Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘Elouise is right,’ cackled Mathilda, ‘you always bring him up if you’re off your face, and don’t even realise you’re doing it, hoping we’ll ask you a few probing questions. It’s so obvious that he’s the love of your life. I can’t even believe you’d bother denying it! You’re insulting all of our intelligences. Collectively! Hef hef! Bad girl!’

  ‘I don’t know where you’ve got this idea I’m in love from,’ Regan stammered, ‘I mean, I haven’t seen him in years, years and years…’

  ‘We know!’ they all chimed. ‘And that makes no differences whatsoever,’ added Diamanda, ‘everyone has a love of their life, and if it’s someone you never even see then it’s even easier to believe that they’re the one that got away, and that everything would be oh-so-different if you only took them up when you had the chance. There’s no time limit to this stuff, it’s unlike anything else.’

  ‘Look, you’ve got this all the wrong way, it’s not that big a deal, I just thought it would be interesting to see what his work is like, having known him before.’

  ‘Bullshit! That is just such bullshit. I remember one time when we were off our tits you told us all he was your first shag, that time when we were camping outside Guildford, on that hill when those guys stole our beer stash, remember? You know what, you should go over there and fuck him good,’ said Diamanda, ‘give him something to remember you by and then never return his calls; think of the power you’d feel!’

  ‘You’re mad! I wish I hadn’t said anything now…’

  ‘Spare us, you’re gloating! You want the whole world to know you’re alive and capable of love!’

  ‘Don’t worry Regan,’ said Daisy, rushing to her aid, ‘there’s nothing wrong with obsessing about someone all your life, Proust is full of it, even if we are too close to the stories we tell to know whether they are true or not. But good luck to you, it’s about time you got hitched.’

  ‘But I only want to see him to catch up!’

  ‘Whatever! No one believes you, and even if we did, catching up is always the first stage of long-distance seduction. He’ll know what you’re there for, trust us. Transatlantic booty call!’

  Regan broke the plastic spoon she had been bending; Mingus’s reaction had not been a factor she had seriously considered until now. ‘Do you think he might freak out with me turning up out of the blue?’

  ‘Why the hell should he, you said he’d invited you didn’t you? He’s obviously just as obsessed as you are, or else he wouldn’t bother chasing you after the zillion years or so since you last got jiggy. It’s weird enough that he got in touch with you.’

  ‘I suppose. But I’m not obsessed, please get that out of your heads! I’m only… interested, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh save it, just do it, get over there and do it – tell him you love him, get married, have babies, and stop playing games. You’ll put yourself and us out of your misery,’ Diamanda said impatiently, ‘and it’ll be about time, we were all getting sick of your Lady of Shallot routine. Stumbling around and looking for someone to save you and pull you out of the water.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m mad then, or a bit sad and going backwards?’

  ‘Of course you’re mad but who cares about that?’

  ‘But I don’t even know if we’ll get on or have anything in common anymore, I could be murdering a good memory for no reason at all. And making, you know, a fool of myself.’

  ‘You don’t need to have anything in common if you’re in love!’

  ‘But I don’t even know that I am!’

  ‘I think if you do love him you’d know about it,’ said Daisy. ‘Would you be in pain if you didn’t go? Think of it like that. Pain doesn’t need to be put to the test, it’s not like love like that, when you’re in pain you know it. Would you feel shit if you didn’t go?’

  ‘I’d regret not going, yes. I mean, it would be something I would look back on and… not feel good about.’

  ‘Do it then, for God’s sake do it! I used to think you never lose people you love, you meet them in other people, and you always have the memory, but life doesn’t work like that; each time you fall in love is a one off, and memories are just pictures. Send him our regards, we’re lovely girls really.’

  ‘Diamanda’s on the money,’ said Mathilda, ‘if I had anyone who wanted to shag me in New York or Newfoundland, I’d be on the next plane over, no questions asked.’

  ‘It’s the three stages of love,’ concluded Diamanda, ‘the religious, the romantic and the practical. You believe in it, you believe in him, and you could probably get on together in the practical sense, so get on the plane. It’s now or never, pilgrim. You’ve waited too long.’

  Regan felt a bleak exhalation in herself. She was about to step into complete freedom; empty, dreadful and empowering, if obeyed – remembered in impotent agony otherwise.

  ‘I’ll go. Thanks. You know I love you all too, don’t you? I do.’ ‘Oh fuck off with that. Just don’t come back and start telling us about how wonderful your sex life is, we’ve all done it and there’s nothing new under the sun, even if the boys do keep on coming…’

  *

  The solstice always came too early; the sense that decline had begun and darkness would slowly filter back into the sky scared Jazzy into using every available hour of light for noisy and demonstrative tasks to prepare for winter’s approaches. That, at least, was his alibi. Cynics doubted whether it was really necessary to install another gate in a fence that already had one, erect a deer-watch to replace the contraption that had only gone up the year before, or build another shed for logs that hardly needed to be cut as they would never burn, now that the farm was centrally heated, and so on; the questions pursuing the tasks like hounds after a hyperactive hare.

  It unsettled Jazzy if folk thought he was simply doing nothing; an overgrown man-child clinging to the hair of his nanny-goat’s beard. When hard at work he was beyond the judgement of others, an essential human service protected from criticism as long as the graft was in plain view. Onerous exertion, Jazzy was sure, was the simplest defence against anyone who might ask what he was still doing in a place he first proclaimed his desire to leave twenty years before, his unfulfilled proclamation drowned under the activity of the fret-saw and clawhammer. Whatever one thought of the necessity of such work, it was undeniable that the fruits of his endeavour littered the farm like beer cans after a party, a range of objects as disparate as shoe trees and tree houses, plywood boiler covers and oak compost holders, all bearing their maker’s mark: exact and technical finishing worthy of a spin bowler on a sticky wicket.

  Having ended his daily flagellation when the last of the hired help left, a Sisyphean re-creosoting of posts, Jazzy had spent the last hour of this particular evening on his own pretending, successfully, that the rest of the world did not exist. By seven o’clock the farm was a shimmering finery of nature’s many tiny parts, or depending on how he squinnied, a vast collage in flux; the late-evening sun burning away until the sky became a pale-blue furnace, layers of nocturnal light that would dazzle until the sun rose again illuminating all below in eerie greys and whites. Jazzy loved it; it was why he was here and nowhere else. In the still-fading streams of yellow and red, the clouds drifting through slow explosions of colour, their shapes and shades migrating into ever-gentler combinations until they blurred into what passed all understanding, Jazzy knew he stood at the helm of the ship, the complaints of the day no more than an unreliable friend who had let him down, again. An elemental breeze, faintly frosty, broached his nostrils, filling them full of hope and banishing lesser concerns into languid inconsequence. He lapped the freshness off his prickly moustache; above all else, out here the world forgave. Alone, Jazzy recognised a miraculous vastness that might even have been the work of God; the smell of bonfires and lavender bushes a fragrance worthy of a deity, the crushed thyme he carried in his pockets serving the same function as a wedding ring would to any other man. Death as a form of cosmic reintegration had never m
ade better sense; here he was a believer, and would remain one until the time came to speak again.

  The Heights, which Jazzy’s eye would always end up wandering down to, infused him with ticklish excitement, its wood and white-stone walls suggesting a shifting mirage of permanence, no more stable than the slashes of sunlight – tiger stripes of scarlet and orange – that bubbled between the shadows of creeping ivy, wisteria and honeysuckle. He could not quite put his finger on what he felt when he saw the house, nearly daring to admit to a thought that was not his, but that he knew himself capable of entertaining, on the condition that he would never have to spell it out, even to himself. His reluctance to cerebrally verify this desire did not stop him from experiencing it as a vague and heartfelt aspiration: that by luck, justice or natural disaster, all this would one day be his, and if it weren’t, he would at least be here, the trusted and acknowledged power about the place.

  The hope was too mean, silly and selfish, spiritual in inspiration and materialist in application, not to say optimistic, for Jazzy to own up to. He could not believe anything he wanted that badly could turn out in the end not to be true. That did not stop his loud hints to Petula that the farm would collapse without him and his boastful acceptance of the title ‘foreman’, which had officially been Seth Hardfield’s position, until Jazzy encouraged him to take early retirement on a full salary, helpfully provided by Noah’s preference for a quiet life. Hardfield may have still reported to Noah from the armchair next to his fireplace, but it was Jazzy’s work he was reporting on now, and no longer his own. From here it was only a tiny step to complete control, yet not one Jazzy was ready to take, yet. It seemed clemently disgusting to think that this was all that his brief acquaintance with consciousness came down to. Possession and ownership were not how he would like to see the world, and equally importantly, not how he wanted others to know he saw it. But the facts, he hedged, might very well force possessive ownership upon him. For when Petula finally got round to divorcing Noah, a course of action Jazzy had been advocating for some years (and why had she not done it yet?), and retired to London (another move Jazzy had been the advocate of), with Evita in rehab and Regan signing contracts in Soho, who else would there be to fly the flag for the family? And who else knew where all the keys to the tool shed were kept?

  When Jazzy looked at it like that, accompanied by the chants of cuckoos and the flowering of roses in reds so precise as to venture on the unnatural, he grew overwrought. What was to stop this process of evolutionary elimination but the continued intransigence of a single stubborn and embittered old lady, who could not even cut her own lawn or deadhead a flower without his help? And that was the point; Petula had become a windy glove-puppet, incapable of sustaining the conditions upon which her life relied. That was why his speculative project was worth persevering with, even if he would not admit to having one, as in the end, patience, forbearance and loyalty, resentfully given or not, would receive their karmic due. How could they not? He was so close to what he wanted.

  The marvel was that these disembodied calculations could inform Jazzy’s entire existence, while not even consciously registering as thoughts; a script he had written down to the last hyphen and full stop, but never dared read back, aware of itself as directional reassurance rather than as the cold-blooded plan it was. This failure of honesty was where Jazzy’s ultimate undoing lay. Expecting a higher power to extract his dreams from where they slept and execute them for him, leaving him to pick up the crown from whichever branch destiny had thoughtfully left it to hang upon, was too passive a strategy to succeed in a world Petula still ran. He would have to try harder.

  Jazzy’s unreflecting reflections were interrupted by Petula’s ageing Volvo Estate, the car she always chose to drink-drive in, holding to the maxim that no one could die in them, however pissed they might be. The dented V.240, looking as though it had been rolled in a drag car rally, veered carelessly from bank to bank, the driver in a rush to get to the house before she was missed. Wedging it at an awkward angle under a pear tree, Petula hobbled away from the vehicle like a guilty vandal before a broken window. Jazzy smiled indulgently; there were no other witnesses. He knew the keys would be left in the ignition for him to park the vehicle in its proper place in the forecourt in good time for normality’s resumption the following morning. His mother was indulging in an uncharacteristic guilty pleasure: several rounds of gin with the ‘Wild Geese’, a handful of divorcees, or as good as, whose husbands had either quit or eschewed all resistance. These late-fifty-something ladies gathered in one another’s living rooms in a combative huddle of inventive gossip and injured self-righteousness, offering balm for each other’s wounds and salt for everybody else’s. Petula’s quiet adoption of the set, whom she had cheerfully looked down on in the past, was now as established as a goose’s hold of an intruder’s leg, evolving from her just happening to ‘drop in’, to becoming a central mainstay at these loathe-ins. Naturally she would never deign to hold a meeting at The Heights, nor would her new friends expect it of her, their social thirst easily quenched by the great Petula Montague entering their world again, for she had been friends with them many decades before, as an honorary complainant.

  For Jazzy it showed overdue human fallibility in Petula: a woman who could waste her time in wasteful pursuits like anyone else who had problems they could not face. Flatteringly he knew he was a cult figure amongst the Wild Geese, a dependably handsome face who was often called in for a beer and motherly chat when Petula had forgotten her way to the car, or fallen asleep on a settee. And the manner in which the tipsy ladies fussed over and infantilised him, with musty undertones of repressed longing, reminded him of what it was like to be wanted, his undisguised enjoyment at having his long arms fiddled about with and pinched all part of the fun.

  However Jazzy did not like the order of things, or their look, when he entered The Heights’ kitchen; his mother had emptied her handbag over the table and was comparing bottles of pills under torchlight, a spirited means to ward off the inevitable need for glasses. Like him she also feared winter, and turning on an overhead light would be a way of acknowledging its onward progression.

  ‘Everything okay, Mum? You look stressed. Anything you need help with? Just say.’

  Petula yawned like a creaking door; it was all too much like reading a book she could not remember. She was sure the mood of the text had entered her sensibility, but as to the detail, she had no idea; what was it she was meant to take before bed to help her sleep? Her last gin, a fifty-fifty mix of flat tonic water and Gordon’s, had seemed so necessary at the moment of its suggestion, but she remembered nothing of drinking it, or whatever else she had consumed to make her completely forget her journey back home. She had recognised nothing; where did any of those lanes lead to? She hoped she had not killed anyone; she never had before, if she did not count her daughter Evita. No, that was wrong, she had only nearly killed her that time in the attic. Yet people had died on the way out of the house through no fault of her own. No one could blame her for that. At least she was home. What was she doing again? Petula dropped the torch and shuffled over to the fridge where an emergency supply of her favourite nightcap awaited her: a large jug of elderflower cordial diluted with Blue Nun wine.

  Still unnoticed, Jazzy pulled open the door of the fridge for her and watched Petula tip the mixture into a tupperware beaker left on the worktop for such occasions. His mother appeared to have given in to a series of mechanical reflexes, and was safe until the moment came when she was forced to decide again. Although he had grown used to seeing Petula in ever-more-vulnerable states of intoxication, there was an exaggerated stateliness to her movement that he found he could not take seriously.

  Still she did not register his presence. Standing right behind her, Jazzy whistled the melody to ‘Maggie’s Farm’ note-perfectly, and still not able to attract Petula’s attention, sung the opening of the old Bob Dylan classic, ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more…’ The song, pla
yed loudly out of his bedroom, and later from his van and cottage, had always been employed to annoy Petula, successfully doing so ever since he went through a phase of referring to her as ‘Maggie’, an unflattering comparison to the then-Prime Minister, twenty years before.

  Tonight it did not. Instead Petula stared emptily in the direction of a mauve orchid on the windowsill, her lifeless gaze seemingly borrowed from some less expressive person. Panicking slightly, Jazzy sang a whole verse, and had got to raising his voice at the chorus and banging the side of the fridge in time, when Petula turned, barged past him and vomited into the sink.

  Ten minutes later they were both sat at the table drinking tea, accompanied by tumblers of whisky and stilton and gherkin sandwiches. The mood was affectionately strained, like old friends willing a parting, so they could remember one another happily unencumbered by reality.

  ‘That was very, very, nice of you, thank you,’ said Petula with her mouth full, beckoning for a re-fill, ‘carrying on until the bitter end, it’s what I always seem to do. I honestly had no idea where I had got to. It’s a bit frightening actually, it must have only been minutes ago but I can’t remember anything. I mean, I remember Mina pouring me a drink and thinking it was time to go home, but how I got here… and then this. Have we been talking long?’

  ‘Nah, I just got here and found you. Forget about it.’

  Jazzy had yet to utter anything of consequence, unable to measure how drunk his mother still was, and unwilling to have to repeat himself all over again in the morning, as he often did after having wrongly calculated she was sober enough to remember their conversations the next day.

  Testing the temperature, he offered, ‘Still, what a lovely night, what a sky. Beautiful. I could never live down in a valley, always a hill for me. I’m not a valley dweller.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘And the weather, glorious, absolutely glorious.’