XII
‘When did you first meet Julia?’ I asked, having switched on my recording device.
‘I remember that as though it were yesterday. It was at the social and political science welcome meeting at the beginning of term, in October 2009. We were all in a totally packed lecture theatre in the school’s main building on George Square, but I noticed Julia right away. I don’t know, there was something about her that immediately drew me to her. She always held herself very upright, you know, like this.’ Alison straightened her back and threw her head back, cocking it to the left to illustrate Julia’s usual posture.
‘So she sat very straight like that on the edge of a chair in the back row with her arms folded across her chest,’ she continued. ‘She reminded me of one of those film noir heroines of the thirties and forties. There was something very feline and a bit masculine about her, you know? I sat down a few seats away from her. But after only ten minutes or so of listening to a pretty ill-judged and condescending welcome speech by a young male professor called George Williams, she left the theatre. Like, deliberately and loudly, so that everyone noticed. She pulled the door shut behind her with a bang. I thought it was very brave of her, and soon a few others got up and left, too.’
Alison took another sip of wine, stretched her back and then continued. ‘I saw her again two hours later, at a buffet lunch organized for the new MA students in political philosophy. I was really excited that she’d be in my class, and I went straight up to her. I made a joke about the bad speech and we both laughed about how inappropriate it had been. Then Julia studied me carefully, and grilled me with lots of questions: where I came from, what I’d studied before coming to Edinburgh, what modules I’d chosen, what books I was reading. We seemed to have a lot in common, and we clicked from the start.’
‘Would you like another glass?’ I asked Alison, since we’d finished the wine by then and she had tried twice to coax more out of the empty bottle.
‘Will you join me?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I smiled.
‘All right then,’ Alison said, and signalled to the waiter.
‘So you and Julia became friends?’
‘Yes, almost instantly – I’ve never felt so close to anyone so quickly. And I’ve never lost contact with anyone so abruptly, either. I mean, I like people and I get on with most of them, but with Julia it became deep and intense very fast. After that brunch we decided to go elsewhere together to continue talking, and Julia took me to a small, totally run-down pub on one of the steep, winding side-streets that branch off the Cowgate. Its windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti of a vaguely political nature. Inside, too, everything was derelict. The floors looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned for decades and the black walls were barren apart from a crudely painted red anarchy sign. The place was run by a bald, bulky and pretty scary-looking Glaswegian whose face was covered with tribal tattoos. His name was Mo. To be honest, I couldn’t understand a word he said, but he and Julia clearly already knew each other, since he broke into a smile when she came in. Mo’s was Julia’s favourite haunt in Edinburgh. It was usually empty and too rough-looking to attract other students. They all preferred the safer, glitzier boho places in the vicinity. As did I, actually, but I found going to Mo’s with Julia really thrilling. Obviously I’d never have dared to set foot in there without her. It was the kind of place in which you’d fear getting beaten up for reading a book, or for having an English accent.’
Our extra wine arrived. We clinked glasses, and then Alison continued.
‘Julia didn’t drink alcohol, did you know that? I never once saw her with a drink, in the entire three months I knew her. Anyway. That didn’t stop me from having the odd one. Or five.’ She laughed.
‘Do you know why Julia didn’t drink?’
‘She said she disliked both the taste and the effect. Mad, isn’t it?’
‘What did you and Julia talk about when you met?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things. Our modules, the other students, our lecturers. Crushes, obviously. Our families. She told me quite a lot about her sister. I think she was called Annie, or Amy, or something. Julia was very worried about her; she had a serious eating disorder, apparently. Julia felt quite torn about how to respond to it. I’ve got a cousin who suffered from anorexia – still does, as it happens, so I could completely relate to her dilemma.’
‘How do you think Julia felt about her parents? Did she talk to you about them?’
‘Hmm, not that much, really. I think I probably ranted on about mine quite a lot, but she didn’t really say that much about hers. From the few things she did say, I gathered that she found her mother a tad cold and her father a bit over the top. But I don’t think she was particularly preoccupied with them.’
‘What topics did interest her?’
‘Ideas. Definitely. She was very interested in theories and big questions – justice, ethics, equality, that kind of thing. She’d always talk about ideas if you didn’t stop her, and obviously she was extremely sharp and articulate and all that, so I wasn’t ever bored when she went on about political and ethical dilemmas and so on. Obviously I was interested in these topics, too, but perhaps not quite as obsessively as she was. She was really serious about it all, you know? Like really intense.
‘Luckily, we’d chosen exactly the same modules that term – one on political philosophy, one on ethics and markets, one on globalization and its discontents. I can’t remember the name of the fourth. We always sat together in class. We had so much fun together. We’d send each other silly little notes and whisper things to each other, and we both fancied one of the lecturers, the one who taught globalization and its discontents, so we deliberately flirted with him to try and make him blush. I think we must have been pretty annoying!
‘But then Julia always made up for those moments. I mean, she was just so fiercely, scarily clever – even the lecturers were in awe of her. And whenever she said anything during the seminar discussions everyone else just sort of agreed and nodded their heads.’
‘Really? I would have thought that her views wouldn’t necessarily appeal to everyone... ’
‘Oh, they did! Well, except for one person – I almost forgot about her. There was one student Julia didn’t get on with at all. Mia something… Meyerowitz, I think it was. I’m pretty sure no one in the seminar liked Mia that much. She had an incredibly shrill, tinny voice and tried to dominate seminar discussions. She looked like a Japanese teenager who’d just returned from the future: she was small and wiry, and wore her pink hair in two braided buns over her ears, separated by a sharp-edged fringe. Usually, she was clad in wetsuit-like rubber outfits paired with absurdly high boots, or else she was dressed like a schoolgirl in an Asian horror film. Like, totally over the top, you know? Mia was a big theory-lover, a highly articulate advocate of identity politics, for whom Foucault, Derrida and Butler were gospel. You know the type? Julia had real issues with Mia’s views – she thought that the politics of representation and the concern with symbolic structures that was so fashionable in academia at that time was narcissistic and a dangerous distraction from the only thing she felt really mattered: a fairer distribution of wealth. She took that kind of stuff very seriously, and Mia really bothered her.’
‘How would you describe Julia’s political views at that time?’
‘I don’t know. They were hard to pin down. She read a lot of stuff on decolonization, all kinds of political resistance movements and guerrilla warfare. There was definitely a neo-Marxist streak. For example, she thought that the only cure for the crude economic and ecological exploitation on which Western privileges were built was the radical abolition of private property. I remember her explaining all that to me in more detail in Mo’s bar one evening.
‘Anyway, Julia and Mia clashed from the start, and their quarrels grew ever more heated. Mia really was quite annoying, with her Mickey Mouse voice and endless theory-speak, and I think pretty much everyone in the class sided with
Julia when they argued. Soon the Western political thought module was completely dominated by their verbal duelling. Things really came to a head when Mia gave a presentation on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. About five minutes into the presentation, Julia pulled a face and rolled her eyes at me. But unfortunately, Mia had seen her do it too. She asked Julia really aggressively if there was something she had to say, and as you can imagine, Julia did.
‘They really laid into each other. Julia went on about how taking these paradox-peddling obscurantist rhetoricians seriously was like contemplating which wallpaper to choose while your house was burning down. Mia in turn called Julia a spoiled upper-middle-class white bitch who didn’t know the first thing about poverty or real suffering. And on they went, you can imagine it. The rest of us were in stitches, except for Mia, of course, who was fuming.’
‘It does all sound a bit crass, Alison,’ I said.
‘Yes, but it was really funny. I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t told the story very well. Julia did have a funny side, you know? She made me laugh. A lot. All of us, in fact. At the start of the year, our seminar group went out regularly for drinks. One evening, we went on a pub-crawl that ended up in a place called The World’s End on the Royal Mile. After we’d been there for a while we all agreed to walk up to the castle to enjoy the view of the city at night. Julia was the only one who was sober. The rest of us were completely rat-arsed by the time we reached the cobblestone-covered car park at the top of the hill. We stumbled across it towards the castle gate, which we planned to enter so that we could inspect the infamous Stone of Scone. But to our great disappointment we found it guarded by a soldier, who was standing stiff and still, blocking the way in. He was around eighteen or nineteen, clad in a traditional Scottish ceremonial kilt, and his white, round face, which was decorated with an unflattering cap, shone brightly in the moonlight. I remember we all thought he looked absolutely hilarious, and we took lots of silly pictures of him on our phones.
‘Then we started pleading with him to let us in, but he just ignored us. He stared straight ahead, never even acknowledging our presence. We came up with all kinds of reasons why we urgently needed to go into the castle. We even tried to bribe him with whisky and shortbread, but to no avail. Then the girls in the group became more daring, calling him names, commenting on the shapeliness of his legs, promising him kisses, finally threatening to lift his kilt, but the boy remained standing to attention. Amazing!
‘Julia watched the spectacle from afar. Then she joined us and declared that she could make him move. We all jeered and laughed, but Julia insisted. Mia didn’t believe her, and suggested a bet. I think they bet fifty quid each – and the rules were no touching and without throwing anything. They shook hands on it. Julia smiled and walked up to the soldier. Then she pulled down her trousers and knickers, squatted down next to him and started to pee. Just before the puddle reached his feet, the boy stepped aside, his face as red as the feather in his cap. We were dying of laughter. It was so funny, Clare. Only Mia was peeved, of course.’
I thought about that scene while Alison went to the loo.
‘How did Julia feel about academia more generally?’ I asked her when she returned. ‘And how did she get on with your lecturers?’
‘Well, really well, at the beginning. There was this middle-aged professor, Robert McMullan, whom we both kind of fancied – you know, softly spoken, rolling his “r”s in that sexy Scottish way, sensitive and quietly elegant, with melancholic brown eyes and floppy grey hair, and so on. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it then, he obviously fancied Julia, too. He always looked as though he was about to sink down on his knees and propose marriage whenever she opened her mouth, like he was totally bewitched. He’d stare at her for ages and forget to respond until people started to giggle. He’d constantly cite her in his lectures: “As Julia put it so lucidly the other week”, and “as Julia has pointed out so perceptively” – that kind of stuff. Embarrassing! The other lecturers were a bit afraid of Julia, I think, because she was obviously so much brighter than they were, and they must have felt threatened by that. You know, most academics are dreadful narcissists.’
‘So why did your friendship with Julia end?’
Alison laughed. ‘Well, why do friendships between women usually end? A man came between us. He stole my best friend. Seriously, that’s exactly what happened. To this day I’m not sure where he came from, what he was doing in Edinburgh, or even what his real name was. All I know is that he called himself Chris, and that she met him at Mo’s place. We were sitting at our usual table, and Julia was talking about the social repercussions of lowering capital gains and income taxes when I noticed that she became distracted. She kept glancing over her shoulder, and finally I, too, craned my neck to see who or what was diverting her attention: it was a tall, very good-looking man, in his late twenties or early thirties, who was standing at the bar and chatting to Mo.
‘He was very good-looking, I’ll admit that: lean and muscular, with short, sand-coloured hair, tanned skin, fine features and dark-blue, dancing eyes. In spite of his rather shabby outfit, he looked sophisticated, and he had a posh voice. Mo, who’d also noticed Julia’s interest, called her over and introduced her to him. They immediately started to chat and were so absorbed in their conversation that Julia forgot my presence altogether. After half an hour or so, I’d finished my drink on my own and got up to leave. She did give me a quick peck on the cheek when I passed them, and half-heartedly introduced me to Chris, but I know when I’m not wanted, and I let the lovebirds get on with it.
‘I saw her only a few times after that. It was obvious that she’d fallen really hard for this guy. She stopped responding to my calls and left most of my emails unanswered. I felt a bit hurt by her sudden rejection – after all, we’d been such close friends. But you know what? In the end I understood. I mean, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? When you fall in love, you fall in love. I got over it. I knew it wasn’t personal. I’m sure I’ve behaved like that myself.
‘She told me a little bit about Chris when I did see her, that he was involved with some political groups, but what their aims were I don’t know. When he wasn’t at Mo’s, he seemed to spend most of his time in a bookshop in Windmill Street, talking to the owner and his friends. Apparently he’d caught the attention of quite a few other women on our course, and rumours were circulating among them. Some said he was a dealer, some that he was a gardener, some that he was working on a radical philosophical treatise. One girl was convinced that he robbed banks and gave away his spoils to the poor. I saw him with Julia in town a couple of times; they were walking hand in hand, looking totally enraptured with each other.
‘The very last time I saw Julia was in mid-January 2010. I’d just returned from my parents’ where I’d spent the Christmas holidays. She called me out of the blue on a Wednesday afternoon and asked if I could come to her flat. She said she wanted to give me something. When I arrived I found her in an almost empty apartment with only a few boxes and plastic bags. We hugged, and she said she was moving out of her flat. I asked whether she was moving in with Chris – it seemed the obvious explanation. But Julia told me that they were going travelling, that they’d had enough of academia, of Edinburgh – of everything, really. I was completely shocked and asked her about her studies, her degree, her parents, how they would finance it all – I was really worried for her. I mean, dropping out is such an extreme thing to do, don’t you think? And it felt like a terrible waste – she was by far the most talented of all of us.
‘She looked at me very seriously. And she sounded genuinely sad when she asked me why she should stay, what for. She said she had no desire whatsoever to work for her daddy in his law firm and to facilitate yet more unappetizing corporate mergers, or to join an investment bank and help some greedy, testosterone-driven cokeheads to gamble away the nation’s savings. Then she handed me two heavy plastic bags filled with books, hugged me hard, and that was the last I saw of her. I still have som
e of her books, including her copies of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Che’s Guerrilla Warfare, Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?, and Marighella’s Minimanual.’
‘What do you think happened to Julia?’ I asked. ‘How do you explain what she did?’
‘I really don’t know,’ Alison said. Suddenly, she looked drawn and tired. All her liveliness and energy appeared to have evaporated into thin air. She listlessly folded and unfolded her napkin, and then folded and unfolded her legs. ‘I mean, I’ve thought about it a lot, obviously. I was totally shocked when the news came out, utterly shaken. When someone you knew and very much liked does something like that, I don’t know, it really affects you. But even today I find it impossible to reconcile my memories of Julia with what I’ve heard and read about her. It’s like we’re talking about two completely different people. I remember her as warm, funny, caring and engaged. Very serious and intense about certain political issues, yes, but, you know, in a completely reasonable way. Most of what she said made a lot of sense to me, and to everyone else in our class, too.’
Alison finished her wine. ‘The only explanation I can think of is that someone must have corrupted her – that she met someone on her travels, someone evil, someone who messed with her head. Perhaps it was that Chris guy. I don’t know. But I know for sure that the person I met in Edinburgh was neither evil nor a sociopath. Far from it.’
The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel Page 14
