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, dragonâs 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 cowâs 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 Joachimâs 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.
Â
Hours later, when her father finally found her, she looked more dead than alive. Joachimâs 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
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, dragonâs 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 cowâs 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 Joachimâs 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.
Â
Hours later, when her father finally found her, she looked more dead than alive. Joachimâs 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
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