The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  ‘You’re bored with the politics already, just like everybody else,’ he said eventually. ‘You want to hear about the personal, right? Fine. Our time together is limited, after all. You need to think about your readers and all that, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said curtly.

  ‘Well. So. Let’s see what I can come up with for you… Sex? You want to hear about sex with Julia, Clare? OK then. Let’s see… She had beautifully formed tits, firm and round, like small, ripe honeydew melons, with hard, peachy-pink little nipples. She had a hot tight little pussy, I can tell you that. Oh, and she had a real thing for…’

  ‘Actually, I was hoping you could tell me about your travels, not about Julia’s genitalia,’ I interrupted. ‘Look, Chris,’ I added more gently. ‘I’m trying to understand who Julia White is. What she liked and disliked, what she believed in, what she cared about, what drove her. I want to understand what kind of person she was. And what might have led her to kill twenty-four innocent people. Can we focus on that? Why don’t you just tell me what travelling with her was like? Some everyday bits.’

  Chris looked at me, once again for a long time. I feared he might just get up and walk away, but I held his gaze and tried not to let him see my anxiety. Eventually, he nodded.

  ‘OK, OK. Fine. Let’s see what I can come up with,’ he said. He took a long sip from his mint tea, and rearranged his cushions beside me, so that he, too, could sit with his back against the wall. ‘I’ll try again then. We went to Indonesia first. At the beginning, everything was just, I don’t know, magical. We were so excited about everything we saw, everyone we met, all the new impressions and sensations and tastes around us. We stayed in backpacker haunts and checked out all the markets, beaches and cool places. It was great. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as in those days. But Julia soon grew bored with all that, and decided it was time we got started on the dossier. She doesn’t really do fun, you know. It just doesn’t come naturally to her. She’s actually a very serious person. Too serious, really… And you didn’t argue with Julia. Especially not if her mind was set on something.

  ‘So after a couple of weeks or so we took a boat to Batam, one of Indonesia’s main free-trade zones. It was super-hot and humid. Really oppressive. We were, like, appalled by the abject poverty hidden behind the glitzy inner-city facades. They seemed to exist only for the tourists. When you looked behind them, shit started to pour out everywhere. I mean literally, you know. Outside the centre, there was no infrastructure to speak of; sewage, rubbish and dead animals were left to rot in the blistering sun; the roads were mere dirt tracks. The workers from the villages on the mainland, who flock to the island in their thousands each year, live in the most pitifully fragile makeshift huts.

  ‘The workers we encountered during our first week there were great but really scared. Most of them offered us food and drink although they barely had enough to survive on themselves, you know. Like totally humbling, those guys. But they refused to tell us anything. Eventually, after two weeks or so, a young woman called Lily, who’d heard about us and our project, came to our hotel on the outskirts of that sorry city. She was super-skinny, absolutely terrified and looked about twelve years old. I think she was actually seventeen or eighteen. Lily told us that she and her thirteen-year-old sister used to work inhumanely long shifts in one of the nearby assembly halls, where baby clothes were manufactured. A couple of months ago, her sister had been beaten so savagely by one of the guards that she died in Lily’s arms three days later. Her sister’s crime had been to return two minutes late from her lunch break. I mean, imagine, Clare! We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. Lily wanted revenge; she wanted the guard to be punished for killing her sister. She told us everything we wanted to know. She even let us into her former workplace at night so that we could, like, take pictures and all the rest of it. She encouraged other colleagues to tell us their stories, too. That was kind of our watershed moment, you know. Suddenly, we received five to ten visitors every day at our hotel who described their plight in the most harrowing tones. Some brought a relative to translate for them, but most of them were able to express themselves very well in English.’

  I nodded my head. I, too, had interviewed many South-East Asian textile workers in the past, and the horror stories they told me beggared belief.

  ‘We stayed in Batam for four weeks, until someone warned us that the factory managers knew what we were doing and had hired hit-men to beat us up. Julia had been totally focused during that period. She took massive amounts of notes; she recorded and later transcribed every conversation, and she took literally hundreds of pictures. She was driven by a kind of cold fury, like an inner ice-storm or something.’ Again I nodded. To that feeling, too, I could relate very well.

  ‘But you know what was kind of strange? After a couple of months or so, Julia wouldn’t really let me touch her anymore. Or only super-reluctantly, like once in a blue moon. She’d never really seemed massively interested in sex – but hey, nobody’s perfect, right? But we were very close – I mean, really close, properly physically close – in Edinburgh. We were totally loved up, at the beginning. We just couldn’t keep our hands off each other, you know? And also at the start of our trip. But the longer we were on our mission, the more she went off it – sex, I mean. She’d work late into the night on her transcriptions, and get up super early. Whenever I put my hand on her leg or her arm or her back, or her hair, she shook it off, like a bothersome fly or something. Her lack of interest became really hurtful, because I was crazy about her. I mean, I was in love with her, totally in love, you know. And I’ve got needs. Like normal needs. I’m not ashamed of it. I didn’t like being made to feel like some kind of annoying pest. I’ve never had that problem before, you know. Normally, women… well, whatever. I tried to talk to Julia about it a couple of times, but she always dismissed it. In the end, she’d always make me feel as though I was being totally unreasonable, like it was my fault.

  ‘“Come on, Chris,” she’d say and laugh and give me a peck on the cheek, or pat me on the back, or something. “We’re on a mission, we have a cause, remember? I need to concentrate. This” – and she’d point to whatever it was she was working on – “is slightly more important right now, don’t you think?”

  ‘And that’s just how it continued, really. We travelled on to Vietnam and to the Philippines, and we had really similar experiences there. At first, the workers would be too scared to open up, but eventually, one of them would break the spell and then suddenly lots of them would queue up to speak to us. It was some dark shit they told us, Clare. Julia was, like, increasingly possessed; she never stopped working and she talked about nothing else. Ever. And she just didn’t let me touch her at all at some point. I don’t remember exactly when – about seven or eight months into our relationship? Can you believe that? I mean, picture it: I was with this gorgeous woman, who I was head over heels in love with, and we were on this great adventure together, but she’d all of a sudden turned cold on me, like she was dead inside or something. It was strange, Clare, well weird. Back in Edinburgh, we were totally amazing together, in bed and out and everywhere. Or at least I thought we were. And then, suddenly: complete chastity on her part.

  ‘I became restless, and a bit depressed, to be honest. I started doing other things when Julia visited factories and spoke to the workers; it all got a bit too intense for me, you know. But she continued, relentlessly – she was totally obsessed. In Vietnam I wanted to visit the ancient Thien Mu Pagoda and the Co Chi tunnels; I wanted to wander through the old city centre of Hanoi and climb the Sa Pa rice terraces; I wanted to explore the pristine beaches of Phu Quoc and take a boat up the Mekong past the thousand islands of Ha Long Bay. You know, the kind of stuff every normal person visiting the country would want to do? But Julia refused to waste time on any of that. So I went off on my own for a few weeks. I missed her badly, but when I got back she gave the impression that she hadn’t missed me at all. She didn’t even rea
lly want to hear about my experiences.’

  He looked sad all of a sudden. ‘That must have been very difficult for you, Chris,’ I said. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Well, it just got worse, really. I mean, I felt more and more miserable and unloved. After about thirteen months in Asia, Julia decided it was time to move on to Central America, to strengthen our dossier further. She’d grown pretty fanatical by then, quite cold, somehow. For example, she really didn’t like all the Western tourists we met and refused to have anything to do with them. I was totally starved of contact with people I could talk to, people who made me feel like my existence and my thoughts mattered somehow, you know? People who didn’t just ignore me all day and treat me like shit. So I started to hang out more with travellers, while Julia visited dozens of “Maquilladoras” in the US-Mexican border territory. Have you heard of them?’

  I nodded. I had indeed.

  ‘They’re just as gruesome as their South-East Asian counterparts,’ Chris explained, in spite of my nod. ‘Basically, multinational corporations send raw materials and equipment to these places, where they’re, like, assembled mainly by female teenagers with nimble fingers, for a pittance, obviously, and then sent back to the country of origin. Duty-free and tariff-free, of course. I guess it’s fair to say that Julia and I had become pretty estranged by then, though I’m not sure Julia even registered that I was in a bad place. I started to feel pretty resentful towards her. I’m not proud of it, Clare, but this is what happened: I had a few flings with Australian and Israeli backpackers. I can say in my defence that Julia never found out about them. And even if she had, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t even have cared. At that stage, you know, I genuinely believed that she didn’t give a shit about me anymore. Really. I felt like I could jump off a cliff or get eaten by a shark or something, and she wouldn’t even notice I’d disappeared. I saw her only in the evenings and at night, sometimes for a short, strained dinner, when she’d pontificate about what she’d seen and heard that day. Then she’d go back to the hotel room and work on her transcripts and I don’t know what else, and I’d go out to meet friends.

  ‘Oh yes, and I forgot to mention. I drank quite a bit back then, and also smoked dope and popped the odd pill. I mean, nothing bad or over the top, I just had to self-soothe a little somehow, you know? I was, like, really hurting. I just couldn’t understand why Julia didn’t love me anymore, all of a sudden. I felt like she despised me for that, too. When I came to bed in the early hours she’d often crinkle her nose in disgust, or tell me that I smelled bad and needed to get my act together.’

  ‘But why did you stay with her?’ I asked. ‘It’s difficult to understand from the outside… It sounds pretty awful, the state of your relationship at that point.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and stared into his empty tea glass. ‘I guess I was simply still in love with her,’ he said, ‘and was hoping that things would return to how they’d been at the beginning of our relationship, once that bloody dossier was finished. I think I probably believed that she was just genuinely busy and totally immersed in the whole project thing, and shaken by all the shit she saw on a daily basis. I mean, the kind of stuff we witnessed can kill your sex drive. I could see that, too. We saw some pretty dark stuff. I don’t know… I guess I’m an optimist at heart? And I cared for her, I really did. She hasn’t exactly had an easy life, you know? The shit about her parents and all that.’

  ‘What about her parents?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? I thought you’d met them. Julia’s adopted.’

  I gasped. ‘Adopted?’

  ‘Yeah. Actually they never intended to tell her, but just after she finished school, completely by chance apparently, she found her birth certificate. It said “father unknown” and the mother’s name was blacked out. Obviously she was, like, totally freaked out by that. When she confronted her parents they stuttered and spluttered and got all aggravated. Eventually they admitted that after her brother was born the doctors thought that her mother couldn’t have any more kids, medical complications and all that, but they desperately wanted a bigger family and so decided to adopt. I think her older brother must have been two or three at the time. Obviously Julia’s little sister came as a massive surprise a few years later, showing that the doctors had been full of shit, as usual.

  ‘Julia said that they were really horrified that she’d found out, that they never wanted her to know, that they really feared it would make her feel bad and all that. She said they swore they loved her just as much as the other two kids, and that they would never tell anyone the truth. You can imagine the scene.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘That must have been a terrible shock for her…’

  Chris shrugged. ‘I guess. Julia didn’t really talk about it much. If it had been me, I think it would have completely destroyed my trust in them and done some pretty serious damage to my sense of identity. I mean, to find out that the people you thought of as your parents aren’t and have been lying to you for eighteen years? That would fuck most people up.’

  ‘Do you know whether she ever tried to find out who her real parents were?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. She never mentioned it. But she did feel pretty alienated from her own parents, I can tell you that. She thought they were hypocrites. I mean, you can’t blame her, right?’

  We both sipped our mint teas for a while, before Chris continued. ‘Anyway, we’d moved on to Guatemala to visit some coffee farms in the highlands, and were staying in San Pedro La Laguna, a small village at the shores of Lake Atitlan. One afternoon, she came to look for me in one of the local backpacker hangouts. You know, like one of those hippy bars where everyone is playing billiards or cards and drinking beer or lying around stoned in hammocks. This was totally unusual. Normally, Julia wouldn’t even go near places like that. I immediately knew that something bad must have happened. Julia looked even paler than normal, and seemed totally shaken. I ordered some water for her and asked her to tell me what was wrong.

  It took her for ever before she could speak, but eventually she told me that she’d witnessed a horrific scene on one of the nearby coffee farms. She’d been interviewing two young women about their pay and working conditions at the edge of one of the plantations when they heard piercing screams. The three of them walked to where the sounds were coming from and saw a cluster of men, standing in a circle. Apparently some of them were wearing the usual uniforms of the plantation overseers. They were watching while a brutish-looking middle-aged man was raping a very young woman, who was crying and screaming and begging him to stop. It was clear that he’d not been the first, and wouldn’t be the last, either. Julia and the women she’d been interviewing tried to break through the circle and shouted at the men to stop, but they pushed them away and told them they’d be next if they didn’t get lost. Then Julia started to take pictures, which I thought was incredibly brave, you know? But one of the men grabbed her camera, threw it to the ground and stamped on it, before hitting her in the face. I felt horribly guilty that I hadn’t been with her to protect her that day.

  ‘Then she decided to run back to the village to report what she’d witnessed to the police. On her way back, she stopped two American tourists who were driving past her, and told them what had happened, and asked if they could give her a ride. But they were totally uninterested in her story. One of them shrugged his shoulders and grinned and said: “Welcome to Guatemala.” Then they drove off.

  ‘Back in San Pedro, Julia went straight to the police station. The officer she spoke to was openly hostile. Only after she threatened to involve the British Embassy did he fill out a report form, like really reluctantly and slowly, you know. But apparently the report ended up so vague and disjointed that it inspired no confidence in her at all. She said the guy didn’t even bother to write down some of the key facts, and he didn’t ask for her contact details, or her passport. When Julia demanded to know whether officers would be sent to the farm straight away to
collect evidence and assist the victim, the officer said yes, he’d send two men out there presently. But Julia waited opposite the police station after forcing her details on the officer. She saw that nobody left the building after her for, like, two hours, and then she saw a whole crowd of officers sauntering to a nearby restaurant.

  ‘She was absolutely furious when she told me all this – totally livid. We found out that the farm she’d visited supplied its coffee beans to Café Olé…’ Chris hesitated before continuing: ‘And then we decided to contact representatives of the company next, you know, so that they could request a proper investigation. From a local internet café, Julia sent a long, detailed report to numerous different Café Olé customer service email addresses, as well as to dozens of public relations officers and quality-control managers and so on. I think she must have sent it to, like, a hundred different email addresses – basically every single one she could find online. She checked for responses almost hourly over the next few days. But she didn’t get a single reply. Not a single one, Clare. I mean, can you believe that? She then sent the story to various British and US media, in the hope that one of them would name and shame Café Olé into action. But again her plea was met with complete silence. She got nothing back at all. Nothing.’

  Chris paused here. We both contemplated his words. After a few minutes, I asked: ‘What did Julia do next?’

  ‘Well, she stopped working on the dossier. Just like that. That was pretty radical, you know, given that she’d been doing nothing else ever since we left Edinburgh? I mean, she’d lived for this bloody dossier. And then she never touched it again. From one day to the next. The fact that everyone totally ignored her gruesome story – the police, the media, the company that should have taken responsibility for injustices occurring in its supply chain – that really shattered her confidence, you know? I guess she thought that if gang-rape doesn’t get punished and fails to shock, what can?’