The Iron Woman

by Ted Hughes

  ‘I know what we’ll do,’ she announced. ‘We have to go to the factory and tell them to stop. And if they don’t stop pouring out poisons their factory will be pulled down tonight.’

  ‘Nobody will believe that,’ said Hogarth. ‘They won’t take any notice of us.’

  ‘Yes they will,’ cried Lucy. ‘Because I’ll give them the fright.’

  ‘The fright?’ asked Hogarth. But then tried to snatch his hand away as Lucy grabbed it. He was too late. Yes, yes, now he realized what she meant. And it was as bad as he remembered. He had to brace himself. It was instantly full blast. It didn’t need any warming up. There it was – terrible as ever – as if it had never stopped.

  He tore his hand free.

  ‘That will scare them all right,’ he gasped, ‘if they can hear it.’

  ‘Of course they’ll hear it. I’ll grab their ears. And you too, you grab them too.’

  Hogarth did not say what he was thinking. He was afraid that he might not have the scream power. Maybe only Lucy had it. But then – what if he did have it? He imagined catching hold of some man by both his ears and watching his face as the noise blasted through him, altering his brains.

  They set off. Soon they were at the great main gates of Chicago, which stood wide open.

  *

  Lucy and Hogarth dodged in past the crush of grinding and banging lorries that seemed to be fighting their way out through the gate and in through the gate at the same time, in clouds of concrete dust.

  Lucy was thinking: If I keep telling myself that I know exactly where I’m going and exactly who I want to see – then nobody will stop me.

  She pushed in through the plate-glass doors of the main office block directly behind a man in a suit who clutched a briefcase and walked with bounding strides as if he had only seconds to get where he was going. Hogarth followed her just as three men burst out of the lift and came hurtling across the reception hall almost running and out through the glass doors, rearranging their folders and papers in their arms as they went, and talking very loud all three together as if they had planted a bomb on a short fuse somewhere inside the building and were trying to disguise their getaway.

  Lucy seemed to know what to do. Hogarth thought: Well, her dad works here. She knows the ropes. Actually, Lucy had no idea – except to find the Manager’s office and go straight there. She looked past the unhappy screen of rubber plants and saw the plan of the office block on the wall. She marched across, past the little fountain and its bowl of plastic lilies, and Hogarth imitated her.

  He had enough sense to know that if they glanced towards the receptionist and caught her eye, she would ask them what they wanted – and that would be the end. She would say: ‘Please wait over there.’ Then she would phone for somebody who would tell them that nobody could speak to them that day. And their attack would have failed. Luckily, she was busy. Hogarth watched her out of his eye-corner, bent over her jumble of computers and fax machines, her hands scrabbling through heaps of papers as if her fingers chased each other. The phone was tucked between her cheek and her shoulder, and the top of her bowed curly head was plainly saying: ‘Please don’t interrupt me.’

  The Manager’s office was on the fourth floor. Hogarth and Lucy went to the open lift. Two men got in beside them. Lucy pressed the button for the fourth, one of the men for the second, the other for the third. Neither spoke to the other. Both stared at Lucy and Hogarth but neither opened his mouth. Both for some reason looked very angry.

  Well they might, if they had known what was coming.

  A few seconds later Lucy and Hogarth were walking down the blue carpet of the corridor between doors, and there it was, at the end – a brass nameplate:

  J. Wells

  MANAGER

  One knock from Hogarth’s knuckle and Lucy walked straight in, Hogarth behind her. He closed the door.

  They paused. It was a large, bright room. The whole facing wall was one big window on to the mass of steaming pipes and towers, where half a dozen factories of different kinds seemed to have been jammed into one.

  The man sitting behind the desk had his back to them, and was staring out into that jungle of steel while he crowed into a telephone: ‘Anything is possible! Absolutely anything is possible. This firm’s unspoken motto is “Impossible is not a word.” It’s as good as done. Right! Right! Yes! Of course! Wonderful! Magnificent! Good!’

  Laughing, he turned, put the phone down – and saw Lucy and Hogarth.

  He had a large space of face which seemed larger because it went right over to the back of his neck. His eyes, nose and mouth were all pinched together in the middle of it, as if they had been knotted tightly by the little ginger moustache. His ears, Hogarth noticed, were unusually large. Big ears, Hogarth’s father would say, mean long life, but Hogarth was also thinking they would be good to grab.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ If the Manager hadn’t been so astonished he might have been more polite. Also, he smelt trouble.

  But Lucy had already stepped forward. She pointed her right forefinger straight at the man’s moustache, like a pistol.

  ‘Your factory has poisoned the river. It’s killed all the fish. It’s poisoning all the creatures. It’s poisoning the marsh. You have to stop it. Today. Now.’

  Her voice really rang out.

  The Manager couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Please get out,’ he said quietly, and his hand went to the phone. He was used to this kind of accusation – though not from a wild-faced girl in his own office.

  ‘If you don’t stop it, this minute,’ Lucy shouted in that strange, solemn voice, ‘your factory will be destroyed. I’m telling you, it will be destroyed. Or worse.’

  And then she remembered the writhing baby in the tunnel of fire and her voice rose to a yell: ‘You’re poisoning all the creatures and you’re also poisoning me.’

  He had picked up the phone. ‘John, spot of trouble. Get somebody into my office quick.’

  Then he came round the desk. He was a thickset, tough-looking fellow. He had started his career as a scrap-iron dealer, a weightlifter, a lover of hard edges who delighted in pounding big posh saloon cars into small cubes. This is it, thought Hogarth. He’s going to throw us out. What do we do now?

  But he strode past them and held the door wide.

  ‘Out!’ he snapped, without looking at them.

  But then something truly amazing happened. Lucy ran at him and grabbed the wrist of the hand that held the door. Hogarth knew what that meant. Even so, he was astounded by the change that came over the Manager’s face. It contorted, as if a pan of scalding water had been tipped over his legs.

  ‘Aaaaaaagh!’ he screeched. ‘Aaaaaaaaaagh!’ And he reeled away across the room, with Lucy hanging on to him like a little wolf being dragged by a lumbering moose.

  Suddenly another man stood in the doorway shouting: ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Hogarth saw his chance. I’ll give it to him, he thought, right where he can’t miss it. And he jumped up to grab the man’s ears. The man caught his wrists, but even so Hogarth managed to catch one ear. And it worked. The man’s mouth gaped, as if he had been stabbed in the back. ‘O God in heaven!’ he bellowed and banged back against the door, trying to get his hands to his quite big ears. But whatever he did, it made no difference, and he began to flail at Hogarth, who closed his eyes and bowed his head, ignoring the blows and simply hanging on. He knew what the man was hearing because he himself could hear it.

  It was a very unusual sight there in the Manager’s office. The two men writhing and lurching about the room, bouncing off the walls as if they were being electrocuted, like balls in a pin-ball machine, while the girl and the boy clung on and were dragged after.

  The shouts brought in others from other offices. All at once Hogarth was struggling and squirming in the hands of two men who lifted him clear of the floor. At the same time a blonde secretary writhed her vivid lips and slapped at his face and head with her bony hands, screaming: ‘Little bea
st! Little beast!’

  He got a glimpse of Lucy’s legs whirling in the air, and a group of figures wrestling around her.

  But whoever touched either Lucy or Hogarth had to deal with the blast of cries – the roar of screams and groans, as if loudspeakers had been clamped over their ears and the tortured cries of the creatures were colliding in the middle of their brains. Even the woman’s slaps hit her with bangs of scream.

  So it was not just a simple matter of throwing out a girl and a boy who were neither of them very heavy.

  In the end, they were thrown out. But not before everybody in the office block had come crowding to see the cause of the uproar, and had tried to get into the action. And whoever touched any of those who had fought with Lucy and Hogarth was hit by the same explosion of screams. It was exactly what Hogarth had called it – instant contagion. Everybody was utterly bewildered. Secretaries who had only been pushed aside staggered away, stunned by what they had heard and glimpsed. And now when they touched each other, there it was again. Nobody knew where the screams were coming from or how they came or why.

  The whole shouting mob burst out through the glass doors at the front of the office block, where Lucy and Hogarth managed to stumble clear. Now Lucy turned, and shouted again:

  ‘Now you know what it’s like. That noise is the creatures screaming with your poison. Now you’ll never get away from it.’

  ‘Get out of here!’ roared the Manager. His collar was burst. His tie was gone. Somehow his jacket sleeve was almost ripped off. All this had happened in his efforts to escape from the screams.

  ‘The police are on their way. They’ll settle you people.’

  The effect on those office workers was shocking. Secretaries sat sobbing. Men wandered from office to office with staring eyes. Nobody could explain it, and nobody could think of anything else. None of them could escape the fact that when they touched each other both were stunned by the screams. It was as if they had all become high-voltage scream batteries.

  And some of them, some more vividly than others, saw things in the screams. As they heard that dreadful outcry, they saw tiny creatures with wide mouths and terrible eyes, clinging to grass or weed or pebbles. They glimpsed the massed faces of fish, as if they were seeing the streaming leaves of a lit-up tree in a big wind at night, with every leaf the face of a fish, trembling as it screamed.

  Nothing could explain it. But there it was. They all felt they might be going mad.

  In the Manager’s office the important people had assembled. The Chief Chemist, the Head of Accounts, the Sales Manager, the Chief Engineer, the Public Relations Officer. They were like people after a mass accident. They simply stared, in a numbed sort of way, or watched the Manager. And he knew he ought to do something. But what could he do?

  ‘Idiots going on about poisons,’ he raged. ‘What is all this? We follow good industrial practice. We stick to the rules. We spend our lives cleaning up other people’s muck and –’

  He threw up his hands. But they all knew that this was not just an ordinary protest. What they were all thinking about, and what kept them all so silent, was the thought: If we touch each other again, the screams are there. Those horrible, horrible screams. What are they? And what do they mean?

  And two or three were thinking: How long will it last? Will it wear off? What about when I get home and my wife gives me a kiss? What happens when the dog jumps up at me?

  They had no idea, of course, that the truly dreadful things had hardly begun.

  *

  Lucy and Hogarth walked home in a daze. Her plan had worked too well in a way. But in another way it hadn’t worked at all.

  ‘They’ve all caught it!’ cried Hogarth. ‘Did you see that man’s face? I thought it was going to fly off and out through the window when I grabbed his ears.’

  ‘But will it stop the factory?’ Lucy almost frowned.

  ‘It might!’ cried Hogarth. ‘They’ve got to think about it. How long do you think it will take before the whole world’s plugged into the giant scream? And nobody dare touch anybody else?’

  The idea horrified him. At the same time, he felt like rolling on the ground with laughter. It was horrifying – but also amazing, wonderfully amazing! To think of such a thing!

  And Lucy too, she was frightened by everything that was happening. At the same time, she was dazed with excitement. After all, if that was the way things were, that was the way they were.

  Her mother and father were less trouble than she had expected. Once she had grabbed their hands and let them hear what everybody was talking about, they sat listening to her. She told them everything. As they listened, they began to feel slightly afraid of their daughter.

  ‘But this business about closing the factory,’ her father kept saying.

  ‘Destroying it,’ corrected Lucy. ‘Not closing it.’

  ‘But people’s livelihoods!’ he cried. ‘Everybody works there. What do you think I’d do?’

  ‘That doesn’t bother the Iron Woman,’ said Lucy. ‘All she thinks about are the screams. Some of those screams are baby screams, you know.’

  Her parents stared at her. She reminded them again of the creatures that had come dancing and writhing up the tunnel of fire. Her mother sighed and rested her forehead on her hands. She stared down at the table.

  ‘How do you come to be mixed up in all this?’ shouted her father. ‘Why you?’ The wrinkles on his brow were a new, unfamiliar shape. His hair was tousled, as if he had just got out of bed in the middle of the night.

  ‘The Iron Man will know what to do,’ said Hogarth. He wanted to make Lucy’s parents feel better. But now they turned their stare on him, with the same dreadful, anxious look. Blackish rings had appeared under their eyes. And Hogarth was thinking: Is this how people look during a war? – when there came a knock on the door.

  ‘The police!’ gasped Lucy’s mother, looking more haggard than ever.

  ‘Why should it be the police?’ cried Lucy. ‘I’m not going tearing up any factory. I’m not the Iron Woman.’

  Her mother opened the door. Three journalists stood there from the local newspapers. And as they introduced themselves, others, behind them, were getting out of cars.

  *

  The family managed to get to bed finally, but none of them could sleep. Their brains were spinning. They would be headlines in the morning. And before noon the television people were coming.

  Lucy had put the cup with the snowdrops and the vase with the foxglove beside her bed. She fancied she could see the snowdrops glowing slightly in the dark. Though the journalists had asked a thousand questions, she had never mentioned the Iron Woman. They had gone off thinking it had all begun with her – Lucy. All they could think was: This girl has abnormal powers. And they argued with each other about different explanations.

  Hogarth lay in his tent, listening to the orchard and the darkness. Everything was so silent now, he thought he could hear the stars rustling. How could the whole globe seem so silent with that terrible scream, somehow, still going on. He took hold of his left wrist with his right hand. Silence. It needed two people to plug into the scream. Then a tawny owl hooted, just above his tent, and his hair went icy. He curled up and pulled his sleeping bag over his head. And suddenly he was thinking of the Iron Man. He imagined him coming across the country in a straight line. So he fell asleep dreaming about the Iron Man, who seemed to grow, till he was far bigger than the Iron Woman, as he strode through the night, over trees and houses, with the moon glistening on his metal.

  4

  Next morning Hogarth and Lucy were up early. They planned what they were going to do. Lucy left a note for her parents:

  When the TV people come to interview me, tell them I’ll be at the factory gate at 12 o’clock sharp.

  Soon they were climbing up towards the woods behind the town. They scrambled over a brambly bank and were among the trees.

  ‘Look!’ hissed Hogarth. He was pointing at the ground. Lucy gazed at the deep, huge
prints in the soft mould. ‘The Iron Man. No toes, you see. Your Iron Woman has toes.’

  The track led up through the woods to the field above, that climbed to a hilltop. And there they were, sitting facing each other, two colossal figures, their backs to the boles of great cedars that grew among the ancient stones on the hill’s very crown.

  ‘We’re here,’ yelled Lucy, and ran towards them. ‘It’s us.’

  The immense heads turned.

  ‘Iron Man!’ shouted Hogarth. ‘I knew you’d make it.’

  Lucy told them everything that had happened: the fight in the offices, the journalists, the television crew coming today. The enormous eyes glowed. The Iron Man’s glowed amber. The Iron Woman’s glowed black. But not a sound came out of either of them.

  ‘Why don’t you come and let the TV people see you?’ cried Hogarth. ‘You could give them the screams, on television. Then they’d have to believe. Everything would have to change.’

  ‘Oh yes, you must come,’ cried Lucy. ‘Just the sight of you –’

  A humming started up within the Iron Woman. ‘Nothing would change,’ came the deep, rumbling, gentle voice.

  Lucy and Hogarth stared at her. What did that mean? Weren’t the screams going to change everybody? And the sight of the Iron Woman, as a giant scream-transmitter – wouldn’t that change everything?

  ‘It needs something more,’ said the great voice, up through their shoe-soles.

  Hogarth and Lucy were baffled. How could there be anything more?

  ‘So what do we do?’ asked Hogarth.