Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘I know little girls talk and say all sorts of things they don’t understand just to watch how grownups react so I’ll be kind to you Regan. Have a care.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. That came out wrong… I didn’t mean to…’ ‘Shut up. Firstly Regan, if you have conversations like this with other people they’ll think you’re very boring so don’t attempt to instigate them or take part in them if someone else starts one, do you understand? Second, silence is golden. You look beautiful with it, use it often, even when you don’t need to, it keeps the idiots guessing and saves you from shaving years off your life. Thirdly, I carried you in my stomach, it was that way around alright? I was not born from you, I know you and for the moment, even if that moment is forever, things will remain that way around.’

  ‘I’m sorry Mummy, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘So am I. Don’t let yourself down like this again.’

  ‘I really don’t know where it came…’

  ‘Should you, despite this warning, find your thoughts running away with you, disturbing that perfect silence I ask you to hold, then consider this. Would you rather have me in control or no one in control? That’s the choice. Now go away. You’ve made me very upset.’

  Regan had faced a truth, or at least the possibility of something being true, and was now compelled to forget it, a lesson that was to become a reflex. She would never relate abstractions concerning social progress to the particulars of her life, or share an idea that advanced an interest separate from her mother’s again, until life left her with no choice. More positively, delineating a taboo loosened her tongue in public, and Regan became an excellent foil for discussions within agreed paradigms, be they on napkins, theatre programmes, recipes or dogs. With patient gaiety she observed the seasonal ritual of ‘modest social success’, welcoming its cycles, patterns and deliberate repetitions, as one structurally identical cast after another swapped places round her mother’s table. Home did not seem so taxing anymore, and when she passed her fourteenth birthday, and the Eighties became the Nineties, watching Donald Eager perform opposite Julie Christie in Hamlet, she considered herself saved from speculative self-indulgence. Choice was a waste of time and freedom a black hole with teeth, the facts were not enough in themselves, to believe in anything she had to want to, and it was beyond her to want anything without first receiving Petula’s blessing.

  Regan’s ‘personal life’ was thus confined to term-time. The holidays, overseen by Petula and quickened by the fear of being outed as boring, which is how Regan now viewed her desire to communicate deeper truths, were an interlude in which she worked on her school persona. At Nohallows she moved through her early conformism to more nuanced positions, retaining only a coy loyalty to the institution through an aloof tolerance of her lot. Regan’s carefully contrived air of knowing everything, while saying next to nothing, bordering on world-weariness that would have been absurd anywhere apart from boarding school, won her the respect of her peers; noisy girls who could not sit still or stop talking. Though it was not obvious to her, others acknowledged her as leader of her year, an important, if tacit, position in a system in which hierarchy was ideology.

  Few guessed that The Heights was her training camp, albeit a slightly lonely one, with no one to remark on her enigmatic silences or share her long and slightly desperate walks with. To keep her term-time reputation for being interesting and elusive meant seeing very little of her friends in an environment where they may discover that she was not so great after all. For the first few years Regan invited no one to The Heights; her social life, such as it was, continued to be her mother’s. Contact with friends her own age was limited to forty-eight-hour stays at their houses, and one-off appearances at parties, always sure to be taxied away first thing in the morning before anyone had enough time to get too used to her dazzling serenity. By imitating the actors, writers and poets her mother collected, Regan exceeded the references of her contemporaries which went little further than Just Seventeen and Dirty Dancing. Their limited horizons enabled her to pose as a true innovator, even when parroting editorials of The Economist and The Smiths’ lyrics that she ventured no further than WH Smiths to crib and copy from. Like her mother, success seemed almost too easy, set against such substandard competition, and the resulting confidence was somewhat cheaply acquired.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s about time you brought some of your friends home with you?’ challenged Petula. She had been gazing at her reflection in a mirror she had never looked good in and was feeling peevish. ‘I don’t want anyone thinking I won’t let you have your friends here, least of all them. It’s your home too and I thought you’d be proud of it. In fact, I thought this house would be the envy of your year. God knows you’re popular enough already. You’re invited to things all the time. Think of how much more kudos you’d have if they could all see where you live. You know, I even had a letter from some obscure woman in Brighton thanking you for the influence you’ve had on her daughter for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Beth’s?’

  ‘Whoever; well where are they all, your many followers? Let’s be having them.’

  Regan went the same colour as she had the day she last crossed Petula’s bows, a transgression her mother had forgiven her for by never bringing up. Petula, sensitive to questions of status if to little else, understood the problem at once. Gently she took hold of her daughter’s wrist.

  ‘Is there some reason you don’t want them here, a silly one you can’t help having?’

  Regan nodded, in plain sight of tears.

  ‘I thought so.’ Petula felt her heart undulate protectively; it would not do for the top dog to be unmasked as a puppy in front of her fan club. She would have to think of a way of giving her daughter prime billing for long enough to usher a gaggle of girls in and out of The Heights, their illusions intact. It was an amusing challenge that ought not to prove too tricky.

  ‘Anyway, no rush, there’s so much on over the next few weeks that we don’t need to find new things to do. Perhaps when you’re next home, we could arrange something then. School is such a pressure cooker you need the holidays to vegetate in. It must be a relief not having every old sweat staring at you all the time and knocking on the bog door telling you get a move on. Or changing that channel from your favourite programme in that stinky common room. Quite.’

  Regan nodded; her mother always knew the right time to be a naif. Even in her tight-knit group of friends, an elite known as ‘The Lasses’, Regan was alone, her reticence the invisible curtain that held their worshipful jealousy at bay. The real and sticky mystery of her being was a chimera she did not wish them to probe, her performances and critical notices would only suffer from discovery; far better to trust makeup and lighting.

  ‘I don’t know whether they’re mature enough to appreciate it here Mummy, it might be a bit over their heads. They act much younger than sixteen, I mean, much younger than you were when you were sixteen.’

  ‘So they might, we should wait until they’ve grown up a little. I once went to India before I was ready and ended up hating it.’

  ‘And most of their parents are idiots. Or common.’

  ‘Please don’t use that word in public. People will think we are snobs.’

  In the end, change did not need her or Petula’s assent to enter their lives, it only had to wait for nature. The weeks that followed her sixteenth birthday heralded a new stage in her development as adult features emerged from Regan’s face like carefully hidden treasure. Dimples fell before sharp angles and her chin and cheeks lost the support of the soft flesh that had kept them company through early pubescence. Regan’s height rocketed too, physically turning her into mother’s fair double, her tendency to stoop so as to not to stand out corrected by a firm punch Petula did not hesitate from issuing in public. With her beauty increasing by the hour, Regan wondered how best to try it out before it was spoiled or lessened in some way. Reading her thoughts Petula urged restraint, to do nothing on impulse or bland affection, he
r ‘goods’ were too valuable for that. In fact Petula need not have worried; Regan’s beauty was not the kind that attracted the flies. Regan gleaned for herself that those few boys she came across, especially the hearty ones keen on a girl they could bounce off, could not stand her or stand in her way. Her sleek appearance was fast turning into something frightening, its intimidating unapproachability threatening to become unattractive if deprived of a human airing. With typical adolescent bravura the other Lasses, envious to their awe-enthused cores, decided Regan possessed an aura that could raise the profile of anyone associated with it. Five otherwise pretty girls shed their cheery demeanours and adopted Regan’s lost detachment, floating through their parents’ dinner parties and the new school year like fragmenting icebergs in an Arctic storm. Soon they were all being ignored by boys, bemusing adults and intimidating their contemporaries, a cast apart in an institution that had no tolerance for factions. The headmistress rang Petula at The Heights, not to necessarily blame Regan for The Lasses, who had by now taken to binding their hair up in handkerchief turbans, only implying that if Regan stopped so might the others. Perhaps Petula might raise the matter with her daughter?

  ‘You want me to use my influence over my daughter? Regan is simply being herself, if others wish to imitate her that’s a personal matter between them and their aesthetic sense. You say these girls aren’t actually doing anything wrong, the wrong bit is a sort of attitude you can’t put your finger on. So I say wait until there is something you can put your finger on, a rule they’ve broken; boys, drugs, alcohol, any of that. Then come to me and I’ll be the first to lift Regan’s feet off the ground and spank her arse. Until then I suppose the best thing for you to do is keep a low profile and try and catch ’em out, because at the moment it seems like they’ve got the jump on you.’

  The headmistress, not used to being told how to do her job, took it because she did not know what else to do, her hand still shaking when she lit a cigarette half an hour after she had put the phone down. The following morning Regan had added blue lipstick to her repertoire, so faint as to look like the rigor mortis found on a corpse, the other Lasses following suit later that day. A line had been transgressed; wearing of ‘face-paint’ was against the school rules and Regan, though not formally suspended, was sent home a few days before the end of term. Her tribe waved her off defiantly, their remaining time on school grounds consisting of a heady mix of detention, cross-country runs and slave labour.

  It was this harsh flowering that increased Petula’s estimation of her daughter; her sense of her latent power and future use to her. By the time Regan returned to The Heights, bowed and a little startled at having finally gotten into trouble, Petula was ready to ring the changes.

  ‘Regan,’ Petula announced to her daughter, who stood warily by the door expecting a lashing, ‘I think it’s high time we held you a party, a party for you and your colourful troupe of friends! I expect you could use a lift after all this nonsense you’ve got mixed up with.’

  It was all Regan could do to not moisten herself, with relief or dread she did not know. However, her friends were not here yet and Petula still was – it was too early for a completely spontaneous response.

  ‘You’re not mad with me then?’

  ‘Of course I’m mad with you, you’ve acted like a perfect prune. But where did anger ever get anyone? I’m all for moving forward, you know me, my darling, I say it once and never need say it again. On! The road ahead. That’s my motto.’

  ‘Mummy, I really don’t know what to say, that’s so kind of you…’

  ‘Get on the blower and rally the troops, I have something memorable in mind, one to look back on and miss very much when you’re older. And darling…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Take that ridiculous blue stuff off your lips, it makes you look like one of Dracula’s tarts. No nice man is going to want to get his leg over with you looking like one of the undead. Or thank me for allowing you to remain that way.’

  *

  Jazzy stared at the hand he had been gesticulating with, and shook his head. His mother’s cruelty and kindnesses were unmingled, entire and uneven, which also tended to be reflected in his muddled responses to them.

  ‘I’m trying, I’m really trying to get my head around it, it’s so hard to but I’m trying, give me credit, you’ve got to give me credit for that at least. Yeah?’

  ‘I do, I know how hard you try.’

  ‘You might, but who else does? It’s like I’m banging my head against a wall on my own here.’

  ‘No one else cares as much.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

  ‘I meant no one cares as much as you do, no one’s affected as much as you are by all the shit they give you.’

  ‘What, so you think I shouldn’t care so much. I should just ignore what’s happening?

  ‘Please Jazzy.’

  ‘Sure, no, I know what she expects, I ought to just carry on taking it lying down, being pissed on, right here,’ Jazzy pointed to his mouth, ‘see how much I can take and break a world record for being pissed on, right?’

  ‘You’ve been through too much, I know it, everyone who really knows what’s going on here does.’

  ‘Pissed on, I’ve been, absolutely yellowed.’

  ‘I wish she could see what she’s done to you.’

  ‘I’ve been through more than anyone else could go through.

  You name one person who could go through what I have. I can’t believe what I’ve been through, sometimes I just sit here and think about it and I can’t believe anyone could take all the shit I’ve had to, from all sides, all the fucking time. Do you even know what I’ve been through? I’ve been pissed on.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’ve done it.’

  ‘I didn’t, they did!’

  ‘I know, that’s what I meant. How you’ve stood it, I mean, the piss and shit, how you’ve got through it all, and not allowed it to make you, er, bitter.’

  ‘I don’t know how I’ve done it, no, I’ll tell you why, I’ve done it because I’ve had no choice, it was do it or die. I never had any real choice; no, don’t say I’m going over the top here…’

  ‘I’m not, you’re not.’

  ‘I did it because I care about the place and they couldn’t survive a day here without me, not a day, holding this shit together behind the scenes, fixing their lousy window latches and hammering in their nails for them every time they need a hammerer. I’ve done it, Jill, but it’s come at a cost, a price, you know, that price is my fucking mind.’ Jazzy rapped his head with a bruised knuckle, ‘they’ve done it, done my head in with all their “Heights” bullshite. I’ve had it up to here with it,’ Jazzy held a piece of toast up to where he had had it up to, his neck, ‘the Heights shite, non-fuckin’-stop, never lets up, whenever you think you can have a bit of normality it starts up again, I’ve had it up to here this time,’ the toast was at his neck again, moving in a sawing motion, ‘we’re off, they can find someone else to waste their fucking lives here, not me, this time I’ve got to make a stand. My going is the only thing they’ll understand, we’ve got to do it, pack up and start somewhere else. Because this shite, this shite right, it’ll never finish, never. I can see it going on forever, I mean forever you know. On and on. God, it depresses me so much to think about it. It’s so depressing, so depressing.’

  Jill ran her hand along her lover’s dreadlocked hair and rubbed her nose sympathetically against his ear, ‘You’ve been amazing, doing everything for everyone and never getting any credit. I love you Jazzy, I love you so much.’

  Fondly, he pushed her away, ‘I mean it this time Jilly, there’s a limit to how much shite anyone can take and stay sane, right? It’s got so I can’t even breathe in this place.’ He motioned round the table. It was the wrong room in the house to have used as a kitchen, no big windows, gadgets in the way of one another, corners grimy and poorly lit, the perfect setting for Jazzy’s despairing digressions. ‘What a
m I supposed to do, I ask you, sit here and take it? I’m trying, but there’s only so much you can take before you break. And that’s what I think they’ve done to me Jill, broken me with their bullshite, I can’t even enjoy my breakfast any more, going out or even talking to you. It’s like there’s this horrible, depressing, filthy, shitty thing separating me from all the stuff I used to connect with. Seriously, it’s getting in the way of me being able to enjoy life, what’s left for me to enjoy. I feel like I’ve turned into a nutter. I’m a broken man, that’s basically it. They’ve fucking broken me Jilly. That’s how shit I feel about it all, it’s like none of the good stuff exists for me anymore. She’s won, she’s got what she wanted, she’s taken my minerals. And this, this is just too much.’

  It was a speech Jazzy made two or three times a week, and every Sunday morning too, groggy and stoned from the night before, if Saturday had been really bad. The loose plaster on the walls and broken appliances stacked by the back door showed the effects of his frustration, as did his sunken knuckles, distorted from punching the oil tank, prematurely greying hair and serrated teeth, the product of too many rants on the whizz. Still only in his mid-twenties, complaint had become a way of life, the news that his sister was to have a large party at the main house, and that his mother expected him to ‘buttle’ at it inspiring this latest tirade.

  ‘She makes me so angry, I wish I could do something to protect you Jazz. I’ve a good mind to go up and give her what for, you know. Finally. She can’t keep treating you like this. Who does she think she is? It’s got to stop.’

  Jazzy picked up a bit of loose rolling paper and crushed it in his hand. The song had basically remained the same for as long as he knew the words: how could his mother treat him this way?

  ‘This time she’s going to see a different me, she’s pushed me too far. I mean, she expects me to wear a bow tie, you know, who’s ever looked good in one of those? I’m not Roger shaggin’ Moore. We’re leaving and that’s it. Mark my words and remind me of them, you know me, what I say I mean, and what I mean I always do, always.’