Julia

by Sandra Newman

he’d really just been Old Misery, the one who looked like he’d swallowed a fly, who coughed more than he spoke.

His real trouble wasn’t that his parents had been unpersons, or that he couldn’t keep up with Party doctrine, or even his nasty cough. Old Misery had a bad case of Sex Gone Sour.

Behind the spectacles, the eyes were childish and lewd at once. The thick lips were always moist. They made you want to cross your legs.

valetudinarians

Crucially, no one was ever to enter with a member of the opposite sex. Certain people of the same sex, however, regularly went there in pairs, locked the door behind them, and came out some time later looking tousled and at peace with the world.

the judge having ruled that, while male homosexuality was all too possible, sex between women could not occur. “The corrupt mind dreams perversions to which human anatomy is not equal.”

LOLZ

Of course it was no news that Vicky had a crush on Julia. That sort of thing was rife in hostels. In fact, it would be a poor sort of girl who didn’t fall in love with a pretty bunkmate from time to time.

pannikin

so happy she felt a keen nostalgia for these hours even as they happened.

She imagined freedom as exuberance, a clumsy romping; it made her imagine two dogs leaping on top of each other in meeting.

In fact, it might be time for her to give up sexcrime altogether. Better to live out her life in chastity, sweetening the time with fags and chocolate and a little self-pleasuring in the dark, than to have another tryst or two, then an agonizing death in the bowels of Love.

Sounds about right.

Farthermore,

shibboleths

ownlife.

But at last she fought her way into a clearing surrounded by tall bushes and saplings that hid it on all sides.

Why is it that just about every popular fiction title with a little bit of mystery in it HAS to have such a clearing in it?!

Parsons once told her, as a salacious titbit, that he’d heard French girls could climax seven times a night. Julia had replied a bit tartly that, given the chance, she too had that remarkable ability. He’d stared at her in shock, then asked, “Do you think you might be part French?”

Boys are dumb

Allied to this truth fixation was a taste for negativity—what Julia called to herself “bloodythink.”

virago,

His hair had been oiled flat, and the comb had left stiff pathways in it. Could that man ever have fucked?

I know that man. Many times over.

This speech left her more petrified than before. When such a man told you not to be afraid, you must die.

And the Chairman washed his hands and forgot.”

you could safely hit them in the face with a brick if you didn’t mind what happened to the brick.

He carried himself with a certain rigid importance, as if he were part stone.

The Youth Leagues dispensed supplementary foods—anything from powdered eggs to dried currants to a nutritional paste called chicken essence, which all knew was made of worms.

One week, there was real meat, with a cat’s face on the tin and writing in some Eurasian tongue. A girl suggested it was made of cats, but the opinion of those who believed the cat was only a mascot prevailed, and the children ate it without a qualm. All the food—the acorns as well as the catmeat—could only be consumed on the premises by the children themselves.

Sometimes prisoners could be seen at a distance, engaged in incomprehensible business,

When one could get close enough to make out their features, they looked satisfyingly disreputable—their

Hate is the highest capacity of mankind. Every other sentiment we share with the animal kingdom—anger, greed, mother love, fear, curiosity. Only hate is human. No lower animal can access its mysteries.

A beast can feel transient rage, but never hate. That is why he is morally null; there can be no goodness without hate.

there was nothing to him but prick and Party;

“I wouldn’t mind not being able to think.” “You don’t mean that,” Ampleforth said absently.

“I really don’t want to think,” Julia said. “I don’t.”

every other housefront was already daubed with slogans wishing death to various people, from Goldstein to “false botanists.”

Death to False Botanists is my next album title.

There was only the cold persistence of the hard tube, slightly nudging to the sides as it was manipulated, then the distant, slippery feeling as it was removed.

Murder, blackmail, suicide—he hadn’t the foggiest conception what these words really meant. It made her conscious, as she’d never been before, that thoughtcrime was nothing to do with crime. It wasn’t even a prelude to real crime.

And for this, he was to be condemned? One might as well execute a boy of six for saying he would like to be a pirate.

She was experiencing sanity for the first time in months, and finding it unbearable.

Same, girl

Beyond was a spacious room, in which warm light shone over a gleaming piano. Two pale-blue armchairs sat on either side, as if awaiting the piano’s song, and the walls were lined with bookshelves full of clothbound books. Even the ceiling was ornamented with plaster flowers, and the piano had its own lovely rug to stand upon. Most strange of all was that no one was in the room. All that beauty sat unattended. The piano alone received the wasteful flood of electric light, light someone somewhere had worked to produce. One saw the hours of a stranger’s life pouring uselessly over the silent piano.

sang the praises of True Vegetarianism—which meant not only eschewing meat but exterminating all animals for their obscene lives.

The scene O’Brien had played kept returning to her, with its skullduggery and masculine glamour.

In that moment, she felt all her old irritations with him as a species of fondness. One grew close to someone and let him matter, and so one brooded on his shortcomings, counting them over in private moments as if they were a miser’s hoard. It was how she had been with her mother. It was a rage that was a kind of love.

Eating the eyes, burrowing through the cheeks . . . The shrieks of the rats went on as, achingly slowly, O’Brien moved the cage forward.

This book was already getting to be a slog, but now this … 😢

with a colossal statue at the front of a naked man brandishing a scythe and holding a sheaf of grain that decorously concealed his groin. Proles called it Bare-Arsed Death,