A Woman of the Future

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by David Ireland


  My hands were damp. I touched myself with them, and they felt as if hands were a foreign piece of matter, rather like soft wood. The rest of me was damp too, like a sweat that comes when the body feels the approach of death through sickness.

  Pains through me seemed to have been there all my life. My head felt as if the left hand of death was gripping the case of my brain. I rolled from side to side, trying to roll from under the pain. I pinched my skin and heard a yell. Immediately I felt more pain, this time closer to the surface. I clasped my stomach down low. I scratched myself with nails I had chewed into sharp points and succeeded in cutting the skin. Cold sweat poured from me, down my sides in channels, making pools of liquid on the earth beside me.

  I screamed to myself: “Think! Think of a world with no pain, where everything is happy; all pain is unnecessary, therefore there is peace and painlessness everywhere, and no tears.”

  “Look at the sun! Kiss the sun! The sun is so kind and good, he kisses all the children of the earth. He’s also lazy, a golden flower. He’s a fiery spider with webs of heat and flame. He is the mouth of a flame-thrower held in the hands of an enemy.”

  A soft white cloud above was spinning. I’d had no food for many days, yet I wasn’t hungry. What was making my body arch and stretch and tremble? In tears, my legs were apart for the sun to touch me there; my mouth was open for the sun to come in and bless the interior of my mouth. My breasts were bare to the touch of the sun; I squeezed them so that the little mouth in each nipple would open and receive the sun.

  Still in pain, but able to get up, I pulled flowers, grass. Still pain. Several dandelion spheres came up with the grass, I held up the dandelions and blew them higher than my head. Tiny seeds fell and drifted and sailed away to earth, the air was white with downy parachutes; dandelions were descending to conquer the earth and the other plants. The soil would be carpeted with dandelions and flat spiky green leaves out of which soft hollow stalks would rise and throw their armies high into the air again.

  The pain will not go.

  Some abandoned parachutes drifted near men’s trousers. I was down again, and the pain worse and I craned up to see the party and catch the smell of the blessed meat and the virgin yearling beef and the bread-filled sausages and screaming fat.

  Perhaps I would be pregnant later. I would become a dandelion and be golden like the sun for a while, then burst, and seeds would come out, and I could sleep on them like a pillow, walk on them like a white carpet.

  Those two males had finished their sport with me. The trousers left off being on the ground, and went away. White gobs of semen dripped down between my legs and colorless liquid, which ran faster, carried it down onto Australian earth. The semen showed a nice reluctance to drip off the soft inside flesh of my legs. In the sky another cloud in the shape of panties hung on a black snaky cloud the shape of a tree. It was, in fact, rapidly changing into a bush, a wild currant bush. I could see the eating party clearly, they were eating and dancing. Vapors from the flames surrounded them, and they danced within the flames and vapors like sprites in a log fire.

  Walking through the bushes toward the distant party I was bent double. The pain. The wet on my face told me I’d been crying. I tried, but I couldn’t weep anymore.

  People passed by through the bushes, and I spoke to them, but they were too busy to answer. They couldn’t have known I was Alethea Hunt.

  I gathered strength and ran down and jeered at the wedding party and the eaters. I was pinched and grabbed but I did not retaliate. The bride’s parents (she’d been bride to every kid in the school) rode at the head of a band of professional hunters mounted on trail bikes. I was chased off, and peered at them from within bushes, and round the trunks of trees. They chased me, I was flying over the twiggy ground, falling and stumbling and knocking things. When I fell I wriggled like a snake until my wits came back enough for me to stand and run. I ran far.

  I ran straight into three men. I was glad it was a long way from the party, glad that my pursuers had disappeared. I would be ashamed to let others see my legs dragged apart. The men were silent, like dogs. When my hair was grabbed, I shut my eyes. I felt one man tread on my hair, the other watching, while the third fucked away.

  I felt each one tremble as he came to get into my helpless body. I lay flat, crucified, the nails entering the middle of me rather than my hands and feet, as women who have been crucified long before Christ was; as they continued to be crucified with the sexual nail.

  As they fucked forwards and backwards, pushing in, pulling back, the same movement all the convulsive time, they became lighter, their faces became the faces, their forms the forms, of angels. Their happiness, temporary though it might be, roughly though it might be grasped, was more important than my pain. As each one finished for a while, he went back to being unhappy, miserable. Each then looked as if he wanted to kick me. Imagine angels kicking!

  They looked at each other as if they could read, as angels, what the other felt as his penis rubbed back and away along the inside of my vagina.

  Others came past, looked at the angels and at me, and were sick, then went away to drink more. My angels looked as innocent as white clouds high in the sky and parachuting dandelion seeds falling on the fertile earth.

  Perhaps Australia

  I didn’t know who brought me home. It was father who woke me, asking gently if I wanted dinner. I think he thought I had been drinking, or taking things. I lay on my bed for a little time, thinking.

  Who was I?

  I had grown from the soil of Australia; its promise of greatness was my own; it was unique, as I was; in a sense it too was an outcast, like I feel I am; it is alone in the world in a special way, as I am alone; it has a strength which has not yet been tested, not yet been developed; it is young, like me; it has resources in its body; like me, it doesn’t quite fit with the world as it is, though it may yet do; it waits, gathering its strength, which is its enormous silence, about it like a coat, waiting for an ideal friend, a lover, a spouse—who does not come.

  The country is a virgin, as I feel I am, essentially. The hidden place in me has not been touched; my trivial adventures have not touched it. Besides, in a larger sense I am not the person who did those things: I am different.

  Am I perhaps Australia?

  Letter From Lil

  Dear Alethea,

  Remember young Sarah Sarau at school, who left after third year to get a job in Coles, well she’s in a sort of rest home where they bar the windows. I went there to visit when I heard, but they wouldn’t let me see her unless they searched me first, which I didn’t mind, but the man took me into the changing room and asked me about Sarah. I had to say I was very close to her in order to get to see her, so I had to do what he wanted or he was going to report me and see that they heard about it at the tire place and I thought, well, it’s pretty funny, and wouldn’t he get into trouble too, but I thought well, better I don’t get into any trouble and get to see poor Sarah or things might get tough for her. All he wanted was to take my pants down and bend me forward across his desk. It was better not having to put my front against him; that way I didn’t feel it was quite like doing it. My guy couldn’t say much if I didn’t see the man’s face.

  I made it up to my guy that night, I told him I’d gone crazy and he was the man with crystal balls and I felt them to find my fortune and he was real tickled, with me pretending they were talking to me. I even held them when he was in, and you’ll be glad to know that I felt better when I made him do me all sorts of ways, including bent over his sink so no one would have had me any way he hadn’t. I felt so good, I pretended he was that Captain Ahab that Miss Manassa gave us in first year, and he was chasing this big white whale (me) ready to harpoon her on sight. Believe me I was so happy it had happened the same as with that man at the place that I was only dying to have his boat overturn and make him drown in me. I really felt like a whale or the sea.

  He made some money out of being on show with eating cars,
and he’s gone on the stock market, he says the market rises and falls faster than women’s skirts but just as sure. At the rest home some visitors were tormenting the old folks, who looked a bit savage. And when a man blew a whistle a lot of people came out and began to comb the grass with real combs.

  I like it best with my guy when he pins me and we’re face to face and I’m helpless. I nearly drown in my own mind when I can’t even move, and I pray that it will last forever.

  Your loyal friend, Lil.

  His Touch

  Aysha Kemal’s parents gave a party for year twelve in the grounds of their ranch-style house off Marconi Highway, and again I had some sort of blackout. I tried, while it was beginning to affect me, to remember who was at the party who might also have been at the quarry wedding, thinking I might come up with the name of someone who would want to put me out. I couldn’t match names at all. The drug took effect so soon. It blinded me.

  I didn’t panic. I just took a little longer to walk places, and made a show of looking around me when someone was talking, so they wouldn’t pick up the fact that I couldn’t see their eyes.

  The rougher ones at the party, apparently in the secret and knowing I couldn’t see them, led me down away from the house on a slope that went further down into the valley toward the old rifle range.

  What I mean is, I had to be led. It was only a bit later that they took me away from the rest and got me against the fence. Somehow they hooked my arms back to that fence.

  When they’d all shot their bolt, they left me. All but one. He unhooked my arms, and it was the touch of his hand on my left wrist, then my right, that stopped me lashing out at him. Instead, I stood still and waited. I could feel the places on my wrists where his hands touched me.

  “Are you all right?” he said. His voice was like a kiss. Not the rough male kiss you first think of, not the wet thing they put on you when they think they’re being romantic and sexy like women want. His voice was a feather-light kiss, yet firm. It said we were strangers, yet there might be a world of something ahead.

  As I stood there still, hoping I didn’t have to speak (fearing that if I did my voice would sound harsh and shrieky) he touched my face. I still couldn’t see. I guess he touched my face so that if I could see I’d have a chance to rear back and show that I could. His skin was so fine it would have rippled in the wind.

  He touched my face.

  That touch! His hand wasn’t hot, yet it was like a fire through me. I staggered.

  He only meant to catch me. I know that. But when I staggered he put his arms out and caught me. My knees felt loose. It was if his judgment was so perfect and he was so strong that he not only adjusted to my sudden stagger, but as well he judged when and where to grab me so exactly that there was no sudden clutch, no scraping fingernails, no squeezing of the soft inner part of my arms, no jarring. I knew then what it must be like to be caught strongly yet with such comfort that one’s own muscles were completely free to perform, like a trapeze artist caught by a partner.

  In that moment I could see a little. And he saw that I could see. A second he waited, while I tried to adjust to the cloudy sight of him. Then, before I properly could, he turned and walked up the slope of grass toward the back of the house and the tennis court and barbecue pit. Then he was gone.

  Colors came quickly back. The grass was a brilliant green that looked liquid. I was so bursting with feeling that I forgot the eager young animals that had been at me, and walked ecstatically toward the party over the blend of couch and summer grass that they probably called a lawn, with here and there a plant of trigger grass and the beginning of a paspalum infestation. My feet inside my silly white shoes, the pair with the straps, felt like fairy floss. I couldn’t feel the ground.

  The touch of his hands! How I wished I’d seen them, seen their exact shape, the way the fingers joined the palm, the color of the backs of his fingers, the glint of afternoon sun on the crisp hairs on the back of his hand and on that part where the wrist leaves off and the arm begins.

  But I had nearly seen his face just as he turned away to go. His walk, well ahead of me, was light yet firm. I imagined him carrying me . . .

  Back at the party I gave none of them the slightest sign that I recognized them—which indeed I didn’t—nor the smallest hint of a suspicious look. I treated everyone as if we were all members of the party, and it didn’t hurt me to know there were eight of them that knew very well what the inside of my vagina felt like to their sexual probes.

  He touched me. I was blind, and he touched me.

  Not even a kiss. No casual jostling of a breast, no accidental elbow brushing my stomach and coming to a full stop outside my equatorial triangle.

  Was he only a boy?

  I was dancing with anyone that asked me, enjoying the movements of the dances and looking for him all the time. My gentle man-child, I murmured, Are you married, a plasterer by trade, a knight of the Southern Cross, a football coach? I know nothing about you. Are you gentle because you hold your power in reserve, do you have that holding-back that gives the impression of great power in potential? Is potential closely related to potent? Have you been held in reserve all your life, always patient? If you let loose would we all have to worry? Are you boastful, vicious, full of lies?

  The colors of the dance, the mercifully ever-changing pattern of dancing movement, soothed me by their excitement.

  To eat or drink, I accepted nothing offered: I followed others to the buffet and picked up near where someone else had picked up.

  Another girl standing often alone, attracted me. She too, glancing through the window glass at the neighboring lights, would allow her gaze to become steady, then fixed; she would be interrupted well-meaningly every time by males, and each time her face would straighten out into an expression containing less interest than she displayed looking into the heart of the night.

  I asked after him. How was I to describe him? The soft boy, the boy who came up last from the gully?

  They didn’t know. Some told me he had gone away. To harden in the sun, one said. His name was Colin. Or did I christen him with that innocuous name? The name of my favorite boy doll when I was a small child.

  He had left the party.

  Ah, my gentle man-child, my boy, my man—how I tried to recapture every detail I had darkly glimpsed of you, how I tried to reconstruct you from insufficient data now that you had gone! If only I had been quicker, and followed you more closely up the slope.

  I was left holding my wrists, with his touch still imprinted on them. Once I put a hand to my face, but took it away, in case I disturbed the place where his fingers had been.

  Bodies All Over the House

  Still at the party. Much later. Drunk. No sign of my one who touched me and left his touch. This was merely a pick-up, it didn’t interfere with thinking of my boy who was gone.

  A map of lower Italy on his jaw spread black stubble down his throat to the chest. By contrast, the alleys of East London persisted on his face through three generations. The glob of phlegm at the tip of his throat, was the tip of a London fog that he constantly swallowed. When he opened his mouth wider, in speaking, I could almost hear the glob drop down his uvula and gum it temporarily to the base of his tongue.

  He was warm against me. His face was warm, looking at me. And close. When, in shifting, he moved away, I saw he grew cold; his face bones showed, he was lonely. I was sorry for him, I could see he felt lost. I knew that when he moved, he moved in cold airs he carried about with him, and from within his cold he desired me. He turned, and turned again, aimlessly. I wanted to guide him, but I could only do that if I was near, and I could only be near if he came to me.

  When he came close he would be warm in my circle of warm. And when his face was toward me he would be warmed and desirable and interesting. He would light up. He would desire me.

  He would be happy, desiring me. He would be excited, seeing he could have me. He would be exhilarated, having me. And having had me, he w
ould be sad again.

  Oh well.

  In the dark. When I felt it, put my hand round it and found it was firm and warm and adequate, I said in relief, “Thank God you’ve got something there.”

  My gentle man-child, where were you? Who were you? What was your name? Where did you lay your head to sleep? Did you breathe so quietly, when you were asleep, that I would have to bend close, closer, to be sure you were alive?

  My boy, my man. Some day I’ll find you.

  My dark-jawed Londoner enjoyed me. It was gratifying to feel his enjoyment. Better than masturbation.

  We slept where we fell. There were bodies all over the house. The darkness of night was private to us all.

  When I woke I found he’d done me in my sleep. At least he’d had the consideration to put a handkerchief up between my legs when he’d finished, to save the drips.

  Why is it some men seem to have a larger collar—flange is the word in the books—and when they pull out they seem to drag half the semen with them? Others must do it differently.

  But I think I know. When you’ve been done from behind, their penis comes out with very little on it. Perhaps the top lip of the flange is cleaned by the thin skin on the more rearward end of the vagina. They all say it feels such a lot different, but as for me I prefer to have them in front. Where I can touch them and do some kissing, if I like them, or just plain see what they’re up to. And every woman must get some amusement from their facial contortions.

 

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