The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (3 page)

Only a few minutes had gone by while we were taking in the facts, and none of us had moved or spoken. Then, as though a spell had been lifted, we began to search for our phones and tried to reach our loved ones. Suddenly there was chaos in the room – everyone was shouting to make themselves understood. I called Amanda, who had not yet heard about the attack, and who was so shocked that she was unable to say anything at all. When she finally recovered her speech, she just whispered ‘Laura’, and I let her off the line so that she could call her daughter. I wanted nothing more than to call Laura myself – I was sick with worry – but the first call was Amanda’s prerogative. The vet tried to reach her husband, but was unable to get through to him and grew ever more panicky – he worked in a bank just around the corner from the scene of the bombing, and often ate lunch in one of the restaurants on the square. After a few failed attempts she told us the practice was closed for the day and to return tomorrow. Only then did we remember our animals, who had begun to wail pitifully: dumbstruck, afraid, feeling the terror but unable either to articulate or to make sense of it, they appeared to me an apt image of our traumatized nation. Aisha, who is usually the gentlest of souls and whose grotesquely raised hair made her look like a woollen blowfish, scratched me when I tried to put her back in the carrier.

I drove straight to Amanda’s house in Golders Green. She had just seen her last patient of the day. We hugged hard and long. She and I spent the rest of the day glued to the television screen, making and taking phone calls, and waiting anxiously for news from Laura. Most networks were down – there was too much traffic in the air. Late in the afternoon, Laura finally joined us. When the attack happened, she had been busy selling salads, sandwiches and cakes in the Blue Nile, an organic fair-trade café in Bloomsbury that she had set up with her friend Moira two years before. It took her almost five hours to get home, as numerous stations had been shut down for security reasons and the entire Tube system was so overcrowded that she had to wait for an hour before she could get on a train, and another hour to get on one of the replacement buses to continue her journey. All of London seemed to be out swarming on the streets, like frenzied bees whose hive had been violated.

Laura was visibly shaken by the apocalyptic scenes she had witnessed on her way home. When things go wrong, the thin veneer of civilized behaviour that we think of as natural wears off as quickly as make-up in the rain. People, Laura said, got into ugly fights to secure places on the overcrowded buses; an old man brutally pushed a girl out of the bus to make room for his wife. The girl fell on her face and didn’t move, and nobody got off to help her (Laura was pressed tightly against a window on the upper deck, from where she could see but not intervene). When the bus was full to breaking point the driver was too scared to stop at the designated stops, where angry mobs were waiting to get on, prepared to use violence to fight for their right to get home.

The three of us sat closely huddled together on the sofa all evening and stayed up until the early hours. We kept pressing each other’s hands and stared at the TV in disbelief. Around midnight, when the identity of the attacker was revealed, the shock was almost worse than the one I had experienced in the vet’s waiting room when the story first broke. Nobody was prepared for this. I suppose we all assumed that a group of fanatical Islamists, angry alienated jihadists with nothing to lose, were responsible. When the bomber’s picture first flickered across our screens, I (and I am sure the rest of the nation, too) thought that this had to be a mistake. I found myself incapable of establishing a connection between the image of the beautiful, earnest-looking young woman and the other pictures we had seen – the twenty-two body bags lined up in a grim, neat row on Paternoster Square, and the footage of the victims who had survived, and of the relatives of the dead howling in pain, burying their faces in their hands, and of the terrible scene of devastation that gaped like a raw, deep wound right in the heart of our city.

Something struck me about Julia White’s face, from the moment I first saw it. I couldn’t quite articulate it then. I thought it at once utterly alien and at the same time uncannily familiar. Above all I was fascinated by the serenity of her gaze: her still, slightly slanted green eyes in that finely chiselled, delicately pale face suggested an old-souled wisdom, someone who has seen more than their fair share of sadness and suffering, and yet there was something else in those eyes that I couldn’t quite fathom. Julia was looking straight into the camera, her full lips unsmiling, her expression strangely unreadable. There was an unsettling contrast between her disconcerting gaze and her soft, milky-white skin. In that first picture to enter the public domain (many others were to follow) her long chestnut-brown hair was tied back into a bun, and she was wearing a crisp white man’s shirt and a grey sleeveless pullover. Like an Oxford student from the seventies; perhaps with a hint of Marlene Dietrich. As I learned later, this picture was taken four years before the attacks, one month before Julia dropped out of university and went travelling.

I think the seeds for what happened later were sown the very moment I saw that picture (and that particular image was to remain the one that haunted me – it still does): I simply couldn’t imagine what might have led a beautiful, highly intelligent young woman, privileged in all sorts of ways, to perpetrate the most ruthless terrorist act that had been committed in Britain since the Lockerbie bombing and the 7/7 attacks. I think the most disturbing thing was that she appeared to be so very much
like us
– twenty-seven, just two years older than Laura, and similar in so many ways. I could picture the two of them chatting away in Laura’s café and becoming friends. Julia could have been my daughter. She reminded me of my younger self – confident and idealistic, driven by an unshakeable trust in the idea that it is possible to shape the future. From the very start, Julia’s face touched something in me, bringing back the memory of things I had lost and for which I must have been mourning – much more strongly than I was aware. In that picture in particular, she looked so proud and safe and at home in her skin and her beliefs. I found myself vacillating between fascination and disgust – after all, this woman had blood, so much blood, on her hands.

On the day following the terror attack, Julia’s ‘manifesto’ was published on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The number of her victims had risen to twenty-three, and one woman, still in a critical condition, would later succumb to her injuries, bringing the total to two dozen. Apart from the manifesto, Julia, who had turned herself in to the police straight after the attack, remained silent. She refused to see anyone but her lawyer. She refused all contact with her family. She refused to receive friends and members of the various political groups to which she had belonged. She refused to speak to journalists. Even during her trial, she never uttered a word. It was almost as though her silence was her second, perhaps even crueller attack: she simply refused to grace us with an explanation.

Her manifesto rehearsed some standard anti-capitalist slogans and a few anti-globalization catchphrases. She denounced the unethical exploitation of workers in the so-called Third World; she decried the apolitical consumerism that dominates our age and the shocking lack of public interest in the suffering of the oppressed in countries other than our own; and she called for a radical rethinking of neoliberal economic policies that pursue growth at all costs. But the manifesto’s rhetoric was strangely unimaginative and lacklustre. I couldn’t help feeling that she was mocking the idea of manifesto-writing, or perhaps even political activism as such. I feared it was nothing but a teaser, a deliberate slap in the face for those in search of answers.

Unsurprisingly, as Julia remained shtum, others began to speak in her stead – both about her and (unauthorized, of course) on her behalf. A chorus of overexcited voices populated the airwaves and flooded the print media, trying to drown out Julia’s uncanny silence. Anecdotes, half-truths, legends and myths soon began to circulate and multiply at an astounding speed. People from all professions were anxious to categorize and analyse Julia and her acts, to explain and thus somehow to master them. Predictably, psychologists and psychiatrists were the most sought-after talk-show guests – psychology, after all, is still the most apolitical and reconciliatory master narrative out there, as everything can safely be explained with recourse to Mummy’s or Daddy’s lack of unconditional love for their offspring (I feel like Amanda just kicked me hard in the shin from afar). But there were also politicians, historians, sociologists, economists, teachers, theologians – the line-up of so-called terrorism experts eager to share their views on the matter was endless. Was Julia ill or evil, pathological or a sinner? A victim of false ideology or a dangerously deluded radical? A disturbed maverick or an alarmingly symptomatic product of our perverse age? Should the professed political justification of her deed be debated seriously, or was she simply a nihilistic sadist? How did she fit in with her terrorist cousins – Latin American guerrilla fighters, IRA activists, the German Red Army Faction, Islamist suicide bombers, militant animal-rights campaigners? What did the anti-globalization movement, the causes of which she had seemingly embraced in her manifesto, make of her? Had she acted alone or were there others who had supported her? And who were the parents who had produced this spawn of the devil?

Julia’s life-story became the stuff of endless speculation, and the fact that she was beautiful and silent only fuelled the public’s interest further. I admit that I, too, was spellbound from the very start – my fascination consisted mainly of repulsion and horror, but also awe. I don’t mean that I was in any way condoning or admiring her horrendous act – of course not; I have seen the human cost of her ugly work. I think what I felt was a general kind of admiration for radical mindsets, for people who are not prepared to compromise, who have visions so strong they defend them with their lives, and who courageously dedicate their entire existence to ideas, regardless of the consequences. In our exhausted political landscape this species is almost extinct. Think about it: what forms of serious political activism are left today? Our streets are populated by swarms of twee retro-fetishists and bearded hipsters with ironic spectacles, who appear to believe that drinking flat whites in cafés that play ukulele music and buying chia seeds and black quinoa in wholefood shops are worthwhile political statements in their own right.

I devoured every single article about Julia, and I had numerous discussions with Amanda about her that usually resulted in heated disagreements. Although I don’t deny the attraction of psychoanalytical explanatory models, I simply don’t believe that they can account for
everything
, as Amanda does. You, too, George, confessed to me once that you found Amanda’s views curiously limited, blind to all political and historical considerations. In addition, Amanda soon made it clear that she felt I had become unhealthily obsessed with Julia White – of course she had many a theory up her sleeve to explain
why
Julia appealed to me so, and
what
she appealed to in me, but I refused to listen. Maybe, with hindsight, I should have.

Then I decided to transform my obsession into something productive. It made complete sense: I would write Julia White’s biography. I would try to unravel the mystery of her strange allure and at the same time turn my research into a much-needed new book. For the first time since the trial, I felt strong enough to tackle a serious project. I didn’t even need to convince you. This was the first project since the accursed trial that wasn’t just a bread-and-butter job, which you had kindly pushed my way and that came with an acceptable cheque that would go towards paying off my debts. The biography was my chance to shake off my sense of failure, the conviction that I was a sell-out. I had been producing nothing but shallow entertainment porn since 2010, and you can’t imagine how much that hurt. I used to live and breathe for my work – it meant
everything
to me. It was all I had. I’m sorry, George – I am of course infinitely grateful for every job you sent my way, and I am acutely aware that you reserved the most lucrative commissions for me, but they did inevitably also tend to be the most facile ones. I had been living like a ghost for the past four years; I felt so hollow.

The generous advance you negotiated for me was of course also more than welcome – my finances were (and still are) a mess so horrific to behold that I had left the task to a trusted financial adviser, who fed me only manageable nuggets of information when she felt I was able to cope. The last I had heard from her was that it would take me at least fifteen years to clear my debt – provided the commercial commissions kept coming in regularly.

I admit that I was also attracted by the challenge. It was clear that I had to research and write the book as quickly as possible, as other publishers would want to cash in on the Julia hype, too. It was a race both against time and against the competition – whoever got their book out first would win the lion’s share of the potentially vast number of readers interested in Julia’s story. I had set myself the ambitious task of delivering the complete manuscript in only fourteen weeks.

But time wasn’t the only problem: since it was clear from the start that the subject of my book wouldn’t grant me an interview, I would instead have to gather all my materials from the people who knew her best. That, too, would be far from easy, but I was used to dealing with difficulties of that kind. I had written three unauthorized celebrity biographies under extreme time pressure before (of a young pop star who had taken too many horse tranquillizers and lost her mind, a suicidal TV chef, and a firmly facelifted politician with a penchant for parading through our numerous reality TV shows in outfits that are too tight and too bright). I was confident I would be able to master this one, too. I used to win people’s trust easily. I could get almost anyone to reveal their secrets to me.