Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘Anyone can admire a view, to live and master a place is the thing. What about Royce? What did she say, stressing about her cats and budgerigar again or likely to flatter us with her company?’

  ‘Actually, she did sound a bit on edge even for her, she was a bit “what is it this time?”. I think she’s afraid she’s forgotten something again, another birthday or anniversary. She’s getting on.’

  ‘Very charitable of you, hers is not to remember or know why, hers is just to bloody well turn up, you should have just told her that the pack must not scatter!’

  ‘But that’s what you’d say, it wouldn’t sound like me if I came out with something like that… I can’t talk like you.’

  The snag was that although Petula knew a perpetual state of crisis was necessary to wield power, the danger of crying wolf was not lost on her. To maintain credibility she required a respectable pretext for the gathering. A party for one of her grandchildren? Hers was not a family that had bought into the cult of the child, and in any case, there were few on offer. Petula had not been celebrated as one and was careful to not bring too much attention to her own. Other people’s youngsters were useful for rallying the troops in a quiet month, but were no substitute for real drama. Besides, quiet months were dangerous for other reasons, people could get too used to them and decide they preferred them to the unquiet kind. For Petula, they also carried personal terrors she dare not share, namely her abhor-rence of peace and being left on her own to meet herself. It was no accident that her radio was never switched off and that she was amongst the first of her generation to purchase a mobile telephone, however much it, and faxing, texting and e-mailing, had affected her psychic powers.

  ‘All any of them need to know is that they haven’t eaten together for… for far too long. And families should eat together, I pity people who’ve been brought up to think otherwise.’

  ‘Two weeks I think, since the last time we met as a family.’ ‘Nonsense, much longer than that. Why do you feel the need to contradict me all the time, you never used to be like this?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise, here…’ Regan passed her mother a cup with stars on it.

  ‘That isn’t herbal, is it? No, good. Well, I’m not just inviting them round to see their faces, there are things we need to discuss.’ Petula snorted and took a sip of her tea, the hot liquid scalding the roof of her mouth in a way she found reassuringly agreeable. Why not really upset the applecart and announce an incurable disease? Despite flirting with the idea for years she was sure she had got one… and, if not, what harm would it do to have a very rare affliction she could invent, something exotic with a Latin name that no one knew very much about, ‘Don’t worry, not a lot of people have heard of it, the great thing is I could still have years left…’

  Petula laughed and put down the cup, her emerald eyes hardening with what might seem to be mischievous resolve.

  ‘The real question is, will the ham be ready in time? Not that any one of them would notice once they get stuck into the booze, the greedy trollops. You know, there are days when I’d sooner eat the people and entertain the ham. Like the pig, often I too feel like a guest at my own meal.’

  Control required novelty but could not be gauche. An undeniable lie might set the trap that would finally undo her, far better to tie her deception to facts. Twenty years earlier, if she were to choose an illness, the cutting-edge option would have had to have been Aids, risqué then, passé now; cancer had always been grubby (not to say specific and all too likely), and while there was respect for a heart attack it was beyond her to fake one. Which left the flu, measles and athlete’s foot, and who honestly cared about those? Disease would have to wait as it could not possibly live up to its billing. Even if it did, one could not rule out the possibility of her audience embracing shock without remorse, or a mute fatalism that was suspiciously like relief. The obedience a period of mourning would afford could not be manipulated this side of death. Without being able to trust her family’s loyalty, it was impossible to play games with it or resort to lesser strategies. Emigration might have once had a similar effect to disease but had been used before, as had threats to sell the house, marry again, and take up the needle and spoon, during a particularly fraught period over last Christmas when they had argued over whether it should be turkey or goose. Petula blew at her tea impatiently, the absurdities even an honest life relied on irritating her greatly.

  ‘Good God, the lengths these people drive you to…’

  ‘You’re doing too much Mum, I’m here to help you if you’d let me. Why have anyone over at all? I could just call and say you’re ill. Well, you are in a way with all the things wrong with you, and it could just be us then. It’d be way more fun, I’d prefer it anyway.’

  Petula rolled her eyes benignly and tried to extinguish the suspicion that her daughter was no longer entirely in earnest when it came to declarations of this sort, or earnest at all. Was there something she was keeping from her, a heart pricked by jealousy or a mind full of murders she dare not commit? If she could doubt Regan, she could doubt anything. It was disquieting how thoughts slid into unruly pathways, covering ground one’s voice would never dare air. Imposing her will on the jetsam and making a decision was the only cure. She would take a stand as she always had.

  ‘Could you boil the kettle again please? This has gone cold.’

  Pretexts and excuses were beneath her, she was chasing shadows with both and conceding the moral high ground she required to rule. Asking people to behave properly required no subterfuge, her achievements went beyond personalities. The Heights was an abstract code, a system that would continue without an individual at its head because the system itself was already a person exhibiting a character: her own. She did not want it to work without her, for the dead to be food for the living. She wanted in; the world turning by itself an unimaginable proposition. What was would be.

  ‘What are you thinking, Mummy?’

  ‘Ignorance, Regan, is bliss.’

  She was spoilt for options, let them all come and she would give them what for. She laughed a little manically, she would simply tell them they were there because she wanted them to be. ‘I’ll rub their noses in my love and give them new faces,’ she erupted.

  Regan took a tactful bite of her pain au chocolat and affected not to hear.

  ‘Options my dear, they distract and mislead but are the purest measure of success I know, the more you collect, the more memorable the decision.’

  In the eternal glory of the present moment, it was easy for Petula to forget a time when she had few if any options at all, a time before the advent of ‘the sisters’, when she was still a girl and not rage incarnate.

  ‘Roll on four o’clock,’ she announced casting her dressing gown onto the kitchen floor, the freckles on her bare shoulders catching the bouncing sunlight. ‘When they get here tell them to keep their coats on and join me in the garden. I don’t care how bloody cold it is, this is too good a day to waste indoors talking shop over last year’s ham. What I have to say to them can be said under the sky, under the sky and in life.’

  Selective glimpses of full nudity were used sparingly but efficiently by Petula to make a point, and as she stood there, proud in her state of undress, her naked flesh a challenge for her daughter to emulate or run from, Regan could not help fearing the performance would be repeated later that day too, and the day after, and the one after that. The future was written, and naked.

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ she said and allowed Petula to draw her head firmly up to her breast, neither tender recollection nor hopeful imagining able to suppress what she knew then: that if life could not stop her mother then she would have to.

  PART ONE:

  Acheron, entry.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  an ending and an introduction.

  How did these things come to pass?

  Of Petula’s beginnings, those early days in which she was available, fearful and alone, little was known. Her life as a sister
began with Regan’s birth and Regan knew her as no one else, the frustrated saintliness already in place by the time Regan was old enough to ask her first questions.

  ‘But all that’s in the past, there’s nothing mysterious about it, boring things that happened yesterday instead of today, the only difference is that they happened to me, not you. Really Regan, you don’t want to become one of those earnest virgins that squirrel round looking for reasons all the time, a nosy hybrid of Miss Marple and Socrates. Asking people about their memories is opening the floodgates at high tide, darling; you allow a whole clod of sentimentalised excrement to wash through your nostrils. Take my word for it, the second anything enters memory is the turning point in which all this banal reality,’ she raised her hands to the four corners of John Lewis, York, ‘is sprinkled with stardust and a panglossian Cathedral of misty-eyed old balls appears in its stead. They say that time is a great healer but what they don’t tell you is that it’s time itself that’s the big pain. The past is a liar; stick to what you know and bugger the old days. The only old bits worth hanging onto are the parts that create the new.’

  From this Regan concluded that the past could not be over quickly enough for her mother and tried to remember as little of her own as she could, which for a time left her very forgetful. As this sat oddly with the sisters’ practical outlook her mother told her not to take her words so literally.

  ‘It’s alright to remember where you left your toothbrush and that cherries taste nice, I meant, stop asking Mummy where she came from, who Granny was or why Evita’s Daddy is different to yours. That’s the sort of boring past we don’t want to talk about. Remembering how to make a cake or to wear an overcoat in the rain is the interesting past, whatever a psychiatrist may say to his charges.’

  If only this were so. Regan came to feel that of all the hard things to reject the existence of, second only to the present was the past, its vengeful pursuit of her mother impossible to dismiss, the seasonal reminders of its existence afflicting Petula like an allergy.

  ‘And please stop asking me where I came from, I came from my Mummy and you came from me, it isn’t normal to ask such questions, even at your age my tiny chief inquisitor.’

  Not wanting to add to her mother’s misery, even if it meant remaining wilfully ignorant, Regan nonetheless formed a view of where Petula had come from, and come from quickly. To be precise, from her first husband with the poor man quite literally still in chase. This may or may not have been her first memory, those prior to it consisting mainly of undifferentiated colour and night, what was beyond dispute was that of all the broken pieces she tried to forget, this was the least fragmented.

  It was raining heavily in the late 1970s, Jazzy and Evita were at boarding school and Mr Montague was in the Far East on unstated business that may have been mysterious. Mystery was the mood Regan encountered the world through. Her mother looked like a folk star, her siblings punks, the farmers another species and their children ghosts who shied from her, all mysterious, all unexplained features that came and went like fate. The sisters were the two constants, staring from the panoramic deck that was The Heights into the eye of the advancing storm, wet leaves grabbing and clutching the window like nature’s paw prints.

  ‘The noise, it’s driving me maaaad,’ said Petula shivering into her scrappy patchwork shawl, the wind, trapped in the chimney, rattling like a shackled dog against its chain. ‘And rain, oh for God’s sake, tell me it’s not true.’ Pensively Regan’s mother studied the blustery horizon, her beauty brutal, feral and lacking then in all refinement, the gypsy hoops and painted green nails larger versions of the ones Regan displayed on her small wrists and fingers, the sisters already living in tandem, their wild hair a compromise between a mother’s nightmare and little girl’s dream.

  ‘And to think your mummy could be dancing in a city, dancing from city to city, coast to coast…’ Petula’s hips began to gyrate under her heavy cloth-work skirt. The fantasy of a dancer’s life was later projected onto her first daughter, Evita, though Regan would not find out about that until an argument over money took an unexpected turn, many years later. For now she watched her mother move to and fro with awe.

  ‘You don’t talk much do you Chuck? But you have lovely eyes, like mine they are…’

  It was true, Regan’s eyes were as piercing and watchful as her words were infrequent and flat. At the age of four she was still as silent as she was at three, waiting until she could make sense of the dark and jumbled brilliance of things before opening her mouth. Not until she was seven would Regan grasp that understanding was nothing next to obedience and imitation. And from then on she was fluent in her talk.

  ‘The only argument that ever advances your cause in this life, Chuck, is exceptionalism, being the exception to every rule. This valley is full of dull mothers at home with their dull little children, cowards and jellies; we are the exception, Queen and heir of all we survey. Take it all in Chuck, you never know when you’ll need it.’

  The heavier weather was moving towards them, thicker clouds forming over the crooked ewes on The Devil’s Paw, and with it the figure of a man, or perhaps a tree stump with legs, Regan could not tell, galloping towards them with the storm on his back.

  ‘Look Mummy. There, that!’

  ‘Nothing out there but rotting posts and mad crows Chuck. Just because a country landscape changes all the time doesn’t mean there’s anything new in it.’

  ‘That. Coming quickly.’

  ‘My, we are the talkative one today.’

  ‘There, there Mummy!’

  ‘What are you talking about? I can’t see anything.’

  ‘There!’

  ‘Fuck a duck. No.’

  It was the first time Regan saw Petula show fear, of the kind she experienced when she was lost or woke in the dark on her own. Regan waited for a moment of self-restoration so that reality could resume and her mother return to her imperious self.

  Instead Petula froze, the freezing followed by a reduction in colour and stiffening of the jaw, not to attack but to withstand and take ownership of the pain that was about to be encountered.

  ‘Whatever you do, stay in here and don’t go outside. And close your eyes. No, come here, we’re going upstairs.’

  But Regan did not close her eyes and Petula did not take her upstairs; rather, they waited with an appalled and fatalistic tingling, rooted to where they were so destiny could have its way with them and provide Regan with her first memory.

  ‘Not here, not him here. Tell me not,’ her mother muttered into her hand, raised like a fist in front of her mouth.

  The figure that seemed to move so fast was in fact lumbering up to the house gracelessly, clearing the lower garden fence with much effort, the bobbing head of a broken man fighting to catch his breath slowly becoming visible. Dressed in a shabby tweed overcoat and battered cap, his muddy boots carrying great clods of field on them, the man, seeing light in the house, raised a fist in a gesture of defiance and slipped over backwards. Taking at once to his feet, his short arms disappearing ineffectually under his flapping sleeves, Petula’s first husband, Rory Anycock, looked like he might not have chosen the wisest means of delivering his message of hate.

  ‘Petula, I warned you I’d come!’

  Anycock’s huffing face was a vision of Hogarthian cuckoldry, microscopic bristles wobbling on his top lip, thin legs barely supportive of a pudgy torso, and blubbery cheeks of the deepest purple, indicative of a life of humiliating underachievement. The pretensions of his squire’s attire completed the picture of intemperate buffoonery Petula had fled, and as Anycock struggled through the garden gate, she afforded herself a nervous grin.

  ‘What a state! And to think I married that man.’

  Regan could not believe how preposterously ugly this gnomic outsider was, far less see any connection between him and her mother, a representative of a higher race as far as she was concerned. In spite of the vulnerability she sensed behind her, Petula had taken care
of her thus far: all would be well.

  ‘I told you I would come! Well I’m here!’

  ‘Just close your ears Regan, watch me, like this with your hands. This person is mad. M-a-d.’

  Standing before the window, his legs stretched ridiculously akimbo, a hand on each hip as if to draw pistols, Anycock bawled.

  ‘You told me to wait and I waited. The mug that waited. So here he is, the waiter.’

  A whiskey miniature popped out of his pocket and went to ground with a hollow plop. For a second Anycock stood there, the rain reapplying itself to a face squashed full of rage, his slight moustache trembling with the indignant pomposity of second place. Wiping the sweat and rain off his forehead he snarled inaudibly and raised his fist again. In his anger, skidding from side to side, it hardly occurred to him that in spite of his close proximity to Petula, she was still keeping him waiting.

  Petula held Regan closer to her and blew out the pair of candles illuminating the afternoon murk, all the while watching Anycock with barely suppressed fascination. In contravention of her survival instinct, she wanted to know what would happen next, the scene so surreal that she forgot she was its referent.