The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (2 page)

It was my grandmother’s picture that caught my eye that night. After her arrival in England, she cut off her long blonde hair, burned it and henceforth wore it dark and clipped like a man. At that moment, I felt as though she was staring down at me, judging me for my weakness and my cowardice. I could hear her harsh cough, impeaching and accusatory; her hazel eyes burned holes into my paper skin. I knew then that I had to make a choice. I had grown so very weak during my time in the cottage. I had been unable to eat; my stock of tinned soup remained almost untouched. I could have faded away peacefully there. How I wish I had. I could have spared so many people so much suffering. But instead I decided to face the consequences of my failure to complete the manuscript, and all the other conflicts from which I had been hiding – your wrath, Amanda’s reproaches, Laura’s disappointment. I forced myself to eat some soup. The next morning – it was 6 November – I drove back to London. At home, I immediately switched my phone on to call you and confess, ready to do penance. But then I found Julia’s lawyer’s message, offering a glimmer of hope. The following morning, I visited Julia, and later that day... well, you know the rest of the story, although I will tell you my own version of it in due course.

Yesterday evening, while Amanda was talking to the doctors, I asked Laura to go into my flat to find my diary and all the materials and documents I had gathered on Julia’s case, and to bring them here: the folder with the interview transcriptions, my notebooks, my laptop, paper and my favourite fountain pen, the black one. She knows where it all is. Unlike my sister, I can always rely on Laura. Even now, in spite of everything, she still has faith in my judgement. How I regret the hurt I must have caused her.

I owe you an explanation, George – and, in due course, Laura and Amanda, too. I can’t bear the thought that you should think ill of me. And I need to make sense of it all, to find some way of holding at bay the dreadful guilt that is tearing me apart. I will write it down. Everything. How it all happened. How it got to this.

I have to stop now, as day is breaking and my back hurts and the nurses will be here soon. Please don’t be angry with me, George. I really did try my best – it simply wasn’t good enough.

Don’t visit or contact me until I get in touch. I need to commit my story to paper before I am ready to see you in person. There is so much you need to know first. I will send you the document when my tale is told. I don’t know how long it will take. In any case, I will have a lot of time on my hands while awaiting the trial – and who knows how much time thereafter. Years? Decades? I don’t think they will keep me here for that much longer. I will no doubt soon be moved to lodgings patrolled by guards rather than nurses. But that suits me fine, since I will be able to write my story better in a cell than in a bed.

With much love,

Clare

EDITORIAL NOTE

Clare Hardenberg is the most talented non-fiction writer I know, and we have been working together for more than sixteen years. She first caught my attention when she was writing for the
Guardian
; I much admired her clear, strong voice, her wit, her verbal precision, and her courage. I liked one of her articles so much that I contacted her to ask whether she would be interested in writing a book on the topic. She was, and her first as well as all her subsequent books proved to be so successful that, ten years ago, she was able to give up her day job and work as a freelance writer. Clare has published thirteen books, four under her own name, the others ghost-written; five have been bestsellers and three have been honoured with awards.
Why Your Sneakers Kill
(2006) won the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Yet Clare’s life was marked by two tragedies, and I am convinced that the second wouldn’t have taken place without the first. I feel responsible for both, as they resulted directly from the books I commissioned her to write. The reader will no doubt recall the scandalous revelations concerning the investment banker Adrian Temple, whose reckless actions brought ruin and misery to legions of small-time investors. It was Clare who meticulously collected the distasteful evidence, which was published in what is arguably her most important book,
The Deal
(2009). Alas, in spite of what seemed to be a clear-cut case, Temple was never convicted of his crimes. Instead it was Clare who was tried and charged with libel, for a trivial detail that had nothing to do with the main thrust of the case. We couldn’t protect her, as the charges related to statements she made in interviews that followed the publication of her book. After the trial, Clare was ordered to pay damages and the court costs. She kept her head above water by ghosting biographies, but I knew that she was bitterly disillusioned.

Over the past four years, I didn’t see her very much; she had become ever more reclusive. I thought of her often, and I felt guilty. Once in a blue moon I managed to convince her to let me take her out for dinner, and it hurt me to see her so dejected, her sharp wit dulled, her spirit broken. I owed her. When she approached me to ask if she could write Julia White’s biography I thought it a brilliant idea. It was the first time since the Temple trial that she had expressed a desire to work on a serious topic again. And Clare, I felt, was just the right person to tackle this important and complex task. I strongly believed that the biography would give her the opportunity to demonstrate her true worth as a writer. Yet, sadly, the project morphed into a poison much more dangerous than the wound it was supposed to heal.

At first, all seemed to be going well. Clare sent me regular updates that sounded promising, but then they became rarer and finally dried up. I had grown apprehensive about three months into the project, as she was ignoring my messages. This was very unlike her. We had agreed on the submission of the manuscript within fourteen weeks. Five days before the submission date, I waited all night outside her flat to confront her, but she must already have been at her cottage in Kent. I had a bad feeling, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I didn’t have her sister’s contact details – psychoanalysts are notorious for keeping their phone numbers private – and none of our mutual friends had heard from Clare for a long time.

Then, on 8 November, the day after the deadline, I bought the papers and there she was on every front page: emaciated, a wild look in her eyes, her auburn bob dirty and dishevelled, her hands handcuffed behind her back. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. In the first instance, and quite likely as a result of her sister’s lobbying, she had been placed in the secure unit of a psychiatric hospital, where she was to await her trial. I tried to see her straight away, but she refused to receive any visitors apart from her sister and niece.

Then, seven days after her arrest, I received Clare’s letter, in which she promised me an explanation. Eleven weeks later, Laura came to see me in my office and brought me Clare’s long confessional letter, which I had been awaiting anxiously and devoured in one sitting.

At the earliest opportunity, I visited Clare in the grim all-female prison to which she had been transferred a fortnight after her arrest. When I first saw her in the visitors’ room I found, to my great relief, a woman who more or less resembled the Clare I had known before her breakdown: she still looked terribly thin and pale, but otherwise appeared fine. Her eyes were alert and had regained their luminosity. She neither looked nor acted like a mad person. She smiled her usual warm smile. We hugged. It took us a long time to recover our composure and even longer before we managed to speak.

I have visited her on every single one of her visiting days since; we had and have so much to talk about – both personal and professional. I think she found our conversations helpful, but whether I was able to provide the answers she so desperately needed from me I don’t know. I sincerely doubt it. I did, however, gradually manage to convince her to allow me to publish her text. I felt very strongly that Clare’s story, as well as the interviews she had collected, and especially the one with Julia, needed to be published. I believe that, taken as a whole, the different narratives about Julia that Clare managed to assemble do indeed answer some of the questions with which we have all been wrestling in the aftermath of the terror. Clare’s own story, moreover, has of course become a matter of public interest in its own right. Clare’s act polarized the country: there are some who openly admire her – she showed me the bags of fan mail she receives every week, and I couldn’t believe my eyes – but also many who strongly condemn her action. The book you are about to read is as much Clare’s story as it is Julia’s. It was, for her, no longer possible to disentangle the two.

George Cohen
(Cohen & Green Publishing)

London, May 2015

I

Where to begin, George? Time is not the problem – the heap of shapeless moments I am facing, demanding to be structured and filled, is growing more menacing every day. Three nights in a row now I’ve dreamed I was trying to cross a stretch of marshland, but I couldn’t move, the mud gluing my feet to the ground and then, slowly, dragging me under. Four days ago I was declared sane and stable (in spite of Amanda’s protests) and was transferred to my new abode. I’ve been spared the horror of having to share my cell, for which I am immensely grateful. I have always cherished my privacy, and I couldn’t bear it if what little of it remains here were to be taken from me. But most importantly, I can now write whenever I feel like it – at night, at noon, at four in the morning when I snap awake. My cell contains a narrow single bed with a squeaking plastic mattress and coarse covers; the walls are painted a shade of ochre that makes me feel nauseous whenever I look at it for too long. I also have a small TV set, some wobbly shelves and a small plywood wardrobe. But the most essential items are a little wooden desk, into which numerous previous occupants have carved an intricate pattern of initials and expletives, and a small red metal chair.

I dread the encounters with the other inmates, those moments in the day when I have to leave my cell and when small talk is required: in the showers, at mealtimes and during the mandatory daily courtyard outings. I have entirely lost the ability to think of normal things to say, to anyone, and I constantly wonder whether the women here know what I did and why I am among them. I feel as though they are watching me, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I don’t think I have either the strength or the willpower to defend myself. In fact, a part of me wishes they would just get on with it and put an end to all this.

Curiously, it is not the creature comforts I miss most – such as food that is actually edible (what they serve here sinks like wet cement to the bottom of our stomachs and renders its victims simultaneously overweight and undernourished). Neither, to my own surprise, do I miss alcohol (my cravings for the state of comfortable numbness that I had sought so regularly in the past few years have disappeared completely), and nor do I miss my soft green velvet sofa, my books, my film collection, and my comfortable bed.

But I do miss company. Although Amanda and Laura faithfully visit twice a week, and call every day, I feel as lonely as never before in my life. The gaps, both old and new, are looming so ominously. I cherish my visiting day more than anything, even if I can barely summon the courage to look Amanda and Laura in the eye. And I miss Aisha. Badly. Every time I wake up, during those few seconds it takes the mind to re-orientate itself in space and time, I turn to touch her, my hand expecting in vain to find her curled up into a furry ball on the duvet right next to me. But what I miss most is having a project. Aims. Something to do. The human animal is lost without tasks. They are what keep us functioning; without desires, without something on which to concentrate our energies, we have nothing to distract us from the abyss.

I need to choose a starting point. I will begin with the day of the attack. It was 23 July, a sweltering Wednesday, the heat having held the city in a tight, sweaty embrace for four long days. I woke up early, feeling sticky and lethargic. Aisha had fallen ill that night – small pools of vomit were scattered all over the flat, as though my wooden floorboards had developed a weeping skin disease. When I found her lying under the sofa she looked even more listless than I felt. Her moon-coloured eyes were clouded, her normally lustrous silver fur looked tarnished and knotted.

I was in my vet’s waiting room in Mayfair when the news broke. There were six other women, each nervously attending to a small ailing animal on their lap, plus the receptionist. The woman next to me (who had been preoccupied with whispering soothing words into the ear of a coughing terrier) suddenly cried: ‘Good God!’ Her mouth fell open as she stared at the television screen mounted on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk, showing the news without sound. Alarmed by the woman’s outburst, we collectively raised our eyes to the screen. ‘Christ!’ another woman shouted; ‘Holy shit!’ wailed the receptionist, who had jumped up and turned around. The vet, startled by the commotion, had joined us. Disbelief slackened our features; something bad had happened right in our midst, in central London. We had risen from our seats and put down our animals (some had been dropped rather unceremoniously), staring wide-eyed at the screen. The receptionist had turned up the sound. Thus we stood united for a few moments, a small community of the frightened. The woman next to me grabbed my hand and squeezed it so tightly that her rings left marks in my flesh.

Not much was known at that point, only that a bomb had exploded in a Café Olé branch on Paternoster Square, right next to the London Stock Exchange. There was carnage; there were casualties. I remember that the face of the young BBC correspondent, who happened to be at the scene by chance and reported live from the square, looked as ravaged as the remains of the scorched storefront, from which thin plumes of smoke were still rising, like translucent ribbons of mourning. Forensic experts in white overalls rushed in and out. They carried a seemingly endless number of black body bags past the reporter, who, stunned by the gruesome procession, kept repeating ‘They’re dead, they’re all dead, they’re all dead in there’, until a colleague took the microphone from her white hand and led her out of the picture.