Justine

by Alice Thompson

  I saw my mother crouched down beside the wall, young and beautiful, diamonds glittering in her hair, smiling comfortingly at me. Lethe would come up to me as I sat at the table, and rub her head against my leg. Part of my room would be transformed into an exact replica of Kensington Gardens, and looking out of the window I would see not the maze, but the square’s gardens. I began to look forward to these hallucinations, as a form of nostalgic entertainment, as if they were scenes from a film I had watched as a child.

  I woke up one morning to see that the walls had now been papered over in a fine yellow wallpaper. I am sure I saw the patterns on the wallpaper shift. At first I wasn’t. Now I am. I could smell the scent first. Of sweet flowers, then I see them growing in paper patterns all over the wall. They are giant red roses with a green intricate filigree of fine leaves. The roses seem too big for the slim stems as if their heads are about to break off their swaying necks. The roses are engorged blood-red, the shadowed crevices between the petals making them look three dimensional as if they are growing out of the wall, as if their heads are peering out into my small world. The leaves curve out into the shape of a J as if reaching out to an invisible sun. Then the flowers start to change shape. They grow larger and paler, their petals spread out and open, become hooked. The red drains from the petals to leave a bled whiteness, veined by red before the red finally disappears altogether. The roses become lilies which sway in my sleep, which sway through my brain suffocating my thoughts with their heavy perfume.

  Sometimes I feel sure that a woman is trying to break through the wallpaper from the outside but then I realize that she already has. She is creeping about the house, like a ghost, haunting me.

  That night I dreamt that I saw something moving from behind the wallpaper. I saw the paper protrude in the shape of a naked woman’s body before she broke through the paper to reveal herself. It was Justine. She bent down over me, and gently undid my clothing and caressed my weary limbs. Her hands were soft and knowing, as if they had touched me before. She sat astride me and held my arms to the floor above my head and I simply lay there, too enfeebled to move, while she seized her pleasure from me. Her skin shone in the darkness like silver. I came helplessly, while she came loudly, triumphantly. I hadn’t touched her with my hands, or kissed her once. Still astride me, she bent down and whispered in my ear,

  ‘Am I what you imagined?’

  I could hear her still laughing, long after she had slipped back behind the wallpaper.

  I woke up, semen sticking to the inside of my thighs. A succubus, I thought, had come to me in the night. Except that I was now naked and my clothes were no longer in the room.

  seventy-two

  The pain in my stomach had come back and in the form of birds trying to peck their way out of my body. I felt a kind of dreary lassitude where the outside world no longer had any power over me. Rather, I was gently slipping out of it. Over the next few days, I lay in my excreta, and urine and blood, watching the bones protrude from my body one by one.

  I must have been unconscious for days, the evening Justine finally returned. The noise of the door opening brought me round. When I looked up and saw a woman standing in the doorway I thought at first it was Salome. Justine was wearing a black veil which transparently clothed her naked body. She turned slightly to the door so that I could see the upward sweep of her breasts. I could tell, by the flicker of the smile across her face that she was taunting me. In spite of, or now perhaps because of, my debilitated state I desired her, but it was mixed with a rush of hatred which eroticized her still further. She stood above me so that I could now see the under curve of her full breasts above me, the pink aureole of the nipple just beginning.

  ‘Kneel,’ she said quietly.

  With difficulty, as the chain had been shortened, I climbed out of bed and got down on my knees. The skin on my body cracked with the effort. I bowed my head. When I looked up she had gone.

  The next day at the same time the same thing happened. Except this time when I knelt and bowed my head, I heard the sound of a whiplash and felt a searing pain slice across the back of my neck. I tried not to cry out loud.

  Each day the whippings became more and more severe until my body was a mosaic of cuts and gashes. The area of my body that the whipping covered gradually increased from the neck to the back, to the buttocks and the back of my legs. It hurt to make the slightest movement. My body was in a constant state of bleeding and bruises. The surface of my skin had been erased.

  I lost all sense of the passing of time. Time just consisted of the moments between beatings. I became a body without a soul, that only experienced the ecstasy of pain. I lived in fearful anticipation of the moment when Justine would next enter the room.

  I fought against giving in to my obsession for her again with all my heart. Desperately, I hung on to my anger against her. But my anger only reinforced my desire. Powerless to stop it, my rage was slowly diffusing, dripping out of me again like the blood from my body. It was slipping from my grasp. I could feel the bodily warmth of my anger slip from my arms. A cool waterfall of acceptance returned to refresh me, leaving me with the blissful emptiness of surrender. I was left cupping the inanimate coolness of empty space.

  seventy-three

  The need to see my tormentor increasingly deepened. I could not stop longing for her next to appear. Her presence broke the anxiety of waiting for the next punishment. At least when she appeared I knew for certain that pain was about to happen. Better that than the terrible space between when there was no pain to block out my identity. I began to long for her, began to feel safe again when she opened the door.

  Justine was using me in the purest way. The moment I gave my identity absolutely over to her was the moment of purest sexual release. The straining carapace of my character had been lifted off to reveal the soft centre of naked existence. I now lived for the pain that she offered me. When she whipped me, when she stroked me, I became her hard whip, her cold hand.

  I had finally found a satisfaction that I had never known possible. The surface of the world’s beauty, its fine art had become vain symbols, extensions of an identity I once had. They had been trashy plastic ciphers all along. The beauty and art in my life had been replaced by the gestures and cruelties of Justine. All natural interest in the world, including the physical representations of myself – my possessions and objects of art, all material things, my body itself – had disappeared. I now lived only for the sensation of absence.

  seventy-four

  I was dying. One night, late into the night, I heard the door unlock and someone come in. I was too weak to lift up my head. Justine, holding a candle, walked into my line of vision. In reality she looked lovelier than she had in my dreams. She was dressed in white silk, like a bride. I feebly, automatically, outstretched my arm to her.

  If I had reached out to touch her, the edge of my hands would have gone straight through, sunk into the warm gauze of her. She lay at the pit of me where my stomach used to be. She lay at the edge of me where my skin used to feel the warmth of a summer breeze but which was now blocked out to all sensation but her. She lay curled up in my entrails like a snake. She was what remained of my identity, the fragments of my personality consisted of her. She stood, gazing at me.

  ‘Justine,’ I said.

  She smiled at me.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why out of all the men you must know, did you choose me?’

  She shook her head. ‘But you chose me. You saw me once at a funeral. We bumped into each other at the gallery. That was Fate. Never knock Fate. But the rest has always been up to you. I did nothing but present my image to you. Your obsession decided on a reality of its own. And ignored mine. It was this that gave me carte blanche. Don’t blame me for your inability to read what was really going on. Your obsession subsumed my identity. And in this lay your downfall. For you are the one that has been finally annihilated. The real victim of your obsess
ion has not been me. It’s been you all along. The prison I have made for you, and what I do to you inside it, is the physical manifestation of what you have been doing to yourself. I have simply transformed your obsession into literal truth. I have made your spiritual prison real.’

  I looked at her opaque, wide-apart eyes and the soft white skin like recently fallen snow. I looked at her mouth which was like a butterfly in flight. I looked hard into her eyes and I saw the truth. She looked like me, in another world.

  She walked out of my line of vision and returned holding an axe in her hand. The blade shone as silver as her skin in the candlelight.

  ‘But, you see, I don’t want you walking away.’

  She raised it above my ankle. I said nothing. Did nothing. What was there left for me to do?

  She said, before bringing the axe down on my leg, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking I am mad. I’m terribly, terribly sane.’

  seventy-five

  I regained consciousness, bathed, draped in a silk dressing-gown, without pain, in a new room. It was also a room that I recognized. It was the exact replica of my drawing-room in Kensington Gardens, containing the same artefacts, all my books and papers, and decorated in a style identical to the original. Even Lethe was curled up in the corner. From where I was lying on the sofa, I could see, through the doorway of my flat, the stairs that led up to my bedroom. My whole flat had been replicated with consummate skill. I realized that this was the place in which I was to spend the rest of my life: a prisoner of Justine, a prisoner of love.

  I looked down at my leg. A bandage had been expertly wrapped round the stump of my right foot. My foot had been amputated. Justine had removed my deformity. She had rendered me physically immaculate.

  Yet when I looked up at the painting of Justine, I noticed that the figure of Justine was absent from it. The painting of the bare, dark room now seemed devoid of all life: Justine no longer sat at the table which still stood in the centre of the painting and a bed had been placed in the space that she had left. However, on closer inspection, I could just make out the naked figure of a man lying on the bed, his face turned to the wall. The brushstrokes that he had been painted in were blurred and uneven.

  Justine was now sitting opposite me in exactly the same position as the original posture of the painting. It was as if Justine had stepped out of the background of the painting, wearing the same velvet dress, into the interior of my Kensington flat. The image of the painting had now literally come to life. She was holding in her hand the book that had once contained pages half covered by her unformed handwriting. However, the hook was splayed open now to reveal blank pages, shiny pale pages, devoid of print.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked, suddenly realizing that this was the point to everything, everything I had gone through, the point to the story of Justine.

  She paused and looked at me serenely, as if she had just been blessed. She broke into a sudden smile.

  ‘That’s for you to find out’. She leant over and handed me the blank book.

  She then rose, turned her back to me and walked slowly out of the room.

  seventy-six

  The library is from where I am now writing to you, writing out the story of Justine. I have almost reached the ending. The shadows on the shelves around me are only books. When I hold up their pages to the light, the paper of many of them is so thin that the words on the other side shine backwards, through.