Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘You’re mad, Evita. Schizophrenic.’

  ‘Of course I am, I’m your daughter!’

  ‘Not my daughter in any meaningful way. Really mad, cracked. They were right about you. I’m glad you’re finding your tongue again but this kind of insanity won’t do either of us any good.’

  ‘Come on Mrs Montague, I’m waiting, I want to know that you have a conscience and feel guilt, that you’re not completely beyond good and evil. Speak up Mum, it’s only me, you can deny it ever happened as soon as you leave this room.’

  ‘Why should I? Why should I play your tardy little games? I’ve already told you that you need to see a psychiatrist. And anyway, who in their right mind expects an equal treatment of unequals, a moral equivalence between you and me? I gave you life once when I carried you into the world and I gave it to you again these past few weeks, scraping up your remains and trying to build you back into a person. And now you’re making me wonder why I bothered. So you could throw it back in my face? Thank God for Regan is all I can say. Only you could fuck up multiple kindnesses and a clean bill of health.’

  ‘Me, fuck up? Can’t you see it’s you, that’s what we all have in common, you! Of course you can’t, how crass of me. This is exactly how you ruined Regan, like you did us, but in a different way all of her own. The thing with you is that you can see it, deep down and really, you’re not stupid enough to be blind to the obvious. You know you’re an insecure fake, don’t you? And you know your inconsistencies and madnesses, you’re wily enough for that. But when I point them out you run hurriedly along or fight to the death claiming they’re anything but. Which is the difference between you and her. Regan’s grown up not even noticing hers, a real evolution on you, you were “mark one”, you had emotions but hid them, repressed them, but she doesn’t have any, she’s “mark two”, an emotional android. The reason you and she have never talked like this is because she doesn’t know she can, emotions don’t interest her because she doesn’t know she has them, and anything that doesn’t interest her, simply ceases to exist. You’ve succeeded in making her what you wanted to be. Not an airhead, an icehead. God help her when one day she suddenly discovers she has feelings. She’ll probably die of the shock.’

  ‘Touching, and I thought it was just me you wanted to insult, touching. I think I have somewhere else I have to be. Think about how long you want this arrangement to last; if you’re well enough to wound then you’re well enough to piss off.’

  From this cheerless low Petula took to leaving Evita’s food and supplies by the attic door, knocking once, firmly, before abruptly taking her leave. This time there was to be no union of solipsisms, only a burn mark to remind them both that life would have to remain conversationally off limits if they were to speak at all. Tentatively they came back to discussing practicalities again; unfortunately, Evita’s improved health soon exhausted this once-promising area and she withdrew into a monosyllabic sulk. Self-flagellation in front of Petula was never likely to occasion anything other than the deepest agreement, a useless gesture and dangerous tactic, for a low self-opinion was the demon that hounded Evita since infancy. Left to brood over her miscalculation, Evita concluded that her universe had shrunk to hold only one person and two concepts: suffering and blame, with the blame poised to tip inwards.

  Over the years Evita had clung to the utopian hope that a positive moral could be retrieved from episodic negativity, ennobling her worst experiences with a lesson. This was how she approached being a Montague, a name and a nature that had never suited her un-contrite heart. From the start she struggled with her mother’s instruction, or at least applied it unsuccessfully, attempting to copy her approach without sharing her goals. Not for her the audacious tacking between pragmatism and revolutionary romanticism, the close reading of reality and then its creation, a rich husband and nice house. Evita spurned these and longed for a purer kingdom of ends. The boy left blinded in the cloakroom on his eighteenth birthday had been the catalyst, he should have realised she was no one’s birthday present. With the help of that abrupt push, Europe lay before her and Evita left with the intention of returning a different person. The first six months were fast-going, friends were easy to make, the conversations ran all night and money was wired to her whenever she ran out. At times she wondered whether her experiences weren’t a trifle too pat, mugged twice in Amsterdam, an Arab boyfriend in Montpellier who beat her, falling off a moped in Rome and being arrested at a protest in Berlin all reeked of the generic – still she persevered, embracing ever-more-radical manifestations of travelling chic. And for a while she believed she was in possession of her own life, the transformation she sought underway at last.

  Her project’s undoing was that the qualities and circumstances she craved were too near the privileges and patrician whims she rejected. Like her mother, Evita was liked, when she was liked, for her vim and enthusiasm, eagerly lapping up the nickname ‘Passion Machine’ from her fellow squatters. Practically she was ready to be useful, tacitly understanding that what she lacked in talent she could make up for in organisational élan. Like the society gadflies her mother collected, the anarchists Evita lived amongst were not averse to having those parts of their lives they were not very good at, run by someone else. Unlike Petula, she could never quite find a way of making her causes serve her. Too often Evita found herself holding the collection box, stuck with a placard or putting up billposters in the middle of night while her savings disappeared into a communal pot. This dug into pricklier aspects of her inheritance; she shared her mother’s ungraciousness, a failure to allow the giver to believe she valued the gift as much as they. With the strength of Hercules, Evita could not pretend that chipped mugs, grey bedding and bathrooms without locks meant as much to her as bolted doors, crisp sheets and Branksome China crockery. Her childish fits and involuntary fussiness soon made her an outcast amongst the fugitives whom she had adopted as her new family. Girlfriends, boyfriends, activists and finally fellow users gave her short shrift, the rules governing communal living more ruthless than those of the society she had rejected. All Evita could do was find another city and instigate another cycle, Berlin gave way to Amsterdam, Rotterdam to Bruges, Lille to Cologne, and finally a basement near the amphitheatre in Orange. At every stop Evita met the same fear waiting for her once the smack wore off. Her travels would never yield what she wanted because what she sought resided at home; her mother’s approval. Why else had she left? To succeed in the arts, find love and take the same joy in the present as she would looking back on it in a year, were her stated ambitions. Not for what they entailed in themselves but for the point she hoped they would make to Petula.

  It was in her last port of call, Orange, that Evita finally gave way to a fit of promiscuity that had been bubbling under the solemn monogamy she had hitherto worked at. The results were mixed, with a marked tendency towards the not-so-good. As a confused solipsist Evita was incapable of learning from experience. Her kiss said it all; a forward lunge, all mouth and teeth, designed to project power and passion, heedless that its targets often faced severe facial mutilation. Never giving the addressee of her affection a second chance, or way of answering the snog, pinning them under her slavering tongue until it was over, meant she could never learn from another, only repeat the action she hid behind, her energy and self thrown away for little return and no knowledge. At the same time she finally made a go of her ‘career’, really a euphemism for an ambiguous desire to be regarded as creative in some fashion. The many different disciplines she thought she would be good at meant that Evita did not only live in one imaginary universe but several. Over her last summer she tried her hand at them all, frenetically and in abrupt succession. A bizarre process of self-sabotage bled her confidence of what little lava it still possessed. She developed a stammer when she wanted to train as an actor that disappeared when she gave up, a limp when she returned to dancing, and dyslexia on joining a poetry class. Evita decided she must be losing her mind, her heroin habit, which until
then felt optional, calcified into a routine, exacerbating the intense loneliness she now felt at all hours. The old Roman town began to appear in supernaturally shaded hues, certain streets filling her with mortal dread, the amphitheatre wall making her hairs stand up and the tram from Montpellier inducing attacks of the shakes. At nights, in her dank basement room, the devil appeared to her as a pig with a human face, saying nothing, his arrival a wicked witness to her failure. One morning she woke and packed her few belongings into a knapsack, the original suitcase she had left home with too heavy for her track-ridden arms to carry. The mark made by her departure had been etched in vain, her fool’s odyssey all but over. With a fortnight’s supply of heroin stashed in her knickers, Evita set her course for the attic kingdom that awaited her at The Heights, a sighting of the eighteen year-old boy she had blinded floating past the Ferry back to Dover her last brush with the spectral. At St Pancreas, she stowed away on the Edinburgh train, hitching a lift from Doncaster to Scotch Corner; whatever pride she had left subsumed by the desire that her mother should see her like this, and know that it was all her fault. And perhaps that was what Petula thought as she ushered the emaciated traveller into the kitchen, her heart broken by the vein-punctured scrap that was once her baby girl…

  The joint was finished and Evita was having another bummer; how did that happen, happen again? She had been trying to dwell on the positives for Christ’s sake, but her thoughts kept coming back to the same juncture… time un-regained.

  ‘Fyuuhuck. Enough.’

  She ground out her butt on a Beatrix Potter tea coaster, the frog Jeremy Fisher’s face blackening under the crumbling tobacco stub. The deep pink scars she caught sight of on her wrists were a reminder of the times she had hoped maiming herself would awaken her mother’s protective instinct. It had not worked, and never would, nothing would change, not her, Petula or the negative current that ran under The Heights. This was always the prelude to how she felt before she considered the only course that felt her own, freely chosen, indebted to no one. Everything is a pain until you accept it, that was her mantra, but she had been given an unacceptably large amount to accept. Suicide, or at least its attempt, was her ownmost possibility, the most authentic deed she imagined herself capable of. To draw a line from nothing, to nothing, cutting out the life between was the dream that drugs had replaced. Without them, it was only the possibility that she could take her own life that gave her the strength to go on, a contradiction that hurt when she laughed.

  ‘Okay.’

  From the very first occasion when Evita had asked her mother ‘Why will I die?,’ she had really meant, ‘Why am I here?’ The time to halt this question’s endlessness had arrived. Getting up from the mattress Evita ran her hand under her chin to inspect a growth she expected to find. There it was, trapped in her fingers, an extra filmy roll of skin. It was amazing how quickly she had put weight on again, foul white-slug-fat collecting round the characterless outlines of her face. That was it.

  Decisively Evita felt under the bed to check whether her comfort object was still there. She had been sleeping over the rope for three days now, the knot already tied into a noose. With a vigour that was nearly inspiring, Evita tossed the rope over the main beam and mounted the rickety stool she used to practice the piano on, to fasten the loop. It was at that delicate point in her preparations that Petula, unusually light-of-foot that day, and wishing to share a gripe about Jazzy, unlocked the door with breakfast, which that morning was grapefruit, kippers and scrambled eggs.

  Petula had already found her morning an unexpectedly involving one. The crybaby Jasper had all but destroyed her good mood and made serious inroads into her equanimity with a volley of wailing and hollering, as lethal to her mood as a surgical strike on a hospital tent. It was hard enough to remember the amount of salmon needed for the evening’s starters, far less that Evita was still skulking in the attic, without his goonshow landing on her doorstep first thing. All that fuss and swearing, in that dreadful accent of his, and just because she had the temerity to ask him to buttle at his own sister’s coming-home party! Really, she thought he’d jump at the chance to put something back in for once. It only went to show that one never really knew what would break the camel’s back, especially if that camel happened to be a psychopath. It reminded her of those fusspot Cubans rioting in Florida having received the wrong kind of orange juice, concentrate and not freshly squeezed… Come to think of it, an internee camp in Florida might be the best place for Jasper. And not only him but Evita. It was as bad as when they were children, she hadn’t known what to do then either. Unless a problem was effectively eliminated, it would always come back to haunt one; life punished the merciful. If Jasper was a common garden nuisance Evita was a rare weed. Petula paused to collect herself, she was in danger of drifting up her fundamental orifice. Focus. The corridor was thick with the aroma of polish and flowers, the smell of her work. It was delicious. Picking up her tray from the side table Petula resumed her journey and attempted to slow her hurried train of thought.

  How long before she could reasonably kick Evita out now that there was no medical need to prolong their mutual misery? That girl, like her brother, could dissemble for England – talk, talk, talk, and none of it the interesting kind, and her silences were even worse. It was time to break the stasis and face her down, present Evita with some practical ultimatum pertaining to the ‘next stage’ of her recovery, pay her off if need be, the crucial thing was to be rid of her and allow some sort of normality to resume. Having her and Jasper at large was like having to fight America and Russia at the same time, the war on two fronts had done for Hitler and would finish her if she wasn’t careful. It was funny how she shared the national obsession for World War Two analogies but identified with the other side, her natural sympathy for the underdog no doubt. Unfortunately, there was no guarantee Evita would go quietly. If she saw she had nothing to lose things could turn nasty; she had always reacted badly to thinking she was no longer wanted, which in this case would be spot on. The alternative was far, far worse though; that she would stay and become another Jazzy. Strong as she was, Petula knew that the lady-in-the-attic days were numbered, it was only a question of a week or so before Mrs Hardfield, or a nosey guest, stumbled upon their secret. That, or Evita might finally develop itchy feet of her own and begin to venture downstairs for nighttime raids of the larder, who knew… Strewth, all this and Regan due home later that morning for the school holidays, it would be a good life if they left her alone for long enough to live it…

  ‘Good morning Evita, I think it’s time you and I turned over a new leaf. Don’t you… idiot, idiot, IDIOT!’

  Evita, her head in the noose, closed her eyes, held her breath and kicked away the stool. Petula was onto her in a flash and for a second the two women struggled, Evita wobbling indecisively as her mother tried to lift her out of danger. Frantically Petula shifted the weight of her daughter’s body into her arms and with her foot caught a leg of the stool and dragged it over. Evita’s legs and buttocks rested helplessly in her mother’s firm embrace. Good, thought Petula, she wants me to save her, she’s as passive as a mannequin.

  ‘Stay still, stay still. Still damn it!’

  Just as Petula aligned the stool under her daughter Evita lunged again, twisting them both into a clumsy knot of kicking ankles and flailing arms. Before she got any further Petula was on her back with Evita on top, the rope had snapped. Neither of them moved, Petula’s head having hit the floorboard with a sullen thunk. Squashed to the floor, hairballs and dust jammed up her nostrils, Petula tried to free her mouth of Evita’s sweaty blouse. Her daughter simply lay there, her arms stretched out in a crucifix pose, indifferent to the body fighting for air underneath. With the determination of a survivor Petula wriggled her face free of Evita’s shoulder and inhaled. She could see silver stars and strange wispy figurines gliding through the walls like seahorses.

  ‘Thank Christ. For that.’

  Evita’s sobs, one at a time a
nd then uncontrolled, had a puzzling effect on Petula. The instantaneous relief at having successfully mounted a rescue had vanished. Evita’s crying was filling her heart full of the sharpest rage.

  ‘Bitch! Silly, selfish, little bitch!’

  Evita’s eyes were wide open now, red pearls in a sea of salty tears, ‘Oh Mum.’

  With the agility of a wrestler, Petula swung her leg round reversing their positions so that it was her sat atop of her daughter, her knees pinning Evita’s arms feebly to the floor. ‘You may well look scared you little prick. All of life’s a suicide mission but only a moron like you could create a mess like this. What the hell do you mean to do trying to kill yourself in my home?’

  ‘Please…’

  Straddling her tightly, feeling her floppy body turn to putty between her powerful thighs, Petula snarled, ‘Well say something you disgrace!’

  She did not expect what came next. With all the fight she had left Evita pulled free her left arm and brought her elbow up into Petula’s cheek, making contact with a muffled crack.

  Petula felt a door swing shut on her face, hot blood streaming over her mouth and chin, her nose a mix of numb pressure and chilly heat. Tremblingly she touched it and observed a crimson spray volt over her finger onto her daughter’s twisted mat of hair.

  ‘You! Why you!’

  Petula watched her hands go for Evita’s neck, her thumbs and fingers and nails forming a second rope over the remains of the existing one, a sweet sensation of total release accompanying a reasonable desire to defend herself against her bestial adversary. She did not know how long this lasted, only that she was no longer angry once Evita ceased struggling, and she lessened her grip. Evita slid onto the floor like a popped balloon, a woozy lifelessness about her that reminded Petula of how people die in fairy tales.