A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  “Swallows be stuffed,” he said. And when I didn’t understand, he told me. “They said that when it happened I’d feel as if swallows were flying out of my arsehole. You didn’t see any, did you?”

  “Beat it, shorty.”

  He was glad to get away. The way he looked you’d think I’d been rasping his little childish thing with sandpaper.

  He was only twelve, and I’d felt motherly. It was a nice feeling.

  Observation

  It’s not fair, I suppose, but at school we could be cheekier and more independent than the boys, more confident in our ability to get away with little departures from the rules, and the reason was plain: they were visited with more punishments than we were for much the same little sins.

  At the same time, we didn’t have to be naughty. If we chose to, we could be. The boys, though, seemed to break out independently whether they made a decision: it was as if something inside them had control and when it said: do this, they did it. And watched, helpless and amazed, when authority caught up with them. As if they didn’t know what they were about.

  As well, we were more game than they in standing up to authority. But if our consciences ever bothered us, it wasn’t apparent. I didn’t find any of the other girls who worried about it. It was sneaky, in a way: paltry. Like the rich accepting privilege without demur.

  The Sock Exchange

  Mister Jonson took to picking me up on the corner of Newton Crescent and Euclid Way. He took me to an unattended tip adjoining the bush, where he settled into a routine of touching me up, then when I’d had it, he entered me. Sometimes it was in his car, sometimes out on the ground in the shadow of the cliff of rubbish. The rubbish was being added during working hours all through the week, and the tip would eventually blossom into a new playing field. It wasn’t smelly rubbish, just bits of timber, scrap building materials, tins, glass, bricks, soil filling.

  I composed a poem on the subject, to impress the English master. I showed in words the filling of a woman and the filling of the tip. I showed how the tip produced a grassed oval and the woman produced new players to play on it. The next area was then filled, and the next women, and the filled women were producing new players for the next patch of civilized space. Miss Heaton showed it to the other teachers, but stopped short of reading it to the class.

  Mister Jonson ran a sock exchange. He was a scientist who would supply new pairs of socks in return for socks worn for a number of hours. People who produced a sick certificate and guaranteed to have worn their socks for three days got two free pairs. He reached the tiny flakes of skin and bacteria that lived in them.

  One day he brought another girl with him. She had a large bottom and above it a tiny waist and rather long trunk leading up to thin shoulders. Below the bottom were two stumpy, hairy legs. I christened her the Centaur. She was deeply religious, imprisoned at the bottom of a fundamentalist well, with a single view of the heavens.

  Her religious cast of mind took the form of honesty, a comforting trait in other people. In case the withholding of information could be thought to be lying, she told everyone everything that happened to her. Without religion she could have been an ordinary gossip. She kept a list of everyone she knew, and when she got pregnant to Mister Jonson she told all the kids in the district, just as she’d told them every detail of every time Mister Jonson had done her.

  Mister Jonson thought the smiles of all the kids and the familiar cry of ‘Hullo, Mister Jonson,’ were a tribute to the popularity of his sock exchange and the PR job he’d done for science.

  Mister Jonson began to come out into the world, and although the way of his coming out seemed unusual to those close to him, and distressing to Mister Jonson himself, since it meant he was no longer a scientist, it was very little worry to the public at large. (It was interesting to see how news had importance and seriousness close to its source, and progressively less further away, until at a distance of a few kilometers it became a joke.)

  The organs of Mister Jonson had grown tired of the darkness inside his body cavities and took it on themselves to come out into the light.

  He’d always been an active man, but now he had to look out for his lungs and take care of his kidneys. Special moisturizing containers had to be put over them so they didn’t dry out in the predatory air. His case wasn’t unique, and he therefore didn’t benefit from his value as a curiosity.

  The last time I saw him he told me of his change. As he was talking I saw in each of his eyes a huge unshed tear, and I was sorry for him.

  Not Long for the Machine

  Mary Madeleine Murphy was not the most brutal girl in school, but she was the loudest, the most vulgar, the dirtiest. If you wanted to find the girl who could spit furthest from the window of a schoolbus, who could get a car driver’s hand on the wheel at a level sixty kilometers in calm conditions; if you wanted to find the girl who most terrorized the younger kids in the lavatories, bashing on the door or pushing it open while the kids were having a pee or just finding somewhere to change clothes on sports day; if you wanted to find the ringleader of the chi-acking on speech day or the source of the yells of distress among pockets of lower class kids in the playground—look no further.

  There’s no doubt she must have noticed it first, but I’d be close to second. We were at Blacktown High, changing for basketball in the long change rooms. She had her left foot up on the brown wooden slats while she put on her team socks. Somehow her left elbow swished her skirt up past her dark regulation pants, and I saw it. It was a bluey-pink round thing—made of flesh—and it seemed to be growing out of her waist. The glimpse was gone.

  “Say, MM,” I said. “That thing?”

  “What thing, you big pile of It?” Everyone allowed her to talk roughly to them, even me, and I could have knocked her silly. The point was, you could have bashed her and she’d still do it next time. There’s a certain respect you owe to people like that. You can’t destroy their personality.

  “That thing at the side of you. Sort of a pink thing, like the head of a dick.”

  Her eyes rimmed wide, and she stared hatred at me.

  “Shut your mouth about that, you stupid smelly slut,” she said. I backhanded her calmly—for the “smelly”—a little blood trickled from her mouth where her lip caught on the teeth at the side of her mouth. Her incisors stuck out a bit.

  “Well, darling? What is it?”

  “Shove your head up it,” she replied, undaunted. I shrugged.

  “I’ll spread it round.”

  But she wouldn’t say a word. I didn’t tell anyone. She even played well.

  Ezekiel M’Aksombe

  I met him at the quarry. His line was direct.

  “Feel this,” he said and in the same movement put my hand on his spout, which was, of course, black.

  What did he want me to feel? It was the same as any other. But he kept my hand pressed there, and pressed harder. Presently I felt the push of firmness in it as it swelled, filling out with blood.

  I began to laugh. It was not the first time it had hit me as ludicrous that something like a sausage skin full of blood was going to be inserted into me. Of course there was no question of minding, but the—well—the temporary nature of the male apparatus got my funny bone. Soon it would be in me in the flush of its natural rhythm. All too soon it would be emptied of its blood as the male who was on the end of it would be emptied of his desire, and his ability.

  He was too caught up in his male assurance and self-importance to be affected by my amusement. Very likely he translated it as delight. My body was built for me by father and mother, but Ezekiel, like other males, thought that when he was in it, it was inhabited by a god.

  I had him several times. He was healthy enough, but in his eyes a vacancy would sometimes swim to the surface and look out at me.

  My Theory

  My theory, dating from that time, is that basically males found us uninteresting. They were interested in our bodies, piece by piece; they lit up when they
saw our assembled components approaching.

  But us: no.

  The person inside was a hinderance, an obtrusion, an edge they wanted smoothed away. No matter what we said, it connected in their minds with nakedness, cavities, moisture, semen, warmth, comfort and relief. And if they could not make that connection, they didn’t—did not—want to hear our voices. Uninteresting and useless: that was their verdict. Nothing we said, nothing we did, nothing we thought or wanted, was of the slightest interest.

  As long as it didn’t cost them and if they could not have our bodies, we might as well be outside the universe, for all males cared.

  Males

  But it was maddening that they had so many ideas. Some of them were all the time coming up with something new. I comforted myself that these weren’t the smart boys, but the lively ones; the smart ones drily excelled, while the lively ones seemed almost to ignore the smart ones and their excellences: they put energy into continually new things. It was as if they manipulated the words used to describe objects and ways of handling them, then altered the words to arrive at new verbal descriptions for such handling, then simply used the new description as a new method.

  Where’s an example?

  Yes. Now say one of them was talking of the difficulties with some new method of transferring power from the engine of a vehicle to the wheels to the road, one of that sort would re-arrange the words in the sentence and come out with a suggestion for transferring power from the road to the wheels or to some other intermediary piece of equipment to the engine. And he would add to his new formula in such a way that it made sense. He would be playing with the words, but also using words as if they were close to being objects.

  Why are we so different? Is it that we females talk so much and with so much enjoyment that we talk out all our springs, our inventiveness, our seriousness, where they keep their mouths shut and the lid on, raise some internal pressure tending toward action, force themselves onward, force out of themselves a kind of distillation of their lives expressed in ideas and new arrangements of existing objects? Is it that we live now, where they save themselves up and live, in a way, for tomorrow? And for others?

  I envy them that.

  Consciousness of Absent Objects

  Science began to be interesting.

  “The whole organism, besides being larger than the smaller parts, is larger than the sum of the parts. And in addition, is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts,” said Miss Cruickshank, the science teacher. “Viewed as disassembled bits, lying around,” she added.

  “Does this mean that pure orange juice is just the same if it comes from a tree or a chemical plant?” asked Alastair Crombie, who transferred from another school in year ten.

  “Certainly—not,” she hesitated.

  “What do you mean the whole is larger than the parts?” I said.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said.

  “In a way. But does it matter?”

  “What are you getting at?” She was nice, treating my idiot questions seriously. I’d only asked a question because I felt uncomfortable and wanted to be forced to think of something else.

  “Well, it seems to me that the whole thing is the same or does the same because the parts are as they are.”

  “What?”

  “I think of it as starting at the atomic level, then the focus widening to cellular scale, then on up to the whole as seen by the eye at usual size. All straight through: the final thing being what it is because the whole lot scales down to atomic level.”

  “I’m sorry, Hunt. I don’t follow. The connection—”

  “You know how one race of ants or people is wary or hostile to another. Yet some, of the same kind, join together. Like in the electron micrographs. Well, the same with atoms, or cells. Like to like, unlike repel. The immuno reaction. The body recognizes intruders and begins to isolate them and destroy biologically. So,” as the class yawned, “so philosophy arises from the cells, it all goes back to the attraction and repulsion of atoms and molecules . . .”

  “Shut up,” the class grated at me.

  “You’ll feel better in a while, dear,” said Cruickshank.

  I didn’t, though. I don’t know why I felt uncomfortable—I just did. I decided to cut off from the class, deliberately un-hearing Cruickshank.

  A thought came into my head: how can you be conscious of something that isn’t present?

  I do it a lot of the time. I can see in my mind’s eye my father’s face, our front lawn, the twin eucalypts, anything I want to recall; the question is: how do I do it? I know I do it accurately, because I check my mental picture with the actual. I mean: how can our minds do it? And since to be conscious usually carries with it a meaning of sensing things, what sense is it that detects or resurrects objects in their physical absence, or when they are hidden from sight?

  Perhaps I would find out after high school, when I got through the grading gate and went to university.

  Old Mother Hubbard

  On the way home from school I kept feeling the feelings that were, so to speak, under the skin of my mind, and was opening my free hand to look at the palm, turning it over to compare it from memory with the hands of males, when the old man in the corner house, old Mister Huddart, called out to me in a girl’s voice.

  “Miss!”

  I’d been told not to take notice of Old Mother Hubbard as he had been known at his workplace, a factory that made doorknobs of plastic and metal. His brain, during the last few years of his working life, was being taken over by a young girl’s. It showed itself in his liking for sudden giggles, pretty lollies, boxes of chocolates.

  Old Mother Hubbard played with his shrubs, cutting them into nice shapes. He wore a frilly apron, yet he fought with his wife, and after fighting, asked permission to do the most ordinary things around the house, such as having a piece of cake or going to bed.

  He had begun to wet the bed, the neighbors said; and often he had been observed milking his sad-faced dog.

  “Miss!”

  “Oh shut up, Nancy!” I yelled at him.

  He looked puzzled, then began to sing in a falsetto voice, standing quite still:

  “Pretty little ducky ducky

  Come and be killed,

  Pretty little pussy pussy

  come and be killed

  pretty little kiddie kiddie

  come and be killed

  pretty little daddy daddy

  come and be killed

  pretty little mummy mummy

  come and be killed

  pretty little neighbor neighbor

  come and be killed

  pretty little . . . . . .”

  and as I walked on and up our front steps the clear, hopeless voice faded into the mysterious space that began a little way from our house.

  As I sat down to tea two dogs were discussing some matter loudly within our space. Perhaps they were discussing their nightly prayer that their masters would stay well and well-off: or pets wouldn’t eat. They were still discussing when I crawled into bed. Dogs’ voices don’t disturb me.

  The slice of sky I see from my window, decorated round the year with a different pattern of stars, told me of explosions, deadly rays, unimaginable heat and the violence of utter cold; it was never far from my science-taught head that the atmosphere that protected me and made the stars twinkle and the sunsets glow, was only a temporary shield from the destruction that waits.

  And yet, even a teenage girl knew that she ought to carry on as if life was forever; the facts of the cosmic situation must have little or no emotional impact on me if I was to stay mentally healthy.

  John Mabbe

  His approach was social.

  “Let’s go to the Shellback,” he said enthusiastically.

  I guess after all the direct sexual attempts I had weathered recently I thought there was a devious flavor about this method, but after we were on our way to the place I began to feel there was a certain comfort about it; the sex bit didn’t
have to be right away. And once there, with the life and energy and packed nature of the Shellback, it was pleasant.

  He began to drink quickly. I signed to him with my eyes, but he took no notice. If I was going to get anything at all it would have to be while he was sober, so I got him outside after an hour and made him come good in the car. I didn’t explain when he grumbled, merely said, “Shut up.”

  “What’s wrong with later? At my place.”

  I waited until I had placed him in, then a little more until he had got the idea well enough not to pull out, and said mildly, “Pig’s arse to your place. You’ll be no good to me by then. Have you noticed the way you’re pouring them into you?”

  “I’m OK drunk,” he said, slightly injured in tone.

  “Not for me, you aren’t. I want a maximum effort.”

  He raised his face a little, to make sure I got his injured expression, then went at it like a steam hammer.

  I led him back inside afterwards, well satisfied with myself.

  It had been some time before I realized that males did not notice my subtle changes of expression. I had signed to them, as to females, since I was about nine, with my face, and with small hints about my eyes and sudden stillness and a lift of eyebrows—I am still unable to raise only one eyebrow—and at no time did they notice a single thing or take the faintest hint. They did not notice the subtlety of my changes of expression.

  Yet I detected them in the mirror quite easily.