The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (6 page)

‘Come on, Tobe, be a gentleman,’ one of his friends sitting on the other side of the room shouted.

‘Just do it, you coward,’ another one cried. Everyone was laughing and firing Tobias on.

Tobias looked totally embarrassed for a while, but then shrugged and finally said, in a resigned voice, ‘OK, just one quick kiss to make you happy then.’

Just as he bent over to plant a quick kiss on my lips, cheered on by the entire room, Julia came back down. Everybody fell silent at once. For a split second, she just stood there and looked at us. Her skin was alabaster-white, her eyes were narrow green slits and her lips pressed together so tightly that they’d turned white, too. She looked like an angry goddess about to wreak havoc, but who didn’t really know where to begin. She let her gaze travel slowly across the room. She looked at Tobias, and at the half-empty beer bottle in my hand, and then she looked at Tobias again.

Tobias got up immediately and said, ‘Look, Julia, don’t get angry, it’s not what it looks like. We were just having fun. Amy asked me to... ’

But Julia interrupted him. ‘How
dare
you,’ she said very quietly. Her voice cut through the room like a whiplash. What followed happened very quickly. She walked over to where Tobias and I were sitting. She stood right up against Tobias and looked at him for a few seconds that felt like an eternity. Everyone was holding their breath. Then she took the half-empty beer bottle from my hand, and smashed it down on Tobias’s head. He howled, and sank to his knees, holding his forehead in his hands. Blood was beginning to trickle from a small wound on his left temple.

‘For fuck’s sake. Damn you,’ he shouted. ‘You’re totally mad, Julia. It was a bloody
game
– your sister
asked
me to kiss her.’

But Julia wasn’t interested in his story. ‘That’ll teach you, you piece of shit,’ she hissed. Then she grabbed me by the hand and dragged me outside. We walked home in silence. I was crying, and Julia was still pulling my hand and going far too quickly for me to keep up. I wanted to tell her that it was true and that I’d asked Tobias to kiss me, but I didn’t dare. Eventually, she stopped her frantic walking and took me in her arms. She, too, was crying at that point.

‘I’m so sorry, Amy. I’m so sorry, forgive me, forgive me,’ she kept saying. ‘I’ll never leave you alone again like that in a room full of hormonal drunken arseholes, I promise.’

Again I wanted to tell her what had really happened, but she stopped me: ‘Hush, hush, now, it’s fine, let’s not talk about it anymore.’

Julia never spoke to anyone who was at that party again. I know I should have told her what had really happened, but I was too ashamed, and too scared to provoke her anger and lose her affection. It was all I had and cared for, you know? I’m not proud of it. Much later, I was to lose her affection anyway, but for a totally different reason.

When Julia was seventeen she started to do volunteer work at a homeless shelter, where she helped in the soup kitchen one evening a week. She also worked at an Oxfam shop on Saturday afternoons. And she founded a debating society at school, and led a weekly discussion group on current political issues. The debates quickly became super-popular, and a huge crowd regularly flocked to the school library on Thursday afternoons to listen to Julia and her provocative speeches.

I still followed Julia like a shadow at the beginning of that year, and tried to help with all her initiatives. At the homeless shelter, for example, Julia chatted away to the shelter’s visitors while they had their meals in the dining room, and in the meantime I’d collect their empty plates and put them in the dishwasher, clean up the kitchen and serve seconds, and things like that. Unlike Julia, I’m hopeless at small talk. But Julia was really interested in the stories of the homeless – she wanted to know everything about them: where they came from, what they’d done in the past, how they had ended up on the street, how they were spending their days, what they thought of government policies on tackling homelessness, and so on. The shelter crowd adored Julia – they called her ‘angel’ and felt incredibly flattered by her interest in them. They had a glow in their eyes when they spoke to her, and some even cried when she touched them – she often took their hands in hers, rubbed their backs, and removed leaves from their hair.

During the weekly school debates, I’d usually sit right by my sister’s side, and fetch things like water, crackers and pens when needed, and otherwise just listened to her rhetorical artistry, completely spellbound like the rest of the audience. Julia set specific topics for each session, such as ‘Should Rapists be Castrated?’; ‘The Psycho-Politics of Charity: Altruism or Narcissism?’; and ‘Redistribution: Ethical Obligation or Economic Suicide?’ Usually two or three kids agreed to debate with her each week, which was pretty brave considering that Julia always won any argument, no matter whether she really believed in the side she had adopted for the purposes of the discussion. No one ever even got close to posing a semi-serious intellectual challenge to her. I think she saw these debates as practice, like a boxer who lets laughably unworthy opponents into the ring just to keep himself fit for a real fight in the future. In any case, the rest of us just enjoyed the show. But after a few months Julia got bored with the society, appointed a new president and debate leader and moved on. The society withered away soon after her departure.

Her waning interest in the debating society was also directly related to her growing interest in someone she’d recently met at the Oxfam shop. He was twenty-three years old, tall, and had floppy blond hair that kept tumbling into his face. He used to flip it back with a jerk of his head that made him look like a camp horse attempting to get rid of a bothersome fly. He always wore green corduroys, white shirts with cuffs, cravats and a tweed jacket – a bit
Brideshead Revisited
, you know? That ridiculously arch lord-of-the-manor style? Five Saturdays in a row, he lingered for hours in the shop during Julia’s shifts, pretending to study the record and book collection. Behind his back we giggled because he was just so totally obvious – we couldn’t believe the amount of time and energy he invested in keeping up this farce. It was clear what he was really interested in. Julia would always politely ask him whether she could help him with anything, and he’d blush, shake his head, tug at his ridiculous cravat and pull out a random book, which he’d then stare at for half an hour.

Eventually – I think it took him about six or seven weeks – he mustered up the courage to ask Julia out for a coffee. He was called Jeremy and was studying for an MA in Politics at King’s. Obviously I trailed along to their first date. We went to some boho café in town after Julia’s shift, where the two of them hotly debated until closing time whether or not communism was compatible with human nature, or whether the accumulation of private property and personal privileges was a necessary driving force for economic and creative productivity. I got bored with their discussion, and I can’t remember what they agreed on in the end. I was also disturbed by some changes I perceived in Julia that day. All evening, she didn’t make any effort to include me in the discussion, not even once. Usually, she’d do that, and make sure that her friends spoke to me, too, so that I wouldn’t feel left out. But that evening, she didn’t even look at me – her gaze remained fixed on Jeremy. They agreed to meet again the next day.

On our way home Julia was silent. I was kind of hoping she’d mock Jeremy’s absurdly posh accent, or his vain hair-tossing, or that she’d dismiss his preposterous political positions, but she didn’t. I asked whether I could sleep in her bed that night, but she said she was tired and needed to rest. The next day – it was a bright autumn afternoon that contrasted starkly with my darkening mood – we all went to the zoo together. Julia and Jeremy were outraged by the perversity of taking animals out of their natural habitat and imprisoning them in cages so that they could satisfy the voyeuristic desires of bored bourgeois families. They hatched plans to liberate a black panther that had attracted their sympathy because of his sad eyes and psychotic pacing in his little cage. They made all kinds of other ridiculous plans like that. Again, they didn’t pay any attention to me at all. I fell behind at some point, and from a distance I saw that Jeremy took Julia’s hand and that she didn’t pull it away. It really turned my stomach, that moment.

After the zoo, Jeremy took us to a vegetarian restaurant for supper. They talked non-stop, really intensely, again until closing time. I hadn’t eaten my meal because I had kind of lost my appetite, but nobody noticed and nobody asked whether I wanted anything else. When Julia and Jeremy shared a dessert they didn’t offer me any of it. It really was as though I had ceased to exist, all of a sudden. At some point later in the evening I went to the loo because I just couldn’t repress any longer the sobs that were threatening to break out. I didn’t want to cry in front of Jeremy – I’d started to massively dislike the guy. I stayed there for at least twenty minutes, and expected Julia to come and look for me, but she never did. When I finally returned to the table, I saw that Jeremy’s hand was on her arm. I stood behind them for a while, just looking, and trying to control my agitation. They hadn’t noticed that I’d come back.

‘Can I see you again tomorrow?’ Jeremy asked.

‘Sure,’ Julia said. ‘We could go and see a film together – actually, Amy and I really wanted to see
Psycho
again. I think it’s showing tomorrow afternoon at the Curzon.’

‘Look, Julia, what I meant was can I see
you
, not you and your sister. I find it a little creepy, the way she follows you around. No offence, but it just doesn’t seem quite right at her age – doesn’t she have any friends of her own? And what about you – don’t you ever get tired of having to drag her along?’

And then he looked at her, from below, in that slimy, puppy-dog kind of way, you know? My heart started pounding like mad when I heard that. Surely Julia would throw her drink into Jeremy’s face, get up and never see him again. Surely she wouldn’t let that go unpunished. She’d smashed someone on the head with a bottle once for having kissed me, after all. What would she do to Jeremy? Spit in his face? Stick her fork into his arm? I held my breath. But Julia did nothing of the kind. Instead, she laughed. Then she pressed his hand and said:

‘OK, I suppose Amy can go and watch
Psycho
on her own tomorrow.’

I slipped away and then returned to the table a few minutes later, white and shaking. Not that anyone noticed. The next day, Julia went off after school to meet Jeremy without me. For the first time ever, I had to take the bus home on my own. The house felt cold and empty – our parents always used to come home late. I did my homework in the kitchen. When I had finished I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I went up to my room and sat on the bed all evening, waiting for Julia to return. I refused to come down to eat with my parents. I was kind of hoping that Julia’s date was going horribly wrong, that she’d burst into my room outraged and tell me what an atrocious kisser Jeremy was, that he had mackerel breath, and that he was a clownish toff. That she was sorry for having neglected me so horribly the other day. Then we would both cry and embrace and she’d let me sleep in her bed that night and confess everything that had happened between her and Jeremy. We’d laugh about it and all would be as before. But that wasn’t what happened. Julia didn’t come home before two in the morning. When she checked in on me, I pretended to be asleep. I had cried so much that night I’d run out of tears.

From that day, the rift between her and me grew wider and wider. She spent all her days and most of her evenings with Jeremy, and when I saw her in the mornings and sometimes on the school bus – the only occasions when we still spent time together – she seemed totally preoccupied. She didn’t share her thoughts with me anymore. She never said a single negative word about Jeremy and only ever told me how fantastic and beautiful and intelligent he was, you know? Most of our conversations revolved around what Jeremy thought about this and what Jeremy thought about that. It was tedious, and I began to really hate the guy, more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life. He had taken the only thing I ever really cared for away from me. He had changed my sister beyond recognition.

I think it must have been around that time that my health began to deteriorate. I mean, I obviously didn’t plan this or anything, I just felt really down and lost my appetite and grew more and more listless. I spent a lot of time lying on my bed. I just didn’t know what to do with my life without Julia in it. Mum tried to speak to me about Julia a couple of times, but in a fairly half-hearted way. She must have noticed that she couldn’t really rely on Julia to care for my wellbeing anymore, and considered it her duty to at least pretend to care. One evening, when I had again refused to leave my bedroom and have supper with my parents, she came upstairs and sat with me on my bed. She took my hand and talked about first experiences of love, and explained they can be intense and all-consuming and all that. She said she was sure that Julia loved me just as much as before but that I had to give her some space for a while and allow her to explore her feelings. She said that Julia had been the most selfless and caring sister imaginable, and that I had to accept that there were parts of her life now in which I could no longer participate. She reminded me that I wasn’t a child anymore, and that Julia had grown into a young woman. She suggested I get out more, find some friends, play sports, and so on. What any half-decent mother would say. I’m sure you can imagine it.

I lost a lot of weight in the first few weeks after Jeremy had destroyed the only close bond I ever had. I missed school a couple of times because I just felt too ill to face the outside world. On a Sunday afternoon, about two months after Jeremy had first asked her out, Julia returned home earlier than usual. She said she wanted to spend some time with me. She said she was worried about me and that she felt we’d lost touch. Those were exactly the words I’d been dying to hear for weeks, but when I finally did hear them I just couldn’t believe that she really meant what she was saying. It had taken her too long, you know? Far too long. I kept thinking that our mother must have asked Julia to talk to me, that she’d much rather be with Jeremy and that I’d become nothing but a nuisance and a chore, a limp, sick albatross around her neck. But she still managed to coax me into getting dressed, and to go out and have coffee with her.