The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (8 page)

I don’t know what to say about the attack. I really don’t. I haven’t seen Julia since it happened. I still can’t believe that my sister is supposed to have murdered all those people. She must have been corrupted by someone. I don’t think she’s well. The person who came back from those trips wasn’t the Julia I knew and loved. Something must have happened to her abroad. Someone must have radicalized her. Perhaps it even started as far back as with that Jeremy guy. One bad friend after another, you know? I wish she’d stayed with me; I wish I’d never lost her. Together, we could have done anything. She only ever wanted to make the world a better place. I really don’t know what to say about the attack. She totally broke my parents’ hearts. And mine.

IV

Amy seemed so starved of human contact, and so awfully thin, and so terribly fragile both physically and mentally, that I decided to contact her parents and her supervisor at UCL to alert them to her condition straight after our second meeting. Her supervisor emailed back right away and thanked me for my concern, but explained there was nothing they could do since Amy had been battling with anorexia for many years and was refusing treatment. Amy’s parents didn’t get back to me until later.

Amy’s story troubled me, on various levels. Although I
did
find her account utterly heart-wrenching (and there is no doubt that she really was and still is suffering), I couldn’t help but feel that there was also a passive-aggressive impulse that was driving her to starve herself to death. Anorexia is one of those conditions that is masochistic only on the surface. After all, while Amy is getting some (admittedly very sad and twisted) form of pleasure from her physical vanishing act, she is forcing those who love her to watch helplessly from the sidelines. Most acts of self-destruction are ultimately fuelled by reproach. You observed something similar once about Lailah: sometimes, you told me, you could catch fleeting glimpses of the furious hatred behind your wife’s limp and lifeless facade – and it made your blood freeze.

Although Julia’s manner of dealing with Amy’s pain seemed hard, I could at least partly understand her reaction: her refusal to play the role that Amy wanted her to play in her psychodrama was also a refusal to be coerced into feeling guilty when, in fact, she had done nothing wrong. After all, what seems to have triggered Amy’s rapid physical decline is simply the fact that Julia had fallen in love with someone and subsequently loosened her sister’s dependency on her, which had, in any case, become decidedly odd. Perhaps she severed these strings too abruptly. But then again, being in love
can
be overpowering. I had to fight very hard not to lose focus when we got together for the first time, George – it cost me all my energy and willpower. I could have succumbed so easily to the impulse to let our relationship transform all my priorities and everything I ever cared for, in that radical, fairy-tale metamorphosis kind of way. But something in me resisted it. Whether it was genuinely my love of work, as I thought back then, or perhaps fear, I don’t know. And I still believe that you never forgave me for that.

In any case, it was strange that Julia responded to her sister’s psychological problems so strongly, almost with aversion, and that her affection for Amy, which appeared deep and genuine, could have been stifled so abruptly. But even that reaction, I am ashamed to admit, wasn’t one that was completely unfamiliar to me. Amy’s story reminded me of a scene when Amanda and I were teenagers. I think I might have told you about it, during that phase when we told each other (almost) everything about ourselves, when we, with a mixture of anxiety and shy pride, spread out the darker details of our past lives before each other, hoping that they, too, would be met with approval. When I was young, I was driven by an insatiable curiosity. My mind was always busy – I read everything I could lay my hands on, indiscriminately, sucking up all kinds of information like a starved sponge; I wrote; I loved to argue; I liked to be among people; I was always pursuing projects. I wished the days had a hundred hours, and I simply didn’t have time for teenage angst, skipping that phase completely. But Amanda didn’t, and when she was fourteen and I was sixteen, it began to affect our relationship. I think in some strange way it still does.

Even you admitted once that Amanda is much more beautiful than me. I have always thought that she looks like a skilfully Photoshopped and more feminine version of me: she is taller and her figure is fuller, her skin is purer and smoother, her hair longer and glossier. Her hair colour, too, is much more striking than mine, a richer, deeper shade of the dark burgundy that both of us inherited from our mother. Hers always made me think of moist Tuscan clay sizzling in the sun. Amanda would never be seen without mascara and her signature stardust-coloured eye-shadow, both of which further enhance the beauty of her eyes, which are ice-blue just like mine, only bigger and better – like everything else about her. Even her voice is smooth and sweet, while mine has more than once been compared to a scratchy jazz record, and, not very flatteringly, to that of a chain-smoking nightclub singer. Yet, in spite of all this, it was Amanda and not I who became obsessed with her appearance when she crossed the thorny threshold into adulthood, and she found it sorely wanting: her weight, her skin, her hair, her style – she began to dislike
everything
about herself. Soon, all her energy was consumed internally, used up in the perpetuation of self-flagellating thoughts. I hated seeing her doing that to herself; it pained me and I just couldn’t understand where it was coming from.

It is such a sad female speciality, self-hatred – I see it everywhere, even here, even among the most intimidating and seemingly confident-looking women: they over- or else under-eat, they cut themselves, they drink, they smoke, they take drugs, they fall for people they can’t have or who treat them like shit, they cover their skins with crude tattoos that, like marks of Cain, loudly announce to all and sundry that they have broken the law, and not one of them uses her time to enhance her prospects for post-prison life. Instead, they turn on each other just to pass the time. Every day, the guards have to intervene in the many scuffles that keep breaking out. But so far, they all leave me be – even the most belligerent ones. I don’t know why. Perhaps word has got round about my crime. Perhaps that knowledge scares them as much as it scares me. I try not to think about it.

Amanda had always been shy, but in her teens her timidity became so extreme that she would barely speak a word unless she was among family. She didn’t go out much and passed entire days alone in her bedroom, doing nothing; she struggled at school and grew ever more reclusive and lifeless, as though she was wilting on the inside. I realized just how much she had changed one Saturday in August. It was our great-aunt Myrtle’s birthday. As every year, Myrtle held a grand garden party in her Hampstead home. All our relatives and many of my parents’ friends came; attendance was a family obligation. Some cousins and nieces travelled all the way from France and Germany to be there.

‘She says she’s not coming,’ my father said in a low voice. My mother wrung her hands. Dressed up and ready to go, they were standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking uneasily at the closed door of my sister’s room on the first floor, as though something bad they couldn’t quite grasp was happening behind it. Although they didn’t speak about it, they had been worrying about Amanda in their quiet way for months. I found their silent sadness unbearable, and decided to go up and shake Amanda out of her stupor.

‘Amanda, I’m coming in,’ I called before opening her bedroom door. The air in her room was heavy with sweat and misery – it was a sweltering day, but her windows were closed and the curtains drawn, and my sister was lying fully clothed on her bed.

‘God, it’s stuffy in here!’ I said before drawing the curtain and opening her window.

Amanda moaned and covered her face with her hands, as though the sunlight was hurting her eyes.

‘Dad said you’re not coming. We always go – Aunt Myrtle will be heartbroken if she doesn’t get to pinch your cheeks this year. Honestly, Amanda, get your act together. You know that Mum and Dad are too nice to force you, but they’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t come. And why wouldn’t you? Look, it’s such a lovely day!’

‘I can’t,’ Amanda said.

‘What do you mean, you can’t? It’s not like you’ve lined up an exciting alternative programme for the day, is it? A bit of sunlight will do you good.’

‘I can’t,’ she repeated.

‘Why not?’

‘Can’t face it.’

‘Can’t face
what
? It’s our family – it’s not like you’d be walking into a place filled with hostile strangers. They all love you and would be really sad not to see you.’ I was genuinely puzzled.

Amanda sat up and glared at me. ‘I know you don’t understand, but I just can’t. Everything always seems so easy to you. I never know what to say to anyone. I freeze up; I get flustered and stiff. People don’t feel comfortable around me. I’m so awkward it’s infectious. I embarrass them.’

I didn’t know what to say. I had been aware that Amanda had confidence issues, but I had never realized just how crippling and deep-seated they were. Besides, she had said these things sharply, almost aggressively, as though the whole matter was somehow my fault.

‘But sweetie,’ I said eventually. ‘This is
crazy
. You’re clever and interesting and original, and lovely besides, and totally gorgeous. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Everyone loves you – I think people like you much more than they like me, in fact.
I
’m the one who annoys people. I talk too much and too loudly and I’m terribly opinionated and I laugh like a drunken hyena at my own jokes. I’d always prefer your company to mine.’

Amanda started to cry, and I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. ‘Bullshit,’ she sobbed. ‘That’s bullshit. You just don’t get it. You just can’t understand what it feels like to have no skin, to be constantly afraid of what others might think or say. It’s hell; I don’t want to go out ever again. I hate talking to others.’

‘But sis, I really can’t follow you,’ I said. ‘That’s all in your head. Nobody thinks that of you. Nobody. Really. Everyone thinks you’re lovely – perhaps a little shy, but that’s a good thing. Shy people are much nicer and better listeners. I’d say everyone actually prefers the company of a shy person to that of annoying blabbering extroverts. Like me. Really. I mean it.’

Amanda didn’t respond.

‘Come on,’ I said after a while. ‘I’ll stay at your side, OK? I can always just step in if you can’t think of anything to say. I’ll just make some stupid offensive jokes as usual.’

But Amanda turned her back to me and pulled her duvet over her head.

‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘You really aren’t coming? But you won’t even have to worry about small talk! I mean it. I’ll do it for you, OK? Come on – let’s go. Mum and Dad are waiting downstairs.’

But Amanda remained silent, ignoring all my further attempts to change her mind. Eventually I gave up and left the room, and we went to the party without her. Somehow, her refusal to attend the party felt like a watershed moment. It was from that day on that we understood that what we had thought was a phase went deeper, but we couldn’t really grasp what it was. Worse, we had no idea how to help her.

What is more – and I am not proud of this, George – at some point Amanda’s causeless sadness and her passivity began to infuriate me. I wasn’t sympathetic to her state of mind – the self-pity and the dull darkness of it all. Somehow, it smelled bad, like a forgotten sock rotting in the washing machine. I wanted the old Amanda back, but I didn’t know where to find her. Most of the time I just wanted to shake her and to tell her to snap out of it. Once I really did shake her, and she was flapping to and fro, like a sack of flour, with no tension or resistance. Yet there was also something about her weakness that must quite simply have terrified me – I can see that now.

In any case, I left home and then so did she, and at university she slowly got better, discovered her ersatz religion, and found men who – for a while at least – managed to make her happy, before they abandoned her and tore open her old wounds and she had to start all over again. What really helped her permanently was Laura – even though the two of them don’t always have an easy relationship.

Sometimes I suspect that deep down Amanda blames
me
for what has happened, that it is somehow payback for my life choices. Sometimes I even wonder whether she doesn’t secretly feel just a little bit vindicated, behind all her caring and worrying. Think about it: I rejected everything that has shaped her own life and that she values: motherhood, marriage, career sacrifice. For a long time it looked as though everything I did was blessed somehow. I was always the more successful one of the two of us. Until it all dissolved into thin air. But, of course, Amanda’s own happiness-plan has not worked out quite so well, either – just like me, she is alone now, but
after
having dedicated the best years of her life to two worthless exploiter types,
after
two cripplingly expensive and time-consuming divorces, and
after
so much heartache. And I still think she is wasting her talents on all those people with too much time and money on their hands, who lie on her couch day after day (sometimes for years), complaining about the fact that their mothers were cold and their fathers absent. But then again, who am I to cast judgement, on anyone? After all, I am the one who’s in prison now, and whose life is in ruins.

I’m digressing. But I have been thinking about my relationship with Amanda a lot, lately. I’m sad about all those barriers between us, and I don’t mean the literal one. I miss her, I feel more than ever the distance between us, which, in some strange way, started to emerge on the day of Myrtle’s garden party, and my inability to coax her out of her dark hole and to properly understand and connect with her pain.

What I couldn’t help thinking after my encounter with Amy was that Julia’s abrupt abandonment of her sister seemed caused not only by the refusal to be made to feel guilty and the subliminal fear of contagion that witnessing weakness can provoke – we sometimes turn to anger in order better to defend ourselves against it. In Julia’s case, the decision to turn her back on her sister seemed driven by a
moral
judgement: it almost sounded as though she considered Amy’s illness an insult, a slap in the face of those who were struggling with ‘real’ problems – poverty, illness, political disenfranchisement. But is it legitimate to privilege one form of suffering over another, and to arrange it into neat hierarchies in such a simplistic manner? Is mental anguish really less worthy or serious than socio-political or physical forms of distress? What of the sufferings of the soul? After all, they can be fatal, too.