The Truth About Julia E-Book

Anna Schaffner

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

How many versions of the truth can there be? In June 2014, Julia White - a beautiful and intelligent young woman - blows up a coffee shop in central London, killing twenty-four people before turning herself in to the police. Apart from publishing a potentially ironic manifesto, she refuses to explain the reasons for her actions. Clare Hardenberg, an investigative journalist, has been commissioned to write a biography of Julia but at the start of the novel she is on her way to prison herself. What has brought her to this point?

Leseprobe

Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2016 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Anna Schaffner, 2016

The moral right of Anna Schaffner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

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Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 76029 012 2

Ebook ISBN 978 1 92526 753 2

Printed in Great Britain

For Shane and Helena

‘In the beginning was the Word.’

The Gospel According to St John

‘In the beginning was the deed.’

Goethe, Faust, Part One

CONTENTS

PREFACE

EDITORIAL NOTE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

POSTSCRIPT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

London, 21 November 2014

Dear George,

I’m afraid this letter contains bad news: I failed. I’m sorry. I let you down. There is no manuscript. My advance (why not confess it all at once) is used up, too – it ran through my fingers like sand. Right now, I’m not in a position to return the sum to you, and it’s likely to be some time before I will be able to do so.

You will have heard by now where I am. The story was all over the news. This place is the natural home of the fog that has taken dominion in my mind and that casts everything in grey. Here it has company and a name and no longer hovers in solitude. It’s as though this place has been summoning me all along. It’s strangely liberating that I can now finally succumb to the thoughts that have been weighing on me like a mud-soaked cloak for months; that I can stop pretending, and finally face the fact that I can no longer tell right from wrong.

Let me address the professional dimension of the situation first (I need to start somewhere). You know that what happened is utterly out of character and unprecedented in the long history of our working relationship. I always deliver; I always meet my deadlines; you could always count on me. Until catastrophe struck. The first one, I mean. I haven’t been myself for years – you knew that, of course, and in spite of everything I am immensely grateful for the fact that you never lost faith in me.

It is so strange, being here, George – I wonder what you would make of this place. I still catch myself thinking this is a bad dream from which I will awake any minute now, back at home, cuddled up in my bed, with Aisha purring on the duvet beside me. But I know that this, here, is real. The sharp white lights and the sulphurous walls that look like they have been rubbed in rancid butter; the muffled groans emerging from neighbouring rooms; the helpless despondency in my sister’s eyes; her agitated conversations with the doctors in the corridors which she thinks I can’t hear, but the meaning of which I understand all too well.

I have never let you down before, and I owe you not only an apology but also a full explanation. You are not just my editor but my dearest, oldest friend. I need you to understand what happened to me, and to tell me why. I hold you in the highest regard, and I know that this feeling is not entirely unreciprocated – regardless of everything that has happened between us. Our minds work in similar ways, we see eye to eye on so many things. I need your sharp, clear intellect; I need you to tell me who the villains are in this drama, and who the heroes. I need you to help me differentiate between right and wrong. I’m so lost, George, tormented by doubt and guilt. And the image of those eyes – those big, clear, innocent eyes that haunt me so.

I cannot trust Amanda with this task. She’s a wonderful sister, and I love her, and she takes such good care of me, but she simply cannot help me with this. I keep returning to the scene that brought me here, and to the fateful events that preceded it, and to all these loose ends in my and Julia’s narratives that wriggle and slide and glisten maliciously in garish colours, like snake tails, and which I simply cannot master.

It is 2.41 in the morning. I managed to convince the cleaner to supply me with a pen and paper – my sister and the doctors wouldn’t hear of letting me write. She is a big woman with a big smile and a deep velvet chuckle. In spite of her size, she moves as gracefully as a dancer when she swings her mop through the corridors. We struck a deal: in return for her help I gave her the latest boxes of chocolates I received. Why does everyone send me chocolates? I never liked sweet things.

All is quiet on the ward, except for the soft hum of the lights and the periodic sound of the night nurse’s tired feet flapping across the green linoleum floors. I so desperately want to talk to you – I cannot bear the company of my thoughts. As I write to you, I keep imagining your responses, your smile and the way you nod your head when you are listening intently. I imagine you folding me into your arms, pressing my head against your chest. I imagine your cinnamon scent, and the feel of your warm hand on the back of my head, stroking my hair.

I need to begin, but where? How far back do I have to go so that all of this makes sense? I don’t have much time – the daily programme here starts so brutally early. The nurses wake and wash us at 5.30 – can you believe it? As though the days in a place like this were not endless enough as it is – time here is like treacle. So anywhere will have to do, anywhere I can think of now.

Was there a definitive turning point? Probably not. I always felt that epiphanies are the stuff of fiction. Real life doesn’t work that way; in reality, we change gradually, sliding ever deeper into the muddy waters of our psyches, little by little, until we go under. The timing of my fateful encounter with Julia was certainly not lacking in tragic irony. The day before, I had just returned from a seven-day spell in the cottage, to which I had fled, and I was ready to face the consequences of my failure to produce the manuscript. I was – I had steeled myself to face your wrath, and had switched my phone back on with the firm intention of calling you right there and then, to confess it all, but then I found Julia’s lawyer’s message instead, urging me to call her back at once.

Have I ever told you about the cottage? I can’t remember – it used to belong to my parents and is situated in an isolated spot in the Kentish countryside. Its bulbous walls look like a sunken cake with dirty icing. Its thatched roof hangs so low that it almost touches the ground. Amanda and I were born there, and although neither of us ever visits the cottage we could never bring ourselves to sell it or even to rent it out. It’s a place filled with memories, and with countless cobwebs, and an intricate network of fine fissures and cracks. I hadn’t been there for years.

It was there that I must have suffered something like a nervous breakdown. After my meeting with Grace, and my argument with Laura, I asked my neighbour to take care of Aisha for a while, packed my bags and drove out of London, away from my computer and all my files, away from my email, away from everything. And it was at my parents’ cottage that I ended up. It wasn’t planned. It must have been a primal instinct that directed me there, like those frogs that always return to the ponds that smell of their childhood to spawn and to die, regardless of how long the journey takes them. The road map is hardwired into their brains – you could take them all the way up Ben Nevis and they would still know how to get back to the waters in which they were born.

I didn’t have the energy to clean the place when I arrived, and besides, I felt quite at home amidst the dirt, the dust and the debris. On the first day, I drove to a superstore about an hour away and bought provisions (tinned soup and whisky), firewood, a large supply of candles and a small gas cooker (there’s neither gas nor electricity there, and no hot water). On the second day, I tried to have lunch in a pub in the nearby village, but I couldn’t swallow my food and felt uneasy, sitting on my own among the regular guests who all seemed troubled by the business of this strange woman in their midst. That was my last outing. In the days that followed, I didn’t see a soul.

On the third day, I switched off my phone. I couldn’t bear its angry vibrations – I knew you and Amanda were trying to reach me, both of you furious, and I couldn’t face talking to either of you. Eventually my anxiety lessened, giving way to apathy and weariness. I grew weaker by the day. I felt a terrible tiredness, as though my very soul had become a thing of lead. I thought I had lost everything – my career, you, even Laura and Amanda. My old familiar sadness about the paths not taken returned with such force that it almost strangled me from the inside. Late on the sixth day, however, something changed. As always, I was sitting in my pyjamas in a brown armchair by the fireplace, a large drink in my hand, wrapped in a threadbare dressing gown and a coarse woollen blanket, both of which used to belong to my father (I could no longer muster the energy to get dressed). My hair was unwashed and my skin felt like ancient papyrus, parched and cracked. You would barely have recognized me, George. Although I was sitting so close to the flames that I feared my skin might catch fire, their warmth didn’t reach me. I was so cold. I had been unable to stop shivering for weeks, and it was getting worse each day. No matter how high I put the thermostat in my flat in London, no matter how big a fire I built in the cottage – no amount of blankets, drinks and cups of tea could thaw the frozen sea inside me.

Then something compelled me to detach my gaze from the flames, and I looked up. I saw the pictures of my family on the mantelpiece; three faded sepia portraits of my parents and grandparents – upright, proud people, good people, anchored and strong. Did I ever tell you that my maternal grandmother walked to this country all the way from Germany? My mother was just four years old when, one evening, while the family was having supper, my grandfather was arrested. Five men in slick black uniforms kicked in the front door, dragged him from his chair and into the street. Nobody spoke a word; nobody made a sound. The incident lasted less than a minute. When the men had left, my grandmother found she was still clutching her spoon. On the very same evening, she decided to escape – she had no intention of acquiescing to a similarly sinister fate. First, she dyed her and my mother’s hair light blonde. Then she ripped the yellow stars from their overcoats and gathered together all the valuables she could carry. She also took a small revolver, which my mother later bequeathed to me in her will and which has been lying in my closet in a box containing jewellery and other family heirlooms ever since.

They left in the dark of a starless night. The two of them travelled on foot, through woods, moors and marshland, for twenty-four days. They sheltered in sheds and stables and hunters’ huts. The year was 1943, and their old coats were no match for the furious November winds. My grandmother never lost the cough she picked up on that journey. They walked all the way from Luneburg in Lower Saxony to Denmark, and then managed to trade their portable family heirlooms for two much-coveted stowaway places on a boat that stopped in Norway before heading towards the safe shores of Grimsby.

It was my grandmother’s picture that caught my eye that night. After her arrival in England, she cut off her long blonde hair, burned it and henceforth wore it dark and clipped like a man. At that moment, I felt as though she was staring down at me, judging me for my weakness and my cowardice. I could hear her harsh cough, impeaching and accusatory; her hazel eyes burned holes into my paper skin. I knew then that I had to make a choice. I had grown so very weak during my time in the cottage. I had been unable to eat; my stock of tinned soup remained almost untouched. I could have faded away peacefully there. How I wish I had. I could have spared so many people so much suffering. But instead I decided to face the consequences of my failure to complete the manuscript, and all the other conflicts from which I had been hiding – your wrath, Amanda’s reproaches, Laura’s disappointment. I forced myself to eat some soup. The next morning – it was 6 November – I drove back to London. At home, I immediately switched my phone on to call you and confess, ready to do penance. But then I found Julia’s lawyer’s message, offering a glimmer of hope. The following morning, I visited Julia, and later that day... well, you know the rest of the story, although I will tell you my own version of it in due course.

Yesterday evening, while Amanda was talking to the doctors, I asked Laura to go into my flat to find my diary and all the materials and documents I had gathered on Julia’s case, and to bring them here: the folder with the interview transcriptions, my notebooks, my laptop, paper and my favourite fountain pen, the black one. She knows where it all is. Unlike my sister, I can always rely on Laura. Even now, in spite of everything, she still has faith in my judgement. How I regret the hurt I must have caused her.

I owe you an explanation, George – and, in due course, Laura and Amanda, too. I can’t bear the thought that you should think ill of me. And I need to make sense of it all, to find some way of holding at bay the dreadful guilt that is tearing me apart. I will write it down. Everything. How it all happened. How it got to this.

I have to stop now, as day is breaking and my back hurts and the nurses will be here soon. Please don’t be angry with me, George. I really did try my best – it simply wasn’t good enough.

Don’t visit or contact me until I get in touch. I need to commit my story to paper before I am ready to see you in person. There is so much you need to know first. I will send you the document when my tale is told. I don’t know how long it will take. In any case, I will have a lot of time on my hands while awaiting the trial – and who knows how much time thereafter. Years? Decades? I don’t think they will keep me here for that much longer. I will no doubt soon be moved to lodgings patrolled by guards rather than nurses. But that suits me fine, since I will be able to write my story better in a cell than in a bed.

With much love,

Clare

EDITORIAL NOTE

Clare Hardenberg is the most talented non-fiction writer I know, and we have been working together for more than sixteen years. She first caught my attention when she was writing for the Guardian; I much admired her clear, strong voice, her wit, her verbal precision, and her courage. I liked one of her articles so much that I contacted her to ask whether she would be interested in writing a book on the topic. She was, and her first as well as all her subsequent books proved to be so successful that, ten years ago, she was able to give up her day job and work as a freelance writer. Clare has published thirteen books, four under her own name, the others ghost-written; five have been bestsellers and three have been honoured with awards. Why Your Sneakers Kill (2006) won the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Yet Clare’s life was marked by two tragedies, and I am convinced that the second wouldn’t have taken place without the first. I feel responsible for both, as they resulted directly from the books I commissioned her to write. The reader will no doubt recall the scandalous revelations concerning the investment banker Adrian Temple, whose reckless actions brought ruin and misery to legions of small-time investors. It was Clare who meticulously collected the distasteful evidence, which was published in what is arguably her most important book, The Deal (2009). Alas, in spite of what seemed to be a clear-cut case, Temple was never convicted of his crimes. Instead it was Clare who was tried and charged with libel, for a trivial detail that had nothing to do with the main thrust of the case. We couldn’t protect her, as the charges related to statements she made in interviews that followed the publication of her book. After the trial, Clare was ordered to pay damages and the court costs. She kept her head above water by ghosting biographies, but I knew that she was bitterly disillusioned.

Over the past four years, I didn’t see her very much; she had become ever more reclusive. I thought of her often, and I felt guilty. Once in a blue moon I managed to convince her to let me take her out for dinner, and it hurt me to see her so dejected, her sharp wit dulled, her spirit broken. I owed her. When she approached me to ask if she could write Julia White’s biography I thought it a brilliant idea. It was the first time since the Temple trial that she had expressed a desire to work on a serious topic again. And Clare, I felt, was just the right person to tackle this important and complex task. I strongly believed that the biography would give her the opportunity to demonstrate her true worth as a writer. Yet, sadly, the project morphed into a poison much more dangerous than the wound it was supposed to heal.

At first, all seemed to be going well. Clare sent me regular updates that sounded promising, but then they became rarer and finally dried up. I had grown apprehensive about three months into the project, as she was ignoring my messages. This was very unlike her. We had agreed on the submission of the manuscript within fourteen weeks. Five days before the submission date, I waited all night outside her flat to confront her, but she must already have been at her cottage in Kent. I had a bad feeling, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I didn’t have her sister’s contact details – psychoanalysts are notorious for keeping their phone numbers private – and none of our mutual friends had heard from Clare for a long time.

Then, on 8 November, the day after the deadline, I bought the papers and there she was on every front page: emaciated, a wild look in her eyes, her auburn bob dirty and dishevelled, her hands handcuffed behind her back. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. In the first instance, and quite likely as a result of her sister’s lobbying, she had been placed in the secure unit of a psychiatric hospital, where she was to await her trial. I tried to see her straight away, but she refused to receive any visitors apart from her sister and niece.

Then, seven days after her arrest, I received Clare’s letter, in which she promised me an explanation. Eleven weeks later, Laura came to see me in my office and brought me Clare’s long confessional letter, which I had been awaiting anxiously and devoured in one sitting.

At the earliest opportunity, I visited Clare in the grim all-female prison to which she had been transferred a fortnight after her arrest. When I first saw her in the visitors’ room I found, to my great relief, a woman who more or less resembled the Clare I had known before her breakdown: she still looked terribly thin and pale, but otherwise appeared fine. Her eyes were alert and had regained their luminosity. She neither looked nor acted like a mad person. She smiled her usual warm smile. We hugged. It took us a long time to recover our composure and even longer before we managed to speak.

I have visited her on every single one of her visiting days since; we had and have so much to talk about – both personal and professional. I think she found our conversations helpful, but whether I was able to provide the answers she so desperately needed from me I don’t know. I sincerely doubt it. I did, however, gradually manage to convince her to allow me to publish her text. I felt very strongly that Clare’s story, as well as the interviews she had collected, and especially the one with Julia, needed to be published. I believe that, taken as a whole, the different narratives about Julia that Clare managed to assemble do indeed answer some of the questions with which we have all been wrestling in the aftermath of the terror. Clare’s own story, moreover, has of course become a matter of public interest in its own right. Clare’s act polarized the country: there are some who openly admire her – she showed me the bags of fan mail she receives every week, and I couldn’t believe my eyes – but also many who strongly condemn her action. The book you are about to read is as much Clare’s story as it is Julia’s. It was, for her, no longer possible to disentangle the two.

George Cohen (Cohen & Green Publishing)

London, May 2015

I

Where to begin, George? Time is not the problem – the heap of shapeless moments I am facing, demanding to be structured and filled, is growing more menacing every day. Three nights in a row now I’ve dreamed I was trying to cross a stretch of marshland, but I couldn’t move, the mud gluing my feet to the ground and then, slowly, dragging me under. Four days ago I was declared sane and stable (in spite of Amanda’s protests) and was transferred to my new abode. I’ve been spared the horror of having to share my cell, for which I am immensely grateful. I have always cherished my privacy, and I couldn’t bear it if what little of it remains here were to be taken from me. But most importantly, I can now write whenever I feel like it – at night, at noon, at four in the morning when I snap awake. My cell contains a narrow single bed with a squeaking plastic mattress and coarse covers; the walls are painted a shade of ochre that makes me feel nauseous whenever I look at it for too long. I also have a small TV set, some wobbly shelves and a small plywood wardrobe. But the most essential items are a little wooden desk, into which numerous previous occupants have carved an intricate pattern of initials and expletives, and a small red metal chair.

I dread the encounters with the other inmates, those moments in the day when I have to leave my cell and when small talk is required: in the showers, at mealtimes and during the mandatory daily courtyard outings. I have entirely lost the ability to think of normal things to say, to anyone, and I constantly wonder whether the women here know what I did and why I am among them. I feel as though they are watching me, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I don’t think I have either the strength or the willpower to defend myself. In fact, a part of me wishes they would just get on with it and put an end to all this.

Curiously, it is not the creature comforts I miss most – such as food that is actually edible (what they serve here sinks like wet cement to the bottom of our stomachs and renders its victims simultaneously overweight and undernourished). Neither, to my own surprise, do I miss alcohol (my cravings for the state of comfortable numbness that I had sought so regularly in the past few years have disappeared completely), and nor do I miss my soft green velvet sofa, my books, my film collection, and my comfortable bed.

But I do miss company. Although Amanda and Laura faithfully visit twice a week, and call every day, I feel as lonely as never before in my life. The gaps, both old and new, are looming so ominously. I cherish my visiting day more than anything, even if I can barely summon the courage to look Amanda and Laura in the eye. And I miss Aisha. Badly. Every time I wake up, during those few seconds it takes the mind to re-orientate itself in space and time, I turn to touch her, my hand expecting in vain to find her curled up into a furry ball on the duvet right next to me. But what I miss most is having a project. Aims. Something to do. The human animal is lost without tasks. They are what keep us functioning; without desires, without something on which to concentrate our energies, we have nothing to distract us from the abyss.

I need to choose a starting point. I will begin with the day of the attack. It was 23 July, a sweltering Wednesday, the heat having held the city in a tight, sweaty embrace for four long days. I woke up early, feeling sticky and lethargic. Aisha had fallen ill that night – small pools of vomit were scattered all over the flat, as though my wooden floorboards had developed a weeping skin disease. When I found her lying under the sofa she looked even more listless than I felt. Her moon-coloured eyes were clouded, her normally lustrous silver fur looked tarnished and knotted.

I was in my vet’s waiting room in Mayfair when the news broke. There were six other women, each nervously attending to a small ailing animal on their lap, plus the receptionist. The woman next to me (who had been preoccupied with whispering soothing words into the ear of a coughing terrier) suddenly cried: ‘Good God!’ Her mouth fell open as she stared at the television screen mounted on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk, showing the news without sound. Alarmed by the woman’s outburst, we collectively raised our eyes to the screen. ‘Christ!’ another woman shouted; ‘Holy shit!’ wailed the receptionist, who had jumped up and turned around. The vet, startled by the commotion, had joined us. Disbelief slackened our features; something bad had happened right in our midst, in central London. We had risen from our seats and put down our animals (some had been dropped rather unceremoniously), staring wide-eyed at the screen. The receptionist had turned up the sound. Thus we stood united for a few moments, a small community of the frightened. The woman next to me grabbed my hand and squeezed it so tightly that her rings left marks in my flesh.

Not much was known at that point, only that a bomb had exploded in a Café Olé branch on Paternoster Square, right next to the London Stock Exchange. There was carnage; there were casualties. I remember that the face of the young BBC correspondent, who happened to be at the scene by chance and reported live from the square, looked as ravaged as the remains of the scorched storefront, from which thin plumes of smoke were still rising, like translucent ribbons of mourning. Forensic experts in white overalls rushed in and out. They carried a seemingly endless number of black body bags past the reporter, who, stunned by the gruesome procession, kept repeating ‘They’re dead, they’re all dead, they’re all dead in there’, until a colleague took the microphone from her white hand and led her out of the picture.

Only a few minutes had gone by while we were taking in the facts, and none of us had moved or spoken. Then, as though a spell had been lifted, we began to search for our phones and tried to reach our loved ones. Suddenly there was chaos in the room – everyone was shouting to make themselves understood. I called Amanda, who had not yet heard about the attack, and who was so shocked that she was unable to say anything at all. When she finally recovered her speech, she just whispered ‘Laura’, and I let her off the line so that she could call her daughter. I wanted nothing more than to call Laura myself – I was sick with worry – but the first call was Amanda’s prerogative. The vet tried to reach her husband, but was unable to get through to him and grew ever more panicky – he worked in a bank just around the corner from the scene of the bombing, and often ate lunch in one of the restaurants on the square. After a few failed attempts she told us the practice was closed for the day and to return tomorrow. Only then did we remember our animals, who had begun to wail pitifully: dumbstruck, afraid, feeling the terror but unable either to articulate or to make sense of it, they appeared to me an apt image of our traumatized nation. Aisha, who is usually the gentlest of souls and whose grotesquely raised hair made her look like a woollen blowfish, scratched me when I tried to put her back in the carrier.

I drove straight to Amanda’s house in Golders Green. She had just seen her last patient of the day. We hugged hard and long. She and I spent the rest of the day glued to the television screen, making and taking phone calls, and waiting anxiously for news from Laura. Most networks were down – there was too much traffic in the air. Late in the afternoon, Laura finally joined us. When the attack happened, she had been busy selling salads, sandwiches and cakes in the Blue Nile, an organic fair-trade café in Bloomsbury that she had set up with her friend Moira two years before. It took her almost five hours to get home, as numerous stations had been shut down for security reasons and the entire Tube system was so overcrowded that she had to wait for an hour before she could get on a train, and another hour to get on one of the replacement buses to continue her journey. All of London seemed to be out swarming on the streets, like frenzied bees whose hive had been violated.

Laura was visibly shaken by the apocalyptic scenes she had witnessed on her way home. When things go wrong, the thin veneer of civilized behaviour that we think of as natural wears off as quickly as make-up in the rain. People, Laura said, got into ugly fights to secure places on the overcrowded buses; an old man brutally pushed a girl out of the bus to make room for his wife. The girl fell on her face and didn’t move, and nobody got off to help her (Laura was pressed tightly against a window on the upper deck, from where she could see but not intervene). When the bus was full to breaking point the driver was too scared to stop at the designated stops, where angry mobs were waiting to get on, prepared to use violence to fight for their right to get home.

The three of us sat closely huddled together on the sofa all evening and stayed up until the early hours. We kept pressing each other’s hands and stared at the TV in disbelief. Around midnight, when the identity of the attacker was revealed, the shock was almost worse than the one I had experienced in the vet’s waiting room when the story first broke. Nobody was prepared for this. I suppose we all assumed that a group of fanatical Islamists, angry alienated jihadists with nothing to lose, were responsible. When the bomber’s picture first flickered across our screens, I (and I am sure the rest of the nation, too) thought that this had to be a mistake. I found myself incapable of establishing a connection between the image of the beautiful, earnest-looking young woman and the other pictures we had seen – the twenty-two body bags lined up in a grim, neat row on Paternoster Square, and the footage of the victims who had survived, and of the relatives of the dead howling in pain, burying their faces in their hands, and of the terrible scene of devastation that gaped like a raw, deep wound right in the heart of our city.

Something struck me about Julia White’s face, from the moment I first saw it. I couldn’t quite articulate it then. I thought it at once utterly alien and at the same time uncannily familiar. Above all I was fascinated by the serenity of her gaze: her still, slightly slanted green eyes in that finely chiselled, delicately pale face suggested an old-souled wisdom, someone who has seen more than their fair share of sadness and suffering, and yet there was something else in those eyes that I couldn’t quite fathom. Julia was looking straight into the camera, her full lips unsmiling, her expression strangely unreadable. There was an unsettling contrast between her disconcerting gaze and her soft, milky-white skin. In that first picture to enter the public domain (many others were to follow) her long chestnut-brown hair was tied back into a bun, and she was wearing a crisp white man’s shirt and a grey sleeveless pullover. Like an Oxford student from the seventies; perhaps with a hint of Marlene Dietrich. As I learned later, this picture was taken four years before the attacks, one month before Julia dropped out of university and went travelling.

I think the seeds for what happened later were sown the very moment I saw that picture (and that particular image was to remain the one that haunted me – it still does): I simply couldn’t imagine what might have led a beautiful, highly intelligent young woman, privileged in all sorts of ways, to perpetrate the most ruthless terrorist act that had been committed in Britain since the Lockerbie bombing and the 7/7 attacks. I think the most disturbing thing was that she appeared to be so very much like us – twenty-seven, just two years older than Laura, and similar in so many ways. I could picture the two of them chatting away in Laura’s café and becoming friends. Julia could have been my daughter. She reminded me of my younger self – confident and idealistic, driven by an unshakeable trust in the idea that it is possible to shape the future. From the very start, Julia’s face touched something in me, bringing back the memory of things I had lost and for which I must have been mourning – much more strongly than I was aware. In that picture in particular, she looked so proud and safe and at home in her skin and her beliefs. I found myself vacillating between fascination and disgust – after all, this woman had blood, so much blood, on her hands.

On the day following the terror attack, Julia’s ‘manifesto’ was published on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The number of her victims had risen to twenty-three, and one woman, still in a critical condition, would later succumb to her injuries, bringing the total to two dozen. Apart from the manifesto, Julia, who had turned herself in to the police straight after the attack, remained silent. She refused to see anyone but her lawyer. She refused all contact with her family. She refused to receive friends and members of the various political groups to which she had belonged. She refused to speak to journalists. Even during her trial, she never uttered a word. It was almost as though her silence was her second, perhaps even crueller attack: she simply refused to grace us with an explanation.

Her manifesto rehearsed some standard anti-capitalist slogans and a few anti-globalization catchphrases. She denounced the unethical exploitation of workers in the so-called Third World; she decried the apolitical consumerism that dominates our age and the shocking lack of public interest in the suffering of the oppressed in countries other than our own; and she called for a radical rethinking of neoliberal economic policies that pursue growth at all costs. But the manifesto’s rhetoric was strangely unimaginative and lacklustre. I couldn’t help feeling that she was mocking the idea of manifesto-writing, or perhaps even political activism as such. I feared it was nothing but a teaser, a deliberate slap in the face for those in search of answers.

Unsurprisingly, as Julia remained shtum, others began to speak in her stead – both about her and (unauthorized, of course) on her behalf. A chorus of overexcited voices populated the airwaves and flooded the print media, trying to drown out Julia’s uncanny silence. Anecdotes, half-truths, legends and myths soon began to circulate and multiply at an astounding speed. People from all professions were anxious to categorize and analyse Julia and her acts, to explain and thus somehow to master them. Predictably, psychologists and psychiatrists were the most sought-after talk-show guests – psychology, after all, is still the most apolitical and reconciliatory master narrative out there, as everything can safely be explained with recourse to Mummy’s or Daddy’s lack of unconditional love for their offspring (I feel like Amanda just kicked me hard in the shin from afar). But there were also politicians, historians, sociologists, economists, teachers, theologians – the line-up of so-called terrorism experts eager to share their views on the matter was endless. Was Julia ill or evil, pathological or a sinner? A victim of false ideology or a dangerously deluded radical? A disturbed maverick or an alarmingly symptomatic product of our perverse age? Should the professed political justification of her deed be debated seriously, or was she simply a nihilistic sadist? How did she fit in with her terrorist cousins – Latin American guerrilla fighters, IRA activists, the German Red Army Faction, Islamist suicide bombers, militant animal-rights campaigners? What did the anti-globalization movement, the causes of which she had seemingly embraced in her manifesto, make of her? Had she acted alone or were there others who had supported her? And who were the parents who had produced this spawn of the devil?

Julia’s life-story became the stuff of endless speculation, and the fact that she was beautiful and silent only fuelled the public’s interest further. I admit that I, too, was spellbound from the very start – my fascination consisted mainly of repulsion and horror, but also awe. I don’t mean that I was in any way condoning or admiring her horrendous act – of course not; I have seen the human cost of her ugly work. I think what I felt was a general kind of admiration for radical mindsets, for people who are not prepared to compromise, who have visions so strong they defend them with their lives, and who courageously dedicate their entire existence to ideas, regardless of the consequences. In our exhausted political landscape this species is almost extinct. Think about it: what forms of serious political activism are left today? Our streets are populated by swarms of twee retro-fetishists and bearded hipsters with ironic spectacles, who appear to believe that drinking flat whites in cafés that play ukulele music and buying chia seeds and black quinoa in wholefood shops are worthwhile political statements in their own right.

I devoured every single article about Julia, and I had numerous discussions with Amanda about her that usually resulted in heated disagreements. Although I don’t deny the attraction of psychoanalytical explanatory models, I simply don’t believe that they can account for everything, as Amanda does. You, too, George, confessed to me once that you found Amanda’s views curiously limited, blind to all political and historical considerations. In addition, Amanda soon made it clear that she felt I had become unhealthily obsessed with Julia White – of course she had many a theory up her sleeve to explain why Julia appealed to me so, and what she appealed to in me, but I refused to listen. Maybe, with hindsight, I should have.

Then I decided to transform my obsession into something productive. It made complete sense: I would write Julia White’s biography. I would try to unravel the mystery of her strange allure and at the same time turn my research into a much-needed new book. For the first time since the trial, I felt strong enough to tackle a serious project. I didn’t even need to convince you. This was the first project since the accursed trial that wasn’t just a bread-and-butter job, which you had kindly pushed my way and that came with an acceptable cheque that would go towards paying off my debts. The biography was my chance to shake off my sense of failure, the conviction that I was a sell-out. I had been producing nothing but shallow entertainment porn since 2010, and you can’t imagine how much that hurt. I used to live and breathe for my work – it meant everything to me. It was all I had. I’m sorry, George – I am of course infinitely grateful for every job you sent my way, and I am acutely aware that you reserved the most lucrative commissions for me, but they did inevitably also tend to be the most facile ones. I had been living like a ghost for the past four years; I felt so hollow.

The generous advance you negotiated for me was of course also more than welcome – my finances were (and still are) a mess so horrific to behold that I had left the task to a trusted financial adviser, who fed me only manageable nuggets of information when she felt I was able to cope. The last I had heard from her was that it would take me at least fifteen years to clear my debt – provided the commercial commissions kept coming in regularly.

I admit that I was also attracted by the challenge. It was clear that I had to research and write the book as quickly as possible, as other publishers would want to cash in on the Julia hype, too. It was a race both against time and against the competition – whoever got their book out first would win the lion’s share of the potentially vast number of readers interested in Julia’s story. I had set myself the ambitious task of delivering the complete manuscript in only fourteen weeks.

But time wasn’t the only problem: since it was clear from the start that the subject of my book wouldn’t grant me an interview, I would instead have to gather all my materials from the people who knew her best. That, too, would be far from easy, but I was used to dealing with difficulties of that kind. I had written three unauthorized celebrity biographies under extreme time pressure before (of a young pop star who had taken too many horse tranquillizers and lost her mind, a suicidal TV chef, and a firmly facelifted politician with a penchant for parading through our numerous reality TV shows in outfits that are too tight and too bright). I was confident I would be able to master this one, too. I used to win people’s trust easily. I could get almost anyone to reveal their secrets to me.

A part of me was also secretly hoping that Julia would make an exception and agree to speak to me after all (I cannot tell you how much I wish she hadn’t now). Right at the beginning, I contacted the lawyer who was representing Julia, asking her to pass my request for an interview on to her client, and I sent her two follow-up messages a few weeks later when I didn’t receive a response. In any case, in the first instance my plan was to contact Julia’s family and friends. I knew there would also be university acquaintances, teachers, neighbours, distant relatives, old playmates and political activists who would no doubt be eager to share with me their version of events. Normally, all kinds of people crawl out of the woodwork when they sniff the elusive fragrance of fame, even if it is just by association.

As soon as I had signed the hastily drawn-up contract in your office, I threw myself heart and soul into the project. All of a sudden, the weariness that had been oppressing me for four long years lifted and I felt almost like my old self again. Besides, Aisha had thankfully recovered from her illness (it turned out to be a harmless stomach bug), and there were exciting developments in Laura’s life. In spite of the fact that the Blue Nile is a non-fussy, down-to-earth affair that consistently privileges quality over hipness, hidden away in one of the less busy side-streets in Bloomsbury, it had received enthusiastic reviews in various papers. Even more thrilling was the fact that Laura and Moira had just found out that they had been nominated for the Time Out Best Newcomer of the Year award (in the organic/wholefood category). Amanda and I were incredibly proud of Laura, and, to be honest, enormously relieved that things had turned out so well for her.

I miss going to the Blue Nile – I used to drop in once or twice a week, to sample their ever-changing repertoire of delicious grain, rice and pulse salads, and when Laura wasn’t too busy, we caught up over a cup of tea. Laura is a very special person – she always knew exactly what she wanted in life, and also how to get it. She has loved cooking from a very early age (although, as you well know, neither Amanda nor I has any talent at all in that domain), and trained as a chef when all her friends went to university, before pairing up with Moira to realize her dream of running an organic café. Moira had the necessary funds and business connections, while Laura supplied the concept, the creative energy and her sure-footed food intelligence. You must visit the Blue Nile for me when you find the time, George – I always felt very much at home there, and would be really grateful if you could occasionally check on Laura to see how she is doing. I worry so much about how all of this is affecting her. She is a sensitive soul, underneath it all.