A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  I ended it there, because the English period ended. I wanted to remind Australians of their heritage; I wanted to tell them they were not separate, or even remote from, their past. I wanted to go on to tell them how I conceived of humanity as a force of nature, equal to natural catastrophies in our effect on the planet.

  I felt passionately about this theme at the time, and our year nine English teacher, Miss Heaton, who was actually the English master, was enthusiastic. But from what she said she was only happy to have someone good at English and didn’t feel my message with any urgency at all. It could have been about tenth century tapestry. She wanted us to love words, but didn’t care much what they meant.

  Poor Maria

  When we got back from the May holidays we were horrified to find that Maria Attardi’s father was in jail for killing Maria. His explanation to the court was that Maria had been “opened.”

  We discussed this news during breaks and were unanimous that what Maria did with herself was nothing to do with her father. We tried to see the sense behind the father’s dreadful action, for there was a chance that he really believed something bad had happened to Maria, but we could not grasp the attitude, common enough in history books, of the father being so concerned that his child had had sexual intercourse. We couldn’t understand.

  I asked my father, and all he could say was that some old-fashioned people thought she might be spoiled for marriage by being had before then, but he couldn’t see why. None of the kids at school had a clue why he should be so upset, not even the boys, or perhaps specially not the boys. It was a mystery.

  Poor Maria. Every time I remember her name I think of her sitting in class, looking obediently forward, her rather shapeless ankles pushed out to either side of her chair and a little back so that her heels rose off the ground. Her long hair was very dark brown and she had thick eyebrows. She had turned fifteen last November: my birthday was ten days ago.

  Nothing happened to Tony Sergio. He went to a high school out near Cheapley.

  When I got home Creep was lying stretched out on the ground, content with the earth. Sometimes he would look up, when he heard a leaf move.

  A Digression: The Landscape Is Never Finished

  Does history really move in a circle? Is any given moment simply a dot on the circle?

  I think of human history as having a wave motion; the successive waves of history. You know how, when you look back on the things history people have written in their books, a wave of ideas just grows, then gets hold of people; one truth prevails for a while, and it’s called reason, then it’s balanced by a wave of opposition and heresy, called unreason, and that climbs over everyone; there’s the odd violence which builds up to a peak, there’s disorder in the name of order and disorder just for the fun of it, conflict comes to be the usual thing. Plans, panaceas and solutions are announced, tried, have no effect on the thing they’re aimed at but a lot of unforeseen effects on lots of other things. Until a new wave of “truth” takes over. The truth will be different from the previous one and the burning issues will be dropped as if they never mattered.

  I think of humans as living on a sort of cosmic coral reef, the waves of time, of truth or circumstance breaking over the reef, and humans as tiny additions to the whole reef.

  Once upon a time, it said in our history, humans lived—like polyps on a reef—an apparently hopeless life, getting food, some shelter, and little more. Then the idea of heaven grew, tacked on to a hopeless life. They carried on like that for a bit. Then some clever people got the idea there was no heaven to go to, so humans had better make this life better. But they didn’t make this life any better, no matter how they tried: it stayed hopeless, full of misery, loneliness, suffering and much too quickly over, since that’s how humans are. And they upset the heaven-believers into the bargain. The odd poet or artist or philosopher speculated on heaven, the something-after-death idea that keeps coming to the surface, but after so much disappointment and uncertainty the bulk of coral polyps gave the heaven idea away and acted as if this was the only reef, the only reef ever.

  Successive waves of history beat over the cosmic coral reef, bringing new seeds, algae, dead fish, debris; and the polyps stolidly added to their numbers and built the reef higher. Sometimes catastrophe blew the whole thing away, but polyps came and did what polyps do, and built it all up again.

  The ground where our house is was once a black tribe’s territory; whites pushed them west to perish.

  Much of our coastal land, where harvests once were, is now full of kitchens; the harvests are pushed west as the first Australians were.

  And will a new wave push us west?

  I like to think that when that happens we will be as the seeds of flowers and trees and living things in the desert, waiting for something more than accidents and sudden storms to bring on our next flowering; something more deliberate.

  My Tits

  They were now a respectable size. I called the left one Cassie, after Cassandra, since she seemed to me to have a slight droop. Perhaps I was being a little hard on myself, but she was slightly smaller in the mirror and from my view of her she did seem not so firm and spunky as Helen, the right one. I hope it wasn’t the beginnings of tit-drop.

  I pictured to myself the original Helen as not being a strapping great female like some of the statues show Greek women—the sleeping Ariadne, for instance, with mighty legs, a round stomach sitting up, big workmanlike breast, heroic arms—rather I saw Helen as on the small side, bright and quick witted, with a flashing smile, a sudden dirty temper, and a small but virile body on which her breasts stood up with pride. I wanted my right breast to be like her.

  Sometimes, waking in the morning, glimpsing Helen under the edge of my pajama top as she rounded inward toward the middle of my chest, I thought of the sea’s edge and a quiet beach, and this pale curved arm of sand. I wonder if anyone will ever think they’re beautiful.

  Day Dream

  A band tune that heralded the national news became my tune. With that tune in my head, taking me over, I ascended a flight of stairs that led out on to a platform high over a vast sloping plain that contained millions of people and those millions of people had to wait for me, and the tune was ever playing and never coming to a finish and as I mounted the steps, slowing the whole process imaginatively so that the tune was playing but didn’t get further forward, I ascended, higher and higher, till in view of the furthest reaches of my audience, then more, and closer, then to the top step and beginning to walk across the platform where I could see them all and they me. I never finished the moment, always wanting the ultimate moment to be better than all before, to be the sum of all: to be more. And I never got that previous moment up to the pitch where I thought that only a step further would be as much as I wanted. I was walking forward, getting no closer to the place where I was to stop, and speak, and be applauded with frenzied devotion. I wanted it to be perfect, and I was never satisfied.

  I daresay for the purpose of my fantasy I might just as well have been looking down on millions of dead packed in a vast, choking cemetery, like sardines side by side.

  Approach of the Assistant Sportsmaster

  His approach was rather to the mind. It was interesting to find him giving me sentences that contained a number of baits, usually one more or less political, one sort of shabby-philosophical, one personal.

  “If the country gets through this fuss about higher intakes through the grading gate, whether or not the result is an enlightened one bearing in mind the possible distress to cases of borderline intelligence, will this have any effect on your family and your emphasis on assessible subjects for the gateway examinations?”

  Try saying it. Then imagine being a girl watching the approach of this tall, athletic, not very good-looking young man that you expect to say, “How about it?” straight away.

  I watched his face as it approached closer to me. He gradually let his eyelids fall shut. He was feeling romantic. I might have said “Good luck,�
�� but by that time his mouth was fastened on mine.

  Personally, I find it absurd that at one moment they have a limp, sausage-like thing that under suitable stimulus erects itself, empties, then resumes its flaccid state: helpless, stupid, obtuse; and we are completely ready at any time, waiting only on their lordships’ convenience. There’s something not quite fair here, specially considering that they are the ones trying continually to impregnate females, while we don’t mind at all if we put it off indefinitely. I’m surprised we females don’t use our power more ruthlessly.

  He made no attempt to stimulate me; I was just a receptable, a bag or a box for him to put his penis into and to withdraw from as soon as he had made his deposit. I expected more from an older man.

  Saturdays at the Quarry

  When they took us to the old quarry, I was as big as most of the boys and this gave me a freedom I relished.

  We were playing around, not exactly throwing anyone into the deep quarry hole covered with green slime, but playing pretty rough. I was beginning to be very strong. If I had two boys, one grabbing an arm each, I could bring my arms together in front of me, and the boys would swish round and collide. I always felt bad if they were a bit smaller than me and their heads smacked.

  A man was there: Mister Jonson. He didn’t approach me like the boys did, he was slow and kept his eyes on my face, and he waited till the horseplay had died down a bit and the other kids were starting to get together with each other. Marie-Louise and I were alone, and she was beginning to get that look of concentrating.

  “Sit on the log and do it,” I advised her. Her accomplishment was praiseworthy, but I never tried to copy her.

  Mister Jonson approached me very slowly, and for some reason I found myself going backwards, until I no longer wanted to look at the different colors that showed in the stone where the quarry workers had split the stone in steep cliffs and made cracks down the face of rock. And I no longer looked at Marie-Louise. The other kids had stripped and were running around; some sat, squatted or lay draped over clean sandstone, and everything was pretty. Even the kids turned toward me and squatting looked pretty with their little patch of dark between the legs. To my eyes it was the first time fucking had been beautiful.

  He went past me. I wondered if he had a wife. I wondered idly if he’d met her down here in the quarry, and if so, whether the sandstone had looked as it did now.

  I felt him behind me. I felt two warm dry hands on my hip bones. The large brown fingers pointed forward. The hands tickled as I felt pressure from the thumbs behind. And those fingers were going in. I had to bend.

  I looked down at the hands. His face may have been the face of an old adventurer raiding a younger age group, but the hands were the hands of a navvy. Though not work-stained, or cracked.

  The tobacco breath round my neck and into my face was new. And the silence was new and the breathlessness. The slow hands were another new thing. He nudged my legs apart with his knees. I was watching the four veined, contrasting feet as he entered me.

  He kept me with him for a long time, long after the other kids had changed partners, long after everyone else had had a swim in the cool pool—the clean one—down the slope of colored sand that spilled straight from the level place where the quarry men worked their stone. The sand was powdery, friendly.

  He put my bottom on his shoulder and carried me along the track away from the sunny stone to his car, where he worked in a different way. He took time, his hands going round everywhere, everything stretched out tight and sensitive. My feet in the car straps, his face slightly rough with silvery stubble and his lips and tongue wet with his spit and various moistures. Everything in contact with everything, he said. I came three times. It was the first time I’d had an orgasm with someone else, the first time it had been anything like the frenzy I reached when I did it myself. Usually other hands don’t go to the right places, or if they do it’s only to leave too soon. I didn’t want Mister Jonson to stop, so I didn’t tell him when it happened first. Toward the second it was getting unbearable, but I bore it. It was even more unbearable the third time, and something else happened. He said not to worry, and didn’t mind it going over his hands, and even his face. The floor of the car was wet.

  He must have been working himself up to it for a long time, because I was dripping for a long time after. My smell was all over him.

  He seemed far more pleased afterward than the boys; perhaps they were too young to know how to express pleasure. I really felt, with Mister Jonson, that I’d given him something, and he liked it.

  I was an Australian adolescent, a healthy girl-plant growing in the sun. What could be more natural to such a plant than generosity? I had things others wanted: why shouldn’t I give? Whether or not I gave to make others happy, whatever reason I gave or had—they would be happy if they got what they wanted.

  I looked into the whirling, mysterious future and could see myself giving, giving, and others happy, pleased, and still others, coming and occupying the place the first ones had; so many that I couldn’t get rid of them. They began to own me (in my future imagination), and the world began to close in around me.

  It isn’t comfortable to be owned. I threw off such thoughts.

  I walked home, refusing lifts. The day was dry. Watt Boulevard was cool with its many trees nearly touching overhead; Malthus Parade was alive with traffic; Euclid Way, past the primary school, dipped steeply down toward the bridge. It was a day for thinking.

  I had comfort, and bounding health and beauty. I wanted for nothing, yet I wanted everything, for I wanted the thing that is most difficult to come by, the thing that cannot be demanded, nor enforced by strength or wealth or beauty: I wanted love.

  To be loved, I mean. I was convinced I was incapable of loving.

  Perhaps there is no one with so rigorous a definition of what it is to be loved as one who cannot herself love. (Or himself, for all I know. But perhaps I shouldn’t add that: I have never considered that men love. Men want: love is female.)

  There was one other thing I wanted, and I blame my mother for it. I thought of females. Females entered my head and danced around my mind. Is that what thinking is? Do the objects actually enter one? Females talking, chewing (most people you see eating in the street are female), females walking slowly and being cursed by males in a hurry, females upset when they’re in the wrong and lashing out, females looking in mirrors, making mirrors out of passing windows and shiny steel sheets, checking, always checking, on appearances.

  I thought of females in love.

  Don’t you think it’s funny? Along comes some guy, and he’s active, always doing something, never still, and he has the idea that there’s love in him—that he loves—and he says so. And what happens? If she likes him, it won’t be long before she loves. But this is what gets me: it’s not before. Only in cases of crushes does the female get on the love-trail before the male. But after he loves, she begins to. As if his action is the trigger. I wonder if that’s accurate.

  Who wouldn’t be suspicious of that order in a process? When do the males check up on the sort of love that only comes to the surface when their interest is already assured and declared? But perhaps males never know. Or care. Perhaps if they love at all their own love is a skin-deep thing, transferable with their alighting glances. Perhaps their self-love protects them from such thoughts.

  I was still dripping as I got home. Daddy was in the bathroom drying himself after a shower. He was rubbing his face. I leaned in at the door and pulled his one. It was thick, like Mister Jonson’s.

  “Ow!” he said, and saw it was me. “Help, Mara!”

  Mother smiled as she wrote. She didn’t look around. I think father was just a little startled: I hadn’t done that for years.

  I went to the toilet and got rid of the rest of Mister Jonson. I washed my red pants myself—the ones with the white flowers—and hung them out with the rest of the washing.

  It was like an amusing secret, being the only one to kn
ow about those red pants. Teatime wasn’t far off; I walked on our wide front lawn, looking down the valley toward the reserve. The border of night was visible among the tall trees.

  Creep came out to meet me. I think he admires me.

  Once, Mister Jonson went through all the motions I had come to expect, and when it was over I found there was nothing to wipe away to keep my little pant clean. I mean dry. (I use the word “pant” for the singular of pants; as far as I know only Marie-Louise and I refer to them in this way.)

  “That was a clean one,” I said.

  He was suspicious immediately.

  “What? What do you mean?” he said sharply.

  I swiftly aimed my hand at his face, to remind him. I had got over my slight awkwardness at being with an older person. He ducked.

  “Don’t you get sharp with me,” I said in a blend of fierceness and coldness. He said nothing, only watched my face warily.

  ‘Clean,” I prompted him, showing him the dry handkerchief.

  “Oh,” and his face was full of concealment. “It all inside. In your tubes.” He tried to smile, and partly succeeded.

  It was something else, I knew.

  I didn’t find out till later that some of them can mimic the spasms of ejaculation, and produce nothing. “Dry-blowing,” it’s called.

  On one of our afternoons at the quarry a boy from year seven was left with me to give him his first.

  “The swallows,” he said. “The swallows!”

  He was poking his little thing—so much thinner than the other males’ that I felt motherly and stroked his hand—into the right place, when he began again.

  “Swallows! Swallows!” he yelped, and looked behind him. I thought he needed help and grabbed him under the arms and pushed and pulled him back and forwards in case he hadn’t got the idea, but it wasn’t that. He went limp and it took me at least two minutes of shaking and pulling to understand that he’d had it almost as soon as it got in; I knew because by that time he made distressed sounds, and besides I felt the tiny thing slip out and the liquid run down on my anus.