Justine

by Alice Thompson

  I enter the maze. The hedge looks dark green at night, menacing, but the bright moon gives it a thick dimensionality. Every leaf shines. I walk down a path only to reach the dead end of a hedge. The next path I take is blocked. When the one after that reaches nowhere, I begin to panic, for now I am lost.

  It is then that the humming begins. A woman is humming the tune ‘Greensleeves’. I follow it through the maze, as if it is a Siren luring me to my death. I turn a sharp corner.

  I am now standing in the centre of the maze. On a bench, Juliette is sitting, reading. Engraved on the red leather covering of the book, in gold lettering, are the words Juliette by the Marquis de Sade. When she looks up and sees me, she smiles. At the same time she shuts the book.

  I run up to her and grab her by her shoulders, the book flies out of her lap on to the ground. I begin shaking her violently,

  ‘Tell me, Juliette,’ I say. ‘Tell me what is happening to me.’

  ‘But you’ve made a mistake,’ she says to me quietly. I stop shaking her, suddenly frightened by her coolness. ‘I’m not Juliette. I’m Justine.’

  But her voice, the expression in her face, her posture they are all features that belong to Juliette and my world grows faint.

  sixty-five

  I was woken up from my dream by a scream coming from the distant corner of the house, then the shouting of two women’s voices, one higher pitched than the other, one belonging to Juliette the other to Justine. I couldn’t work out the words but I could hear furniture being banged and the crashing of china being smashed to the ground. Then silence fell.

  I heard footsteps coming down the corridor towards my room. The key turned in the lock, but the door remained shut. Footsteps walked back down the corridor and quickly afterwards the shouting started up again. I looked down at the chain that bound my leg: to my surprise the chain had gone. But then I remembered, the chain had only been part of my dream. In reality I had never been chained. I cautiously stood up off the floor, my legs unsteady. I pressed the door and it opened easily and silently. The corridor had been lit with the dull blue glow of gas-light. The shouting suddenly became louder and I could hear clearly the words, ‘Stop playing these games with him’ spoken in the hysterical tone of Juliette. And then the cool relaxed note of Justine’s laughter in response. The words were coming from a room a few doors up from me on the left. I could tell that the door was ajar as light was pouring through the chink into the dimness of the corridor. I walked quietly down the corridor and peered round the edge of the door.

  Inside was a huge, high-ceilinged room – a four-poster bed framed in crimson old velvet streaked with dust stood in its centre. The painting of Leda and the swan hung on the wall. The carpet was faded to the colour of the walls: an old fawn beige. Books had been flung across the room, their leather bindings split and the pages torn. Pieces of bone china lay scattered across the room.

  Juliette was standing to one side of the room, facing in my direction, speaking to the armchair where Justine was sitting. Justine was obscured from my view by the back of the armchair. A candle on the bedside table offered the only light but I could make out enough of Juliette’s face to see that the structure was contorted by anger and pain.

  ‘Are you incapable of expression? tell me what you are thinking, Justine. Don’t just sit there with your secret cold schemes, leaving me all alone in the dark.’

  Juliette lunged for the armchair and for a moment I thought she was going to violently attack Justine. But instead she tore off the arm covers and began ripping up the rose-­covered fabric into pieces. They scattered round the room like confetti. Underneath the chair was an intricate structure of wire and hair, like a monstrous piece of machinery.

  Juliette turned and started to walk in my direction. She seemed to be looking straight at me, but was still talking to Justine. ‘How long are you going to go on with this pretence of being abducted? Inventing phantom characters as if you were writing a book. Using fiction for your own malicious ends.’

  Justine did not reply.

  So the abductor had just been a fictitious character of Justine’s mind. His existence had been a fabrication. I was part of a far larger plot. Justine had not been kidnapped. I had.

  I returned unquestioningly, of my own accord, to my room. The fact that the outside world had locked me up only seemed the natural consequence of the inside of my mind. I no longer needed to leave. But to which sister’s plan did I belong and to what end? It never occurred to me to wonder that if there had been no abductor, then who had asked me to murder Jack?

  sixty-six

  I found out the next day to whose plan I belonged. It was of course, Justine’s. Juliette had never come into the picture. Not really, ever.

  On waking, I heard from outside the window the voice of a woman singing.

  Alas my love! Ye do me wrong

  To cast me off discourteously.

  Greensleeves was all my joy.

  Greensleeves was my delight,

  Greensleeves was my heart of gold,

  And who but Lady Greensleeves?

  I went to the window and looked out, leaning heavily on the window sill – for support. I was too weak from hunger to stand without support. From down below, Juliette was staring up at me, slightly hunched, smiling. As soon as she saw me, she stopped singing. She had been waiting for me. She started to undress.

  I watched her coarsely-woven clothes fall off her like leaves from a dying tree. I watched them as if they were falling in slow motion through the air, of their own accord. A wind suddenly rushed through her hair, momentarily concealing her face. A cloud crossed the sun but the shadows only accentuated her expression where the sun previously had blanked out her face. It seemed to take forever until she stood there naked.

  She stood looking at me proudly, like a deer that one comes across accidentally in a forest, before it runs off startled. The tone of her flesh in the shadows transformed her flesh from silver into bronze. She looked up and smiled and in her smile was all the awareness of her nude beauty. I felt as if I were flying down to her, that I was not trapped in this room watching from behind barred windows. But what she did next shocked me back into the prison of my body, freeze-framed me back into another reality.

  I watched as Juliette slowly got dressed again, not in the same dress, but in an elegant, deep green silk that wrapped itself round her body. She stood up straight and gracefully. The expression on her face had changed. It had become serene and distant. It had become Justine’s face. Justine then looked up and smiled at me. I turned from the window.

  I noticed for the first time that sometime during the night a bed had been placed in the corner of the room.

  sixty-seven

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs. The door opened and Justine entered. Her face was as smooth as alabaster. She bent down over me where I had lain down on the bare bed and clasped an iron chained ring round the ankle of my deformed foot. She padlocked the chain to the bed. I saw her breasts sway under the dark green silk of her dress.

  She stood up above me and looked down without saying anything.

  ‘There are no twin sisters,’ I said slowly. ‘Or rather they are both you. All along it has always been just you. Just Justine.’

  ‘Did you know that man’s ability to manipulate his own kind is what distinguishes him from the other animals? That I manipulated Jack, and then manipulated you in order to wreak revenge on Jack, is what distinguishes me from the lower primates.’ She laughed. ‘I am a jealous god. You know jealousy too, don’t you? I mean know, intimate like a lover, the closeness of jealousy. Been as intimate with it as Christ was with his cross. A cauldron of blood, metal and wood. I have the stigmata too but it is on the inside.

  ‘Juliette fell in love with Jack. But she never trusted him. His eyes consistently strayed. Like the eyes of a lost dog. She decided to set him a test. She invented a sister: Jus
tine. Justine was independent, omnipotent and unable to love. Juliette didn’t stand a chance against her. Jack fell. Poor Juliette. But more poor Jack. Jack didn’t believe in jealousy but you and Juliette did. That is why trapped between our singular desires he had to die.

  ‘In order to take revenge on Jack I had to be elaborate: I needed a murderer. You came along just at the right time. The image of Justine ensnared you, then Juliette came along to put the trap into operation. Juliette was necessary to give credence to the story of the abductor.’

  ‘But what about the ribbons? Who left those behind?’

  ‘Justine.’

  ‘Who wrote the letters? Those obscene letters?’

  ‘Justine. Juliette knew where you lived, remember.

  ‘But I don’t take full credit for the murder of Jack. It was your jealousy of my image that really did it. You wanted your notion of my beauty for yourself. It was not the abductor’s threat of my death, but the threat of the death of your fantasy that killed Jack. But the fantasy of the abductor did bring you out here. Of course, in your heart you know that you are the real abductor. The abductor of Justine’s identity. You wanted it for your own. So in the end it’s only fair that you are punished too.’

  But I was still confused. ‘So which one are you? Justine or Juliette?’

  ‘Did either of you really think you could divide me up that easily? Like a child sorting out two colours of brick. But both you and Jack were always one for appearances. While the real me was climbing between the two phantoms of Justine and Juliette, living somewhere in the space between the two and neither you nor Jack noticing, neither of you concerned with who I really was.

  ‘You both really should have guessed, you know. The characterizations were so basic. Omnipotent Justine and needy Juliette, virgin and whore. Just enough to titillate the preconceptions. You were both one of a kind, the murderer and the murderee. It was inevitable in the end that you had to cancel each other out.’

  sixty-eight

  Anger cracked open the hard shell of my obsession. It was as if my heart had been plucked out and swallowed up by the air around me.

  ‘So now you know,’ she continued, ‘My story was the real one. I’m not talking about Death is a Woman. It never existed. I’m not talking about words on pages, about my failed attempts to get published, about pale representations. I’m talking about the story I have really written, the story of Justine. The story I have got you, my ghost writer, to write for me. I’m talking about the real thing. I’m talking about the story of life. And the story of death. That’s where having a plot really counts. But you chose to ignore my story. As have all the men in my life. You were too busy making up your own. If I was to be the heroine of your book, you could at least have given me a speaking part. But now that you have acted out my story, I think it’s time that you put it down in writing too.’ She paused and smiled. ‘Just for posterity.’

  For the first time since I had laid eyes on her I wanted out.

  But what was the true identity of this woman? I had to call her Justine just to hook on to some kind of reality. I could not cope with more than one illusory woman at a time. Was she insane? How far was she in control of her own actions? How far was she in control of mine?

  After she had left the room, I tried to look for signs of madness in the entangled intricacies of our shared history but I was met with a television shut-down of contradictory conversations and information.

  She had certainly acted at all times as if she had been in absolute control. She even had her sense of control under control. For had she not acted out the implacable cold image of Justine just as she had acted out the passionate incoherence of Juliette, with equanimity? She was not mad at all. She was simply a woman possessed by a lucid sense of revenge. Hell hath no fury.

  sixty-nine

  I cherished the fury that her revelations had generated in my heart. My anger was a reclamation of my identity: my rage fought against the world of Justine that I had slipped into, had been slowly sliding into like quicksand from the moment I had first seen her. All along, I had assumed that I had been bringing her into my world, so that I could put her in a glass case, a private exhibition of her which I could let out at my delectation to taste her sweet flesh. I had been tricked by the beautiful object that I had sought to possess. She had had her own thoughts and desires which had manipulated me. There was a parallel universe and it belonged to her. Worse, she had dragged me into it.

  I nursed my anger as I once had nursed my love. My anger felt good, like a long lost friend who made me remember how I once was. The reality of the world around me suddenly took on new meaning again. It became imperative that I escaped.

  Justine seemed oblivious or indifferent to the change in my feelings for her. She shouldn’t have been, as they were dangerous. In fact, instead of being on her guard she now seemed to relax. It was as if her confession had in some way absolved her. She began bringing me in food every day. I swallowed needily mouthful after mouthful, while she would just watch with cold appraising eyes. She would then take the tray away without uttering a word.

  Weeks passed and I slowly began to despair at ever managing to escape. The room was devoid of anything that I might use as a weapon and I still doubted I was strong enough to overpower Justine without one.

  One day as I was eating, Justine silently watching me as usual, the sun suddenly came out from behind a cloud and a bright beam shot across the room. With the fluid intuition of a dream, I lifted my head up as if someone had just walked into the room and was standing behind Justine’s left shoulder. Uttering a scream, I tried to stand up as if to take a step away, but the chain that bound my leg to the bed pulled me back and the tray and the cutlery fell crashing to the floor. A knife fell at my left foot.

  But she didn’t turn to look behind. She sat simply staring at me in astonishment, as if I had gone insane.

  ‘Jack,’ I said to the phantom standing behind her.

  And it was, for a moment, as if I actually did see him standing there.

  This time Justine, letting out a cry of shock, twisted her body violently round. For a moment she must have wondered if I had killed Jack at all. Unless she believed in ghosts.

  I watched the back of her body relax when she saw no one was there and she turned slowly round again to face me, her expression calm and cold.

  ‘You are having bad dreams,’ she said quietly. ‘That way madness lies.’

  But after she had picked up the tray and left the room, I bent down under the bed and picked up the knife which I had kicked out of sight under it.

  seventy

  Lunchtime next day came too slowly and by the position of the sun I could tell that Justine was late. Justine was never late. I finally heard her footsteps echo down the corridor. Imprisonment in a room meant footsteps now were always precursors to her presence, were always how she made herself first felt.

  It was my turn to play. Possum. I lay down on the bed, my arms dangling over the sides as if I were unconscious. The metal of the knife concealed in my left hand was sticking hotly to the flesh of my palm. I listened to the key turn in the lock and the door open. The sound of her footsteps clipping on the wooden floor as she crossed the room stopped abruptly. I, on the other hand, felt calm in this new black world where Justine had become reduced to a series of arrhythmic sounds. I heard her put the tray down on the floor, too loudly. I had unnerved her. Her grandmother footsteps started up again.

  Justine’s breath smelt of lilies as she bent down over me.

  In another world she would have been about to kiss me.

  I swiftly brought up my arms about her neck as if in an embrace. I could hear her inhale sharply in surprise. With my eyes still shut I stabbed her sharply in the side of the neck. I could feel the metal of the knife penetrate the surface of the skin, meet bone. I had expected her to collapse. Instead Justine began to grapple with my body w
ith what seemed superhuman strength. It was as if my action had created a monster.

  I opened my eyes to be met with her face bearing down directly above me. It shone with beatific joy. It made her beauty seem demonic. The knife stuck out of the side of her neck like a bolt.

  We fell from the bed on to the floor, our bodies intimately intertwined. I screamed out loud as the chain pulled my leg violently and painfully taut. Her body was muscular and powerful, resistant to all my attempts to subdue it. Relentless arms pulled back mine, her legs kicked up into my groin, her head butted into my face, forcing the back of my skull to bang hard against the floor. Pinioned to the floor, I looked up into her clear all-seeing eyes. My eyes slowly filled with tears.

  Astride my prone body she stood up to her full height and looked down at me. Reaching up her hand to her neck, with a cursory movement she pulled out the knife.

  She didn’t flinch. The knife came out unstained – the only trace of a neck-wound was the faint outline of a hole in the shape of a heart.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ she said.

  She picked up the tray of untouched food and took it out of the room, locking the door behind her. Long after she had gone, I could still hear her footsteps echo down the corridor.

  seventy-one

  Justine didn’t return. I lost count of the days that passed without food or drink. The hair that had grown on my face was a source of constant irritation to me, and I constantly scratched at the skin around my beard until my face grew raw and inflamed, I now no longer noticed the smells that emanated from the room or from my armpits and groin.

  Soon afterwards the hallucinations began. Not the dreamy/nightmarish hallucinations that I had experienced while opiated but hallucinations that featured scenes from my past, real life events, transposed into the present.