Justine

by Alice Thompson

  forty

  ‘Can I help you?’ one of the tops of the plants seemed to ask. I looked up into the centre of the white heat of the sun. A face was peering at me from the balcony that ran along the top of the conservatory. A hand was resting on the balustrade and I thought for a moment the fingers were bleeding badly, until I saw that they were grasping a scarlet petalled plant.

  ‘Are you John Baptiste?’ I asked.

  He moved out of the direct sunlight into the shade where I could see him more clearly. He was.

  ‘Come on up. If you follow the path where you are standing, round, it will take you to the foot of a spiral staircase.’

  I expected the air to grow hotter as I climbed but the fountains of water were freshening the atmosphere of the upper half of the greenhouse. Jack was bending down over a flowerpot, his back to me, planting the flower that I had seen in his hand. His fingers confidently manipulated the soil around its roots. He stood up when he heard me coming and turned to face me. He stood at least a foot above me, emanating masculine health.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s about Justine,’ I said.

  ‘It’s always about Justine. You’re a friend of hers?’

  ‘She came to me for help,’ I started to explain.

  ‘She came to you for help?’ Jack repeated, obviously astonished. ‘Justine never needs help . . .’

  She must have kept the threatening letters a secret from him, I thought, she didn’t want to worry him.

  ‘But surely you’ve noticed that she’s gone?’ I persevered.

  The conversation was verging on the surreal.

  ‘Oh, I never worry about that. Justine is always disappearing. She’s addicted to disappearing. She does it to make her life more interesting – to compensate.’

  The heat of the greenhouse was making the headache that I had had since I had woken up, worse.

  ‘Compensate for what?’ I asked.

  ‘For not succeeding as a writer.’

  ‘But she’s a successful writer!’

  ‘Who on earth told you that?’

  ‘Both Juliette and Justine.’

  ‘Oh, they’re as bad as each other.’

  ‘Are you saying that Justine has never been published?’ ‘Never. She has been working on a novel called Death is a Woman for years, but she can’t get the plot to work out. Or the characters, for that matter: they all seem to merge into each other. So she lives her life as if it were a novel instead. It livens things up for her – she’s the prototype drama queen. Don’t worry that she has disappeared. In fact, now that you mention it, I remember her telling me she was leaving the house for a few days.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About twelve days ago, I think.’

  Twelve days ago was the day that she had been abducted. This was making no sense. Had Justine known that the abductor was going to be successful? Ridiculous. For whatever reason, Jack was lying.

  forty-one

  I realized that there was no point in my explaining to Jack the true circumstances of Justine’s disappearance. I took his phone number and his address and left realizing that he knew even less than I did. And also feeling, since our meeting, that I now knew less than I had done before. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Jack had been lying. If Death is a Woman had not been published, how could the abductor have become obsessed by its heroine? The only person who had read her writing was Jack. Surely he couldn’t be the abductor? But if he had followed Justine for all those weeks, wouldn’t she at some point have caught a glimpse of him and recognized him?

  I climbed back down the spiral staircase, through the artificial rain. A few minutes later I heard the sound of running footsteps and my name being called. I turned around to see that it was Jack.

  ‘Do you mind if I walk with you a while?’ he asked. The light changed the colour of his eyes from slate grey to blue.

  We walked down towards the lake. He’s like Puck, I thought, a grown-up Puck. He causes trouble. Wherever he is, his sense of playful irresponsibility, his lack of introspection, will cause trouble. He will be the catalyst for his own destruction. He will be the carrier of distorted messages. This is the man whom Justine loves.

  ‘Do you love Justine?’ I suddenly felt compelled to ask.

  ‘Love is . . .’ he paused and then laughed. ‘Love is . . . like an armchair cover. It hides a multitude of sins. It’s washable and may well have a riot of roses and auriculas splashed over it, but underneath everything is all ripped up.’

  He turned and looked directly into my eyes. His eyes were now blue black like the water of the lake. A child’s pram was floating in the water.

  ‘Do you love Justine?’ he asked.

  I was taken aback. It had not occurred to me that he would attempt to analyse my feelings, that he had a consciousness of his own that would not be acting in exact conjunction with my own.

  ‘How can you ask that, if you don’t, as you have just implied, believe in love?’

  ‘Ah, but you do and so does Justine. So why don’t the both of you play let’s-pretend?’

  He skipped a stone across the surface of the lake. It bounced six times.

  Something plastic squashed beneath the heavy platform of my right foot. I had stood on a doll. I bent down and picked her up; she was in a hot pink dress, with frothy golden curls and forget-me-not eyes. She batted her eyelashes at me.

  ‘You should hand her in,’ Jack said before turning away and walking back towards the greenhouse.

  I put the doll under my jacket, obscurely angry with the little girl who had lost it for being so careless. Arriving home, I phoned Waterstone’s but there was no reply. I stuck the doll up on the mantelpiece, just under the portrait of Justine. She had been lost, and I had found her, and I had taken her home where I could keep her forever.

  forty-two

  The events of the story of Justine had become my new drug of choice. But I saw through the haze of my obsession that blood was now dripping from one of Justine’s painted eyes.

  The letter arrived the next morning. It lay propped up on my mantelpiece, a missive from the underworld, defiling my sanctuary. My name and address were written in the unformed handwriting that I now immediately recognized. It did not occur to me to wonder how the abductor had found out where I lived. I opened the letter with a mixture of fear and anticipation.

  The words on the page were like a visitation from the devil. All the feelings of my mind and body rose in revolt against its words. For the whole of my life I had been surrounded by a wall of beautiful artifice. Yet from the moment I had first seen Justine my protective fortification had been toppling in pieces, one by one, around me. First the wall around the fortress, then the towers of the fortress itself, stones whole and broken, falling hundreds of feet down into the waiting grass. Dust motes were hanging in the air.

  I looked again at the only words that had been capitalized on the closely written page: kill jack or justine dies. The abductor’s jealousy of Justine’s love for Jack was stuck between the barbed-wire of his other obscenities like a black paper flower. The words were only made of black print.

  I blocked out the letter from my memory. However, over the next few days London’s violence seemed to intensify accordingly, become its very heartbeat. The tensions in the streets had been normalized by the words of the letter, become part of a larger pattern. Everywhere I now looked I saw the imagery of death. On television, in newspapers, in film. As if the imagery of the world had come up to meet my own private world.

  forty-three

  I arranged to meet Jack the following Saturday: he suggested Leicester Square. Arriving early, I was met by a seething mass of humanity which filled up the square with its noise and smells and gestures. The multicoloured lights and arching machinery of a fair had been erected in the square’s cent
re. Ferris wheels revolved high up in the sky to a discordant cacophony of musical tunes. People of all ages and colours, their faces strained by the need to have a good time, shoved violently around me. The crowd swallowed me up before I had time to escape: they had violent whims which pushed me any which way.

  Jack was heading straight through the crowd towards me. He was conspicuous as if parting the sea. He seemed to have no difficulty in walking in a straight line through the crowd, as if the crowd were moulding itself to his intentions. In spite of his broad shoulders he was walking with the still head and lithe movements of a ballet dancer. Jack seemed to be full of these supple contradictions. As if his body couldn’t make up his mind about who he was, or perhaps it was because he himself didn’t care. Leaning over the shoulders of the crowd, he reached out his hand to me. I took it, reluctantly: his palm was cool and dry. He dragged me gently in the direction of a building which stood to the side of the square, fronted by stone steps. Climbing the steps, we stood above and apart from the crowd.

  As we stood together in silence watching the crowd, it began to gently rain. Water trickled down Jack’s hair and over his face. I realized that in spite of his contradictions, there was something very specific about him: his sexuality. And as soon as I thought this, a sense of repulsion engulfed me. It repelled me to think of his body heaving over the pale ethereality of Justine.

  The rain was stopping.

  ‘All’s fair in love and war,’ Jack said. Before I had time to resist he had seized my hand again and was dragging me back down into the crowd.

  forty-four

  The nearer the centre of the square we drew, the deeper I felt we were travelling into an underworld of lost souls. The Ferris wheel was circling high up in the sky ahead of us, a bangle of sparkling light.

  Jack stopped in front of the gun ring. It was a stall with a row of fluffy teddy bears and Barbie dolls standing in shadow at the back. The woman behind the stall had the callous shrivelled face of those who work for the entertainment of others. She had sold off all her joy long ago. She handed Jack a gun. Her smile was as yellow as a plastic duck.

  Jack confidently picked up the gun, held it to his shoulder and took aim at a fluffy green teddy bear. He shot it between its plastic eyes and it slowly toppled over to one side.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said, smiling and handing the gun over to me.

  ‘I don’t know how to,’ I said.

  Standing behind me, he placed the gun in the crook of my shoulder and altered my grip. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

  ‘Aim the barrel of the gun between the two points at its tip.’

  Magically, the tip of the Barbie doll’s pert nose became centred in my view-finder.

  ‘Pull the trigger. Now,’ he said.

  I fired and the Barbie doll fell off her perch on to the sawdust floor.

  ‘See, it’s easy when you know how,’ he said.

  We began desultorily circulating the fair again. All the lights of the fair were in the primary colours: blues, yellows and reds, major not minor tones. But they couldn’t compete with the flesh-coloured light of London that constantly shines up in the sky, that is never shut off, that hovers over London like a halo. The fair lights are the lights of a toy lamp compared to the pervasive presence of the city light.

  There are no stars in the sky of London any more. Like the fair, they couldn’t compete with the city. Instead of flashing in different colours to make an impression, the stars went out. London, with a huff and a puff, blew them all down.

  ‘You take life seriously, don’t you?’ Jack asked.

  I was startled out of my introspection.

  ‘I don’t tell jokes, if that’s what you mean,’ I said.

  ‘Not exactly. I meant that you seem to be missing a sense of irony. You’re like the boiling frog.’

  ‘The boiling frog?’

  ‘It was a scientific experiment. If you put a frog in boiling water it jumps out again immediately. If you immerse a frog in cold water and gently heat it, it remains in the water until it boils to death. The frog just doesn’t notice what’s happening. That’s what you’re like with your seriousness. You are sitting happily immersed in your lack of irony. Not noticing that, imperceptibly, it’s boiling you alive.’

  We were both sitting on painted horses waiting for them to begin circling. The Kinks were playing ‘You’ve Really Got Me’ over the loudspeakers. One of the painted eyes of my horse had been scratched out. My horse was on the inside of Jack’s and lagging slightly behind.

  ‘But, I could say the same about your lack of seriousness,’ I retaliated. ‘You treat life as one long shaggy dog story.’

  ‘At least being boiled to death by a running joke is more fun.’

  ‘Only if it’s a good one.’

  The horses slowly started to revolve, going up and down to the music.

  ‘But don’t you see,’ Jack said, ‘that you can take life either way? And that either way is neither right nor wrong. If you treat life lightly or intensely it comes down to the same thing in the end. Death. So why not enjoy yourself in the meantime?’

  The words ‘You’ve got me so I can’t sleep at night’ blocked out the rest of his words. I watched, feeling distant, his mouth opening and shutting like a goldfish in a plastic bowl.

  forty-five

  The horses were going round faster and faster. I clutched on to the pink fibre of my horse’s mane which cut into my hands. London was passing me by in increasingly faster circles.

  ‘Perhaps we’re two different sides to the same coin. My frivolity and your intensity. The same selfish coin,’ Jack suggested.

  ‘That would be a turn up for the book.’

  The horses were slowing down, London was coming to a standstill again. Jack’s curly hair was tousled. I tried to control my envy of his joie de vivre. No, we were not alike. I watched the lines at the corners of his eyes wrinkle up when he smiled, laughter lines.

  We walked back out of Leicester Square through the disintegrating crowds that were dwindling along Charing Cross Road. The music of the fair faintly echoed in the distance. I felt tired and oddly satisfied. It occurred to me that we had spent the day more like two lovers, than like two men who supposedly loved the same woman. We said goodbye at Trafalgar Square. Nelson’s column was lit up from far above us.

  I put out my hand reluctantly to shake his hand. But Jack moved his face towards mine and abruptly kissed me hard on the mouth. The stubble on his chin felt coarse. His mouth tasted of alcohol, his lips were wet, his tongue just flickered. I stepped away violently from him but he was smiling.

  ‘Either way, it makes no difference,’ he said.

  He turned and walked away.

  I turned back home with a deep sense of triumph. Jack’s bisexuality was a weakness, a nebula. It rendered his identity inchoate. It was a secret that he had casually dropped onto the ground in front of me and which I could now pick up and nurse to the point of its suffocation.

  forty-six

  The floor is uneven, the narrow cavities in the rocky floor making it difficult to walk. But I can hear the faraway screams of a woman’s voice. The scream is of pure thin pain. A sound where language has become irrelevant, replaced by the body’s direct expression of agony. The nakedness of the sound arouses me. It pierces to the centre of my soul.

  I turn the corner. Justine, naked, is chained to the black walls of rock. Her white flesh is bleeding as if someone has drawn a map of an unknown country, in red ink, on her body. The walls of the dungeon are sweating water, and I can smell the sweet stench of decaying flesh.

  The abductor is bent down over her. I can make out from the movement of his back and the crack of a whiplash that he is whipping her. Justine’s face, which is turned in my direction, is contorted by need and desperation, wet with tears. Her face has concaved and her eyes have disappeared into a
grimace of pain. But when she sees me her face lights up. She stretches out her arms towards me in supplication.

  ‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ I say to her.

  On hearing me speak, the abductor straightens up, lets his whip drop to his side and turns around. He looks straight into my eyes. But I am looking back into my own eyes, the abductor has my face. He looks like an angel. I step back in fear, turn, run back through the passageway hearing his footsteps running behind me, the same arrhythmic limping, chasing me, knowing that if he is to catch up with me it means my death. For it is impossible that the two of us can co-exist in the same world.

  forty-seven

  Over the following days the distinction between my identity and the abductor’s became less and less clearly defined. I began to feel almost as if he were my alter ego. He had captured Justine, was watching her, looking after her, loving her. He was carrying out the extreme point of my desire.

  The thought of making Justine my slave began to preoccupy me. She would show utter sexual devotion, perform every sexual gratification or whim. I fantasized about the malleability of her body, her shifting position, her opening-mouth, her touching-hands, her wide-open legs that revealed the rose interior of her. I would keep her chained to the bed like a dog.

  It was Jack who was the true monster, not the abductor. It was Jack who was incapable of passion. Jack was indifferent to Justine, worse, flippant about her. It was Jack who was the abuser of Justine, not the abductor who, because of the power of his love for Justine, could not help himself. The abductor shared with me an overwhelming passion for Justine. Jack, however, had retained total self-control. He was not made vulnerable by the power of his obsession. He was not one of us. How could his cursoriness compete with the concentration of our ardour? He was the one that should be punished. The realization had come suddenly but had crept over me with the inevitability of the truth.