Petula did not notice him go; the drink had turned another corner with her, allowing her to mistake a fruit bowl she was laughing at for Jazzy’s ongoing presence for twenty more minutes, by which time she had forgotten the content of what had passed between them, losses of temper and memory occurring simultaneously, and remembered only that he had upset her in some way, provoking another of her flying furies of which he would doubtless consider himself the victim. The kitchen had grown dismal and all of a sudden Petula had no idea what time it was, the suspicion that it might be late afternoon in winter fuelled by the cold clicking of her joints. Taking her plimsolls off and putting them on her hands like glove puppets, having them ‘argue’ in the voices of Jazzy and Anycock, amused her for a time without wholly extinguishing the fearful appeals of moral reproach; had she gone too far this time?
Crossly ticking herself off for listening to the conversation of phantoms, she clambered up and walked the length of the house, stopping in rooms and spots she normally had no use for, as if to say hello, not quite knowing where she was for periods; her confusion strongest whenever she glanced out of the window, the view full of a colour she did not recognise. Occasionally a sense of emergency would creep into these wanderings; the need to find the lavatory a periodic interruption; the usefulness of switching a light on another. Robotically she would miss both cues, walking into tables and sicking up on her leg. The smell round her began to grow rancid, nature’s call repeatedly absorbed by her slacks, but not knowing what the stench was or where it had come from, only the faint memory that something awful had occurred kept her going, before sleep overtook all, and the horrors of the night joined those others in the overhead locker of accumulated regret.
Waking on a rug at the bottom of the steps, shivering, Petula struggled to free her hair of the scarf she had confused for a nest of nocturnal vampiric crows. The desire to protect oneself, and its mutation into the exploitation of others, was what she had thought of every time she passed the Hockney portrait of Evita in the hall before passing out, and she could still hear the thought repeated as though a tannoy had been set up in her skull. Were there other people in the building who had wired her to it in her sleep? And whose voice was it she could hear, Wrath’s or some old hag’s, about to announce the results of the sack race at her school sports day? The house was alive with strange utterances.
Quickly she wrapped her shawl bedouin-like round her head and, scared stiff, crawled back to the kitchen, encamping under the table where she resolved to count down the minutes until daybreak. From every corner of The Heights disharmonious and weird entreaties threatened to materialise into a concrete manifestation she could at least identify, without being so kind as to actually do so. There was nowhere to hide, but she was not sure who was watching her or why she was desperate to be hidden; she could be seen and heard everywhere, that much she knew. Struggling to her feet and banging her head against the table, Petula stumbled into the hall again and grabbed a large Ming vase out of which she discerned painful groaning, lifting it toward her ear like a giant shell. To her horror, a fearful version of ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ was being sung backwards by a satanic choir, the racket booming deafeningly if she held the vase to her right ear, but changing into a creepy murmur if she switched to the left. Nervously she moved the vase to her eye and peered in; what the hell was in there? Like Alice, but not in Wonderland, Petula saw a frightened woman peer back out into her mouth, deep down into the darkness where her secrets were hidden. It was not her nerves this time, the Devil had come to collect. The house terrified her. She wondered how she had never noticed before. Petula started to scream and cry and jabber and mewl, until she could no longer hear herself, running about in the early-morning light locking doors and closing windows, without the presence of mind to know why or stop.
Rising later that afternoon, Petula was relieved to find that reality was nearly the same as always, at least as far as the weather was concerned, and taking the precaution of avoiding Jazzy for the next few days, she returned cautiously to her established routine.
*
Nothing had been as Regan had foreseen. To start with she and Robinson were not seated together on the plane – she in Economy, Robinson at the front – her one trip up to see if she could share some First Class sushi a short one: Robinson was unconscious in a silk eye mask with ‘Fuck’ and ‘Off’ stitched into the eyes in glittering emerald beads. Regan did not sleep, read or gaze at accompanying clouds, only blink and brood about what she was doing, having never given in to a comparable impulse since that fateful night by the lake. However she sought to justify her journey, she was going a long way on very little, and would not have been doing so, she saw, if she were not a very unhappy individual. The plane was full of omens she tried to ignore; the laboratorial hum of the air conditioning morphing into the guitars on The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ for the duration of the flight, the man next to her resembling an overweight Jeremy exhumed from the grave, and a flat Coca Cola that kept repeating on her comprising the third prong of Satan’s trident. She had been asleep for perhaps a second when the plane landed so abruptly that she thought it had crashed.
New York was not bright, interesting and loud, but overcast, indifferent and noisy. Robinson’s insistence that she lie spread out in the backseat of the car in a sleeping-pill hymn to oblivion, forced Regan into the front like an anxious domestic, ruling out any residue of camaraderie that might have survived the flight. The driver, a balding man with halitosis, or possibly a lively hencoop at the rear of his mouth, leant over every few minutes to tell her how Robert Morley had asked him to slow down in the red-light district, noting conscientiously that nothing had come of it. The atmosphere in the car was lonely and detached from the city outside, suggestive of unfulfilled hopes and wasted trips, Regan thought, as she scowled at the aggrieved face she caught sight of in the wing mirror.
An ugly kerfuffle at the hotel was caused, without his knowing, by David Bowie, who was also going to the Mingus show. His being housed at the last minute in the suite Robinson had originally been booked into prior to the Thin White Duke’s gazumping, forced a hasty retreat to rival premises that would provide a room of similar specifications, on the basis that she be downgraded to a building where her neighbours were senior executives and lawyers, and not Elizabeth Taylor and Prince Nelson Rogers. In a catty and lingering rant that ran from the reception to the dining room, back to reception via the bar, and out into the foyer, Regan began to experience the first inklings of the ‘what-am-I-doing-here’ feeling she was so scared of encountering, recognising it as the harbinger of more misery to follow. Sure enough, on the way into the lift, still screeching at all and sundry, Robinson’s foot was caught momentarily in its closing doors; how hard no one knew, but she threw herself onto the floor howling, clutching the injured limb like a Premier League footballer looking for a free-kick. The next hour was a whirligig of activity, and before Regan had time to find her room, she was taught another lesson in how some lives are more important than others, as the hotel doctor, a surgeon who was staying on the same floor, another doctor from the general hospital, and a private podiatrist all announced that although they could find nothing technically wrong with the foot, Robinson would need it bandaged and rested for several days; the suite immediately transformed into a state-of-the-art medical facility. To Regan’s alarm, Robinson assumed that the best thing for her to do now was to stay in the suite with her as a companion in pain, feeding her Häagen-Dazs and taking phone calls, thus causing another altercation in which Regan left the room almost in tears, but at least left the room, a portfolio of obscene antipodean slang following her out into the corridor.
Splashing her face, and dressing in clothes that did not reflect her in the sassiest light, for in her current mood she did not know what could, Regan fled for a cab, only to feel conspicuously alone with razor-wire butterflies, robbed of her cover in Robinson. The taxi abandoned her a block away from the venue with an hour
to spare, leaving her a sixty-minute window to pace round the warehouse district in heels wondering again, as she hoped she would cease to do once things got going, what the hell she was doing in New York.
With the hour over she found out that if she was there to view art, such an innocent alibi, she was still the very first person at the gallery, for who else but the mad woman of Mockery Gap would turn up to a society event bang on time? Detecting an unhealthy lack of respect for herself that she hoped wouldn’t show, Regan stumbled down the velour steps, past a podium where anyone worth having a camera pointed at them would pose, a line of burning torches, and a pair of giant ‘Matey’ Bubblebath Sailors she presumed Mingus was responsible for, into a narrow tunnel that led to another world. Waiters dressed in overalls and boiler suits approached her, carrying trays of champagne and absinthe cocktails, as behind them, in what resembled a stonewashed sports hall, glass cases full of refuse and obscure tat mutely kept their council. Hung above her from the ceiling in giant parody of a pub sign was an illuminated plaque, with the title of the show, ‘IN THE ABSENCE OF A SOLUTION TO THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS I GIVE YOU A WORK OF GREAT ART’, squashed on in bubbly pink neon lettering.
The room was vast and utterly without atmosphere, less a gallery than a post-modern marketplace in which deals were done; the sense that she had wandered into a commercial hub nauseously omnipresent in the sound of the Stock Exchange, streaming into the hall through hidden speakers. Snatching a drink and taking it to a far-off corner, where a line of squirrel skulls had been arranged along a strip of asphalt next to a packet of tapioca pudding entitled ‘MORE SIGNIFIER-LADEN BRILLIANCE’, Regan feigned absorption in the hope that anyone who saw her would not know at once she was friendless and, were she not so anxious, already quite bored. After several painful moments, impossible to measure other than in intense rivets of fear, the room filled up. Regan was easily absorbed; there were many people, it turned out, who had come on their own, and they were all grateful for a floating companion, however disengaged, to disguise the fact. Managing to avoid looking at any more of the artwork, as very few others had even seemed to notice it, Regan spent the next forty minutes being passed about like a relay baton, in brief conversation with an underwear manufacturer, a moaning rapper from Bristol, a Columbian artist whose parents had been kidnapped by the FARC, and a well-meaning banker who insisted on showing her how she could hear New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ on his mobile telephone, thanks to evolving technology. Pleasant as they all were, Regan would not have travelled from The Heights to Darlington to see them, far less undertake the actual journey she had just suffered. Taking a long time over a trip to the lavatory, she was thinking that it seemed as though the least painful course open to her was to taxi back to the hotel to be alone with her shame, and fly out the following morning, when all at once she was standing face-to-face with him. It was a close-run thing to work out who was more shocked, and in her astonishment, Regan tried to barge past in the pretence that she had not seen, or did not recognise, her oldest friend.
‘Regan… Regan! Hey Regan, stop, it is you! What are you doing here?’
‘What?’
‘Regan, it’s me! It’s me of course, this is my show! What, I mean, what brings you here?’
‘Oh Christ, Mingus!’
‘Yes, Mingus! How come you’re here?’
‘I was, erm, invited.’
‘Well that’s, that’s amazing! I had no idea, no idea you’d be here. This is just amazing! How long has it been? No, forget it, it’s just amazing to see you here, to see you again, it’s been so long! Who invited you? No, forget that, it’s just amazing. Amazing that you’re here full stop. Do you live in New York now?’
‘No, London; do you?’
‘Most of the time yeah, I’ve got a barge in London too, that I sometimes use.’
‘Wow. Two residences!’
‘Yeah, two, three really if you count the place near Palma. And four if you count my parents’!’
‘Palma? Wow! Things have really come on for you!’
‘Yeah, they have, I mean, everything’s changed a lot since we last… saw each other.’
‘So I see…’
Regan was stuck. Mingus was not quite as she remembered him. He was no longer skinny and gave the impression, in his tailored-to-fit clothes, of cool coordinated strength. Wearing tinted glasses and with an at-home-in-the-world gait, he conveyed something that she had not expected; the air of one who had no real need of her. The entire room was here because of him, no one else cared who she was, and she understood she had only seconds to say something to hold his interest or draw him in, before the crowd took hold of him again. It was startling that she had even had him to herself this long and the bridge she had to cross was already drawing up; she had no idea what to say and nor, now, by the look of things, did he. He was still smiling, sincerely; at least she had that.
‘I’m sorry, it’s so crazy seeing you here Mingus! You know, I know you’ve more right to be here than me,’ Regan began again, ‘and this is a really daft thing to say, but I don’t pay much attention to the art world and I didn’t know you were this Magus character I’d heard the name of; I probably should have guessed but I didn’t make the connection,’ she lied, though only in service of her point, ‘and it’s surreal just to see you in this context and know all this is your life now. Unbelievable really, I should just stop going on about it I know! But it’s so different from how I was used to seeing you before.’
Mingus frowned. ‘In Mockery Gap you mean?’
‘Yes, I don’t think we ever saw each other anywhere else, did we?’ she said, hoping to deliberately miss the point, if there was one.
‘You don’t remember that time in London then, when we were small? I often think of it.’
‘Oh!’ Regan was more elated than embarrassed; if he could remember that after all that had happened to him, then there was hope. ‘Of course! I wasn’t counting that, I meant as grownups!’
‘Grownups?’
A tall black woman in a painted-on pinstripe business suit walked through Regan and took Mingus’s arm with calculated authority; ‘Darling, what a lot of wankers there are in here tonight. I can’t wait for us to get away; fucking Americans; I told you an artist doesn’t turn up to his own shows.’
Mingus smiled apologetically, and touching Regan’s shoulder as he was dragged away, managed to say, ‘It was really nice to meet you again after all this time…’
As Regan rushed to the entrance a few moments later, tripping over stray feet and barging into swinging elbows, she was collared by a grinning man she recognised as the pompous bassist of a seminal three-piece rock group that she could never remember the name of, their tunes synonymous with building-society adverts, property development and bleach.
‘You’re Petula’s daughter aren’t you? Do you remember me? I was at a party of your mother’s years ago, you couldn’t have been more than a girl. How old are you now?’ He was already too drunk to consider such peace-time breaches of etiquette as rude, and pressed against her so his arm was resting round her neck. Without waiting for Regan to answer he continued, ‘And how is she? You know, I once did quite a lot to try and help her. It’s been years since I last saw old blood and guts; I suppose she’s still going strong?’
‘Yes,’ Regan somehow managed to say; how she did not know. His breath stank of canopies and cigarettes and riddles of the lower gut. She might yet be sick if she breathed in another word of his, but his hand was on her wrist and he was not letting go.
‘Hmmm, but she’s never been any good at understanding other people’s terms of reference has she? Oh my, I am sorry,’ he placed a hand on her chest flirtatiously as he belched, ‘but perhaps you and she are just the same? Weren’t you called, even then, something like “the sisters”?’
So this, Regan thought, is what it is like to be brought back to life only to be killed all over again. Holding a hand to her mouth, she wriggled the other one free, and turning, ran into
the tunnel towards the muggy aquamarine light.
*
Regan lay fully clothed on her bed, and gazed toward the open blind, too upset to make any other concession to the world of being and doing. It may have been a moment when, were she the type to end her own life, she would have. But Regan took consciousness and public opinion too seriously to consider suicide, understanding that in her case it would make her look a fool and spoil whatever fleeting satisfaction she may yet obtain from eating chocolate and buying a newspaper. Balance, as always, oversaw her torment with smug dispassion.
There were several angry messages from Robinson awaiting her, not so much pouring salt in the wound as mocking her notion that she mattered enough to even be wounded. Lacking the passionate conviction to call her back and tell her to fuck off, Regan resolved to say very much the same thing to Robinson over breakfast, by which time some sense of worldly care may have drifted back to her. For the moment she was a nothing, fit only for the purest melancholic and unfiltered wonder, lying there listening to the passing traffic, wondering where all the different cars were going. This was not what she had expected to be doing on this particular night, but why should she have anticipated any other outcome? Of all the nights of her life, what tiny proportion had been spent in the company of anyone who cared about her? She was lonely, of course she was and had always been so; Petula may have kept her physical company but even then she was alone, cast as her own witness, her actions remembered only by the unnoticed subjectivity whose proper name was Regan Montague.
Nature and Necessity Page 54