Julia Paradise by Rod Jones Page B

seem to have noticed the music. She was talking about her childhood with the old intensity. Her words, which had begun to slur, came out in venomous little bursts as she struggled for breath in the middle of sentences. Now and then she had to stop herself and make a loose sucking noise because of the saliva that had collected in her mouth. ‘The first night Willy came to the Hotel Continental he was just another man in a suit who had come to pay to get rid of his excess fluids.’ She suddenly looked very much older than her thirty-one years of age. Her eyes looked raw.
    After a silence she spoke on, her voice ugly.
    â€˜Later that night I saw a man chasing the child along the balcony outside. She was terrified. I ran to the door but she was already at the end of the balcony, the man nearly with her. And then she turned and jumped. When I looked over the rail I could see her white nightdress spread out on the road below.’
    Little claws of lines had crept around her mouth which she had rouged a shocking red since the afternoon.
    â€˜Tina Terrina put her big arms around me and wouldn’t let me go down to look. We cried together in her bed all night. I can still feel her big breasts shaking in her nightgown.’
    Visions of her past continued to pour out of Julia. Everything stubbornly and perversely failed to flesh out the Freudian bones of the ‘case’ assembled by Ayres in his clinical notes. As on their Tuesday afternoons she would brook no interruptions for question or clarification.
    At one point, suddenly turning in her chair, she switched on the standard lamp and picked up from the floor a flat cardboard box and opened the lid. Still talking all the time, she began shuffling through the dozens of photographs inside. Ayres watched her with a foreboding that he was about to be shown her ‘night pictures’.
    It was dark outside and Ayres was anxious to get going.
    She was not capable of driving the motorcar and even if he could make it to the station there was no certainty that trains had not been delayed or even cancelled. He felt trapped. He wanted to stop the woman speaking because she was telling him things he did not want to hear, but there was a part of him sitting in that room, with Ayres but not of him, so it seemed, that cold cruel part of his mind which continued to listen behind the knocking of his heart. So excited was that scientific part of him that he said nothing, and sat and watched her hand shake as she lighted her next cigarette.
    Open on the table beside his chair was the flat cardboard box of photographs. They had indeed proved to be her ‘night pictures’ of the Chinese quarter in Shanghai: a legless beggar sitting on the footpath outside the entrance of a bank; coolies carrying huge bales on either end of bamboo poles bent over their backs; the girl-prostitutes, scarcely twelve or thirteen, lifting their skirts to expose themselves, hungry eyes grotesque above their mannequins’ figures; a man wearing a gas mask, and behind him an open tray truck piled with corpses. There were photographs taken in the early-morning tea shops and around the markets, and none of them would have seemed out of place in a police coroner’s report. But the subject of the photograph he was staring at was very much alive: one of the waif-prostitutes with her gleaming hair piled up on top of her head, her blouse open to reveal her unformed breasts, her face with its precocious make-up pouting forward at the camera as though she recognized some image in the lens, or behind it. It was the girl called Lucy, whom Morgan McCaffrey had hired as a model a couple of times and whom Ayres himself had used occasionally.
    Now Julia spoke urgently, and it was apparent to Ayres that she was entrusting him with everything because she sensed she might be running out of time. She was full of stories that afternoon, specific and detailed as if they had actually occurred, a victim of her own