top of it, where the penis had rested, was crawling! It moved sideways, its lattice of structural wrinkles, and wrinkles due to its folded position, moving together a little way—very slowly—then moving back. It too breathed.

  But why would it breathe? It was more like thinking. What an idea! That both of these two lowly, protected, abused, serviceable, talented organisms—beings?—persons?—were thinking. Alone, apparently unobserved, they thought. Of what? Of the destiny of nations, of the sine wave graph of human fortunes and endless change? Or were they thinking for the man whose apparent appendages they were?

  In which case perhaps he was the appendage to them.

  Holding the penis erect like that, I saw the circumcision mark clearly. I turned it round and saw the collar thing shaping upward and pointing at the mouth via a narrow channel in the head. There was a limit to how far you could pull it upwards; though it was soft and stretchy, there was a limit. I could feel a gristly thing inside it that I had come to the end of. It was just over seventeen centimeters: I knew that because just over seventeen centimeters was the length of my hand from middle finger to base of thumb.

  He was still deeply asleep. I knew from times he had been drinking that he would be asleep for at least three hours.

  I began to give the thing a tickle, all of it; from the pile of scrotum skin to the columnar penis, just an idle thing to do, like a child’s game, turning it round in my fingers and pressing and lengthening it, noting the long brownish raised line on the under side that led down and broadened toward the beginning of the scrotum and continued right on underneath, dividing the scrotum into two sides and the hairs that sprouted where that line began, hairs and pores that had been stained a purply brown, even several lumps on the skin of the scrotum itself. And going on in this way for some time, hardly thinking what I was doing, the thing began to straighten and thicken. I was making it erect! What would happen? Would he wake?

  For some reason I felt a duty to it and could not or would not stop. With my fingers I traced the thickness and checked it from the head where it seemed to stop just short of the fleshy mouth itself, like a tense muscle, down to the inner parts of the scrotum and further than that—I checked with my fingers inside the underpants—into something like the center of the scrotum and down into his body! Right in him. It wasn’t just something attached to the skin or to some outside shell of the body, it came from deep inside him!

  It stood up without support. I ran my fingers down it and up again, seeing how the fine skin on the outside slipped along over the muscle inside, noting how the mouth stood open, how the green veins that were thick under the skin were more prominent and the thin reddish ones were still no different from what they had been except there were more of them and a big green vein I hadn’t noticed before was down near the base, perhaps a quarter of the way up.

  I bent over to—well, to smell it, I suppose. There was a slight smell of cigarettes, probably from the place he’d been drinking; there was a light soap smell; also a smell I could not place, never having met it before. I couldn’t describe it: it was warm and wettish, and—but no, I had no word for it since I had never come across it.

  It was so clean and fine, and he was so fast asleep, I put my mouth over it tentatively. There was no taste. Just for fun I tried my mouth over it as far as it would go. It went back into my throat, I felt it near that thing that hangs down, the uvula, and it nearly made me cough and sneeze at the same time. I tried it again, and made a point of br
eathing through my nose and it was all right.

  I looked sideways at his face. All I could see was chin and nose and eyebrows. What would I do now if he woke? Say—“You never gave me a talk about things, so I was finding out for myself?” It was funny to see him so helpless.

  I moved my mouth up and down on it, but nothing happened.

  I took my mouth off it, got my handkerchief and wiped my spit off. Not long after I stopped touching it, it began to wilt. The head inclined, but instead of bending from up there near the top, it began to collapse from nearer the bottom and perhaps in the middle too. I replaced everything and did him up and went back to my book.

  I was sorry to be getting near the end of Jane Austen.

  Father on Irrationality

  It was the same night. When he looked at me I tried not to blush or anything silly.

  “Irrationality has a positive value. Think of our leaders. They wouldn’t be leaders if they weren’t technically insane. Who is it wants to lead a nation? Is there a preknown destination for a nation? If there’s not, where is a leader taking us? Is the leader, or the hundred aspirants to leader, someone who thinks he’s the best man to do it? How did he know? Did he find out? No, he didn’t: he’s convinced in the absence of evidence. If he says he found out, where did he find out? Who told him? The answer is: he told him. So he talks to himself and believes what he hears. But now you say—” (I hadn’t said a thing.) “What about writers and composers and people who invent things? Ah, here is the value of being able to follow one’s own direction in the absence of a preknown goal, in the absence of evidence that one can do the task. For these things are activities for which there can be no training. They can be trained in details, in the manner used by others, but for the whole task they’re on their own. They must develop their own way of doing. So when a young person says: I will be a great painter—is that rational?”