A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling. They were perhaps four metres away when the girl stumbled and fell flat on her face. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain. A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. She held her free hand to him and he helped her up. In the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. He transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square....He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! The idea had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. The unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmered figures into the speakwrite. He drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole.

...For a week after this life was a restless dream... When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. ...Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table. He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating. Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily. In a low murmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; and between spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressions.

...Winston was in VICTORY SQUARE before the appointed time. He wandered around the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which BIG BROTHER's statue gazed southward. Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing. Soon he was within an arm's length of the girl. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them. The girl's shoulder and her arm right down to the elbow were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near enough for him to feel its warmth. She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmer easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.

"Can you get Sunday afternoon off?"

"Yes."

"Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station--." With a sort of military precision that astonished him she outlined the route. "Can you remember all that?" she murmered finally.

"Yes. What time?"

"About fifteen. Now get away from me as quick as you can".

...It was the second of May. There had been no difficulties about the journey. In a minute he came to the footpath which plunged between the bushes. He looked up. It was the girl. She led the way into the wood. Winston followed. The sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him - a creature of the indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin. They were in a natural clearing.

"Here we are." the girl said.

"Now that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to look at me?" said Winston.

"Yes, easily."

"I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth."

"I couldn't care less." said the girl. "Isn't this a splendid hideout? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike."

"What is your name?" said Winston.

"Julia. I know yours. It's Winston - Winston Smith. What did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?"

"I hated the sight of you," he said. "I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police'"

The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise.

"From your general appearance - merely because you're young and fresh and healthy." he said.

"You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes - all that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?"

"Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that, you know." he said.

"It's this bloody thing that does it," she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough.

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls. She had no memories of anything before the early 'sixties, and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. She had been a troop leader in the Spies and branch Secretary in the Youth League before joining the Anti-Sex League.

She felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him. The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.

"Where did you get this stuff?" he said.

"Black market," she said indifferently. "Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe."

"You are very young" he said. "You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?"

"It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a chance. I'm good at spotting people who don't belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them."

Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere. A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom swore, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had left the clearing and were wandering, arms round each other. He pulled her round. Her body seemed to melt into his.

"Not here...back to the hideout"

Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire; that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour. Winston woke first. You could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

"We can come here once again," said Julia. "It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course."

As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She began arranging details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked.

"Never go home the same way as you went out."

She named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy.

"And now I must go. I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. ...goodbye, my love, good-bye."

She kissed him almost violently and disappeared into the wood.

They never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love, in another hiding place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time.

In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation which she called 'talking by installments'. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips. There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead.

JULIA'S FATE (reader asks about Party doctrine on Julia's kind of thinking). Mar 17, 2004. Go to 27.Goodthink & 37.We Are The Dead

Anti-boy t-shirt craze (female subversion of male power; hidden agenda to downgrade boys). Yahoo! Reuters, Mar 4, 2004. Go to 27.Goodthink & 30.Love Instinct & Family & MALE BASHING WHAMs

Mobile phone is spying on you (same as every person in UK wearing electronic tag like convicted criminal). Daily Mirror, Jan 19, 2004. Go to 3.Surveillance & 20.Thought Police

Cops' message to people of Canada ('Do as you're told & you won't get hurt'). Province, Jul 1, 2003. Go to 37.We Are The Dead & ANIMAL FARM DOGS & CANADA COPS UNLEASHED

"Mens groups are hate-criminals" (say gov't funded feminists monitoring male-equity activity). National Post, May 30, 2003. Go to 27.Goodthink

Bisexual feminist leads YWCA (witchcraft & goddess worship). National Post, May 25, 2003. Go to 27.Goodthink

Doctors tell men to be the new women (should take the flu shot and model themselves after homosexuals). National Post, Nov 3, 2001

WHO CONTROLS WINSTON'S MIND?

WINSTON DIES INSIDE

WINSTON & JULIA COINCIDENCES

WINSTON & JULIA

29.Risking Renting Room and 31.Love Nest and 32.Enemies Of The Party and 37.We Are The Dead