Julia Paradise by Rod Jones Page B

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.
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    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.
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    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