The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  ‘What happened to the dossier?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know.’ Chris shrugged. ‘I hadn’t been working on it for quite a while, and I don’t know what she did with it in the end. It was odd, the time after the rape, Clare. She’d always been, like, super-busy, you know, out interviewing and taking pictures, all day every day, and then, all of a sudden, she just sat in our room and didn’t know what to do with herself. She really didn’t. She didn’t really do pleasure, or relaxation, you know? She always needed projects. For a couple of days, she just paced around in our tiny hotel room, like a trapped animal or something. It was pretty disconcerting to watch. She was beginning to say weird shit, and ranted and rambled a lot. Then she got ill with a virus or food poisoning, or something. I made her stay in bed and nursed her. She couldn’t keep down any food for a whole week, and her body was shaking with convulsions and cramps. It’s weird, but I hadn’t felt as close to her since the very beginning of our trip, you know? I sat next to her on the bed for hours on end and held her hand and wiped her forehead with wet towels and listened to her feverish talk and tried to calm her down.

  ‘When her temperature finally dropped she became all morose and hostile. She was totally at a loose end without her work. For a couple of days, we argued a lot. And then came the final argument… Since Julia’s health had stabilized, and since she’d become pretty unbearable, I’d started to go out again. I’d gone out to meet some friends one evening, and when I returned to our hotel room around one in the morning she was waiting up for me. I knew something was up. She looked like she was intent on picking a fight, and she did. She could be pretty intimidating when she was in fighting mode, you know? She was sitting on the bed, her arms folded across her chest, and her green eyes were fixed on me. There was, like, no sympathy, let alone anything resembling love left. Her gaze was just ice-cold.

  ‘“You smell of drugs and drink again,” she said when I entered. “I hope it was worth it. You know what, Chris? I’ve had enough. You’ve let me down, and you’ve let our project down. Why weren’t you with me on the day of the rape? Why? You could have stopped it. But instead, you were getting high, or drunk, or were fucking someone, or whatever it is you do all day now. You’re full of shit, just like all the others. You just talk the let’s-change-the-world talk to look cool, but in reality, you don’t care. Your kind really is the worst: you’re nothing but a poser. A wannabe revolutionary.”

  ‘“Oh yeah?” I said. “And what exactly is it you’re doing that makes you so superior to all the rest of us? Your dossier? You haven’t even touched it in the last few weeks. You think pacing around in a small room and pouring scorn on normal people who talk to each other and have some fun and do all the things that make life worth living makes you a better person? You’re bitter and cold, you know that?”

  ‘“Better that than to be a junkie, or whatever it is you are. You think because what you consume is illegal it makes you cool and counter-cultural – but guess what: it doesn’t. You’re just a consumer, too. You live to consume, just like everybody else.”

  ‘“You know what? You should try it sometime. Maybe it would relax you a little, loosen you up a bit, you know? Maybe then you wouldn’t be such a stuck-up, frigid bitch. I think a little pot and a drink would actually work wonders on your character, Julia.”

  ‘Julia just laughed. “There we go again. Your eternal pathetic lament. I happen to have interests that transcend the gratification of base sexual instincts. And especially yours. If you don’t like it, I suggest you go and fuck some travellers.”

  ‘“You know what? I might just do that.”

  ‘It really wasn’t my finest hour, Clare, but it seemed like the last straw, you know? So I grabbed my backpack and started to pack my things. Julia just kept on looking at me. She was studying me, like I was an insect on which she was about to tread or something. I got the impression she was amused rather than upset, you know? I couldn’t help feeling that she’d been testing me all along, to see how far she could push me before I’d snap. But I don’t know. That was probably paranoia speaking.

  ‘“Fine,” she finally said, very calmly. “Get your things and don’t ever come back.”’

  ‘And that was it?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘You just left and never saw her again?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Chris said. ‘I packed my things right there and then and moved in with some friends. A couple of days later I was beginning to feel bad about how things had ended. I couldn’t believe it was really over, and that it should have ended like that, after everything we’d been through together. I mean, could you, Clare? And in spite of everything that had happened I also missed her, like really badly. So I went back to the hotel to see if she wanted to talk. But she’d checked out and disappeared. I continued to travel in Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia for a few more months on my own. I followed the rough itinerary that we had drawn up together before things went wrong. I was hoping I’d run into her somewhere, and that we could talk things through. But I didn’t, and it wasn’t fun anymore, and so I returned to London for a while. I hated it there. Then I moved here. Someone I’d met abroad had told me about a vacancy at the refugee camp. I tried to contact Julia via email a few times. Actually, to tell you the truth, much more often than I should have, you know? But she must have blocked my address or closed down her account or something. They all bounced back.’

  ‘How did you feel when you found out about the London attack?’

  ‘What do you think, Clare? Pretty shitty, obviously. Numb. Surprised. Disgusted. Sad. I don’t know. I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. I just remember thinking she should have done it at night, she should have done it at night, she should have done it at night, when nobody would have got hurt, over and over and over again. I mean, like an empty building, I could see why she’d do that, you know? Café Olé and all that, it kind of made sense. But with people in it, in broad daylight? Twenty-four random customers? But what more can I say? No words can patch the fucking damage Julia has caused.’

  He shook his head. He looked so sunken and dejected that I put my hand on his. We sat together in silence for a while. Then he sighed and said: ‘I need to leave now, Clare. It was really good talking to you. Thanks for listening.’

  And then Chris got up, pressed some coins into the hand of the proprietor behind the bar, and disappeared into the mild southern night.

  I returned to London the next day. I had less than four weeks before the submission deadline, and I still hadn’t written a single proper chapter. I hadn’t even drafted an introduction. All I had was a handful of interview transcripts. And I was still none the wiser regarding my master narrative. Chris was clearly not the great enigmatic corruptor figure who radicalized Julia, and in whose existence Timothy, Amy and Alison firmly believed. If anything, the process of corruption had probably worked the other way. It was also my strong impression that Chris’s representation of Julia as a frigid, perhaps even sadistic ice-queen was primarily driven by his wounded pride. It was so obvious that he was still hurting very badly.

  Chris’s story certainly provided some extremely important clues: to find out that she was adopted that late on, and by pure chance, too, must have contributed substantially to Julia’s sense of alienation and to the corrosion of her trust in both people and institutions. The cold, hard streak in her that some of those who knew her had observed was probably a defence mechanism, a reaction to a traumatic revelation that left her entire world in pieces. I was genuinely shocked that Rose and Timothy hadn’t told me the truth – they had seemed so raw, so authentic when I met them, but quite a lot of it had clearly been play-acting. I suppose they simply wanted to keep their promise to Julia and not to act disloyally, washing their hands of their adopted child when she needed them most. I suppose they felt terribly guilty, too, convinced that their lack of honesty had contributed to Julia’s radicalization. But while the revelation that Julia was adopted certainly explained some things, I didn’t believe it was the key to
the mystery. The majority of adopted children who find out the truth about their parents turn out just fine.

  The significance of Café Olé in the saga, too, was now clear to me. But I still couldn’t understand why Julia attacked the chain’s customers, rather than, say, its CEO, or just its buildings, as Chris had suggested. I also had no doubt that witnessing the rape and her anger at not being heard and at not being able to get justice for the victim would have contributed to Julia’s decision to leave legal forms of activism behind. But I strongly felt that even this extreme episode couldn’t fully explain her act: many people witness gruesome scenes like that, or even worse, and don’t lose faith in institutional justice. On the contrary, some people would have been spurred on in their campaign by an event like this. And most people would probably just have grown cynical and bitter, like me. Turning into a callous mass murderer, however, is on a different level altogether.

  XVI

  Yesterday Sarah, my silent companion with the bruise-coloured complexion, was attacked in the lunch queue. I’d arrived early, and had sat down in my usual place, waiting for her to join me. I could see it coming; in fact, I was surprised that Sarah had been spared for so long. Frail and frightened as she was, she looked like the perfect victim. That day tensions were high, and two bullies were hungry for a fight. They entered the hall together, oozing aggression, rudely pushed Sarah out of the queue and took her place. She lowered her head and joined the end of the queue once more. But one of them, Tanya, turned round and pushed Sarah again, harder this time, so that she fell on the slippery floor.

  ‘Piss off, bitch, you’re spoiling my appetite,’ Tanya shouted.

  Sarah tried to get up, but Tanya kicked her hard in the stomach. The hall had fallen silent, and I thought I could hear something cracking. Horrified, I jumped up to intervene, but somebody else had been even quicker and was already at the scene. It was Amelia.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said sharply. ‘Drop it, ladies. Right now.’

  To my amazement, Tanya obeyed her. Then Amelia lifted Sarah up, brushed her down and led her to my table.

  ‘You take it from here. That girl needs to eat, and then she needs to see a nurse,’ she said. ‘I reckon they broke one of her ribs. Painful, but she’s gonna be all right.’ I nodded and after a while joined the queue again, to get Sarah’s portion for her, while she sat slumped in her seat, holding her side. Tanya and her partner watched me with narrowed eyes, but they let me be. Whether that was because they were afraid of Amelia or me was hard to tell. I still wonder whether people here know what I did. I haven’t told anyone. But word gets round in a place like this. And it was in the papers, of course. Then I started wondering whether maybe I wasn’t just like them – the Tanyas and all the other violent women – but actually worse than them.

  The other day, Sarah broke her silence and asked me what had brought me here, but I changed the subject. I’m not ready to talk about it. Far from it. My discussions with my lawyer, whom I’m currently meeting twice a week, are different. They are technical, factual, dry. Most of the time, it doesn’t even feel as though it’s my own story we are talking about, but rather some abstract intellectual problem that needs solving, to which we apply ourselves in a disinterested, rational manner.

  My lawyer wants to firm up our strategy in the run-up to the trial, which will begin on 24 March (the date is now set). She strongly believes we should plead diminished responsibility owing to temporary insanity, but I refuse to go there. It’s untrue, and I’m done with lying. I wasn’t insane when I did it. I was perfectly compos mentis, George. Confused, distressed, despairing, physically low, emaciated, on the edge of a nervous breakdown (whatever that means), yes, absolutely – but I knew what I was doing, and why I was doing it. At least at the time I did. Now, of course, I’m no longer sure. Now I wish I could go back and undo it all, banish those haunting eyes from my memory and live again without constantly feeling wracked by guilt.

  My lawyer, as you can imagine, is not happy with my attitude, and neither are Amanda and Laura – they all think I’m deliberately risking a much heavier sentence than necessary, owing to a misdirected desire for self-punishment. Maybe they’re right. I do want to pay for what I’ve done. But above all I want to be able to embrace my sentence with dignity – I want it served clean and pure, untainted by any plea-bargaining. What’s more, I really am done with all the lying and pretending; I don’t have the energy for games and strategies, even legal ones (and what good have they done me in the past, in any case). I’ve decided to face the consequences of my actions, whatever they may be. I will speak the truth in court. Or at least whatever feels like the truth at the time. Truth has become so slippery. It continues to slide through my hands like wriggling jellyfish. This, too, is Julia’s dark work.

  After I returned from Marseille, my energy reserves were low. I spent five days holed up in my apartment, transcribing the interview with Chris and studying my notes, over and over again, and worrying about the deadline. I was feeling increasingly paralysed, and a numb sense of panic was beginning to take hold. I didn’t change out of my pyjamas, and I slept badly. I self-medicated with whisky (as you know, smoky single malts have always been my soul-soothing substance of choice in times of crisis), but that only made me feel even more wretched in the mornings. I didn’t have the strength to deal with my emails, and I ignored the repeated ringing of my mobile. I knew that you were on my case (I’d stopped sending you updates), and that you were eager to know how I was getting on. But I simply couldn’t face talking to you. I began to imagine the unspeakable awfulness of the moment when I would have to confess that all my efforts had come to nothing and that I had let you down.

  Poring over my notes, I realized there was one final avenue for me to explore. But I procrastinated for a few days, probably because I suspected it would end in failure. Failure was something I felt increasingly unable to cope with. But on 16 October I pulled myself together to confront Julia’s last traceable acquaintances on my list: her former colleagues in the vegetable shop in Camden, where she’d worked in the months prior to the attack.

  It was a dreary Wednesday morning, but, spurred on by sheer desperation, I managed to drag myself into the shower (the first time in days), put on proper clothes and took the Tube to Camden. The shop was in a particularly derelict street in a run-down corner of the borough. All the houses were in bad repair, paint peeling like dead skin from uncared-for facades and rotting woodwork. Most of the shop-fronts were boarded up. Although it was ten o’clock in the morning, there wasn’t a soul to be seen on the litter-strewn street. It took me a while to find the place, since its small wooden sign announcing ‘Organic Fruit & Veg’ was awkwardly positioned, its faded letters barely legible.

  The door was stuck and I had to push hard against it to enter. Inside, I was overwhelmed by an all-pervading sense of gloom. I felt like the narrator of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, so strongly did the dreariness of the place affect me. Everything looked grey. The wooden floorboards were old and worn. The heaps of undersized and misshapen fruit and vegetables, carelessly displayed in wooden boxes placed on a long narrow table, were covered in dried soil, looking as though they would taste of ashes. There was a dusty makeshift shelf on which grains, pulses and rice in brown paper bags with handwritten labels were stacked. An antiquated till sat on a smaller table on the left-hand side of the room, next to which there was also a pair of rusty scales. A woman sitting on a chair behind it had been scrutinizing me suspiciously while I took all of this in. A mangy German shepherd was dozing at her feet.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said sharply. She was already bristling with hostility, although I had not even opened my mouth. In perfect keeping with the furnishings, her face, too, seemed to have a grey sheen. Her mushroom-coloured hair was scraped back tightly in a short ponytail, and exposed a prominent white forehead. Her colourless lashes and eyebrows emphasized further the peculiar flatness of her features.

  ‘Uh, yes, I h
ope so,’ I said. Then my words failed me. I should have rehearsed my lines before entering, and I found myself freezing under the woman’s lashless stare.

  ‘Well, how? What is it you want?’ she said.

  ‘My name’s Clare Hardenberg,’ I finally managed. ‘I’m a writer and I’m currently working on a book about Julia White. I wondered whether I might speak with you about her. And what she did. It’s my understanding that she worked here before the attack.’

  When I mentioned Julia’s name, something that looked like pain flickered across the woman’s face, before it regained its former hostile expression.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘She did.’

  ‘Would you mind if I asked you a few questions? It wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Yes, I would mind. I’ve nothing to say about her.’

  ‘I realize it must be difficult for you, but I’d be really grateful if you’d let me ask you just a few questions. You see, I’m in a predicament…’

  But the woman interrupted me. ‘I already talked to the police and told them all I had to say on the matter. Julia’s dead for me. For all of us here. We renounce violence – all violence – against people, animals, even against plants. Julia’s no longer one of us and we had nothing to do with her actions.’

  ‘I know that, of course,’ I said hastily. ‘I wasn’t at all trying to imply that you did. I just wanted to ask you some questions about her as a person. A lot of people are trying to come to terms with what she has done, and to understand how it all got to that point, and I’m hoping to speak to the people she knew to find out more about what might have motivated her. How would you describe your relationship with her?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ the woman snapped. ‘We had no relationship. We were co-workers. That’s all. And I already told you I’m not answering questions.’