The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (24 page)

‘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 hope 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.’

‘But you must have talked to her, must have some impression of her character, some memories…’ I tried again. ‘In such a small, intimate shop you would get to know a co-worker quite well, wouldn’t you?’

The woman folded her arms over her chest and stared at me.

I wasn’t getting anywhere with her. I needed to change tactics. ‘Could you at least tell me a bit more about your shop, then? It looks… special. What’s your philosophy? Where do you buy your stock? Who are your typical customers?’

‘On the web.’

‘Pardon?’

‘That information is on the web.’

God, I wasn’t on form that day, George. In the past, I would have known how to crack this woman’s armour, how to chase that contemptuous frown from her forehead and get her to share her most secret thoughts with me. In just a few minutes, I would have managed to find out what she cared about most in this world and what her darkest fears were. I’d succeeded with much worse cases. But on that day I just lost it. Completely. Suddenly, all my frustration at the futility of my task and the difficulties I had encountered during this accursed project turned into anger. And it was all directed at the poor, pale creature in front of me. I’m not proud of it, George. It wasn’t my finest hour. I should send her a letter someday to apologize.

In spite of my hazy state of mind, I was still able to notice her reaction to the word ‘relationship’ and her strangely insistent assertion that she and Julia had been no more than co-workers. Clearly there was a story there. It was obvious that the woman had been hurt by Julia, just like everybody else. She had probably thought of Julia as a friend. Yes, I became convinced that the woman in front of me was the rude, pale friend Timothy and Rose had mentioned, and with whom Julia had cohabited before the attack. They might even have been lovers. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if Julia had turned to another woman for comfort. It would fit perfectly. Upon her return from South America, disgusted not just by the injustices of the global economic system but also by men in general and with her ex-boyfriend in particular, still reeling from the terrifying rape she had witnessed, alone and alienated from her former friends and family, Julia must have been looking for companionship, some human warmth. And she found it where she least expected it – in this most joyless of sanctuaries, in the shopkeeper’s bony white embrace.

‘You were lovers, weren’t you?’ I blurted out. ‘And she broke your heart. Just like everybody else’s. You’re not alone – Julia has a habit of using and then dropping people. What did she do to you? You can tell me; I’ve heard it all before.’

But the woman just continued to stare at me, cadaverously expressionless. Her dog, in contrast, had perked up, sensing the tension between us, and it had started to growl. The woman took hold of its collar.

‘I bet she stumbled in here one day,’ I continued, ‘beautiful and auratic and highly intelligent and articulate and all that, everything you ever dreamed of being, and you were completely smitten. Thunderstruck. You just melted away, and gave her everything she wanted. Didn’t you? A job, your heart, your finest crooked carrots, even a place to stay… Yes, I bet she moved straight in with you – she didn’t have anywhere to go after her parents cut off her allowance, did you know that? She must have been so desperate that even staying with someone as lacklustre and lifeless as you would have seemed acceptable. She had sunk that low, and you jumped at the chance.

‘Julia has the gift of making people feel very special when she wants something from them, you know? And you, you gave her everything, expecting gratitude, friendship, love in return, but she just took and took and never gave you anything. I bet you let her stay in your apartment, in your bed, even, hoping that once she’d recovered from all her traumatic experiences abroad, she’d appreciate what a good, decent person you are, and respond accordingly.

‘But it didn’t work out that way, did it? Instead, Julia just used your flat and your money, and soon stopped bothering to hide the fact that she found you really irritating. And boring. She began to stay out late. Sometimes, she stayed away for days. She didn’t even bother to call you to let you know; she didn’t talk to you much anymore.

‘And you suffered. You were in love with her, weren’t you? You tried desperately to please her, but no matter what you did, it didn’t work. And when you heard the news, you went straight home and burned all her notebooks and letters, so that when the police searched your flat, all they found were some old clothes and a few books. Isn’t that exactly what you did?’

The dog had started to bark ever more loudly during my crude monologue, and was straining hard against its collar, ready to attack.

‘Are you done with your crazy rant?’ the woman eventually asked in her flat, lifeless voice. ‘Then get the fuck out of here before I let the dog loose on you.’

At that moment, another woman entered the shop, and when she saw me she said: ‘Oh, you’re busy, honey. I’ll come back later.’

But the shopkeeper, whose lashless gaze remained directed at me, said: ‘No, stay. The lady was just leaving.’

And leave I did.

XVII

The date of the trial is fast approaching, and I have to see you before then; I have to speak to you and hear your thoughts, on everything, before I can face my judge and jury. I still feel so confused and bewildered; and night after night I’m visited by the apparition of that still, white face with the wide-open grey eyes. I think about the little girl all the time, George. She must be about the same age as your daughter.

After my doomed trip to Camden I once again withdrew to my apartment, like a wounded animal. On my way back from the humiliating encounter, I stopped at my local supermarket. I’d lost my appetite back in Marseille, and couldn’t muster the energy to think about food, although I was vaguely aware that my fridge and cupboards were empty. But all I managed to purchase was some whisky and crackers, as well as cat food for Aisha.

In the middle of life’s path, I found myself in the dark wood of my psyche, alone and fearful. I’d always managed to find fulfilment in my work, but now I felt adrift, deprived of the stable intellectual ground that I had always taken for granted, my moral certainties sorely shaken by the events of the past few weeks. I always used to know exactly what I thought and felt, who the bad and the good characters were, whom to trust and whose accounts to take with a pinch of salt. I used to have firm views and clear opinions. But I just didn’t know what to think anymore. And I still don’t.

Worse, the corrosion of my certainties spread like cancer. What had begun as a specific and localized crisis of faith in my work proved virulently infectious. Above all else, I felt terribly lonely – where was the partner to whom I could turn, and who would embrace me and stroke my hair and take my hand and listen to my sorrows? Where were
you
, George? You’re the one who should have been with me all along, and I don’t mean as an angry contractor, nor simply as a slightly concerned friend. It was you I needed – your mind, your body, your love. What had I done, throwing it all away so carelessly? And where was the daughter I never had, with whom I could have talked all of this through, who would be as worried about me as Laura was for Amanda when she went through her two divorces?

All I had was a crippling mountain of debt, a cat, a sister harbouring old resentments and a lovely but always busy niece. And my work, what good had it done? The biggest criminal I’d ever exposed was about to receive the highest honour in his field – like the rest of my life, my work had been in vain, a fiasco; I could just as well have saved the paper. I had to face the truth and stop pretending. Given my state of mind, I wouldn’t be able to write this book, not in two and a half weeks, not even with a massive extension of my deadline, not ever. And what was left, now that I could no longer write? Dead paper. The taste of failure in my mouth. Ashes.

I stayed at home for five long days, unable to sleep, wrestling with dark thoughts. I stopped working on my notes. I no longer knew what to think and what to believe. I simply couldn’t tell whether Julia was right or wrong, a victim or a corrupter, psychologically disturbed or politically confused, a product of our sickeningly materialist age or a brave soul staging a valid protest against its perverse values. I couldn’t decide whether she was an ice-cold monster, a psychopath, or whether she had legitimate reasons for her actions. Most of the time, I sat in a darkened room in my big armchair, wearing my pyjamas and primrose-coloured dressing gown, drinking too much, trying but failing to get things clear in my head. I’d put my phone on silent; its ring-tune hurt my head.

I thought about calling my sister a few times, to talk things through with her. But I just knew what her spiel would be – psychoanalysts are so predictable. I could hear her explaining the effects on a young woman’s psyche of finding out she was adopted and had been lied to for all those years by those whose responsibility it was to provide her with love and support. I could also hear her reflecting more generally on cold mothers with high expectations and weak, adoring fathers who love their daughters far too much. Like a vulture that has spotted carrion, Amanda would focus on Julia’s alleged emotional and sexual coldness, which she would interpret as a perverse amplification of her mother’s own detachment and affective dysfunctionality. Then she would spin theories about early infant-mother bonding problems, and argue that Julia’s murderous revenge fantasies about her ‘bad’ mothers (the real one who abandoned her, and Rose) had not been contained, which is why they resurfaced in a murderous act many years later. But this blaming-the-mother culture has always made me deeply uneasy, George. It’s a dangerous path to tread.

Julia, Amanda would say, developed typical narcissistic defence mechanisms at a very young age. In my mind I could also hear Amanda explaining in great detail the repercussions for Julia’s vulnerable psyche of the traumatic moment when she witnessed her father kissing her music teacher – a double rival. She would then move on to what always constitutes the climax of any of her analyses, and it was this, the anticipation of yet another dull discourse on Oedipal triangles, that nipped in the bud my desire to call her. I’d heard that particular narrative too many times, and although I appreciate many of the often brilliant and much more nuanced insights that psychoanalysis can offer, the Oedipus complex has always struck me as a highly overrated cliché. I just couldn’t face it.

On the afternoon of 22 October, numb and intoxicated, and for the first time since my return from Marseille, I managed to find the courage to open my email, and listlessly skim-read the 211 email headers that aggressively announced their unread status in bold, reproachful letters. A relatively recent one, flagged as urgent, caught my attention – ‘VICTIM WANTS TO MEET YOU – RESPOND!’ it read. It turned out to be from you (as were at least fifty other emails).

‘Christ, Clare, WHERE ARE YOU? Can you please ANSWER MY EMAILS AND MY CALLS?’ it read. ‘Grace Taylor, one of the victims who survived the coffee-shop bombing, heard about the book project and contacted me. She wants to meet you. Please call her as a MATTER OF URGENCY.’

So call her I did. Grace Taylor’s voice sounded like the deep murmur of a mountain stream lapping gently against moss-covered rocks. When I introduced myself she simply said, ‘Yes, Clare, hello. I’ve been expecting your call. When would be a good time for you to come and see me?’

We agreed to meet the following day, at eleven o’clock in the morning. This would leave me enough time to make myself presentable, and to cover up some of the traces the previous weeks had left in my face. When I put my trousers on I realized I must have lost weight – I needed a belt to keep them in place. My blazer, too, felt baggier than it used to. I hadn’t eaten anything much apart from crackers; everything else I’d consumed was of a liquid nature.