Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘I would like to come and live here if my Father would let me.’

  ‘What, London?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This actual room you mean?’

  ‘Yes, it’s full of interesting things. And interesting people.’

  ‘Bravo!’

  ‘But don’t you want to paint things Mingus?’ asked Regan, unconsciously drawn into the act. ‘He told me he wanted to paint things.’

  ‘We should have guessed, the boy’s an artist.’

  ‘You’ve never said that before, Mingus. I know quite a few artists as it happens…’ Petula interrupted, looking to bring them back to the point of their meeting: her.

  ‘I collect things, I put them in boxes and sometimes paint them.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Well, that obviously isn’t art!’ snapped Petula trying to wind the Mingus show down. ‘That’s just collecting objects and calling it art!’

  ‘What things little man, what do you paint?’

  Bloody hell, it was as bad as Jesus talking to the elders at the temple! Petula raised her voice a little, she had to, Mingus was actually talking over her and the audience were listening to his conversation, not hers.

  ‘An artist isn’t a collector, anyone can do that, to paint Mingus you need vision,’ she said, gently tugging his arm.

  ‘I collect animal bits, bird wings, skeletons and snail shells and put them in Dad’s glass case next to the mantlepiece. And I paint on them sometimes.’

  ‘Oh really Mingus!’ She stopped herself, her voice was acquiring a tight desperate quality; if she carried on like this she knew she would end up sounding like a nutcase. Her armpits were sodden. This fear wasn’t her at all, let the child carry on, remember that the boy was only that, cut him dead at the right time and make a mental post-it to never be caught like this again.

  ‘I like poems as well,’ Mingus said, ‘listening to them and saying them sometimes.’

  ‘You’ve come to the right place then,’ Esther said reasonably, ‘we are all poets. Do we know any poems the little man might like?’

  Petula felt her heart quicken, the initiative had fallen to her again. Earlier in the week she had worked her way through the poems of Wrath, feeling nothing either way for the most part. A slight stirring of irritation with the longer ones, based on Norse sagas, pleasing indifference towards the sexual parts, the occasional jolt of passion amidst the repetition and gloom and she was done. Afterwards she concluded it to have been a worthwhile experience, even if at the time it was a struggle to keep awake. Her sixth sense told her that it would be well worth rehearsing a poem by heart, one never knew when it could come in handy, especially when one was going to ‘bump’ into the ‘Shatby Four’ in a couple of days. The trick was to not be too obvious. Yet the trouble with the trick was that Wrath’s masterpieces resisted simple recitation; the interesting poems requiring the reader to discover their genius for themselves.

  Unfortunately, there was no shortcut to the understanding of something without making that understanding one’s own. What Petula ended up committing to memory was not Wrath at all but a passage that she felt ought to have been him.

  Swiftly Petula rose to her feet to greet an imaginary lover, brushing Mingus away as she did so, her eyes closed with concentration, her ‘poem’ delivered in one long world weary sigh,

  ‘Touch me. Soft Eyes

  Soft soft soft hand.

  I am lonely here.

  O, touch me soon, now.

  What is that word known to all men?

  I am quiet here, alone.

  Sad too.

  Touch, touch me.’

  Silently she drew back to her chair, a swan closing its wings, picked up her cup, drained it and snatched one of Astley’s cigarettes.

  He lit it for her. ‘Outrageous, wonders never cease, sing that to me again!’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Oh, the book just fell open at the right place.’ This was exactly what had happened, a thumbed copy of Ulysses catching her wandering attention when she had all but given up on Wrath.

  ‘Bloody stunning,’ said Margy.

  ‘My dear,’ Eager took her arm. ‘I always thought that Joyce was as a man compiling a dictionary that doesn’t need updating, it only need be done once. You’ve proven it can be done twice. This is news that will stay news. Here’s to you and your merry band of players!’

  The rest of the evening, for night had already fallen, passed through a tunnel of excitement, running mouths and inadmissible hyperbole, impressions of Kenneth Tynan and Peter Barnes flitting between those of Leonid Brezhnev and Princess Anne. By the end, Mingus and Regan had fallen asleep in a large basket, cradled in each other’s arms, Esther photographing them both twenty times before running out of film and starting on the brandy. A burly stagehand carried the sleeping beauties and their shopping to the waiting taxi, Petula staggering up the main isle of the theatre behind them, a shoe in each hand, the breath of the ‘Shatby Four’ still hot on her freshly kissed lips.

  ‘Darlings,’ she shouted at the top of her voice, the sound ricocheting round the red-carpeted vastness of the auditorium, ‘till Shatby, you glorious players!’

  ‘Till Shatby, Queen P! And keep the little darlings’ programmes handy, we still haven’t autographed them!’

  She glanced up at the Royal Box, empty yet not without the promise of occupation, a presentiment of the power that would be hers. And then it was over, the lights of Shaftesbury Avenue taking her into their generous and enterprising arms. ‘If you have the courage to scale the heights,’ they seemed to say, ‘then nothing is impossible.’ Graciously she blew them a kiss and tumbled into the taxi, crushing most of the shopping as she did so.

  ‘What did you make of that?’ Astley turned to Eager.

  ‘A starfucker. She could be the bride at her daughter’s wedding, high-voltage, a real pistol… I think she’ll do very well by us.’

  *

  On the train back the euphoria was quickly replaced by disbelief at the unreality of her achievement, as if the right goods had been delivered to the wrong address. Petula was to feel a recurring sense that, grand as it was, success was never quite as tasty as it should be, partly because each success could only happen once and by the time it did, it was already over. Life was at its best when it exceeded itself, and in doing so somehow became more alive, but the lulls that followed directly, though lived, were less than living. Not for the first time Petula had occasion to wonder whether she was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Which, if true, left her with no one to rage against. No, she preferred to think of this as a rational problem; all would have been perfect if it had not been for a little fly in the ointment, one that prevented her from attaining the complete peace of mind she deserved. That testy scoundrel Mingus upstaging her with his happy-clappy piffle and god knows what else he’d picked up off the television; how could the lad have been so ungrateful? Without wishing to be a Mrs Haversham about it, she would have to lay a frosty egg to prevent future disruptions of a similar kind.

  Giving her daughter a quick tug, Petula whispered to the halfasleep girl, ‘Regan, wake up, wake up, I’m talking to you. I think the time has come for you to meet more girls of your own age…’

  ‘What Mummy?’

  ‘Girls of you own age and background. You don’t know enough of them and you should.’

  ‘Why Mummy?’

  ‘Why not? Now shhh, you’ll wake him. Be quiet and go back to sleep. I’m thinking.’

  It was unnerving, Petula did not know she was anything like as furious as she was until she spoke. Could it be all the boy’s fault? She had to hope that it must be so. Petula turned her head to the window and gazed through her shaking reflection at the black countryside, the rage she could never understand or stem, living over all she saw, the brooding silence of the moon whipping through the passing trees the closest she would come to an answer she had not sought.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER THREE,

  an aside and an event.

  There was danger everywhere. Jazzy and Evita lost their virginity early in life to the same person, the agent Tim Tinwood, then in his pomp and a ‘normal’ man, the newspaper headlines that would castigate him as a filthy paedophile still thirty years away. Petula would find out about this almost as soon as it happened, choose not to believe it, later claim that it was their stepfather who was responsible, and play politics over the abomination to her death. Both children would go to their graves insisting their mother was devoted to them, a speculative utterance Regan could only repeat in a crowd, usually through clenched teeth. All Petula could do was shake her head with relief. She marvelled at Jazzy and Evita’s myth-making from the time they could talk, failing to recognise it as a tribute to her own, their avowed claim to enjoy a special relationship with her belied by the course and content of their lives. That an ideal relationship should exist, at least in theory, remained curiously important to them, however little substance it enjoyed in lived experience. The desire that it ought to amused and touched their mother, who in the lonely moment of the last instance, had very few real illusions of her own.

  Whether they were defiantly fouling themselves on the way to the opera at the age of seven, or displaying nasal piercings at fourteen, Petula dubbed her first two children ‘attention seekers’, lazily characterising their subsequent promiscuity, self-harm and under-achievement in similar terms. It hurt her to see herself in them, the parts she deliberately sought not to recreate, flashes of what she had left behind on the grass with Anycock returning whenever she glanced at their eager faces. Try as she might, these living embodiments of her former self felt somewhat less than hers, speaking only to her deepest fear: that there was a hidden part of her essence that everyone else saw which would one day be her undoing.

  As a consequence of this misconnection, the years of upward mobility were hard on Evita and Jazzy, brother and sister incurring a scorn they could not understand yet were rightly terrified of, their mother capable of anything until her temper, like a fit of demonic possession, receded into glassy formality. Gradually they responded more like the frightened animals Petula was afraid they would become, grunts and hysteria evolving out of dribbling dependence, until she could rightly claim they were ‘ready for Borstal’, by which time they had other ideas of their lives’ eventual destination.

  Petula did not think that the public view of her as a doting mother was wrong; there were highly public ways in which she did dote, and the overall welfare of all her children was a flag she never tired of unfurling. Sadly for them, Jazzy and Evita had come at a time before the sisterhood when Petula considered herself to be little better than a child. For this untimeliness, over which, she acknowledged, they had no control, the children had her sympathy. To give birth before one was interesting enough had certainly been a mistake, whatever unworkedthrough strangeness in oneself bound to come out in the child. The process of becoming more interesting and self-transparent clashed awkwardly with their growing up, the children needed a mother, not a social gadfly, so inevitably Petula found herself at cross-purposes with their development: it had to be one or the other; them or her. Her selfishness did not go so far as neglecting her protective instincts completely; no one but a freak could think Anycock’s damp shack was a better place for children to grow up in than The Heights, and it did her credit to let them know this from an early age. Undoubtedly it served her purpose to keep up a high sense of fearfulness in the children (who were often confused for twins despite being a year apart and looking little alike). Their correspondingly high levels of gratitude to their mother for acting as their saviour meant that whatever else she lost charge of, it would not be their ultimate allegiance. By the time their need grew cumbersome Petula was already trying to live it down, its remnants visible in their hyperactivity and the superficial rejection of the ‘lardy-dah’ values they associated with her.

  Although Evita would reinvent herself as a Seventh-Day Evangelist, later defecting to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and attempt to reconstruct a relationship with the past based on wishful thinking, it was she who showed the first signs of wanting to flee the fanged nest. When not trying to kill herself Evita hatched multiple escape attempts, each more ingenious than the last. Disappearances on school trips, getting ‘lost’ at airports, catching the wrong trains, and climbing into strangers’ cars were all part of her repertoire by the age of eleven. Her success was patchy and she celebrated her twelfth birthday by raising her game, sneaking out of the cinema her mother had left her party in, catching a bus to London and turning up at Vine Street police station claiming to be a prostitute. The desire to enjoy her moment of triumph and show her mother she had got away meant escape and annihilation; absolute and final affairs that brook no looking back evaded her. Suicide proved to be equally inconclusive, Evita always falling a few pills short of a full complement, her poisons turning out to be homeopathic remedies, the leaps to her death occurring from ground-floor windows with no more than a twisted ankle or sprained wrist to show for her efforts.

  Stirred into embarrassment, but fundamentally unshaken, Petula took it all in her stride, knowing that her daughter desired to see her broken. The real worry that harm could befall Evita was quickly replaced by social damage limitation as the monotony of dealing with the girl’s tantrums acquired a pattern. Every weekend Evita would pack her things into a satchel and set off across the fields ‘to Leeds’, the drama addiction she had inherited from her mother taking on ever-more-tiresome forms as flight and the suicide solution gave way to immolation. A mixture of half-hearted cigarette burns, scabby cuts and nasty scratches began to appear over her arms and neck, giving Petula hope. Pretending to make a mess of your life was better than pretending to part with it. By the same token, intrusive as bikers, green activists and touring bands were, turning the old piggery into a doss house for ne’er-do-well pot heads, at least Evita was having fun. This curious mixture of tolerance and neglect, abetted by Noah arranging an abortion with Petula’s consent over a fling with a ‘Southern Death Cult’ roadie, meant that Evita knew her mother was there for her in a fashion. Petula, for her part, was torn between completely giving up on the girl, and encouraging signs of life. The most heartening of these was Evita’s ballet lessons, the only activity she did not give up as she entered her mid-teens, instead trading them for modern dance. With Petula’s voracious support she joined a local troupe led by a former member of ‘Pan’s People’. The girl’s passion for this activity was genuinely disarming, and Petula enjoyed watching Evita’s excitement build to the day of her classes. Yet to her disconcertion, Evita demonstrated no talent for choreography, bungling the elegant movements required of her and ending the sessions jiggling round like a plastered chicken, as the other students tactfully left her to it.

  Petula knew she was clutching at straws, and rather than risk her daughter’s fledgling confidence taking a merited battering, blamed the instructor, beginning by politely questioning her skill and ending by dismissing her as a provincial slut. This was hard on the teacher but good for Evita; ambiguity and mixed feelings were lost on the girl, and in the black-and-white way in which she was raised, the end of the lessons were celebrated as the prelude to a glorious next chapter. With plenty of fanfare and a sharp needle Petula leant on an old girlfriend of Noah’s to include Evita in that year’s intake at an independent college for dance and the performing arts in Harrow.

  The thought that she might have talent proved to be a seductive one for Evita, more intriguing than administering biro tattoos backstage at Crass gigs. Belief in a vocation was a pleasing substitute for withheld love and Evita began to define herself as a dancer. After all, most people who had anything about them tended to be their own inventions, or the successful manifestation of other people’s projections.

  ‘Why haven’t you finished your pudding, you like trifle?’

  ‘Dancers have to be careful over what they eat you know.’
r />   ‘Oh, oh good.’

  ‘And I can’t do any more lifting, we have to protect our backs.’

  ‘What do you have to lift?’

  ‘That’s not the point, lifting is just a no-go area, right?’ Petula saw the abrupt difference this change evinced and began to extravagantly praise the slightest thing Evita might do, be it a headstand or a slight shuffle to a song on the radio, anything to hurry her on her way to the college in Middlesex. Evita’s last summer at The Heights passed quickly, and before she had time for second thoughts, she was ready for her new start in ‘the Big Smoke’, Petula frequently breaking the speed limit to get her there, with the problem of what would eventually become of her first daughter unsolved, yet handily contained.

  If Evita’s youth was all about leaving home, Jazzy’s was largely about staying there, and it took him far longer to decide that he had really loved his mother all along as a consequence. Petula liked this homing impulse no better than his sister’s disappearing acts. Jazzy was a ubiquitous presence on the farm, popping up everywhere in a way that might be thought endearing for one who had enjoyed the Just William stories as much as Petula had as a girl. Except Petula was no longer a girl and had deliberately set enjoyment aside to become an adult, though she did not yet know it, as she too was still growing up.

  Taken at face value, Jazzy’s interests were, at least to begin with, healthier than his sister’s. Building dens with Mingus, finishing a technically accomplished treehouse with Seth and spending hours in the workshops asking intelligent questions about the use of various tools ought to have won Petula’s approval, and that of society at large. Unfortunately, these healthy qualities came with excesses that qualified the good to the point of disqualification. His temper was as wild as Petula’s own; the treehouse took four years to complete thanks to his habit of smashing it to pieces whenever he grew impatient with its construction. The dens were actually camps in games of war that frequently ended with other children hospitalised, his partially bent nose, broken twice, dating from this time. Mingus soon grew wary of playing with his older charge, leaving Jazzy in tears when he explained his reasons. Consolation came in tools filched from the farm storeroom, hammers and splints doubling as weapons in his long-running border disputes with sons of local farmers, which were to fester into lifelong hatreds. Jazzy’s twelfth birthday was spent in a police cell, events threatening to turn nasty until the French exchange student agreed that the flick knife had been pulled before Jazzy’s scythe, the cuts to his shoulder found to be cosmetic once Noah had made out a large cheque to his family. Still, Jazzy’s dominant mood was one of needy cheerfulness, which for Petula merely added insult to injury, as the boy had no inkling of how much he infuriated her.