Justine

by Alice Thompson

  She gave me the address, which was out of London, in the country.

  ‘I’ll be there by tomorrow evening. Are you alright?’ The phone went dead.

  I couldn’t go back to sleep: I would be seeing Justine tomorrow. What to do then, how to rescue her, would depend on my wits and ingenuity. I had come this far and I had no intention of failing now.

  fifty-seven

  The next morning, I realized without a shadow of a doubt that I would be leaving my flat, forever. Justine would now be enough. My flat seemed like a dead religion, a church empty of significance. The paintings, the statues, the patterned tapestries all seemed irrelevant. They were hollow artefacts, even the portrait of Justine had shrunk to a simulacrum. I was about to own the real thing. I packed a suitcase of a few clothes, and some money. Lethe looked on indifferently from the corner which she had not stirred from in days.

  I kept the methylated spirit underneath the bathroom sink. I unscrewed the lid and took the bottle through to the drawing-room where I splashed the spirit over the blood-stained sofa, the carpets, the Chippendale chairs, the walls, Jack’s blood-stained portrait of Justine. The strong succulent smell made me feel light-headed. I went up to the doll I had placed on the mantelpiece and soaked her dress in the inflammable liquid. I struck a match and set fire to her. The flames engulfed the doll immediately, the plastic face concaving, as if at first she were about to burst into tears, then into irreparable deformation. The photograph of Justine, propped up beside the doll, melted into streams of red and gold. The flames quickly licked upwards towards the portrait of Justine above the mantelpiece. I saw her smiling at me between the flickering flames as the paint dripped off her face.

  I picked up my suitcase and made my way out of the burning flat. I wondered how long it would be before someone called for help. What mattered was that they waited long enough for all my mementos to beauty to be destroyed. I no longer needed them. I was about to rescue and possess the icon of beauty itself. As I got into the lift of my apartment block and shut the heavy black metal gates together, I could taste the acrid smell of burning in my mouth and hear the other-worldly screams of Lethe being burned alive.

  I was euphoric – by burning my flat I had eradicated my solitary past in preparation for a future with Justine full of exquisite pleasure. As I climbed into the taxi I turned my head to take one last look at my flat. Flames were beating out of the windows of my top floor, angry and impassioned, demanding gratitude for their force of will. I never doubted their power to cleanse.

  fifty-eight

  Outside Kings Cross was purgatory: beggars, drug dealers and pimps. Lost souls waiting for their bodies to return to them. The bright lights of London lit up around them, like the fires of Hell. Inside the station, the light that shone through the vaulting arches belonged to God. Stations always beguiled me. They seemed to me full of containment and the largesse of the soul. They were the gateway to the other side.

  As the train moved out through the suburbs, I realized that this was the first time I had travelled out of London since I had met Justine. Justine had become terminally connected with the city, it was where I thought she had been imprisoned, where I had looked for her traces.

  The train was almost empty. The windows were not tinted, but muddied with dirt. The gentle murmurs of the passengers served as a fluid melody to the rhythm of the train, like a stream of blood to the beating of the heart. The train rumbled on through the dark countryside. It was misty and foggy outside. But the sky above was as white as Justine’s flesh. The light was so bright that it hurt my eyes.

  I was certain that light also lay in wait for me at the end of my journey. A light that would engulf any pain in the moment it took to blind me with its brightness. This light would be jealous of any pain, burn it out of existence. Only the angel of terror and pleasure would be left to hover above my head.

  In the opposite compartment, twin girls were playing chess. Their profiles were identical, their movements synchronized. They could have been one person reflected in a mirror.

  The train stopped at a small provincial town and an old woman got on. Much to my annoyance she sat down opposite me. Her damp grey hair fell in strands around her ears.

  ‘Would you mind not staring? It’s very rude,’ she suddenly said to me. Her breath smelt of linctus.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that I was,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you should have. You strike me as someone who is not very observant of someone else’s feelings. Or of your own, for that matter. You shouldn’t go through life with so little self-awareness. It could end in trouble.’

  She was quite clearly insane, and I was relieved when she got off at the next station. I watched her stride along the platform. She was smiling. In spite of her age, she looked very far from death. Further away from it than I was.

  fifty-nine

  It was late afternoon when I arrived in the small village that Justine had told me was in the vicinity of my final destination. The place was idyllic, on the verge of unreality – the pretty cottages looking as if they were made out of pillarbox-red cardboard, and the village pond out of coloured glass. I hired a convertible and followed Justine’s elaborate directions out of the village, to the stone pillars which formed the gateway to the drive. I turned up the driveway, the wind blowing across my face, the sun coming out in a last-minute appearance before nightfall. The avenue of trees cast shadows on the driveway, the leaves were just on the edge of turning gold. I had been here before.

  Looking back now, as I write, I think the journey to Justine’s, that day, was the happiest of my life. No other emotion can compare to the sense of freedom, laughter and erotic anticipation of meeting someone with whom one has fallen in love. The danger involved in my journey heightened my excitement. If I had my life over, I would wish simply to be approaching forever the stone gates of the driveway and driving up through the shadows of the trees, the smell of leaves and grass in my head, the sunlight full on my face, with the first and only total sensation of freedom I have ever had.

  The recognition of what was happening to me now, from the dreams that I had already had, reinforced my sense of Destiny. This was where I was supposed to be. The last few months had been leading up to the inexorable fact of the present moment. The sound of the birds, the fresh breeze, had all been experienced before in my dreams, to make their happening now a form of welcome, a kind of reward.

  I turned the corner of the avenue to be faced with the Gothic house of my dreams. I stopped the car and walked out across the gravel. Looking up I saw someone at the window staring down at me from between the bars. The sun lit up the glass, blinding me for a second, and then went behind a cloud. I could now see the face clearly – it was a woman’s. It was Justine. Who else could it have been? There was a humming in my head as I approached the steps of the main entrance and walked up them, through the open door into the house.

  sixty

  The interior of the house was dark. The smell was what struck me first, or rather the absence of smell. In spite of the age of the house, the plethora of hard dark wood, the late eighteenth-century portraits which hung on the wall, and faded oriental rugs, there was no musky sweetness, no atmosphere of dust. The absence of smell had a curious effect: it made the interior of the house seem as if it were a backdrop, a fake, a trompe-l’oeil. Or a three-dimensional phantom that only appeared to have substance. I put my hand out to touch the bottom whorl of the oaken staircase.

  Justine was somewhere in here. She was waiting for me to come to her rescue, at the top of the house, in the room with barred windows. There were no signs of life down here in the hallway. Neither were there any signs of the presence of her abductor. The main hall began to appear to me more like a stage set for some melodrama. But I knew that the reality of Justine was imprisoned somewhere above me, the soft voluptuous reality of her. Making love to her would be a consummation of the weeks that had led
up to it, all the pain and design. My desire, once consummated, would justify reality. Or rather give back reality to what I saw around me. It would make life real.

  I called out her name.

  It hung in the air, seemed to mark the place and space in time. But there was no reply. I felt strangely unafraid. The abductor was obviously out of the house. It was all falling into place.

  I made my way up to the top floor. I walked along the corridor, softly, to the room from where I had seen Justine look down at me, between its bars. However, to my surprise, the door was wide open. The small bare room was empty except for a pen and some sheaves of paper lying on a wooden table and a chair. The light fell in exactly the same way as it had in the background to the portrait of Justine. But Justine was no longer in the painting. Entering the room, I walked up to the window and looked out through the bars. Formal gardens reached out from the back of the house, tapering out into the smooth flat plains of wheat fields.

  The door slammed shut behind me and a key turned in the lock. I ran up to the door and frantically pulled at the handle. The door was made of thick solid oak.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ I shouted through it.

  I had no idea who I was talking too, but I heard the sound of his footsteps recede into silence.

  I looked around again at the desolate room. It was small and stuffy. I sat down at the table. The walls were blank.

  sixty-one

  As I write now, I cannot really remember in any great detail my reaction to being locked in. It was as if, because I had visited the house before in my dream, that what was happening to me at the time was also unreal. All I knew was that it was my Destiny to rescue Justine. I was not afraid. As I write now, I realize more clearly that my reaction was really one of feeling that I had been set a test.

  I tried the window. It opened easily but the bars behind it were unbreakable. I had expected them to be as old as the house but to my surprise they were shiny new. Someone had designed this prison for me very recently. There was no leverage with which to jolt the door open.

  I knew it was important to retain a sense of control over my circumstances. Thinking in long, well-constructed sentences helped me maintain a sense of power over these events. The blank paper and the pen stared suggestively up at me from the table. A message – I was supposed to write a message. But to whom? The room was absent of clues and the situation reminded me of Juliette’s flat after it had been abandoned.

  I went to the window again and looked out over the garden. I could see from above clearly the symmetrical pattern of the maze. From up here the design was easy to read. A bench had been placed in the centre of the maze. On the bench, in the early evening, a woman was sitting reading. It was Justine. The abductor must have imprisoned her in the centre of the maze. But a few moments later the woman stood up and calmly began to make her way out of the maze, following its twisting configurations unerringly, as if she had known its secrets since a child. The exit was directly below my window and I could see her more clearly as she approached the end of the maze’s long corridor. I noticed the ill-fitting clothes she was wearing, the way she walked slightly defensively, the way she looked straight up at me, in my direction, but didn’t register what she saw. It wasn’t Justine. It was Juliette. She disappeared into the house.

  So Juliette was here. But what was she doing here?

  Had she been kidnapped too?

  Just then there was a knock on the door. A black joke, I thought, I can hardly say come in.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked. My voice sounded odd.

  ‘It’s Justine.’ She was speaking softly. ‘I’ve managed to get out of my room. He left the key in the lock. But the outer door—’

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ I interrupted. ‘There’s so much I don’t understand. I’ve just seen Juliette in the garden.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything to you. But you’re going to have to wait. I can hear him coming.’

  She fell silent.

  ‘Justine?’ But I could hear her footsteps disappearing down the corridor. ‘Justine.’ justine.

  By the next morning, having spent a night on the hard boards without any food or water, I was becoming desperate. I was not used to any form of deprivation. I started clawing at the door shouting Justine’s name over and over again. I was pounding at the door, shaking it, knowing that there was no way I would be able ever to defeat its intractable strength.

  sixty-two

  I sat down at the table and picked up a pen. On a blank piece of paper I wrote,

  juliette. i’ve been imprisoned in the room at the far end of the east side of the house on the top floor. the one with bars on its windows. please help me.

  I signed my name.

  I then moved the chair to the window and sat down and waited for her to come out into the garden again.

  Early in the afternoon of the next day she appeared, carrying her book. I watched as she entered the maze confidently and weaved her way through into its centre. After an hour of reading she walked out of the maze in the same way. As she was walking underneath my window, I put my hand to the frame to throw out the message. But the window stuck. No matter how hard I pushed upwards, I couldn’t get it open. I was too far up for her to hear my cries.

  During the night I finally managed to open the window. I was then reluctant to close it in case I could not get it open again. The wind at night was freezing and I slept curled up in the corner of the hard floor. The room was also beginning to smell of urine and excrement. Juliette did not appear the next day nor the next.

  I was growing fainter and fainter. If I had been offered food now, I would not have been able to eat it. The pain of my hungry stomach had been replaced by an odd feeling of fullness, as if it had been stuffed with empty space.

  I began to lose track of the passing time.

  I continued my vigil by the window. Early one morning, Juliette finally entered the garden again. Without hesitation I threw the message down to her through the bars of the window.

  The paper floated through the air like a butterfly to land by her feet. I watched her bend down and pick it up and read it. I signalled desperately to her between the bars. Her face seemed stony, to give away no response. Suddenly she turned up her face in my direction. The sun came out and I could see the expression on her face more clearly. She was laughing. She was throwing back her head in laughter.

  I withdrew into the darkness of my cell and lay curled up on the floor in the foetal position. Now the smells of the room, instead of repulsing me, had begun to offer me comfort. Their acrid warmth had become the proof of my existence.

  sixty-three

  I shut the window that night. There was no need to have it open any longer. Was I to remain here until I starved to death? In spite of what I had done for the abductor, for having killed John Baptiste, was I to be rewarded not with Justine but with a slow lingering death? I had been right about Juliette. She was in league with the abductor, unknown to her sister: she had seen me and laughed. Did that make Juliette involved in Jack’s death too? Had her desire for revenge taken her that far? Had I been just a pawn employed by her to murder him? But where in all these torturous convolutions did this leave Justine?

  I began to wonder if Justine was a monster of my own creation. Locked up in the room I wondered if my imagination had created her all along, that she was just the projection of my obsession made bodily flesh.

  She began to take on paranormal qualities: at night she shook the house so it felt like the wind was blowing through. Her presence permeated the house, the sound of a creaking door was the moan of her complaint, the rattling of the glass window her laughter.

  I became increasingly aware that my room was only a component of a giant house, a vulnerable locked-away part, while the house with its own machinations went about its gigantic business, with its sounds and rustles
. The paranoia increased, and I felt perpetually monitored, perpetually watched by the house that was permeated by Justine.

  I began to long for the detail of the rest of the house, of the outside world, outside my small room. The longer I stayed here, the more absent the details of the room became. I knew each crack in the wall so well that they ceased to seem real.

  sixty-four

  One night I dreamt that I heard footsteps coming down the corridor towards my room. The key turns in the lock, but the door remains shut. Footsteps walk back down the corridor. I try to stand up but the chain that binds my leg stops me short. But as I look down the clasp miraculously opens wide to show its smiling teeth. Looking out of the window it is late evening and the full moon is shining outside so brightly it almost seems like day. I can see over the giant wall that surrounds impenetrably the grounds of the house. A huge city stands outside the wall with cars and people. We have been in the heartland of London all along. I look over to the maze where Juliette again sits in the centre. She is reading a book by the light of the moon.

  I walk down the stairs into the cool, silent, summer night air. The scent of lavender hangs in the air. I can no longer see over the huge wall that has grown up in my dream, which soars up high around the tapering lawn. The outside world has vanished. The maze now dominates my vision.

  I am obsessed by the need to find Juliette. I need to find out what has happened, to strangle the information out of her, so that I can understand finally what is happening to me. This is the pursuit of a knowledge that I know unconsciously I already have. This knowledge is like a cancer that has been proliferating in my body, only able to make itself known to me when it comes to the surface in its own specific shape.