A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  I walked along the red brown creek bed and sat on a rock, looking down. My father muttered and wanted to shout; my mother said nothing. (I don’t think she took in the fact that the chocolate brown rock stopped as if a cake knife had cut it.)

  The water proceeded at the same pace to the sharp edge, then casually went over. It didn’t seem to realize it had such a long fall.

  I sat. Father watched anxiously, leaning against a large concrete thing that might once have been a barrier or a sign. Perhaps they had so many people jumping over that removing the sign gave suicides no clue it was such a handy place.

  I looked down. It was a good place to think. There was nothing to stop a person from just walking to the edge and I trembled, but not so the water. Water doesn’t bruise. It was the freedom to do it that fascinated me. But the thought of the pile of rocks below, broken slabs of fallen cliff face, leaving this perpendicular face of rock smooth and regular. And how sharp the rocks looked. No, I didn’t get to my feet and jump. But the thought of it tugged at my feet. And thinking of that fall made pains in my legs.

  Freedom to jump. Freedom to not jump. I was beyond reach of my father’s hand. I didn’t want the freedom to jump, I wanted the bread of living. With all its unfreedoms. When you’re free the answer seems to be that you have nothing else but freedom. It’s like owning a hole in the ground. Hole is a noun, and you think that because other nouns are objects you can do things with a hole, but just try moving it.

  “You’re sure you’re safe there?” father asked. Some words were questions in that sentence, others were statements, as if he was asking me was I safe and assuring himself and me that I was safe, only to say the very next word with a question in his voice. You’d have to hear it to get it, you can’t really describe it in words.

  If I did walk out to that edge, and put one foot over, would some magic or miracle save me? Would the act be irrevocable? Would there be a ledge below to save me, or a frail tree to grip while my father rescued me? No, I knew the cliff was sheer from top to bottom.

  If miracles could happen, who could say that all sorts of odd things wouldn’t happen without warning in the future? I’d be a slave to freaky slips in the system of cause and effect, time-slips, memory reconstructions. They sounded fine, but to happen without me calling them down, made me a slave to accidents.

  The wide valleys ended where ridges remained. It looked as if the ridges were there first and the rest had sunk or fallen down and got washed away. You could look round from one ridge with its exposed sheer sides to another one a kilometer away, and see how the top stratum of rock kept a level line to its neighbor. Its lower edge was defined by green things growing, then beneath that another stratum of rock, not so deep though, could be seen to be the brother of the second top stratum way over on the right, and over here on the left. The time it must have taken. And there was I, sitting on a rock that would one day get bowled over when the creek bed was full of flood rains; I lived and breathed and could see the rocks and cliffs and strata, and would die shortly. The rock would go on for practically ever, and it couldn’t even see.

  That was the thing that reconciled me to living, with all its disadvantages; being able to do things: to see, to know, to move.

  Alternate breaths of warm and cold air came up from the lip of the drop. The ages-old fallen rocks overgrown with green and covered by earth and vegetation bowed dumbly under the large sky. Those trees and grasses were wide open to the rest of the universe, with only an atmosphere in the way. Somehow, with all the pictures of the earth, I’d never thought of the natural features of the earth as being so open to the universe, so that if there was anyone to see, they could.

  Feeling the scale of it I could no longer believe that humans bowed down to anything of wood or rock. No wonder people began to worship the Out There.

  But I, a large schoolgirl sitting on a rock above Govett’s un-signposted leap, I needed no one to worship. I needed no one to keep me in order, to keep my conscience. I didn’t want to be part of a human ant-heap, though I was attached to it. I didn’t mind taking responsibility for what I did; I was insignificant enough beside the wreck of this rocky plain now broken down in parts to valleys and ridges: how could I hope to oppose its alleged Maker Spirit? Freedom seemed to be freedom to choose, and the mountains couldn’t choose. The water couldn’t.

  I could. I got to my feet and walked back to father. Mother had climbed to another lookout and was standing at the edge of another hundred meter drop, writing.

  “That was fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds,” he said, relieved.

  “In the wilderness,” I added.

  “Have you been thinking of fame and reputation, time and death?”

  “The precariousness of life,” I answered. “The insignificance of humans.”

  “The precariousness of all life?”

  “No, just mine.” I looked again at the concrete blocks. They had holes in them. There had been a bridge, and signs, once. Now there was nothing to tell you were even approaching the top of the falls. It must have had quite an attraction, that drop.

  On the way back in the car I listened to a religious story on the car radio of a great man who attained everything. At the pinnacle of his success, or greatness—I still couldn’t separate them—he became aware of a younger rival, and he considered this young rival better than he was.

  He called the younger person, offering to stand down in his favor.

  “No,” the young person said. “I’d be given it on a plate, I would have no chance to achieve greatness myself.”

  I thought about it.

  Was greatness more in the work done?

  The radio man went on to an informal analysis of the Great Man. He was two-sided, a compound of Jekyll and Hyde, but in an apparently agreeable blend. At the end of a major stage in his life he finds he has to choose between one and the other. The broadcaster didn’t say if he had to choose for image purposes, or for his own spiritual satisfaction. I took it as the latter.

  He also found his life had little meaning.

  In the story the great man chose Jekyll, and his young friend chose Hyde. They seemed to be of equal strength, but since in this world good is less powerful than evil, the only way they could seem to be of equal strength was in the consideration that there were adverse social indications for evil, consequences of evil, which trimmed the balance.

  Evil and good were evenly matched.

  And, in fact, that was how I thought of them.

  Where did Alethea Hunt stand in all this? The trees flying past seemed to say: A.H. has something missing. What is it? Is it knowing what I should do? Is it knowing where this supposed and far-off greatness might lie?

  Or is it—terrible thought—that the thing in me is lacking that would push this hint of what I am and should do up into view?

  It was going on in my head when I got home.

  I guess I was quiet, sitting down at teatime, for father raised a glass of tomato juice to me and said, “Here’s to my big little girl,” as a toast. I raised my own glass after a small hesitation and silently clinked glasses. As the glass chimed, I said within myself, somewhere near my liver, it seemed, “Greatness and the whys.”

  I felt a glow of spiritual energy, but it faded after the fourth mouthful of father’s steak with wine sauce.

  “I’d marry you, you know,” I said to him. “If you weren’t past it.”

  “For my cooking, I hope,” he said.

  “Of course your cooking.”

  A moment later, after the thought of what else he’d meant but not said had faded, I remembered my spiritual energy burst.

  Drink the toast to greatness, yes. Say the words, yes. But do nothing, nothing to bring the wish about. Greatness was as far away as its definition.

  Greatness could come from the greatness of a cause. But in my youthful and empty cynicism there was no room for causes: there were none. As for any cause being great—that belonged to the past. But why? Wasn’t it a matter o
f searching, in any age, for causes that must be possible?

  I returned to the ancient domestic wisdom I had taken in from I knew not where: greatness is within, be great there.

  Going to bed, after finishing an essay for social science on the rate of human sign learning in chimpanzees, there still returned to my mind the thought: push the search to the end and live with the consequences.

  Even if in my tiredness at the end of the day I reverted lazily to the conventional domestic wisdom of the interior existence of goals and virtue and greatness, the urge toward action still remained.

  I fell asleep dreaming of two young chimps combining three signs into the action-sentence: “Gimme more drink.” If I hadn’t been so sleepy I would have flushed with embarrassment at the parallel: three stupid mammals stumbling over combinations of words.

  My Car

  Tomorrow is my birthday, and father is getting me a car. It’s only small, but I don’t mind. The party will be at Strathallen, so mother won’t be disturbed. Besides, the kids drink a lot and make a noise, and noise is unpopular round our streets.

  I had a win at school today. They wouldn’t let girls start up a weight-lifting class in the gym after school, so I brought some women’s organizations into the argument, and today we were told in assembly that the school had decided to start a class for girls at the sportsmaster’s suggestion, and if the parents’ association would put in half the money the school would get the rest.

  Celia O’Donnell and her gang are all going to be in the class when it gets going. They want to get stronger for their forays, on late shopping nights, into shoppingtowns where other gangs go.

  It will be good to be mobile and go where I like when I like.

  Darker Than Pink

  The day after my birthday party we played Bankstown.

  I was last to finish dressing after the game, but with a car, who cared?

  Little noises in the wall of the change rooms at the stadium turned out on investigation—I thought it was a rat—to be a friend of the caretaker. He was fascinatingly dirty, so filthy that he was lovely. Washed-out eyes observed me from his wine dark face. I wanted that dirty thing in me.

  “Contemplation of the worthlessness of thought or action is the only thing worth doing,” he said, settling back on the pile of matting where he had enthroned himself, and insisted that I impale myself on him and do all the work.

  I felt a little wave of viciousness toward him as it passed into me, as if I was adding to the mess he was in. Dirtying him, I mean. (Why did I feel that?) It was streaked with grime, and on the back of it—when it was up, the part I could see, the under part—the dirt was so ingrained it was studded with blackheads like black-currants in a cake. At the roots, where it joined his body, the crease was dark brown, even slightly purple brown, and shiny with sweat. The smell of that part of him was so awful that it had a sweetness at the back of it, like an aftertaste.

  “Do you come here often?” I asked. I didn’t mean it. I continued to ride up and down.

  “I live here. I go for a walk when events are on.”

  “What about training at nights?”

  “I’m asleep then, in the storeroom.” His teeth were stained to the gums, and there was something horrible about the bright pink inside his mouth. I wanted to get in there, with all of me, and revel in the mess. His throat made me think of a sewer.

  “I enjoyed that,” I said when I’d finished and he’d finished.

  He lay back on the matting after I’d raised myself off him, his thing wilting slowly and the stuff running down it, bits clotted on it near its collar, and the watery part running down the inside of his leg toward his bottom, and over the wrinkled and hanging old purse with long hairs growing sparsely on it.

  He didn’t mind. Spider webs like grey scum clung near the ceiling.

  A noise on the concrete floor, and behind us stood a child of about thirteen with gorgeous grey-green-cobalt eyes, skin looking so fine it might split to the touch, and hair golden at the front and on top and lightening to not-much-more-gold-than-blonde at the nape of his neck. His lips were darker than pink, with another shade that troubled me. His lips he carried apart, under a fine slim nose. Something inside me turned over. I could feel those more-than-pink lips with the bright wetness traveling in an angel’s caress all over my parts. I thought I saw his delicate white penis rise from a hairless place into the air until it was surrounded by three pink surfaces and those surfaces belonged to me. I swallowed with a dry mouth, and licked my lips with my tongue.

  “Gets to you, doesn’t he?” said my filthy companion, lying there with waves of aromatic human gusting from him. The air shook.

  I pulled myself together as I dressed and thought soberly of greatness.

  But what was that shade: darker than pink?

  Why were we here on earth? What should we be? What should we do? Did greatness have a part? What was the purpose of greatness?

  Perhaps its purpose was to give every generation an example of something necessary to humanity, something necessary but practically unconscious on the part of ordinary humans. Was this slight consciousness given to me as a trust, as to someone who could make use of it?

  It didn’t seem that many of those around me were concerned with finding out why they were here. Or did they have thoughts they never made known?

  What a lot of questions.

  I stood up before the baffled beautiful eyes of the first year boy, and the beautiful filth of the caretaker’s friend.

  The boy and the man both provoked in me feelings I didn’t usually have even when I was tearing into one of father’s steaks.

  A blob of semen slid down my upper leg and stopped. Perhaps it was caught on a few of the hairs on the inside of my thigh. I wiped it carelessly, pulled on my tight pants, picked up my heavy schoolcase and with dignity went out. I don’t know what happened in there after I left.

  Perhaps the whole of life was searching; going, but not arriving; simply going toward, never reaching. The journey is the whole of life.

  But that couldn’t be so. I was left with the same questions to answer: What should we be, what should we do?

  When I got to the street, I looked behind because I felt eyes on me. It was the beautiful first year boy. All the way home I wanted to go back, lift him in my arms and crush him to me. Would I eventually have a male as beautiful as that boy? Had father looked like that once? His boyhood pictures in the album showed a handsome boy’s face, but not a beautiful one. What would it be like to own a toy as pretty as that?

  The Female Flying Dutchman

  I held my legs wide for the moon, which beamed right up over the sill to light up my bed; I was a spider trapping the light.

  The light caught the silhouettes of the short hairs on the tops of my thighs, and made mountains of my upturned breasts.

  Outside the window, high against the moon in the jeweled dark, a black spider hung down from her thick webline suspended from our phone wires.

  I imagined I was dying, naked and sensitive to light, which felt like hands and touched me with interest; I was breathing hard, I was dying, the spider spun its thick strong wheel and waited, shifting a little every few minutes; I felt moist. A globe of moisture came out of me, came out like a spider to the sticky part of its web, and waited, then dropping slightly through the jungle and leaving its sticky trace, forming a film round some hairs. It gradually changed shape and formed a perfect tear, and dropped into the hand of a man whose face I could not see.

  1. He sealed it in a locket and wore it forever round his neck, round his waist, dangling near his sinister, powerful prick and its display of fierce hair with its back-up of silent inscrutable scrotum full of testicles, puffed and overflowing. He treasured it.

  2. He never washed that hand. That hand did nothing ever after, he kept it clenched to retain till he died, my moisture, my sticky trap . . .

  3. I changed my dream. He rubbed it over his face and body, it glowed so that I might recognize hi
m . . .

  4. He put it on the tip of his tongue, then on four limbs he came looking for me, climbing over the sill, along my bed, between my legs, looking for the taste he had on his tongue, his tongue . . . for the essence that has become part of him . . .

  I went to sleep and woke before dawn, legs no longer apart. And cold. The moon was gone, the sky bare. I found my pajamas and put them on, going to sleep, too sleepy to regret the one who had me as an essence inside him and could not forget, but would be marked by me forever.

  I woke again at six. The sun was up.

  It took only the mental picture of the top of his shoulders to make the feelings come. By the top of his shoulders I mean the silhouette of his head, including the way he shaped his hair, the curve down to his neck, the way his neck curved outward to the beginning of the wide part of his shoulders, and the shape of the top of them down perhaps a few centimeters . . .

  I could picture the long muscles of his upper arm showing, one after the other, as his arms moved; showing under the skin and under the slight thickness, the slight softness between the skin and the muscles they covered.

  And the feelings that came! They were the important thing! They were the things that lifted me from my picture of where I usually was in the world to a picture that I could never see clearly, but could exactly feel. As if feeling were the location.

  And the picture of where I was ordinarily? Why, it was a picture of a mass of millions of people standing shoulder to shoulder on level ground, and the mass stretched for so far into the distance that the horizon consisted of the heads of people like grains of sand. And to the east, the south, the west . . .

  It was the thought of that special part of him that made me feel those feelings in my arms, along the inside of the softer skin of my arms. When I touched it with my own hand, there was next to nothing. But if I touched it—in the dark—in a way that was almost not a touch! And when there was no touch at all but so close to touching, that’s when I felt a tingle along all my surfaces, echoed on the sides of my tongue and downward where it was rooted to my throat.