A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  “Did you dig the hole?”

  “I dug the pit.”

  “Oh.”

  He went inside, kissed mother, ignored her irritation, changed into shorts and jogging shoes and came out to me.

  By the time father had lined up for his first jump, some other kids had come by, and stood watching.

  Father jumped, I jumped. I put the board so that a 5.8 meter jump would land me in the middle of the jumping pit. Father insisted on having first go, and failed. The audience made a murmur of sympathy. They were girls from year ten and nine, mostly living down in Boyle Avenue.

  I went to the start of my run, shut my eyes for a second to rest them, relaxed all over as I stood there, breathed deeply, then took off, trying to judge my run-up so there were no uneven strides just before the jumping-off board. I flew, working my legs as I had seen Olympic athletes do 5.8 meters. I stood up, thinking with satisfaction of Arnold Long.

  The audience made no sound. Father had another go, and failed again. I’m afraid I laughed.

  “I beat you!” I rejoiced, but the watching girls sympathized with the loser. They couldn’t have jumped it, either.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have got him to compete with me. Perhaps he was tired. Adults do get tired at odd times during the day, as well as at night.

  He smiled at me, his spirits up.

  “Good jumping, darling,” he said. “You’re a winner. Men are definitely the weakest sex.” We had a little understanding about the number of the sexes. He went inside.

  I practiced until I could get to the 5.8 meter mark every time, and went in when I was satisfied I could match Arnold Long.

  He was sitting at the dining room table.

  “I can do it!” I said. “I can do it every time.”

  He didn’t look at me, but said quietly, “I suppose it must be right, and we are the weak ones.”

  That’s all he said, but an hour later when I’d finished my homework I came out ravenous, and he hadn’t even started getting tea ready. He was still sitting there, looking out of the big back window, one elbow on the table and its hand with a thumb under his chin and forefinger resting below his nose, the other arm loose across his left knee. He didn’t seem to notice me, and as I looked one of those small, harmless flies landed on his forehead, stopped to search about for goodies among his pores, trotted a few paces further on, scouted around, crossed its front legs busily with a washing motion, one over the other, then reversing the movement. It took off briefly, though father made no movement, then landed again, just above his right eye, did much the same things. Very friendly. It made a short flight, landed on the back of his hand, and did a difficult journey down his arm, awkwardly negotiating the long hairs, full of the high seriousness of small creatures. Neither of them noticed me. I went quietly away.

  This Isn’t Exactly a Dream

  It’s a mental picture I carry with me: a ring of adoring faces surrounds me, my mother, my teachers, various boys’ faces, neighbors, relatives. They beam a message at me with their eyes and their smiles, and I reward them with a smile of my own which I can reproduce at will.

  This almost-dream picture is liable to become visible to me at any time; on my way to school, dreaming during one of those interminable explanations of surds to the duller kids in the class, and unreal and imaginary numbers. Or in the middle of eating my tea at night, with a fork halfway to my mouth, with perhaps some underdone steak on it that I know I shouldn’t like—because of certain intellectual objections to killing animals, which one may have if one wishes—I shouldn’t like but I do.

  This picture is most powerful, sensually, if I’m in bed at night and I’ve decided to masturbate. I do it with all those beaming, approving faces watching me, and when it comes the orgasm is shattering—an ecstasy of pleasure shot through and through with apprehension, a feeling of some mysterious pain which is something other than pain. This particular one starts up in my chest and descends on a thin thread of feeling that winds down below my navel, then strikes in deep with a warmth, a radiance that words can’t take hold of.

  Have You Had a Bleed?

  They’d asked me so often, the kids at school, that it was with a great sense of relief that I felt the intimations and small miseries of my approaching initiation.

  When it came it would be sports day. I was the only one of the regular basketball team that was out injured that day, so I sat and watched. My schoolbag was between my legs, I shifted it to one side of me, glad of the comfort of sitting down and containing within the solid block of my lower trunk parts the unease that had got into me and to have my legs together right from my ankles to the top of my thighs. I took out a pen and an exercise book and wrote a poem.

  Mirror bordered by flesh-frame

  Reflecting, as it must,

  Blue sky between white,

  Floating chunks of edible mountain,

  Toothpick trees.

  Smash the mirror,

  Each long sliver of brittle flesh on the grass

  A piece of the jigsaw,

  Part of the sky-mirror,

  Bearing bits of brittle blood.

  It wasn’t really a poem. Did I mean the mirror was the mind?

  Or the world was a dinner? Or the body was a mirror?

  I gave up. It was a mess. I began watching the game again, while daylight fell in ribbons round me.

  Friends For a Time

  Shaziye Osman was coming from tennis when the bus dropped me back at school. I walked with her.

  Shaziye was, courtesy of our biology class, called the Callistemon Queen, or Cancer Knobs. She had knobs on her arms like the cankers on a tree, or the seeds on an arm of bottlebrush.

  “Hello, Cancer,” I said ungraciously to her, but she was so glad to be walking with me she didn’t mind. I was mainly hoping the pad was in place, and no leaks.

  “It’s not a cancer,” she corrected me mildly. “It’s just that some of the inside has surfaced.”

  “Have you got it on the rest of you?” I said. I didn’t really care. The day of your first period ought to be special, but here I was talking with Cancer Knobs, and not feeling very special at all. What if the blood ran down your legs?

  Her father had wheat stalks in his elbows. When the specialist referred him to the state agriculture department the verdict was that it was an old hardy type of wheat with heads not as full as more recently developed grain, but it would be handy for the genetic bank; he was to submit the full ears, when they came, to the scientists, and they would harvest him for the benefit of future stocks.

  We talked about wheat and her father for the rest of the walk. She left me when I turned off into Heisenberg Close. She had another kilometer to go. She never took the bus because of her knobs: the kids pinched them and it hurt.

  I saw her next day too, and we became friends for a week or two.

  We told each other everything. She’d had her first bleed five months before.

  We practiced together how to look attentive; our teacher was a magazine article on how to hypnotize males. We practiced our timing—when to look attentive. We practiced random and puzzling expressions calculated to put them off balance.

  We devised small movements of hand, head, eyes to force them to look. We tried to work out verbal ploys to lead them on, to get them to say more; in short, to make them look like the fools we knew them to be.

  We told each other everything.

  One morning, before my second period, I suddenly thought: I’ll be walking with that pill Shaziye again this morning. I’m sick of her.

  I left home ten minutes early and never walked with her again.

  It was the same week that the Park was pronounced dead: the one near Carpentaria Chemicals. They had to dig out all the soil to a depth of a meter, and bring fresh earth in.

  Maria and Tony

  Maria Attardi came from a school out toward the mountains; her father had moved to be near his relatives. She often sat up the front of my aisle in music, her legs out sidewa
ys and feet planted well back behind her. I tried to copy her position, but found it put weight on the lower parts of me, and it felt like something that would lead to masturbation. I liked to sit back and regard the teacher in a detached manner. Most of them thought I was being superior.

  Maria used to wait on the newsagent’s corner for a dark boy in a red car hung with tassels and with gold flashes on the side. Tony, she said his name was. Tony Sergio. His father worked in a gambling place.

  She’d had periods since year seven. I watched her, her face, her actions, her words, to see if I could see why I was different from her. She was medium in English and terrible at maths. Why should I bother my head about her? However, she was in my class for English, and something about her kept me thinking of her, and looking. When Mister Patel had us for two periods and gave us the whole time for writing a story, I had Maria in mind, only I made her a child.

  Lisa

  Maria’s special friend was Annette Julian. Her older brother was Mario. He had always loved to make things. At that time he was making a girl he called Lisa. She grew out of him, feet first. His family, who came from the Mediterranean, had such pride that they kept him locked in his room because of his deformity. He didn’t have a room to himself before, so this could be seen as an improvement in his station in life.

  By the time two feet were out and it was clear this was a female of perhaps eighteen—he was sixteen—he knew every line of the feet, every hair, every toe-shape; the arches, the insteps, the pattern of prints on the soles. He fingered them constantly, and they wiggled slightly as if they liked the contact. He discovered what any mother knows, that we are born with all the wrinkles necessary to make the movements we need, without stretching and tearing the skin.

  Soon there had to be a foot-rest for the new legs, for it was a great weight for the front of him, and soreness developed at the top of the extrusion where the skin stretched, and also beneath, where skin, common to him and his girl, folded up and was pressed together.

  I dreamed that at night her unformed soul crawled out from her limbs and inspected him.

  My Father Was Mother to the Woman of the Future

  My father was my mother in all practical ways, such as cleaning up after me, washing the dishes I’d eaten from, also the cats’ plates, doing the cooking for my unpredictable appetite, making my bed. Mother had turned aside from such futilities years before though she seemed happy enough that they continued to be done. She was her own woman: she certainly didn’t belong to father or to me. We went our own way in the house, taking care not to disturb her. If you went up to her to say something, the aura round her gave you a little push while you were still several meters away, and if you came on despite that, and spoke to her while her pen was busy on the paper, it was most likely that you would get no reply. If she had finished her sentence she might look up and look at you as if she were listening, but her eyes seemed to penetrate your body like those cosmic rays the man put dry cleaning fluid down a hole to catch, and you knew she could see only a vague outline of you, and everything important was beyond.

  Father was mother to the woman of the future, and the future extended before me like it did before mother; she had millions of bits of paper to write on in the future: I had millions of moments on which to write in large letters that word I was so shy of.

  Father Is Sometimes Silent

  Father is sometimes silent in what I think of as a real situation, and I know why. It’s because he is afraid that he might go straight into the lines of some play he’d done, speaking lines instead of turning his attention painfully to what is actually happening.

  I worry for him.

  Several times I’ve been talking to him and being bright and so forth, and he’s begun to look at me in a really loving fatherly way, then suddenly caught himself and said: “Shit! I did that on stage!”

  Apologizing, blaming himself. I would have been content with the look as it was, wherever else he used it.

  By a stroke of bad luck I hit his eye when he and I were having our weekly boxing. There’s still a lump on the eyebrow. It wasn’t my fault entirely: he put out his left hand just as I was coming forward and my right glove traveled over his forearm and elbow and shoulder and landed over his left eye. I was sorry for that, especially as I’d beaten him in jumping so recently. He was silent after my punch, too. It was exactly what he’d told me to do.

  Sometimes When Father Had Been Drinking

  Sometimes when father had been drinking, but not enough for passing out, he had peculiar moods: some miserable and dark, some querulous.

  He once burst out to me, “Who am I? Am I my best part? Am I someone I have never discovered?”

  He was under no illusion that I was too young to understand.

  “Why haven’t writers written a part for me, me!—myself—for my real self? Am I to die when my writer, the writer of me, is still a child? Unborn, even?”

  He gazed into his steel pocket mirror and asked passionately and fearfully: “Who is it? Who am I? What am I?”

  His distress was not painful for me: he was an adult. I was shaken by my own storms; his were not earthshaking to me, though his words opened a new door on the world of grown-ups.

  “I’ve always had to feel others’ emotions! Never mine. How am I to know after all this time whether mine are really mine? Am I too practiced in emotions, can I bring them too facilely to the surface, to know which contain me?”

  “Is facilely a word?” I asked. This brutal remark brought him back to his accustomed pleasantly genial state.

  “I do run on, don’t I darling?” And he kept silent for a bit. Then, “No. I’ve never even felt those emotions I have to act. They’re all practice. Windowdressing. Inside, I feel nothing. They say the pain of some of my professional emotions is terrible. But it’s just pain. Not terrible: just pain. The pain is unreal, it’s in the audience. I throw the words, the situation, the expression at them. They feel it all. I’m a dummy.” He laughed, clearly wanting me to laugh. I smiled nicely.

  I imagined him then, on his deathbed, still with the mirror, being different people, acting others’ lives, and saying “Which one is dying? They all are. But which damned one is me?”

  I didn’t tell him my imaginings.

  I don’t think father ever spoke like that to mother. I daresay she would have taken no notice.

  And yet, despite her ignoring us—I don’t mean purposely, but in effect that is what she does—mother dominates us. She’s not even there, she’s in another room, yet she prescribes what we will do. I’m sure father does what he does because it is the way to please her and give her nothing to complain of.

  There are times when I’d like to complain, but I’m afraid it will disturb her. I censor myself because of her. And I don’t like it.

  She didn’t fall deep into one love like he did: she fell deep into herself and became a miner.

  Time and Women

  All the girls I knew turned every time they passed a window or a sheet of glass, even a shiny expanse of metal, and looked at themselves. The gesture could have been mistaken from a distance for a sporty toss of the head, one designed to have the hair fall in a windblown fashion over the forehead, or a curious look into a shop window, but it wasn’t.

  Not one man looked sideways into windows. Why not? If the behavior of the women was normal, why were the males lacking in this bit of display? Were they so caught up in their round of being active—even sprawling around they seemed to be thinking of distant objects and actions, rather than clothes and their hairdo—that they had no time for the slide into neutral gear that allowed the mind to slip from active pursuits and objects to interior matters of self-contemplation?

  Did females live longer because of that interior life, so that of any hour they had a higher proportion of time devoted to their own interior concerns? Did they truly live within, in a manner allied to but different from Eastern contemplatives? Were the hairdo, the overall appearance, the face-color, the lottery
of the future, the equivalent of navel, nirvana and mantra?

  Did men have shorter lives because they did not allow themselves this time? Was that why women were often so unused, in the sense that they knew less of the world’s objects, less of the world’s motives? If so, how did they manage to age more quickly yet live longer? Or is that not a fair question?

  Had they used themselves up less?

  A longer life with less in it, or a shorter one with more—is that the choice?

  The sun, which teaches us time, knows the answer, but which of us knows how to ask the right question?

  Pale Robert

  When there was rain the boys in senior school took us for rides in their cars. One of their favorite places was at the bottom of the gorge, where a road led down to a depression, then up out of it. The depression filled with about half a meter of water, and the boys got up speed and ran at the sheet of water and if they had enough speed they aquaplaned over to the other edge of the water then, when their tires hit solid ground they skidded, for the wheels, after aquaplaning, weren’t straight forward.

  The best was when Don Strong had his antique Beetle, with its flat plate underneath to give it flotation, filled with kids and the rest of us on the roof. There was no other traffic down there in the gorge, everyone knew it flooded after rain.

  When everyone was there, a sort of nerviness rose from us—we all felt it—and we took it for energy and were pleased with ourselves.

  Even Robert Gambling, who had a brown rabbit growing, came with the rest of us to enjoy the thrills of danger.

  He had kept the rabbit secret until the very day that the whole crew on the roof of Donny Strong’s car was thrown off when the car hit something under water, and stopped. Robert was under several others, under water, and swallowed lots, and when the others got up, he floated. We pulled him out and turned him upside down to get the water out, and his shirt fell open. There was the head of the rabbit. We gave it some grass. It took three months to grow out.