A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  Perhaps they were building a kid to play on the next oval but one.

  In summer we put the rubber on the bitumen and played on beaches. Once, when I just felt like sitting on a rock, I wrote this:

  Look at us running to swim in a vintage sea

  Pink flesh and white bone

  White bellies and sudden pink petals of mouth

  Other petals of thick rose mushroom, sly pink

  Opening their mouths against the blush purple soft head

  Concealing its bone hardness

  Towering over rising brown foliage.

  That pink bulb will push apart my brown nest of hairs.

  His arm throws itself over my head, his hand white

  after long swimming,

  Cold blue fingers pull open my brown bud

  Finding the glistening petals, pink

  Of the heart of my rose.

  And further, down the cone-shaped-like-a-whirlpool

  To the pinkish pomegranate pieces that will yield and open,

  Flesh teeth glistening in a circle: moist.

  I put it in at school for English Expression. Mister Khoury said I was developing an interest in poetry, and I was intelligent. I suppose he meant it as a pat on the back. Was he serious? I hope he didn’t think I was fool enough to want to be a poet, lonely in a cold society.

  In a sense we were free to do anything and go anywhere, certain of nothing but that our energy would take us somewhere. But then certainty wasn’t the point.

  Freedom from and Freedom to

  I longed to leave the machine of childhood which wanted to teach me the virtues of community. (In case I became a Free.)

  I wanted the luxuries of privacy, my individual freedom; anonymity among the elite of the Serving Class.

  When I was free of the machine, my freedom could be translated into the dynamics of action. The free act, as an ideal, floated tantalizingly before my mental eyes. Freedom to steer myself on the waves of the sea of society, rather than loll on the sea bed. Free of entailments, free from the drag of the sea anchor of conscience. The unmotivated act.

  What a freedom it seemed! To achieve a life of unmotivated acts, a life as free as breathing, as free as the workings of the circulation, as free from direction as the involuntary nervous system.

  I thought then that nothing could be so inspiring as to shake off these humans that were all round me, and to go alone into the class of people where I would feel at home. The world seemed to ring with meaning more resoundingly every day, and I responded with the energy and imagination that I felt growing within me.

  I must admit I often felt, thinking of the other kids, most of whom would never make it, rather like the vines and creepers on the fence and round the trees: night and day they grew, reaching for something.

  Something to strangle. Certainly, the social system was unfair, but that’s not felt keenly by those on top.

  Fame

  Acker Campbell was now practically hollow. They kept him at home for fear of his organs being punctured by some inquisitive or malicious member of the public. He would no longer let others squeeze his liver or his lungs, or feel the processes in his guts with their bare hands. He had to be sponged constantly, like the dolphins and other sea creatures that were moved over land. They didn’t let me close to him, they kept him behind a glass screen.

  “It’s not funny anymore, is it?” he said to me plaintively.

  “Are you really hollow?” I said. There wasn’t much to say.

  For answer he lifted some of his organs aside and fisted himself on the chest. It gave out a lovely hollow boom.

  “At least I haven’t got a live body growing out of me,” he said with something like satisfaction, meaning Mario Julian.

  I didn’t see him again, only pictures of him, in science articles and on television. In a funny way he had made it, despite his change. As I went home I wondered at his lack of resentment, and at his ability, even in his condition, to look down on someone else.

  A Lovely Day

  The morning I got Lil’s next letter I was sleeping so soundly and wanted so much to stay in bed for the rest of time that I was really offended when the devil in the clock smashed the silence of my room. I took it personally and got up grumpy and wouldn’t look at father as he handed me my breakfast. Nor did I ask him “How’s mother?” as he returned from her room after giving her hers.

  By the time I’d got out of the frontyard onto the footpath by the special step father put in so I wouldn’t tramp down the rockery since I wouldn’t go the long way round the letterbox down the front drive, I’d forgotten everything except what a lovely day it was and didn’t even remember being grumpy.

  On the way to school the houses growing out of the hill opposite looked pretty, and I passed a one-legged peewit and a kookaburra that cocked her head at the ground from her branch with a look of disappointment. In the yard of the old corner house near the bridge a large patch of violets was busy subduing all the grass around it by cutting off their sunlight with a dense cover of leaves, from which the delicate violet stalks and petals looked up demurely.

  The weather was hot. I knew that when I came home from school at three I would see high birds looking, looking for the reflection of water.

  Lil’s Next Letter

  Dearest Al,

  Please excuse me writing to you again. I hear of you often from Jimmy and Maurie, my little brothers. They’re in year seven and eight. I’ve been home today to look after Mum, I hope they won’t dock me for the day. It’s been raining and where we are now in the bush the trees are thick and very tall, since we’re down near the bottom of the valley. Sometimes when it’s raining I imagine I hear the trees saying, We’ll bend our crowns over to make a roof for Lil’s family. And their trunks are thick, just like the blocks of rock those primitive men put up at that place Stonehedge that we learned about in sixth class. I guess those people in olden times were pretty well stumped for a way of getting a roof over it. But I guess if they’d built roofs over them there’d have been no way for reverence to come in. I like the idea of a church open to the sky and God. Did I tell you my guy’s old man got divorced and had to leave the kids? Even if he hadn’t got divorced he’d’ve had to go—there was no room for him anymore. The things he left behind they split up. As if he was dead. You wouldn’t know his mother, my guy’s mother I mean. I’m not knocking her, she’ll live till she’s a hundred and after all she’s my guy’s mother, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the father. He’s gone to live in the city, you know, where it’s cheap. One room he lives in. He can’t afford to come and see the little kids. I went and told them it seemed a bit wrong for him to be put out like that, put out sort of to die. They threw me out. I was just saying what I thought. I was in there to that city a little while ago, it was cold, the wind was fierce trying to blow the sky away. There were so many people they had no name, just like drops of rain. The old buildings, well, even the fire escapes looked lonely. Poor man. As for the neons, trying to put some brightness over it all to cover the dark and dirt. Maybe in the future people won’t need to be virtuous and do the right thing, maybe the system will make sure everyone gets justice. I did what he wanted when I visited him and now my guy’s very mad with me. But it was just sort of sympathy. It didn’t mean anything. I hope you and your family are well. I kiss our school photo every day to kiss you.

  Your friend, Lil.

  There’d Been a Party

  Next morning father sat in the comfortable chair with the bright green upholstery, his head in his hands. Still connected at the neck, of course.

  “Oh God. Oh God,” he was saying.

  I grabbed his hair and pulled up his head to look at his face. Tears patched the skin under his eyes, messing the remains of his eye make-up. He didn’t always remove it completely when he came from the theatre.

  He stared at me with sorrow.

  “Dead, dead, dead,” he moaned.

  “Everyday.” He put out a hand to grab me, bu
t some unsympathy made me knock the wrist aside. He didn’t care, or didn’t show it.

  “Can you know what it is to die every day of your life and knowing that at the end you’ll never wake to play again?”

  “You mean it’s not the story of the play that’s done this to you?” I said. “Just your part, having to die before the end?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What about the others that die? What about the ultimate change that the play’s all about?”

  “But me! That doesn’t help me. If only I was still in my mother. Better still, if only I was still a spermal possibility. Then I’d never know I existed, flushed down some lavatory, dying on a handkerchief, or washed out of someone’s underclothes. At least the infinite possibility would be there. What a blessed state. To have it all to come. Instead of which, once the egg is fertilized, it’s the beginning of the end. Life, birth, living, just a brief final flowering before the real end. And I mean E-N-D. No more possibility. Cast the seed of my own life, much comfort that is, then curl up and die. Wither. Back to elements. Never come again. All possibility gone. Exhausted.”

  I made breakfast for him. You can’t expect a father overwhelmed by the sorrow of existence to make breakfast for himself.

  “Do you want something for your head?” I asked.

  I mean, he was older than I; he’d survived this long: why not longer? I fetched him tablets for his head, and a glass of water and left him to his sorrow.

  Separate

  A thing that bothered mother was my coming home into the house after sport or music practice just on time for tea and walking up to father, putting both hands on the sides of his face and saying sweetly, and outrageously, “This is the man of all men that I have intercourse with!”

  “Alethea!” she trumpeted when I first did it. “This is your father!”

  “Is he?” I said.

  “To think you can speak of your father like that!”

  “Mother, it pleases and grieves me; pleases that you are for once talking to me, though I’m quite tough and could last forever without response from you; grieves that you think I can’t speak to father in any fashion I like after all these years of only speaking to father and not you, of telling him, not you, about my periods and telling him about the boys that touch me up and telling him about the men I screw and telling him about my coming greatness and telling him about the changes I see in the world about me and that I never see in you.”

  This was not strictly a logical discourse, nor was it meant to be. I didn’t tell him any of those things, and she often spoke to me. Well, fairly often.

  Father made a pacifying gesture, his hands came up near his face, then out toward me, and one remained vaguely pointing in my direction while the other wavered over toward mother; as if both arms performed some sort of linking of the two females in his life who happened to share the house.

  But there was no such link. Not between him and us, or between any of us then, for I was separate, and though I would probably be part of him and of them tomorrow, I was myself then. Just at the moment that I was proclaiming he was the man I had intercourse with!

  I could do that because I was separate.

  I wasn’t the same all the time. When I got a letter from Lil and smiled at her way of living her life—why didn’t she get away from that family?—or lifted an elbow into someone’s ribs at basketball, or stayed awake at night thinking of poems, refusing one of the kids at the quarry for no reason at all, or moralizing in an essay about the conduct of politicians and powerful corporations, I was being a different person. One person in one place, and a stranger to that person in another.

  Which one was I? Was it natural to be all those different people? Or was it a deep fault in me that I had so many faces?

  I dreamed waking and sleeping, of greatness, whatever that might be; and I knew I had to do, to perform, to act. My life was cut up between two options: action and dreams.

  Was it part of my trouble that I had inside me another person who was reacting to and countering what I did and thought, so that by doing the complementary thing at each step she was effectively nullifying all I did and wanted?

  You Can Admire the Old

  Today I think of death. Not in the same way as when I was three or four, but as a terrible certainty. Myself, my flesh, my hands, my face, my legs, my new breasts, all are going to perish. Perhaps today, tomorrow, but if I live to be a hundred, it will be certain some day.

  I look around. All those much older are just as game as always, doing the same things, smiling the same smiles, yet they’re getting old. I can’t look more fearful than they look, for in the natural course they will drop before I do. And there they are, walking into obliteration with their eyes open.

  It’s one thing about the old that you can admire.

  I’ve even seen old people out at night gazing up in wonder and enjoyment at the high-sailing clouds and bright moonlight leaking through: and it’s all going to be there after them as it was before them. Yet they don’t seem to resent the facts.

  I wonder if father and mother do.

  When I think of death I think always of them, and always I feel just a bit weepy. Dear parents—you, too, mother—may dreams always guard your sleep and stand like sentinels over your sanity and health!

  LITANY OF SUCCESS, SUNG BY CHORUS OF TEACHERS

  Your father will be here later,

  I’ve asked him here specially.

  You’ll achieve.

  She’s an achiever,

  She’s bright

  She’s aggressive

  She’s strong

  She’s the best we’ve ever had

  No apparent disabilities

  No sign of inherited weakness

  No lack of spirit

  No absence of self-esteem

  No lack of any quality necessary

  One day

  You will remember us

  And remember that we said

  You will achieve far beyond

  Any other product of this school

  And any product of your own family

  Or ancestry

  You will remember

  One day

  We join together in being proud of you

  And promising that we will do

  Everything we can do

  To help you

  Succeed.

  Xmas Holiday

  The girl was lifted gently from a car, and seated on a patch of white bush sand at the side of the Mona Vale Road. The bag over her head was ventilated. She sat there while the car drove calmly away past Terrey Hills, her knees drawn up under her long skirt, her hands together in a muff-like loop of material.

  The first rescuers to decide she wasn’t a bomb tried to get her to her feet. When they stood her up—and she stood in a curiously crouched way—she fell over. Falling, she put out both arms to save herself, as if handcuffed.

  When they abandoned impatience and embraced investigation, they found her hands had grown together at the palms, her feet sole to sole. The graft scars were fresh.

  Medical students had held her in a weekender over the six-week Christmas break, had immobilized her, fed her, kept her quiet, and performed the surgery necessary to graft together her hands and feet. They did it as a holiday exercise, and anonymously wrote a teaser report on the work, hoping to interest the newspapers in parting with large sums of money for a fuller report. The deal stayed at that stage, for the relatives of the linked girl made it hot for press and police, threatening to have the perpetrators and anyone who cooperated with them. The relatives even argued that she should not be separated right away, they wanted the public to be aroused against the privileged Servants of Society by exposure to her misery.

  She was Mary Pogson, of Popper Way, and before the holiday she had been in year ten. Her best friend was Mercedes Facciuola, and she went out with Challenger Lutherburrow.

  Fourteen Minutes and Fourteen Seconds

  Father had this mad idea to get some
fresh cold air, and Blackheath wasn’t far on a Sunday if you got up before the other million cars.

  “Let’s walk from the highway,” I urged the authorities. If you didn’t speak quickly they’d ride all the way to their air, get out, sniff, and get back in the car. My father drove on a bit with his father look and finally consented to park.

  We walked along a road that said Evans Lookout. My father lost his resigned look after a while and made creaky jokes about lookout for Evans, and my mother loyally made notes. I don’t know that she wrote about what he said: I’m guessing. Maybe she wrote about liquidambars and pines.

  Another road became a bush track over on our left, so we walked across and took that one. I picked up a silvered grey stick to ward off snakes. Downhill we walked, sniffing the cold air gratefully, and at a dammed pool we got on to a narrow path that said Braeside Walk, where we had to go single file.

  I led the way. Alternate breaths of cooler and not so cool air blew in our faces, and we exclaimed about them. Ahead, the creek that ran alongside the path, only two or three meters away, showed as a spear of silver, straight and broader in the distance.

  Where the reasonably flat bed of the creek broadened near the path to about four or five meters, I could see that it was not merely a creek bed; it was the top stratum of the whole mountain of rock that supported our small valley. We’d been walking down the slight slope of what appeared to be a valley; now it appeared that the valley was merely a ripple on top of a huge ridge, and the creek bed went another twenty meters, then was no more. It cut off sharply, the water disappeared, and the next thing in view where the creek should have continued was a valley floor covered with the blobby, conical tops of trees a hundred meters below.