Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘Jill, are you fucking listening to me?’

  In the morning there was a fist-sized hole in the oil tank and an empty place beside him in bed; Jazzy would tell anyone who listened that Jill had not wanted children, the explanation more consoling than the letter she sent a week after her disappearance, the contents of which he could never bring himself to accept, his remaining contact with her limited to the dreams she haunted, inconstantly and in different forms, for several years after.

  *

  Petula could hear the phone ringing and opened her eyes with no idea of where she was. The throbbing pain at the bottom of her leg was so extreme that any movement, past, present or future, seemed beyond her. The ceiling was certainly consistent with her bedroom, and the smell too; the incongruity therefore, must lie in her. Panicking, Petula reached down to her waist and to her relief found that she was at least partially clothed and that her underwear, though ridden hard, was firmly on. That she was lying the wrong way up and in a wretched tangle with some other sleeping thing constituted a problem of a lesser order, until confronted, at which point it would doubtless seem just as bad as the thought of finding herself naked had seconds earlier. All she could be sure of was her shame at having let herself down irrevocably in public. The back beside her bore this out; it belonged to Chips Hall, thankfully also clothed, his appearance more frightening for only appearing to be sudden, the truth being that they must have both lain there for several hours. And not only him: lying sideways at the head of the bed was Eugene Tackleberry, snoring grossly into her favourite lavender-scented pillowcase.

  Instinct warned her that she must move quickly, but movement was impossible; her ankle had swollen up to the size of a small football. It was excruciating enough simply lying there, would she ever be able to use her foot again? It felt doubtful. The dawn of a brand new day and she had already reached the end of the line. She was a prisoner in her own house and a hostage to her memory loss, horrible forgotten spaces opening up all around her, talons real and imagined poised to claw her into the worst of all places: current reality.

  The phone had started to ring again; hearing it was pure torture on account of her natural urge to answer, and her new one to hide forever from its awful reach. Petula felt it was time to try and say something but her throat was bark-dry and tongue too thick for her to dare risk inhaling her own breath. What had it all been about, and what had it all been for? The night was a myth. Life was a myth. She was a myth, oh no, no! Images were returning to her, followed by trickles of remembered sensation, the party was much worse than mythology, it had been a tragicomedy-tragedy… Fogle, the partridges, Trafalgar… she was finished, finished as a serious force for modest social success, all thrown away for a wonder drug and an appalling rake with nice bone structure who may or may not have chewed her face off in full view of her daughter, her daughter, Regan, that was the worst of it! What respect could she have for her now?

  ‘My God, Regan!’ Petula choked, her voice sounding like something being flushed down the lavatory, ‘Regan!’ – what must she think of it all?

  There was an abrupt knock on the door, bringing Hall to with a grunt, ‘God, what a party. My oh my. Monster-mash blowout…’

  Petula was lost for ideas, in too much pain to physically prevent more embarrassment but incapable of issuing the vocal command that could at least keep whoever was knocking on the other side of the door.

  ‘Tell them to shut up!’ snapped Tackleberry, burying his head under the pillow, ‘I need rest. Tackleberry is not very well.’

  ‘Nor am I,’ called a voice from the floor, probably Tinwood’s judging from its subterranean rasp, ‘has anyone seen my watch? It was an Omega…’

  ‘Petula, Petula,’ the voice from the other side was Hardfield’s. ‘Can I come in please Petula? It’s ever so important.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ croaked Petula feebly, her voice hardly rising above a hoarse impersonation of a whisper, ‘please don’t. I’ll be up soon.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ sniggered Tinwood from the foot of the bed, ‘I need a bloody drink, a G&T, and make it a strong ’un. Aspirin ain’t going to cover this mother.’

  ‘Tackleberry is going to die.’

  ‘I’m sorry Petula but I really have to speak to you at once, it’s urgent.’

  ‘Get on your broomstick and fuck off, whoever you are,’ Tinwood growled, inspecting his bent glasses.

  The door pushed open and Hardfield meekly cleared her throat, what awkwardness she may have registered in the scene more than tempered by the news she had to share.

  ‘I’m sorry Petula,’ persisted Hardfield, ‘but it really is most distressingly pressing, don’t you know. Otherwise I really wouldn’t have bothered you.’

  ‘I know, but not now, please, not now.’

  ‘It’s the Police.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the Police, Petula, on the phone you see. They want to speak to you if they can, I said you were still asleep.’

  ‘The Police? Why? A drugs bust? Shit!’

  ‘No Petula.’

  ‘But you said the Police…’

  ‘Yes, the Police Petula, I said you were still asleep, and they said fine, so I said what does that mean, and they said that’s alright, they’d come straight over.’

  ‘Why? What the hell do they want? Why do they need to see me? What have I done? The drugs weren’t mine!’

  ‘That actor Petula, the one that hit his head funny on the lavatory, you know, the ambulance came for him, well, he didn’t get better you see, he didn’t get better at all…’

  ‘No… this isn’t happening.’ Repelling a force heavier than herself, and with great effort, Petula sat up. Once upright she was struck by a dizzy blow to the head, seemingly inflicted by no more than gravity, ‘I think I’m going to be sick, please, someone bring me something to be sick in…’

  ‘Oh oh, chunder city, call the life guards!’ laughed Hall, who in contrast to Petula was very much enjoying himself.

  ‘What happened to the idiot, they found drugs on him did they? What did he tell them, that I was selling them?’ Petula coughed, fighting back the bile that was swirling round her throat. ‘He was on the bloody drugs and bloody bought them himself, it was his own fault that girl belted him, self-defence, he must be mad to press charges.’

  ‘He can’t Petula, he died on the way to the hospital.’

  ‘Sheesh,’ mumbled Hall, ‘what a bummer.’

  ‘Petula, Petula, are you alright? Can I fetch you anything…’

  Hardfield’s words were in vain; Petula could not hear them anymore, her nervous system having made the decision to faint for her, her body swooning over the sheets before flying headfirst, hitting the floor with an conclusive thunk. For her the party was finally over.

  CHAPTER NINE,

  reputations and reversals.

  The wind changed direction, again. The next three years saw Petula rise from a celebrity to a legend. Notoriety was the open prison she operated from, protected by a healthy reputation for madness, a short fuse and the ghoulish rumours surrounding the house on the hill: wild orgies, black magic and psychedelic experimentation constructing a dark halo over The Heights, Mockery Gap’s own Castle Dracula. This myth-making was supported by the voyeurism of the village itself, proud of its newly acquired reputation for the dark arts, and pleased to have come out of the twee shadow of Richmond and Shatby. Scandal added to Petula’s lustre, there being no firmer stamp of exceptionalism than having one’s guests leaving one’s party dead in an ambulance. The judge who decided that the verdict of death by misadventure for Rex Wade would be punishment enough for Petula, supposing the damage done to her reputation should render further prosecution unnecessary, did public opinion a disservice. Society, contrary to the formulations of reason, was to prove a far more perverse referee than either the Law or Petula could have guessed, her glamour now enhanced by a macabre and dangerous mystique.

  Death (though, crucially, not her own) open
ed doors for Petula. Aiming higher than fate would allow her to go ceased to be a problem. People whom she would have once sought to cultivate were frightened of her in a way they had not been prepared for, allowing her to ruthlessly press her advantage. Choosing to come out on the front foot, exactly at that point when conventional wisdom said a defensive feint was called for, was a move so audacious that her critics were left with nowhere to go. Instead, the malcontents who whispered that Petula had tried a little too hard in the past found they were prepared to make the extra effort themselves when faced with social irrelevancy. Besides, they knew Petula’s weaknesses and how many sugars she took in her tea; she had played coy with them before. Put up with her for a bit, safe as they were behind their electric gate codes, then watch her choke on her own hyperactivity, the same way she always had; all they had to do was to sit tight and allow the storm to pass.

  These relics of the old order underestimated her. Petula no longer cared for their patronage, oblivious to the blandishments and bribes dangled enticingly within reach. Whereas she had never known how to say no to society before, living under the shadow of eventual rejection, she now discovered that it was good for her soul to do a bit of rejecting of her own; the more indiscriminate, partial and obscure, the thinner the explanation and more oblique the motive, the better.

  Sensing that this reprieve called for a stylistic overhaul, Petula cut her cloth accordingly, ditching the Eighties and their superannuated notions of demi-monde chic by her back door in shiny black bags for the council to collect and recycle. Adopting an ivory cane (her ankle had never properly recovered from the party), and alternating between a voodoo cockerel handle and a shrunken celtic chieftain’s skull, her hair straightened and dyed a witchy black, the ample curves of her hips slimmed into prepossessing onyx frocks and androgynous business suits, lipstick a light grey, Petula was reborn as a more curious and less corporeal being. From tasteful overstatement, Petula’s appearance grew seductively quiet, her transparent smocks verging on the bland until her public noticed who was wearing them and how little she had on underneath. Accordingly she approached fewer people and fewer felt inclined to approach her; the summer garden parties, soirees for favoured neighbours, and use of the house by the local great and good, phased out in sniffy doses. Each purge fed a dynamic of further trimming, and by the second anniversary of Wade’s death, the annual invitation to The Hunt to have breakfast on the front lawn was dramatically rescinded, joining tactical entreaties to minor royalty and charity galas on the scrapheap of recent social aspiration. Petula’s former constituency did their best to hide their shock; should it not be they, after all, who were doing the banishing? But by then it was too late: they were already experiencing the shame of exclusion, victims of the temporal trap that believed the future owed them the same reassurances as that time of greater success: the past.

  All this clearing of space did not mean that Petula became a hermit. Into the void rushed Danish directors, one of whom mooched hopelessly round her for a whole summer, the nouveau riche who repaid her suppers with holidays in Sardinian villas, nightclub owners (these men fascinated Petula, their knack of making punters pay handsomely for the privilege of inclusion running parallel to her own modus operandi), nervy music producers and, of course, the new breed of DJ, hot out of Detroit and Chicago, Ibiza and Goa, the exorbitant cost of white-label vinyl meaning that Petula’s record collection quickly outgrew her children’s. The effect of this social spring-cleaning was positively rejuvenating; deep house and rare groove blowing over the lawn on Sundays where once the sound of church bells, string quartets and The Eurythmics would have had to suffice. Among her new associates Petula began to refer to herself as a businesswoman, and though taking no greater control of the day-to-day running of Noah’s various concerns, amused herself with the purchase of shares and various other investments, noisily bringing attention to her activities, careful then to make fun of her prowess in a very ‘Nineties’ parody of showing off. Her financial portfolio was more than an interesting diversion; it led to personal consultations, and with embarrassing ease she found that she had become a local expert on commerce, taking care to not allow herself to be put in a situation where she might really be put to the test. Confidence and common sense, the perennial substitutes for knowledge and learning, were all she needed. No longer did Petula lie awake with the usual fear of having become old news. And not for nothing did Royce say, by way of an admonishment that delighted its target, ‘My, look who’s changed with the times… or have the times changed with you?’

  Amongst her old set who survived the cull Petula made a greater fetish of ‘quality’ than before, eventually divorcing it from any real-life examples so that it became an inhuman standard of acceptance, keeping the survivors on their toes and sparing them from the liberties they might have taken had they been at their ease. Between exactingly high criteria and misanthropy Petula patrolled the line, mindful never to cross it, her brand of energy too canny to deprive her tribe of the hope that she would one day forgive them for Regan’s party, the moment her old world let her down.

  Naturally the psychic tax that had to be paid for not coming clean about what she truly thought, feared or loved, was not cheap – Petula did not expect it to be. She willingly paid up, and would have sold her soul many times over rather than face a reality she was not the master of again, or be reminded of what enforced admissions to the self had cost her, on the night she heard the partridges speak. Those scars were the vengeful phantoms that drove her forward and spared her the humiliating agony of looking back. Why should she, when she knew what was there? Ample proof that a world that had not succumbed to her principles of invention was not a habitat that could support one such as her. Petula’s aims were thus constant with her founding principles: power, control, proof that she was alive and that others knew it, realistic substitutes for the self-knowledge she had no use for, her credo to win and never to know. It was the same hemlock that had always been her tipple of choice, drunk in the belief that though it passed her lips, it would be someone else who would take her place and die.

  *

  Whether her mother’s latest round of social roulette evinced the last sighs of her exhausted genius or the beginnings of another metamorphic cycle, was a worry Regan pretended to regard as a blessing. Though she had not yet come to the conclusion that Petula might be in it for herself, Regan had only just stopped short of it the night of her party, and wondered how she could have got so close to so demonstratively slanderous a belief. Pique had to have lain at the heart of her misjudgement, the discreditable envy towards one whom she still fell short of the mark of twisting her logic and robbing it of its informative potential. As such, Regan’s satisfaction at watching Petula topple dangerously was a discomforting shock she could no longer pass off as a priggish anomaly. The shame of her mother drunkenly letting off steam at her party paled in comparison to her response to it – coldly looking down at the one she owed her every thought to. Witnessing others, particularly the old, enjoy life too much (the thought of anyone younger than she being happy was merely weird), triggered a reflex to criticise in Regan, her judgements delivered from a chilly and secluded perch that bore no resemblance to anywhere she wished to nest. This was the flaw in her project of existential self-creation; her ice-queen persona had flopped because it was no persona at all, simply a sop to her natural failings.

  There was little point in saving herself from what must have already been evident to others. Regan knew she was the selfish one, the pain of the admission easier to bear if she was brave enough to acknowledge it was her fault, and not that of the value system she inherited. But this charitable concession did little to put out the fire that Petula’s second and third coming had lit in her daughter’s troubled heart. Regan continued to feel one thing, while trying to think another, ensuring that her conscious and unconscious minds settled on opposite sides of the room where they remained eternally unreconciled.

  For her mother matters were sim
pler. Regan’s relative failure as social bait had led her to drastically reassess her daughter’s going worth. This she conveyed by loosening the reins and lessening the interest she took in the unremarkable doings of Regan’s life. Accordingly Regan plainly grasped that spending her free time at The Heights in Petula’s company was beginning to get on her mother’s nerves. Much as her siblings, she saw that life on the farm necessarily meant taking second position; in her case, becoming a paler version of Petula. Frightened at the insidious feelings that were likely to overwhelm her if she stayed to embrace this fate, Regan decided to leave at the first opportunity, and embrace the same fate elsewhere, having already unconsciously substituted Petula’s goals for her own. With tender self-deception, Regan flattered herself that she had affected a genuinely original synthesis, using the mistakes of others to avoid more of her own. Inculcated in the dogma that Evita and Jazzy were failures for having gone against their mother, leading their lives as pathetic replies to the overweening glory of Petula’s, their independence a pathetic sham, Regan sought to maintain the old code in new territories and export her mother’s gospel. Embracing the concept of necessary distance, Regan split their world into complimentary zones of influence, separated by age and a little geography. Henceforth she could enjoy her own life, enhanced by the best advice a girl could leave home with, far enough away to neither antagonise nor irritate the free spirit she sought to emulate. Petula, recognising that her hold over Regan was still secure, yet annoyed by the way her daughter dithered over her destination, swiftly prepared her charge for a gap year temping at Chase Manhattan, followed by a place on the newly instigated Business Management degree at Cambridge; Regan’s first preference for Art History loftily pooh-poohed as so much old hat.

  Cambridge in the mid-1990s was where Regan now awoke, at first confusing the ringing of her mobile phone for a crying baby, then, on identifying it for what it was, cursing the fact that it must have also woken the boy beside her, an undistinguished Argentinian hockey player she had picked up the night before at the South American Society Barbecue. The grizzly highlight of this hearty cross-cultural gathering, concerned for the most part with exchanging ideas on how best to roast meat, was an ex-shag of hers throwing himself into the charcoal pit to stop her flirting with her current bedmate. Fortunately on-the-spot first aid had reduced the jilted attention-seeker’s injuries to a small patch of burns along his hands and neck, but not before he had noisily and publicly accused Regan of being responsible for his poor exam results and emergent suicidal tendencies.