Justine

by Alice Thompson

  As the carriage clock chimed one, Juliette curled up on the sofa, her dress falling back over her thighs, the flesh of her legs above her stockings as smooth as Venetian glass. Her manner had shed its nubile gaucherie, as if it had been invaded by an occult force that had incorrigibly transformed her identity.

  I sat down beside her, close, and she didn’t flinch. Lethe, however, leapt from her lap. I bent down towards Juliette, raised up her chin gently with my hand, and kissed her. Her soft mouth opened for mine. But suddenly she drew back and sat up. I expected her face to be flushed with desire but instead it looked quiet and reflective.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.

  I tried to control my sense of panic that she had guessed my real reasons.

  ‘Why are you so intent on seducing me?’ she continued. ‘It would be as obvious to an idiot that you despise me. And find me physically vaguely repulsive. But you are acting as if driven by the devil himself.’

  I clutched desperately around in my head for an answer that might satisfy her, appease her insecurity.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can say that,’ I replied. ‘You are completely mistaken. I find you incredibly attractive.’

  I leant towards her again and started to play deliberately absentmindedly with a strand of her hair. She turned her head towards me hut her eyes were lowered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Ignore me. Writers have such terrible imaginations.’

  She raised up her face to be kissed and we began to play out that silent language which has its own grammar. The portrait of Justine watched the proceedings from above the mantelpiece, a smile flickering about her lips in the candlelight. She’s smiling at me, I thought, smiling at what I will do for her.

  twenty–one

  I woke up the next morning to find that the bedclothes had fallen off us during the night. Juliette was lying next to me, looking up into my eyes. Already I was picking up on a change in her since we had had sex. She was beginning to smell of need. The need of a woman was rotten at the core, it seeped through her whole body, permeated its edges: need spread. It would start in the eyes, make its way through the posture, interfere with the vocabulary, and finally invaded what was once a sensibility. Need provoked the worst crime of all: self-consciousness. Already I could see that what lay beyond Juliette’s desperation, her clumsiness, her seriousness, was her encroaching self-consciousness. It crippled her identity, deformed it, crystallized and then shattered it. She was like a cracked mirror, always self-reflecting an image that was deformed.

  Juliette sat up and crawled to the end of the bed. Kneeling over my body, she began cradling my right foot in her hands. I watched her face, curious about her reaction to the foot’s deformity. However, her mien remained impassive and unreadable. She was tracing the line of the foot’s bony deformation as if it were a seashell that she had picked up from the shore.

  ‘You can keep it, if you like,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You don’t accept it, do you? The asymmetry of your body.’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s a misrepresentation.’

  Juliette left later that morning. I watched her from my window run down the street. I lay down on my sofa and took out my pipe. Through the myth-making of its smoke the portrait of Justine had changed shape yet again. Her mouth was now wide open and her laughter sounded wicked.

  twenty–two

  I had not wanted to return to Waterloo. I had had enough glimpses into the sordidity of Juliette’s lifestyle, just from the outside, to last me. However, she had insisted that it was her turn to entertain. And I knew in my heart that I had to see her again. She answered the door to the pet shop in a dress splattered with sepia details (taken from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus) of the goddess emerging from the sea in her shell. Juliette was just another impostor I thought of a different kind. Icons of love could only be worn by Justine.

  I followed her reluctantly through the deserted pet shop. I could hear the animals quietly stirring in their cages. The staircase up to her flat, at the back of the shop, was narrow and steep and covered in a thick coarse carpet, the colour of dense mud. As I followed her up the stairs, a parrot in one of the cages from down below called up, ‘Silly Boy . . . Silly Boy’.

  The plain white door at the top of the stairs had a smooth surface, empty of a number or letter. Juliette inserted her key into the small keyhole which was surprisingly low down in the door. The door was positioned very near the edge of the top step, making it awkward for me to get into her flat without stumbling, but Juliette took my hand.

  The hallway was dark inside, but as I followed Juliette down the narrow corridor, I could just make out that the walls were papered in dark red flock. She opened a door at the far end of the passageway. Entering, it took me a while, because of the very dim light, to work out where I was. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I slowly realized that I was standing in the middle of a pile of junk. I was surrounded by rubbish. Discarded mannequins, stuffed one-eyed owls, biscuit tins, old torn newspapers, and a stoat perched forever on a tree stump in an old glass case, lay all around. Was this some kind of joke? There was hardly enough space for my feet. Books, hand-written manuscripts, crusts of bread, broken-open piggy-banks and soiled underwear littered the ground. It was as if every conceivable used object in the world was lying on her floor. Worst of all, this room was lived in by a woman. There was not a single trace of feminine tidiness or nicety.

  In the distance, in a neighbouring flat, someone had started to play hesitantly on the piano, ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine’. I looked up at Juliette. She was now standing on the other side of the room, having quickly negotiated all the obstacles in her way with nimble feet. She was staring at me. In the dark saturated room I watched as she began to move her hands over the sepia print of the dress, stopping at her breasts to touch her nipples, or rubbing between her legs, the material crunching up wetly between her body. Her face was flushed and her mouth open, but her eyes did not leave mine once. The background noise of the chaos, the darkness, the warm smells, the inane tinkling of the piano were all insanely contributing to my heightening arousal.

  I was oblivious to the broken chairs and pieces of glass that snatched and cut at my ankles, as I made my way over to her. Reaching out to her, I pulled her body to me, at the same time kissing the warm pale skin of her neck, tearing at her dress to kiss between her breasts, placing my hand between her soft open legs. My desire for her was making it difficult for me to breathe. Without undressing I took her standing up against the off-white peeling walls.

  But afterwards, as I belted up my trousers again, I felt ashamed. Juliette torn and dishevelled, stood quietly watching me, her back still leaning against the wall. I felt degraded: for a moment my desire for Juliette had actually been real. I wanted to hit Juliette for what she had done, for her repugnant temptations, for being too much. For making me betray Justine.

  I looked around the room again – who could live in a room like this? What sort of person? The debris, the lack of order, the smell, the constant assault to every civilized sense. It would require a kind of insanity or autism to tolerate it. Someone who lived only in the interior world of the mind.

  A piece of handwritten manuscript lying on the floor caught my eye. I picked it up. The page was headed with the single word: plot. A diagram of a square had been drawn underneath. At each of the square’s corners had been written a name: Juliette, Justine, Jack, and my own. Who was Jack? Juliette snatched the paper from me.

  ‘You reading the plot is not part of it,’ she said, mysteriously.

  Then, her clothes half-ripped off her, and covered in sweat and semen, she said the words that, at that moment, I had least expected her to say.

  ‘You haven’t fooled me for a second. Do you really think that I haven’t guessed who you’re really interested in? I’m just your way in, aren
’t I? To finding out more about her. So you want inside information? Let me give it to you. Justine’s favourite colour? Green. Justine’ s favourite book? The Portrait of a Lady. I can give you all the clues that you want. But let’s cut out the crap. I haven’t got all the time in the world, you know.’

  twenty–three

  I looked at her, wondering if it was worthwhile bothering to conceal my shock and dismay that she had discovered the truth. Had she known the truth all along? My plot was being rewritten by her and I didn’t like it one bit.

  Juliette seemed disinterested in my response. She also seemed indifferent to the fact that she was now writing the story.

  ‘Of course, you are making a dreadful mistake,’ she said, ‘I mean with regards to Justine. She’s dangerous. She is cold. She is without emotion. I may be neurotic, but at least the only person I hurt is myself.’

  I watched her face as she spoke. Standing in the junkyard of her home, as the night grew closer, the fair hair that fell in tendrils about her face turned black in the shadows. The eyes set far apart in the face were opaque. I decided to try to get back in control of the events.

  ‘What makes you think it is Justine, not you, whom I want?’

  ‘The disappointment in your eyes in the National Gallery when I told you I wasn’t Justine – it has never left your face.’

  I gave up then any thought of continuing my pretence.

  Juliette started to cry. Through her tears she began to speak quietly, so that I could only just make out her words.

  ‘She does everything better than I do. She also writes but unlike me she has been published. Her first novel, Death is a Woman, was an international success. Critics adored her literary pretensions, the public her realistic insight into character. I can’t even get an agent.’

  She stopped for breath and then began to speak more loudly as anger took over from pain.

  ‘She even makes love better than I do. In spite of her sangfroid, Justine is unutterably generous with her flesh and all its hollows. Her lovemaking weaves a web: it catches her lover, like a fly, between its intricate lines. You see, I know all the intimate details. Would you like to hear how?’

  I didn’t know what to say. By this time her face had hardened so much, it looked as if her blood had frozen into ice.

  ‘The only man I have ever loved told me. “It’s the way that she kisses me,” he began. As if he were cutting off the head of a flower for his button-hole. As if the explicit details he then gave me of their lovemaking were a justification for him leaving me. Hard to believe that someone could be so cruel, isn’t it? But then he is an artist.’

  She’s talking about Jack, I thought. The name on one of the corners of the square.

  ‘She is so devious. You have no idea how. She asked for permission to steal him from me. That was her way. At the time her novel and Jack were only ideas in her head. She took me aside: “I want to make the hero of Death is a Woman an artist. Could I borrow Jack for a few days? Just for research?” I felt as if the flesh on my body would fall away as she spoke. Because I knew she was asking for the reality of him, the reality of his body and soul, not for a character in her book but for herself. There was nothing I could do to stop it from happening. How could I argue against the reality of Jack?’

  The more Juliette told me about Justine, the more bewitched I became by Justine’s cool treachery of her sister. Any adjective used to describe Justine, any verb to sketch in the way she behaved, only added to my desire for her. Every word to do with her had this effect on me, no matter what the word meant.

  It had grown so dark in the room I could barely make out Juliette’s outline. We were still standing in the same place where we had fucked an hour earlier. Rain was beginning to patter hard against the window pane and the skylight above. The room took on the appearance, in the increasing shadows, of a cubist painting, rectangles and circles projecting into the darkness.

  twenty–four

  It was as if, once she had started, Juliette could not stop talking about Justine. Her hatred of her sister had become an obsession.

  ‘As children, Justine and I spoke the same language. But over the years the differences have built up like bricks to form a high wall between us. It is a wall I feel protected by now. Justine knows this too: we need our differences.’

  The intensity of her feelings was now finding full expression in her voice, seeping through from thought into articulation, like blood into a bandage. Even the structure of her face seemed to be concaving under the power of her emotion. The acidity of her passion was dissolving the edge of her physical features.

  I was beginning to realize that Juliette might prove an unpredictable go-between for myself and Justine. But if she were still prepared to be used, I was still prepared to use her. I conjectured that the only way she had of separating herself off from her twin, was to relentlessly perceive herself as the failure and Justine as the success. The two sisters were like shadow and light. Each needed the negation of the other. Her determined reading that I preferred Justine to herself did not precipitate it as a fact (for it would have been true, whatever she did), but rather confirmed a need of her own. She had wanted me to choose her sister over her, all along. She was fed up with the gruesome shades of half-truths and betrayals that had, up until now, marked out her life. The junk in her room consisted of the trophies of all the hurts and deceptions that had filled up her mind.

  Juliette had told me her story and I wanted to get on with my own again.

  ‘Do you think you might be able to arrange a meeting for me with Justine?’

  Juliette didn’t flinch.

  ‘She likes her anonymity. It is difficult for even me to get in contact with her. She is also extremely wary of strangers. She has particularly obsessive fans.’

  I felt as if bars were enclosing me one by one, that any fact now about Justine, good or bad, would be made of iron. I could tell Juliette had no intention of giving me any more details tonight. I would wait until she fell asleep, and see what I could find out about Justine, on my own.

  twenty–five

  I watched Juliette fall asleep, from nervous and sexual exhaustion; on the floor between a three-legged cane chair and a bag of golf clubs. In the dark she looked like just another mannequin. I wondered where to begin looking. The sheer multiplicity of objects in the room seemed to mock me, as if daring me to examine each miscellaneous object in turn, for the rest of my life. I was also reluctant to turn the light on in case I woke her.

  I decided to try another room first. Coming out into the corridor, a line of doors on either side faced me, as in Alice in Wonderland. The first door I tried was locked, but the second opened slightly and then stuck. Shouldering the door, I shoved hard and the door opened to the sound of books crashing to the floor. A bookshelf had been propped up against the door. Inside manuscripts and books covered the floor and a single bed stood in the corner. A stuffed raven, its feathers oiled black, was perched on the mantelpiece, next to a half-full coffee cup. This was Juliette’s bedroom.

  I tried the tall-boy first – the drawers were filled with pastel, silk lingerie, clothing I would never have associated with Juliette. It was late and I felt tired and hadn’t eaten for hours. I was also beginning to feel inexplicably nervous as I searched through Juliette’s things, as if I were on the edge of some kind of disaster. A disaster that my search would directly instigate. This did not stop me looking, only made me the more determined to find something quickly, that would have to disturb me.

  When I did find what I was looking for, I almost passed it by. Having unearthed a child’s scrapbook from beneath a layer of frothy negligée, I unthinkingly flung it on to the ground. Only when the book fell face up, and open, did it catch my attention. It was a catalogue of photographs, stuck neatly in columns on to the coloured pages. Each photograph depicted an explicit sex scene between two lovers, obviously taken without thei
r knowledge. Through each photograph a knife had been drawn in red ink on to the Polaroid snap that dissected their bodies in half. The words ‘Jack and Justine’ had been printed clearly above each photograph. I noticed that Justine had moles in the star shape of the plough across her torso.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ Juliette’s voice sounded cold behind me.

  Luckily, as my back was turned to her, my body was blocking her view of what I was looking at. I slipped the scrapbook under the bed and turned round. She looked terrible – rings, like huge bruises, hung under her eyes.

  ‘I’m looking for clues.’

  ‘Clues to where you might find Justine?’ She laughed mockingly, ‘You won’t find them in this room. They’re all up here.’ And she tapped her head.

  twenty–six

  It was almost midnight but Juliette knew of a café under the arches which would still be open. It was still raining and to me the black stone of the bridges seemed like the entrance to the end of the world.

  We sat opposite each other at a formica table eating disgustingly cooked food but I was too hungry and tired to be affronted by the squalor of the place.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ Juliette said, her dress falling off her shoulders to reveal her scratched skin beneath. ‘I hate Justine. I want my revenge. This is where you come in.’