The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  Again I didn’t respond.

  ‘You know I’m right. And deep down, you also know that this assumption is naive, and that its premise doesn’t hold. Any attempt to educate by reasoning is futile. The public imagination can only be seized by unreason – in our cynical age, only a shocking, seemingly gratuitous act of violence can awaken people to political issues.’

  Then Julia embarked on a long monologue on the history and psychology of terrorism. First, she reflected on the practices of nineteenth-century Russian anarchists, and marvelled at how they assassinated only the highest-ranking representatives of forces they perceived as evil – tsars, police chiefs and military men. She went on to praise the cleanliness of classical tyrannicide, and commended the German Red Army Faction for striking blows only at the very heart of the system and nowhere else. Yet unfortunately, she claimed, these methods have become impracticable in our times, as political evil no longer has a clearly distinguishable face, affairs of state being now inextricably enmeshed with highly abstract economic structures, all of which have reached a level of complexity that doesn’t allow for the kind of clean, neat blows that still made a difference in the past. If you chop off one of the heads of that many-headed hydra that tyrannizes our age, two more will grow in its place.

  I’d been listening to her in a daze. My blood was rushing and my mind was racing. But at that point in her speech, I jolted as if stung, and thought, no, that isn’t true – evil does have a face. At least in my world it does.

  Julia continued, and her precise, clipped words cut through the heavy air like the strikes of a sickle. ‘Think about it. What good has your writing ever done? Sure, it won you a few prizes and paid your mortgage, but apart from that?’ Then she bent forward again, her face almost touching mine. ‘Clare,’ she whispered, ‘I feel your pain. I understand your dilemma. Trust me, I know how you feel. But there’s another way.’

  For what felt like a long time, neither of us spoke. Then I gently folded her cuffed hands into mine.

  ‘What really happened to you in Guatemala, Julia?’ I asked. ‘Please. Just tell me.’

  She pressed my hands. Then, completely without warning, tears started to stream down her face. I continued to stroke her fingers, whispering soothing words, the kind I would have spoken to my own child in times of trouble. Eventually, Julia began to talk.

  ‘That day, in Guatemala, on the coffee field, when I witnessed the rape… I never told anyone. Nobody, Clare. They didn’t just destroy my camera. The woman I had interviewed and I… when we ran towards where the screams were coming from… they pounced on us. Like wild, frenzied animals. There was nothing we could do. We screamed our hearts out, I kicked and struggled and bit, but they held me down, my legs, my arms, my hair. There were so many of them. They took turns. It seemed to last for ever. Then finally they left us lying there in the mud, with our insides ripped to pieces and our bodies covered in bruises. And the shame and the pain. But suddenly we were surrounded by women, farm workers, colleagues of the other two. They carried us to a nearby shelter, they cleaned us up and clad us in fresh clothes. They made us drink tequila, lots of it, to forget and to wash away the dirt on the inside, they said. I sat with them, drinking, and then they started to sing. Strange, soothing songs. Eventually, I felt strong enough to walk back to the village. I tried to report the incident, but nobody was interested. The police just took the piss. They didn’t even take down my details.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell Chris, Julia? Why didn’t you go to the embassy?’

  Julia rubbed her hands over her face. ‘I didn’t want to be a victim. It wasn’t supposed to be about me, none of it. I didn’t want to destroy everything I had worked so hard for. It wasn’t supposed to be yet another “Westerner getting harmed abroad” story. It was supposed to be the other way round.’

  ‘But how could you just go on, as though nothing had happened? You must have been hurt, traumatized, you can’t just shake something like that off…’

  ‘Well, I did. That’s exactly what I did.’

  But I’m sure you didn’t, I thought. That’s just not possible. Nobody can do that.

  Julia was watching me intently. ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘It didn’t affect me in the way you think it did. I wish I hadn’t even told you. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘But…’ I started, but Julia interrupted me.

  ‘Don’t do it, Clare. Don’t reduce me to a pathetic victim figure. I can see what you’re thinking now: post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality, disassociation, shame, guilt, translated into hate – you think you’ve got me pinned down, don’t you?’

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘But you know what – you don’t. The rape doesn’t explain anything. As I said, I put it behind me. It’s too simple, the assumption that one traumatic event can explain it all. Please don’t make it all about this.’

  ‘Time’s up,’ the guard said. We stood up awkwardly. Another guard entered and led Julia out of the room. Before they left, she turned around and looked at me one last time – a long, green, impermeable look that made me shudder, and that still haunts me.

  My guard accompanied me through the long corridor to the visitors’ check-in area where my belongings were being held. We walked in silence. I tried hard to control my breathing, hoping that I would make it out into the open air without fainting or throwing up. But just after we passed through the final door, before returning to her duties in some other part of the building, the guard looked at me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said:

  ‘Don’t you listen to a word that woman says. Don’t you do that, now. She’s a snake. That’s what she is.’

  Then she shook her head, clicked her tongue and locked the heavy iron door from the inside.

  I just about managed to drag myself outside, and then I was violently sick on the pavement.

  XX

  It’s time now for the final chapter in my own confession, too, George, time to tackle the most difficult part of my story. I fear going there. But I must finish this, and soon – I want to see you. I want so desperately to see you. Apart from sharing some basic facts with my lawyer, I haven’t yet told anyone about the hours that followed my meeting with Julia. Not even Amanda. I don’t think she’d want to hear this – she’s scared of what I might disclose, scared that it will for ever change her perception of me.

  I still find it difficult to revisit the scene, to connect with and understand the person I became, for those fatal few hours. But it wasn’t insanity, temporary or otherwise. On that point I remain adamant. And I won’t let anyone present it as such. Two days ago, I signed a paper confirming that I understand I’m acting against legal counsel and that I’m prepared to live with the consequences. Laura and Amanda (who acts as though her outburst never happened) don’t yet know. Bless them; I know they only want what they think is best for me. But I can’t do them that favour: what else do I have left now but the afterlife of my act, in all its stark, paradoxical and ugly imperfection? I don’t want to see it twisted, or instrumentalized, or misrepresented in any way.

  My meeting with Julia on that fateful November day last year had put a seal on a period at the end of which, having invested everything (and I mean everything) in my writing, I was forced to acknowledge that all my hopes had come to nothing. I was confronted with the consequences of my choices: I had failed in everything I’d ever cared for.

  On leaving Holloway prison I felt sick, numb and utterly exhausted. I’d stopped thinking. I’d ceased agonizing over all of the questions that had been torturing me. In a daze, I took the Tube back home. I poured myself a drink. And another. And another. And possibly another. Then I went into my bedroom, and opened a box in which I keep my most treasured family heirlooms. Jewellery, mainly. But also my grandmother’s revolver.

  It was ancient. My grandmother had carried it with her, ready for use, in her threadbare coat pocket when, with my mother in tow, she had wandered through the icy German forests towar
ds safety. I’ve no doubt that she would have used it had the need arisen. It looked like a museum piece – heavy steel with a mother-of-pearl handle, a curiously shaped artefact from a bygone era. I opened the cylinder and found there was a bullet in each one of the six chambers.

  I still can’t really explain my thinking during those fateful hours, George. All I can say with any accuracy is that it wasn’t really thinking, but a confused, emotionally warped gut-reaction. I was under Julia’s spell – I both admired and despised her. She had planted an idea in my head, an idea that seemed to be the only way out, the solution to all my problems. I wanted desperately to save my life’s work. To restore meaning to my existence. So that not everything would have been in vain.

  Although at some point I’d stopped following the reports on the award ceremony that was to take place that very evening at the Institute of Directors, I had memorized the details disclosed in earlier articles on the subject. Doors would open for invited guests at seven; the guests of honour would arrive at seven thirty; proceedings would start at eight sharp.

  It was early afternoon when I left my flat. I walked from Gilbert Place to Oxford Street; I traversed Oxford Circus and walked down Upper Regent Street; I crossed Piccadilly Circus, continued down Lower Regent Street and Waterloo Place until I reached the Mall. I stopped a few times to have a drink on the way. I remember contemplating the hordes of shoppers that now congest the arteries of our city in such astounding numbers, drawn like sleepwalkers to some unspecified promise of salvation that they never find, no matter how much they purchase. I remember thinking: Julia, you’re right.

  On Regent Street I saw what looked from afar like a political demonstration, a large crowd clustering in front of the Apple flagship store, which occupies a beautiful building that, a long time ago, used to be a place of worship. But when I came closer I saw that they were bearded hipsters, clutching cups of flat whites in one hand, and artfully discoloured retro rucksacks in the other, queuing to purchase some newly released gadget. It struck me as such an apt symbol of our times. Fornication with objects, and the raw pink pain of holes that can’t ever be filled that way. We’re living in the end times, George, the sad times. Why is it that everyone seems to have given up on anything that transcends the satisfaction of hollow consumer fantasies? What’s wrong with this twee, backwards-looking new generation of retro-fetishists? I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for the messy, hot-headed age of isms in which I grew up, and sorrow for the disappearance of our polarized political landscape which had turned into one big, corporate-sponsored blur. Again I thought: Julia, you’re right.

  I’d arrived far too early at the Institute, earlier even than the security guards who started patrolling the area an hour later. I positioned myself close to the entrance, next to a set of pillars supporting a portico, and to the red carpet that reached out of the grand neoclassical building like a limp scarlet tongue. I remained stoically at my post. I must have looked a little deranged, since people kept their distance from me. A security guard enquired about my business at some point when he and his colleagues started to cordon off the red carpet area. I showed him my old journalist’s pass, which appeared to satisfy him.

  I stood amidst a slowly growing crowd consisting mainly of photographers, onlookers, and, who knows, perhaps even the odd Adrian Temple fan, for more than three hours. I stood there silently and still. My hand was in my pocket, clutching my grandmother’s revolver. I can’t remember what went through my mind. I recall only one thing: although it was bitingly cold on that Sunday early in November, I’d stopped shivering.

  I watched while a stream of minor celebrities began to file past. I watched the head of the Bank of England and his wife flashing big white transatlantic smiles at onlookers. I watched as various high-profile CEOs, many of them knighted, walked by. Finally, I heard some journalists announce his name. A black limousine had stopped on the opposite side of the street. I saw the chauffeur stepping out and opening the door. And then I saw him. He was wearing a blue cashmere coat and a Bordeaux-coloured scarf. His floppy brown hair was brushed casually to one side. I saw his haughty smile that exposed the tight row of small bright teeth that had been haunting me for so long. And then he was already on the carpet, strutting towards the entrance.

  I dived under the cord that had been put in place to keep the onlookers at bay. All of a sudden, the buzzing of the voices around me stopped. And then we were standing face to face, Temple and I. We looked each other in the eye. His were the colour of a frozen lake, strangely similar to mine. He recognized me immediately. A cruel smile flickered across his face.

  ‘Clare,’ he said. ‘How charming. Have you come to congratulate me?’

  I still had both of my hands in my pockets. I clutched my weapon. The security guards watching the entrance were about to move towards me, but Adrian Temple lifted his hand.

  ‘It’s fine. We’re old acquaintances,’ he said. ‘Clare’s a big fan of mine.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said. My voice sounded like that of a stranger. In the silence that surrounded us, its echo reverberated eerily.

  Temple was about to walk past me when I cocked my weapon. Then I lifted the hand holding the revolver from my pocket and put it on his forehead. I could see his eyes widening in surprise. And George: it felt good, seeing his fear. It felt good, knowing that the arrogant grin would be wiped from this face for eternity. That nothing could ever bring it back. It felt good, George, that finally someone was making this man pay, and it felt good that the someone was me. And then I fired. He didn’t fall over, he didn’t even tilt backwards; he sank. Slowly, like a battleship holed beneath the waterline. Quite naturally, he sank to his knees, his eyes wide open. He raised his arms, as though trying to surrender. And then he collapsed on his side, his eyes still wide open. His head came to rest on the carpet, where the blood gushing from the small hole in his head formed a sticky puddle that surrounded him like a dark liquid halo.

  Seconds later, I was the one on my knees, having raised my hands and dropped my gun. My job was done. And then the crowd around us awoke from its stupor, and the onlookers started to scream. I was jerked up brutally by one of the guards, who pinned my arms behind my back. A flurry of camera flashes further contributed to my sense of unreality, the feeling that I was trapped in some kind of cliché-ridden film.

  But then I saw them. They must, unnoticed by me, have climbed out of the limousine after him, probably to avoid the cameras. And one of them sank to the ground, too. Adrian Temple’s wife, clad in white fur and candy-coloured satin, broke into a shrill, piercing wail, and shook her husband, over and over again, as though he had merely fainted and could be roused back into consciousness. His daughter, in contrast, remained eerily silent. She was perhaps five years old. Her sand-coloured hair was braided into two long plaits decorated with pink ribbons, and from her right hand dangled a white teddy bear. She’d been running towards where her father lay, and then she suddenly stopped, just two feet away from me and the guard who was clutching my arms. She remained perfectly, unnaturally still. She just stood there, frozen, her grey eyes wandering from her father to her mother and back again. And then she turned to look at me. She looked and looked. Separated from all the frantic clamour around us, she and I occupied a different space, in which an eerie underwater stillness reigned. It’s her gaze, George, those large, grey eyes in that tiny white face, and the plaits that stopped bouncing, that I see before me every night. It was when our eyes met that I knew I wasn’t like Julia.

  Then I heard the sirens, and then I was pushed into a police car and was removed from the scene.

  POSTSCRIPT

  After completing the manuscript, I sent it straight to George. For two days, I waited anxiously for his response. Finally, he called.

  ‘Ach, Clare…’ was all he said, and then his voice broke and we both started to cry. We wailed like children, listening to each other wringing our hands and sobbing our hearts out. We didn’t manage to speak during that call, but th
ere were others, many others, afterwards. The wait for his first visit was torturous. But when the day finally came, and when I saw the familiar outline of his tall impatient figure behind the frosted window pane of the door to the visitors’ room at 4.30 sharp, I understood how desperately I’d been yearning for the company of this man. I realized how much I’d needed to pass my hand through his bristly hair, how badly I’d wanted to rub my face against his stubbly cheeks, and how I’d craved for him to embrace me and finally to be able to find peace on his heaving chest. The guards had to pull us apart. When they reprimanded us, sternly reminding us of the no-touching rule, we giggled like teenagers who’d been caught making out in the bedroom.

  During my trial – my second one – George stood by me once again. This time, however, Lailah didn’t come along. The two of them are getting divorced.

  But it will be a while before we will know if we can be properly together. Nine years, seven months and four days, to be precise. Unless I’m released early. Which is unlikely.

  George’s, Amanda’s and Laura’s visits are what keep me going. Laura impresses me so. The future, if it’s shaped by the likes of her, scares me less now. To Laura, too, I showed my manuscript, but I haven’t yet mustered the courage to give it to Amanda. No doubt she’ll read my confession when it’s published. I hope she can forgive me.

  Just a few days ago, Laura and I talked about it. I argued that there is never just one truth, there are always truths. All we have are stories, I said, nothing but conflicting narratives. Each has its truth, and each has its blind spots. But Laura wasn’t in the least impressed by my analysis. ‘Isn’t that just a poor excuse for those who are too timid to state it?’ she asked. She dismissed my view as cowardly relativism, and added: ‘You know what? I find it all so obvious – Julia’s just a very, very fucked-up person with no capacity to empathize. A psychopathic manipulator.’