Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘It’s the unfairness Jazz, it’s so unfair.’

  ‘She doesn’t realise I’m a man of my word.’

  ‘I know it.’

  Jazzy nodded, encouraged that his core grievance should have found its way off his chest into the mouth of another, albeit his devoted girlfriend, Jill ‘Aries’ Cronin.

  ‘I hate the way they’ve taken all your good energy and given you all their bad. You deserve better karma than this, Jazzy. All you’re about is good vibes.’

  Which in itself was a matter of opinion. The perceivably unfair treatment between Jazzy and Regan, tacitly justified by the fact that Jazzy was not Noah’s son (a biological quirk Jazzy considered tasteless to bring up) steadily defined Jazzy to a point where it whispered to him in his sleep. For all Petula’s posturing, Noah held the purse strings, and though he was not averse to financial appeasement, his friendly indifference to his extended family could not survive the tempest of Jazzy and Evita’s adolescence. By the time the boy hit twenty-one his stepfather was looking to slash the subsidies that Jazzy considered stingy on account of their failure to keep up with inflation. The moral imperative that this man should pay for stealing his mother from his real father, as Jazzy saw it, cut little ice with Noah who made more of personal responsibility and other fascistic abstractions. Questioning Jazzy’s lived experience of inequality, his key to understanding life’s many complexities, gave Noah his first black eye and Jazzy his first night in the cells, experiences neither wished to repeat. Wisely their mutual antipathy switched to the cold kind, Noah keeping Jazzy alive and no more, Jazzy doing nothing to make him change his mind or pursue the more generous tack he held out for.

  With a care he showed nowhere else in his life, Jazzy refused to openly blame Regan for the way she benefited from his or Evita’s ‘neglect’. Instead the simmering jealousy he embraced, albeit hidden within the language of natural justice, grated painfully with his self-image of being a ‘laid-back’ guy, ‘chilling’ his way through life. He loved Regan in a brashly sentimental fashion and did not relish either envying her good fortune or others noticing his obsessional resentment. Unfortunately, he was unable to suppress it and would regale anyone from the postman to distant relatives on the subject after the first drink had passed his lips. If only he could be given the means to succeed, he would show them all, and in doing so, prove himself at last. Yet his attachment to the farm either killed him with kindness, he feared, or tied him to a way of life that never raised him further than dependence, he claimed, so in the end he went nowhere.

  Petula could never leave a problem unexploited for long and decided that she would eventually have to find a use for her quarrelsome firstborn. Carefully she manipulated him through his many grievances; if he let go of them she knew he would lose his capacity for being played, but, she guessed correctly, bitterness was a path he could not abandon. He was like a dog in search of an owner, his loyalty and fervour wasted on those who did not value it. Times that were merely bad became terrible in relation to what they should have been; poor in comparison to how much his mother appeared to be enjoying life anyway.

  Petula had been quick to make the most of her ambiguous relationship to work. The night with Wrath was locked away, the day in Shatby released into the world, the role played by her organisational genius growing at every telling. Events of a similar stature were offered up to her and she was careful to share joint billing with whomever fell under her authoritative spell. Fetes, concerts, outdoor productions of The Tempest and Prince Charles’s visit to the York Viking Centre all fell under her capable auspices. To Petula’s chagrin, though not surprise, her growing renown as an occasion manager did not make enlisting Jazzy to her cause any easier. His childhood rejection of her world had established a fault line neither he nor she could traverse. Even if his fantasy of being a rock-and-roll gypsy had struggled to survive its first encounters with real life, Jazzy had not taken refuge in her dazzling trinity of country life, high society and culture. What Petula needed was a basic change in strategy that could secure the ends she had failed to obtain by more obvious means; to turn what had always upset her most to her ultimate advantage: Jazzy’s refusal to move away. True, his farm-bound stasis had known some gentle variations; a few months dossing on floors in Hull, an extended holiday on Australia’s Gold Coast, several exchange trips to Corsica and yearly inter-rail adventures, all absentmindedly funded by Noah in the hope that one day the boy would not return. Unlike Evita, who fled the nest having blinded a local lad in one eye after a sexual assault no one could prove, her last-known addresses a series of lesbian squats in Hamburg, Jazzy loved the farm even as he despised its traps and trappings. If it were up to him, his future would lie nowhere else.

  ‘This farm may be your great love but it’s a great love that has no room or need for you Jasper. It’s what the poets would call love of the unrequited variety, the sort that makes no one happy, capiche? You must realise by now I’m the only thing standing in the way of you and a rocket to someplace else. Noah’s been egging me to get you to sling your hook…’

  ‘He doesn’t give a shit, it’s you who’s always hated me.’

  ‘…to get you off the property ever since you landed him that shiner. Your marching orders are on the tip of his tongue, kept only from being spoken of by me, the poor fool whom you profess to hate. But that’s another story. The point is you can’t carry on loafing round here indefinitely, it isn’t your home. And your acting like it is sort of makes me feel a bit sick, actually.’

  ‘Let me work here, do that and I’ll show you here’s where I belong. I’m good for it Mum, I’ll show you if you let me.’

  ‘Show me? Oh come on, haven’t you already been here long enough? I’m sick of waiting for you to wake up and do something manly. You’re twenty-one years old for God’s sake, in my day that was old enough for you to be sent out to war; in Iran that’s old enough for you to be made a bloody General.’

  ‘I love this farm.’

  ‘I wish you’d follow your sister’s example and vamoose under a cloud. She daren’t come back. Some big brother you were to her anyway, couldn’t even keep her out of trouble, and once she shows she has the stones to do what you can’t, actually leave, well, even that’s beyond you, so you end up writing miserable letters asking her to come back. She’s told me! Call yourself a man. Instead of handing out black eyes and pinching the odd arse you should gear up for a full-blown crime. Do something that makes a difference instead of standing in front of me feeling sorry for yourself. Become a mercenary or something.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m not a good brother, that I don’t love my sisters…’

  ‘You’re not a good brother Jasper, you have never exerted any positive influence over either of your sisters or been a support to them in any way other than rhetorically, and I don’t need to tell you where you get that from. Your father was a great one for investing in the bull farm, especially when it came at no cost to himself. But I’m not going to suffer for you like I did for him; you see, this conflict just isn’t worth it. The point is, yes, Regan is lucky that Noah is her father, but you, you are lucky that I married her father. Which makes you lucky but just not as lucky as Regan. That’s all there is to it. Be thankful you weren’t born being barrel-bombed in a ditch in East Pakistan.’

  ‘I can’t believe you, where you get off? I don’t. I don’t get where this comes from… the evil, your poison. You, you were never there for either of us, we were practically abandoned when you were out partying with your devils, slags, whoever they were. Do you know what happened to us all the times you were out, what it was like to be left alone every time? Call yourself a mother? I hate you. You’re a fake, an irresponsible monster. Selfish, selfish, selfish. You killed my Dad.’

  ‘Oh come on.’

  ‘And you followed the fuckin’ money. I reject you with all my might, right?’

  ‘Which isn’t very much is it?’

  ‘You’ve never believed in us, it was always y
our shit, we never had a chance. Your friends fucked us.’

  ‘Never had a chance? Well it’s not like the sculpting career ever got anywhere, is it? How they laughed at me for believing in you then… You see the trouble is, I have wanted to believe in you Jasper. Of course I’d prefer to think you’re something better than a deadhead but it’s you who’s never let me. Never let me by failing at anything you turn your hand to. Your career as a sculptor, your chance to be an artist, what happened there, eh? Oh Christ, I shiver to think of what a prat you made me look; prat, did I say prat? I meant something far worse that rhymes with hunt.’

  Jazzy had to give his mother that one. It had always been her knack to find the one aspect of an argument that afforded her a sliver of validation, and reduce every subsequent disagreement to it. For a moment, albeit quite a long one, Petula wondered if Jazzy might have a dispensation for what his teacher called ‘three-dimensional art’ or what she preferred to think of, until disabused by the data, as sculpture. On principle she asked Noah to provide the eleven year-old with the materials, whilst she offered the moral support, her friends taken aback at the savage pride she was prepared to take in Jazzy, now that he had finally shown ‘artistic credentials’.

  Jazzy did indeed enjoy handicraft, creating and filling small plastic moulds to manufacture the faces of trolls, orcs and gargoyles, loosely based on swords and sorcery fiends, often producing several dozen at a time. With the tender concentration of one with little else to do, he stuck these grotesque shapes onto bodies cannibalised from dolls and other family-friendly toys, leaving his mutant creations round the farm to surprise people. Noah lost his aim when he found one leering at him from the top of his lavatory panel early one morning, and his sense of humour when another turned up stuffed in the exhaust of his MG. ‘The Creatures’, as Royce dubbed the miniature monsters, showed a skill in construction and idiosyncratic touches that could at least deflect questions over whether they amounted to little more than a hobby or not. It was, as Petula made clear to her circle, ‘a start’. Ten years later Jazzy was still at it, the creatures having found lebensraum in three sheds, their novelty palling in a way that had yet to affect production. Inspired by the outdoor sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy, Jazzy branched out into transforming burrows, old badger warrens and hollowed-out trees into dens and castles for his charges, attracting a photographer from Orcwind and Fire magazine, though sadly not Goldsworthy, whom Petula loyally prepared a herring casserole for in the hope of luring him to The Heights. A showing held outdoors one Halloween, flares lighting the figures’ determined silhouettes, and a catalogue describing them as a lost tribe of Yorkshire Pixies, was the last straw for Petula, who, having had the designs rejected by a toy company Noah approached, asked Jazzy to melt the lot down.

  ‘Yes, your sculptural work still turns up in the most interesting places, not private collections I’m afraid. No, the gardener dug up a thing that looked like a dwarf with small pox. Don’t think he knew quite what to make of it.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about all that now.’

  ‘No. I bet you don’t. What was it you wanted to talk about again, I forget?’

  ‘I want to work here, here on the farm, just let me prove myself, right?’

  ‘Not again.’

  ‘It’s where I’m meant to be, please.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Please Mum, please.’

  ‘There are some things I suppose you could do…’

  ‘Please, I’ll do anything, I’m good for it, I can work.’

  ‘By God boy, you’ll owe me though.’

  ‘Anything, I’ll do anything to work here.’

  ‘Better on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in, I suppose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Later Jazzy would claim that he did not know what he was letting himself in for, his dependence on his mother’s patronage moving from the conditional to the absolute. As with any farm, there was no shortage of unpleasant tasks that required unskilled labour, and so at his insistence, Jazzy found his adult calling. Not farming but labouring. There was never any question of there being a honeymoon period, his was not the kind of work that allowed for that.

  ‘I assure you that you will learn the true meaning of a thankless task.’

  ‘I’ve told you, bring it on, it was what I was born to do.’

  ‘Pride before the fall.’

  ‘What is it you don’t want to get? It would be so good for you to think I can’t take it, but the trouble is I can, I’ve been taking it all my life. I don’t care what you throw at me, I can take it.’

  But he did care, even if he could take it, at first only a little, soon after a bit more, and eventually very much. Jazzy’s attempts to get involved in the more meaningful side of farm work were marginalised and stymied by the tenant farmers who got their kicks watching Petula’s boy dig up thistles and nettles for them. Glamorous guests would hurtle up and down the drive wondering who the surly youth potholing the track in all weathers was, or glance across the lawn and marvel how lucky they were not to be digging an irrigation ditch in the middle of a storm. In this way any joy taken in a practical life that Jazzy nursed a passion for merged with a drudgery indistinguishable from a slave rowing his master’s galley. Annoyed at his cranky ingratitude, sullen self-absorption, and the thought that she now lived under the same roof as a labourer, Petula prepared her coup de grace. It would come in the form of the ‘middle’ cottage, The Jacaranda Tree, a gift-wrapped castration she knew Jazzy could not refuse.

  Since the military couple had fled, The Jacaranda Tree had come down in the world, ending up in the hands of a family of Sikhs who had violated the terms of their agreement by turning the building into a Temple. With directed needling, Noah evicted the tenants who, displaying a docility unknown in The Heights, left promptly and without argument. The Jacaranda Tree was Jazzy’s gift for services rendered, a way of giving him some of what he wanted, whilst withholding the independence he craved. The house was delivered on the condition that his tasks were to continue at a high standard, failure to complete them would mean the introduction of a rent he could not afford; not because Noah cared anymore, his life and interests existed elsewhere, and the arrangement was Petula’s baby. But now her son would owe her his adulthood as surely as he blamed her for his past.

  ‘There are just three dwellings on this farm, here’s your chance to show what you can do with one of them.’

  ‘I won’t let you down.’

  ‘It’s not me being let down I’m worried about. Deep feelings are no good without deep thoughts, you’ll need to use your loaf on this one boy.’

  The opportunity to return the house to its former condition was a project Jazzy embraced, rushing round DIY shops, retail parks, builders’ yards and charity shops for trophies and knickknacks. He made some good beginnings, though, to his frustration, nothing visible enough for the farm at large to remark on. The fiddly details never grew past initial implementation, whereas his weeks in the workshop produced well-made artefacts that had no place in the house he returned to. Meanwhile he drowned under the sheer number of onerous tasks cast his way. By the end of the first year the only concrete change to the building was the name Tianta, which cost sixty pounds he did not have (in conformation with fire-brigade regulations) to register. At home, asbestos boards remained in place, along with leaks, crumbling tiles and lakes of damp; elsewhere leaf clearance, the rodding of drains, unblocking of gutters and gravelling of tracks sapped whatever vigour and vim remained. The cottage, which his mother now dubbed ‘The Pimple’, remained without electricity until Noah paid for it to be installed properly, the poor plumbing forcing Jazzy to come back to the main house to use the lavatory. Soon, a case could be made for the project having become a burden to the main farm and not the asset Jazzy had promised. His anger, which had been a boy’s, now grew to man-sized proportions. Different farm tools bellowed with his rage; the boiler, strimmer, van, t
ractor and even lawnmower, no season or inanimate object safe from the overflow of his pain.

  ‘I really can’t see what the matter is? You’ve got what you’ve asked for, how many boys your age can boast their own house and regular work? And what work! You don’t even need to get on your bike to find it, no one minds if you’re a little late, you can take breaks whenever you like…’

  ‘I… you’ve tricked me, haven’t you?’

  ‘Have I? Have I really?’

  ‘This isn’t right, no, the way you’ve made this out isn’t right. You gave me guarantees, right?’

  ‘Which you’ve singularly failed to keep your end of. I don’t mind keeping you on, even if you’re not up to it, I’ll always do everything I can for you, but for heaven’s sake please stop this constant whining, it’s like listening to an old woman getting her sums muddled up. You’ve got it in you to be better than this.’

  ‘You’ve set me up, this isn’t fair! How was I supposed to know it would be like this?’

  And with his face wet with salt water Petula could see what he meant.

  ‘Nature hates an unlucky man, Jasper. But there’s a difference between a man down on his luck and a victim, do you know what I mean by one of those? One who is so unlucky, so often, that it doesn’t count as bad luck anymore, the sort of fellow who is an unconscious participant in his own misfortune. You’ve never missed an opportunity to make it all a little worse for yourself, have you?’

  ‘Christ Mum, can’t you just for once make it easy for me and stop the games? It doesn’t have to be like this, right, we could all be living in paradise…’

  ‘Well at least you’ve an honest face Jasper, that will attract sympathy for you if nothing else does.’

  Petula was right. The sympathy Jazzy won was heartfelt, his intense experience of victimhood obscuring the respect he forfeited to land it. At times he wondered whether Petula wished to see him humiliated so she could be his only friend; there was never an unpleasant exchange that was not followed by a generous hamper full of goodies. Not that he did not need them; he was not used to living alone. Having rejected his mother’s world, Jazzy now found his own not to his liking, the dream of inhabiting his own rural republic failing to tally with the plans of his friendship group. They had fled to exotic imaginings of their own – India, Florida, Tenerife, or London – leaving him very much alone with a local community he remained on the margins of. The Hardfields were always there for love, though their acceptance of their lot made his complaints unintelligible to them, and despite the goodwill shown by most locals, his attempts at farm insurrection were ignored or dismissed. Like the editor of a student newspaper pontificating on world politics, his views were held at too little cost for him to be heard, he was just the boss’s son after all, fed, clothed, tolerated, or just about. As his mother said when he expressed his disbelief that she had not been ejected from the house by a mob of downtrodden peasants, ‘the labourers on this farm do not live in “The International Working Class”, they live in Mockery Gap in a country called England, and if they feel threatened, that is what they will defend. And so long as Noah and I are careful to not take the piss, that’s how things will stay.’