A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  The Possessor of Lisa

  Mario Julian by now had grown his girl-product to the extent of her legs; the buttocks were out and the long-awaited pussy there. His friends came to see him, hearing an incautious word from his young brothers; held his hands to keep him powerless, and used her.

  He was shocked, and gasped out to them: “You’re doing me! You’re doing me!” And they left.

  He touched her constantly. His parents marveled that he regarded her as part of himself; the way he protected her, the way he fingered her and knew her and thought of her all the time.

  “He really loves that girl,” his mother said.

  “KKKKnnnnnnccccccccK!” his father snorted.

  Both Feet Firmly on a Cloud

  I was sitting in Science, it was Monday; outside the science block and in the street leading to the school I saw a person rise up out of the drain underneath the lip of the gutter, a person with a number of heads and on each head a different hairdo. A lady gardener, with not much to do till her family came home, struck at the person with a garden spade so that the top of one of the heads was split down the center and blood ran out.

  Some of the other heads turned to look at her, and several mouths opened and shut, talking to her and commenting on her actions. While they were attending to her the wounded head joined back together and the blood stopped. The lady with the spade turned away, annoyed, and resumed pottering in the garden.

  The person with the heads turned toward the school, and when it got to the wire gate stopped and looked toward me. I narrowed my eyes and tried to see the various words it had growing on its various heads. Yes, growing. Not just printed.

  What I did was to ascend out of the school window into the air above the school playground and step onto a small cloud. I planted my school shoes firmly on that cloud and watched down on the many-headed person with satisfaction as it writhed and twisted its heads and made little leaps up off the asphalt as if it wanted to ascend with me. I folded my arms and gazed down on the miserable cowering thing benignly. The power in my eyes, and the concentration behind them that I mobilized so easily, worked on it like a judgment. The heads one by one wilted and hung limply down on the end of their long necks. The body shrank and grew thin. Very soon it was small and groundfast and was glad to become a shrub.

  I started up the cloud and drove over to the window I’d come from. I flew in, sat at my desk, and packed the cloud in my schoolcase. It folded up into a square no bigger than my white hanky. In fact it was my white hanky.

  In the playground I was thoughtful. Kids said, “Look at Hunt. Thinks she’s Jessica Christ. Won’t speak to anyone.”

  They didn’t have visions. Major visions.

  That Word

  That word that has followed me all my life (because I have not allowed it to cut loose) was it only a casual word mother spoke?

  It couldn’t be casual: she said it so often.

  Was it a habit?

  Was she repeating something she’d heard might be good for little kids to hear?

  Was she repeating something she’d heard when she too was young?

  Had she been joking—admittedly an adult joke—and I simply not capable of appreciating it?

  Yet it had to be more than that, or why did I respond to it so readily and so completely? (But people can respond to things other people don’t intend . . .)

  No, it had to be more than a casual, accidental joke.

  I wonder if mother even remembers. How can she, when she acts as if we—father and I—were dead and she doesn’t visit our graves?

  Little Things

  There was a great demand for our bodies. We girls didn’t put all that much value on what our bodies represented: they did that. We simply went along with it. We were necessary; it brought advantages. Little things, it’s true, but little things were all that males could give.

  In truth, those little things—the dinners, the sights, the money, the drives, the gifts, the sexual exercise—were all they had to give. Their sperm ran out again, and was flushed away.

  Later, once the males got the idea that our bodies were to us no more than theirs were to them, our value would vanish. They would say we weren’t attractive.

  Those of us who cared least for our toilet, the boys rejected first. But in general, by the time we showed this casual disregard for the magic they saw in our bodies—which we had never understood—we would be middle-aged, tied down by children we had borne and supported.

  And to us their bodies held precious little of the magic ours did for them.

  They never cared for their nails or toenails, they didn’t build up their faces, study their ears and noses, align their hair carefully in the mirror, put softening cream on the points of their elbows, brush their hair for five minutes or two hundred strokes at night, make mouths into the mirror, practicing their “I love you” or their “No-to-mean-yes.” Well, not all of them.

  Lil Lutherburrow

  I rescued her one day at school from fifth form boys. She had wandered into their territory around on the lower side of the Assembly Hall, and they had taken her prisoner. By their rules, she had to report back to them every playbreak and lunchtime, until they decided to release her.

  They did things to Lil. When I saw what was going on, I charged into their area and grabbed her. They got on to me and tried to hold me, but I had no vulnerable points, and they had.

  “Lil!” I yelled at her. “You come round back to our area. Right now.”

  She could see I was trying to help her, and responded. She came.

  “Isn’t it against the rules, to leave without being released?”

  She was that simple.

  “Rules, what rules? They make the rules up! Take no notice of boys’ stupid rules!” I was shouting at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Thanks for helping me. I didn’t know when I’d get free.” That was all she said, but she was my friend for life.

  It’s easily said, but it was true. Lil was the steadiest friend I had. Maybe the only real friend. And she didn’t even get around with our group. I never bothered to keep the friendship in good order, but she always remembered, always wrote. I never once wrote back.

  The boys got her after school, and she hadn’t wanted to be got. She wasn’t like the rest of our knot of hardened girls. It was one thing to go looking for trouble, it was quite another to have it forced on you. I shot my mouth off, and next thing there were police at the school.

  Lil had those kids in the palm of her hand, but she was too nice a person. In the end she claimed she was willing. That let the boys off the hook.

  Lil threw her reputation away and saved the boys from nice long sentences and the savagery of a sedentary judge.

  “I give up, Lil,” I told her.

  “They’re only boys. You can’t punish them for being boys,” she said.

  In return they got her down by the river, near Little Coogee. Kids were in canoes on the mucky water, and the boys from school were in Lil on the bank.

  Lil’s Car-Eater

  Lil left school early. She got a job as office assistant in a tire retread business where she made out work orders and kept records of work and hours and overtime.

  She admired one of the mechanics there. He wasn’t really a mechanic, since he had no qualifications, but he helped take off and put back on the wheels of cars, and wielded his rubber hammer and rolled car wheels along the concrete floor with abandon.

  As a hobby he was eating a car. After work each day he went home and broke bits off the bomb in his backyard and ate them. He’d polished off the front fenders and the front and rear bumpers; he still had a way to go. The other men at the retread place used to accompany him to the lavatory to hear him shit. His name was Gavin May. The car was an old FJ Holden. Lil wrote me about him. I’d never had much to do with her, but she considered she was my friend.

  Dear Alex, You know I got this job at Booker’s, well there’s a guy there eats cars. No, honestly. I
don’t go out with him, though maybe I would if he asked me. Just to see what he’s like. I only know him at work. How’s your father’s act? Does he still have to go to Sydney to die each day? Anyway, this guy Gavin counts the bits as they go through him in the natural way, I guess he wants to get into the record books though I haven’t asked him this yet. And is your mother OK? Those people that keep trying to get us to shift out of the bush are still trying, we have to keep moving. The dogs give us good warning when anyone comes though. I’d like to ask Gavin how he’s going to prove to the record books that he’s eaten the bits that come out of him, but I think he’d think I was rude. I wouldn’t want that, it’s just that I want to see him get what he wants and into the record books if that’s what he wants and I can’t stand to think he might not be able to prove it. The people might laugh at him and not believe him and I wouldn’t want to see him disappointed. I think I might ask him some question about it and maybe if he thinks I’m not laughing at him and if he sees I don’t really understand so he can explain it to me, he might take me out. I know you’re busy so don’t worry about answering this, it’s a pleasure to know a person like you and to write to you and feel that you’re still my friend, because I’m still yours,

  Lil.

  Encounters with Nothing

  Like cats we were, straying near the source of food. Asleep, scratching, playing, washing, playing at sex, returning to the source of food, never leaving, but for short prowls near other animals.

  The little rules and laws we lived by were our prejudices, crystalized for a time to give the impression of permanence. Then a new batch of kids came on the scene and lived by a slightly altered set of prejudices.

  Our responses to questions put to us by our surroundings were a selection from the feelings we had at the time. We dramatized each truth, each feeling for our own benefit, as if we were trying on new clothes; tasting each new truth, each hypothesis, each new outfit.

  Judgment is a duty of every person, we were told. Judge yourself, pronounce sentence, execute the sentence: that was learning to be an adult.

  The pursuit of ourselves was expected to occupy our youth. It was supposed that we would approach the goodness and simplicity of the ideal, Citizen Christ, as a form of selfhood in action. We were engaged in doing things that formed a search for our identity.

  What made us not know? Why were we uncertain of our identity? Surely other races, other times, other people were born knowing exactly what they were and where they fitted in. Maybe we had too much time. There was nothing we had to do each day to survive. Everything was so free it seemed we did as we liked.

  And when we found our identities, what we found was that we were trivial. I don’t mean what we did was trivial, though it was. I mean we were, in ourselves. So trivial and unimportant that it didn’t matter if we found an identity or not. It didn’t matter if we had one. It never had mattered. We were just here for a space, then not here. Like pet animals, cockroaches, leopards in a zoo.

  We had chosen idleness, and pleasing ourselves. We looked into the distance for the dreams and colored visions that might be the future, but what we saw was distance. Admittedly distance too was a drug.

  We accepted the regular meals, the rightful shelter, the protection of custom, the nourishment of entertainment, like laboratory mice.

  On an excursion once I saw in a laboratory a nude mouse. It scampered about and sometimes stopped and watched me. Its eyes were bright, and, I thought, knowing. But later, when its head had been snipped off with the secateurs and its braincase opened, the rest of its head looked at me with just the same expression it had when it was alive. It had known nothing.

  Of all the young I knew, I think I was most convinced of my ability to get through the grading gate into the minority, and of the rightness of this happening.

  My comfort was internal. Perhaps that was why I hungered for harshness, danger, risks, complications, enemies.

  Instead, what I had at sixteen, was dream after dream of violent action, fighting and shouting, and an awakening to nothing each morning. There was school and sport and the joy and vigor of competition, but once I’d accepted this order, it was easy. It was unsubstantial; there was really nothing to fight. Every breath, it seemed, was part of a lifelong fight against nothingness, and the effort of the fight, the essential assertiveness of the fighter, was what held us together. For though there was nothing to fight, the fight must continue, or we would fall to pieces.

  Without this fight we are ghosts merely, phantoms, inhabitants of a dream dreamed by some shadowy consciousness—(once in ten times it dreams of us and we have existence).

  But I would be no ghost: I would fight: I would make the effort: I would hold together.

  I wrote a sort of poem about it, but I didn’t show it to anyone. It looked too much like a poem about war and the devices of war.

  Blooms appear where no green is

  and there is hate, a deep flower.

  Children in bronze rooms

  wear it as more than charms.

  The black rain screams and sings

  into the prepared soil. The hour

  is expectant, dizzy, and becomes

  choked in its need of flames.

  Hearing a man’s thunder begin

  beasts and the kings of beasts cower;

  a red shield covers shames,

  and crosses – men’s names.

  The young are weary of things

  lacking violence. The world is sour.

  The wheel turns and comes

  back on those it tames.

  We will be rid of all silences

  but those that cluster within the flower

  whose unimaginable blooms

  shall purge us from all harms.

  Note Made After Friday’s Science Period

  It could only be pointless to address you, inheritors of the next universe. When our universe shrinks finally, explodes, and after desolate ages inconceivable as a mental picture to humankind, forms new systems and stranger galaxies, the particles of these pages will be not only dispersed, but may not even exist as atoms of the same elements, for who knows in what way the next set of elementary particles may re-form after the next universal explosion?

  If only there was a way of leaving decipherable traces of our works and what it meant to be us, for the inheritors of the next cycle of life. Assuming curiosity has a value then. But we, in our compartment of the ages, are shut off from the next cycle as finally as from the life of the cycle before us, and that is a boundary nothing can cross but perhaps some of the elements of which we—the universe—are made.

  The Painting Class

  I caused a sensation—admittedly only a sensation at our school, but school was a world—by doing a painting of the cruxifixion.

  It was a painting of a painting, for the crucifixion in my canvas was posed. It was real enough, and blood flowed, and a human sacrifice made, but the artists capturing it at the foot of the cross were artists first, prepared to sacrifice one man so that their painting had reality. There they were, canvases stretched on easels, brushes poised, spaddling on palettes or busy brushing; a whole class of outdoor painters while the figure on the cross writhed and gradually ceased moaning and began to faint away for longer periods, until immobility and the upright position and loss of blood and shock took consciousness away for good. Then only drying blood was left.

  The painting class worked like demons. Their part-finished paintings showed on their canvases, and all were different!

  The painting class won first prize in our school art competition—art was made attractive for potential Frees—and attracted notice from local painters.

  The Crucifixion as an Artwork, commented the local throwaway paper. Portrait of the Artist as a Young God, said a metropolitan daily, sourly.

  How delightful it is to be good at things!

  Inspiration, Ambition?

  Her head was down, her body had a forward lean. Determination was printed on her T
-shirt, pig-headedness on her face.

  “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do,” she grated through clenched dentures. (Sorry, I don’t know that they were.)

  Mrs. Footlow, our art teacher, was inspired, it seemed. She had, I think, been spurred by my small success to try her hand at something ambitious. She was working on a panel to illustrate the emotional aspects of the magic square totaling thirty-four. She was trying to combine hard-edge expressionism and post-industrial apocalyptic. Styles swirled under her hand as no doubt they did in her teaching brain. We watched as we went past the art room on the way to lunch.

  In the playground I made a remark about Footloose Footlow trampling down the plants in the garden of styles with the Wellington boots of coarse ambition.

  “Love thy neighbor,” MM said, unhelpfully. Which was all very well for MM, but Footlow had said to me a week before, “You have no desert spaces, no untamed wilderness in you.” And she meant it to hurt.

  Oh, haven’t I? I’ve got as many as Australia has.

  Rose Hearts and Pomegranate

  The image persisted in my mind of the rubbish tip spreading down from the completed sports oval. In its shadow we parked our cars. Each time we came, more filling had pushed us further away and raised a cliff of rubbish to shade us from the houses a few hundred meters away. By summer a second oval was done—over the places where we played—and another being filled down into the slope of the bush.

  Others played there too. Grown-ups. I think of a shabby pair: she an outcast, wearing an overcoat in all weathers; he with that sockless look and unpressed clothes that were not the uniform of the unpressed young.