At first, all seemed to be going well. Clare sent me regular updates that sounded promising, but then they became rarer and finally dried up. I had grown apprehensive about three months into the project, as she was ignoring my messages. This was very unlike her. We had agreed on the submission of the manuscript within fourteen weeks. Five days before the submission date, I waited all night outside her flat to confront her, but she must already have been at her cottage in Kent. I had a bad feeling, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I didn’t have her sister’s contact details – psychoanalysts are notorious for keeping their phone numbers private – and none of our mutual friends had heard from Clare for a long time.
Then, on 8 November, the day after the deadline, I bought the papers and there she was on every front page: emaciated, a wild look in her eyes, her auburn bob dirty and dishevelled, her hands handcuffed behind her back. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. In the first instance, and quite likely as a result of her sister’s lobbying, she had been placed in the secure unit of a psychiatric hospital, where she was to await her trial. I tried to see her straight away, but she refused to receive any visitors apart from her sister and niece.
Then, seven days after her arrest, I received Clare’s letter, in which she promised me an explanation. Eleven weeks later, Laura came to see me in my office and brought me Clare’s long confessional letter, which I had been awaiting anxiously and devoured in one sitting.
At the earliest opportunity, I visited Clare in the grim all-female prison to which she had been transferred a fortnight after her arrest. When I first saw her in the visitors’ room I found, to my great relief, a woman who more or less resembled the Clare I had known before her breakdown: she still looked terribly thin and pale, but otherwise appeared fine. Her eyes were alert and had regained their luminosity. She neither looked nor acted like a mad person. She smiled her usual warm smile. We hugged. It took us a long time to recover our composure and even longer before we managed to speak.
I have visited her on every single one of her visiting days since; we had and have so much to talk about – both personal and professional. I think she found our conversations helpful, but whether I was able to provide the answers she so desperately needed from me I don’t know. I sincerely doubt it. I did, however, gradually manage to convince her to allow me to publish her text. I felt very strongly that Clare’s story, as well as the interviews she had collected, and especially the one with Julia, needed to be published. I believe that, taken as a whole, the different narratives about Julia that Clare managed to assemble do indeed answer some of the questions with which we have all been wrestling in the aftermath of the terror. Clare’s own story, moreover, has of course become a matter of public interest in its own right. Clare’s act polarized the country: there are some who openly admire her – she showed me the bags of fan mail she receives every week, and I couldn’t believe my eyes – but also many who strongly condemn her action. The book you are about to read is as much Clare’s story as it is Julia’s. It was, for her, no longer possible to disentangle the two.
George Cohen (Cohen & Green Publishing)
London, May 2015
I
Where to begin, George? Time is not the problem – the heap of shapeless moments I am facing, demanding to be structured and filled, is growing more menacing every day. Three nights in a row now I’ve dreamed I was trying to cross a stretch of marshland, but I couldn’t move, the mud gluing my feet to the ground and then, slowly, dragging me under. Four days ago I was declared sane and stable (in spite of Amanda’s protests) and was transferred to my new abode. I’ve been spared the horror of having to share my cell, for which I am immensely grateful. I have always cherished my privacy, and I couldn’t bear it if what little of it remains here were to be taken from me. But most importantly, I can now write whenever I feel like it – at night, at noon, at four in the morning when I snap awake. My cell contains a narrow single bed with a squeaking plastic mattress and coarse covers; the walls are painted a shade of ochre that makes me feel nauseous whenever I look at it for too long. I also have a small TV set, some wobbly shelves and a small plywood wardrobe. But the most essential items are a little wooden desk, into which numerous previous occupants have carved an intricate pattern of initials and expletives, and a small red metal chair.
I dread the encounters with the other inmates, those moments in the day when I have to leave my cell and when small talk is required: in the showers, at mealtimes and during the mandatory daily courtyard outings. I have entirely lost the ability to think of normal things to say, to anyone, and I constantly wonder whether the women here know what I did and why I am among them. I feel as though they are watching me, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I don’t think I have either the strength or the willpower to defend myself. In fact, a part of me wishes they would just get on with it and put an end to all this.
Curiously, it is not the creature comforts I miss most – such as food that is actually edible (what they serve here sinks like wet cement to the bottom of our stomachs and renders its victims simultaneously overweight and undernourished). Neither, to my own surprise, do I miss alcohol (my cravings for the state of comfortable numbness that I had sought so regularly in the past few years have disappeared completely), and nor do I miss my soft green velvet sofa, my books, my film collection, and my comfortable bed.
But I do miss company. Although Amanda and Laura faithfully visit twice a week, and call every day, I feel as lonely as never before in my life. The gaps, both old and new, are looming so ominously. I cherish my visiting day more than anything, even if I can barely summon the courage to look Amanda and Laura in the eye. And I miss Aisha. Badly. Every time I wake up, during those few seconds it takes the mind to re-orientate itself in space and time, I turn to touch her, my hand expecting in vain to find her curled up into a furry ball on the duvet right next to me. But what I miss most is having a project. Aims. Something to do. The human animal is lost without tasks. They are what keep us functioning; without desires, without something on which to concentrate our energies, we have nothing to distract us from the abyss.
I need to choose a starting point. I will begin with the day of the attack. It was 23 July, a sweltering Wednesday, the heat having held the city in a tight, sweaty embrace for four long days. I woke up early, feeling sticky and lethargic. Aisha had fallen ill that night – small pools of vomit were scattered all over the flat, as though my wooden floorboards had developed a weeping skin disease. When I found her lying under the sofa she looked even more listless than I felt. Her moon-coloured eyes were clouded, her normally lustrous silver fur looked tarnished and knotted.
I was in my vet’s waiting room in Mayfair when the news broke. There were six other women, each nervously attending to a small ailing animal on their lap, plus the receptionist. The woman next to me (who had been preoccupied with whispering soothing words into the ear of a coughing terrier) suddenly cried: ‘Good God!’ Her mouth fell open as she stared at the television screen mounted on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk, showing the news without sound. Alarmed by the woman’s outburst, we collectively raised our eyes to the screen. ‘Christ!’ another woman shouted; ‘Holy shit!’ wailed the receptionist, who had jumped up and turned around. The vet, startled by the commotion, had joined us. Disbelief slackened our features; something bad had happened right in our midst, in central London. We had risen from our seats and put down our animals (some had been dropped rather unceremoniously), staring wide-eyed at the screen. The receptionist had turned up the sound. Thus we stood united for a few moments, a small community of the frightened. The woman next to me grabbed my hand and squeezed it so tightly that her rings left marks in my flesh.
Not much was known at that point, only that a bomb had exploded in a Café Olé branch on Paternoster Square, right next to the London Stock Exchange. There was carnage; there were casualties. I remember that the face of the young BBC correspondent, who happened to be at the scene by chance
and reported live from the square, looked as ravaged as the remains of the scorched storefront, from which thin plumes of smoke were still rising, like translucent ribbons of mourning. Forensic experts in white overalls rushed in and out. They carried a seemingly endless number of black body bags past the reporter, who, stunned by the gruesome procession, kept repeating ‘They’re dead, they’re all dead, they’re all dead in there’, until a colleague took the microphone from her white hand and led her out of the picture.
Only a few minutes had gone by while we were taking in the facts, and none of us had moved or spoken. Then, as though a spell had been lifted, we began to search for our phones and tried to reach our loved ones. Suddenly there was chaos in the room – everyone was shouting to make themselves understood. I called Amanda, who had not yet heard about the attack, and who was so shocked that she was unable to say anything at all. When she finally recovered her speech, she just whispered ‘Laura’, and I let her off the line so that she could call her daughter. I wanted nothing more than to call Laura myself – I was sick with worry – but the first call was Amanda’s prerogative. The vet tried to reach her husband, but was unable to get through to him and grew ever more panicky – he worked in a bank just around the corner from the scene of the bombing, and often ate lunch in one of the restaurants on the square. After a few failed attempts she told us the practice was closed for the day and to return tomorrow. Only then did we remember our animals, who had begun to wail pitifully: dumbstruck, afraid, feeling the terror but unable either to articulate or to make sense of it, they appeared to me an apt image of our traumatized nation. Aisha, who is usually the gentlest of souls and whose grotesquely raised hair made her look like a woollen blowfish, scratched me when I tried to put her back in the carrier.
I drove straight to Amanda’s house in Golders Green. She had just seen her last patient of the day. We hugged hard and long. She and I spent the rest of the day glued to the television screen, making and taking phone calls, and waiting anxiously for news from Laura. Most networks were down – there was too much traffic in the air. Late in the afternoon, Laura finally joined us. When the attack happened, she had been busy selling salads, sandwiches and cakes in the Blue Nile, an organic fair-trade café in Bloomsbury that she had set up with her friend Moira two years before. It took her almost five hours to get home, as numerous stations had been shut down for security reasons and the entire Tube system was so overcrowded that she had to wait for an hour before she could get on a train, and another hour to get on one of the replacement buses to continue her journey. All of London seemed to be out swarming on the streets, like frenzied bees whose hive had been violated.
Laura was visibly shaken by the apocalyptic scenes she had witnessed on her way home. When things go wrong, the thin veneer of civilized behaviour that we think of as natural wears off as quickly as make-up in the rain. People, Laura said, got into ugly fights to secure places on the overcrowded buses; an old man brutally pushed a girl out of the bus to make room for his wife. The girl fell on her face and didn’t move, and nobody got off to help her (Laura was pressed tightly against a window on the upper deck, from where she could see but not intervene). When the bus was full to breaking point the driver was too scared to stop at the designated stops, where angry mobs were waiting to get on, prepared to use violence to fight for their right to get home.
The three of us sat closely huddled together on the sofa all evening and stayed up until the early hours. We kept pressing each other’s hands and stared at the TV in disbelief. Around midnight, when the identity of the attacker was revealed, the shock was almost worse than the one I had experienced in the vet’s waiting room when the story first broke. Nobody was prepared for this. I suppose we all assumed that a group of fanatical Islamists, angry alienated jihadists with nothing to lose, were responsible. When the bomber’s picture first flickered across our screens, I (and I am sure the rest of the nation, too) thought that this had to be a mistake. I found myself incapable of establishing a connection between the image of the beautiful, earnest-looking young woman and the other pictures we had seen – the twenty-two body bags lined up in a grim, neat row on Paternoster Square, and the footage of the victims who had survived, and of the relatives of the dead howling in pain, burying their faces in their hands, and of the terrible scene of devastation that gaped like a raw, deep wound right in the heart of our city.
Something struck me about Julia White’s face, from the moment I first saw it. I couldn’t quite articulate it then. I thought it at once utterly alien and at the same time uncannily familiar. Above all I was fascinated by the serenity of her gaze: her still, slightly slanted green eyes in that finely chiselled, delicately pale face suggested an old-souled wisdom, someone who has seen more than their fair share of sadness and suffering, and yet there was something else in those eyes that I couldn’t quite fathom. Julia was looking straight into the camera, her full lips unsmiling, her expression strangely unreadable. There was an unsettling contrast between her disconcerting gaze and her soft, milky-white skin. In that first picture to enter the public domain (many others were to follow) her long chestnut-brown hair was tied back into a bun, and she was wearing a crisp white man’s shirt and a grey sleeveless pullover. Like an Oxford student from the seventies; perhaps with a hint of Marlene Dietrich. As I learned later, this picture was taken four years before the attacks, one month before Julia dropped out of university and went travelling.
I think the seeds for what happened later were sown the very moment I saw that picture (and that particular image was to remain the one that haunted me – it still does): I simply couldn’t imagine what might have led a beautiful, highly intelligent young woman, privileged in all sorts of ways, to perpetrate the most ruthless terrorist act that had been committed in Britain since the Lockerbie bombing and the 7/7 attacks. I think the most disturbing thing was that she appeared to be so very much like us – twenty-seven, just two years older than Laura, and similar in so many ways. I could picture the two of them chatting away in Laura’s café and becoming friends. Julia could have been my daughter. She reminded me of my younger self – confident and idealistic, driven by an unshakeable trust in the idea that it is possible to shape the future. From the very start, Julia’s face touched something in me, bringing back the memory of things I had lost and for which I must have been mourning – much more strongly than I was aware. In that picture in particular, she looked so proud and safe and at home in her skin and her beliefs. I found myself vacillating between fascination and disgust – after all, this woman had blood, so much blood, on her hands.
On the day following the terror attack, Julia’s ‘manifesto’ was published on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The number of her victims had risen to twenty-three, and one woman, still in a critical condition, would later succumb to her injuries, bringing the total to two dozen. Apart from the manifesto, Julia, who had turned herself in to the police straight after the attack, remained silent. She refused to see anyone but her lawyer. She refused all contact with her family. She refused to receive friends and members of the various political groups to which she had belonged. She refused to speak to journalists. Even during her trial, she never uttered a word. It was almost as though her silence was her second, perhaps even crueller attack: she simply refused to grace us with an explanation.
Her manifesto rehearsed some standard anti-capitalist slogans and a few anti-globalization catchphrases. She denounced the unethical exploitation of workers in the so-called Third World; she decried the apolitical consumerism that dominates our age and the shocking lack of public interest in the suffering of the oppressed in countries other than our own; and she called for a radical rethinking of neoliberal economic policies that pursue growth at all costs. But the manifesto’s rhetoric was strangely unimaginative and lacklustre. I couldn’t help feeling that she was mocking the idea of manifesto-writing, or perhaps even political activism as such. I feared it was nothing but a teaser, a deliberate slap in the f
ace for those in search of answers.
Unsurprisingly, as Julia remained shtum, others began to speak in her stead – both about her and (unauthorized, of course) on her behalf. A chorus of overexcited voices populated the airwaves and flooded the print media, trying to drown out Julia’s uncanny silence. Anecdotes, half-truths, legends and myths soon began to circulate and multiply at an astounding speed. People from all professions were anxious to categorize and analyse Julia and her acts, to explain and thus somehow to master them. Predictably, psychologists and psychiatrists were the most sought-after talk-show guests – psychology, after all, is still the most apolitical and reconciliatory master narrative out there, as everything can safely be explained with recourse to Mummy’s or Daddy’s lack of unconditional love for their offspring (I feel like Amanda just kicked me hard in the shin from afar). But there were also politicians, historians, sociologists, economists, teachers, theologians – the line-up of so-called terrorism experts eager to share their views on the matter was endless. Was Julia ill or evil, pathological or a sinner? A victim of false ideology or a dangerously deluded radical? A disturbed maverick or an alarmingly symptomatic product of our perverse age? Should the professed political justification of her deed be debated seriously, or was she simply a nihilistic sadist? How did she fit in with her terrorist cousins – Latin American guerrilla fighters, IRA activists, the German Red Army Faction, Islamist suicide bombers, militant animal-rights campaigners? What did the anti-globalization movement, the causes of which she had seemingly embraced in her manifesto, make of her? Had she acted alone or were there others who had supported her? And who were the parents who had produced this spawn of the devil?
Julia’s life-story became the stuff of endless speculation, and the fact that she was beautiful and silent only fuelled the public’s interest further. I admit that I, too, was spellbound from the very start – my fascination consisted mainly of repulsion and horror, but also awe. I don’t mean that I was in any way condoning or admiring her horrendous act – of course not; I have seen the human cost of her ugly work. I think what I felt was a general kind of admiration for radical mindsets, for people who are not prepared to compromise, who have visions so strong they defend them with their lives, and who courageously dedicate their entire existence to ideas, regardless of the consequences. In our exhausted political landscape this species is almost extinct. Think about it: what forms of serious political activism are left today? Our streets are populated by swarms of twee retro-fetishists and bearded hipsters with ironic spectacles, who appear to believe that drinking flat whites in cafés that play ukulele music and buying chia seeds and black quinoa in wholefood shops are worthwhile political statements in their own right.
The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel Page 2