Occasionally Jazzy would disappear without a word for an afternoon, adding to his portfolio of tree sculptures dotted round the grounds. An old oak suffered creatures like those he moulded as an adolescent carved into its trunk, while a totem pole of related freaks appeared at the base of a red beech by the lake. An outbreak of experiments with the branches of ash trees, sharpened like spears, followed, and a quintet of small conifers were turned upside-down and stuck back in the earth to mark his fortieth birthday. These playful forays in to wood-art led to Jazzy’s eventual pièce de résistance, the result of several months’ covert labour and one weekend’s noisy construction work. With stubborn meticulousness Jazzy had set about a cluster of birches and stripped them of their bark, uprooting and replanting them over forty-eight hours by a remote south-facing border of the property, the straight line of trees pointing like cruise missiles to a world beyond The Heights in what may have been a homage to either war or peace, attack or defence. His feat took those few walkers who saw it by surprise, whilst causing no one any offence, and very little comment, Petula slyly not giving her son the pleasure of raising even the slightest objection to his relocation of natural resources. Soon after that Jazzy sulkily switched back to the creation of small moulds, this time mostly in the form of elves and fairies that he sold at local markets with Spider’s jams and cordials, the resemblance between these figurines and his old girlfriend, Jill, obvious to those few who still remembered her.
There were other more prosaic changes. Jazzy was no longer considered a ‘colourful’ character, at least as far as his clothes and physical appearance were concerned. Turning his back on the harlequin garments and loud togs of a medieval troubadour, Jazzy submitted to overalls and construction boots like any other mid-life labourer, his earrings, nose ringlets, Celtic bangles and love beads vanishing, the best of the trinkets going to Spider’s children, their original owner content to blend into the ordinary and unremarked-upon world of the average man. The relaxed drift towards an assimilation with his surroundings was roundly welcomed by his neighbours, Jazzy finding that middle age was not the cruel trick he had been warned of, rather a condition unusually suited to his staggered acceptance of ennui. Naturally he would have preferred life without the patch of scarlet veins that shot up in rivulets under his cheeks, the shying of hair, which fell in twisted clumps once the dreadlocks were untangled, and disabling pain that broke out in places he had taken the obedience of for granted. All that was as miserable as it would have been for anyone else, his fierce work ethic alone disguising the full extent of the maladies that functioned as a tag team, one ailment passing the baton to the next in an uninterrupted slow roll of illness and aches. Indoors, Jazzy would lie on the saggy, battered old couch, salvaged from one of Petula’s spring cleans, and groan, but outside, the general levelling particular to survival into his fourth decade heralded doors, albeit it narrow ones, he welcomed the opening of.
It was gratifying to reach a point in life where he could call people ‘son’, ‘young man’, or ‘kid’, and not have them laugh behind their hands, and say of young women, ‘Well she’s only a lass’, and have their mothers chuckle in agreement. Nearly as pleasing to him was huffing and puffing as he raised himself from his stool to buy another pint, and have the barman nod with stony empathy, enjoying the doleful respect of one who had seen it all before, even though as a forty year-old there was not quite so much need to make all that noise. His crowning triumph, however, was his assumption of a wise and patient smile as someone else tried to explain themselves to him for once. Then he could mutter and tut and shake his head with the best of them, as he explained to the sufferer that there was nothing new under the sun, that life was a bastard, and that his would be another pint of mild with a Bell’s chaser, before winking at whoever else happened to know he was right. The older farmers and cash-strapped labourers would make a place for him at the bar, linger in conversation, ask after his health and exchange jokes, the purpose of which was to signal acceptance and not mirth, often at their own instigation. Jazzy could easily slip into the ebb and measured silences of a conversation on nothing much, always generous with his time even when busy, his past intensity and rowdiness a bit of a joke to be laughed off like a plaster cast on a broken leg at a farm show.
Not so far below the innocent consolations of mediocrity, Jazzy did wonder if his improved standing might not be attributable to a less-than-noble perception, in short, that his fellow sufferers now liked him because they saw his life was just as fucked as theirs. To them he was no longer a silly little rich boy in a paisley waistcoat, showing off in the cider tent, or a highborn playing at being poor, but a man whose prospects they could honestly believe in the irreversible shittiness of. Jazzy did not dwell on the porous base of his popularity for long; tolerable inclusion was not so bad, and nobody could question the one solid achievement he had devoted his life to – to stay in a place where he was not wanted for a very long time. Jazzy had always been as committed to The Heights as the firmest advocate of Volk to their Fatherland, its soil as valuable to his survival as his own blood. Now the rest of the community had caught up with his passion and returned the compliment; even Petula no longer asked him how many more years he intended to linger under her feet for, his existence on the farm having slowly transmogrified into a process as natural as cutting the grass.
Under the veneer of good-natured placidity, Jazzy drilled himself to ignore those questions that still filled his sleepless hours, fearful ones like where had all the (good) time(s) gone? Would he ever get to sleep with anyone else before he died? Should he and Spider have had children or were hers enough to kill him on their own? Was it too late and financially prohibitive to hire a private detective to find Jill? And most potently of all, nice as it was that Petula was no longer horrible to him, what would it take to make her finally love him? This last question was usually presented in a milder form, just before he lost consciousness, so that when he woke, he could dimly remember the terrain it was posed on, without actually remembering asking it, which prevented him from making fateful progress towards the drastic answer his salvation required.
In truth, reaching forty had freed Jazzy only of his least noticeable eccentricities, his neuroses burrowing underground into subtler and more remarkable forms of disturbed oddity. Without registering what was happening, Jazzy redirected his anxieties into curious obsessions related to finitude and erosion, as an experiment to see if any substance could really change in life, having already decided that his own life could not. As the seasons passed, he grew into the overseer of the erosion of minutiae, dedicated to the use and wearing out of records, jackets, boots and old vans, until they rusted, their grooves wore through, their linings were torn, or they were otherwise rendered unusable by smelling so awful that public opinion forced him to cast them aside. Spider would catch him holding filthy trainers up to his nose and examining old jumpers for new holes, tugging at the loose elastic of underpants and picking paint off battered tractors, all part of a daily ritual devoted to the total consumption and finishing off of things, especially hand-me-downs that he was always on the lookout for; his violent elation at the point of their falling apart, or being thrown away, practically orgasmic. This quest to watch items that no one else wanted die or expire, joined the host of other habitual secrets – talking to himself, pulling his ear-hairs, taking a pornographic magazine into the farm toilet – that he considered at once too boring and too shameful to share, while at the same time very much looked forward to and indulged in daily.
Practised as his attempts to smooth out, re-describe or blot out the existential wrinkles were, there were white stonewashed walls, blank malignant days, that he could not help hitting with the force of a power-saw. Twice a week Jazzy would suffer a ‘crisis morning’, usually Monday and Tuesday, often Sunday and Monday, and sometimes all three, where he felt too miserable to fall out of bed and subject himself to the whirring blades of ongoing reality. At these troughs he saw himself as a horny
lead on the set of a pornographic film who finds that he cannot perform, and despite being exactly where he wanted to be, lacking the one thing he could always take for granted: an erect member to make all those naked bodies work for him. Like the impotent actor, Jazzy was on the spot he loved more than anywhere else in the world, the farm, surrounded by nature in every beautiful variant and guise, but to his recurring disappointment, somehow unable to take advantage of it all. The world was massive in theory, he only had to look at a map or drive into Middlesborough to see that, but the only part of it he could ever see himself in remained minuscule and resistant to his stewardship. The conundrum, shaped in what amounted to Biblical time, was finding its formulation: he could not survive anywhere else, but when would ‘home’ actually be his?
Jazzy’s response to responsibility without power was that of the Stakhanovite packhorse, renewing his efforts to visibly be seen to be working even harder, and thus earning the right, in the eyes of the public if not his mother, as their opinions may sway hers, to be thought of as at least the second-most-important person on the farm. Although Seth Hardfield had been appointed farm manager after Noah’s flight, regularly reporting back to the absent master much as he had always done, he had, ever since Jenny’s accident in the Landrover, lacked initiative, allowing Jazzy to make himself truly essential to The Heights’ upkeep, doing the jobs that Noah knew needed doing, and Seth was too long in the tooth for. Under Jazzy’s watch the fields were sublet, the shepherd’s nook turned into a new barn, his mother’s flower business planted, primed and packaged, essential maintenance turned into a fine art, and most tellingly, Petula was forced to lean on him in a multitude of personal ways that compromised her claim that she could rule alone, or survive without his help.
He was faithfully on-call as her driver, the old injury and the onset of arthritis making the manipulation of the clutch and brakes painful for Petula, when not playing the part of her foreman, relaying and enforcing messages and commands she found too tiring to look into or deliver herself, and eventually, a kind of confidante; Jazzy’s need to share his thoughts with his mother largely ossified after so many years of finding them unchanged, but hers, however, growing more urgent and in need of sharing with age. Without exactly finding themselves on the same side, or sharing an identical interest, circumstance was creating a bond between them that compromised Petula as much as it encouraged Jazzy.
This move towards generous accommodation seemed no more than ‘doing his duty’ to Jazzy, who would never have attributed an ulterior motive to his becoming his mother’s reliable working limb. Contradiction, however, lay under the blankets of his sweaty selflessness. On some days he tried to spend as little time with his mother as possible, on others as much; watching Petula disgusted him, her selfishness and pretences repellent, but it also inspired; her unwavering self-belief and almost total mastery of him a feat he could not help but remain in awe of. To be the fly on the wall or the mole tunnelling under the foundations into the throne room, both a trusted insider and a loathed outsider who would never fit in all at once, kept Jazzy confused as to his own reasoning, the tacit direction his life had taken fundamentally mysterious to him, as its honest slyness did not fit with the person he had long ago decided he was.
Petula watched his savage devotion and never for a moment assumed that it could be as entirely disinterested as her son wanted her to believe. Petula understood that she would have to pep him up from time to time, and leave a brace of low-hanging carrots in his path to prevent rebellion at whatever point Jazzy saw he was not going to get what he could not, until then, admit he wanted. In the short term simply taking him into her confidences over matters of mingling and indeterminate value worked wonders, though over time she would have to promise more, as even a faithful retriever had to hope that one day it would be fetched from the kennel and allowed to lie by the great roaring fire.
Her chosen means was to appeal to what she thought lay behind many a selfless life; an unacknowledged desire for property and wealth. In doing this Petula gambled recklessly, needlessly leading Jazzy into temptation. ‘Accidentally’ letting slip one night that a third of everything would be his when she died, she handed Jazzy a practical motive for the darkness that would follow, though neither had any inkling then that the seeds of transgression were scattered. Her lie was transparent to anyone but a wishful thinker, as she had no intention of divorcing and risking the loss of anything valuable to her in her own lifetime, while the very idea of a world others would inhabit after she had gone lay beyond her imaginative powers; if Anycock’s children wanted a legal right to Noah’s estate let them marry him themselves! Yet in the absence of any other goal to work towards, her empty promise, so easily disproven had Jazzy thought to probe, repeated whenever she was tipsy or simply wanted to play with him, became the emergent focus and stimulus for his existence, providing a vision of generational succession he could not rest till he had. Tragically, especially as it was never in her power to divest what was not hers, Jazzy would have been happy with so much less – credit, respect, an acknowledged role on the farm with securities – his innocence contaminated simply because his mother was not in the habit of playing for stakes any less dangerous.
Petula gave the matter of murderous incentives very little thought; she was enjoying her new wardrobe, her games with Jazzy a pivot to enable her to get on with the more important developments in life. She had graciously settled in to the role, while working furiously hard to create it, of a national treasure with countywide renown, fusing her past selves into a grand synthesis of her previous styles, pretensions and modes of being. It had always been a knack of Petula’s to know, like the rock star shedding skins or opportunist switching sides, which role best suited the stage of life she had just reached, and so it continued to prove. Years in the public eye had trained her in the discipline of ruptural adaptability, picking the loose clothes that disguised a thickening body, and those identities most likely to keep her at the centre of attention and power; wisely, for there could be no question of allowing standards to slip when even her most fanatical followers were at least forty-nine percent sick of her.
Correctly adducing that to chase society nakedly would be unseemly and unbefitting a woman of dignity, secure in her own worth and indifferent to the dictates of fashion, but that to not do so would be a fate worse than being forgotten, Petula was incentivised to find ever-more-ingenious ways of drawing the crowds in. The device she settled on was beautifully appropriate to a grand lady nearing sixty in a new millennium: family.
Loudly she declared that her main obsession in life was family, indeed always had been, that she was a woman who had sacrificed her life for this tribal concept, and now longed for nothing more than to be surrounded by those she had lifted out of nothingness, her two children with Anycock excepted. With her cover story established, and received wisdom dumbly echoing her platitudes, Petula had the alibi she needed to justify the continuing string of parties, dinners and lunches that people who were not related to her were still expected to attend. What family that did come was not necessarily her own – in fact, rarely so – but obscure cousins, uncles, aunties, step-brothers, sisters and even ex-partners of Noah’s. These joined the other ‘motley randoms’, as Regan dubbed them, who belonged to friends Petula had come to regard as ‘family’, her personal bloodline represented only in her own, and Regan’s, selves. The press-ganged collection of wealthy, bemused and easily bullied relatives would arrive quietly and sit about in the corners of Noah’s house and wonder what they were doing there now he was gone, until the first string of real guests arrived. Then pride and the belated recognition that they were somehow related to this shrill iron-age queen so keen to claim possession of them took over, enabling them to play their parts to clumsy perfection, the other guests wondering why these clownish losers had been invited in the first place until they remembered that Petula, bless her, loved her family.
These back-to-basics feudal meals, held on the elongated rec
tangle table that Petula insisted on calling round, in homage to Arthurian legend, occurred at least once a month, Regan still called on to attend, irrespective of where she was in the world or her life. The food was always more lavish than the occasion required, Noah’s retainer covering multi-option courses that would have had their proper home in Michelin-starred restaurants, chefs being hired for a weekend, entire meals driven up from London, and on occasion, prepared by Petula herself, aided by a reliable army of caterers and housewives, eager to see the inside of The Heights by whatever means necessary.
However, not all the food was eaten and not all the people who were invited came, the banquets becoming an altogether more confused gathering of odds and sods than Petula would have liked to present them as. The ‘main attraction’ was a decidedly anti-systematic collection of whichever distinguished persons Petula could get hold of from month to month. What constituted a desired guest was no longer an absolute value so much as a slippery slope, the slightest perception of stardust of any colour or kind being enough to have her throw herself, gracefully and with restraint, at the intended target, wielding them into her orbit. Property developers, archbishops, television anchormen, the head of Chris De Burgh’s road crew, antique dealers, the Master of Hounds, a recently divorced head teacher of the local choir school, a handful of colonels, wing commanders and brigadiers and their wives, sat next to what remained of her old faithfuls; Astley, the Middletons, Chips Hall and whichever unfortunate happened to be the local Member of Parliament at the time. Through sheer weight of numbers, and a constant rotation of faces, Petula was able to shore up her power-base in quasi-conventional ways at the very point that the conventional, once again, wondered whether the time had not come to finally wash their hands of her. Sadly for her haters, Petula could manipulate their social rituals to political effect so much more effectively than they, sharing no more confidence in their judgement than they had in their own, thus forcing them to abandon plans of ushering her into purgatory for a life of crimes she had probably got away with.
Nature and Necessity Page 48