Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘Do you mind reading one of her books before she comes, it would help you know. To get to know her.’

  ‘Um, I have quite a lot of coursework I brought home…’

  ‘Oh, I don’t really mean read it. Just skim the thing, and maybe the first ten, and last ten, pages properly, you’ll get the general idea and the main characters, that’s the important thing.’

  ‘Which book?’

  ‘I don’t know all their names. Go to the library and ask for the best one, they’ll tell you. It’s what they’re there for.’

  Regan tried to remember the other, more encouraging names on the list. Ones she half-knew or remembered from her childhood training: Max Astley, Seymour Barchester, Rex Wade, a lot of men, and one any teenage girl ought, she knew, to positively thrill at the inclusion of: Crispin Fogle, the hunk who had played the ‘noble savage’ in the last series of Dr Who, and was now touted for the main role. How did her mother get hold of that one, she mused; Petula certainly had her finger in a number of pies unknown to Regan.

  ‘I read the first, can’t think of its name offhand, had “butternut squash” in the title I think though that doesn’t sound right, does it?’

  ‘She doesn’t write the cookery books, does she?’

  ‘Oh come on! That’s that Delia, plain as parsnips. Penelope was most likely using vegetables as a metaphor for her heroine’s genitals or something. She’s an author of literary fiction, though don’t ask me what that is supposed to be.’

  Once Regan could get over the idea that none of this was her idea there would be a great deal to enjoy, or if not enjoy, at least the welcome possibility of being enjoyed. To not be found boring by adults was how Regan measured her pleasure; she knew of no other criteria to consult in their company. Her involuntary tics and longings belonged to the world of Nohallows, and as they were no more than a reflection of attitudes absorbed at The Heights, what Regan desired for her own sake remained tantalisingly hidden. Coming top of her class had not given her confidence, simply an understanding of the things she had read, much as leading her year socially had not made her a leader, only the least led of her flock. Her instincts were reliably unsure of themselves. Watching the world through moods she tried to ignore left a robotic residue that her ‘real’ feelings rarely emerged from. Was this why she knew that whatever pique she felt towards Petula would vanish? Whatever rose from the heart invariably wilted, it was easily the most misleading organ nature had encumbered her with.

  ‘I think there may be a new man in her life, in fact I’m willing to bet on it, Hayden Fox-Davies. He’s set to come into a lot of money and is meant to be quite charming though useless in every other way, and he does, poor man, look a bit like Dracula, you know, the Count, Christopher Lee version. He’s coming to your party. I think I might sit him next to the Mooncalf.’ Mooncalf was the name Petula had taken to calling Royce for an accumulation of offences. As Regan was still going through a sustained and frequently topped-up period of not liking Royce, the moniker met with her approval.

  ‘Yes, I remember his name from the list.’

  ‘His father’s second wife has a title. And no children. Fact.’

  Just the opposite, thought Regan. The names that interested her most on the list were neither facts nor titles. The names were hopes and her way of becoming the woman who might one day explain all this back to the girl she still was. Metamorphosis was in the night air and she knew she must embrace it. Her last term at Nohallows had felt like a vanishing memory even as it happened, one set of associations falling away in the face of other less certain outcomes. Eras often ended before others realised they had, Regan noticed, and the days of marmite by candlelight, sat in her filthy games kit listening to The Pixies, were fading fast. So too were the purple, green and blue lipstick, her love bites with Diamanda and the freezing Saturday-night ritual of fighting over mastery of the common-room video recorder huddled under blankets and quilts. She was ready to enter another stage; weirdness was a dead end, so far as the world outside school was concerned. In that wider reality all she and her friends represented were smaller versions of Jazzy or Evita, losers, as uncool as they came. Regan had long suspected that she and The Lasses were strange but not particularly interesting, doomed in a context more challenging than one where merely disobeying orders wrought notoriety. She had only to look at their excursions into parties at other schools to see their icy defiance signified little more than an ability to pointlessly baffle, and there was enough of that in normal life to bore the boys without confusing it for a countercultural stance. She would have to raise the subject of change with her merry band as it was out of the question to desert The Lasses. They were her responsibility. How could they not be when she had made them love her by fooling them into believing she was more than they? And somewhere near the un-ignited spark of her undeclared soul, Regan was sure that Petula was proof that this was a ruse that could work forever. The birthday dinner was her chance to traverse universes and begin the second half of her teens. She would take it as confidently as an older girl would a younger one’s place in the lunch-line.

  ‘I want to go for a run.’

  ‘What, now? It’s nearly midnight!’

  ‘I do at school, night-running.’

  ‘They allow you to?’

  ‘Not really, it’s just something some of us girls do.’

  ‘How can you know where you’re going in the dark? It’s bloody dangerous.’

  ‘We carry carrots.’

  ‘Huh. Very clever. So where are you going to run to at this hour?’

  ‘The lake maybe.’

  ‘You must be mad. Well, off you run you unfathomable freak, but make this the last time! I was hoping you’d grow up this holiday. Night-running, I mean, it’s not very far off a midnight feast or rounders in a corridor, is it? You’re getting too old for all that now.’

  ‘I’m not that old yet.’

  ‘No, but you will be soon. People will stop thinking we’re sisters before you know it.’

  ‘No they won’t!’

  ‘They won’t stop calling us them, but they’ll stop thinking it. What they think will be an entirely different matter,’ her mother chuckled gloomily. ‘Anyway, keep making me proud of you and you’ll have nothing to worry about. I will always be there for you.’

  Once in her room Regan glanced at her watch. Ten-thirty. The night was cloudless and the full moon blindingly white. Skulking out of school as the rest slept gave Regan the sense that she was in the presence of what no one else was, the loopy dreams of a thousand girls amplified in the intense silence, the only sound for miles the smack of moths flying into the giant electric lights by the main gates. Home was different, running at night here allowed her thoughts to come to her in subtle gradations, vague but sly realisations she would have forgotten over breakfast or needed a week in the sanatorium to recall if she were still at Nohallows. Quickly she stripped off her clothes and changed into the new running outfit she had acquired from a sixth-former for the cost of an old buckskin jacket Evita left behind. The tight leggings and top felt as if she were pulling on someone else’s body, a constriction that made her consider her skin, pinch it and wonder what it would be like for someone else to be as close to her as the cold lycra she was embalmed by. Standing in front of the mirror Regan laughed at the alien she saw there, her new Nikes sticking out like Martian hooves, the antithesis of the saggy tracksuit and plimsolls held together by an ugly elastic tongue that had formerly constituted her PE uniform. Though she only half-guessed it, she was in the process of enjoying herself and feeling her age, a frisky effortlessness to her movements like a lamb at play.

  Outside it was surpassingly balmy, and Regan began at a reckless canter, the mild air filling her nostrils and lungs when she had expected them to be skinned by the chill. Agile enough to take suppleness for granted, Regan skipped down the gravel drive, the path before her illuminated by the fifth-largest satellite in the solar system, its melancholic beams her floodlit torc
h. To sustain her pace she often introduced an element of fantasy to her runs, imagining she were leading a marathon with the eyes of the world on her or sprinting towards a drug dealer to kick his evil arse. Tonight her dreams were of a different order, and as the landscape around her appeared to conflate with the orb in the sky, Regan felt as though she were gliding over a lunar surface, past the battered American flag-and-crater-ridden southern highlands of the Moon.

  By the time she reached her destination, she was on the verge of hormonal euphoria. The starry constellations of Orion, Gemini and Auriga were emerging over the lake, their reflection quivering like distant eruptions of joy. Below them shone Procyon, the brightest star of all and the one Regan wished on whenever she wanted to extract some small advantage from life that her mother might not be willing to grant her. Feeling like an overfed woman who finds that she cannot breathe because the trousers she habitually wears are a size to small, Regan threw off her woolly hat and let her hair hang down. Kneeling down at the lake’s edge she splashed the freezing water over her perspiring face, the effort of sprinting down teasing sweat out of every pore. With a defiant disregard for time and temperature, she lay out and gazed skywards, the tail lights of a passing Boeing flickering high over her pointed nose. It seemed, in the loneliness of her discovery, that this was one of the moments for which the world was made. Happiness was pouring out of her and it did not matter how much she lost for there was no set amount to hold onto; tangled lines of re-creation were carrying her into infinity faster than her doubting laughter could withstand;

  ‘Let me know this always.’

  Unlike her mother, Regan stopped before God and knew she always would. There was a thing in life more inhumane and powerful than Petula and she was beginning to suspect she would one day have cause, should she switch horses and bolt, to know more of its oft-spoken-of mercy.

  *

  Mingus had been out with Jazzy, the skinny art student in drainpipes and raincoat cutting a dour figure next to the blustering wiseacre wrapped in a leather scarf, Stetson hat and yellow wellingtons. That was at least what Jazzy told Mingus over his sixth pint, the ribbing, lectures and bitter confidences all part of their ritual trip to The Condemned Felon. The outing, to mark Mingus’s return for the holidays, like so many of their other reunions could be summed up for Mingus by his keenest sensation of the night; one of carrying a bladder full of alcohol that had rested in the same place for too long. Since growing apart in their early teens, Mingus had been round the blocks with Jazzy, the friendship never settling in a form either were comfortable with, yet persisting through habit and Jazzy’s devotion to the older Hardfields.

  When Mingus first hitched home from art school in Leeds he was greatly excited at the thought of sharing his boundary-expanding discoveries with his old friend, whom he privately worried might be wasting his time in a backwater. Though put off by Jazzy’s brash hedge-bandit shtick, Mingus found the continuity he offered comforting and appreciated his friend’s loquacious and sentimental airs. A mutually complimentary exchange of perspectives was not, however, to be the order of their reunions. Jazzy had testily spurned Mingus, aghast at being patronised by this self-taught Picasso, making fun of the younger one’s pretensions in front of the locals and dismissing him as a wannabe townie and outsider at every turn. Mingus, hurt and bewildered, took his rejection as irrevocable and went back to Leeds at the first opportunity, earning a rare postcard from Jazzy rebuking him for deserting his parents and forgetting his roots.

  When it was next time to come home, Mingus made a different kind of effort, on this occasion pretending he had learned nothing in the city, failed to develop in any discernible way, and was still the boy Jazzy had played with in years gone by. He went so far as to help Jazzy with his jobs around the farm, offering his services in as demeaning a way to himself as he could, to cheer and lift his chippy companion. To his bemusement, this made things worse as Jazzy accused him of trying to supplant him, Mingus’s insistence that nothing could be further from the truth and that his future lay at the Royal College of Art, not Mockery Gap, falling on overheated ears. Pride stopped Mingus rushing back to his halls of residence this time, the failure of his craven peace offer an embarrassment to him, and so, to Jazzy’s intense annoyance, he opted to stay and observe his punishment.

  Jazzy decided to flatly ignore Mingus or at least keep an impolite distance, his old friend’s ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ approach striking him as an arrogant conceit, and eagerness to make up proof of his guilt. The trouble was that Jazzy was in and out of Seth Hardfield’s workshop too often for indifference to work, enjoying cups of tea with Jenny, and generally treating The Wart as a second home. And in some ways the Hardfields, proud as they were of Mingus’s achievements, were also out of their depth in his company, whereas Jazzy conversed with them about a world they knew, the farm, tractor parts, blocked drains and, of course, Petula. The two young men, to spare their elders awkwardness, eventually fell into an occasional and uneasy co-existence, eked out with the help of booze, snooker, marijuana and music. Providing Mingus allowed Jazzy to play the part of elder brother and rural seer on their evenings in The Condemned Felon, and kept the conversation off Freud, art history and the wilder shores of the universe, he was cheerily tolerated. As Mingus was used to surprising people, his anticipation of reactions that were surprising and often hostile had become a way of life for him. He did not expect to be treated as he treated others because he expected his treatment of others to be misunderstood, and their treatment of him to be based on misunderstanding. His optimistic attachment to life and tacit belief in destiny were his protecting angels; this and the abiding certainty that he was always going to be alright. Petula had once said to him, ‘You and I are survivors and survivors usually do a little bit better than just survive.’ Even when he did not know whether he was doing well or not, or questioned whether he ever had been happy, he’d answer yes in an instant if he were asked to live it all over again. He wore the attitude quietly; people who liked him noticed it in his unthinking confidence and swift, lightly critical eyes. People who did not, drew away uneasily, scared that if he were to look at them for too long he would find something out. Jazzy, though he did not know it, shared his mother’s innate distrust of Mingus, who was no more his creature than he had been hers years before.

  The two young men staggered out into the car park, Mingus relieved that another session was finally drawing to an end. Their last conversation had hovered close to unintelligibility, Jazzy not caring to explain himself and Mingus too drunk to mind very much, conscious that last orders had already been called.

  ‘You going to drive back? Jazzy?’

  Jazzy was staring ahead and saying nothing, usually a bad sign when his final drink had been whiskey. It tended to mean that the subject was going to be changed towards a matter his companion was not going to like, possibly to do with the companion himself.

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Alright, are you?’

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Let me tell you something. You know your trouble Ming? Your trouble is that you’ve never really known what it is to suffer, right?’ Jazzy began, his eyes focusing once more. ‘Really suffer, you know what I mean Ming? Everything’s just come to you on a plate because of that talent of yours, you’re an arty fucker, right? People who have talent that isn’t so obvious, ones like me that have to work for everything they get, you won’t ever know what it’s like to be one of them, to be the bloke who mows the lawn with his teeth, one of that mass of, mass of stinking half-talented ones. I mean, I’m not saying I’m one of those, but nor are you, you know what I mean, like? That’s why my Mam used to spoil you and not me. She knew you were artistic, always, you know, making things and drawing attention to yourself. That was what you did. You got more attention than I did. Period. Period. Not that I give a flying fuck about it now.’

  ‘So what are you talking about it for the
n?’ Mingus replied, laughing disingenuously.

  ‘Fuck you man. My Mam gave far more of a shit about you than me, right? Did everything for you, nothing for me and my sister, my real one. You’d talk about it too if it were the other way. You would, of course you would. It was all about you and Regan, like fuckin’ Barbie and Ken. It made me want to puke, truth be told.’

  ‘Thanks for telling the truth.’

  ‘I’m telling you that’s the way it was.’