Being Your Own Person
The head was a bare pink plain reaching over from front to back, a broad tongue of shining tough skin poking into the skirting mangroves, coming down at the back into a loop of vegetation.
Tufts at the side stood up with quixotic belligerence above the ears, only to go down fighting farther back.
Below the collar there was such a mass of cloudy tendrils, swirls of fine hairs, that you wanted to get his head between you and the light, to see the wonder of it, and the poetry, like a tree on a spring afternoon. The hairs here and there frizzed out aimlessly. There were split ends.
As he bent his head sideways, the skin folds of that side of his face crumpled like a concertina. Old Balls was up to his knees in death.
On the way home in the car my father talked about being authentic, belonging to yourself.
“To be your own person, to act from your own center, that’s being an authentic person.” His voice hardly carried above the noise of the engine and the wind padding the car’s edges and surfaces. His voice was soft, the ride was soft, wind soft. Mother looked out of the window at the passing lights.
“The air does rush past,” she said poetically.
“Like the lights, the air is stationary,” I informed her. “We humans move. You could come back in ten years and stand in the same patch of air.”
“You’re not serious!” she exclaimed.
At least she wasn’t writing notes.
There Is No Usual
Old Mister Cowan still worked on his coffin. He lined it with lead, took the lining out, painted the timber many times, had pictures put in it, an oxygen bottle, food—in case he was buried alive, though that was unlikely since postmortems were general—relined it, clad the outside in stainless steel, stripped the whole thing down to the bare essential shape, scraped off the paint, and started again.
It was a permanent hobby. His wife didn’t object, though she made no move to have one of her own in the garage.
When people spoke of it they seemed to resent his behavior as being different, as if they thought their own was in line with the usual. But I watched, I looked around at all the people I knew, I listened to stories, and as far as I could see there was no usual, not anywhere.
Perspective
As an assignment for Art, I used a small square of pressed chipboard (that once, in another form, stood vertical in the Huon district of Tasmania), and mixed sand with paint to give a suitably primitive background. When the mixture of ochre and sand was dry, I scratched the figures into it. The foreground was a darkened cave, made by mixing black mud into another mixture of paint, and when it was almost dry, spreading black dirt over it. In this blackness the silhouette of a cave-dweller sat looking out into the sandy glare of day. The profiles of small ancient buildings sat nearby on the lowest horizon; behind them larger buildings, up to three or four storeys; and behind these the usual big-city skyscrapers. But behind the jagged tracery of skyscrapers and elegant, sometimes monstrous towers with their bulbs on top, the newest building spread across the sky and rose toward the stars, blotting out all distance and all height, and with millions of windows, rising to cut off any view of the sky from the dark cave.
I had the city history of man in my painting. I got a rave assessment from Miss Barwon, who predicted that I would go far: she liked me. Not like Footlow, our regular art teacher. Footlow was jealous of me.
A Social Illusion
Yesterday the man from the river came for the last time. This time mammals and lifelike children grew from his pockets and he paraded around the empty streets leading them like a family, or tribe.
At the end when he had assembled them all on the oval he unwound a belt-like thing from his waist and held it at arm’s length. He marched round the perimeter of the oval holding it out, calling, “These are the last days! These are the last days!” We could hear his words as far away as Heisenberg Close.
News broadcasts told the human inhabitants of the metropolitan area that the man had been seen in fourteen suburban locations, holding out the unwound belt and proclaiming the last days.
The last thing the man from the river did was to hold out the belt-like thing and ceremoniously take from the end of it a small plug. He began to collapse where he stood, sagging at the top and the middle first, then falling in a heap. When he was flat, the mammals and children gradually deflated until all were level with the grass.
The whole lot blew away by morning.
A Wojan of the Future
This approach was a beauty, believe me. He was, irritatingly, absorbed in my face. You know how it is; a girl knows her face, knows it well. The deficiencies seem sometimes to be signposted, provided even with audio-visual equipment saying “Get a load of this mess!” and all one wants to do is get attention away from a bottom lip that’s not full enough, or from eyes that don’t open as wide as some of the dreamy dears that snap up males like besotted flies with their gooey great eyes practically running with liquid and probably catching all the dust around.
My eyes are, unfortunately, not very big in the sense that the top lid doesn’t open in an almost circular way, rather it is inclined to be narrow. Intelligent, you must grant me, but narrow. Not slits, though.
All he would do was examine me. Waiting for me to crack.
Not altogether comfortable with this I remarked, “Well, shitface, what’s on your mind?”
He looked at my eyes in anger and as if with that look he could make threats of thunder shake the air. He drew back the left side of his body and quickly punched at me with his left fist. Mindful of the karate kicks I had seen—but never executed—I doubled my body over sideways, also to the left, and pushed out my right foot toward his middle. I was only playing. Unfortunately for him, I hit, and he missed. I should have just punched him, like I did father.
When he felt better I asked why he tried to punch me.
“Because of the way you spoke to me,” he said.
“It was only words.”
“It’s not only words to me,” he explained. “You see, when someone speaks like that to a male, it’s on. I mean, it’s too late for more talk, it’s the signal for: let’s shut up and get stuck into it and see who comes out on top. Fists, boots, what the thing is. But with a wojan, you’re not supposed to hit them. They’re equal, but you’re not supposed to. So the guy has already lost face being talked to like that, and the only way to save it is with the old aggro. But he can’t. He knows this, so he won’t argue in public with a woman. You can’t win with a wojan, in a man’s terms, by all he’s learned, all the rules he’s lived by since he was five or six years old, out in the street with the kids nearby and in the playground with the kids at school and the teacher to be reported to.”
“Well, you struck at me first,” I said. “What’s a wojan?”
“Just a word for females.”
“And all this aggro theory?”
“I’m a verbal behavior and situation perception adviser. Sounds a lot, but it’s just prole stuff.”
He began to walk away.
“What’s your name?” I called after him.
“Claudio Matuzelski.”
“Come back, Claudio.”
In his car he insisted I undress myself. After that, all he wanted to do was look at it and poke it with a finger. Nothing more. Enraged, I pulled my things on and left him, still with his trousers on.
I called out, “Shit for brains, Claudio!”
He didn’t attempt to fight with me again.
Under Fire at School
I came under fire at school yesterday for saying that man’s been on the planet much longer than anyone is prepared to guess, and that the extinction of the dinosaurs saw his rise; that man was first dark and that the light-skinned ones are new; that it will be wonderful when most of the continents join up again as once they were, though this time at the opposite end of the globe.
Miss Brockman said no good purpose was served by such speculation, which contained a
n element of irresponsibility; on the other hand Mister Pollard thought the exercise of such ideas was mind-expanding, and one of the steps in the practice of creativity.
Which is right? And aren’t we coming closer to Asia every year?
In school today I was punished for saying that the Chinese are the Teutons of Asia. The punishment was an essay of apology. I hate apologizing.
I got my own back, though, on Mister Saussere in an argument in class on European culture. He had said that European culture could not “take,” in Australia, implying a lack in us. I pointed out that it had not “taken” in the United States, Canada or South Africa either—the main colonies of Europe—except to some extent in the main cities. Then I let him have it.
“European culture, as you call it, is a metropolitan thing, a product of the cities of Europe; it has never even penetrated the villages and backwoods of Europe. No wonder it didn’t travel to such distant backwoods as we have,” I said. He went on to speak of the lust for ownership and the spirit of materialism having become the dominant values in Australia; he didn’t want to admit I was right, in front of the class.
Karen Gott
She ate like a pig, blew her nose on her fingers, and didn’t care what she said or did. She was magnificently coarse.
She had the reputation of being very hard on males. They said she would get their things out and compel them to erect, then hit it, or twist it round sideways, or sucker them into putting it into her mouth, then bite. That part of them is very sensitive to pain.
Once, they said, she got one of her men drunk and stapled the loose skin of his testicle bag to a wooden spectator bench at the oval.
When she detected any type of lovesick behavior among the younger girls, she would get them into a corner, shake them, and say, “OK you. Go round and say to fifty kids, I love you. Sincerely. That’ll get the loveshit out of you.”
Usually it worked. She stood over them until they had completed the fifty, and some of those girls got as hard as she was.
Karen had transferred from a city high school at the request of that school; the authorities thought a quiet area like ours might have a steadying influence on her. What happened was that she teamed up with the brutal bunch and vied with the five leaders of the bunch to be top leader.
For the teachers, having Karen Gott in their classes turned the weather grey as ashes.
We weren’t supposed to have real contests in our boxing class—just training lessons—but Karen challenged me, and I didn’t feel like backing off. It wasn’t my fault—she turned it into a fight; I would have sparred all the time. She hadn’t done the training, just thought she could fight because she was tough. When she started hitting to hurt, I punched her hard and broke her nose.
We weren’t allowed after that to do more than spar, with the sportsmaster present to supervise.
I Am Sixteen
I am sixteen, and in my dreams the thing that calls to me is the most unreasonable thing of all: that I am different, unique, beyond compare. That I am on the edge of something big and don’t know what it is. Will I last long enough to know it?
Is it someone I have yet to meet?
Is it a guess? An insight?
Is it something I will do? Something I am?
Will I be a martyr in a cause I do not approve? A leader?
What?
It’s such a torment, being held fast by this prophecy of mother’s. How did I let it take such a grip on me? Yet how can I ask this question, since my view on the world is from inside this state of mind? I can’t get out and examine it, nor can I get out and walk away from it.
The trouble is, all my life I have felt it is reasonable. When my mother said her “Some day . . .” to me, I could see myself wrapped in the greatness she predicted. Not in detail, or clearly, but I could see it.
Surely I should have had a hint of what it is, by now.
The Dream of the Greatest Woman in the World
When would I begin, when would I feel it, when would it be apparent to others?
I woke in the night to dreams of greatness. The precise form it took always eluded me. I woke at night to the long dream moments before the applause of an immense audience spread out below me, whose clapping and shouting I could feel before they began, whose sudden roar of recognition was like a natural phenomenon and carried me high above them to a place where I was supported on nothing more solid than the upswelling force of their emotion.
Time and again I reached the top step of the platform on which I had four paces to go to put my hands out and touch the ranks of microphones at a little above waist height, the place where I would stop and begin to speak.
Speak? Of course speak. It had something to do with speaking to a multitude. But telling them what?
Before I opened my mouth the noise of their earthquaking response to the greatness I represented took my breath away, then filled my chest with an emotion that was lighter than air and had far more lift than any air. I breathed deeply, let it fill me, and began to ascend. As the noise died down I spoke and my voice rose above the noises of the world, and the world grew silent, bound by the spell I cast over them like a net, like a gas. They were listening, receiving; I was raping their minds.
When I woke the hands of the woman of the future were wet with sweat.
Son of Cannon
The man with the cannon growing from him—who was now rather suspended from the end of it than growing it—had a son, Mark, who did the usual things boys do in Australia; playing games, stealing, by turns being a good boy and a little bastard, until he began to solidify at the age of fourteen, just as puberty came over him like a bad joke.
The sort of orebody he began to be allowed him in a moment of anxiety to arrange things so that his penis became solid when it was extended. He had a naive belief that this foolishness would wear off—and who among the free citizens of the world is without a touch of this saving hope?—so that when his flesh relaxed again into the supple, familiar smoothness, softness, flexibility, he wouldn’t have lost the opportunity for growth in the member that means so much to males.
Mark, son of Cannon, gradually settled into a weighted existence, and after a painful three weeks, did not move again. His eyes were the last things to be immobilized, though after this scientists detected brain life through electrodes placed on his surface, and some claimed to have got an ECG. The thing was that the electrodes could be placed anywhere—movement in his interior had to be detectable everywhere on him since he was solid, brittle and coherent throughout. His surface was still smooth, since he was a sort of bronzy, aluminum, nickel-iron amalgam. This was inferred from surface color and spectroscopic analysis; his parents refused to allow bits to be chipped off: they thought he might bleed when he resumed his proper shape later.
He has not changed so far. They keep him in the hall as a statue.
Fucked by a Tree
Oliver Morris had the attitude that any female was going to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of his experience.
I admit there is a certain attraction about the idea of a businesslike approach in which all the clumsiness and drollery of extreme youth is excluded, but something is missing nevertheless. I daresay it is my continual secret complaint: that love has never touched me.
(I wonder do males complain as much? I mean to themselves. If they don’t, but go just from one defeat or unsatisfying experience to another, hardly thinking about it, blearily through life like unreflective zombies—then it’s no wonder a female counts herself lucky she’s not male.)
Oliver prevailed on me to allow his penis to plunge back and forwards within the slithery halls, and I didn’t mind. He had branches of willow growing from his feet, arms, legs and the middle of his abdomen, just above the hairy triangle.
In his first high school year the teachers got him to break off bits, and they planted them in two lines on either side of the creek down past the rifle range, to form an avenue in the bush. Strangely a stream appeared soon after, bigger a
nd stronger than the old creek; it flowed all the way along the valley where before it sometimes ducked out of sight under a day creek bed.
He kept his growths trimmed, his parents were reimbursed for cuttings they sent round the country.
Well, maybe not a tree: fucked by a sapling.
He kept me there, demonstrating that, as he boasted, he could get “eight off the one stick.” I didn’t tell him how many I could have had during the time it took him to achieve the first one, if I put my mind to it. And I must confess that I don’t really know if he was simulating any or all or most of the eight. I think the only way to check such a statement would be to withdraw each time and for a witness to check that there was an ejaculation each time. With at least some sperm content. I don’t think dry-blowing should be counted.
At the end he looked drained as the sweat dried on his face and neck and front.
One of the creek willows had its bank partly removed by little kids digging for treasure; the exposed tree roots crossed over each other like arms.
Perhaps I Would Be
Perhaps I would be an explorer of the human condition, an enlarger of the mind of man, the age of man; move men to action, inject a vision into their lives; give them a foretaste of experiences that would seduce them from their present lifelessness, enlarge their grasp of the world. I might help my fellow human fix his position in the universe he inhabits, even in the body he inhabits. Perhaps help others create their own unique world.
I might perhaps even create a world that never existed before.
On the other hand I might, at twenty, be sleek and self-contained, remembering best the brittle winters of other lands; the times I went with men to cabins in the snow and stayed a fortnight loving and being loved, exploring only the borders of another human whose essential being, behind the skin, would be forever hidden under bland and sudden lust. Decaying in pretty colors.
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