Julia's Secret

by Valerie Attard

  As the day wore on, it turned out to meet Julia’s expectations beautifully. The weather miraculously held off from raining for the entire day so the children could play within the extensive grounds; they picnicked in a picturesque spot and spent the day walking around the beautiful countryside. The air smelt clean and fresh a mix of the woody undergrowth and dampness. It was one of those days that they would all clearly remember. Julia felt carefree and at one with her family she felt that closeness which only comes about after years of marriage. They spoke very little; however, there was no need for words they were there for each other at that moment in time. Even if the excitement in their marriage had died down it had been replaced by something precious.

  It was a day when Julia turned off the mundane worries about her life’s routines. Today was not the day for worrying about juggling busy schedules, covering up her lies or taking a guilt trip about the time she spent with Sophia and away from her family. Today was a day just for Julia surrounded by the people who were everything to her. She had chosen this man for better and for worse and they had been through a lot together. The lows had been frightening, so much so that Julia often questioned whether their marriage could beat the grim statistics and survive; however, on days such as today she felt blessed to have been given so much. Even with his greying hair and the first signs of wrinkles she still felt attracted to him. He was not one of those men who made women swoon as Julian had been. Julian had been full of sex-appeal and beauty like some Adonis who only paled in comparison to his beautiful companion. Ben was different; in his own way he clearly had a magnetism that attracted women. It was perhaps not his physical looks that did it but a combination of his mannerisms, the way he spoke in a surprisingly calm and soft-spoken voice and the way he was capable of complimenting women in a sincere and genuine way. Of their three children it was Emma who had inherited this calmness. Many times she reminded Julia of her father. Andrew was hard-headed and rash, traits which he had picked up from her side and Laura’s character too was closest to Julia’s. She often wondered if the children would turn out like her and secretly wished they could be more like Ben, he always seemed to tackle things so rationally and was definitely not half the worrier that she was. He always took things in his stride and did not choose to worry over things he could not change. He always seemed so sure in whatever decisions he took and never tortured himself by querying how things would have turned out if he had chosen another route. Julia couldn’t help it she had always been this way, and this madness manifested itself even more since she had the children, especially as she felt the weight of her parental responsibility bear heavily on her shoulders. She was glad that she was not going down this road alone. She could never survive as a single mother. Apart from the fact that she would absolutely go insane if she only saw the children for half the time due to a separation, she couldn’t imagine taking any major decisions without Ben’s support. Julia always tended to exhaust an argument to such an extent that the decision would leave her washed out. She would mull over the problem in her head trying to break it down in more digestible components, but often she did this irrationally and her emotions would get the better of her. Even in arguments her emotions would take over so much so that she often found herself blurting out words which she knew she did not mean and which weren’t exactly true or did not even make sense. Ben always seemed to mean exactly what he said and he seemed to think carefully about the words he uttered. In arguments his words were poignant and hurtful because they very often hit the nail on the head. Julia would cry, shout and scream and work herself up into a fury which would leave her exhausted emotionally and physically. Thankfully these arguments were not a common occurrence and Julia was trying her best to curb the emotions that would sweep over her and cause her to lose control. She hated lashing out at Ben like she did, it only made her look weaker and powerless. The fact that he was always so masterful in his self-control gave him the power to win the argument. So many times Julia had rehearsed in her mind what she would tell Ben and how she would respond to his side of the argument; however, the reality of their quarrelling always turned out so different.

  Julia often wished she could somehow rate her marriage. In her mind she pictured a comical Likert scale which at times indicated ‘Very Bad’ whilst at other times was closer to the ‘Very Good’. Were all marriages like theirs? Was it normal to feel like this? Why did she always have to have so much self-doubt about everything? If she doubted her very self, then perhaps it was understandable that she doubted the success of her marriage. Was it her self-destructive side taking over? The side that refused to let her enjoy happiness and always try to destroy what made her happy. Even on this blissful day there was a small inner voice inside her that kept reminding her that such a perfect day could not last. A voice which told her that something bad was about to happen. But did it have to be so? Was her subconscious creating this negativity in her life or was it her external environment? Was she trying to sabotage her marriage by the paranoia of the notebooks she kept, or was Ben really covering up something sinister?

  The thunderstorm was drawing nearer. The time of sunshine and bliss was over. The picnic things had been packed and the children were half asleep on the drive home. The black clouds of doom and destruction were forming, getting denser and thicker so that they resembled poisonous, toxic smoke rather than clouds. Julia couldn’t put a finger on how they had started to form or about why they were forming; all she knew was that something had changed. Something had occurred. Maybe it was something she had said or maybe it was something which Ben had said or maybe they hadn’t said anything, but a thought had just struck Ben’s mind, it didn’t really matter what it had been what was more important was what it had caused. Julia had seen it for that split second in the way he had looked at her when she got in the car. It was the look a stranger would give cold and unemotional. It was far from the look of her beloved husband.

  Julia could draw the curtains tightly and turn up the radio to block out the sound of the thunderstorm outside, yet nothing would cover the fact that a thunderstorm was raging dangerously close to what was dearest to her. There was something threatening her. It was something that threatened her marriage. It was something that threatened to harm her children. She did not know what it was. She knew that whatever it was frightened her and that whatever it was, was very powerful and very real.

  Julia started to dose off in the car and the dream she dreamt was so vivid that she wasn’t quite sure whether she had dreamt it or whether she was still awake. She dreamt that she was all alone in a dark African forest. Looking down she realised that she was completely naked and barefoot. There was a crowd of villagers around her, she knew they were dark skinned and were covered in some sort of paint; however her vision was fuzzy as if she had forgotten to put in her lenses. She couldn’t make out the expressions on their faces or the contours of their visages. She couldn’t make out whether they were threatening her or friendly towards her. She stood in the middle of a large circle. The villagers held torches and on the ground in front of her was a stretch of red hot coals like some sadomasochistic catwalk. The villagers were egging her on and Julia was walking on the red hot coals. At first she did not feel anything. She did not feel any pain. The only emotion she felt was the humiliation of being naked in front of so many strangers and then it happened. She was almost half-way through when all of a sudden the pain shot right through her. It engulfed her completely and she screamed out in fear. It was a pain she had never felt before and she was rooted to the spot in terror. She couldn’t decide whether she needed to run back or forward. Which was the shortest way out? She couldn’t see the end of the coals because of her fuzzy eyesight combined with the darkness. The heat from the coals was burning her legs and her entire body. She smelt burnt flesh as if she were being burnt alive. Then all of a sudden she felt herself lifted up by some spiritual force only to be thrown down into a dark pit. She heard terrible sounds from around her, the sounds of despair and terr
or. It was the sound of the sinners in Dante’s Inferno. The blackness was all around her so now Julia could not see her limbs, she still felt pain all around her yet she did not know whether this pain was emanating from her limbs or her soul. It was pure terror, something she had never felt before. The pain made her shake and tremble so vigorously that it somehow shook her out of this state and she woke up feeling confused and hot so that it took her a while to realise that she was still in the car safe amongst her loved ones.

  Chapter 24

  Later on that evening the children went to bed early, they were exhausted from the time spent outdoors and the long drive in the car. The weather was now considerably colder and Ben had started up the fireplace. The chimney needed cleaning as the fire was smoking, causing the air inside to feel heavy. Julia knew that she would wake up the next day with the smell from the fireplace still clinging to her hair; however, she loved the cosy atmosphere it created. They rarely lit the fireplace relying mainly on their central heating to warm the house; however, when they did light it, it felt magical. It reminded Julia of her carefree youth curled up on the sofa playing board-games with her sister. Now she was curled up on their sofa, she had cleared up the kitchen and emptied out the picnic basket which was now stored away back up in the loft. She had opened a glass of merlot and had spent the last hour cuddling with Ben on the sofa downstairs, hardly saying anything, just watching the flickering flames. Ben had the beginnings of a cold, so he was preparing to go to bed. She could hear the sounds of water splashing as he brushed his teeth. It always amused her how noisy he was at getting this simple task done. She could hear him gurgling, the water and spitting in the sink from downstairs. The warmth of the fireplace was causing her to get sleepy; however, she wanted to check her work email before going to bed. Now was the quietest time to do so because trying to reply to her emails with the children awake was a pointless task.

  Julia dragged herself up from the sofa slipping her feet into her comfortable bedroom slippers and walked to the garage. The garage had an interconnecting door to the house so she didn’t have to go outside to access the car which was parked in the garage. She was glad of this as it had just started to rain and she could hear the pattering of the raindrops increasing in their intensity by the minute. The laptop bag was not on the passenger seat where she usually left it. She looked on the back seat and on the car floor just in case, realising that she must have forgotten the laptop at work. She tried to recall her day at work yesterday and felt certain that she had placed the laptop in its bag but must have left it on her desk. She didn’t remember carrying the laptop back to the car. She had been carrying a hamper filled with wine and goodies; it was a gift from one of their many suppliers and she had been carrying her checked umbrella and her large Louis Vuitton bag, so she couldn’t have possibly been carrying the laptop too, as there was no way she could have managed to open the car door.

  “Oh sugar, how stupid I am!” she muttered crossly to herself, she had got into the habit of saying this in an attempt to cut down on her use of bad language in front of the kids.

  There was nothing she could do she would have to check her emails from Ben’s work laptop. She much preferred using hers because she would only be able to reply to the email without being able to send any attachments which were all saved on her computer, but at least she could still check her email from his computer since it was a webmail account.

  Since Emma had turned ten the home computer had been transferred into the girls’ computer upstairs with the excuse that Emma needed the PC to carry out her homework, this however meant that the times Julia could actually use it was limited. Julia did not mind, especially now that she had her own laptop from the office, in fact she rarely used the home PC anymore and only did so if she needed to print out something as her work laptop was not connected to their home printer.

  Ben’s black laptop bag was resting alongside his brown leather briefcase in the entrance hall downstairs. Julia took the bag to the cosy sitting room and opened the laptop. She pressed the top left hand key twice; however, the laptop still did not start up. She then realised that the laptop’s battery must be dead.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” she moaned in sheer exasperation.

  This meant that she would have to check her emails from the kitchen where she had an easily accessible socket, as the ones in the living room were all taken up with the TV, DVD player and the decoder. The kitchen was considerably colder than the sitting room and the hard counter stools were far less comfortable than the luxurious leather sofa. Julia plugged in the charger and the laptop immediately came to life. She keyed in the password incorrectly twice before she realised that she had keyed in their home PC password and only managed to enter the third time when she typed in their wedding anniversary date. Ben was so predictable in his choice of passwords they all revolved around birthdays, their wedding day and a combination of their names.

  Ben’s desktop was empty having just a few shortcuts. It was a far cry from Julia’s desktop which had around forty icons. Ben had repeatedly told her that this was not good practice as it tended to slow down the laptop; however she kept on piling the desktop with most of the documents she was working on. Ben’s laptop was clean and tidy, unlike Julia’s which often had fingerprints on the screen, crumbs between the keys and even coffee marks on the external side where she had placed down her mug on the closed laptop.

  Julia immediately clicked on the chrome icon to open her webmail account; Ben was calling her from upstairs to come to bed. She didn’t want him to know that she was obsessively checking her work emails; because he would rightly point out that she wasn’t being paid to be available round the clock. The last thing she felt like hearing was this, although she knew that it was the truth. She quickly skimmed through the unopened emails. There were only three new emails so it did not take long. She typed out a quick reply to the first email, quickly rechecking for any spelling or syntactical errors before sending off the email and the other two emails were internal ones so she replied to these less formally and she was done.

  Julia logged off from her email account and exited the browser. Her fingers were already on the laptop’s mouse pad and she was just about to shut down the laptop when curiosity got the better of her. One of the icons on the laptop was that of Ben’s email. Before she even knew it Julia had clicked on the icon. It was too late now and she had opened up his email account which did not require another password. Ben’s email account was even neater than the computer desktop. Ben had a few unopened emails which stood out in bold, whereas the rest were all saved neatly under various folders. Some of these folders had dates whereas others had more general categories. They were listed alphabetically under each other. Julia was impressed by how well Ben sorted out his emails. There were folders labelled finances, backups, budget, banking, taxes, bills and receipts, credit reports, government, insurance, tenders, programmes, forecast the list went on and on. One folder which caught her eye was labelled personal. Julia clicked on it, at this point she was really getting carried away; however, Ben had called her again and she was rushing through things as quickly as possible. The folder opened to annoyingly reveal a whole list of subfolders. These were labelled photos, letters, bills, household finances, school, there were folders with the children’s names, one labelled private lessons, home insurance, life-policy etc. there were dozens of folders all listed alphabetically. Julia exited the email folder and clicked on the documents icon. Here again the folders were categorised in a very similar way to the ones she had seen in the email folder. There were no word documents saved in the documents folder, unless they were placed in their relative folder, unlike Julia’s folders; because when she actually remembered not to save the documents on her desktop she would just place them under the documents folder and it was already becoming a nightmare to retrieve certain documents, especially if she couldn’t recall what she had named the documents. Perhaps this should be one of her New Year’s Resolutions for the coming year, be
efing up her IT skills and becoming more organised: after all this complimented the image of professionalism and perfection which she was striving hard to portray.

  Julia was about to exit the folder when she spotted the personal folder. The urge to open it was too strong and once again it was organised in a very clear structure very similar to the email folders. Julia’s eyes scrolled down the list of folders when something caught her attention. There was a folder which was not present in the email folders. The folder which caught her attention was the one sandwiched in between the ‘school’ and the ‘stocks and shares’ folder it was a folder called ‘Sophia’. Julia froze. She could hear Ben persistently calling her to switch off and come to bed; however, it was as if the rest of time had come to a halt. Her heart had stopped beating and for a brief moment she could picture herself sitting in front of that laptop, huddled over the keyboard in her thin pyjamas. She felt her skin go cold and hot at the same time and her stomach lurched as if it had just been caught out doing something very bad. For a brief second she thought she would be sick but then the nausea abated and she started to shiver.