The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (21 page)

‘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.

‘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.