The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  ‘What, no applause?’ my sister said, staring mock-angrily at the wedding guests. ‘That’s SO disappointing. I’ve thought about this speech for months, and I’ve worked on it day and night!’ Then she got up from the table and left the party.

  We never spoke again after that. I occasionally heard about her from Dad and my mother and Amy, of course. About her dropping out of university and all her mad travelling. But I saw Julia only very rarely, at a few big family celebrations, at which we avoided each other’s company. I wasn’t at all surprised when she finally acted out and went on her murderous rampage. I always thought she had the capacity for ruthless violence written all over her in big, bright neon letters. I always thought the psychotic bitch should be sectioned. Unfortunately, nobody ever listened to me.

  I am sure you expect me to provide an analysis now and to explain how an intelligent, privileged middle-class girl who was very much loved by her parents could have turned into a mass murderer. There is only one thing I can say, and I have said it before: my parents are decent people. We are all decent people, our entire family, with one very extreme exception. We have done absolutely nothing wrong. None of us deserve any of this. We would have lived happily ever after had it not been for my monstrous sister, that incubus that must have crawled straight from hell. And for no good reason and right from the start, the bitch set her sick mind on destroying us and everything we stand for.

  The bombing wasn’t political. That manifesto is bullshit. It’s a farce staged for the media to make her look interesting. The bombing was deeply personal. Julia could just as well have placed the bomb in my parents’ house, last Christmas when we were all there, and annihilated our entire family with a single stroke. But I suppose she thought that her alternative plan would be so much worse. And she was absolutely right about that. She probably weighed up the options carefully in that revolting brain of hers, and decided that keeping us alive would be more fun. Death would have been too merciful an option. Mercy, as I am sure you will agree, is not one of Julia’s attributes.

  The bombing was nothing but the inevitable climax of a pernicious campaign to throw dirt on everything cherished by decent people like us. Julia was always already a hate-filled psychopath, even as a young girl. A stranger in our midst, a different species. But she managed to deceive my parents about her true nature until the very end. They were simply too kind and too naive to face the bitter truth: their angelic-looking, oh-so-talented favourite child was a malicious murderess in the making, intent on causing maximum damage and distress.

  Why did she hate us so much? What have we ever done to her to deserve this? I don’t believe any of the bullshit psychologizing, the finger-pointing and the trauma-mongering that are so fashionable these days. In my view, Julia was simply born evil. Wickedness had been indelibly imprinted on her soul from the start. My sister is malice incarnate.

  VII

  Ah, evil – this gloriously lazy theological catch-all. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that some people just happen to be born demonic. I don’t believe that nature can remain unaffected by nurture (but neither do I believe that nurture can explain everything, as Amanda does). Julia, sadistic spawn of Satan, who visited this pure, good, innocent family like an evil spirit in a horror movie – no, I thought, there had to be more to her than that. Jonathan’s assumption of an Iago-like motiveless malignancy seemed far too simplistic, and also morally dubious.

  Besides, I thought it very obvious that Jonathan’s portrait of his sister was distorted by a hefty dose of sibling rivalry. In his view, Julia had destroyed the bond he cherished most in this world: his special relationship with his father. Sibling rivalry can be such a powerful force in shaping our actions and aspirations. I’m not just thinking of the obvious meaning of the concept – the irreparable damage to our narcissistic bubbles when we have to acknowledge that we are no longer the only sun shining in our parents’ universe. Sibling rivalry can be an ongoing way of defining one’s identity against somebody else’s – somebody who is simultaneously both like us and not like us.

  Consider Amanda and me, for example: we couldn’t be more different, character-wise, and we used to operate in completely dissimilar spheres, professionally and socially, and yet we could never quite free ourselves from the urge to compare our lives to each other’s. Especially recently, of course. Although purely professionally speaking, I used to be the more successful one (which I am sure must have irked Amanda), I often secretly wondered whether somewhere down the line I had not made some fatally bad choices in other areas of my life.

  While I have no doubt that our parents loved us equally, they always appeared much prouder of my achievements than hers, something of which Amanda reminds me frequently, and I concede the point. I wish they had been slightly more diplomatic, since this issue has contributed significantly to the tensions between my sister and me. For example, there were seven pictures of me receiving various awards on the walls in my parents’ house, and three of Laura (as a shiny plump newborn, as a feisty pigtailed primary-school girl, and as a tanned backpacker admiring the wares of a street-food vendor in Thailand). But there was only one of Amanda and her first husband, Peter, in which she was slightly out of focus, her face and body in Peter’s shadow. (My parents never warmed to her second husband, and stayed in touch with Peter long after the acrimonious divorce, much to Amanda’s distress.)

  When we emptied their house, a few months after they died, we found a series of eleven heavy, leather-bound albums in one of the cupboards: they revealed that my father had diligently cut out and collected every article I had ever published, starting with the first hot-headed piece I wrote for a student paper in the eighties, and ending with a feature story printed in the New Statesman just three days before a distracted driver ended my parents’ lives (and his) on the M5. In another album (golden) my father had collected all the positive reviews of my books; a much smaller red one contained the (thankfully not very many) critical responses my works had attracted. My books, in pristine condition, were proudly displayed on a single book shelf in the centre of the drawing room, which also held some prize paraphernalia (Amanda used to refer to it as my ‘shrine’). In my father’s study, we also found used second copies of each one of my books that had evidently been read carefully, and which contained many underlinings. When Amanda and I discovered the albums, she burst into tears and I didn’t know how to console her.

  ‘I feel like I’m the little girl who just got an orange for Christmas, while her sister got a bicycle,’ she sobbed.

  But at some point, things shifted and the scales tipped the other way – gradually at first, and then ever faster. When Laura was born and when I first held her, I marvelled at her tiny hands and her seductively sweet milkshake scent, and I felt a short, sharp pang of regret and envy. This feeling disappeared for a few years while Laura was little and hard work and screamed a lot. But it resurfaced even more strongly when she was beginning to talk and to articulate her view of the world, which has fascinated me ever since. I love Laura, I love her deeply, and although I see her frequently, I often wish she were properly mine.

  Then there were Peter and Frank, Amanda’s husbands. While I found neither of them particularly attractive or interesting, I felt it again in their presence, that strange mixture of regret and envy. For example, when I happened to observe little gestures or looks they exchanged with my sister – betraying an intimacy that I had never known myself. Peter had this way of gently tugging a stubborn strand of hair that kept falling into Amanda’s face back behind her ear; Frank would fold his arms around her from behind and plant a kiss on the nape of her neck (always exactly in the same place – a place that made Amanda shiver with pleasure).

  I have observed that unspoken, affectionate familiarity between you and Lailah, too, George (in the beginning, at least). The way you always helped her into her coat, and then tenderly rearranged her scarves and collars, or her hair; the way she always saved some of her pudding at dinner parties
and discreetly passed it over to you, because she knows just how much you love sweet things. I have noted many times how you steered conversations away from topics that you knew might upset her: ignorant opinions on Middle Eastern politics; crudely Western-centric views on veil-wearing Arab women; anything that reeked of unreconstructed orientalism. In the early days of your marriage, I saw Lailah quietly but firmly insisting that Sundays should be kept free for her and your daughter, regardless of how prestigious and important the invitation was that you had to decline to follow her bidding. And you never let the two of them down. Very soon, the family Sunday became law in your world. Once, I saw you all in St James’s Park (from afar) watching the ducks, and you two, with proud smiles, marvelling at the miracle that is your daughter. I couldn’t breathe, as though something was choking me from the inside. Sometimes, the regret I feel about never having had a child of my own is so strong that the pain overwhelms me.

  When my world fell to pieces after the trial, Amanda was there for me, as were you, of course. But sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder whether she didn’t (perhaps only a tiny bit) get some secret satisfaction from my failure. After all, the high flyer to whom everything had come so easily had suddenly crashed down to earth. Now I was the one languishing in a dirty pool of debts and shattered dreams, while Amanda still had her work, her patients, and, above all, Laura. Now, it looked as though I was finally paying for my past choices, and that hers had somehow been retrospectively valorized.

  I remember that, while working on the transcription of the interview, I was struck by Jonathan’s repeated emphasis on decency – a moral term. Why was he so keen to emphasize the family’s decency? I wondered. Was that simply to counter as strongly as possible the potentially negative public perception of himself and his parents? Or might it be driven by a secret fear that decency was precisely the quality his family was lacking? Sometimes, we protest most forcefully against what, deep down, we fear to be true. Even now I can’t shake the feeling that some form of censorship, or even whitewashing, has shaped his account. I understand the impulse, though; after all, the only reason he spoke to me in the first place was to clear his family’s name.

  I wonder, now, whether I didn’t judge Jonathan too harshly back then, all things considered. I admit I didn’t like him much, but perhaps that had less to do with him as a person and more with his line of work and what it has come to represent for me. After all, my experiences with City traders haven’t exactly been pleasant. I had come to associate the entire world of investment banking with one figure only – Adrian Temple, my glib nemesis.

  Since the day of my trial – 21 May 2010, I still remember every little detail of it as though it were yesterday – I had fantasized so often about taking matters into my own hands, bringing about the kind of justice that the judicial system had denied me, like some heroic vigilante in an American movie. (Have you ever noticed that virtually all Hollywood action films celebrate the solitary ethical outsider, who courageously stands up to corrupt institutions and seeks justice on their own terms?) But I did no such thing. Instead, I just reacted allergically to people such as Jonathan, which is hardly a heroic act, and nor is it fair. I know, of course, that not all of them are criminals. Not all of them are ruthless confidence tricksters, responsible for the ruin of thousands of small-scale investors and the cause of numerous suicides in its aftermath. But one of them is. And they allowed him to get away with it. I still can’t believe they let him walk that day – not just unpunished but victorious, free to continue with his ruthless gambling. Which is of course precisely what he did. His triumphant glare after the sentence was read still burns on my skin, even today.

  But I tried very hard to follow Amanda’s advice in the early stages of the project. For the first time since that fateful May day, I actually felt hopeful and excited about my future. I knew that I needed to let go of the past, I needed to bury it and move on with my life, and that was what I was doing. During the first few weeks of my research I felt fine. In fact, more than that: I felt exalted – I was, after all, working once more on something meaningful. After all those years – who would have guessed?

  VIII

  I’m not just a prisoner because my movements are restricted – I don’t mind that part so much. Right now, I wouldn’t know where to go even if I were free. What’s worse is being subjected to the drab sameness, the soul-destroying routine of strictly monitored and rigidly timed activities. It’s the imposition of external rhythms that gets to me most, the knowledge that someone else is the master of my time. Every day, at 6.30, we are driven to the shower rooms, like a flock of sluggish sheep. There, we are at our most vulnerable – you would blush scarlet if I told you the demeaningly obscene things women are capable of saying about one another’s bodies. The faint trickle of water is lukewarm at best, and the scratchy towels we are given smell of vinegar.

  At 7.30, we have to assemble in the dining hall, a place I have come to loathe. Even though it gets scrubbed three times a day, its lime-green lino floor is eternally greasy (on my first day I slipped on it like a novice skater on ice, making an embarrassing spectacle of myself). Sixteen long, beige plastic tables stand neatly aligned in the centre, like the bars of a zebra crossing. The seating politics are complex – I have yet to figure them out. For the moment, I sit on the table frequented by other newcomers and the long-term loners; often, the seats around me remain empty. There’s a counter connected with the kitchen, behind which two big women with bare arms and hairnets ladle things onto our plates that would make Laura fume with indignation. The smell of frying oil stains the air, and it has permeated our skin and hair. No matter how rigorously we scrub ourselves with the little scentless soap bars we are handed every morning, it just won’t come off.

  After breakfast, we are allowed to spend time in the common room or return to our cells. Some go off to their jobs – they produce things in workshops, or work in the kitchen or the laundry room. From ten to eleven, we have to take some exercise in the courtyard. Most do so in groups of two, three or four; but quite a few walk around on their own. Some defy the request to be physically active completely and just lean against the brick wall, smoking and watching. A few women run and do push-ups. At twelve thirty, we are summoned once again to the hall of horrors for lunch. It’s the two hours after lunch that I cherish most: then, we are allowed to explore freely the few leisure activities available here. There’s a gym, a games room, a TV room, and, thank God, the library. It’s a small, quiet room with a few sparsely filled shelves. It’s a peaceful space, a refuge of sorts; there are a few armchairs and two small, round tables, and they even have a selection of daily newspapers. I sit in the same armchair every day reading the papers. Hardly anyone else comes in, and I think of the room as my little sanctum.

  Visiting hours tend to be between four and six. In addition to consultations with my lawyer, I’m allowed two one-hour visits a week in the heavily guarded visitors’ room, where we sit for an hour at one of the twenty or so small tables with our loved ones, whom we are not allowed to touch. So far, Amanda and Laura haven’t missed a single opportunity to see me. But Amanda seemed strained and tense during our most recent encounter. The other day, she reprimanded me rather too sharply for the fact that I’m still not eating properly. I try, but I find the idea of chewing and swallowing nauseating, and it’s not even because of what they serve us here.

  Anyway. Jonathan must have urged his parents to speak to me, having convinced them that it was in the interest of the family’s reputation, because at the beginning of September, only a few days after my interview with him, I received a phone call from Timothy White. In a pleasant, gentle voice he asked whether I would be able to meet him and his wife the following day, and suggested 8 p.m. at his company’s offices. Timothy’s law firm is situated in an imperial Georgian building on a quiet side-street off the Strand. When I entered the marble-panelled lobby a porter asked me to sign the visitors’ book and take a seat. I had just sat down on one of a grou
p of hard, black leather armchairs when Timothy came down the stairs. I was immediately struck by his appearance: a tall and naturally elegant man with silver-streaked dark hair; his gentle manner and smile seemed warm and authentic. His suit was expertly tailored, his shirt crisp and white. As Jonathan had indicated, he was an accomplished small-talker. As we climbed the wide marble steps that led to his offices on the third floor, he told me about the history of the building, and even found time to mention that he had read and very much enjoyed my study on the Bangladeshi sweatshops. If ever I had to cast someone to embody suavity in a film, my vote would go to Timothy.

  His office, too, demonstrated quietly expensive taste (the kind acquired over generations, confident and not needing to show off): minimally furnished, it featured nothing but a large cherry-wood desk, a very orderly floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that held leather-bound tomes of legal literature, a black leather sofa and a matching armchair, a little drinks cabinet and a glass coffee table on which stood an empty fruit bowl. The floors were covered with a thick white carpet, and on the light-grey walls there were no pictures other than a colourful map of the world in a golden frame, probably dating from the fifteenth century. I noticed only one imperfection: there was a light, rectangular patch next to the map that must until recently have been covered by another picture.

  Rose White was sitting upright on the edge of the armchair when we entered. She rose to shake my hand (a contact that felt strangely immaterial, as though I had been accidentally touched by a phantom). She, too, was tall and thin, and both her frame and her facial features gave the impression of excessive angularity. Everything about her seemed hard-edged and symmetrical, like a modern glass and steel building: her strong jaw, her sculpted cheekbones, her high forehead. She looked older than her husband, an impression that was mainly owing to her hair, which was ghost white, and her dark, tired eyes. Those eyes seemed to glide restlessly across the objects in the room, searching for something to take hold of, like a ship adrift at sea.