The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes Page A

are you?’ thundered the Iron Woman from deep inside. ‘Say it again.’ And her pounding dance-steps shook the hill in time to her words, while the Cloud-Spider jerked and contorted, like a rubber comedian’s face.
    ‘I am Mess. I am Mess,’ came the sobbing wail.
    ‘And who will clean you up?’ came the Iron Woman’s voice, her words timed to her stamping dance-steps and the weird whanging boom that shook the hill. ‘Who will clean you up? Who? Who?’
    ‘Mother,’ wailed the vast snail of a mouth.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Mother.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Mother.’
    ‘Tell us again. Who?’
    ‘Mother will clean me up.’
    But now the Cloud-Spider was beginning to turn, as the dancing Iron Woman began to turn inside it, dragging it with her like a gown. Its wail grew agonized, higher, thinner. Its edges were being dragged towards that turning centre, like spaghetti being rolled up on a fork. As it turned it rose upwards, turning faster. Soon it was spinning, like an immense whirlpool. The Iron Woman’s revolving dance had turned into something else. Something that climbed into a spinning column. The cloudy body and webs of the giant spider were twisted tightly round it.
    ‘It’s the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon,’ cried Hogarth. ‘Going back up. It’s taking the horrible cloud with it.’
    ‘But what about the Iron Woman?’ cried Lucy.
    Sure enough, the long, swaying, whirling corkscrew of darkness was going up – just as they had seen the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon coming down. Lucy and Hogarth couldn’t take their eyes off it. The Cloud-Spider was now completely wrapped around that spinning column in tight webby folds, with a few raggyskirts of it flinging out here and there. Somewhere in there the eight eyes must be stretched out long and flat and thin like elastic. But where were the Iron Woman and the Iron Man?
    They watched the writhing column climb into the sky, with its corkscrew tip now piercing upwards, worming upwards. Huge and dark and towering, it swayed as it climbed. Growing smaller, as it climbed away. Soon it was a wispy blot, high in the blue. Then a dithering dot, like a skylark. They watched it, and watched it, till at last they were staring into nothing.
    They looked down the hill. The air was so clear, in the morning sun, the town seemed to be sparkling. The Iron Woman and the Iron Man were just coming out of the woods, climbing towards them. Lucy ran towards them. Then stopped. Hogarth joined her. The two giants stopped.
    ‘Oh!’ cried Lucy. ‘Are you all right?’ The Iron Woman was no longer a beautiful, gleaming blue-black. She was the colour of an iron fire-grate after many fires, rusty pink and grey-blue. And the Iron Man was the same. As if the inside of the Cloud-Spider had been a furnace of some kind.
    ‘Go home now,’ said the Iron Woman. ‘And watch. Wait and watch.’
    The Iron Man said nothing, just raised his great hand.
    *
    Like everybody else, Lucy’s mother had heard and watched the tremendous storm of happenings in the dark cloud. And she too had watched the spinning blur climb away into nothing. As if the whole terrific tempest had drained into the blue sky through an upward plughole. She was still standing at the window in a daze when a voice behind her complained:
    ‘Towels, where are all the towels?’
    She turned. There was her husband, stark naked except for a skimpy hand towel, shivering and goose-pimpled from head to foot, with a seven-day beard, his hair plastered down over his brow, and a woebegone expression on his face. But, worst of all, the stubbly beard and the hair, that should have been black and curly, were now snow white.
    ‘Charlie!’ she screamed, and fainted.
     *
    So it seemed to be over. All the men climbed out of the rivers, the ponds, the swimming pools, the baths. Women ran everywhere, with bags full of clothes and towels. Slowly, life started up. Lights came on. Cars began to move. Shops opened. Telephones rang incessantly .
    But things had changed.