‘She’s got the right stuff alright,’ slithered the lizard, ‘Carmen incarnate for sure, but oh-so-forgivable.’ Petula tried to ignore the hissing abomination, and instead watched Diamanda, who had at least retained a human shape if not her modesty. Her assured manner was more conqueror than conquest, and with a crude wink, Diamanda gave Regan a high-five and whispered something into her ear. Almost simultaneously Mathilda, another of Regan’s friends, left the table she was on in tears and sobbingly rushed up to Regan to recount what seemed to be a tale of great importance. Pressing enough for Regan to look down the room and catch her mother’s eye, the drug exaggerating Regan’s precise beauty to a point where Petula was afraid wings were about to grow out of her back and she would fly to the heavens. The vision, far from disturbing her, successfully changed her mood. Her daughter was beautiful and she had made her daughter.
‘There looks to be quite a little drama brewing,’ commented Eager.
‘It’s… it’s so compelling,’ said Petula, the pace of the drug shifting gears once more. She had become the lead camera in a film, and was eager to see where the script would take her next. The action looked ready to absorb its audience, as Regan strode past the tables that separated them with an expression of controlled concern, perhaps worried by the way her mother was busy chewing a fork without any food on it.
‘Mummy, are you alright?’ Regan asked, gently taking the item of cutlery out of Petula’s hand.
‘What! What?’
‘Calm down Mummy, are you alright?’
‘In a manner. Why is everyone asking everyone, I mean me, whether they’re alright, I mean whether I am?
‘Are they?’
‘Could you get out of the way please, I’m trying to watch what happens next.’
Obligingly, though not without some reservation, Regan did as she was bidden, adding quietly, ‘You looked like you were having a bit of a bad time.’
‘What is going on over there I wonder…?’
Mathilda had returned to the table whence she had come and slapped the actor who had been asleep in the taxi earlier, Bobby Stack, sharply across the face. This caused him to laugh shrilly and for her to weep even harder than before. The scene was abject and in poor taste; Petula really would have to have words with the director if things did not improve.
‘It looks like a lovers’ tiff, the same the whole world over, they could pull their fingers out a bit more and entertain,’ she mused aloud. Petula was conscious that others could hear her criticisms, especially as she was speaking them aloud, but this felt of no consequence. Keeping secrets from the outside world was unnecessary. The film was everything, her own narrative put temporarily on hold until she could get to the bottom of who had decided to stage this drama in her house. Unless, of course, the answer was that she had… that she was, as Esther had said, responsible for all this… this whatever-it-was.
Feeling queasy, Petula vaulted over the thought and returned to the movie. ‘So who started it, what’s behind the fight?’
‘That’s what I was I was going to tell you Mum, there’s been some unpleasantness and an accident. Involving one of those actors, the really drunk one. It’s quite serious actually.’
‘I can see that! Your friend’s belted the poor blighter in the face. Fascinating. But it’s fine now, he’s making a joke of it. Look he’s laughing.’ Which was true, though there was nothing funny, or fine, about Stack’s laughter, its piercing ripples closer to the caverns of Mordor than Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
‘That’s not the accident I mean Mummy. Diamanda and that guy Rex, well, they sort of went to the toilet together.’
‘The toilet…?’
‘Yes, together, well, he basically led her there, followed her I mean.’
‘Oh yes…’ Petula was out of the story again, the weird voyeurism of the preceding few minutes draining the prurient curiosity out of her like the itch from a bite. It was startling: how could she have ever been so taken by this sordid exchange? The effort to retain a static sense of self, or point of interest, was a challenge she had persistently failed to meet. The drug had beaten her hands down, she must establish supremacy over it or drown the next time she met its current unawares.
‘I think he said that he wanted to show her something. Anyway, something happened and he ended up banging his head, quite hard, against the lavatory seat. I think he’s still unconscious now, actually. Don’t worry, Mrs Hardfield is going to look after him and has already called an ambulance, I think.’
‘Fine, fine, fine,’ said Petula impatiently, ‘bully for him. Hospital is probably the best place for the man. And what about those two? What’s all that about?’
‘Right, well that guy has really upset Mathilda.’
‘Where, I can’t see a scratch on her? She’s quick to tears, isn’t she?’
‘I didn’t say hurt, I said upset. Not like that, he’s hurt her feelings, he’s been really out of order.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t really want to say Mum.’
‘Oh come on.’
‘Really.’
‘I’ll ask her myself.’
‘No, don’t do that, please. The guy, Rob his name is, he said, he asked her if he could fuck her in the mouth.’
‘Right, and then what?’
‘That’s it. And now she’s going home, she’s asked if you can call her mother so she can collect her. They don’t live so far away, near Wetherby.’
‘I won’t be ringing anyone. I can’t leave the party. Tell Mathilda where the phone is and ask her to do it herself. Or else leave it for bit, wait until she gets over it. And don’t worry, none of this is your fault. It’s more the kind of thing that happens when you get a lot of interesting people together in one place. Stuff can get a bit unpredictable, which is part of the fun of course, but also the risk you run.’
‘Sure. Are you positive you’re okay Mummy?’
‘Of course I am, can’t everyone just shut up about that for a bit? I simply had a funny patch, well, a couple, thanks to that idiot I was talking to earlier overdoing my drinks. Listen darling, I know the evening has been slightly uphill until now, but it isn’t too late to enjoy the last ten yards, so go and relax and let your hair down before you wake up tomorrow morning with any regrets.’
Regan nodded hesitantly, thinking that she could have offered her mother much the same advice.
‘I mean it Regan, stop observing and go and enjoy.’
Feeling the futility of arguing the point, she turned to look for Mathilda, who had vanished into the bathroom Wade had yet to emerge from. Rather than follow her, and pre-empt another unfortunate incident, Regan stopped Jenny Hardfield, who was carrying a large tray of faux medieval cocktails specially prepared for the girls, and took a sip from one. It tasted flat and furry, an alcoholic mousse for minors.
‘Yuk!’
‘Careful with those,’ warned Hardfield, ‘truth be told I tried one myself earlier and I’m feeling a bit tiddley still.’
Regan laughed impishly, sticking her finger into the lumpy brown mess and licking it, ‘You’ll be okay then, this is the night of the living tiddlers.’
‘Isn’t it just? On my life, I’ve never seen anything like it!’
For a wayward second Hardfield, her smile flickering wonkily like a fading image on a malfunctioning television, reminded Regan of Mingus. This struck painfully at a part of her being that was not prepared for it. Regan had already briefed her friends on Mingus, moving swiftly through tenderness and sticking to a formula she had rehearsed earlier, that ‘He and I no longer fit into each other’s lives,’ worked from a line in Dynasty that had impressed her. If her friends had looked puzzled as to why she should wish to airbrush her first real boyfriend from her life Regan affected not to notice, Diamanda’s question, ‘But what does he think?’ a surprise. It had not occurred to Regan that Mingus would think anything; his thoughts were not a part of the equation that concerned her. The belief that there were living beings
at the business end of her actions enjoyed a formal reality that was still highly disembodied, a notion brought uncomfortably to boil by Hardfield’s smile. What had she really done to Mingus? Left him behind, that was for sure, and in doing so caught her first glimpse of a karmic return; hurt done to others was the hurt one would be left with when they were gone.
Seizing a fresh goblet Regan sucked up the froth and smothered her self-reproach, wheeling it to the rear view of her mind with a determination her mother would have envied. Needless torture was the last activity the hour called for. Of pressing relevance was her mother’s insistence that she should take advantage of the occasion and party. To decode: if she wanted to get wildly drunk in front of Petula, this was the evening to do so, a smokescreen for any sin she may commit or have committed in her name.
Having approached the evening nervously, expecting Petula to make a great show of her as she had at previous parties, abandoned to boring or overbearing men, possibly even forced to make an impromptu speech in fancy dress, it was a cheerful surprise to witness the pantomime anarchy of the past hour. Undeniably, her mother’s best-laid plans had been thrown into disarray, yet Regan could not help feeling secretly proud of the mess, and enjoying her association with it. If The Heights had burned to the ground there could not have been any more to talk about than there was, and it had all gone down at her party. The other girls would look back on it and discuss this night until they were old women, and, of equal importance, all of Nohallows would know of it too.
It did not really matter to Regan that the actors lacked star quality; this was no loss: she had never believed celebrities were mysterious or inspiring figures and had only ever looked up to Petula. Possibly they were not so pitiful underneath it all, even though Regan could not see that far down; either way, their personalities would gain in even the most cursory retelling. For their misdemeanours it was likely Petula would be blamed, which probably explained her jarred and awkward manner, for her mother was certainly suffering for their art while Regan, in the cold recesses of her un-fully-formed heart, had not felt a thing, her mother’s pain provoking only slight curiosity. Petula’s bullishness, which Regan knew to be a transparent deception, freed her from any formal obligation to worry, it was true, but if she loved Petula should she not feel more of her distress? Or was she really such an ice queen that it did not matter who it was, mother or lover, they could all fade away and radiate so far as she cared? The thought and its chilly undertow, similar to her snubbing of Mingus, was monstrous, but its promise of increased power as mechanically seductive as oil reaching an engine. There was nothing ennobling or wholesome about its path. A blackly erotic and refined cruelty underlay it, Regan could sense it in the seat of her pants, an intimation that she had been working up to this for years: a persona of her own to get behind and cultivate at last, ‘The Ice Queen’, perfect because it was perfectly true. All she had to do was pick up the crown of identity and put it on.
She was interrupted by Chips Hall, who had been thinking of some pretext to approach a girl, any girl, and act as her White Knight.
‘Yah, I thought so, I recognise you from somewhere, are you one of the actresses from that show?’
‘No, I don’t act.’
‘Really? You do in a way though, don’t you?’
‘No, really, I don’t.’
Hall squinted and clicked his fingers in an attempt to pretend to guess who Regan was. ‘But I’ve seen you before, I thought it must have been on television, either that or you look really, really, like some girl I’ve seen on telly.’
‘I’ve never been on telly.’
‘Then why do I know your face? Who do you remind me of? You’re just not what you seem, are you?’
Regan could see that he really did not know who she was, also that it was too late to dismiss Hall. She would listen to a minute more for the sake of politeness at the end of which she could disclose her identity and icily excuse herself; he would be the Ice Queen’s first victim.
‘I suppose you must be connected with Petula in some way, most of us are, she invited a few of her daughter’s chums, enough to try and palm this event off on her anyway.’
‘Did she? In what way?’
‘Don’t be naif, when is the gig not about Petula? She barely gave me the time of day earlier, busy charging after what’s-hisname, you know, sucking up to those degenerate pups shipped in from central casting like they were, I don’t know, like they were Burt Reynolds or someone. She’s getting too old for it…’
‘She’s not old, she invited them for a bit of fun, for everyone to enjoy.’
‘Really? She invited them for herself; it’s all about her, trust me. I hear she regards her daughter as a less satisfactory version of herself,’ Hall added knowingly rubbing his nose, ‘I mean, what’s all that about?’
Regan twitched her lips so as to speak but found she was speechless, desiring instead for Hall to spontaneously combust and to do so while remaining alive, so as to better feel the pain.
Hall nodded and with a confidential smirk went on, ‘Yah, they call them “the sisters”, funny eh? A cut-throat partnership if ever there was, that’s her over there isn’t it, the daughter?’ Hall asked, pointing to Mathilda, who having briskly walked back from the toilet with a horrified expression, had stopped at Petula’s table. ‘I haven’t seen the little one since she was sent away to school. They do look a little alike don’t they,’ he added, ‘filthy tarts the pair of them…’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Ha, I… I hope I haven’t put my foot in it, you know, one hears things that’d make your afro curl about those two. Well, not so much things, more opinions, you know, about some stuff, yah?’
‘What is it you’re trying to tell me?’
‘Oh, nothing really. They’ve just got that thing really, that way, you know, of looking I mean, in common, yah? A bit of the cathouse, a bit dirty,’ Hall smiled feebly, ‘you could imagine the same bloke going for them both and them obliging, heh heh, hope I haven’t overstepped the mark?’
‘Not at all; we, my mother and I, have exactly the same way of smiling falsely,’ Regan replied, ‘when people are boring or rude to us. Goodbye, whoever you are.’
Petula watched Regan march away from Chips Hall with a tinge of disappointment. Having lied to Mathilda about her mother being called, successfully negotiated the release of the meatloaf from the kitchen, held off the ambulance man who had allowed Hardfield and Eager to drag the still unconscious Wade to the front door, thus keeping the emergency services at arm’s length and avoiding an unnecessary scandal to add to the others, Petula was quietly coping. Even the lSD had settled into a contained pattern, leaving her fellow diners only partially transformed, so that their mouths and teeth retained animal features, leaving the rest of their faces largely human, and with most other perceptions under surveillance, and taking every second as it came, Petula felt capable of an accurate third-person value judgement. The arrival of the meatloaf was to change all that, though for the moment, she was sorry that Regan appeared to have given Chips short shrift, however correctly she had assessed his oily smarm. This was one occasion where standards were an impediment to growth. Chips might have been yesterday’s man, and a bit of a creep, but at least he was a known quantity to lose one’s virginity to, and a far better inductor than the acting troop, who did not look capable of a single sustained sexual act between them.
‘Goody,’ said Margy, who had opened an eye, and then another, her nostrils succumbing to the overdone stench of burning meatloaf, ‘here come the mains!’
Leading the procession out of the kitchen was Fogle, the lord of misrule, who had appropriated the chef hat Hardfield had been wearing and, dressed in an apron and brandishing a torn oven glove, held a pair of tongs in the air, shouting, ‘Make way for the meat! Black, burnt and beat! Make way for the meat!’
Behind him a line of hired help were carrying trays on which generous cuts of loaf, far from its best thanks to delays, sustained r
eheating and Fogle’s kitchen invasion that resulted in it being trodden over the floor and inexpertly reassembled, then hidden under handfuls of parsley to better conceal the damage, finally made its way to the diners.
‘I expect it’s all ruined,’ Petula commented realistically, ‘held up by all that pointless sushi and my son’s vanishing act.’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Margy, ‘food is food, and meatloaf is pretty good at retaining its flavour.’
‘For the first few hours anyway,’ qualified Eager.
Laughing as though he possessed some secret, Fogle passed their table and lowered a plate of cuttings towards Petula, for her inspection. ‘Meaty treaty. Have a sniff matey. Slam in the Lamb!’
‘Push off,’ Petula growled, an element of Fogle’s plate nonetheless catching her attention. ‘Here,’ she said, standing and taking the plate out of his hands, ‘what’s all this?’
Petula’s fingers tingled most unpleasantly. What was before her eyes could not be what she thought it was. It could not be. No. Not that. Not even Fogle would have done that. He couldn’t; it was simply too barbaric to credit.
‘What is it Petula?’ asked Astley, returning to the table, Fogle brushing past him in paroxysms of laughter.
‘He can’t have…’
‘Can’t of what Petula?’
‘Shat! Shat in the meatloaf!’
‘You what? You’re not serious?’
‘Not me, that bastard over there, taken a shit on the meatloaf and put a piece of parsley on top. To try and get away with it!’
Astley looked aghast and took a step back, as Margy narrowed her eyes with the intense curiosity of the very hungry. ‘Looks alright to me…’
Petula raised the plate to her nose, the smell was foul yet resided in a corridor of ambiguity. Yes, the meatloaf was indistinguishable enough from shit to look like it, the steam flying off rancid enough to smell of it… Petula acted on a wild instinct and, grabbing at a chunk, bit deep, flakes and juice running over her lips, a portion diving down her front, and all to no avail – was it shit or was it meat? She was eating it and she still couldn’t tell!
Nature and Necessity Page 29