Story My Eccentric Friend Julie

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This was written long-hand at a creative writing workshop I participated in years ago. I can’t even remember what the specific exercise was and I have only just edited this and typed it. Julie is a completely fictional character, not based directly on anyone I know. Enjoy. My Eccentric Friend Julie Julie is a girl I find easy to fall in love with though many find her easy to hate. I guess that’s why I love her. She considers herself liberal minded, though she only ever votes for parties likely to lose their election deposits because she sees it as her moral duty to vote but doesn’t want the big parties to win the elections. She doesn’t trust any politicians. Her purse has precious little in it at any given time. Her keys, bus fare home and a crinkled letter from Clark Gable she wrote herself, forging his signature to a declaration of his undying love for her long after he actually died. She strokes the letter from time to time, probably fantasising that he is with her instead of me. Her hair is cropped short, and naturally brunette. She likes having less to cope with and more time on her hands outside the bathroom. She avoids make-up. She sees the pigeons, sparrows and an occasional hedgehog in her front garden as her pets, frequently setting bread and milk aside for them. She won’t have animals in the flat as she considers it no better than keeping animals in a zoo cage. She is a veritable Francis Of Assisi. She adores Gothic black, but she nearly always wears green because vampires frighten her. She hates TV, but watches the adverts while leaving the room during the programmes. She likes to see what they are trying to sell to her so she can go out of her way not to buy it. She despises anything normal, conventional or within the rules and regulations. She is anarchic to the borders of lunacy. Her sister Kate is the exact polar opposite, a qualified doctor, a success, a happy mother of three. Julie sees her avoidance of career, family and commitments as a major achievement in her life. Jainists avoid stepping on insects to sidestep bad karma – Julie sidesteps social expectations and peer group pressure for the same reason. She kept her hair short but she had experimented with going totally bald saying cryptically that Samson was at his strongest without his hair, only to find that people assumed she was undergoing chemotherapy. She reluctantly grew some hair back. She told people sarcastically that she’d been to Lourdes for a miracle cure. She sneaks into the kitchen like a ninja to see if I have crept into the kitchen, as she doesn’t trust me not to eat her yoghurts. Julie loves being mistaken for a boy, and often calls herself Tom as in Tomboy. She climbs the trees in the park. I get scared in case she falls but she never does. She once saw a man run over by a car dying in the street. She was seven. It crushed her sense of anything to do with religion and the supernatural when she saw a priest rush over giving him absolution, actually getting to him before the doctor who turned up could get close enough to help the poor man. She cried when she told me this. She thinks I’m ‘funny-amusing’, in my jaw-dropped reactions to her eccentric quirks and tendency to cause mischief. She likes to shock, and I’m easily shocked though hard to offend. I thought I was unshockable until I met her. She says there is no such thing as normal. Julie hates tidying up and hates me when I tidy anything away or hoover up for her. She told me as we woke up this morning that she wants to learn how to drive. I advise her that it sounds a really bad idea, but she smiles, knowing that is all the more reason why she should. Arthur Chappell