The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (11 page)

‘Congratulations to the artfully made-up bride and her solid groom!’ she began, in a mockingly sweet tone. ‘To the charming setting, the expensive pink champagne that is bubbling away so cheerfully in our glasses, and to the tasteful finger-food buffet! Jonathan, my brother: may your wealth and happiness increase in equal measure. I wish you the best. May all your dreams of shiny SUVs and Bentleys, of two-point-four kids, and of a chic townhouse in Chelsea, come true. Now, with a ring on your finger that fully confirms your traditionalist credentials, will you finally follow the siren call of duty and accept a nomination as Conservative candidate on the local council? After all, the Tories have had their eyes on you since you reached the age of three.’

At this point, people were still laughing, but Susanna and I had grown tense. I didn’t like where this was going one bit.

‘You are their man, Jonathan. You were born to fight for the petty little rights of petty little citizens, such as wider parking spaces so that people in oversized cars don’t suffer discrimination. You could launch a petition to paint all kittens white so that we can see them in the night. You could start a campaign to ban the competition-stifling caps on bonuses for bankers – isn’t it outrageous that some deluded continental Europeans think that 500 per cent of one’s annual salary should be enough? You could fight for a special policeman to watch over the playground your two-point-four children will be frequenting, to make sure that no poor people and no black people ever set foot in it. Hurrah for the family values of middle England!’

Most people, except for a few very drunk ones, had stopped laughing. There was an uncomfortable silence in the marquee when Julia continued.

‘Oh, but hang on... What do I see in my hand-blown crystal champagne flute? Dark clouds are gathering in the future. I see a midlife crisis in your early thirties – no surprises there, either: you’ve always acted twenty years older than your age. But the horror! Your once-so-pretty housewife has grown bored with the kids and her little creative pottery projects. She’s started to comfort-eat and – I hate to break this to you, Susanna, I know how much your looks matter to you – she’s grown fat. She has begun to hate herself and her out-of-control body that never quite got back into shape after the second pregnancy, and she resents you because you’re always working. She’s nagging you. The nagging is benevolent at first, but over the years her attacks grow ever more vicious; she hates the way you chew, the way you swallow your food with an audible gulp, the way you button up your shirts to the very top; she hates the too-pungent scent of your aftershave. She also resents the hell out of you for having a life outside the family, and for having a successful career. You now regularly stay out late and go to strip-clubs with your banker-friends to avoid the spiteful spouse who’s waiting for you at home, ready to attack you as soon as she hears your keys in the lock. You no longer touch each other; you stopped having sex after the second child. Instead, to satisfy your still active cravings, you fuck your average-looking but willing secretary on your desk twice a week after everyone else has left the building.’

‘Stop it, Julia, that’s quite enough now,’ my mother, who had stood up, said sharply. ‘I think it’s time for more music, don’t you all agree?’

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Julia said. ‘I’m almost done, I promise. I hate to break it to you, Jonathan – after all, this is a festive occasion, isn’t it? – but things are getting even worse. Oh dear! Your once gorgeous girl-children, who’ve grown up in an atmosphere of barely repressed hostility and poisonous resentment that has done horrible damage to their psycho-sexual development, are troubled. Seriously troubled. One of them is firmly in the clutches of a classic middle-class eating disorder. The other daughter is more aggressive; she’s angry as hell. She feels she’s never been properly loved; she feels that her mother has never forgiven her for ruining her pre-pregnancy figure. She marries young, just like you and Susanna, she gives birth to two-point-four gorgeous girl-children, but she can’t really bring herself to love them, and she soon begins to resent the hell out of her husband, who is always away, and she repeats the whole pointless story all over again. So, once again, my warmest congratulations to you two! Hurrah! To Jonathan and Susanna!’

Nobody clapped, nobody laughed. Everyone had stopped eating and drinking. My parents looked pale and sombre, and Amy had started to cry. It was blatantly obvious to everyone that this wasn’t just a drunken, ill-judged attempt to deliver a funny speech. In fact, Julia was completely sober. She never drinks. It was an aggressive, malicious affront, deeply insulting to both Susanna and me, and designed to spoil our wedding day.

‘What, no applause?’ my sister said, staring mock-angrily at the wedding guests. ‘That’s SO disappointing. I’ve thought about this speech for months, and I’ve worked on it day and night!’ Then she got up from the table and left the party.

We never spoke again after that. I occasionally heard about her from Dad and my mother and Amy, of course. About her dropping out of university and all her mad travelling. But I saw Julia only very rarely, at a few big family celebrations, at which we avoided each other’s company. I wasn’t at all surprised when she finally acted out and went on her murderous rampage. I always thought she had the capacity for ruthless violence written all over her in big, bright neon letters. I always thought the psychotic bitch should be sectioned. Unfortunately, nobody ever listened to me.

I am sure you expect me to provide an analysis now and to explain how an intelligent, privileged middle-class girl who was very much loved by her parents could have turned into a mass murderer. There is only one thing I can say, and I have said it before: my parents are decent people. We are all decent people, our entire family, with one very extreme exception. We have done absolutely nothing wrong. None of us deserve any of this. We would have lived happily ever after had it not been for my monstrous sister, that incubus that must have crawled straight from hell. And for no good reason and right from the start, the bitch set her sick mind on destroying us and everything we stand for.

The bombing wasn’t political. That manifesto is bullshit. It’s a farce staged for the media to make her look interesting. The bombing was deeply personal. Julia could just as well have placed the bomb in my parents’ house, last Christmas when we were all there, and annihilated our entire family with a single stroke. But I suppose she thought that her alternative plan would be so much worse. And she was absolutely right about that. She probably weighed up the options carefully in that revolting brain of hers, and decided that keeping us alive would be more fun. Death would have been too merciful an option. Mercy, as I am sure you will agree, is not one of Julia’s attributes.

The bombing was nothing but the inevitable climax of a pernicious campaign to throw dirt on everything cherished by decent people like us. Julia was always already a hate-filled psychopath, even as a young girl. A stranger in our midst, a different species. But she managed to deceive my parents about her true nature until the very end. They were simply too kind and too naive to face the bitter truth: their angelic-looking, oh-so-talented favourite child was a malicious murderess in the making, intent on causing maximum damage and distress.

Why did she hate us so much? What have we ever done to her to deserve this? I don’t believe any of the bullshit psychologizing, the finger-pointing and the trauma-mongering that are so fashionable these days. In my view, Julia was simply born evil. Wickedness had been indelibly imprinted on her soul from the start. My sister is malice incarnate.

VII

Ah, evil – this gloriously lazy theological catch-all. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that some people just happen to be born demonic. I don’t believe that nature can remain unaffected by nurture (but neither do I believe that nurture can explain everything, as Amanda does). Julia, sadistic spawn of Satan, who visited this pure, good, innocent family like an evil spirit in a horror movie – no, I thought, there had to be more to her than that. Jonathan’s assumption of an Iago-like motiveless malignancy seemed far too simplistic, and also morally dubious.

Besides, I thought it very obvious that Jonathan’s portrait of his sister was distorted by a hefty dose of sibling rivalry. In his view, Julia had destroyed the bond he cherished most in this world: his special relationship with his father. Sibling rivalry can be such a powerful force in shaping our actions and aspirations. I’m not just thinking of the obvious meaning of the concept – the irreparable damage to our narcissistic bubbles when we have to acknowledge that we are no longer the only sun shining in our parents’ universe. Sibling rivalry can be an ongoing way of defining one’s identity against somebody else’s – somebody who is simultaneously both like us and not like us.

Consider Amanda and me, for example: we couldn’t be more different, character-wise, and we used to operate in completely dissimilar spheres, professionally and socially, and yet we could never quite free ourselves from the urge to compare our lives to each other’s. Especially recently, of course. Although purely professionally speaking, I used to be the more successful one (which I am sure must have irked Amanda), I often secretly wondered whether somewhere down the line I had not made some fatally bad choices in other areas of my life.

While I have no doubt that our parents loved us equally, they always appeared much prouder of my achievements than hers, something of which Amanda reminds me frequently, and I concede the point. I wish they had been slightly more diplomatic, since this issue has contributed significantly to the tensions between my sister and me. For example, there were seven pictures of me receiving various awards on the walls in my parents’ house, and three of Laura (as a shiny plump newborn, as a feisty pigtailed primary-school girl, and as a tanned backpacker admiring the wares of a street-food vendor in Thailand). But there was only one of Amanda and her first husband, Peter, in which she was slightly out of focus, her face and body in Peter’s shadow. (My parents never warmed to her second husband, and stayed in touch with Peter long after the acrimonious divorce, much to Amanda’s distress.)

When we emptied their house, a few months after they died, we found a series of eleven heavy, leather-bound albums in one of the cupboards: they revealed that my father had diligently cut out and collected every article I had ever published, starting with the first hot-headed piece I wrote for a student paper in the eighties, and ending with a feature story printed in the
New Statesman
just three days before a distracted driver ended my parents’ lives (and his) on the M5. In another album (golden) my father had collected all the positive reviews of my books; a much smaller red one contained the (thankfully not very many) critical responses my works had attracted. My books, in pristine condition, were proudly displayed on a single book shelf in the centre of the drawing room, which also held some prize paraphernalia (Amanda used to refer to it as my ‘shrine’). In my father’s study, we also found used second copies of each one of my books that had evidently been read carefully, and which contained many underlinings. When Amanda and I discovered the albums, she burst into tears and I didn’t know how to console her.

‘I feel like I’m the little girl who just got an orange for Christmas, while her sister got a bicycle,’ she sobbed.

But at some point, things shifted and the scales tipped the other way – gradually at first, and then ever faster. When Laura was born and when I first held her, I marvelled at her tiny hands and her seductively sweet milkshake scent, and I felt a short, sharp pang of regret and envy. This feeling disappeared for a few years while Laura was little and hard work and screamed a lot. But it resurfaced even more strongly when she was beginning to talk and to articulate her view of the world, which has fascinated me ever since. I love Laura, I love her deeply, and although I see her frequently, I often wish she were properly mine.

Then there were Peter and Frank, Amanda’s husbands. While I found neither of them particularly attractive or interesting, I felt it again in their presence, that strange mixture of regret and envy. For example, when I happened to observe little gestures or looks they exchanged with my sister – betraying an intimacy that I had never known myself. Peter had this way of gently tugging a stubborn strand of hair that kept falling into Amanda’s face back behind her ear; Frank would fold his arms around her from behind and plant a kiss on the nape of her neck (always exactly in the same place – a place that made Amanda shiver with pleasure).

I have observed that unspoken, affectionate familiarity between you and Lailah, too, George (in the beginning, at least). The way you always helped her into her coat, and then tenderly rearranged her scarves and collars, or her hair; the way she always saved some of her pudding at dinner parties and discreetly passed it over to you, because she knows just how much you love sweet things. I have noted many times how you steered conversations away from topics that you knew might upset her: ignorant opinions on Middle Eastern politics; crudely Western-centric views on veil-wearing Arab women; anything that reeked of unreconstructed orientalism. In the early days of your marriage, I saw Lailah quietly but firmly insisting that Sundays should be kept free for her and your daughter, regardless of how prestigious and important the invitation was that you had to decline to follow her bidding. And you never let the two of them down. Very soon, the family Sunday became law in your world. Once, I saw you all in St James’s Park (from afar) watching the ducks, and you two, with proud smiles, marvelling at the miracle that is your daughter. I couldn’t breathe, as though something was choking me from the inside. Sometimes, the regret I feel about never having had a child of my own is so strong that the pain overwhelms me.

When my world fell to pieces after the trial, Amanda was there for me, as were you, of course. But sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder whether she didn’t (perhaps only a tiny bit) get some secret satisfaction from my failure. After all, the high flyer to whom everything had come so easily had suddenly crashed down to earth. Now I was the one languishing in a dirty pool of debts and shattered dreams, while Amanda still had her work, her patients, and, above all, Laura. Now, it looked as though I was finally paying for my past choices, and that hers had somehow been retrospectively valorized.