‘About an hour.’
His lips twitched slightly, to one side, as if an invisible string attached to his mouth had been pulled. I had given him the wrong answer.
‘We normally wait twenty-four hours before reporting a person missing, Sir. She could have just popped out to the shops.’
Normally, I thought, yes in a normal world that would normally make common sense.
‘But she’s been kidnapped. He left a white ribbon behind,’ I said, desperately.
It was beginning to sound like the Scarlet Pimpernel. I could hardly bear to meet his ironic, appraising eyes. It would be impossible to convince him of my story. Its characters were in a plot verging on the ludicrous: twin sisters, the mysterious Jack, a phantom abductor and me in a starring role. What made the portrayal of my character so realistic that he should have to believe in me?
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘It’s too complicated. You wouldn’t understand.’
I walked back out into the evening. But I knew it was more than just a story, I hadn’t made it all up. There were the other characters in the plot to confirm it.
There was a phone box on the other side of the road. Inside, it smelt of urine. An empty crumpled white McDonald’s bag lay in the corner. Cards in primary colours were stuck to the walls, advertising prostitutes. The black silhouettes of cartoon-like images of women were printed on to them. One of the glass panes was smashed, just to the right of my neck, letting the wind blow through. I dialled Juliette’s phone number, trying to breathe more calmly. There was no reply. I let it ring and ring until a robotic voice told me that there was no reply to my call. I heard the chink of the returned money as I put back the receiver.
I better go home, I thought. I needed to relax – things were getting out of hand. I needed space in which to recollect myself, pull myself together. My flat would offer relief from the squalor of what was happening to me. I hailed a taxi back to Kensington. But having arrived home I could not relax. I found myself immediately dialling Juliette’s number again. Still, there was no reply.
I wondered in a moment of despair if the last few weeks had only been a dream, an invention of my own making. The last month had proceeded so quickly, so intensely, I thought that if I could just eradicate it from my memory, my life would return to the tranquil solitude that I had once enjoyed. I had no proof of anything, no proof that Justine even existed, nor for that matter Juliette. Yet just because I had no proof, didn’t mean I could dismiss my memories altogether. Now that Justine existed simply in my head made the burden of her image only heavier to bear.
thirty–five
The painting of Justine that hung in my room was no longer enough. I wanted to paint a picture of her in my head with her lifeblood. The living Justine grew pale and empty with dry sockets and collapsing skin. Vampiric, the new image of her in my head sucked out her lifeblood in order to live afresh in my mind. In my head she became immortal. This fresh icon took on a life of its own, taunted me, bewitched me until I became its slave.
I started by drawing the letter J over the pages of the novel I was reading, then engraving it on the lid of my Queen Anne walnut desk. But I soon ran out of space and began on the walls, little J’s, then larger, in black ink, like they were insects. J is an ambiguous letter, neither linear nor totally curvaceous. I couldn’t turn it into a shape or pattern, I couldn’t organize it, I just had to draw it repeatedly, over and over again. The letter was a hieroglyph: it stood for her. It was a straight line but it was also hooked. But then as I stared at the sequences of J’s that lined my walls, the letter became meaningless, unreal, standing for an occult knowledge that would always be forbidden me. It stopped being the symbol for her. It stopped being the symbol for anything.
Even though the painting now failed to satisfy me as a whole, portions of the portrait still gratified me. I began to focus particularly on one area of it: the neck. It was long and white like the neck of a swan. I wanted to caress it. But her painted neck also invoked a kind of terror in me. The slim structure made me feel breakable and assailable. The neck, in spite of its chalky intransigence, reminded me of death.
The intensity of my fantasizing gradually became replaced by a realization that the real Justine had gone. I might never see her again. An atmosphere of horror filled the house, smelling of tar. I could hardly move, talk or think. My body and hands constantly trembled and when I attempted to eat my throat retched up the food, as if I had committed an act of impurity.
When I walked from room to room in my flat, my body felt distant, the deformity of my foot, however, grown to monstrous proportions.
Anger replaced fear. An anger that Justine had abandoned me. My murderous thoughts put my fingers around her throat. I was left in my hands with a wondrous creation of earth and broken bones.
However, in bed at night, the thought of her white bare body quickened my mind and my skin.
thirty–six
I began to wander around the centre of London in the vague hope that I might catch sight of her. I took buses instead of taxis, tolerating their noise and crowded smells. Their slower pace allowed me more time to survey the streets, and sitting on the top deck I had a panoramic view of the areas I had to cover. Beyond the glass, London seemed oblivious and alien. I was frightened to look at London in too much detail. I was reluctant to see its reality. I was scared that the external fact of London would split me in two.
I knew that in order to find Justine I would have to become more intimate with London’s underworld. Since I had met her, it was as if London had thrown off its opera houses and art galleries, its vestiges of civilization, like a discarded cloak. No longer did I see London sheathed as the centre of cultural and political greatness. I saw the capital uncovered as a heterogeneous collection of tiny occult communities, any of which could be hiding Justine within its depths. I then had to peel back London’s skin of dirt and violence and pluck out Justine from its heart.
One night I was travelling back to Kensington on a night bus, exhausted from a whole day of searching. Hypnotized by the glow of the lights in Kensington Park, I realized that their brightness only served to show up the blackness behind them. For just one moment, I took a step outside my desire, looked at my love as I looked at the park’s lights from the top deck of a bus, and saw the darkness behind it. My love for Justine was reduced to a piece of luminously wrought-out fiction. My obsession was supported by the black space of unreality. I knew, looking into the shadows of the park, that only an act of blind faith could carry me through.
I gave up travelling by bus, and started to walk. I spent days exploring London on foot, stopping in transport cafés for lunch and checking into squalid bed and breakfasts at night in the hope that I might find her. Only then did I really perceive the cruelty of London, I had resisted its streetwise imperative, and because I refused to give in to its mean streets, to see them, to believe in them, London rejected me unconditionally: London left me out in the cold. But this suited me, London made a fine burial ground.
At night the cold nibbled at my skin as I wandered through the lights of Soho. The icy wind was slowly pulling the skin off my bones in strands with its thin lips. The car headlights which flashed past loud and fast, were wet and shiny with violence. The black skyscrapers veered up into the skies like monoliths to an urban god. A god that had long since abandoned his city, leaving behind the shell of his shrines. London, at night, was silent, it didn’t utter words, just emanated moods of brutal unpredictability.
One evening after weeks of searching, it began to rain and I entered a café in Charing Cross Road, to watch from the neon-lit window for a glimpse of Justine. No matter how far I travelled out to the outskirts of the city, I always returned to its centre in the end. It was a light late summer rain, and I waited for London finally to take pity on me and bring her into the café, when her defences were down, because it was raining.
thirty–seven
/> It was then that I saw Justine walk past the window of the café. I ran out into the wet street, peering through the affronted crowds around me. She was walking about a hundred yards down the street, her green dress and gold hair conspicuous amongst the greyness of other women. She was moving slowly and I caught up with her quickly, tapping her shoulder as she had once tapped mine.
A face turned to look at me of horrific disfigurement. The skin had been so badly burned that any structure to the face was unrecognizable. The eyes were foamy white cataracts. The skin was a lurid red mass of scarred tissue. I quickly turned away, murmuring my apologies, whispering a case of mistaken identity. But as I walked away I felt secretly pleased at the strange woman’s injury. It was her punishment for not being Justine, for making me think that she was.
thirty-eight
I returned to my flat. The portrait of Justine had changed yet again. She was now wearing a velvet dress in the green the grass goes after it has rained. Her face was paler than usual, but full of grace, and her eyes, because they were lowered on the hook she was writing, seemed shut in death. I refrained from calling out her name. It was her seeing me that would wrest all power from me. Visually, she was mine. As long as she didn’t look up and see me, I had the upper hand. I was in control. I wanted to watch her forever, never disturb her, leave her trapped in her world of words so that I could just look.
My eyes were drawn irretrievably to her neck: a chain of gold in heavy loops now hung around it. It was definitely a chain – there was even a padlock fastened to its side. My eyes fell to her wrists, where again the same chains of gold were fastened. I could see that they weighed her down, slightly deformed the grace of her movements, as she lifted her hand to turn a page of her hook. The chains were of heavy old gold, the gold of blood. The links pressed into her flesh, leaving their imprint. Only when she sat completely still could she maintain the illusion of being free.
I picked up the phone and tried calling Juliette. There was no reply. I looked at my watch – it was nine o’clock – still not too late. I decided to go round to Juliette’s flat.
It had stopped raining and the August evening was humid and still. There was a light on, in her flat above the pet shop and I rang the doorbell. No one came down. I pushed against the door, and to my surprise it opened easily – it had not been shut properly. I walked through the gloomy, strangely lighted, pet shop, past the sleeping animals. In the distance I could hear the record, ‘These Foolish Things’, being played. As I walked up the steep steps to Juliette’s flat I began to be able to make out the words: . . . and candlelight on little corner tables. The music was coming from her apartment, the melody winding its way down the stairs towards me.
The winds of March
That make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings
But who’s to answer
O how the ghost of you clings
I knocked on the half-open door but there was no reply and I entered her flat. I walked to the end of the corridor and opened the door. The light was on. The room had been completely cleared out. It was empty except for the duck egg blue carpet that the removal of all the junk had revealed. An empty orange juice carton stood in the corner.
I ran to her bedroom. Empty, even the bed had gone. Only a record player stood in the corner. I watched as the song came to an end, the arm of the record-player swung back to the beginning of the record and began to play the tune all over again.
A tinkling piano
In the next apartment
Somehow told me
What my heart meant
O how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you . . .
I lay down on the wooden floor of her bedroom, my head next to the record player, letting the song interminably repeat itself, close to my ears until I finally fell asleep.
The next morning I woke up with a bad headache. The record had stuck in the groove of lipstick traces, playing the phrase over and over again. I switched it off. The ensuing silence returned a sense of peace to the flat. Morning sunlight was shining through the rooms. I had given up finding any clues to what had happened to Juliette. I decided that I needed some air and went to the window to open it. Jammed in the window frame was a pamphlet for Kew Gardens. I eased the folded paper out and put it in my pocket.
Closing the door to Juliette’s flat behind me I went downstairs. Inside the pet shop was the musty smell of animal scent and sawdust. I stood for a moment in the shadowy light of the hypnotic blue gleam of the fish tanks. The owner was at the far end of the shop, at the front, his back to me, feeding a tank of fish. The black skin of his bared arm looked blue in the light. The Angel Fish floated slowly up towards the half-moons of his nails.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
He looked round.
‘I wonder if you could tell me what has happened to the girl that lives in the flat above you?’
He continued to look at me.
‘To Juliette. The girl who lives above you.’
‘No one lives there,’ he said.
I heard a clicking sound start up. I turned round to see a hamster going round and round in its tiny red plastic wheel.
‘No, I know no one lives there now,’ I said impatiently. ‘But the girl who used to live there. As far as I know until a week or so ago.’
‘No one used to live there, neither,’ he said. ‘Those rooms aren’t even used for storage. They’re kept empty except for a couple of cardboard boxes. That’s how it is. This girl you’re looking for – Juliette. She’s been having you on.’ He smiled at me, a big smile.
I remembered her flat when I had first visited it, full of objects which had looked like the accumulation of years of habitation: the clothes, the furniture, the manuscripts. And I looked at this man’s implacable face. I turned and walked out of the shop. As the door swung shut behind me, the parrot let out a piercing peal of laughter.
thirty-nine
As I walked back into the centre of town that morning, various questions kept on going round and round in my head. Why had Juliette disappeared? Where had she gone? Was she, after all, in some way responsible for her sister’s abduction? I remembered how she had looked when she had spoken of how she had been betrayed by Justine and Jack. The look in her eye had spiralled in on itself. Had that only been an act, to draw me in, as she had later led me to believe? What about the explicit photographs? The knives drawn through them?
Now that Juliette had gone, the only remaining character left on the plot’s square was Jack. The only thing that I knew about him was that he was an artist. I also had an approximate image of his face from the photographs I had seen in Juliette’s scrapbook. As I was walking, my mind hopelessly churning, my hand felt in my pocket a piece of hard card that I didn’t recognize. Curious, I pulled it out – it was the Kew Gardens pamphlet that I had found in Juliette’s flat. Absentmindedly, I began to flick through the pages.
Inside, was a brief history of the gardens and a list of the famous botanists who had been involved in their creation. I closed the pamphlet and was about to throw it away when the cover caught my eye. A bright colour photograph of one of the large conservatories was featured on the front, just above the times and admission prices of the gardens. A figure of a man was standing to the right, in front of the conservatory, just inside the right-hand corner of the square of the photograph. He looked as if he had wandered into the photograph by accident and was looking questioningly at whoever was taking the photograph. He did not look like a man who wanted to be trapped in Technicolour.
His face looked blunt in the outside light, the cheek bones sharp, the mouth wide and cheeky. His expression was one of making perpetual mischief. His curly hair seemed too soft and feminine for the masculine impertinence of his face. His eyes were slightly slanting in a bemused expression under the tendrils. I kept on loo
king at the face, beguiled by it. It was as if I had to stare at the shape of the face for a long time, in order that I might recognize it as Jack’s. His body looked as if it had been draped around him for his own pleasure.
I hailed a taxi to Kew. Having paid my entrance fee, I walked through the gates, surrounded on both sides by high stone walls, into the gardens. Just inside, a long queue of adults and children were waiting for entry to the maze. I wondered why people were willing to pay to get lost, when they already were, for free. Perhaps they just wanted to confirm something that they already knew. It was noon and the sun was high up in the sky.
A uniformed warden was walking towards me. ‘Excuse me.’
He looked up at me. I brandished the cover of the pamphlet and pointed to Jack.
‘Could you tell me where I might find this man?’
The warden looked down at the cover and gave a smile of recognition.
‘He got into there by mistake. Yes. That’s John Baptiste. He works here. You’ll find him over there.’ He pointed just north of me to the conservatory that was also featured on the front of the pamphlet.
As I approached the conservatory, I saw a small figure running towards me down the path. As it grew nearer, I could see that she was a young girl of about nine, in a lemon dress, with long chestnut hair. Tears were disfiguring her face. She stopped when she reached me.
‘I’ve lost my doll’, she said with abrupt impertinence. ‘You haven’t seen her, have you?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t’, I replied. ‘But I know the feeling.’
She looked at me crossly and ran on.
Inside the greenhouse, the air was humid – I felt it was trying to pull me inside out. I could hardly breathe. From high up above, water trickled down from carefully positioned fountains, running down the tips of the tall jungle plants, but dissolving in the heat below. I was surrounded by a dark green lushness, except for the neon flashes of orange, yellow and red blooms. The sun beat down from the glass above.
Justine Page 7
