The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (7 page)

‘What’s wrong with you, Amy?’ she asked when we were seated at a small table in the very same café where she and Jeremy had met for their first date, which I thought was a rather unfortunate choice, to be honest. ‘Why have you stopped eating? Why do you spend all your time locked up in your room? I so wish you could be happy for me – I’m in love, you know? It’s wonderful, and it’ll happen to you soon, too, I’m sure. This should be a special time for me, but I feel like you’re punishing me for something. I haven’t abandoned you, you know? You’re still my lovely little sister, and I care so much for you. Can’t you see that? But I have to start living my own life, and you need to start living yours.’

I began to cry. I couldn’t speak. This wasn’t at all what I’d expected. A part of me had still been hoping that I’d become her confidante once again, like in the old days, that she’d finally admit that Jeremy wasn’t that great after all, that he was terrible in bed and really boring company. But Julia wasn’t impressed with my tears. Instead of hugging me, she sighed, rolled her eyes and ordered cake. It was pretty cold, I thought, to be honest.

‘You really need to start eating again, Amy. Mum and Dad are terribly worried about you, and so am I. But I also feel that your little hunger strike is a bit passive-aggressive, as though you’re trying to make me feel guilty. Don’t do that to me, OK? Come on, let’s be friends again. These cakes look delicious, don’t they?’

It was a totally unfair accusation, and really infantilizing, too, and I didn’t like it one bit. Then she started to talk about how wonderfully clever Jeremy and his friends were, what an exciting time she was having, how the two of them went to all kinds of political gatherings, and that their entire group of friends would travel to Cuba over the winter holidays for two weeks. She had long finished her cake – a large slice of Black Forest gateau – and I could tell that she was watching me and expecting me to eat mine, too, but I just couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t. I pushed bits of cake around my plate to give the impression I was engaging with my food, but every time I lifted my fork I felt like my throat was constricting and my mouth was going dry.

The next morning, Mum came up to my room and sat down on my bed again. She took my hand and suggested I see a therapist because she and Dad were extremely concerned about my weight loss – it was totally obvious to me that Julia had instructed her to do so. She was clearly trying to pass on responsibility to someone else once again, so that she could stop worrying about me. Someone who’d get paid for it, like a nanny or something. It was humiliating. But once a week for three years to come – until I, too, left home for university – I visited the consultancy of a woman called Molly Unsworth-Todd, who tried to help me to come to terms with what she called my ‘issues with nurture’. But our sessions didn’t help at all, as you can probably tell. I didn’t like that woman, and I don’t think she liked me much, either. Often, we sat in silence for almost the entire fifty minutes. It was pretty uncomfortable, actually. Most of the time, I just didn’t feel like sharing anything with her. She wore this weirdly shaped small golden medallion on a chain around her neck, and I kept thinking that she’d somehow convince me to join some strange cult if I opened up to her. I also didn’t like the way she folded her plump white little hands in her lap, like she was secretly praying to some obscure divinity. She was getting paid to listen to me, that was her job, and I just never believed her for a second when she said she cared, you know? I mean, obviously she didn’t. She just did it for the money.

Julia did travel to Cuba, and apparently had an amazing time there, and she stayed together with Jeremy for another two months. But shortly before she finished school, she broke up with him – she’d decided quite suddenly that he was a total hypocrite, all words and no action. She seemed to get over the end of her relationship very quickly, in spite of what Mum had told me about the ‘intensity’ and ‘all-consuming nature’ of first love. She delivered a highly politicized speech at our school’s end-of-year ceremony, which enraged some of the parents so much that they hissed and heckled. It was pretty amazing, really. Virtually all the school kids, in contrast, supported her, and we broke into loud ‘Julia’ chants that completely drowned out the parental sounds of discontent. Lots of parents got up and left the hall in protest. When she’d finished, Julia raised her right fist and smiled triumphantly – she looked stunning at that moment. Her long hair shone in the limelight, she had put on mauve lipstick that emphasized her pale, delicate skin, and she wore a simple black shift dress with old Doc Marten boots. Everyone who was still in the hall stood up and cheered. It was a totally memorable event, and even the local newspaper ran an article about the ‘beautiful communist graduate’ who had ‘transformed a traditionally dull and peaceful ceremony into a generational battlefield’.

Just a couple of weeks later, Julia packed the super-light green backpack that my parents had given her together with a plane ticket as a reward for her amazing A-level results, and left for India. Before she departed for her gap year, we made a deal: Julia promised to email me as often as possible, and in return, I had to promise her to eat. In the few weeks between her breakup with Jeremy and her departure for India, we had grown a bit closer again. For the very last time, I felt like I was an important part of her life. She told me some pretty hilarious stories about Jeremy and his phony champagne-socialist friends – I think they all ended up really annoying her in the end. But otherwise, she focused all her energies on planning her trip. We’d sit cross-legged on the floor in her room, looking at maps together, deciding on routes and marking up her
Lonely Planet
guidebook. Her plan was to travel the country for three months and then join a volunteer organization based in Punjab that fought for fairer trade rules and economic justice for the agricultural labourers of the region. We ended up deciding that she’d spend three weeks in Mumbai, then travel south to Goa, where she was planning to visit some alternative communities and two yogis whom some friends had recommended to her. After about two months, she’d travel north, along the coast by bus and train, passing through Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan until she reached her volunteer post in a small village on the border with Pakistan.

I accompanied her on numerous shopping trips to buy her travel equipment: together, we chose heavy watertight walking boots and a pair of strong sandals; two sets of khaki-coloured cargo pants and white linen shirts; one fleece pullover; a good-quality rain-jacket; a pocket knife; pepper spray; a sleeping bag and a sleeping mat; a lightweight one-person tent and a tiny gas cooker. We’d often lie on her bed and she would read aloud to me the texts she was studying in preparation: histories of India and various books about economics, globalization and the fair-trade movement. She also started to read Salman Rushdie, but gave up on him almost immediately. She never really liked fiction.

My parents and Julia clashed over something a few weeks before she left. I heard their raised voices in the kitchen one night, long after supper, and I think I also heard Julia crying, but I never found out what it was all about. The door was firmly shut and I couldn’t hear the details, no matter how hard I tried. She seemed strange and distant after that for a few days, wandering around dazed, like a sleepwalker, but then she gradually switched back to her normal lovely self.

We all accompanied her to Heathrow on the day of her departure. Even Jonathan had joined us to say goodbye. I’m pretty sure he was secretly relieved that she was leaving the country for a year. But I just couldn’t stop crying. I simply couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t see her for twelve months. I had no idea how I’d even begin to get through the year without her. I was kind of hoping that she would hate it in India and miss me so badly that she’d come back early. I even secretly hoped that she’d get malaria or cholera or some other hideous disease, so that she’d be forced to come home and I could nurse her back to health. I still remember the moment she walked through passport control: straight and bright-eyed and full of anticipation, wearing the cargo pants we chose together and a white pullover, her hair braided into a long, thick plait. She turned back three times to wave at us all, blew me a final kiss, and then disappeared.

I checked my inbox almost hourly in the first days after she’d left – I was so desperate to hear from her, and to learn that she was safe, and find out what she was doing, you know? But her first email arrived only after two long weeks, and it was a lengthy and pretty angry report on the appalling scenes of poverty she’d witnessed in Mumbai. She wrote about beggar children whose parents had mutilated them in horrific ways so that they would elicit more generous donations from tourists. She wrote about the thousands of people who slept under bridges and on sidewalks and who didn’t even own enough to cover their emaciated bodies with clothes or blankets. She wrote about the perverse contrast between the rich and the poor, and said it made her sick. She wrote that wherever she went she was pursued by a flock of ravenous, disease-ridden children who tore at her clothes and backpack, begging her for food and money. She wrote about the appalling attitudes to women she’d witnessed and the primitive sense of sexual entitlement of Indian men. There was nothing personal at all in her message, and my heart sank when I realized that it wasn’t even addressed to me directly but to a long list of friends and family to whom she had promised updates from her travels. Almost all of her subsequent emails from India were similar. I sent her long, regular emails about my own admittedly pretty uneventful and empty days, but only very rarely received a personal message in response. Usually, she told me that she hoped I was eating well and that she thought of me and that we were all terribly fortunate and owed the world some compensation for our privileges.

She ended up not following our carefully developed travel plan at all, and left Goa after just one week. She wrote that she had no interest in the drug and clubbing culture she encountered there, and that in fact she utterly despised it. Yoga, meditation and various other spiritual practices and doctrines people down there were interested in didn’t strike her as valid preoccupations either – she thought that the yogis and their mainly Western followers she visited were hypocrites, privileging the pseudo-enlightenment of a chosen few over the much more urgent task of redistributing wealth and establishing fairer economic conditions for the many. Or something like that. Her emails had become quite ranty in tone. She travelled through hundreds of small villages and visited numerous factories and farms on her way up north. She’d also inspected some sweatshops, and described in extremely graphic detail the conditions she saw there. Then she forbade everyone on her mailing list from buying textiles produced by a long catalogue of Western companies which she said mercilessly exploited Indian women and children. Every single one of my favourite brands was on that list. We could all tell that she’d become restless, and increasingly impatient to do something about all the horrors she was witnessing on her travels. In the end, she took up her work placement one month earlier than originally planned.

Once she was installed in Punjab, her messages to us became less and less frequent. The organization she was working for was helping local wheat and palm-oil farmers to secure fair-trade deals: I think they provided practical, financial and legal support, that kind of stuff. Julia wrote a few articles about the initiative that were published in various British newspapers. She spent a lot of time interviewing the villagers in the Pakistani border area about their daily plight and she uncovered some totally scandalous practices for which two very well-known Western companies were responsible.

After five months, her very infrequent personal messages to me dried up completely. It’s probably fair to say that she broke her part of our deal. I think that compared to the sufferings she encountered in India on a daily basis, my own issues must have paled into insignificance. I can’t really blame her, I guess. I know that my problems are boring. But it still hurt really badly that she just completely ripped me out of her life, like a weed or something.

When she returned after twelve months I felt she’d changed. She talked mainly about economics and political stuff. She reacted quite badly to the fact that I was still battling with my weight, and told me really brutally that I needed to get a grip and snap out of that phase. She said it made her incredibly sad that I, who had everything and all kinds of privileges, wasn’t able to appreciate my gifts, and that I should travel to India sometime to see what children who aren’t starving for fun but for real look like. It was a pretty horrible thing to say. I felt like she wasn’t really interested in hearing about how I was. When I tried to talk to her, she seemed distracted and impatient. Shortly after her return, she left home to study PPE at St John’s College, Oxford. And then I just didn’t see her very often anymore. Only at big family gatherings, really. She sent me birthday cards, but that was it. Even when I was hospitalized for five weeks – I was being force-fed against my will – Julia didn’t come to visit. Not once. I mean, that’s pretty extreme, isn’t it?

She graduated, with a sky-high First, of course, and then went to Edinburgh to take up a scholarship to study for an MA. You probably know the rest of the story. About halfway through her programme, she dropped out and went travelling again, with someone she’d met up in Scotland, I think. We didn’t hear much from her during that period, apart from the odd postcard. Mum and Dad worried a lot about her, and so did I. After about two years, she came back to London. Again I only really saw her at family gatherings, and even then very rarely. I don’t know what she did all day here. She had weird friends – people in radical political groups, activist types. The one person who was still in regular contact with her was Dad, and he was under the impression that she went to a lot of demonstrations and occupations and anti-globalization gatherings, and that kind of thing. The last two times we saw her, on Christmas Day last year and on Dad’s sixtieth birthday, were strained. She was pretty caustic and seemed on the war path with everyone. During Dad’s birthday dinner she made a long, passionate speech against the consumption of meat that just about spoiled everyone’s appetite. I guess she thought we were all hypocrites or something.