Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘It’s the way you remember it.’

  ‘You’re too young to remember, too busy lapping it up.’

  ‘My Mum and Dad, they listened to you, they still listen to you. More than they do me, you know, and I don’t mind. Everyone finds the audience they deserve.’

  ‘Don’t be snark.’

  ‘I’m not, I’d like them to listen to me but they don’t know what I am really on about most of the time.’

  ‘Because you don’t talk to them on their level, fuckin’ chuntering on about Andy Arsehole and the Noowah Yaawk scene, you can’t expect them to be interested in all that shit. It’s different anyway. They’re hicks like me. Country people, normal people. That’s what I’m saying, right? I have some normal people in my life now. Have you any idea what it was like growing up with someone like Lady P for a Mam, have you man? A nutter who keeps it coming from every orifice? S-h-i-t, of course you haven’t, you had it easy with your parents, they’re salt-of-the-earth normal. I never knew a normal day with Petulaaah.’

  ‘She’s strong, not as a person, but a strong character.’

  ‘Naah. Bollocks. Ahhh, she’s not strong, that’s just what people say, she’s crazy, not heavy, a ding. I’ve got evidence on her. Know how she operates, oppressing your mum and dad, oppressing me, what’s the matter, you don’t think so? Don’t you care? She’s an oppressor. You’ve seen how I live, the fix she got me into. Anger, man, I feel anger about it all. You should too. You would too, if you weren’t so soft.’

  To be angry with someone in retrospect for something you signed up for struck Mingus as revisionist flakery, yet it was difficult to remember a time when Jazzy had not been angry, the sour phase having lasted far longer now than the sunnier warmth that preceded it. Of course people could be expected to be sensitive over what they chose to make of themselves, so with a tact so well learned as to have become intuition, Mingus replied, ‘I see it. That side, nicer to the people she invites to dinner than the ones cutting the hedges yeah, I see, that’s her.’

  ‘Shit yeah, always losing it with some poor cunt. She’s a conductor of, you know, of anger, wipes her pain over you and makes it yours. That’s the trick, I mean, that is just the trick. And she doesn’t work, never has, never met a deadline in her life, just gets others to work for her. All those poxy events, I mean, what’s that all about? And what does she know about real life, what it feels like to be us, what goes on in our… in our brains, right?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing, exactly, so we’re in agreement, she knows nothing. I was watching this thing the other night, it was like all about, all these talking heads were talking about, talking right, about how this certain kind of person is completely mad. And I can’t remember the name they had for being this off-your-head, in this particular way, right, but anyway, that was Petula, this name they had, that was her in a nutshell.’

  Mingus nodded. He thought of Petula, and then only rarely, as an aloof fantasist who existed very much as a winter blizzard; a natural phenomenon that could be beautiful providing you were wrapped up well, watching it from afar. From the time she had banished him from Regan’s life as a small boy he had felt a fatalism regarding any attempt to renew contact with her. In truth he suspected he would be regarded as a contamination and crushed underfoot like a beetle that could not find its way outdoors, if remembered at all. It was a potentially upsetting experience he would rather avoid.

  ‘I don’t think she liked me as much as you say Jazz. I mean, I’m flattered you think so, only I didn’t feel the love you’re talking about so much. I do remember falling off Regan’s birthday party list before I was out of shorts, and that was a time ago, years. And she’s hardly said a word since, Regan or your mum, we’re talking longer than when I went away, way before then. She just stopped coming to my house and I didn’t get invited to yours. It was hard enough to still play with you, and that’s only because you’ve never cared what your mum thinks, so you went ahead and were friends with whom you wanted. I’m not first name on the team sheet anymore with Petula. If ever I was. I was just some weird kid for her daughter to hang around with when she was small.’

  ‘Of course, I’m sorry man, yeah. It makes my shit itch, being played off like this, played by my own flesh and blood, and us turning on each other, you and me, it’s not right. I didn’t mean any offence, right?’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘No, that’s what it isn’t. Not okay no, not right, no. I haven’t even said about the worst of the shite yet, you’re not going to believe this. A fucking party for Regan, for Regan, and she, Mum, I mean Mam, she expects me to sing and dance and God knows what other shit at it, I shit you not padrone. Your father’s right about her, about the… he’s wise, imagine the shit you have to be acquainted with to be so wise, that’s him, you know, Seth…’ For a moment Jazzy looked lost, the moonlight casting its spectral hand over his guileless face.

  ‘Yeah, I know, my Dad. Seth, what did he say about her?’

  ‘That’s none of your business to know! What happens between, said right, between me and Seth, stays between me and Seth!’

  ‘Sure! Only, I, well, I didn’t know he had an opinion on her.’

  ‘How can you say that? How can you stand there and say that?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Your trouble, you know Ming, the trouble right, and this is wrong, so wrong of you man, is you don’t respect that man enough, you don’t know what you’ve got in him, that man, that man is a genius, a real one, not some arty twat, a real salt-of-theearth legend, right? So you can keep your Salvador shitheads because I don’t need ’em. Your father, he is the fucking man, right…’

  Mingus was smiling now, guiding Jazzy towards his van. ‘And you talking about him like that makes me see red Ming, really, because he deserves better than you. He deserves me and you know it. Talking to him like you’re some kind of professor of… of shite basically, right. Where do you get off?’ Jazzy snorted charitably, ‘You don’t see it, that’s the trouble, don’t see what’s really important in life, had your fucking head turned, haven’t you? All that art-school bullshite, you’ve forgotten what really matters in life, family…’

  Jazzy had reached the van and was fiddling with the key.

  ‘Shit. G-o-o-o on, get in!’

  Mingus yawned. Years later he would hear people lecture on the dangers of drink-driving and wonder how his erstwhile friend had ever survived so many nights like this.

  ‘I feel like walking.’

  ‘What, upset you have I?’

  ‘No, no, just want the air.’

  ‘You mad? It’s freezing. Actually, it’s not that cold, might walk myself. Nah, fuck it. What do you want to walk for?’

  ‘I like walking at night.’ And it was true, Mockery Gap at night was the only way Mingus could stomach the place and free himself of the associations he had thought he would have outgrown and replaced by now, but probably never would.

  ‘To yourself be true, to yourself be enough, that’s what I say. See you the other side, there’s some shit I need to talk to you about before you go back, to Leeds, seriously, serious stuff, so don’t go getting dragged and mounted in the bushes by anything naaaasty, walking at night, arty twat!’

  ‘The dark is scared of me.’

  ‘Of course it is. We need to talk. Okay. You take it easy now. I love you man, you know it, don’t you? Wouldn’t talk to you like I do if I didn’t, I’d do anything for you. Love, it makes my world go round. Would yours too, birds like you, I’ve seen ’em. Look that there’s no one in the road, yeh; my bloody rear-view’s buggered. Love, think about that man, think about it.’

  Love. Had Mingus been where he wanted to be, romping with Regan in a loft in Greenwich Village, he would have told Jazzy to shut his impertinent mouth when the subject of the younger Miss Montague came up. But as he was nowhere near this desired end he could, to his shame, share some of the sourness of Jazzy’s critique, particularly the sense of becoming a
person of less importance on the farm. The matter was not as clear as it was for Jazzy, as Mingus guessed his fate rested as much on future wars of appropriation as it had the meagre pickings of past campaigns. Furthermore, he was confident that love would have its say when it came to the matter of endings, at least in his case.

  Like a young Yuri Zhivago, Mingus had abandoned himself to a life of tragedy, so far as love was concerned, the day he found out that Regan had left for Nohallows. True, he was young, extremely so, not sexually active and incapable of understanding abstractions cognitively. However, his eight year-old self could grasp the basics of a broken heart and reel from the sudden disappearance of a loved one, the true helplessness of childhood revealed as one paradigm hastily gave way to another. There had never been anything filial in his regard for Regan, quite the reverse, his feelings were as romantic as befitted an imaginative boy who regretted being at least a decade too young for marriage. The suddenness of Regan’s removal was a crime against induction, and like a faithful canine pining for the return of its owner, Mingus drove his parents to desperation asking when Regan would come back, incapable of telling, in spite of his preternatural canniness, that they grasped what he could not.

  After the first two summers, Mingus gave up on vocal expressions of his grief and brooded inwardly, wandering along the tall hedges that separated the Montague world from what he was fast understanding was his, in the hope of hearing a rustle from the other side and being reunited with his amour. It did not happen; Regan had other things to do – in London, York, Shatby or indoors, always elsewhere and never at a loss, which was where Mingus usually found himself. Slowly he came to understand that he had loved Regan as a beautiful aspect of his own early existence, later as a symbol and, once she was about to evade his orbit, as a girl. In her absence, the risk of deifying her was overwhelming and it was to girls, flesh-and-blood ones who he could actually come into contact with, that Mingus knew he must turn.

  There had been a number of them, first at the local school and then at college, who were taken with his quiet elegance, unashamed oddity and dark good looks, their attention obstinate enough to wake him from his internal dwelling places. Suffering had grown tiresome, as had wondering whether he was a latent homosexual or idealistic fusspot, which in Mockery Gap amounted to near the same malady. Embarking on his own sexual revolution, he discovered, despite a false start with a girl who spent an hour looking for a condom, that he was not impotent, the female form was his preferred erotic outlet, and that if he thought of Regan, his climaxes could be quite satisfying. A number of girls fell in love with him, and though he felt some responsibility for that, his eyes were too focused on escape to go through the pretence of teenage relationships, based on adult equivalents copied from Australian soap operas and tiresome situation comedies. Art school offered an opening at a slightly more elevated level. A humourless affair with one of his tutors, a bitter crone who had said it was impossible for her to make friends with other women under capitalism, had not answered any questions, and nor had a Greek beauty who had pretended to carry his child in a bid to get him to marry her. As with his studies, matters of the heart were hard work (he would enjoy the artlessness of being young much later in his thirties), with one fling after the next mimicking the exact inconsequence of the last. Girls who were tired before their time were drawn to him, mistaking his surface seriousness for nullifying maturity. This was enough to keep his hands full, but not to forget Regan, or more precisely, her continued existence, doing things at the same time as he was, in different places and with other people. The thought tormented him to a point where it ceased to make sense and he began to wonder whether a thing he cared about so much could even exist outside of his mind. Unfortunately it could, and he saw just the right amount of Regan in the holidays to appreciate the objective fact of her being, glimpses of her fair hair pirouetting past The Wart on her runs his ideal of overflowing beauty.

  Waving to her from the kitchen window, a shy hello at Christmas and answering a few questions on the Easter Monday walk comprised the larger part of his annual points of contact, though he noticed she often looked sad, which he took to be, he did not know why, a good sign. Animated by a shrewd self-deprecation that came close to insincerity in his attempts to protect himself, Mingus was always going to annoy the sisters; Regan wondering whether he was making fun of her, Petula detecting chippy impudence in the way Mingus made so much and little of ‘what he had been up to’. Nevertheless, she found him watchable and amusing, a face pressed against the glass, refused admittance yet cheerfully game. Doubtless he was a kind of enigma, but not one Petula could take credit for and, therefore, a potential problem to be isolated and perhaps preserved.

  For his part Mingus tried to resist the essential deceptions of nostalgia, reminding himself that being cut or rejected by someone could make one think one liked them a lot more than one did, and that Regan may very well be no more than the pretty little rich girl the songs had warned him of. Might her stellar incandescence be a product of his own longing for perfection, or at the very least, a gross overestimation of what was after all only a human being? His insides told him otherwise and reluctantly he accepted that he would never be able to banish Regan Montague from the totemic position she held over his affections.

  ‘Mingus,’ his mother said tenderly, not quite able to believe that she had summoned the courage to raise the subject, ‘it’s no good mooning so. She’ll be bound to marry some other bloke and make you unhappy for wanting it to not be that way. You’d be better off larkin’ about with one who cares for you, this village is full of girls who’d give you the time of day.’

  ‘What are you talking about Mam?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘Mooning? You what! Not me, you’re going mad!’

  ‘I don’t want you to be hurt. I mean, what do you two have in common? Who’s to say if you’ll ever even talk to her again! Not properly anyway. It’s no basis for love, Mingus.’

  ‘Love? Come on… I don’t know what you’re on about love for. I’ve never said anything about love.’

  ‘You don’t need to.’

  ‘Agh, you’ve got this so wrong.’

  ‘Please listen to me Mingus, I never lecture you or tell you what to do with your life. Please, it’ll bring you no good, caring for one who never even stops to inquire how you are. You’re not in her reckoning pet, I’m sorry, you’re not.’

  Mingus knew she had a point. The holidays were long and interminable, Regan had every opportunity, should she have wished, to drop in for a cup of tea, ask whether he wanted to go to the cinema or join him on a trek in the woods. With so little to do with one another’s present lives, it was not difficult to imagine receding into one another’s past. What was their token communication, stacked with significance his end, if not a memory in the process of fading until there would be nothing of substance left to animate it all? So, once again he decided to stop thinking about her and had then gone on thinking about her without much interruption until his latest trip to The Condemned Felon, for if there was one thing that marked this obsession, time spent thinking about Regan passed quickly.

  The quaintly dilapidated pub was tucked into a bend at the bottom of the steep hill that The Heights sat atop. By cutting directly up, past the giant lake that the Montagues had put in to announce their arrival, Mingus could be up at The Heights in half an hour if he did not spare his legs. He had made a link between his thinness and sex appeal and decided walking was the best way to naturally maintain whatever advantages his real parents had given him. With the exception of his first few seconds of being awake, where he experienced Edenic bliss, Mingus found the countryside annoying, mainly due to the absence of city dwellers. Natural beauty was a distracting backdrop; faces were the thing. So much so that he did not notice much about the walk up, the strange glow of the moon, the wood full of noises or the abruptly still spaces flanked by circles of bent old trees, the dead air that surrounded them causing him not the
slightest disquiet.

  It was not until he came to the clearing that led to the lake that his heart began to beat to the rhythm of human interest. He could see a shape lying in the grass, a mermaid or siren, certainly not a run-of-the-mill night prowler, and he knew at once, knew because it had to be so, that it was Regan. As casually as a man emerging from the woods in the early hours of the morning could, Mingus came off the slope and walked towards the water’s edge, from where he hoped to make himself visible without scaring her.

  Regan knew she had company. The figure smashing its way out of the undergrowth, silhouetted in the moonlight, was not difficult to notice in an otherwise deathly tranquil clearing. Her first thought was that she was completely safe. This was not a poacher or a rapist. From here her process of elimination was as fast, though more unexpected than Mingus’s, since unlike him she had not spent the last few years musing over her neighbour. The boy she used to play with was as boxed away as the rest of her childhood mementoes in the attic. Consequently, there was no reason she knew of as to why she was sure it was Mingus, or why she should have been glad, past natural relief, that it should be so. Mingus had certainly meant far more to her than any of her other companions prior to the age of eight, but having decided to write off everything she had felt before the age of twelve, it was hard to know how she should rank the affections of her earlier self. Mingus was unquestionably, from the little she saw of him, appealing and possessed an arresting face, though Regan’s relative sexlessness and absence of romantic élan meant that such observations counted for little. The greatest sensual pleasure she had been able to tease out was a pleasant tingling round the chest whenever Sebastian Coe raced on television, and then only a half-hearted simulacrum of passion that ended before the finishing line. There was also a bicycle saddle she had enjoyed sitting on for vague and disconcerting reasons and a somewhat forced crush on a friend’s older brother, diminished by the discovery that he was ‘a gay’. It was high time for something real to happen, now or never, and it could not be never but nor could it be now; oh what to do! With studied absent-mindedness, as if to say ‘what else could a girl think of in the circumstances’, Regan peeled off her top and lay there, her small breasts stiffening in the misty chill. There was no time to take herself by surprise, it was already done. Immediately she thought better of it, scared by whatever madness had taken possession of her, and rolled onto her front assuming the position of a nocturnal sunbather. Resting on her stomach, her chin propped on her fists, Regan wondered whether there was enough time to get her vest back on again before Mingus reached her. The figure had stopped but was not far away, and could almost certainly make out the details of her movements. She would have to brave it out.