Read The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel Online
Authors: Schaffner Anna
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.
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 there 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.’
After a pause, she added: ‘She played you, too, Clare, you know that, don’t you? She read your soul like an open book – you know that her kind has the capacity to discover your deepest fears and greatest desires? She smelled your wounds like a shark, and she knew exactly what to say to make you do what you did. I bet she doesn’t even believe in her own sick theories. Not for a second. I’m not even sure her rape story is true. I mean, how can you tell? You know what? I really think she said all those things just to push you over the edge. Just because she could.’
But Laura’s wrong. It’s not that simple. She’s still so young.
My serpentine seducer, with a mind of winter. Still I puzzle over the meaning of it all.
Sutton Valence, Maidstone, May 2015
I am indebted to Agnès Cardinal, Andreas Essl and Hubert van den Berg for reading early drafts of the novel and for their astute feedback, and to Sarah Savitt and Sam Copeland, my tutors at the Faber Academy, for their excellent advice, which helped me to shape and develop the novel, as well as the other students on Faber’s ‘Edit Your Novel’ course, whose passion and determination was inspiring.
Thanks are also due to Francesco Capello, Jeremy Carrette, Laurence Goldstein, Katja Haustein, Deborah Holmes, Ben Hutchinson, Heide Kunzelmann, Gordon Lynch, Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Lucy O’Meara, Natalia Sobrevilla Perrea, Axel Stähler, Núria Triana Toribio and Mikkel Zangenberg for being amazing colleagues, and to Katharina Paschkowski, my parents, Ernst and Eva Schaffner, and Verena Trusch for moral support.
I would also like to express my gratitude to my fantastic agent, Caroline Wood, for her brilliant judgement, her support and her belief in the project, and to Amy Waite at the Felicity Bryan Literary Agency, as well as to my editors Sam Redman and Clare Drysdale at Allen & Unwin, whose perceptive comments, suggestions and enthusiasm were extremely precious.
Finally, this book would never have been written were it not for Shane Weller, love of my life, who believed in me from the start, and whose encouragement, fine judgement, sharp ideas, unremitting proof-reading skills and love made all of this possible in the first place.
Anna Schaffner is a Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. She has recently completed a Faber Academy writing course and
The Truth About Julia
is her first novel.