A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  He paused.

  “It sounds reasonable,” I said tentatively, looking away.

  He clapped a hand to his forehead. “She’s got me. Yes—reasonable. But not rational.” He was sitting back against a corner of the lounge. The parts of him that I knew about were bunched under his trousers. I love you, father, I said in my head, and when he looked away from my face, I let my eyes rest down there, just to see them again.

  “Me: ML”

  Her budding breasts pointed like arrowheads at a distant enemy who would inevitably fall. They were sharp and stuck up under her tunic; it was impossible to tit clash her, they were so far apart, and small.

  When she wrote verse for the English lesson, her stuff was always about herself. “Me: ML” was a sample title:

  Only yesterday she stood under

  A streetlight in a busy town;

  It drowned her in the gold of sodium.

  She groped, caught in darkness loud as thunder.

  Four walls she built round her mind

  But the twisted heart, the forgotten part of her

  Is unprotected, open to the sky.

  Her consciousness is a room clouded

  With smoke. Her sky concave,

  Beneath it she feels

  An inner greatness wrapped in distracting laughter.

  The calm she feels is paper-frail,

  Deep dangerous fluids swirl beneath,

  Which are no friends to her.

  Hot metal passes her face

  Arrows of acid, arrows of fire

  Rioting from her own brain

  Pouring from her,

  Returning,

  Aimed at only her.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. “Not that I give a shit.”

  I didn’t answer. I think she hadn’t asked the right question. Plumpton liked it: that was enough to give ML the chance for a sneer.

  “Oompah, oompah,

  Shove it up your joompah,”

  she said cheerfully when she got 19½ out of 20.

  A Disease Called the Future

  Kids hung out of the buses each afternoon, making the noises of hell for the driver. They yelled at people walking in the street, flicked lolly papers into the driving windows of cars, and tortured anonymous citizens with their laughter.

  The only thing that could silence them was the sight of a long sleek car drawn up alongside the bus at the lights, a long car with expensive people in it, expensive young people. Pros, not proles.

  When the wheeled money had drawn away ahead, the kids would sigh collectively; they knew there were two classes and the hope of riches was something that would recede further every year they lived. The years would stretch hope out thinner until one day they would fail the grading or their bodies would change and it would snap.

  Today a long red car was there at the intersection and the kids shut up, watching full of envy as it hurtled ahead, subsiding in a communal sorrow when it was out of sight.

  There was a glow in the sky as if the world had blood pressure. The clouds were crystallized sugar. When a miserable few drops of rain came, they were greasy like sweat, and looked as if they’d taste of salt. The sky coughed, its nose ran. The drops brought up the smell of the bitumen road, then evaporated on the warmth left by the sun. The road we were on was an artery of the world, and it was clogged with waste products, like us kids. We were not an organ of society: we were a danger to it. Parasites embedded in the walls of society.

  A big storm came up that night, the wind picked at the locks, tried the doors for weakness, tried to knock them down. The roof beams groaned. But as I lay sweating in bed trying to emulate Marie-Louise I felt it wasn’t the roof propping up the sky: it was me. Next day I stopped at the top of the street after school and stood for about twenty minutes looking for signs of humanity on the faces of people who passed in cars and trucks and buses.

  I gazed in at the windows of cars that had to stop at the crossing—and they hated stopping, it used their cars up—looking in at them, trying to say without speaking: Do you know me? Do you recognize me? As if, perhaps having seeds of future humanity in them, their recognition of me meant that I was part of the future too.

  So much of our thought, so much of our desire is toward the future. As if the present is only a nuisance, an obstacle, to be got over, round, through as soon as possible. The end of the future is, individually, death. Yet if there had been a betting agency taking bets against death, the whole society would have invested.

  Was I part of the future? Were they? And why were death and the future so much on my mind, so much a part of my mind? Thirteen years of age. Did mother know? And was that why she had retreated from the world? Was that why she dangled greatness in front of me? Or had she caused me to choose death and the future as companions because of that word?

  I knew I was being unreasonable.

  After yesterday’s storm this is one of those days of bird’s-egg sky and sharp-beaked birds. How changeable the world is from one day to the next!

  Scaredy Cats

  I had to stop playing hidings with the kids from along the street. When I was “in” I went after them, not cautiously but as if I were a hungry tiger, leaping through the middle of bushes and pouncing on them. I don’t know what made me do it, but they got frightened and for a while they didn’t know whether they liked the fright or wanted me elsewhere. After I leaped headfirst through a clump of hibiscus bushes three houses along Heisenberg Close, the grown-ups were against me too, and they told their children to come inside, which meant we had to move off to a frontyard represented by at least someone in the game. But the rest decided they didn’t want me landing on them either and went inside, and next day they were nowhere to be seen.

  I was left standing out the front near the eucalypts by myself, breathed on by a soft October wind with a mouthful of early summer flowers—but the taste of flowers was in the wind’s mouth, not mine.

  The Spare Room Was Full of Mother’s Notes

  Father bought a prefabricated shed and had it erected in our backyard. The neighbors wondered if it was a toolshed, a playhouse, a supersize dog kennel. He said no to everything. He wasn’t ashamed of my mother’s notes, just careful of her right to keep making them in privacy.

  The shed was called Proust, after the redoubtable Marcel, who also chronicled moments of conscious life. We assumed this was what mother did.

  We moved mother’s oldest notes to the furthest corners of the shed, over her protests. She wanted the most ancient things closest at hand, so her past would be easily accessible.

  “OK,” said my father. “Fair enough. So we put the latest things in first, at floor level.”

  “Will I be able to get at them easily?” asked my mother.

  She could not visualize future events. She had no way of picturing where those notes would end up in relation to the things put in later.

  “Naturally not.”

  “But I want them where I can look over them immediately.”

  “But you want the old ones where you can look over them immediately,” said my father.

  “Of course.”

  “But you can’t have both.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she laughed. “Of course I can.”

  The removal bogged down until mother carried things out to the shed herself. She got the piles one deep round the walls, all were accessible easily. Then she went back inside to consult the volume of unplaced notes. There were still too many in the spare room for her to get at them easily. She added another row alternately on top of the first row in the shed, then inside the first row. Both ways were inconvenient.

  “Would you like a dozen sheds in the yard so you can have one row round the inside of the walls in each shed?”

  “Wonderful!” said my mother, clapping her hands.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said my father in the only display of annoyance with her that I ever saw. She spent the rest of the day in deep depression at such savagery, and in furious notetaki
ng activity.

  I suggested shelves all round, so nothing had to be lifted to get at the rest. Father put the shelves in. Mother put her boxes on the shelves. The house settled down.

  Harvey Comes Up Roses

  Harvey Lowe was the boy I kept next to in optional woodwork class; he worked in his father’s workshop at home and made chessmen on his father’s lathe. He was the best boy at woodwork, and I determined I would be best girl. I watched every movement he made, and I could see the difference between us. He loved wood, and seemed to understand it. When he cut or hammered, it was if he said to it: This will do you good, you want to be this new shape, nothing’s going to hurt you, you and I are working together.

  But I, although I admired the grain and the shiny effects as you turned the planed wood against the light, I didn’t love it. The smell was nice, no more. Harvey Lowe drank it in as if he was a baby snuggling against, and drinking in, the smell of his mother.

  He had a Maria Callas rose growing under his right armpit. Only the flower: the stem was inside.

  “I can’t bud from it,” he said sadly. “I went to the nursery, and they told me they need more stem. There’s no stem, no stem at all. Still, there’s a market for the blooms.”

  He got a dollar a rose. His armpit Maria Callas was famous, and researchers and curio collectors and sellers would have bid up the price, except they formed a ring and agreed to keep the price at a dollar. It was all a matter of being on the spot when the rose appeared as a bud and bloomed. It only took a day in summer, and sometimes in winter there were weeks between blooms.

  It got in the way of his woodwork, but he looked after it well in the other classes. He wasn’t in my class for anything else. I did top levels in everything: he was only good at woodwork.

  “Still, there’s a market for the blooms,” he said when I asked to smell it, then wrinkled my nose and straightened up, looking down at his honest but none-too-bright face. He wore a protector to stop his bloom from being crushed. It smelled.

  The Big G

  In letters from friends, quiet asides from teachers, admiring comments from neighbors who didn’t have kids around my age, and from relatives who by reason of circumstance were exempt from jealousy, came the same message: I was destined for big things.

  Don’t laugh. I wasn’t a large, brutal, kneeing and elbow-jabbing basketball player in class; I was a diligent, clever student, sometimes attentive. I did some work at home, but I was lucky in that I seemed to understand the teachers the first time. That was a great advantage; it meant that all later learning was built on a base. The kids that didn’t understand the first time were in a sweat trying to understand what went on three steps ago, and never caught up. I know the lessons weren’t useful later, and knew then, but it instilled a confidence, a presence in the face of new situations, that stayed with me.

  From what people had been saying for years, I began to aspire, all on my own, toward a glowing distant light called fame. Reputation was another name for it. There was yet another word, but I never said it to myself. I heard it from a friend at high school, a girl kept at high school by her brothers, though she couldn’t easily afford the uniform. Somehow they managed to get the material and have it made up by ladies who lived in proper houses. They lived in a tent in the bush. Her name was Lil Lutherburrow, the one who wrote the poem.

  The shy word was greatness.

  “Your name will live,” Lil wrote to me in a holiday letter. “There is greatness in you. I can tell. I know it.” (Why did I take notice of a Free?)

  That word gave me the urge to push against its accompanying idea of death and the future, against the dissolution of self, against separation from others. Against the final relinquishing of life, to which I was now committed, and had been, for thirteen years.

  Before conception all one’s possibilities are intact: the possibility that one will be born some day; that one will be unlike all who have ever lived; the possibility of being so different and so special and so full of energy that one’s existence might be greatness.

  Yes, I am committed to the future, which is a rope coiled on the deck of a boat. Length by length it is taken up, and each length is a day; it is lowered over the side into deep water length by length, and on the end of it is an anchor. The future is used up length by length and thrown overboard, and when the anchor strikes the seabed there is no need for more.

  It Looked As Drunk As He Was

  I had waited, not really having planned anything, for father to come home Sunday morning. He’d been out all night; he rolled out of a taxi, singing, and slumped onto the sun lounge. Mother took one look and went gladly back to her desk. She wouldn’t be interrupted all morning, not even with nuisance kisses on the back of her neck.

  What I did was to get it out, raising it in the same way as before, and placing its head, or its mouth as I think of it, against the part of my unders where it obviously ought to go. I rubbed it back and forth against the soft flesh a number of times, but couldn’t get it to make an impression on my little clitoral bump, but another thing happened. A quantity of moisture from my natural stock of such things seemed to respond to the movement in those parts and descended to the area affected; no sooner there than the back and forth movement was abruptly stopped, for the mouth of his penis slipped in.

  What should I do? My legs were spread one on each side of him, my thighs straining with the unaccustomed spread position. It was obvious I wouldn’t be able to move much. Men pushed in and back, but if they were stationary the female would have to move up and down. What punishment on the muscles!

  I decided to just let myself down to see what it felt like inside. Would I tear something? We’d have to see what happened. I let myself down slowly and felt a slight sensation round the entrance, no more. Was that all? Wasn’t I a virgin? Where was the destruction of tissues? The blood? I looked under me: no blood. I gratefully allowed myself to rest on his body, with it in as far as its length would take it. There was something then, a sort of fullness; perhaps it was pushing against some organ or other.

  I thought it might be indecent to go up and down, apart from the difficulty, so I got up until its mouth was only just in me, and ran my fingers lightly up and down it, using the moisture that I had left on it. I did this for quite a time.

  When my thighs couldn’t take it anymore, I got off. The penis chose that moment to erupt. Two spurts of whitish thick fluid went into the air, and more welled up and overflowed the end of it, running down the side rather like cornflour and water when it’s halfway between being cooked and uncooked—part clear, part cloudy. I think I had expected the spurts to rise up like a volcano and shoot around everywhere: at least I knew now it didn’t come in bucketsful. But maybe inside mother, the normal way, there would be more.

  I didn’t think it right to give myself an orgasm with my father, so I cleaned up his penis and wiped up round his underclothes and replaced everything.

  Even when I’d wiped its mouth it lay there, head on one side, dribbling slowly. It looked as drunk as he was.

  When I’d wiped it all up, I wished I’d spent more time looking at the semen itself. I should have examined it more closely. How could there be millions in that little lot?

  The Weak Sex

  Arnold Long, the jumping boy, had been at school for the partly sighted in his primary days. He’d always been hopping about on one leg or two before, but at High he began to show promise at the thing he became famous for. He looked very cute; even a dour fourteen-year-old girl could acknowledge that; hopping up and down, a grin on his face, his smooth downy cheeks decorated with a large pink spot on either side of the grin. His eyes never shone, though; the lids didn’t open like other kids’, and the sun didn’t have a chance to catch the glint of liquid on his eyeball.

  His pleasure in jumping was the most innocent thing in the whole school, I guess.

  When he got away from the asphalt on to the grassed edge of the playing fields he bounced up from the balls of his feet and w
ent high, high, touching easily the lower branches of the trees no one else could reach. One of the teachers suggested he try for the long jump. After school he had to be shown the white marker and learn to find it as he ran toward it. It was painful to watch but he kept at it.

  One of the teachers told his parents, and arranged for him to be given practice after school.

  I saw him jumping there and was startled to see him jump 5.8 meters. In year eight, and only partly seeing! I hurried home and marked out a run-up across the neighbors’ front lawn, got father’s mattock and dug a jumping pit, digging the sandy soil up so it no longer had lumps and sods. By the time father got home I had adjusted the jumping mark so that with a good jump I landed in the middle of the pit.

  The car came round the curve in Heisenberg Close, slowed to turn right up our drive and as it climbed the twenty meter slope I took off. The car was stopped and I was flying through the air and father watched in amazement as I landed in the greyish sand and sent spurts of soil before me; I saw his eyes go to the run-up, the jumping mark, and again to the pit I had dug.

  “Al! What have you done?” he said, with no great originality.

  “Training for the broad jump.”

  “But you trained at school before,” he said lamely.

  “That meant I didn’t train.”

  “But you won before, with no training.”

  “Not now. There’s a kid at school can jump 5.8 meters.”

  “I can jump that,” he countered. “At least I could.”

  “Get your gear off, father. And show me,” I dared him.