A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  With both Leonard and Hugh there was again, when they came, a wild assortment of groans and cries and short, piggy gruntings. Did they feel a great deal of pleasure? Much more than we females? Did one need a great deal of experience before one caught the essence of it? Or were their cries and drastic facial expressions at the moment just another manifestation of male heartiness?

  I knew some girls shrieked and moaned, but I always suspected them. I hadn’t felt anything to be particularly bucked about—certainly nothing as wildly pleasurable as when I masturbated. But of course at those times I had to keep very quiet.

  Anger, Even

  Hugh Holland’s first go with me was a failure. I think my physical strength and the reputation I had from sports rather put him in the shade. (I think too, I grabbed their wrists or other things with more power than I intended, and that set them back on their heels, rather.)

  It was in the car, and we got naked with the car rug handy in case of police or peepers, and I thought he was being more excited than the occasion warranted. It wasn’t as if he’d never done it before in a female.

  By the time he was in position and moving his thing towards the patch of hair we wanted him to penetrate, he seemed to convulse, his hand clenched over it as if he could stop it coming, but I think the extra pressure probably helped it come.

  It came, all right, several spurts of semen on my stomach, on the top of my left thigh, and one into the thicket, where it’s so awkward to wipe away.

  I knew it was called premature ejaculation, and it wasn’t serious. I found it funny, and laughed. He thought I was smiling at him. Males often think you’re smiling at them when you’re really laughing at them. Though there was a sort of excitement at the back of my throat, of all places, before the event, that, not being satisfied, could, I felt, turn quickly to irritation. Anger, even.

  Peeknik

  There were picnics and strip barbecues and dirty affairs like peekniks. And we had a number of all of them, and since I had disposed of the burden of my childhood, and been de-virginated, I was invited to more and more.

  It became a joke that we always had to take Don Kershaw, whatever party we had, for he issued paper, like tissue, from a slit under his shirt.

  “Wipe, wipe, wipe yourself,” we sang in the cars on the way to the clearings in Duffy’s Forest that we used for group affairs, “Wipe yourself on Don’s,” to the tune of “Row your boat.”

  The influence on his cells of the image of outside objects had made him productive of something that benefited his fellows, and we valued him for it.

  (A peeknik was where each pair that did it had all the others standing round watching. The male that couldn’t do it publicly couldn’t turn up to the next peeknik.)

  Organs

  It was at a sort of barbecue-houseparty at the Fienbergs (the parents were away) that I had another squeeze of Acker Campbell’s organs. He had stomach organs that craved the light so greatly that they grew outside him. (Did they crave to be seen?) The one I squeezed was a length of tubing that had an opalescent whitish skin and appeared to be a darker, pinker color inside. At the party he had several more red things protruding, and one beginning.

  The first edge of red had formed outside, and he showed me, on certain conditions, the way it seemed to ooze outside of him, in a stringy sort of way, as if it came separately through his pores in strands, then re-formed outside. And it did look like that.

  “What will you do when you’re hollow?” I asked him.

  “You’re hollow. What do you do?” he said.

  “Hollow?” Then his hand came up my leg, which wasn’t at all sensitive, so I didn’t bother about it. When his fingers were at the gate I realized what he meant by hollow but it was too late. The hand up my crotch had worked my automatic defenses, and by the time I had any more thoughts at all, Acker was on his back on the carpet. My arm had swept round and had taken him under the jaw and he had fallen under the blow.

  Poor Acker. Later I let him fiddle with me, but only for a few seconds. I didn’t like it much. It felt as if his hand was fiddling around in a bag of marbles and really didn’t have any clear aim.

  Later I relented and allowed one finger in while I played with his organs, those that had come out seeking the light. He didn’t feel it at the time, anyway, when I squeezed one containing food or gunk in the process. It aroused a research impulse in me: I wanted a knife to see what was inside.

  Mutual Masturbation

  When we were together, boys and girls alike, what was it but mutual masturbation? I did it to them, they did it to me, but each of us, I and they, had to specify what we wanted in order to get the most satisfaction out of the others’ actions. That’s what I mean by masturbation: we already knew what we wanted done. We knew, from doing it ourselves, what we wanted, then merely got another to fill in for us. Instead of my hand, it was a boy’s, but I had to tell him the place and the frequency and all the rest, in order for his actions to get as close as possible to my own, which, of course, satisfied me most exactly.

  Some Word I Have Never Known

  In social science I got into trouble for arguing with the teacher.

  ‘‘It is not an affluent society!” I was practically shouting. They got a good wage for turning up at school, and some of them weren’t bad teachers, but there was no excuse for raising your voice and losing your cool. I’d never had to raise my voice before to stir a teach.

  “We will stand by the popularly accepted definition of this society as an affluent society,” she answered. She was tired, she’d had a filthy weekend. I mean lousy.

  The other kids looked at me in mid-yawn, which was the nearest they got to startled attention.

  It was Monday. I’d been listening to visitors at home on the weekend, moaning and complaining about this and that.

  I lowered my voice. “Let’s be calm about this, Mrs. Winz. I look around me—at the society I live in—” (underlining each word) “and what do I see? I see cheap building, with less rooms than in the old houses and less space in those rooms. I see things built that are only just strong enough to stand up, yet I see old terraces in the city built over a hundred years ago that haven’t got a crack in the brickwork. The staircases and doors in the old places are of Tasmanian redwood and cedar: these days they sell what they call pine and it’s not, they sell what they call maple and it’s—Ah! I forget the name, but it’s no good. Goods can’t be produced cheaply any more. Mortgages of forty-five years are common. Young people starting out can’t get a house. Schools have to show kids what caterpillars are, and flowers, and cows and horses, instead of the kids being able to see all these things for themselves in the bush or in parks. No, Mrs. Winz, this is a poor society.”

  I had quoted fairly well some of the grown-ups’ complaints. I’d forgotten “hemlock.”

  “The affluence of a society,” said Mrs. Winz, “does not rest upon a few areas of complaint by consumers as to quality of individual items. It rests upon the general availability of a large range of consumer goods, the credit to pay for them, the standing of the country as to its gold reserves, the—”

  Mrs. Winz went on for a long time, long after I’d forgotten what I’d said, telling me more about economics than I wanted to know just then.

  While she droned on I wondered, thanks to all the times I’d heard these things discussed at home when we had visitors, what had happened to the ideals of past political agitators who wanted to make life long, easier and comfortable for the least fortunate. For now the least fortunate were a larger class than ever before, or at least larger than for several hundred years. The only thing that could mitigate their failure was the undeniable fact that this large lower class of society was as equal in opportunity and in treatment as could humanly be expected.

  Next period was history, with Mister Saussere in Room 26. He went on about Australia.

  “This,” he said, “is a proletarian country. I don’t wish to say something too hard, but in your country you make a virt
ue of plainness—plain speaking—where older cultures might prefer a decent evasion. Older cultures like the European, the Asian. You see, even your rich talk like louts. I have heard them, with my own ears.”

  “You mix with the top people, Mister Saussere?” asked Griselda, with innocence.

  “I am invited along to receptions because of my family history,” said Mister Saussere. “It is another indication of your country’s—ah—youth. But to get on, your land has no dream, not even a dream that has existed for a while then misfired, like others who started out with good cheerfulness. I must add that the people of this country appear to me to possess no—how do you call it?—guts? No determination?

  “I speak to you, because you will be the future citizens, of whatever class. Where is your sense of achievement? Where is your sense of responsibility? You act as if you must work because penalties await you if you don’t, you speak as if today was unbearable and tomorrow will, hopefully, not exist. You have no dream, just a national sleep.”

  He was really knocking us, but we knew how to take criticism: we were Australians; we’d knocked ourselves for two hundred years.

  It was that time of the month, the thought of it weighed heavy in my head. Walking home with my heavy schoolcase, my blood weighed like lead between my hips, pulling me down. With a disability like this, how could I ever expect to be capable of heroism? Yet poor old Boof had been a hero, once, and he was just a dog buried up the backyard where the leaves were fresh and damp on dewy mornings.

  (Some word I have never known is struggling to be said. When will I hold it in my mouth?)

  Dream of the Tiger

  I became a boy in the dream. I loved fishing, and while throwing my baited line down into the water, making sure to keep it clear of the oystered rocks—incongruously in a freshwater bush creek—the lean tiger walked up to me along the thin bush track and knocked me over. Just swished his paw at me and whack! I was on the ground.

  I say the lean tiger, because the tiger I saw at Taronga was alarmingly poor-looking. His sides sank in. I was dizzy when he knocked me over and didn’t resist when his teeth sank into my waist. I wasn’t naked, but where his teeth sank into my side the flesh was bare. The realization that I was being eaten roused me to resist. I pushed out my hands toward his face, trying to hurt his eyes.

  He took two bites to bite my fingers off. I don’t remember if he chewed them. (Often I’ve got back into the dream to see if he chewed my fingers, but I could never tell for sure.)

  His claws sank into my side, into both sides. The clothing magically disappeared from the places in the instant his claws touched my skin. My skin is very smooth there, and went in steeply round each claw point, before the skin broke.

  He bit both my arms off. He didn’t chew them up. He never did that, anytime I dreamed the tiger.

  My arms lay there, arranged gracefully enough, not even getting sand on to the torn flesh, mainly because the ground was turning into rather comfortable rock. Clean, but not terribly hard.

  Unfortunately, at that point his jaws closed over my head and he bit my head off. It lay there, resting on its side, not rocking or knocking, and the wretched beast began to chew at my ribs, which are my tenderest spot.

  I stood there, clothed and unharmed, looking at my remains. It was the funniest feeling watching him chew at my pubic region, relishing the soft pink of my genital area and getting the hairs stuck in his mouth. And watching him chew my bottom.

  I’ve since had feelings like that with some males, watching them act out their fantasies on my disposable body, from the slight eminence of a pillow.

  Secret Thoughts

  I had the feeling that any of the people I knew could have led me toward greatness: if only I could decipher the thing about them that could have pointed the way. Was mother’s whole life a lesson to me that I would shortly understand?

  Was there really something about me to correspond to what my well-meaning relatives saw in me? Perhaps what they said had been prompted by an intuition and wasn’t just a dutiful impulse, a mere loyalty to the family stock.

  Alongside my growing belief in my future was another feeling—an amusement at myself: I was so ready to believe and apply to myself the greatness thing they said, without altogether believing them.

  The Mercy of Alethea Hunt

  I went to the Opera House with Greg Melrose, a boy in year eleven, simply because he wasn’t in the usual game of Pantzaroff and Inboys. Greg called for me, was respectful to father and didn’t seem to notice that mother mumbled and didn’t look up.

  After he had parked and we walked along the timbered walkway with the sea sparkling on the left, I thought to myself—since he left large patches of silence—that there was an imbalance between the behavior of boy and girl. At least between this sort of boy and girl. I’m sure he was behaving more carefully with me than he did elsewhere. He was tender, solicitous, protective, imaginative, and his whole being turned inward constantly to our circle of two. And I? I was the same as usual.

  He didn’t try to touch me up, just awarded me a respectful kiss at the end of the evening. Was he always like that? Was it just acting? It was altogether different from being with the other boys. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  We saw Lower Depths; it was set for English. The audience laughed a lot, it was a great success, the best comedy in years.

  Outside, people had sprayed messages on the rock wall; others answered. As if people wanted conversation, at a distance. One series was:

  GOD NEVER SLEEPS.

  POOR OLD BUGGER

  TRY MAKING IT LAST THING

  GET FULL EVERY NIGHT, IT WORKS FOR ME.

  ME TOO

  COUNT THE LAMBS OF HEAVEN

  TRY WORKING HARD ALL DAY

  TRY GETTING WORK.

  Coming back in the car, Greg drove through the city streets. In Elizabeth Street, I saw something funny, and we pulled over to watch.

  A bedraggled man with a crazy mouth was taking cartons and stuff from a pile outside the Carlton Arcade, taking them up the Prudential steps, ratting them methodically by tearing open each parcel of rubbish, taking what he wanted and putting it all back where he got it, in smaller bits. Another old tattered man of the night was entering the Martin Place opening in the wall outside the Prudential, making his way to several green plastic bags. He was taller, he could bend over into them and extract the goodies the affluent workers had discarded.

  Greg watched my amusement and said something about our very own lower depths. Then we drove home to Church Hill, where no one walked the streets after dark.

  I wanted him to ask, but he didn’t. Shyness crippled him, or he was respectful of me, or his morals prevented him: some disability. I didn’t bother to force the issue, just accepted the kiss and went inside.

  Dear, gentle Australia! Land where leaves fall unwillingly, but people are felled to the earth by the lightest of blows!

  Little Me

  Friday morning I lay in bed just at the moment when you realize you’re awake and, without thinking, suddenly leap out of bed.

  I saw her. One of her. It was me. I couldn’t make out if she was a hundred meters away through the wall of the house, or a centimeter high crawling over the hinge on the door of my wardrobe, between the door and the frame. She crawled out of the crack and stood on the hinge. At first she didn’t seem to see me, but when I moved my head she was watching me.

  I looked away, then back, and she was gone.

  In the bathroom, the first thing I saw was a little Alethea climbing up out of the sinkhole. Another ran round the rim of the bath; one stood on the window sill sunning herself.

  At school one greeted me on the gatepost, another came up out of the hole that was used for an inkwell in the old days when kids used ink.

  Could they see me? They waved, sometimes.

  Perhaps I was bigger than this world. I looked round me to check. No, the other kids seemed much the same size as I was.

  Perhaps they saw the wo
rld like this and were afraid to tell, wondering if they were alone in their dismay. Perhaps they too saw tiny versions of themselves.

  That night something woke me. I was tied hand and foot. Six captors—one black, one yellow, one coffee-colored, three white—watched as crowds of little Aletheas escaped from my body. No orifice was spared: ears, eyes, nose, mouth, bladder, anus, vagina—all poured with duplicates. They were scooped up by my captors but they couldn’t hold them. Hosts of Aletheas fell to the ground and were wasted. There were so many. When I was empty they unbound me. Each went away with only one of me, which they clutched like a sample from a fair or a lucky-dip prize.

  ENGLISH EXPRESSION: POEM AGAINST DOOM

  The plagues, the floods, the ice, the endless wars,

  Don’t you remember?

  In your blood is there not an echo

  Is there not some red stain transported

  From what once was home?

  Muscles grew big in later generations

  As in the first: the nerves as steady; the will

  To fight, survive.

  What makes you think emergencies of now

  Are greater than the past’s? More dire?

  Why do you think it impossible to survive?

  Or, pared to a few, to rise again?

  Animals, birds, fish, insects

  Often all-but-destroyed:

  They rise again.

  It would not be the first time the world knew

  A precious few, nor bowed before the onslaught

  Of determined men and gave way, made room,

  Backed off, until that few

  Niched themselves in to a defended place.