I sat letting my thoughts wash over me, then recede till my mind was empty.
I looked round at the trivial occupations of the other guests. I was alone. There was no Colin here.
I felt tired, as if all my insides had gone out of me. I didn’t mind if I slipped off the edge and sank to the floor of the pool. I loved him.
How I loved him! It was such a violent feeling that I could have smashed a few heads together and screamed it out to everyone. But there was no energy left in me.
It was my first sickness. The animal within had decided to fail.
All My Yesterdays Crowding Round
I dragged myself home. Our house was only a few hundred meters away. On the corner of Heisenberg Close, Old Mother Hubbard pulled his coat round him as if against cold rain, but the sun was hot: this rain was in his bones. He said something after me, but I heard nothing.
At home I could see in my father’s face that he thought my tiredness, which probably sagged my features, was a mood. Mother didn’t look up, she was busy loving me on paper.
I put a knee on my bed and allowed myself to fall on my face. It was a relief.
I thought: I have been logical in my attitude to the world, but the world is not logical. I’ve learned when I was supposed to learn. I’ve developed my abilities as best I could. How can I be sick? I’ve never been sick. I’ve done nothing to deserve sickness. I thought the irrational was just a frill, a fantastic decoration edging the solid border of the world, but it is an integral, essential part of the world. It has caught up with me because I neither understand it nor respect it. It could destroy me.
Is that unreasonable?
I fell asleep and dreamed. I dreamed of brothers and sisters I’d never had, of dogs speaking to me on footpaths, of costume balls, of women’s dresses walking along uninhabited except by full breasts, of men in checks and dirty shoes, of witches holding out for me my costume so that I might be dressed for a ball. (It was a light green jacket, with scarlet bows over the pockets.)
I took train journeys in trains that turned over, scattering debris and dead over a large area. I flew, beating my arms with one strong stroke to clear the traffic, and with four or five strokes rising above housetops. I glided slowly over the lives of the fantastic people that make up the population of my life.
I swam again at that pool party. There was hardly enough water, in fact there was a sucking mud on the pool bottom. Musicians dressed as gypsies abused us with their songs as we struggled in the deepening mud.
Even my dreams felt sick.
It was late afternoon when I woke. I got on my feet, looking hopelessly about for something to potter with.
The old chest of drawers was something.
In the top drawer were things I’d used recently, but it wasn’t far underneath to the layers of the past. And in the back corner of the top drawer I found the old apple I stole when I was eight.
Wrinkled, very tiny and dry, it was hardly a red color at all now. It was soft and wrinkled like an old person’s skin. Wryly I remembered thinking extraordinary people have the right to transgress with impunity. This withered apple was the evidence. (If I could wake tomorrow and be a little girl again.)
What was the matter with me? I had never felt weak before, or even tired, except for a minute or two after a game or a race. I had done well in the examinations, I would be in the top few percent through the grading gate. I belonged in the Serving Class, not among the Frees, where you expect weakness of all kinds.
Was it the forked path under my feet that even now was tearing me in two directions, that had induced this deplorable, embarrassing weakness? In one direction fame, ambition, greatness perhaps: and the new direction called love.
Why did these things take me in different ways; why couldn’t they both point in the same direction? What was the meaning contained in this violent difference between the two?
I felt my pulse. It punched up at my finger strongly. I could feel that pulse all over me: feet, backs of knees; I saw my front throbbing, just above my stomach. When I touched the table, the doorhandle, they throbbed in time with me. They had my pulse. Anything I touched at that moment contained a rhythm directly traceable back to my pulse, my blood, my rhythm.
My heart was struggling at my ribs not in weakness but strength, like a large animal in a too-small burrow. I didn’t feel at all sick.
Nor did I feel weak. And I certainly wasn’t tired. In that moment I felt as I did just as I was lifting a weight, just as I was taking off from the board on a long jump—I felt marvelous!
A few minutes later I felt so relaxed that I lay flat out on my bed, as easy and boneless as a cat.
A Fabulous Monster
At the table father said: “Darling, your eyes!”
And turned to mother. “See her eyes. Don’t you think they’re changing? Not grey. More green, but a lot of yellow.”
Mother glanced up briefly. “She’s probably tired.” Her head went down over her plate, and she went on feeding.
“Are they really?” I said. I must have looked alarmed. He quickly reassured me.
“Of course not. Just caught a golden glint. You turned your head, and the light glanced off your eyes with a different color.”
I ate ravenously. My father didn’t mention my eyes again, but now and then I felt his head turn toward me, watching. What had he really seen? Were they becoming yellow?
Instead of tormenting myself with love and achievement I kept my mind on my food. As I ate, there came into my head a vision of a field of grass as wide as the world, it seemed. I saw rivers and lakes; the waving grasses, bending before light breezes, beckoned to me. I felt caught up in a community of living things that were being called by these watered plains. I stayed with the vision, but rising higher and higher above it until the plains were so far below and the coasts bordering them were in sight, so high that at last Australia was the iris of a great eye, and the coasts its thin border.
I was so cold, so far above the world, in a profound emptiness lashed by a terrible wind. I looked more closely with my changing eyes: the wind was caused by people rushing into existence and living and dying so quickly they couldn’t be seen, and it’s thousands of years into the future and no desert left in the world, no desert at all.
Time rushed by, roared and whistled, there was a perfume such as I’ve never smelled before, the smell of spring after spring after spring, all running into one another and rich with living things and everything that grows.
I followed the dream further; it slowed; soon I would see, at the very end, what will be.
Father touched my forehead.
“Darling, you’re out in a cold sweat. What’s the matter? Something I can do to help?”
I jumped at his touch, my arm came up involuntarily and my nails scratched his arm.
“Sorry,” I said, and my voice was peculiar, more like a guttural cough than a girl’s voice.
I began, that night, to collect all my pieces of paper, my souvenirs from childhood, fantasies, school compositions; anything that might give someone the clue as to what I was and what I became, and why. On mother’s paper I began to write everything I could recall.
I did not know what was happening, except that I was changing. I was never going to be the same again. The animal within hadn’t failed: it was asserting itself, it was taking over.
Was I a fabulous monster, a mythical beast that would be a symbol for future females, an archetype for the future?
Whatever words I used I could not conceal from myself that I was now a failure in ordinary terms: I was one with the guilt and grief borne by all other failures and changelings. I shared the punishment visited on the majority: I was free. The responsibility for society rested with others: I would never share it now.
All the time I thought it was youth I was gradually leaving, but it’s life as others know it that’s going!
Night accepted me as it had never done before, as it must have accepted all those before me who cont
ributed to my inheritance; I felt welcome and borne upwards. I slept like a curled lump. Toward dawn I had a dream: I dreamed that all the words in the world are necessary to make up one soul, and I had blank, numb spaces in me where I had lost many words but no way of knowing which words were gone.
A Straw to Clutch At
I wonder if fame is a kind of greatness. Perhaps I may have fame some day because people will know I believed in a future for mankind. So many, without quite knowing it, never really believe the world will last long after their own demise. That’s the next step: the ability to think of the future of the race.
But what was my future?
If only I had been able to love. But now, with this unknowable change coming, the possibility of love was behind me.
Will my change be a kind of death? If it is, the way to face it and stay on an even keel, is to take what I can of it day by day, and enjoy it; holding each moment in front of my face like an absorbing book so I cannot see the rest of the universe or know fear of death. Perhaps this is what animals do.
Will my change be my greatness? (Sometimes I wish I had never heard the word. Or that mother had kept her mouth shut instead of filling my head with such thoughts.)
Dread fills me. Yet I’m not cold about the heart: the reverse rather. When I change, will I remember the dear voice of my father? And mother’s too? All they’ll have is scraps of schoolpapers, photos, exercise books, prizes, to remember me. But they will live on.
I don’t want to give any part of myself to death; I hope this is something other than death. Perhaps I won’t be dead at all, but ready to be born again. (Of course I won’t be dead: I’ll be changed—and free.)
Black Tears
December is nearly gone, and I have got down on paper as much as I can remember. For the rest, the old notebooks and scraps of diaries are interleaved more or less in order in the pile of paper I shall soon bundle up and tie with string. If I find more I will include them.
My skin has changed, and I have father bring my meals to my room. He is terribly worried, poor dear human father.
I have times when I know my voice is not going to work properly, and I write a note for him. Mother is immersed in her work, as usual. My handwriting is unsteady. My grip on the pen has become clumsy.
I stay by myself in my room. The thing in me that is changing me from the inside makes me weep, and the tears are black. But they are not abject: ferocious rather, as if a terrible strength is building in me; and uncertain, for I don’t know in what way this strength is to be used, or in what way it will use me.
All I know is that as a human I am some sort of Ugly Duckling: what the swan-equivalent will be I do not know.
The Fear of Alethea Hunt
Everything I thought I was is wrong. The tall girl who seemed to succeed at everything she touched—so healthy and intelligent—contained all the time the seeds of failure and shame. The person who seemed certain to step through the grading gate to become one with the responsible, hard-working Servants of Society, was becoming something other than human.
What am I?
Whatever I become, will I be able to stay sane? Sanity surely is a cushion against reality. No facts, no matter how dire, can have great emotional impact on a sane mind, since sanity depends on a consistent denial of so much of reality: one’s deepest instinct is to go on.
If I can take each day as it comes, each change as it comes, and not panic!
Already my time-sense has changed: more movement, more events, seem to fit into each second.
Each night when darkness comes I go outside the house. Although I make no sound as my feet touch the grass, Creep whimpers from his kennel up under the peppermint gum. The sound makes something feel large and free and pleased and brutal in my body—somewhere between my shoulderblades and down as far as my stomach—and I can feel my eyes opening wider, and a brightness forms on the surface of my eyeballs. On the nape of my neck hairs rise. I am answering that in me that is a hunter.
Once, when father didn’t know I’d gone out, he heard Creep’s fear and came out with a torch. I turned as he pressed the button, and the light shone full on my face.
“What is it?” he gasped, retreating.
“Only me,” my deep cough of a voice said. The light shone on my clothes, and he knew it was me.
“Your eyes,” he said. And “Oh God!” pressing his hand to his head in theatrical despair. “They reflect the light. Like a—!”
He stopped. I stopped. I signed gently with my hand for him to go in first. He wasn’t to look at me.
He did as I wanted.
The Light of Freedom Shines on Monsters
My thumb is retreating. It’s hard to grip a pen. There is fur between my fingers. How I have managed this far I do not know.
Even with hands changing and eyes different, my body hairs getting thicker and standing up stiffly, my freedom to walk the streets gone, there is still something in me that has the will to do what I set out to do, and the will to be free to do it.
Ill Would Change Be at Whiles
Were It Not for the Change Beyond the Change.
I will go as soon as this shape becomes too awkward for me to be in a house. I hope I will be able to drive.
In my mind’s eye I see a vast lake a thousand kilometers long and half a thousand wide. At the edge of it are towns, and quite near the towns the grass starts and a bit further back the first line of trees, then a patchwork of forests interspersed with grazing land and cultivated land. And a network of water channels bringing life.
I see a vast natural tract of wilderness where the rocks and stones are too thick for anything but trees and wild game.
Ah! my lake. I see its edge, I see the sun rising on it in the morning and setting in a red blaze before the dark wheel of night returns the sky to its deepest blue.
Last Letter From Lil
Dearest Al,
Here I am and there’s nothing in the house but washed pots and peas. Something has come over me, I feel as if I’ve been hanging in a closet all day and they take me down at night, I guess I mean I feel as if I don’t exist. When I go out and walk on the street, all I meet is eyes, hardly any people. Do you ever feel like this? And all the time waiting, waiting to go nowhere, waiting for someone with enough money to buy up my hunger. Did you ever think that birds and even poor moths have a better view of this world than we do? I often think that. I wonder if me feeling like this means someone close to me is in a bad way and I don’t know. When I go to the town to get money for my pension check—I get extra now my guy’s gone, but I need it for his kids and the new one coming: my one—I look up at the bank in the way people used to look up at cathedrals. Do you ever have the feeling, when you’re in the middle of an emotion, that you want to keep it, maybe in your mouth, for if you let it go through you it will melt when it gets to your heart and you’ve lost it? I do.
I read in the magazine section of the Sunday paper that bits of skin are coming off all of us all the time and they get circulated round about, in the air and things—well, the germs and mites on the skinflakes must get to be brothers with everyone else’s, mustn’t they? I like little thoughts like that. I’m sorry to be nattering on about my worries, I’d hate anyone to think I was looking for sympathy. Did you know our flowers turned black in the garden? I thought at first it was the kids, but it was something in the plants.
When I was in the doctor’s waiting room looking at the fish tank, waiting for them to blink, I dreamed I saw the doc’s face through the tank, he beckoned me into the surgery, put me on the bed, and approached me slowly like a boat trying to make it to the shore when the tide won’t let it and the current strong. But then he picked up my dress at the hem and cut it with his knife and it began to bleed. Isn’t that a crazy dream? I hope some day you get the joy of passing on life, even though I don’t want you to have to sacrifice yourself in any way. Love to my friend always,
Lil.
Last Words
The future
is somehow . . .
somewhere in the despised and neglected desert,
the belly of the country
not the coastal rind.
The secret is in the emptiness.
The message is the thing we have feared,
the thing we have avoided
that we have looked at and skirted.
The secret will transform us
and give us the heart to transform emptiness.
If we go there
A Woman of the Future Page 41