Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  Mingus had noticed this feverish activity without knowing quite what it denoted. He hesitated, conscious that he had never had to start a conversation in these circumstances before, aware too that caring too much could be his undoing. Success often fell to those who had learnt to not place any value on it. He had waited for Regan for a very long time, things could fall into place but people rarely did, yet here she was. With haste, he strode up to her and asked the stupidest question to ever have taken leave of his mouth: ‘Hi, you’re Regan, aren’t you?’

  Regan looked up, as stunned by the inquiry’s assumed ignorance as the asker, grateful still to have been given a line to pull on. ‘It can’t be that dark Mingus.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But this is a bit random so I don’t blame you.’

  They both laughed. Mingus stared down by Regan’s bare back, ‘Were you, were you thinking of going for a swim, now?’

  ‘Um, sure.’

  Mingus turned to the water. Despite the warm evening, it looked very cold. He had not swum in the muddy brown lake since he was child and was fairly sure Regan had not either, but here she was, poised to take a midnight dip, alone with him and on the verge of removing the rest of her clothes. Keeping his feet dry was outrageous: he would hold his manhood cheaply if he did not do as fate bid. Anyway, with the amount he had drunk there was more chance that he would drown than freeze. Better that than a marathon dance of nerves and intensities brought on by recollecting an opportunity squandered ever after.

  ‘I’ll come too, if that’s alright?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  Regan could think of several reasons why not, and was determined that whatever else happened, her knickers were going to stay on in the water. Getting up, her arms covering her breasts awkwardly, she grimaced, ‘This is just so random.’

  ‘It is, yeah…’

  ‘Random.’

  Random summed up more than Regan’s evening (why had she taken her top off, and having taken it off agreed to swim? To save embarrassment? She was not embarrassed, no more than being by the lake in the first place had embarrassed her, which was not one bit). Her misgivings were those of agency rather than shame. At heart she felt she was an arbitrary person who never knew why she was anywhere, randomness was welcome for the variety it could bring, and with it the hope that something would turn up worthy of being imbued with value and transform her into a woman of destiny. With Petula in charge of the significant decisions, it was sensible to leave the rest of her life to chance. That she was on the verge of making a choice that might count as important, awed her. It was slowing her joints and binding her limbs, a weird density pushing her back from the deed she was set to embrace.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ she murmured, the first of her trainers kicked away, the second resting obstinately on her ankle.

  To pretend the present was past, that anything she was about to do had already happened and that this swim was old business to be finished off and not the instigation of the new, was how to proceed.

  ‘It looks chilly, doesn’t it?’

  ‘We should just go for it. I only need to get these off,’ Regan undid the shoe and tugged at her lycra leggings, ‘they’re kind of like painted on…’

  ‘Do you want a hand with them?’

  ‘No, um, no I’m okay.’

  Neither her legs nor her breasts, voice or words seemed to belong to or want to have anything to do with her. This radical disassociation of feeling was of a piece with Regan’s acceptance of the arbitrary and fed into what little she’d had to do with boys. Romance, or more explicitly, kissing, on those rare occasions it occurred, had been as good as forced on her. Floppy mouths that tasted of Dutch courage trying to prise apart her firm lips, were how her dates concluded, courtesy of lads who, having asked her out, did not know what else to do. Like her mother, her way of giving into temptation was to pretend that she did not have a choice, yet unlike Petula she did not feel temptation’s call. ‘Just be yourself,’ she remembered Diamanda saying, absurd advice, as what could be less relaxed and more harrowing than being that? Would going with the flow be any different this time, she wondered? Her gut, a rarely-listened-to part of her anatomy, told her that it might.

  ‘I’m nearly there.’

  Mingus was stood with his back to her. He had stripped to his underpants, obviously mindful of the same sanction against total nudity as she, his arse not much bigger than hers, and was eyeing the water as something to be conquered. Without facing Regan, and taking a lot on trust she thought, Mingus bounded into the water and roared with shock as his legs, tangled in weeds, gave way and propelled his body forwards. Bathing in icy water was a great leveller and Mingus was overjoyed to find Regan plunging in by his side, aborting an attempt at breaststroke and instead clinging limpet-like to his boney hips, her legs hanging through the gaps in his elbows as he drew her close. Even in the cold water his erection was hard enough to support a building, and as he bent to face her face, she pressed her blue lips into his neck with an urgency neither of them were prepared for, and bit him.

  ‘Regan!’ It was an uncontrollable exclamation of hope revived; the idol Mingus had prayed to, on faith alone, was real. Quickly her mouth found his and her tongue, licking away hopefully, slipped between his chattering lips like a spilt oyster and completed a brief circle before losing all feeling in the warmth of his response. For a moment they held the kiss, Mingus splashing from foot to foot to keep their balance, Regan revelling in the absence of that quality.

  Both felt an urge to begin a disorganised conversation in which they said everything on their minds, no matter how unrelated or potentially compromising of former attitudes, but each was salient enough to know they had to get out of the water first or die of hypothermia. On shore huddled under Mingus’s trench coat, matters felt different. Now Regan was sure that not knowing what to say was, for once, a sign that she understood the situation better than she would were she talking. Fortunately, Mingus felt no pressure to say anything at all. Reeling from the number of potential scenarios with Regan he had run through and prepared for, he was happy to now have no need of them. Reality was a far better place than the dress rehearsals of yearning had prepared him for.

  ‘Strange,’ Regan said at last. Their shivering bodies were so closely entwined that they were practically wearing one another, and though it did not matter what she said, it was time to confirm their closeness in words.

  ‘Strange,’ she repeated, ‘mad.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They agreed without really believing it; for very different reasons each thought their presence by the lake to be one of the saner acts of their lives.

  ‘Do you still like to upstage little girls at their parties?’ Regan asked.

  ‘I do? I mean I did?’

  ‘It’s what my mum said once.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Perhaps she was afraid she might upset you.’

  Mingus smiled broadly; the prospect that Regan might have a sense of humour was one he had never considered.

  ‘That’s good of her. I have a thin skin. Very sensitive.’

  ‘So what else have you been up to when you’re not doing things like this?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve time to tell you.’

  ‘You’ve had a busy few years then?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘I like quick versions the best.’

  ‘I’ve been preparing to be good at what I want to do when I leave here. Be an artist.’

  ‘That’s cool. I’m not good at anything really.’

  Mingus adjusted her head on his shoulder so as to look at her eyes, which had lost their far-off veneer and were inquiring and desirous. His first thought was to tell her he loved her though he feared that could ruin everything, and more importantly, give something of his away that may never be returned, so he said instead, ‘Do you remember the party where we were all done up as animals? Had our faces painted by the famous
artist friend of your mum’s who fell out of that balloon on telly. What was her name? Anyway, I was a fox, all covered in stripes so I looked more like a yellow zebra, and you were a…’

  ‘A rabbit, she made me a sad rabbit! Why couldn’t I have been something else? It’s not fair, it was my party!’

  ‘She was a painter, a famous artist, she must have seen deep-lying, sad-rabbit tendencies in you.’

  ‘Are they still there?’

  Mingus could not honestly say they were: the sad rabbit had become an antelope. They kissed again and it was, when they looked back on it later in their lives, as good as they thought possible.

  ‘You’re still a fox.’

  ‘You…’ Mingus had to say something that was true of how he felt, whether it would run the risk of making a fool of him or not. Some sincere expression of care was, in its way, as important as getting into the water, for if he were silent, that first act of courage would remain incomplete.

  ‘You’ve one of the most beautiful souls I’ve seen in my life.’

  Regan laughed, though to his relief not cruelly. ‘I’ve come across quite a few people with mixed motives recently…’ She knew it was her wont to see through emotion and thus miss the point of it, a cheap cleverness that passed exams but forgot sunsets. Without the mediation of any mental softener, she thought about Mingus liking her, the reality of it, and stopped breathing. It was a simple thing but even a simple thing was composed of smaller things that could not always be summed up simply, and by the time she began to breathe again, she found she was too scared to speak. ‘I don’t know what to say, I… I like your soul too.’

  And there she lay, wondering whether she would be expelled from instinct forever, until Mingus pulled down her wet pants and made careful love to her. Afterwards she ran her hands over his body so as to remember it when he was gone, for she had no intention of seeing him again and thus risk what had already passed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN,

  malevolence and misunderstanding.

  It was close now, Jazzy could feel it move over the fields and up the hill. He was not following the news that morning, the broadcaster’s voice dispassionately moving from the funeral of Terry Thomas to the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini without indicating a preference for either, and the main feature of the breakfast programme the wholesale massacre of a small town in Angola he had never heard of. It had once been suggested to Jazzy that if he were to focus on current affairs his own problems would not seem so onerous, an absurdity he dismissed with a sad shake of the head. The only way a massacre in Angola could be worse than being asked to waiter at his sister’s party was if he were forced to undergo one after the other; and in all fairness, those who perished in Angolan massacres were pretty used to doing so, whereas Petula was always thinking up novel ways to torment him, the kind that would not take second stage to goings-on in Africa. Jazzy stubbed out the joint. It was risky to be toking this early in the day, but as he had hardly slept, the demarcation point between the night before and morning had faded into an indecipherable formality. He looked at his watch; six forty-five, Jill would be up in fifteen minutes for her job at Pug and Sons, a local solicitor’s where she was a typist, much to Jazzy’s disgust. They did not, in his opinion, need the money, and even if they did Jazzy never noticed it being spent on anything worthwhile, only bills and repairs that should have been Noah’s responsibility. By choosing to work at Pug’s Jill was as good as using her salary to normalise their oppression, especially as she ring-fenced it from him in an account they did not share, ostensibly ‘in case they had children’. It was yet another example of her failure to live in the present. He wished he had thought of putting it like that the night before instead of knocking the bedroom door off its hinges in a fit of frustration, sending splinters flying into every corner as he stomped his foot through its plywood frame. He could not remember precisely what had sparked the argument, only that one occurred on his return from the pub and after a muddled start settled on a few well-worn themes, continuing until Jill was too tired to speak and nodded off. The first time this happened Jazzy had shaken her awake again, furious that she was not ready to take his pain seriously enough to stay up and keep him company with it. But Jill had looked so angry the second time he had done this, spitting at him in point of fact, that Jazzy was taken uncharacteristically aback. No matter what the provocation Jill did not normally react in this way, all the more startling since after snarling at him she had promptly fallen asleep again without so much as an apology.

  With a bong in hand and a rug slung over his shoulder Jazzy decamped to the kitchen to recover from his shock. Getting wasted was no longer a simple way of passing the time; it really worked. At least this way the first thing Jill would feel on rising was guilt for having as good as banished him there, stoned and alone. He could not countenance, however cold, uncomfortable or paranoid he grew, slinking back into bed and giving her the solace of hoping she had not hurt him. Jazzy also enjoyed the feeling of losing control, or more control than he was normally used to losing, staring out into the vastness of a world he was but a tiny (but very angry) part of. Rather than diminishing the size of his problems when confronted by the universe, agonising by the window expanded Jazzy’s angst into something as large as the sky itself, propelling him to dizzying and sublime fits of pique. Problems and regrets attained new heights of clarity and catharsis, as his conversation with himself rose to dazzling peaks of eloquence, the only pity being there was no device to record and play back the results of his adventures in solipsism. Having reached enlightened self-knowledge, Jazzy’s voices evaporated into puffs of smoke enabling him to drop into a peaceless slumber, coming to once his face rubbed against the sticky linoleum table. This cycle had gone on for hours, broken by a vision at five in the morning of a cluster of clouds that formed a giant Peace symbol in the sky; Jazzy taking this as a sign that all would be well, then deciding an hour later that all wasn’t, which was where he remained until Jill quietly entered the kitchen. Her hair was lank and wet from her rushed shower, a cheap over-sized blazer and grey skirt giving her the air, as Jazzy so often said, of a cut-price Member of Parliament.

  There were signs of irritation round Jill’s twitching lip that made Jazzy feel as though last night’s argument was in danger of being carried into breakfast more seamlessly than he would have liked. He had prepared for this eventuality, working out several versions of what he wanted to say, though by the time the cocks had started to crow, his preparations had distilled into just two words, ‘Fuck you’. This morning some instinct, possibly tact, held him back, for there was a new element in the mix, one he had seen signs of but never apprehended before in her dewy eyes. The best way he could characterise it was rebellion, which was absurd, as Jill had no cause to throw over any authority he was aware of other than the one that ground them both down, The Heights shite; yet it was evident that it was nothing so general as their overall situation that caused her to pout angrily as he cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, another night where no one’s the winner,’ Jazzy offered diplomatically, drawing heavily from his joint, ‘same as it always is. No winners, only losers.’

  It was a tacit understanding between them that though their arguments usually originated with Jazzy, the reason they did so was because of Jill’s lack of understanding, so that officially the blame lay with them both. It kept their relationship on an even keel without one feeling more put out than the other, whoever may have been more at fault for their most recent spat. Jazzy did not mind taking his share of the knout and would have eventually made it known that he regretted any harsh words he could no longer remember, so long as Jill acknowledged the aggressive passivity that had provoked them. Quid pro quo. What he was not used to was being looked through like he was not there. Must he bear the guilt of confusing himself for someone else lost in his own life? No, he would not allow the tables to be turned. He put out the joint and pushed away the ashtray calmly.

  ‘Jill? Jill, I’m talk
ing to you, right?’

  Jazzy looked down at the joint he had just crushed. If he straightened out the stub it was probably good for another couple of tokes, and to be honest, he could use the help. He drew the ashtray over again and lit the stub, the flame from the zippo catching his lips and blackening the end of his already-sooty nose.

  Coughing, he tried again: ‘The thing with fighting, right, is that there are no winners, period; you’d may as well dig two graves. That’s where it leads, seriously. This can’t keep happening to us, turning on ourselves, fighting amongst ourselves, you see what I’m saying? It’s madness. As above so below, you know?’

  If she did know she was not telling. Jill was not only ignoring him, but curling her lip as she stepped over the broken shards of door in a way that made it look like she thought him at fault for the damage, shaking her head and laughing sardonically to herself. Jazzy sat upright in his chair, all pretence at being relaxed dispelled. What he was detecting was a frightening lack of respect. He was not used to it. Jill loved him and her high regard, though he often brought it into question, was a factor he could always take for granted once the drama ended, as he now decided it should have.