The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel by Schaffner Anna

singing. She has a beautiful voice.
    Dad and I used to have a special relationship. He can chat away to anyone – cleaners, janitors, CEOs, politicians. He is a great small-talker and makes people immediately feel at ease. When I was young he would sometimes take me hiking with his male friends in the Lake District. Later, when I was a teenager, he would talk to me at length after work about some of his cases and explain to me in detail the complex financial and legal decisions his clients were facing. I learned so much from him. My interest in finance and business was definitely stimulated by my dad. It was only because of my sister that there were tensions between us.
    When I was eleven I developed an interest in British military history. I started to collect little tin soldiers, the kind you had to paint yourself. The tin soldiers were another thing over which Dad and I bonded. We would spend many evenings after supper in the games room, painting different types of more or less historically accurate uniforms onto the blank figurines. While we were painting, Dad would tell me about heroic British military achievements in the Napoleonic Wars and during the Normandy landings. I never wanted to hear about losses and defeats. We would re-create famous battles on a big wooden board with our painted mini-troops. One evening we were about to set up our armies for the Battle of Waterloo. Both of us had been looking forward to it for days. But then we noticed something appalling when we opened the box in which our soldiers were kept: every single one of the figurines had either an arm or a leg missing. Sometimes both. With painstaking precision and iron determination, someone had broken off the limbs of about two hundred tiny tin soldiers. A few of them even had their heads removed, probably with a small metal saw or pliers.
    Dad and I had no doubts about who the author of the tin soldier massacre was. My sister, who was about eight years old at the time, must have dedicated an entire day to her dark task. I was terribly upset about my mutilated toys, and started to cry. I demanded she be punished for what she had done. Dad took me in his arms and tried to calm me down. We sat there for a long time. He murmured soothing words into my ears and stroked my hair. Later, we went up to Julia’s room, hand in hand, to confront her. Julia and Amy were lying on the carpet. I think they were looking at an illustrated fairy-tale book together.
    ‘Julia,’ Dad said gently but firmly, ‘why did you destroy Jonathan’s toys? Look how upset he is!’
    ‘I’m sorry, Daddy; I didn’t mean to upset Jonathan. But that’s what happens in wars: people lose their arms and legs and sometimes much more than that, and many people die all the time. I saw it on TV. War is not something fun, you know. It’s not a game.’
    I was far from satisfied with that explanation. I still believe that she did what she did purely out of jealousy and spite rather than to educate me, as she claimed. But Dad could, as so often, see her point. Julia can be very convincing. She is an expert manipulator of people. Unfortunately, Dad wasn’t immune to her powers of persuasion. I fear he still isn’t, even now, after everything she did. He gave Julia a little half-hearted sermon on the value of other people’s property and their right to explore things in their own way, even if she had different opinions on the matter. But he didn’t mean it. Even then I could see that secretly he was enormously proud of his daughter, who was so intelligent and articulate and original and mature beyond her years. He tried to hide it then and there. He probably felt he owed it to me to be stern with her and to take my anguish seriously. But just two hours later, when I went back into the games room to take another look at the calamity that had befallen my troops, I saw Julia sitting on his lap. Dad’s eyes were shining with pride. He spoke with an animation that I never noticed when