Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Jazzy pulled out his rolling apparatus enthusiastically, flattered that he had an audience for his thoughts. ‘Right, the way I see it, right, is to not be mad, to be balanced, all your proportions have to be very nicely adjusted to each other. But if any one part thinks it can make the journey on its own without the others’ help, it’ll destroy the balance your sanity requires,’ he tapped his head intently. ‘Madness, like you think of it being, that’s in most of us all the time, but we check it all the time to stop it getting out of hand, yeah? But Mum can’t anymore, because she just doesn’t want to. And because something else has got into her. She’s being guided by a bad spirit.’

  ‘What, like a ghost or a devil?’

  ‘That’s what I think after I’ve been at this stuff,’ he said, pointing at his drug tin, ‘some unhappy demon that’s recognised a kindred spirit in her and is taking her over the edge with it. But,’ he carried on, not wanting to alienate his new partner with too much metaphysics, ‘you don’t have to dig that deep to see Mum’s not in control anymore. She’s dangerous, to herself and us. What she did to Evita, driving her mad and away, the same’s happening to me. And maybe even to you now, yeah? We can’t do nothing. We can’t. We have to be, right, like, resolute from now on. We have to take our turn to be in charge.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Regan, impassive, ‘you sound a bit like her yourself, and why shouldn’t you? I mean it as a compliment. She’s always summing things up, isn’t she, leading us from crisis to crisis that only she can save us from.’

  ‘There’s nothing that can stop her from carrying on like this forever unless we do something! I mean it Regan. I’ve thought and thought about this so much, non-stop. There is more going on in my head than there used to be, and I tell you, I keep coming back to the same thing. She’s got to go.’

  ‘Leave here? Me too, what’s going on here has got to stop, I don’t think I can last another meal myself.’ Regan took another sniff of her tea, tepid, cloudy and cold now. ‘If you’ve got any herbal, poof’s tea to you, I’ll have some. Otherwise could I have some hot water?’

  Jazzy got up eagerly and, throwing open a cupboard, began to rummage with endearing concern, his sister metamorphosing from threat to ally, a comrade whom he would gladly protect under the threat of torture, and would be glad of a chance to prove it. His loyalties were fanatical, triggered by a surplus of care that a life of conflict had deprived him of the opportunity to share, his devotion driven by a need born of rejection that he confused with principle, the prospect of joining forces with Regan exhilaratingly liberating.

  ‘Here, ’alf a mo’. You’ll like this.’

  Regan accepted the mug of microwaved fruit squash humbly, pretending to not notice the caffeine-lined rim of the Steam Fair souvenir cup. A doubt had been removed, a sceptical voice she did not hear anymore gone, and the blankness, which was simply the fear of admitting to what was what, had been filled in.

  ‘It’s so awful,’ she said, ‘because I don’t know what to do about it anymore. Before I could make a hint, or stay silent, there was always a way of making Mum see herself and compromise, so if she pushed I could push back. I wasn’t helpless.’

  ‘Yeah, she understood that she could only push so far before she broke you.’

  ‘Exactly. She did, instinctively, she had a political head like that. But I feel absolutely hopeless now, nothing I say to her works, I can’t reason with her or appeal to common sense, she makes it up as she goes along. And I don’t have a method or way to protect myself to keep her off me anymore. I’ve tried every option, being respectful, keeping my distance, and when that didn’t work, being here all the time if she asks me, taking her into my confidence, even standing up for myself, but nothing makes any difference. She’s too much, too much for me.’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘It’s only the truth. And I sit there, knowing that everything she is saying and doing, none of it’s true, it’s all wrong, it’s all false, it’s destroying her and I know that there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it, that to try to is impossible. And then I find that I don’t even have the energy to agree, even though I know disagreeing is pointless. So I’m just sort of there and not there. It’s horrible, like I’m dying. It’s killing me Jazzy. And she doesn’t stop. The demands go on and on. I don’t want to daughter as she mothered anymore.’

  Regan’s eyes, even when they were happy, had always looked as though they could see something sad, and for the first time Jazzy truly pitied her, the anointed one and heir to an unhappiness purer and less cluttered than his own. ‘It’s all survival techniques, it’s alright if you think they make a difference and that things will slowly get better, but we know better than that. Seriously Regan, you might not think it, right, but I’ve tried everything myself. Like you. And nothing works and nothing will change. Or if it does change, it’ll change only to get even worse. We’re nearly old. Our time is passing by and we’ve got to do something, right, before it’s too late for us. This shit is urgent, no lie.’

  ‘It’s like there’s this process going on,’ said Regan, ‘a kind of movement where everything’s going faster and faster and I just know that it will all end terribly unless we can stop it somehow…’

  ‘We can’t. We’re marked, all of us, and we can’t get out of it. That terrible thing you mention, we either do it or we wait for it to happen to us. Do you know what I am saying?’

  Regan knew what Jazzy meant but did not feel ready to speak of it yet. Instead she stood up, and he taking his cue did the same, locking in a mutual embrace, Jazzy welling up and sobbing and stopping himself and then allowing it all out again, hoping that the kids didn’t barge in with the puppies as he’d have trouble explaining this one to them; Regan allowing herself to be squashed and held close, the charge of emotion agreeable and intense, if somewhat empty. She was still ice-queen enough to see that their new bond was as attributable to their mother as their old division had been, though she knew it would be a while before her brother recognised this.

  ‘We’ve played her game you know,’ said Jazzy, rubbing his eyes and reaching into his pocket for a lighter, ‘you know, allowed ourselves to be played off against each other, letting it happen, baying for each other’s blood when we should have, you know, not have let her take advantage.’

  Of your natural jealously for me, Regan wanted to add, opting for the less contentious, ‘I know, she doesn’t mind people hating each other if it furthers her objectives, they’re always free to make up later if they want. I used to think she did it by mistake but…’ Regan went quiet, she had never talked about her mother like this before, but as with everything else in this exchange, her part had already been written for her, the lines simply waiting for her to realise they were there. ‘Look, I don’t want to just stand here and bitch her off, and then have everything go back to how it was. Let’s be clear, I think I do know what you mean, what you’re implying, and it isn’t that she move to a new house, is it? Have you given it, you know, this thing, a lot of thought? I mean like plan what you’re going to do, not just whether you can do it?’

  ‘Yeah, a lot. What about you, have you?’

  ‘Idly, not seriously, but only because I don’t dare really think about it like something that I could actually do, only as sort of hypothetical dream that I want to happen. But I guess I have, yes, you know, slip something into a drink, fiddle about with her medication, I feel crazy enough to. Completely unhinged, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Tell me about it, you’d have to be to get into the right zone. But could you, you know, could you do it yourself. If you had to?’

  ‘I don’t know, no, not when I think about it like this, speaking normally about it. But since I came back from New York, I find that every time I think of her the only way I can stand the thought is by knowing she’s going to die someday. I mean her death, it’s both a surrender and an attack if you see what I mean? Oh shit, this isn’t right…’ Regan cl
utched her head.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No, no of course not! Think of what we’re saying here Jasper, how could I be alright? Half of me doesn’t even know what I’m talking about…’ Regan sat down, lest she fall, a phalanx of nausea closing in on her, ‘this is just…too crazy. I can’t believe it is happening, I’m so tired, I haven’t slept properly, I don’t know, for literally months and months… Are we for real?’

  Jazzy ceremoniously lifted his finger to his lips. ‘Not another word, you’ve suffered enough, let me take this on right? I’m going to take care of it all. And look after us.’

  Regan gazed up at her brother, stood over her with the murderous assurance of an underworld enforcer, and sensed his crazed excitement. And she did, she had to admit to feeling strangely safe, the wind having grown calmer, moving over the yellow stubble of the fields in gentle strokes, the howling in the chimney place now an uninhabited whispering.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  Jazzy nodded solemnly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Good, and not a word to anyone mind, we’re into something here and…’

  ‘I know,’ Regan replied, hurrying to condemn them to a queer fate that she had no desire to understand too quickly, witness, face or explain to anyone else.

  ‘Perfecto. Then we get each other then. That’s the thing.’

  Outside, her car looked out of place, parked where no car of hers had ever stopped before, the chrome chirruping of a jackdaw reminding her of an earlier time when she and Petula had walked down to the cottage and laughed at how ugly it was, waiting to see if their provocative cackles would draw Jazzy out into one of his amusing tirades that Petula enjoyed, and Regan secretly feared. Jazzy was no more to her than he had been when she first entered his house an hour earlier; had any of it been any more than an abrupt dream? She shuddered all over, she could see her mother’s disappointed face over the dining table; you could only change sides so many times in this life: the enemy of her enemy was still her enemy; what had she done?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN,

  late and later.

  The sun had already started to stamp its way through the thin quilt of low-hanging cloud; there was not another moment for Jazzy to lose, he had spent the night awake floating on his sweat for this, sometimes thinking he had fallen asleep and experienced the relief of having done it, electric currents producing images of his face as a hammer and Petula’s as the skull, the weapon chasing the object round his workshop; her screams, his tears, his screams and her tears, phantasmic companions until the alarm went and Spider, shivering in her nylon gown, winter’s nip now in the air, dragged the first of the kids out of bed for school. The night before, Jazzy had calculated that it was impossible for him to remain conscious for an entire day and hold his nerve intact until nightfall, there had to be the break of sleep, or some approximation of it, so that the resolve he woke with would translate seamlessly and quickly into the deed. Little could be less suspicious than an accident in broad daylight, and with Regan in the house, who in unfeigned shock would be the one to stumble upon the corpse, he had gained a perfect and half-knowing foil. Her visit the previous afternoon was the sign he had been waiting for; his adult life had up until then been an ultimatum torn up in his face, the paper stuck to his blushing cheeks: today was the beginning of the new calendar.

  Jazzy reached for the ashtray and lit the joint, a pair of crumbled Es rolled in with the baccy and skunk, a raver’s rum ration. It would be just the one spliff this morning; one last compressed session of doubt, buoyed by hesitancy, blind terror, and then out the other end to life everlasting. Was it Petula he wanted to stop or the fear he felt whenever he opened his front door and skulked into the world? It wasn’t too late to step off the carousel, and let the ride go on without him; he could move to another country and take the kids and Spider with him – they would always make ends meet somehow, other people did, the world was enormous and Petula would be left behind, an unreal memory that they might sometimes even look back and laugh at. Jazzy attempted to visualise where they would go, and had got as far as a couple of swings and a barn before he saw that his vision was a memory of The Heights of his childhood. He was utterly held by the place. The move would never happen, nor the laughter or looking back in mock tranquillity; he would always know that she had beaten him, and of what he could have achieved had he only the guts to stay and finish it. The fear would still be there, a killer of a different kind, living alongside him till the end of days. He had not invented this, there really were no other options or exits, and if he had not been such a good person in the first place, he would not have wasted weeks tormenting himself with ways of saving her. This was his day, the hour of the Anycock, vengeance most justified! He stabbed the joint out, having consumed it in four systematic inhalations, a killer whale catching its breath before going underwater again, and rolled out of bed onto the cold tiled floor. The pile of clothes he had prepared the night before, folded up on the rickety stool that doubled as something to sit on when his clothes weren’t on it, lay in a bold pile; a suit of armour for the battle ahead. With the automatically repressed sensation that this might be the last thing he did with his life, Jazzy dressed, a rolled-up balaclava sat atop his head like a beanie cap going on first; next his thick walking socks and tight trunks that clung to his thighs like cycling shorts, which Spider preferred to the candy-striped boxers that made stalks of his legs, then beige combat trousers, army surplus boots, a Mickey Mouse vest (worn for luck) and donkey jacket, given to him by a veteran of the Battle of Orgreave. He was ready now, and checking his menacing reflection in the mirror, Jazzy judged himself a suitable candidate for a coffin-bearer at an Irish Republican Army funeral. The analogy was fitting. Movements with unrealisable political goals gradually degenerated into criminality, obeying a law of entropy, but in his refusal to accept he was a gangland assassin, or idealist chasing the impossible, rather a freedom fighter on his home turf struggling for national liberation, Jazzy saw redemption; war called for a different kind of seriousness to peace, for a warrior who understood that the freedom of his people came at a blood price. By the time he had laced his boots, his head filled with visions of himself besieging Troy, javelin in hand, Jazzy could not have felt any better, deciding to skip kippers and porridge lest he offset his E-rush.

  Clambering out of the bedroom window, somewhat unnecessarily, already completely free of his reason, Jazzy bound up the hill, vaulting over the fence, so as to approach The Heights from the fields and make his way round the back, a guerrilla who knew his own land better than any invader, the frantic thrill of imaginary bullets whistling past his ears accompanying his galloping drug-high. Crossing yet another fence, which to his annoyance he saw he had coated in a thin line of razor-wire, dumped in the woods by a military contractor, Jazzy felt the slack of his trousers catch and rip, wrong-footing his jump, so that he landed on one leg turning his ankle. Grimacing in agony, but back on both feet in an instant, Jazzy chuckled at the extent to which he still lived in fantasy as a reflex pleasure; an embarrassing reminder of all he was not in actual fact, his situation never so heroic as he desired. He was a forty-four year-old would-be-murderer on a desolate hillside in North Yorkshire with his arse hanging out of his pants, not Che Guevara in a Bolivian Jungle leading grateful Indians to El Dorado, but fortunately the drugs were too powerful for this to make a marked difference to his mood. The chemicals were throwing up all sorts of ominous shapes and shadows in the unyielding morning light; yew trees stalking towards him and gnarly puffs of gristle sailing through the sky like Zeppelins, but nothing could extinguish the joyful emptiness that preceded his leap into the void, light and carefree, the promise that things may not turn out as usual dazzling, if just for one day.

  Jazzy sucked at his tongue, running it back and forth over his teeth and gums, puzzled that someone had turned the music down, before realising that he was so off his tits that k
eeping in motion was all that stopped him from rolling onto the grass and simply lying there with his feet in the air, gurning like a toxic tramp. He had to keep moving, that was the key to landing the plane in the right place.

  Hurriedly he entered the long run of lawn that bordered the back of the house, mown so low that it already resembled some extinct substance; dried beds of lavender, wilting rose stalks and overripe apples, browning and fit to explode, sucked into a memory of the innocence he was leaving behind. Catching himself out again, he stopped running and tried to walk, the inclination to actually dance his way across the garden nearly irresistible. He was far too visible, and oughtn’t charge across the garden like a rampaging barbarian, while at the same time taking equal care to not creep in, as in the ordinary course of things he was loud and imposing, and nothing should appear out of the ordinary. Or was he being too cautious? After all, it didn’t matter who saw him there, he was a common enough sight, and Petula did not deign to notice him at the politest of times. Jazzy settled on a half-walk, half-trot, lending him the air of a desperate comedian milking an audience for cheap laughs, as he hobbled across the lawn out of breath, ridges of sweat steaming off his brows.

  The curtains both upstairs and down had already parted, and he could see sharp and deliberate movements in the kitchen. Taking a hunk of bread out of his pocket he jogged up to the bird-table, under the guise of replenishing it, to see what the activity heralded; faintly he could hear Petula’s booming voice carry through the glass, another passionate lecture before breakfast, he adduced. Would she be wasting her time with more talk, or the morning paper, if she knew this was the last sunrise she would ever see? Surreptitiously he shuffled nearer the window, with his back still turned to it, a moonwalk Michael Jackson would have been proud of, had Jazzy kept his balance and not fallen sideways into the flowerbed.