Meanwhile in the private room of the Dorian Grey, a Hamburg nightclub, she became virtually acquainted with her double
First there was no news and then there was Julia’s news.
The card of a beached fishing smack was sent from Corfu where she’d met a Birmingham boy called Scott, master of torque settings, and scourge of Albanian pirates trying to steal powerboats he – Scott – was nominally in charge of. This affair – or more accurately fling was followed by something more substantial with a Greek boy, Georg.
Georg turned out to be rather well heeled; Julia ended up working as a secretary for his father’s shipping company in Athens (the card was of a reefer vessel on its Atlantic run); they needed someone who spoke international as opposed to Greek English. While Julia was soon fluent in Greek, and swearing as she put it like a Greek in a Gerry Durrell novel, she was not greatly enamoured of Athens. Far too smelly, as she put it in a proper letter – one of the few that came wending Suzy’s way in those years.
This was around the time Suzy fell out of love with America and came back to England vowing to beat the prophecy and got back instead with Jimmy. Jimmy was trying to launch his ultimately doomed pop career. He’d got together a hat full of songs, one of which (Car Boot Sale) she never liked but got played on Peel and then picked for a while by the commercial stations including Capital. – Julia liked it of course (she loved everything by Jimmy). – She used to play the tape as she drove around Athens in Georg’s car.
On the card was a picture of a big-lipped Greek mother sporting a pink bra. Julia had written, I am also this size now, but Suzy did not believe it!
In the meantime, she travelled to Mexico with Georg. (A picture depicting grimacing Aztec warrior) … Just with love.
After this and a true hiatus of news, Julia’s news arrived on lined pink paper with a box of hearts and an uncharacteristically tired and emotional outburst:
Here, you see no one ever goes to bed; they all drink much too much, and although I like that… I cannot see myself becoming a doctor or an engineer. When they grow up, they all want to be doctors or engineers. Even Georg wants to be a doctor and not go into his dad’s business. Sometimes I think I can’t keep up with them and it frightens me, especially the argument we get into around three o’clock in the morning. Georg becomes an insufferable prig and I don’t want to talk to him anymore. I tell him I’m leaving him and he tells me to go right ahead. I think they are so spoilt you know. I want to talk to people who aren’t spoilt brats. Then I wake up the next day I feel sick and full of remorse…
Suzy, she wrote rhetorically, you will promise me to come and visit.
This was followed by a phone call five days later; she told Suzy Georg was cheating on her; it was retribution for her own cheating ways. (You know me, Suzy, I am a serial cheater).
After Georg, Julia moved to Milan … She started working for a dress company called Alcatraz (don’t ask why). They made the dresses in the Far East and changed the labels when they got to Milan (all because the company had to prove it was made in Italy). Julia was now making love in Italian she wrote. I think it’s the real deal, she wrote in unlined paper torn from a notebook.
Out of the blue but two weeks apart, came two postcards. The first was from Stockholm, HQ of the Nobel Prize. The real prize, however, was the blonde Swede (“It’s far too cold here for my thin blood even if I would be tempted to stay for his body alone”). The second was of the exhibition hall in Cologne (the spot marked where she had her exhibition stand rendezvous for another tryst with her Swede).
Then nothing: no news.
Julia did not write for over a six-month period in which time Jimmy, god bless him, had cut his album with the Q-tips and splintered his hand (Nothing serious, Suzy thought. On the other hand, she always thought like that).
When she received a postcard from Rome: a view of the Vatican from villa Borghese, Julia had changed jobs again. She was working for the British Council (in Bologna). It was a serious job, she wrote. A job where they pay your taxes and you can see the money in your bank account. She wrote it brought back the nice me – and not the naughty one. Suzy wrote back and said that she got married – on the spare of the moment – in a registry office in central London. Jimmy gave her a ring in the shape of plastic pink and orange flower. Julia didn’t write back and then she did about a month later.
She wrote on the back of the postcard of an Etruscan vase:
“That’s lovely. I am sure you will be very happy.” – Then quite unexpectedly, since she and Jimmy had been hardly having any sex, Suzy got pregnant, which of course changed everything. Amber was born on the fifth of October, nineteen ninety-five. That seemed more news than Julia’s news, which went quiet like an overdue baby.
The card Suzy received, about eighteen months later, showed a naïf girl in patchwork dress sitting outside a country cottage. She was in France, Toulouse to be precise. She had met Thierry, who was a filmmaker. He was, she wrote, making a documentary about an Albanian poet who had been a thorn in the side of the Ancien Regime. It was, she wrote, going to last at long last.