Jazzy’s self-imposed exclusion bit hard that first winter in Tianta. There was no social overflow from Petula to wet his whistle, so the drug-dealing sons of landless labourers, vagabond crusties and public-school mendicants he had forgone when his sister left, returned. Tianta was the centre of their operations, insulated and filled with sugary cider belches, the stink of hash scones and electric soup. These drop-outs alone had an insight into Jazzy’s dilemma, recognising a world that had hurt them too, their stories not so very different from his. Together their defeatism began to reconfigure time and space in its own image, shared dreams giving way to coping strategies, little things to look forward to and unforeseen developments that might be interpreted in a hopeful light. Theirs was an optimistic little community, however much it would break the rules to admit this to the outside world.
For Jazzy life amounted to ‘waiting for someone to cark it’, an absent step-father or ever-present mother, a waiting game in which time was not on his side. Though the farm was used to living in the atmosphere of untruth, or at least, all of what they could not say to each other, only Jazzy manifested daily symptoms. Occasionally, when he was really upset, he would go so far as launching what he dubbed ‘a protective stepping-back’, ignoring his mother for as long as he could, which rarely lasted more than a few days, their close proximity and his daily chores making a mockery of any principled stance.
In the midst of his irascible grumpiness it was inevitable that he would find his mother’s most lasting gift to him, a prolonged and distracted indifference to real happiness, the most useful mechanism for enduring life at The Heights. With it came his premature stoop and ability to live like he had nothing to lose. Care for the quality of his life would have made him check out years earlier, and maintenance of a cheerful nature would have rendered him more vulnerable to disappointment. In his more speculative moments, stoned to near-incomprehension, Jazzy wondered whether he was not contributing to an epic tale in which someone else had been cast as the lead. In this version his very being was no more than a foil, existing simply to make sense of another man’s story, that man’s happiness, this other being’s eventual fulfilment, as what could he consider himself to be but an onlooker?
Out of his broken social scene came Jill Cronin, who, at four years younger, had taken a fancy to him at the last private school he had been expelled from, she then a diminutive pixie with funny teeth and greasy hair whom he had affected to never notice. Five years and a cumbersome brace later, Cronin could have passed for a great beauty, were it not for a neediness that wrapped her shrunken perfection in a scarf of hyperactive worry. A propensity to read palms, tell fortunes and bring out the tarot deck, her thin limbs buried deep under layers of tiedye and kaftan, did not blind Jazzy to her elfin sexuality, and the two wound up making love in someone else’s sleeping bag to mark their connection. In Jazzy she saw a wounded lion, or rather, the person he still sometimes saw in himself; proud, defiant and fair, his embitterment the result of being robbed of his place in the natural order. As a healer and Jazzy’s soul twin, Jill sought to enable him through loving him back to health. In practice this meant moving in to the cottage, asking others to politely move on, listening to his tirades with rapt and undivided attention and massaging his weary limbs once he was done. If only his potential, or those aspects of his soul she saw, were unlocked, he would emerge into the world as the same irresistible force that squeezed her tits and made her come every night. For Jazzy it was more prosaic: he needed Jill’s vote of confidence as much as he was failed to be convinced by it. Unlike her, the weight of history was already bearing down on him, and inside his pronounced defiance was a cynic resigned to the worst.
Nurturing good energy was not enough to make the future a different place from the past, Jill’s shock far greater than Jazzy’s resigned fatalism, as every watershed proved to be no more than another step towards being absorbed into someone else’s life. Their tendency to take each day as it came looked feebler at every turn, Jill’s good vibes lost in an endless succession of grey mornings, drizzle and arguments over the benefits of soya milk. Slowly it dawned on Jill, originally the product of a family of middle-class hoteliers, that those who cannot plan a future together probably don’t have one, her gentle attempts to chide Jazzy into making decisions grinding to a recriminatory standstill. Gestures and outbursts replaced any semblance of progress, claims that he would drive off and live in a lighthouse undermined in long and oblique letters to his mother asking for ownership of Tianta. Patiently, Jill stood by to watch which way his exhausting combustibility would blow next.
‘Do you know how hard it is to know what you actually want in life?’
‘I want you, Jazzy.’
‘You’re lucky you’ve got it so easy then. I wish I had your bloody certainty,’ he smiled and held her hand, ‘Jesus I’m lucky to have you, Jill.’
Contradiction followed confusion, the bifurcation of her partner’s personality leaving Jill frightened that her love was the only thing keeping him together, his meltdowns as regular as sleep. Tiptoeing around his moods became the safest way of being left alone, countered by her crusading desire to try and save him; which inevitably led to conflict again, the conversations dragging on so that she came to hate the sound of her own voice.
‘Please let me help you.’
‘What can you do?’
‘I can love you.’
‘Just leave me, I’m not worth it. You should know that by now.’
Angry as he was, Jazzy never turned directly on Jill, tenderly watching her check his star sign and astrological chart every day, her efforts to suppress her natural anxiety leading to weight loss and short haircuts that gave her the look of a sectioned caterer. Guilt and anger vied with each other as Jazzy wondered whether this was not all part of an attempt to emotionally blackmail him into making more conventional moves to secure their future together. His resistance to Jill’s thwarted expectations of him manifested itself in niggling stands; reading a newspaper when Jill’s parents came to visit or taking a crap in the middle of a meal, wasting days in which they were meant to do things together by trawling round car-boot sales and hunting pigeons with his catapult. Jazzy’s wish was never to hurt her, only to remind her that he was in the constant process of being hurt. The news that he was expected to play butler at a party for his sister’s spoilt-brat pack, not even a birthday but a Beano held for the hell of it, renewed hope of breaking the deadlock. Here was an as-yet-unexperienced humiliation that sought to take him beyond what he already knew of the quality.
‘I mean it Jill, I’m glad she’s done it, really, I’m glad, this time it’s different, this time she’s really pushed me too far. She’ll see, you’ll see, too far, way too far this time.’
‘I know.’
‘Too much, do you have any idea? And idea of how… of how hard it is living like this?’
‘I know Jazzy, I know, I’m not the one you need to tell.’
‘What?’
‘I said I know.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing, please, I didn’t mean anything.’
With a firmness as final as one holding onto dear life, Jazzy picked up his knife and drove the handle into his palm. ‘Owww!’ he cried and threw it at the wall. Leaping to his feet he grabbed his coat and headed for the door.
‘Be careful!’ cried Jill, strangely heartened that Jazzy had shamed himself into a corner he would have to duke his way out of.
‘Jesus!’ she heard him shout, ‘Jesus!’
There was an involuntary twitch in the corners of her mouth. It took her a moment to realise it was a smirk.
*
Matters were proceeding on a calmer footing further up the hill. Petula woke as she always did in her own good time. Her first thought of the day tended to be a social one and today was very much in keeping with that drill. The room was awash with cards thanking her for the glorious evenings, wonderful nights, beautiful weekends, charmin
g mornings and most memorable few hours that several friends had taken the trouble to reassure her of. The cards had a medicinal effect on Petula, lifting her physically and adding an extra layer of certainty to the many layers she already possessed. Making a mental note to remove the string of cards hanging over the window place that made the room look too much like a hospital ward, Petula cursed another missed opportunity. Ever since Noah had stopped bringing tea and a boiled egg to her in bed, he had threatened to employ a live-in maid, a modest proposal Petula had vehemently objected to, claiming it would be worse than having a spy in the house. She could just imagine the sort of dizzy-looking tart who would come sniffing for that kind of work. Yet her back ached, and knees clicked, and on mornings like this the tart might have been quite useful, spying be damned. Who, after all, would care what a maid saw? As for the interview process, she could always vet it. Old dogs needed work too. Petula’s attention turned again to the cards, particularly a large one depicting Monet’s lilies taking pride of place on her bedside table. It was from the Countess of Barchester, a woman so desperately agreeable that she would not have been out of place presenting the local news and then changing dresses to announce the weather forecast. In her favour she was still a Countess who wrote a good card, and a valuable addition to Petula’s court of admirers. Petula puckered her lips with the satisfaction anyone else would take in a glass of squash on a hot day and reread the card for perhaps the twelfth time:
My Dearest Petula, how to do justice to your hospitality; you
are a phenomenon! You and lunch were perfection personified, it
will be a long, long time before I forget that first bite of quiche!
How do you do it? No, I don’t want to know, that would be
telling after all, and the aspect of you that I find so compelling
is your air of mystery, so please never spoil that for me.
Anyway, whatever you do, please never ever change,
Love as always,
Delicia
PS – your son is gorgeous! Please ask him to mow the lawn more often!
Petula exhaled an appreciative sigh of agreement. There could never be a woman who attracted more flattery that was as nakedly sycophantic, and to her credit, Petula recognised her gift. Once a person paid her a compliment she would fall silent and look at them inquiringly to see if there was any more to come, encouraging them to grope their way further up her flagpole, as if the very act of starting made their eventual destination, complete self-abasement under the shining towers of her brilliance, inevitable. It was instructive to watch how someone wishing to pay her a small tribute would be forced to build on it until she finally acknowledged the compliment, the payer upping their game until they had finally reached Petula’s self-estimation. Petula put the card back in its place and wondered how long before its edges would fray and corners turn, it ultimately having to take its place with all the others in one of several files packed in the attic. Without knowing why she was making the leap, Petula suddenly saw herself in the place of the card, packed-away and old, a vision of extinction running through her like a lance. It was an affront that there was an event she knew of that she could not control or be around to feel. The cards that had made her so happy just seconds earlier were telling a different story now, representing joys that made her live too fast, too decisively, eating up time in large bites, hastening that moment where there would be none left to enjoy. Or worse, she would run out of life before she had even gotten to the end of her story, perhaps needing someone else to finish for her, to know the end before the grave had even opened.
Petula sat there, leaning against her bedhead for a while, no longer thinking. Outside the early-morning cloud had yet to clear, the subtle gradations between differing hues of white revealing nothing for anyone to look up at in wonder. It took the noisy rattle of a hang-glider engine to bring Petula back to her senses.
What demon had taken possession of her? There was always more to say about life, there were no last words, there was always something else, and, as usual, the particular would triumph over the philosophical. She did not have far to look for the diversions that she would later successfully confuse for matters of existential importance. There were, for example, a number of problems she had invented, or made her own, regarding the inauguration of the new bishop, a rather sexy liberal who had come on the scene just as she had found herself gravitating towards Cathedral Christianity. Drinks in the Close fell upon her like a combination of puzzles that could not be solved one at a time, calling for a Eureka moment she would have to put off until after her bath. Her morning was looking agreeably full again, any potential awkwardness raised by that shadowy fog in which she had met herself, forgotten until the next time it happened. After days of unbroken plainness, petrifying stillness and icy showers, the sun was at last breaking through the early spring sky and warming the tip of her nose. Petula ran a firm hand up her long and substantial thigh; she was beautiful and strong, if only she had the imagination to let go of what was, long enough to lie back, close her eyes and touch herself, this would be the time to, but it was too much like self-administering a massage, and she could not get the timings of that evening’s dinner service out of her mind.
There was a great clanging from the ground floor, as though the very foundations of the house were under threat from a geological catastrophe, the building vibrating as if it could lose its balance at any moment. Petula snarled and began a slow count to ten. She hoped that it had nothing to do with that business in the attic… of course not, no one knew about that. It could only be Jazzy hammering at the door, no one else would have the impertinence to ignore the bell. What on earth did the silly bastard want of her now?
CHAPTER FIVE,
exile and escape.
The knocking was loud enough to stir Evita, who was lost in an uncomfortable hypnogenic stroll, the attic ceiling the canvas over which she watched her memory advance to the beat of time, without the sequential whimsy that suggested. What she could not see past was the sheer amount she could not account for, the lack of what she could say she had done with it, the misuse of the gift. Time weighs heavily on those of us who waste it, she could remember her mother once telling her.
It had been an hour since she had awoken from a nightmare in which she was pursued by a thing with wet liquorice hair and yellow gums, leaving her with the unfortunate conviction that she had been subjected to an attack by a manifestation of pure evil that dwelt in the house. Since then she had lain as helpless as a baby waiting to be lifted from its cot, old memories struck from one end of her life to the other like a glass on a Ouija board, terror hovering over her attempts to rescue a valued image from the contaminating oblivion of sheer waste.
‘Sheesholes on the sheeshore. Sheeshocker: I’m drowning, drowning here…’
Evita was used to waking to unrecognisable situations, or at least ones she could not remember from the night before, always an exile from herself and reassurance, the distance between where she woke and home measured by a sensation that her innards were lain out behind her on a laundry line. It was physically unbearable to be in the presence of thoughts long forgotten and feelings she hoped she had successfully suppressed; the good stuff, if there had actually been any, lost to blue periods on Turkish smack. But what did she expect, having returned to The Heights with her tail between her legs, late one January night, two months earlier, her homecoming a desperate attempt to cure the habit that had accompanied her round Europe’s squats, basements and the occasional loft conversion…
With practised effort Evita turned onto her side, found, lit and drew a nimble toke from the gamey joint she had left unfinished the night before, a dry fissure opening at the back of her throat that no liquid could moisten. A moment or two later she was unburdened of her earlier clarity, that hopelessly arid overview of events that revealed nothing of consequence or importance. In its place lay a richer knowledge, engrossing and fuzzily indistinct. Her soul, the only part of her being she
still cared for, remembered with the heart and not the mind. It alone retained ways of relating to those who marked it long after she had forgotten such people existed, their voices making themselves known to her with day-dream vividity. This was much better; Nina, Lottie and the Dutch boy with the kissable dick were all on the mattress with her, stroking, touching and pressing, the air heavy with good spirits. It made her attic nook in The Heights feel part of a wider world and not the miserable corner of Yorkshire she usually experienced it as, her lonely situation slowly conceding its advantages.
Nature and Necessity Page 14
