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.
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.
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.