Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘What?’

  ‘The weather, it’s been good, aye.’

  Petula’s expression changed as if she had discovered something nasty in her food, her eyebrows forming an arch of sudden annoyance. ‘Good weather? Good weather? What on earth has that got to do with me?’

  ‘I was just saying…’

  ‘Good weather is one of the great deceptions performed on the nervous system! A way of pretending life has really changed when in actual fact it has just slapped on the makeup. Don’t talk to me about it, please… One day the sky will go black and everything will simply stop. Good weather? Whatever next! We’d may as well talk about what will be on television this Christmas!’

  Jazzy laughed uncomfortably, ‘I know what you mean,’ which was a lie as he didn’t, ‘but until that day cometh, life goes on eh?’

  ‘Exactly, it cares too much about bloody going on to care very much about whether we’re still in it or not, so please no more mention of the Hardfields and their bloody untalented son. It was all anyone could talk about tonight, all I could hear, the silly old gin dragons. Nothing else to do except tout and dissect other people’s business. That boy hasn’t a drop of talent anyway.’

  ‘You what? I thought we were talking about the weather! I don’t give a damn about that talentless little git Mingus, if that’s who you mean. Don’t pin any interest in him on me, he’s a sneaky piss-weasel.’

  ‘Exactly! Love thy neighbour bollocks! What a thing to do to us, abuse our hospitality by attempting to make out that that bloody son of theirs is some sort of media star. A big name! Do you know, I think he once had it in his mind to seduce Regan? The cheek! Storming the art world! It’s all his mother can go on about apparently, some bloody show in New York she’s been invited to. I mean her, that woman who can’t even spell Matisse, in New York, really! It would be like finding out that the Queen’s got a todger. She doesn’t even know where America is. And Mingus, that’s another one we can chalk up to Noah and thank him for, bringing him here as a baby. That boy hasn’t a single thing going for him more than you, except a talent for self-advancement. Look at the way he tried to use me! And he was only three at the time! Artwork balls. I’d take your bloody creatures any day, foul as they are!’

  Jazzy, whose quiet hatred of Mingus was another of his life-sustaining obsessions, would usually have joined Petula in her mood of vituperative spite, yet tonight he checked himself from going any further, or encouraging her to continue. There was a flowing quality to her invective that worried him; it was rolling out too quickly and haphazardly. Without careful steering, it might easily be his turn to be run over next.

  Smiling with considerable effort, he stated: ‘Still, Mrs Hardfield’s alright isn’t she? She’s not her son, and Seth – what can you say. Forty-five years’ loyal service. What a bloke, salt of the earth. What you see is what you get with him. We should all try and love our neighbour eh? That’s what the good book ays.’

  Petula, who though used to Jazzy’s middle-aged conviviality found its commonness more offensive than the purposefully inflammatory persona it had superseded, exclaimed: ‘Love? Now you’re really waking me up! Love what? What are you gabbling about?’

  ‘Your neighbour, you know, me and the Hardfields, your neighbours. The Bible says you should love us Mum!’

  Petula looked at her son as if her were mad, implying perhaps that if she did not love him she was not exactly ecstatic about herself either.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ she said at last.

  ‘Anyway, forget about it, it’s not important.’

  ‘Quite. My God, what’s wrong with them…?’

  Petula was staring at her fingers with alarm; her wobbling digits were threatening to escape from her shaking hands and crawl across the floor in search of a new body to attach themselves to. Whatever she had gained in clarity from heaving into the dishes, was lost in the last throat-full of Scotch. She felt chased and harried by a vengeful abstraction. There was a thought that had occurred to her earlier, strong enough for her to pull into the side of the road, only to forget what it was; its terrifying force falling away as abruptly as a half-realised déjà vu. But it was back again now, no longer an immaterial terror but a common enough problem for people her age.

  ‘God,’ she groaned, ‘this is it, isn’t it?’ Her life would never get any better than this and she did not have the heart to rally and stop it from getting any worse. ‘And to think I used to believe I was different! Instead of just a silly old bat like the rest, redeemed only by hard work, never having had any talent, but now too pissed and lazy to even slog. How profound! Even my problems are a milkmaid’s. In what way am I still different? In absolutely no bloody way at all.’

  ‘How much have you had tonight Mum? You’re a bit of a mess if you don’t mind me saying. There’s nothing wrong with you that a bit of sobering up and sleep won’t fix. Do you want me to help you up to bed? Here, put that down and let’s get shifty, eh?’

  Petula sniggered, tickled by the suggestion that she might be making too much of her difficulties. Was it simply that she was still very drunk, and nothing, certainly not anything that might occur to her before she fell asleep, would mean a thing by the time she came to remember it all tomorrow? To sleep and wake and not feel the slightest difference from the day before, oh God, she was going in a circle again, this had all happened to her in the car, before she had pulled over into that lay-by, full of crushed cans of Tango and shredded pornographic magazines. She had stopped the car because she wanted to give up, and then forgotten why she had. What was so important about whatever she was trying to recollect anyway? And what would it change if she could still remember? Of course, there was no point! That was it!

  ‘God, it’s all so pointless,’ she tutted into her tumbler, eying the orange-gold content with an absence of the cynical optimism that had got her through every single day of her life.

  Jazzy fiddled with his glass and laughed weakly. ‘Alright. Don’t go to bed, suit yourself. It’s funny though. Do you remember the days when it used to be me who would come in here all tiddly like, and you and Noah that would have to sit and hear my story? And you’d be the ones telling me to go to bed! It’s like we’ve switched roles now, eh?’

  ‘I don’t see how, you still seem pretty tiddly to me.’

  ‘Oh come on Mum, be nice.’

  Petula burped noiselessly, and pulling the jug of elderflower wine towards her, muttered: ‘You’ll never, ever, have the satisfaction of hearing me agree with you…’

  Jazzy dug into his pocket for tobacco, and considered his next move. Earlier he had intended to make a short speech on how it would be more expedient for money that was going to be spent on the farm to be paid into his account directly in a single lump, than his having to justify every expense on a caseby-case basis over the telephone to Noah, who was ignorant of local conditions. The hope that a cosy nightcap or two might get his mother to agree to this progressive step seemed reasonable, given that anything which loosened Noah’s hold over their life was generally welcome. But seeing how much the worse for wear she was, as confused and clumsy as he had ever witnessed, led him towards thinking she would be better served being escorted directly to bed by force.

  ‘This tastes awful, have you put thinners in it? Or Lucozade? It’s meant to be equal part cordial and wine you know. Drink speaks for all my wants and my wants are all a bunch of cunts,’ Petula slurred. ‘What is this awful stuff? What have you put in it? Are you playing games with me too?’

  ‘I haven’t touched it.’

  ‘Oh haven’t you? So I suppose it gets drunk all by itself does it? Don’t think I don’t know about your little raids, you and those children. Nicking the Green & Blacks out of the larder and as many cases of the Blue Nun as you can carry. For your parties.’

  ‘I’ve too much taste to touch that stuff, don’t put it on me.’

  ‘There’s nothing about you I don’t know boy.’

  Jazzy was
about to say that his mother should go to bed by herself or risk a strong-arm escort. A reservation, not edifying or pretty, held him to his seat, and left the words unspoken. Seeing Petula totter in this state presented a ghastly opportunity to break with the preassigned moves and countermoves that regulated and filled their exchanges with content of the utmost predictability. He did not want to play with Petula, as he sometimes did with a lack of charity he could not help, her furious seriousness making her drunken condition a thing of mockery. That was a game he was ashamed of enjoying, suitable for rebellious children, but if a man of his age wished to get on then it would require learning things she would never be ready to disclose or discuss in her right mind. Slumped over her tumbler, wittering on in frowsty semi-consciousness, meant that she could not be better primed for interrogation or being led; it was an opportunity to snatch the power from her side of the table, and turn the screws, for in a fair fight he would have no chance.

  ‘Do you ever think of my Dad?’ he started.

  ‘Yes,’ Petula answered immediately, ‘of course I do. Though I thought you’d finished about all that stuff, you know, how I as good as killed him, a while ago.’

  ‘I have,’ said Jazzy taken aback, already frightened that he had underestimated the speed at which Petula could re-discover her cognitive bearings. ‘What I wanted to ask was what you think about when you remember him. He was a big part of your life once. But we act like he never was. And you know, when you think about it, what’s yours was his, right, and I guess what would have been his is as good as mine, which makes what’s yours sort of mine too. And it all started with him and, well, it’ll all end with me I guess.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, basically what I just said, right?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what any of that gobbledygook is supposed to mean, and I am amazed you do. But as for your father, well, I think nothing of that unfortunate man that you will want to hear, nothing that you’re capable of understanding, I am afraid.’

  ‘Try me. I know you think I’m a bloody idiot but I get things well enough.’

  ‘You have wise-man airs but you understand zilch Jaz, always was, always is.’

  Jazzy ground his teeth and feigned an ironic countenance. It was too soon to bring the subject over to the question of dynastic succession, especially as he had no idea of how to steer her towards this enormous subject without sounding grasping. He decided to stick to curiosity, for the present.

  ‘What do you think about when you think of him, then?’

  ‘Try this. I think about me Jazzy, and not really of him at all, I think of knowing him for all that time without his knowing he was going to die. And I think of the door that suddenly slammed shut for him, and hasn’t for me yet, and what he might still think of me if our places were switched. And I think of how much of a nicer person he would have become if he had lived for as long as I have.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Shut up, I haven’t finished! I think of him dying angry and ignorant and simple, and of all this life stuff being completely wasted on him, because the further into the future you go, the more you learn about the past, and he died too early to learn anything. He’d never even been abroad, not once. Or been further south than Burton, poor man.’ Petula stopped and sneezed into her cup. She could remember Jazzy’s father turning down the chance to share a holiday in Brittany with friends, telling her that she would not go either, since with her imagination, she did not need to travel to a far-off land to know what it was like. She had agreed, not realising that the future would be just such a place. She looked back at Jazzy, who was mopping his scrunched-up eyes with a tea-towel.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘he said he would die happy if he expired within walking distance of where he was born, and he could walk a long way, so who can say he lived in vain? I don’t know whether he really meant it though. Not that, or any of his other oaths and loud predictions. Because it’s usually not the stuff you really want to happen that comes true, rather more the rubbish you spout when you’re not thinking about what you’re saying. That’s the stuff fate will call you out on. Every time I say I hate this place or my life, which I know is quite a lot these days, the chances of my reaching happy old age here lessen. Whether I mean it or not. We exaggerate the difficulties we face because it’s wrong that we should face any difficulties at all. Just look at a baby when it starts crying…’ Petula allowed her sentence to putter out, the plane she had been flying slowly dematerialising until she was left with just her feet for pedals. There was something wrong with her insides, a sour aftertaste, like a marmalade in which the oranges had been substituted for carrots; she may have looked the same but did not taste so, her essence had been substituted.

  ‘Hell, I’m burning, burning up. Well, do you know what I am talking about? Are these the answers you wanted? God, I sometimes hate the sound of my own voice, of me.’

  Jazzy said nothing; he knew what his mother meant all too well. Memories of being teased for his privileged existence as a boy with a rich stepfather, a big house and a bathroom the size of his friends’ cottages, all used to undermine his son-of-theearth credentials, shadowed his every protestation of poverty. And his response to his underprivileged tormentors so blunt that it became as big a part of the ribbing as Noah’s wealth itself: that he would be perfectly happy if he grew up to live in a draughty old shed and grow wormy cabbages. And now look at me, he thought, trying to avoid his mother’s remonstrative gaze.

  Petula flinched as she observed her son’s downturned mouth, doing its best to not give up its shape altogether and open up into the dark hole that preceded a howl; this boy-man whom she could never rid herself of, residing beyond, but still in sight of, her love. How alike they were, dependents both, confusing selfishness for doing what it took to ‘survive’, all so they could sit in a tiny corner of England that they had confused for existence itself, and blame others for their unhappiness. ‘We just haven’t come far enough have we?’ she offered, brushing a tiny blob of hardening mustard off her nose. It fell into her drink and started to dissolve. She considered taking his hand in hers but dismissed it immediately as ridiculous. It would only embarrass them both later.

  ‘No, I mean yeah,’ replied Jazzy. He had no exact idea of what he was negatively assenting to, only that this kind of mood made him intellectually agreeable.

  ‘We haven’t changed, worse luck, but the times have,’ continued Petula, nearly sentimental now. ‘You’ll realise it for yourself one day, how lucky you are to not know what will happen next. As you get on. And get old, you either pretend to be a saint, or degenerate into a pest. What you won’t do is stay the same, that’s the same as degeneration. And if that happens no one will care what you are anyway. It happened to me and it will happen to you. We’re not that different, worse luck. We’re denying progress by simply turning up in our bodies every day.’

  ‘I feel finished at times, if that’s what you mean,’ said Jazzy, doubting very much whether his bright mood earlier that evening had ever really existed.

  ‘What are we still doing here? Alive I mean. This isn’t our time Jasper. What have we left to discover, or offer?’ Petula snatched her drink and gulped at it. Wiping her mouth she continued: ‘Most people who really count and knew me twenty years ago probably think I’m already dead.’

  ‘Maybe we’re being spared for a purpose? Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘If so we’re hardly going out of our way to discover what it is. How long have you been here, how long have I been here? And what have we done with our good luck? With all this good fortune we’ve been drip-fed? Composed symphonies? Written novels? Found a cure for the common cold? No! Simply plotted different ways of fucking one another up!’

  ‘Oh come on Mum, it’s not that bad, is it?’

  ‘Seriously, isn’t it?’

  ‘Give over. We’re a… we’re a family! There’s both good, right, and bad in us. We’ve got to stay positive.’

  ‘Why should
I? What’s the point of us?’

  ‘Steady, right? You’re losing perspective.’ Jazzy moved Petula’s tumbler, and the by-now empty jug, onto his side of the table with authoritative ceremony. It had been hazardous of him to test the power of the snake by prodding it when coiled; Petula’s venom had never travelled an orderly path.

  ‘Oh that sounds clever Jasper, perhaps I am being a perspective-less ninny?’

  ‘Don’t be like that, please Mum. Be nice. We’re not plotting against each other, just the opposite, we’re supporting each other. And what you’ve got to remember about this world Mum is that none of it is serious, you’ve got to remember it’s all just a game, right? A game played to certain rules that stop you from taking it too seriously, from forgetting it’s a game, right?’ Jazzy was attempting to rally; he tapped his head woodenly. ‘A game, yeah? And if you forget that, then you can go a little bit gaga, yeah, that’s the rub.’ Describing life as a game was still the profoundest card in his deck; a PE teacher had once made a great impression on him by making the same point, and having found his mother’s musings more upsetting than revelatory, Jazzy had no choice but to lay it flat. ‘People who can’t see that, well, they can’t see the wood from the trees or the fish from the fowl. And they can end up a bit twisted. I don’t want you to end up like that. There’s no need.’

  Petula looked ready to laugh. ‘A game? I suppose I would rather play a game than go to war. But that doesn’t let you off the hook, because you still have to win both. Plots or no plots.’

  ‘Life isn’t like that Mum. It’s not all about winning and losing all the time, and you can win a war by not playing if you see what I mean, just by living in truth and sticking to your principles, like Gandhi and, you know, flower power and the hippies. All of that lot.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you said life is a game, and war is part of life, so how is not playing it any answer at all?’

  ‘Well, war’s a game too, isn’t it? Like I said, and,’ Jazzy scratched his head, his thread was out there somewhere, ‘…and you win a game by, well, by playing it, and… sometimes not playing it can be kind of like winning too.’