by Rod Jones
At home he supervised the undressing so that the costumes were properly stored where they had lived all these years in her mother’s cedar wardrobe. One evening when they had driven the horse and trap home from the station and she had taken off the precious petticoats, he suddenly grasped her around the waist from behind. His fingers bit through her cotton shift and she turned around, fearing she had displeased him in some way. She was surprised when he was smiling through his beard.
He went to his study and came back with a leatherbound folio from which he took several watercolour paintings he had made of various species of birds. On some of the thick pieces of cartridge paper he had replicated exactly the stuffed birds on his study wall; on others he had sketched birds mating.
It excited him when he came across a pair of birds hurling and fluttering against each other in such a way in the garden. He had often taken up his stick to point this phenomenon out to her. He even indulged himself in preening, little pirouettes in imitation of the birds, and laughed and bade her join in the game.
Now, beside the cedar wardrobe, the games continued.
In those intervals between governesses and when Julia stayed shut up with her books, Joachim had become casual in the matter of nudity around the house. He had dismissed all the servants the previous year out of deference to his ideas on racial contamination.
In the late afternoons when customarily he bathed, and the slanting light fell deep through the slats of the shutters and along the passages, there seemed to be a third presence, quite apart from the man and the girl, and which could not entirely be ascribed to the memory of the brooding, ill woman who had died in the room at the back of the house, and to whom all the months of enemas and foments had given the appearance of utter lifelessness long before it was actually so. Now, in the afternoons, there was something subtly and inevitably manipulative in the silences.
On the occasions when he did have a woman from the brothel at Mem make the journey up to the Duck River, Joachim was not always careful to ensure that the bedroom door was completely closed. By this time he had his doubts about the authenticity of his daughter’s deafness and on one occasion that summer, the woman’s howls of slaked lust brought the girl silently to put her eye to the crack of the door. Joachim noticed the slight disturbance in the configuration of light there (in spite of the fact that at that moment he was still in complete possession of the woman) and he knew that it was with jealousy and not shame that the girl slunk away, her childhood finally behind her.
It was the rainy season again, the season when Joachim, who hated the wind, spent entire days in bed with the shutters closed, locked into a semi-permanent artificial night. He sat up in his bed with his spectacles on, the candles burning, his writing tray balanced on his large stomach. Reference books he had carried in from his study weeks before were stacked up on the floor as high as the bed, his notes and manuscripts scattered around him.
During these times, Julia’s household duties doubled, then trebled, so that whenever she had a moment to herself she fell asleep. She had to cook for him, and in spite of his inactivity his appetite was voracious. She had regularly to empty his chamberpots, of which there were two, one for each bodily function. And she massaged his paunch to ease his pain through his attacks of flatulence. Then, as though it were a natural concomitant of her nursing duties, with his wind expelled and his member erect, she made of her mouth a repository for his semen.
The longer his periods of hibernation, the less inclined he was to leave his bed at all. As with his other corporeal urges, there had been another subtle transformation in the relationship between them. Their sex, since she had begun menstruating, had retained the spontaneity of that first time they had begun ‘playing birds’, the game by which he had introduced her to partial penetration. She accepted it as quite natural for him to take her at any moment of the day or night. In the kitchen while she was at her chores, outside in the garden, even at table during a half-finished meal, Joachim would simply move behind her, raise her skirts and take her with several brutal efficient strokes. This was always his method of enjoying her, as if to have to look at that pale bewildered face while he was performing his act would have been too much for even his hardened heart to bear. From this early age of thirteen she had come to accept the insertion of his erect penis as a natural and unremarkable bodily function.
Now, as her father spent longer and longer in bed, she learned to judge his sexual needs by the clock. These duties became so mundane that she performed them without thinking. After she had helped him break his wind, she pulled her long black hair from her face and rested her cheek on the soft paunch and performed her perfunctory but efficient act of fellation. From that position she found she could stretch her neck over the edge of the bed and spit out his semen into one of the china chamberpots.
Sometimes, resting face down over the side of the bed like this, listening to the slowing rasp of his breathing and the monsoon winds outside shaking the trees and rattling the iron roof, she looked at his manuscript scattered across the floor, the pages criss-crossed with his spidery German hand in black ink. Half closing her eyes, the lines rearranged themselves in new patterns and she liked to speculate from these upon their possible meaning. Gradually, from recognizing a word here and another there, she began to decipher lines of his text. Also, there were his beautiful drawings of plant specimens, rock formations, birds, animals, and the vast cities of coral building themselves under the water. She loved to look at the delicate night blues, the Venetian reds, magentas, russets and cyclamens; at the rose, dragon’s blood and cinnibar; at the sea greens and jades and viridians of the coral which he had captured in his water colours. And forever after that when she heard German spoken or saw it printed on a page she was back in the dark airless atmosphere of that room with the taste of semen in her mouth.
It was during one of these extended periods in bed that Joachim developed a skin disease. A patch of leathery skin had appeared then spread ominously from its original site under the pit of his left arm, across his plump and pendulous breast and had begun its slow creep down his belly.
At first the scaly skin had contracted into what looked like fungus spores. Then it had yellowed, then browned, and the patch of skin had toughened so that it resembled a piece of cow’s hide. If Joachim himself was worried about his skin disease he did not reveal it to the girl.
Sometimes Julia believed that her father was actually becoming a mushroom. The tough skin on his stomach changed colours with the tides of the moon. The hide on his belly grew a rich deep brown, but at certain times of the month she awoke in the night to find his patch an iridescent orange, or a pale yellow speckled with brown spots. In the mornings, if he were well enough to occupy himself with his manuscript, she surreptitiously looked at the fungi on the walls to find that they too had changed colour. In this way Joachim’s disease and the damp growth on the walls of the house kept secret tabs on each other.
With each wet season, the house had fallen deeper into decay. Mosses crept around the window frames, tree ferns sprouted from the outside walls, and when leaves and overhanging branches fell onto the roof they rotted there and provided a rich compost base for the next generation of parasitical growth. A small softwood tree with shiny oval-shaped leaves grew out of the veranda and the roots hung down through the holes in the rusted iron roof, where they tickled the face of anyone foolish enough to walk along that veranda in the dark. It was from one of these twisted clumps of roots one afternoon as Julia sat alone in an old wicker chair reading her Golden Treasury and listening to the groans of her father and a woman making love inside the darkened house, that a green tree snake began to unwind itself.
Every muscle in her body taut, she waited for the snake to fade naturally out of existence and become an innocent strand of tree root again. She watched its sharp eye, its calm reptilian mouth as the green snake arched its back and swayed even lower through the air towards her.
Hours later, when her father fin
ally found her, she looked more dead than alive. Joachim’s difficulty was that the floorboards around the hole where she had fallen were so badly decayed that when he knelt to stretch his arms down to the filthy bundle that was his daughter, his own knee went through the wood and he was just able to save himself from falling down into the pit beneath the veranda. He was calling her name all the time, over and over, then swearing in German, and it was these cries which brought the whore out from the dark innards of the house, still wrapping a red housecoat around her body.
Joachim fetched an iron crowbar from the shed and plied away the rotten floorboards until there was space for him to lower himself. Woodlice jumped in the gloom. There were unnamed and unnameable insects, strange hybrid and mutated millipedes and leeches already making themselves at home in her mouth and nostrils and ears. Joachim did not dare to look beneath her torn clothing for fear of the life forms he might find there.
Once he had carried the girl into the house, nothing could revive her, neither sal volatile, nor the application of hot and cold flannels to her forehead. Ice to the temples and vigorous slapping of the face all failed to bring back any sign of consciousness in her.
Joachim and the woman from the town watched over Julia all night. By the next morning the girl had ‘turned the corner’. In the dawn Julia continued to breathe and Joachim was relieved that he would not, after all, have to make the twelve-mile journey to the little coastal town where Dr Perkins had his practice. In the course of the night he had learned from the woman that Julia was with child.
Julia’s fear of snakes extended to such a point that she refused to touch even the most trivial and harmless object. It was too much to ask that she pick up a rubber mat for fear of the cold-bloodedness of the material. Sometimes a lady’s glove on the hallstand suddenly filled with energy and moved for her. The desiccated texture of string or rope induced fits of shaking and vomiting. Even the red silken cord which fastened her father’s dressing gown had to be hidden away in a drawer because of its cool liquid slithery quality and because, in a certain angle of light, it appeared to Julia to be moving.
She often sat with her back to the slender coils in the big jars of methylated spirits in her father’s abandoned laboratory. In the big room the paint was flaking from the walls and every surface was covered with a thick layer of dust. Still, she used to steal in there sometimes, when she knew her father would not surprise her, and when she could safely take the key from the pocket of his waistcoat hanging over the bedroom chair, and sit in the dim air with all those smells of science.
The woman whose howls of love had disturbed Julia’s sleep that distant afternoon and brought her to put her eye to the door was a real Italian prostitute named Tina Terrina. After that first visit she had regularly taken the train north from Mem to stay for several days at a time with the unfortunate ‘professori’ at Duck River, for a financial consideration, of course.
That first afternoon had pleased the girl. She had thought her father was hurting the interloper and that soon he would send her away on the Sunday train. But on another level, Tina Terrina fascinated her. She painted her mouth in a big red heart, and her brown arms hanging bare from her blouse were golden-bangled. Tina Terrina never seemed comfortable in a dress, when she wore one. She was always looking down at the bosom and trying to pick off an imaginary piece of fluff.
In the later afternoons, after the dark airless hours of lovemaking with the rotten-skinned man, they took the girl down to the river to bathe. On the first such afternoon Julia saw that Tina Terrina was without bathing costume. She simply ran from the buggy through the gum trees to the edge of that vast plain of green water that was the Duck River and began taking off her clothes. Julia watched as the woman undressed and she saw the plump brown nipples, the dimpled thighs, the great white buttocks which hung down in folds of fat, the shocking expanse of her black pubic hair. Tina Terrina unfastened the long braid which hung down her back and pushed herself off into the river, causing scarcely a ripple in the thick green scum on the surface. Then the girl watched her father undress, baring that unsightly skin, and follow the woman in.
Julia sat on the river bank in her ballooning cotton frock and watched the two figures at sport in the water. Her face still wore the slightly puzzled expression of the mute. How could she compete with such ripeness of flesh? She, with her smooth dark nipples, the little mound of her stomach growing so slowly? She was astounded by the woman’s vulgar maternal beauty. Even Julia felt that she wanted to nuzzle her face into Tina’s slack belly, to push her mouth towards those big soft breasts.
Tina Terrina’s visits became more frequent, and increasingly she took up Joachim’s time. He no longer spent all day in bed. His monograph had been abandoned during his illness and returning health did not rekindle his interest in it. He looked forward to the relief of Tina’s visits, to the drive in the buggy to the railway station to see her running along the platform in her lurid clothes, changing her cardboard suitcase from hand to hand as she ran.
She would arrive at the station from Mem in her gaudy dresses and hats, but in the succeeding days her dress would diminish gradually until she was getting around the house in a pair of silk drawers, her great tawny breasts jouncing as she moved. Some afternoons after their long lovemaking she walked around the house in nothing at all.
There was something else, a kind of redemption: Tina Terrina had casually unearthed in Joachim the pleasure of giving. One time, as she was leaving from the station, he had pushed the roll of tattered pound notes into her hand. She had counted them by habit, then, acting on impulse, stuffed them back into Joachim’s paws in such a resolute way that he offered no argument. There was a glow of gratitude on the man’s face and the moment stayed with him for a long time.
After one of her visits he had found her gold crucifix on its chain amongst the sheets and bedclothes. He had worn it himself, the weight of the gold brushing the diseased skin of his chest, intending to return it to her on her next visit. She asked him to keep it as a gift, and he never took it off again. He became devoted to Tina Terrina and each time the sexual act was repeated between them that moment of gratitude was reinforced. That moment on the station contained ingredients for Joachim which might have made a second marriage, had it not made instead a kind of religious conversion. One day, when he was staying overnight at the brothel at Mem, he accompanied Tina to the Catholic church, confessed his sins to the womanly Irish priest and thereafter called himself a Catholic.
Julia panicked at the prospect of sharing her father, although now he was careful to avoid physical contact with her. There were secrets to be kept from any intruder and it unsettled her when, from her vantage at the gap in the door, she saw Joachim initiate Tina Terrina into some of them.
She added her own distinctive smell to the mouldering house so that for days after her visits Julia would catch herself thinking that Tina Terrina was still there. No amount of opening windows could douse those fruity odours the woman had left. Nor could the sweetmeats, which Tina Terrina brought with her by the bagful from the store in Mem and which she would grudgingly dole out one at a time to Julia in return for some service, disguise her putrid breath.
Julia found her one afternoon in Joachim’s bedroom staring at the books which had been left months before in a scatter across the floor. She puzzled over the weird script and exclaimed at the beauty of his sketches and his watercolours of the coral. Julia went in and sat beside her and entered again the world of coral she had inhabited as a child. Another afternoon Julia found her in front of the mirror in Joachim’s bedroom rubbing scented oil into her body to disguise her smell as much as to soothe her skin which had grown brown and scaly so that at times it looked as though it was covered with cobwebs. It was only later, when Tina Terrina began to exude the same yeasty smell as her father, did the girl realize Tina Terrina had contracted Joachim’s skin disease.
One night when her father was away with Tina in Mem, Julia sat alone on the veranda with th
e moths beating around her face. So big and white were these moths, they were like blind graceless birds blown in from the ocean, and Julia was suddenly seized by the premonition that Joachim would not return. The wind began to move through the gum trees.
She began to cry, a dry grizzling in her ears which seemed to come from outside herself, from the garden somewhere. ‘Papa,’ it cried. The moths sensed her fear and redoubled their attack. Julia had never minded moths before, but now the more the panic rose up in her the faster the moths whirred around the kerosene lamp and flapped against her face. She caught one in anger, cupping it in her hands, and carefully tore the wings off its husk-dry body. The other moths homed in on the lamp, and it was several minutes before it occurred to her to douse the wick. The creatures fell away and Julia was left alone while the night noises multiplied in the darkness and she began to cry again, simply and forcefully, like any child. ‘Papa, Papa!’ she cried. Miraculously, the words were forming once more in her mouth. For the rest of her life whenever she cried she would always feel the cottony wings of the moths between her fingers.
Storms were common at this time of the year. There would be a strange quality in the light and a perfect stillness when all the birds disappeared. Men would huddle on the docks securing the fishing boats and looking nervously out to sea, waiting for the palm trees on Charlotte Island to begin to bend.
But this storm had blown in during the night. Joachim looked out the windows of the Hotel Continental through the driving rain to see the muddy river flowing through the street. The sound of rain hammering on the iron roof was so loud he had to lean across and shout into Tina Terrina’s ear to make himself heard.
