The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  Tariq didn’t know much about Chris’s background, but suspected he came from a rich family. It was the way he spoke, he said, and the fact that he never seemed to have to work and always appeared to have enough money to pay for his accommodation, travels and so on. I asked Tariq about the dealer and the bank robber rumours, but he just laughed.

  With Tariq’s support Chris organized a few anti-Shell campaigns in Edinburgh. Chris was arrested a couple of times on anti-G8 and WTO protests, and for chaining himself to a petrol station gate. He was a likeable, outgoing person, Tariq said, with an easy manner and bags of charm, and many people, especially women, felt drawn to him. He had hundreds of friends and acquaintances, and Tariq reckoned he was one of the best-connected people in the Scottish left-wing scene. Tariq had even met Julia once – Chris introduced her just before the two of them left town. He remembered thinking her very beautiful and that the couple seemed very much in love, but couldn’t recall any other impressions. He received a few postcards from Chris while the two of them were abroad. After his travels, Chris didn’t return to Edinburgh, but stayed in touch with Tariq. Finally, Tariq told me that Chris was currently working in a camp for illegal immigrants awaiting deportation in the South of France, and agreed to email him to ask whether he would be prepared to speak to me.

  He was a lovely man, Tariq, and that evening, after he had closed his shop for the day, we went for a drink, and then he invited me to his place, where he cooked a delicious chicken and almond tagine, which we enjoyed with a bottle of strong, spicy Syrah. I didn’t return to the B&B that night. You never liked that about me, my ability to enjoy such encounters entirely without guilt or false expectations. You always got grumpy and paternal when I told you about them, even long after our relationships had ended, and I liked to imagine that there was, perhaps, a part of you that was still in love with me on some level, and a little jealous. But who knows? Maybe you simply disapproved. You were never like me that way.

  I left my card with Tariq the next morning, and, while I was on the train back to London, he called to say that Chris had agreed to get in touch with me. Until I went to bed that night, I kept checking my email every two minutes to see whether he had written, and I grew increasingly anxious that he might have changed his mind. Meeting Chris, I felt, was my final chance – the future of the entire project seemed to hinge on the frame of mind of Julia’s former lover.

  XV

  Once again I slept badly that night, tossing and turning, and imagining all kinds of horror scenarios that would ensue if I were unable to deliver the manuscript on time. I got up early, and to my enormous relief found a message from Chris in my inbox. He told me to come and see him in Marseille whenever it suited me. He asked me to keep my meeting with him secret, since he had ‘unresolved issues’ with the UK authorities and didn’t want them to find him. His email address was registered in Poland, and he didn’t sign off with his real name. I booked my flight for the next day, and emailed him my mobile number and arrival time.

  The very minute my plane touched down on French soil I emailed Chris again to let him know I was in town and ready to meet him whenever he was free. His email address was all I had – he had sent me neither a phone number nor an address. It took him two days to respond, during which I explored the city’s famous promenades, the harbour and the winding alleyways of its labyrinthine centre, and spent many hours in a charmingly run-down brasserie at the Old Port. It was evening and I was at the brasserie reading over my notes when Chris finally contacted me, just after I’d ordered my fourth glass of the house pastis – I had grown very anxious, fearing that my trip had been in vain, and that I wouldn’t hear from Chris again. However, he suggested we meet two hours later in a shisha café in the French-African part of town, near the old market. I cursed my lack of faith, as I hate conducting interviews when I’m not sober, ordered a strong double espresso, and then tried to find a cab to take me to our meeting place. Three taxi-drivers refused me before an old Berber with a thin white beard agreed to drive me to the edge of the African quarter. Even he, however, declined to take me all the way, and, once I climbed out of the taxi, I could see why.

  The area was ruin-strewn. More than half of the buildings in this apocalyptic urban wasteland were boarded up; many had broken or missing roofs and neither doors nor windows, and I could see the shadowy figures of ragged children lurking in the entrances. Rubbish lined the streets, and the potholes in the cracked tarmac were so deep they looked like bomb-craters. At first my fear concentrated on a big rat that rushed right past me, but soon my focus shifted to the groups of hooded youths with hostile eyes who loitered at the street corners. The hissed sing-song with which they greeted me was bristling with sexual aggression. I attempted to follow the vague instructions of the taxi-driver as faithfully as possible, while I hurried deeper into this maze and attracted far more attention than I should have.

  Eventually, I arrived at a mosque – the café was supposed to be just around the corner from one. I walked past another large group of men, who were congregating outside their place of worship and followed me with dark eyes, and I sighed with relief when I finally spotted a café in the dusty window of which I could make out the shape of a waterpipe. The entire place was covered with thick Persian rugs and filled with smoke, and groups of men in kaftans were sitting cross-legged around low tables on which stood magnificent azure-coloured hookahs. When I entered, a tall, bearded man with sand-coloured dreadlocks tied together at his neck, who had been chatting to the proprietor behind the counter, raised his hand and came to greet me.

  ‘Clare, glad you found it,’ he said in a bright, clear voice while he firmly shook my hand. ‘Come, follow me.’

  He led me to a quieter corner at the back of the café, and arranged some cushions for me so that I could lean against the wall. He wore dirty jeans and a white linen shirt. His bushy beard covered most of his features, but his brow was high and clear, and something about his alert blueberry eyes drew me to him immediately. His skin was tanned and I noticed his smooth, cat-like movements; he clearly felt very at home in his body. His age was difficult to establish: he could have been anything between twenty-five and forty. He emanated a faint woodland smell, of ferns and pine trees. We looked at each other for a while without speaking.

  ‘You should try the mint tea – it’s excellent,’ he said finally.

  ‘With pleasure,’ I responded, and he signalled to the waiter.

  After the tea had arrived, having poured me a glass he stretched back languorously and said: ‘OK, Clare, shoot. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Right, let’s get started,’ I said and switched on my recording device. ‘Why did Julia and you fall out?’ I was nervous and flustered from the unpleasant trip to the café and dizzy from all the pastis I had drunk before our meeting; I didn’t quite feel myself.

  Chris raised his eyebrows, leaned forward and studied me. ‘Seriously? That’s a really weird first question. Why don’t we start at the beginning? Or are you in a rush? There’s so much basic stuff to cover before anyone can even begin to understand why Julia and I eventually fell out.’

  He was right, of course. It was a silly first question. I blushed and sipped some of my mint tea. ‘Fine by me,’ I said eventually. ‘Please start wherever you want. I’ll interrupt if I have any questions, if that’s OK.’

  ‘Sure, chip in anytime, Clare. Well, it makes most sense to start with our first meeting, don’t you think? We met by chance, in a bar in Edinburgh owned by a friend of mine.’

  ‘Mo’s place,’ I said, keen to make up for my blundering opening and to show that I wasn’t completely ignorant of their story.

  Chris looked surprised. ‘Yeah, that’s right. How did you know that? Anyway, Julia and I hit it off immediately. We were completely on the same wavelength. It was totally intense, sparks, tension, chemistry in spades and all that: have you ever met someone you thought was your soul-mate? That’s what it was: we seemed to think exactly the same way abou
t everything we talked about that night. I mean, everything. I’d never met anyone before who was so super-sharp and articulate, and so hot! She is beautiful, don’t you think? That milky-white skin, those cat-like eyes, the pert ass, the long legs. Man, I was totally blown away.

  ‘That night we just talked and talked and never got tired, until Mo threw us out. Then we went back to my place and talked some more until the sun rose, and only then did we finally kiss. And we both knew that we were made for each other, you know? Like in a film or something. It was so clear and simple. We were together from then on, no questions asked. She was the first and only woman I ever met who was as crazy and passionate as me about all the things that really matter in this world. Women like that are bloody rare, you know.’

  I smiled and nodded. Chris’s enthusiasm was rather fetching. He sounded much younger than he looked.

  ‘Julia was still at uni when we met,’ he continued, ‘and was going through a really radical disenchantment. I’d already gone through exactly the same thing a while ago. She very quickly became totally disillusioned with the pointless phrase-mongering, the narcissistic glory-hunting, the sickening hypocrisy of it all, the blahdiblah, the whole fucking rhetorical-bullshit-producing machinery. You know what I mean, right? But she got there much faster than me. It took me years to realize all that shit, but that woman does everything fast – really fast. I mean, she’s definitely the brightest person I’ve ever met. She just got me, you know? I still miss her like crazy.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Even after what she’s done?’

  ‘Yes, well… we’ll get to that. Relax, Clare. Where was I? Julia and I soon decided we had to get out of Edinburgh. The whole arty-farty pseudo-boho posh student blah circus just started to get massively on our nerves. And we didn’t just want out of Edinburgh – we wanted to get away from all of it, the whole fucking perverse system, you know? We’d come up with a project: we wanted to go on a fact-finding mission to chronicle the sufferings of the wretched of this earth. The idea was to honour the people who slave away on sun-scorched coffee fields and in toxic textile and technology factories so that we can indulge our insatiable thirst for supremo skinny latte macchiatos and the newest distressed denim and blahdiblah super-light-tablet crazes, and that kind of shit. Our plan was to compile a dossier, sort of a graphic report with lots of pictures, documenting the exploitation of so-called Third World workers. We wanted to redirect attention away from the glossy surface of our endless shopping-phantasmagorias to the dirty underbelly of Western capitalism, to the dire sites of production, you know. We wanted to send a stern reminder to all those careless consumers that their caramel frappuccinos and iPhones and neon trainers were bloodstained.’

  It was strange, hearing Chris say all these things. A very similar agenda had driven me to write Why Your Sneakers Kill, but hearing these ideas articulated by him made me feel uneasy. It sounded so… naive. The world doesn’t work that way. Grow up, I wanted to say. I longed to tell him about The Deal and its afterlife, but I decided to listen instead. After all, that was why I was there.

  ‘We were of course totally aware that lots of people before us had tried something just like that,’ Chris continued, as though he had guessed my thoughts. ‘I mean, we knew that many of the things we were hoping to expose were already well-known and out there in the public domain, and so on. But we were hoping to discover something new, something big, something different, you know. We wanted to cause a splash, an uproar, a scandal. We wanted to create a more lasting moral outrage, something that would turn into a consumer backlash with real financial consequences for the multinational corporations that are to blame for all of this shit. You know, something like the Shell boycott, or just brand image damage? Like when it became known that Amazon were mistreating their workers, and that Starbucks and Google were dodging their taxes. Something like that, only bigger. What we wanted was for our message to go viral, you know, to make a real difference somehow.’

  ‘And how exactly were you planning to do that?’ I asked. I was aware that I sounded prim and weary, like a bitter old spoilsport, but I couldn’t help it. I knew he wouldn’t like the question. Chris didn’t seem to be the type who dealt much in practical details.

  He did indeed look displeased. Once again he raised one of his eyebrows. ‘We didn’t really know how we’d manage to get there, and exactly what form our dossier would take, but we were planning to figure it all out during the trip. The mission was explorative, right? An adventure; blue-sky thinking. We just trusted that we’d find a way somehow. That we’d discover something. And go with the flow?’

  I was touched but also completely unconvinced by his naive idealism – my own story had taught me all too painfully that no factual revelation of any kind, no matter how shocking and ethically outrageous, has the capacity to shake up anything at all these days. Teenage revolutionary fantasies, I thought, oddly out of place in the age of twenty-first-century techno-capitalism. I’d worked as an investigative journalist all my life and traded in precisely the kinds of scandalous exposures the two had been envisaging, and although my work had attracted as much attention as one could realistically hope for, I am now firmly convinced that ultimately it has achieved nothing. Nothing at all. Adrian Temple was the living proof of this, of course, a mocking reminder.

  To be honest, George, I was astonished to hear that Julia seemed to have believed so firmly in the power of information to generate change. I wouldn’t have thought she would ever have subscribed to the classic consciousness-raising-as-political-activism idea. Or perhaps Chris merely assumed she did? Or was she just pretending? I think my face must have betrayed my doubts in spite of my best efforts, as Chris paused once again, and looked at me intently. He must have decided that my sceptical expression related to his political convictions, not the means for their implementation, since he broke into a lengthy anti-corporate diatribe during which my mind grew hazy. The peculiar atmosphere in the café intensified the dream-like state I found myself in while attempting to listen to him, dominated as it was by groups of cross-legged men murmuring in unfamiliar tongues, half-hidden in the white smoke of their shishas that hovered in the room like the kind of Dickensian fog that rises from English rivers on wet nights.

  ‘Clare, Clare, you’re not with me, I can tell. But can’t you see?’ Chris began. ‘Shopping is the new opiate of the masses: our age fetishizes goods, not gods. All people care about is how much spending money they have in their pockets – shopping is like literally their religion. Our government can get away with everything these days: with massacring the NHS, tripling student fees, spending billions on leaking nuclear submarines, lying about wars, fiddling expenses, covering up child abuse in its own ranks – you name it, right? People don’t give a fuck. But as soon as politicians touch their spending money, they riot. They riot, Clare. Take away the people’s power to shop and they’ll rise up like newborn zombies. You know I’m right. Hitting the high streets to hunt for spoils is the only thing this sorry society has left. I mean, the term “retail therapy” says it all, right?’

  It was ironic that Chris was lecturing me on these points, but unfortunately the irony was entirely lost on him. I realized he really didn’t have a clue who I was.

  ‘But there’s a nasty catch,’ Chris continued. ‘So that we can buy loads of cheap shit all the time and keep the economy growing and all the rest of it, corporations outsource the production of their goods to countries where workers are hungry, labour laws lax and taxes tiny, right? Otherwise, if they were paying fair salaries, stuff wouldn’t be so ridiculously cheap. I mean, how else can people here buy school uniforms for, like, four quid or something? Who do you think stitches them together?’

  Chris paused and looked at me. ‘I can see you think you know all this already, and you know what? You’re not alone. But the funny thing is that although everyone knows the facts, nobody can even begin to imagine what this set-up really means for the workers who are at the producing end. They’re hidden
from sight like Wells’s Morlocks or something. Their tragic stories don’t even make it into the news. Literally nobody gives a shit about them. You know I’m right, Clare.’

  Chris’s lecture began to annoy me. How could he be so smug, preaching to me about these things as though I was some imbecilic gossip columnist? But Chris, unaware of my feelings, continued. He went on and on about the brutality of factory managers and the appalling working conditions in the so-called free-trade zones; young children collapsing in sweatshops after inhaling lethal doses of carcinogenic fumes during their fifteen-hour shifts; people burning to death in their thousands each year in shockingly unsafe buildings; and the ransacked lands and seared coffee fields in Mexico and Guatemala. I’m sure Chris would have gone on for ever. But at some point I couldn’t stand it any longer. His sermon wasn’t just patronizing, it was also far too abstract for my taste. After all, I’d travelled all the way to the South of France to hear stories about Julia, not the usual spiel from the anti-globalization handbook.

  ‘Tell me more about the specifics, Chris,’ I finally interrupted him. ‘I can’t picture Julia and you on your trip. Where did you sleep, what did you eat, how did you travel? What did you talk about? What did you do all day? Can you remember any concrete events and episodes?’

  Again Chris fell silent and glared at me. He was annoyed by my intervention, and signalled to the waiter to fill our glasses. He didn’t speak until we had a fresh pot of steaming mint tea in front of us. In the meantime, he rubbed one of his matted coils between his fingers and ignored me.