I better go home, I thought. I needed to relax – things were getting out of hand. I needed space in which to recollect myself, pull myself together. My flat would offer relief from the squalor of what was happening to me. I hailed a taxi back to Kensington. But having arrived home I could not relax. I found myself immediately dialling Juliette’s number again. Still, there was no reply.
I wondered in a moment of despair if the last few weeks had only been a dream, an invention of my own making. The last month had proceeded so quickly, so intensely, I thought that if I could just eradicate it from my memory, my life would return to the tranquil solitude that I had once enjoyed. I had no proof of anything, no proof that Justine even existed, nor for that matter Juliette. Yet just because I had no proof, didn’t mean I could dismiss my memories altogether. Now that Justine existed simply in my head made the burden of her image only heavier to bear.
THIRTY-FIVE
The painting of Justine that hung in my room was no longer enough. I wanted to paint a picture of her in my head with her lifeblood. The living Justine grew pale and empty with dry sockets and collapsing skin. Vampiric, the new image of her in my head sucked out her lifeblood in order to live afresh in my mind. In my head she became immortal. This fresh icon took on a life of its own, taunted me, bewitched me until I became its slave.
I started by drawing the letter J over the pages of the novel I was reading, then engraving it on the lid of my Queen Anne walnut desk. But I soon ran out of space and began on the walls, little J’s, then larger, in black ink, like they were insects. J is an ambiguous letter, neither linear nor totally curvaceous. I couldn’t turn it into a shape or pattern, I couldn’t organize it, I just had to draw it repeatedly, over and over again. The letter was a hieroglyph: it stood for her. It was a straight line but it was also hooked. But then as I stared at the sequences of J’s that lined my walls, the letter became meaningless, unreal, standing for an occult knowledge that would always be forbidden me. It stopped being the symbol for her. It stopped being the symbol for anything.
Even though the painting now failed to satisfy me as a whole, portions of the portrait still gratified me. I began to focus particularly on one area of it: the neck. It was long and white like the neck of a swan. I wanted to caress it. But her painted neck also invoked a kind of terror in me. The slim structure made me feel breakable and assailable. The neck, in spite of its chalky intransigence, reminded me of death.
The intensity of my fantasizing gradually became replaced by a realization that the real Justine had gone. I might never see her again. An atmosphere of horror filled the house, smelling of tar. I could hardly move, talk or think. My body and hands constantly trembled and when I attempted to eat my throat retched up the food, as if I had committed an act of impurity.
When I walked from room to room in my flat, my body felt distant, the deformity of my foot, however, grown to monstrous proportions.
Anger replaced fear. An anger that Justine had abandoned me. My murderous thoughts put my fingers around her throat. I was left in my hands with a wondrous creation of earth and broken bones.
However, in bed at night, the thought of her white bare body quickened my mind and my skin.
THIRTY-SIX
I began to wander around the centre of London in the vague hope that I might catch sight of her. I took buses instead of taxis, tolerating their noise and crowded smells. Their slower pace allowed me more time to survey the streets, and sitting on the top deck I had a panoramic view of the areas I had to cover. Beyond the glass, London seemed oblivious and alien. I was frightened to look at London in too much detail. I was reluctant to see its reality. I was scared that the external fact of London would split me in two.
I knew that in order to find Justine I would have to become more intimate with London’s underworld. Since I had met her, it was as if London had thrown off its opera houses and art galleries, its vestiges of civilization, like a discarded cloak. No longer did I see London sheathed as the centre of cultural and political greatness. I saw the capital uncovered as a heterogeneous collection of tiny occult communities, any of which could be hiding Justine within its depths. I then had to peel back London’s skin of dirt and violence and pluck out Justine from its heart.
One night I was travelling back to Kensington on a night bus, exhausted from a whole day of searching. Hypnotized by the glow of the lights in Kensington Park, I realized that their brightness only served to show up the blackness behind them. For just one moment, I took a step outside my desire, looked at my love as I looked at the park’s lights from the top deck of a bus, and saw the darkness behind it. My love for Justine was reduced to a piece of luminously wrought-out fiction. My obsession was supported by the black space of unreality. I knew, looking into the shadows of the park, that only an act of blind faith could carry me through.
I gave up travelling by bus, and started to walk. I spent days exploring London on foot, stopping in transport cafés for lunch and checking into squalid bed and breakfasts at night in the hope that I might find her. Only then did I really perceive the cruelty of London, I had resisted its streetwise imperative, and because I refused to give in to its mean streets, to see them, to believe in them, London rejected me unconditionally: London left me out in the cold. But this suited me, London made a fine burial ground.
At night the cold nibbled at my skin as I wandered through the lights of Soho. The icy wind was slowly pulling the skin off my bones in strands with its thin lips. The car headlights which flashed past loud and fast, were wet and shiny with violence. The black skyscrapers veered up into the skies like monoliths to an urban god. A god that had long since abandoned his city, leaving behind the shell of his shrines. London, at night, was silent, it didn’t utter words, just emanated moods of brutal unpredictability.
One evening after weeks of searching, it began to rain and I entered a café in Charing Cross Road, to watch from the neon-lit window for a glimpse of Justine. No matter how far I travelled out to the outskirts of the city, I always returned to its centre in the end. It was a light late summer rain, and I waited for London finally to take pity on me and bring her into the café, when her defences were down, because it was raining.
THIRTY-SEVEN
It was then that I saw Justine walk past the window of the café. I ran out into the wet street, peering through the affronted crowds around me. She was walking about a hundred yards down the street, her green dress and gold hair conspicuous amongst the greyness of other women. She was moving slowly and I caught up with her quickly, tapping her shoulder as she had once tapped mine.
A face turned to look at me of horrific disfigurement. The skin had been so badly burned that any structure to the face was unrecognizable. The eyes were foamy white cataracts. The skin was a lurid red mass of scarred tissue. I quickly turned away, murmuring my apologies, whispering a case of mistaken identity. But as I walked away I felt secretly pleased at the strange woman’s injury. It was her punishment for not being Justine, for making me think that she was.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I returned to my flat. The portrait of Justine had changed yet again. She was now wearing a velvet dress in the green the grass goes after it has rained. Her face was paler than usual, but full of grace, and her eyes, because they were lowered on the hook she was writing, seemed shut in death. I refrained from calling out her name. It was her seeing me that would wrest all power from me. Visually, she was mine. As long as she didn’t look up and see me, I had the upper hand. I was in control. I wanted to watch her forever, never disturb her, leave her trapped in her world of words so that I could just look.