Julia Paradise (5 page)

These neurotic symptoms were, of course, complicated by her narcotic addiction, which Ayres did his best to control. Sometimes she was able to prevail upon him to let her have an extra ampoule beyond her ration of five grains a day against the possibility of a very bad night. But she had apparently found another source of the stuff, and there were Tuesdays when he could see by the languidness of her movements, the apathy of her expression that his specified dosage had been exceeded. Ayres assumed that her husband was still ignorant of this matter; a state of affairs which suited Ayres, who knew only too well how false the non-addict's view of addiction can be. Besides, she was a reasonably well-adjusted addict and Ayres was utterly convinced by now that it was not her addiction which lay at the root of her problem.

Even under the influence of morphine she still had the capacity to talk lucidly and intelligently, and it was when she was physically groggy like this, with her hair tousled and eyes wild, she exercised upon Ayres a grotesque kind of sexual attraction. In fact her slim childish figure had begun to interest him a great deal. Her unremarkable freckled little face became dominated by her eyes, which glittered in her head as she tried to make him understand the intensity of her hallucinations. Commonly, their conversations held an element of ironic teasing.

‘How do you know these animals are not really there?' she asked.

‘No one else sees them.'

‘But what if they're really here and it's just that at the moment neither you nor I can see them?'

‘Nonsense!'

‘But isn't it possible that the animals are really there, but that they're hiding in order to trick me? You will at least admit the possibility?'

‘No!' he laughed. ‘They only want to annoy you. They have nothing against me.'

‘No!' When she laughed her serious worried face changed completely. She took on the look of a young girl about to participate in some treat.

‘Or perhaps you're not looking hard enough to find them.'

‘Only mad people think like that. Not doctors.'

‘How else are you to understand the complaints of your patients?' She paused, then added, ‘I never think of you having other patients, apart from me.'

She looked at him intently, her lips pressed together. She had begun to sweat profusely, even though the day was not particularly hot.

‘Are you seeing the animals now?'

She silently mouthed ‘No' but the look of abstraction, of rapt intensity, inclined Ayres to disbelief.

Whenever Ayres questioned her closely about her childhood the invisible barrier went up between them. It was not that she didn't co-operate—she spoke of her childhood in such vivid and far-fetched detail that Ayres thought always that she was hallucinating.

Then, just when he felt that he had reached a dead end in the case, one afternoon when she was quite relaxed and fully conscious, she said something to him in German. He remembered of course that her father's language in her childhood had been German, and that her husband had said she had spoken in German during the initial stages of her breakdown.

Ayres himself had become fluent in the language during his year in Vienna, so he understood perfectly what she had said: ‘
Also sie haben noch einen Heizer geschickt.
' Instinctively, Ayres feigned ignorance and replied vaguely, ‘Eh?' She laughed, and went on to talk in English about something quite unrelated. Ayres couldn't help feeling that she was teasing him, and it occurred to him that perhaps she had been teasing him in other respects. But the fact that she had said the word
Heizer
, fireman, remained in his mind. They'd sent a fireman. It seemed a clue to something. When he had pretended not to understand he had caught her looking at him, momentarily but unmistakeably, with something like contempt.

She was still a long way from being cured of her troubles. On occasions she would appear at his door in a state of near panic. Without a word of greeting she would take off her coat and lie down on Ayres' ottoman and wait irritably for the massage and the soothing words to begin. When she was tense like this, the words flew out of her—her hallucinations, her old animal phobias, her affection for a dead pupil, little things about Willy and the mission spilled out, jumbled up—nightmare and reality together. It was as though her mind were a pressure cooker full of such fears and images, that the whole lot might explode disastrously in her head without the relief of her weekly visit to Ayres, and another of her hysterical breakdowns occur.

The animals, cunning creatures, lay in wait for her mercilessly: the toads and snakes pursued her wherever she went from the mission school. The starched white sheets and crisp counterpane of Ayres' bed, the cream-painted bars of the bedstead, were no defence. One Tuesday she awoke after her morphine injection only to find a bloated toad sitting on her stomach, watching her. Many was the time she looked up from a book in Ayres' sitting room to see the skinny brown snakes writhing in silent scrutiny across the parquet floor. Ayres feared that she might become a constant living rebuke to science.

But at last, after many weeks, something began to happen. The patient's spirits seemed suddenly to improve, her general health was better and her hallucinations troubled her less often. She was able to engage more fully in the life of the mission school. She reported that her husband had allowed her to resume part of her teaching duties. On fine mornings she took the girls out of doors, reciting poetry under the mulberry tree in the mission garden. She even began to talk of plans for a short holiday. With her mind thus occupied she slept better, and she had apparently ceased her nocturnal wanderings about the city.

Only with the doctor did Julia Paradise continue to explore the world of her illness. In his dark room with the shutters closed, the line of his pipe smoke drifting up to meet the flickering blades of the fan in the ceiling, she was confident, even brazen. She began to impart quite deliberately to Ayres the details of her childhood which had so profoundly disturbed and excited him in ‘hallucinated' form. Now she began coldly and methodically to build up for him a picture of her father, Joachim Johannes.

She lay in the doctor's bed, relaxed in the crook of his big pale arm; or turned away from him facing the wall, her eyes open, shifting her head on the pillow from time to time to gauge his reaction; later she climbed over him, kneeling astride his bloated stomach so he could look at her flat little chest and dark nut-like nipples. And all the time she talked, and talked, as though she would never stop.

It was in this way their regular Tuesday afternoon adultery began.

 

 

 

 

When she was thirty and in the grip of that mad music she sang to ‘Honeydew' Ayres, Julia often wandered back to the Duck River region in Northern Australia where she had spent her childhood. In particular she liked to dwell on that morning when she had drifted calmly away from her horrorstruck father on the roof of the bawdy house at Mem.

Her father, Joachim Johannes, a German-born explorer and naturalist whose feats have now fallen into obscurity, was often away from the big wooden house on the marshy land on the edge of the rainforest he and his English wife had inherited. Julia had been born in that house and she had vivid memories from the earliest age of the sound and sight of the mosquitoes rising in clouds at dusk. She remembered how the Kanaka and Chinese servants chattered in their strange mixture of tongues as they bustled the little Julia indoors and rigged the mosquito nets over the big casement windows. Even then, before her mother's illness and death, the nursery maids and governesses blighted Julia's existence.

When he was at home and not scaling mythical western peaks or traversing southern oceans, her father was on the brown Duck River, rowing bare-chested in the tropical sun with his sketchbooks and a wicker-covered jug of wine in the bows. In those hours she spent with her half-tipsy father in the flat-bottomed boat it had seemed to the child that the purpose of her life had already been accomplished.

It had been her father who had first taken her down to the wide slow river in the buggy, who initiated her into the world of the wild river animals. In the boat, straining the great muscles of his chest and arms as he rowed, he took time to point out the various species among the teeming bird life and the dull ribbons of snakes on the brown banks. It was through her father, ‘Doktor' Johannes, an immense man with his little alpine mountaineer's hat and his cigar clamped firmly between his teeth, that she first developed her love for the river life. Her father was blamed, first by his wife, then by the women he employed and seduced, for making their young charge such an incorrigible tomboy.

Years later, her father stood with Tina Terrina on the roof of the Hotel Continental in Mem the morning of the great flood, while the buildings and the animal population of the upcountry farms raced past them. He was astounded as he watched his daughter manipulating the tiller and expertly dodging the larger tree trunks and the bloated carcases of pigs, sheep, and cattle which had made their way downriver to the delta and the mangrove country and, eventually, to the sea.

 

Julia was tiny and the world huge. She had come inside early for her lesson. She loved her father's study with its leather chairs, the big redwood desk and the walls full of books. But more than this she was fascinated by his laboratory which adjoined it through a door of frosted glass. It was in there her father practised his taxidermy and where he kept all his instruments and his trays of geological samples. Even the strange, awful smells attracted her: formaldehyde, ammonia and methylated spirit. She loved above all else to observe her father at work in there, to watch him with his white apron over his waistcoat and cravat as he cast his scientific spells over matter animate and inanimate.

Sometimes, such was his reputation among the local people, she had barged in and found him peering into the mouth of a whiskery islands man suffering from toothache; or miraculously producing a baby from one of the three fat De Vooer sisters who lived at the edge of the little settlement and who all wore identical straw hats with veils and tissue paper roses on them.

Door handles were unreachable and she could hardly lift her father's black Bible from the lectern. Today she wanted him to read to her but the study was empty and there was only the smell of the leather chairs and the light coming through from the other side of the frosted glass door. Here she saw the shadow of her father bending over something inside—bending over the washbasin, or brushing his beard in the mirror, perhaps.

She stood in the dim study for a long time puzzling over the groans she could hear and watching his bending shadow at work on the other side of the frosted glass. She was putting off the delicious moment when she would walk in and he would show his surprise and pleasure, then turn back to his work at the table and benches.

The little girl in the neat pinafore, her father's heavy black Bible hugged to her hollows, drew closer to the frosted glass door. The shadows continued to move. As she touched the door and it opened she felt very tired. The book slipped from her hands and was lost somewhere and she entered the room slowly as if she was moving through the warm landscape of sleep.

It came upon her so suddenly that she was amazed she hadn't time to shout out against it, or even to shut her eyes. Yet now as she heard herself speak, her voice was very old, as though another were saying it: ‘Papa?'

A glimpse of their servant woman, Dolly Hang, full lips, squinting, smooth stripes of scar tissue across her cheeks. Pain and compassion for the child on her face. She was bending forwards over the scrubbed wooden table with her skirt around her belly, buttocks bared. Her father, fully dressed and maintaining his decorum in every way except that his trouser flies were unbuttoned, was in the act of penetrating her from behind. Her father looked down at the woman, whose face had always frightened Julia, as though surprised to find her there, then looked at his daughter at the door.

The girl turned and ran with her amazing discovery into the garden, where her mother was buried. Blank blue afternoon greeted her. Benign, mundane day, lacking in any sense of outrage. Wet washing flapped on the clothesline like laughter.

‘Douglas!' the child called. ‘Douglas come quickly!'

As if by some trick of her father's time-lapse photography she watched him advance. Douglas Hang leaned forward as he ran from the vegetable garden, carrying the spade he had been using to dig potatoes. Its sharpened head flashed in the sunlight. He swept the spade from side to side low through the air, and in his effortless jerky progress from one posture to the next he was suddenly at her side. But something was wrong. Here was Dolly Hang out in the garden where she was still bent over with her buttocks bared. All the members of the Hang family and their long dead ancestors in ceremonial dress were stepping forward in unison with the same jerky steps, a dance well-rehearsed, the skeleton of a dragon which only the child could see.

There was exquisite timing in their steps, they moved magically, they smiled, these ghosts, and showed by their smiles that they knew she was there. Smiles of unmistakeable recognition. It seemed strange to Julia that they did not attempt to speak to her in language. The blur of ancestral motion focused again into Douglas Hang at her side. She heard the water from the pump splashing into the iron bucket; then she felt the cold water on her cheeks.

Next she was staring up into Dolly Hang's face. At first she could not understand how the woman could be out here in the yard under the bunya-bunya tree when at the same time she was in her father's laboratory. Then she realized that time must have passed, and she was lying on the ground, a grey blanket covering her.

The world went dark and when it was light again Dolly Hang's face had not gone away. Urgently, the child found herself trying to talk. She had never before felt such a blinding need to hack the words pellmell through the walls of her mouth and into the air, but the spell cast by the presence of Dolly Hang, and the blur of the Hang ancestors working their way around her locked the words away behind the root of her tongue, where they died, and in Dolly Hang's arms the child shivered and itched, and found that she could say nothing.