Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  It seemed to Regan as though every third boy or fourth boy she slept with fell in love with her or manifested the signs of some perplexingly intense obsession. It was puzzling, as Regan knew she had given no more of herself to these lovelorn lads than she had to their less insistent counterparts, both kinds of couplings unilaterally tepid and perfunctory. Out of her incomprehension grew an intolerance with what appeared to be no more than immature play-acting, a sham that men that could not accept that there was not that much to anybody, herself included, played out in the vain hope that it would prove they were different. Their only distinction was their hopeful idiocy, fed by power ballads and teen flicks; self-deluding Romeos all haunted by their own most human lack. It was no accident that Regan sought out tepid conformists, irrespective of what it was they had chosen to conform to, be it rugby-club ethics or their father’s dentistry practice. The more indifferent and vague these boys were over who they were, the easier Regan found it to pass the time she required them for – passion and fireworks the domain of charlatans and romantic losers.

  A narrow, thinly tanned ankle caught against hers and the Argentinian, with the lazy entitlement particular to the other South Americans Regan had known intimately, opened an eye, glanced at her vaguely, and turned over to make up for the sleep lost during their divertingly brief union, which, Regan remembered, had ended in tears. The tears were of course his – in all probability prompted by the memory of a distant and betrayed girlfriend lighting a candle for him in Buenos Aires. As Regan had fallen asleep to his lopsided sobs she had wondered, briefly, what it was he had found attractive about her, and while attempting to focus on that thought, nodded away on the back of dark galloping horses. This morning he appeared to be exacting his revenge; short bursts of phlegmy snore breaking through his irregular breathing, and the faintest aroma of burnt carcinogenic gas rising from the sheets on his side of the bed. She reached down; there was dry come on her thigh, again, proof that an event could register as itself, without her having to notice. The ringing had stopped, and though she felt the groggy privations of having shared her bed with another, Regan knew she would not go back to sleep.

  The fresh start in Cambridge was not the great panacea Regan had initially hoped for, the city and its life too close to her previous existence to signal the rupture she would later decide she needed. Her flat, taken at the start of her third year in a new block of studios far from the university and its trappings, reflected an isolated state of mind, one that was grimly made up, and owed little to local colour or conditions. Regan’s decision to lodge alone was an act that dismayed those friends who wanted to be proven wrong about her, her determination to find a place too expensive and small to share an unqualified success. Pegasus Court had yet to meet with Petula’s approval, since after the first year she had stopped visiting Cambridge, driving straight to London instead, which did not prevent Regan from hoping that her mother would give its sparse interior the grunt which granted her qualified assent. The flat’s eggshell-white walls, nuclear-bright window fittings, cream ceiling and carpets were difficult to keep clean, so beyond those guests necessary to prove its existence, Regan discouraged visitors. To those who made it up, the space sat as an odd fit for a young student, the cheekier comparing it to a Martian escape capsule, an afterdeath experience or, once they were a safe distance away, the final word in consummate zen blandness. Regan heard it all, and would have preferred to live on a stack of shelves than return to her college and its traditions, which like talk of ‘community’ or ‘seasonal spirit’ carried, for her, the suggestion of showering in someone else’s sweat.

  Living in a glorified hotel that denied the very question of taste conversely answered a need close to rebellion in Regan, buried below the comforting explanations and other diversions invented to deny the basic tensions in her life. Having wasted a year in New York, put on weight watching Jerry Springer, and suffered the loneliness of a lowly bank teller, all to provide her with ‘real-world’ experience, Cambridge felt like it could be public school mark-two. Quickly perceiving what was required of her if she was to achieve conventional popularity, Regan braced herself for a repetition of the cycles she had undergone and overgrown at Nohallows. But to her dismay she found that she could not comfortably tread the same water twice. Often Regan found her thoughts turning to the recent past: the toasty junior common room in winter, her legs entwined with Diamanda’s; nighttime by the lake at The Heights and Mingus’s serious and forlorn face, fresh humiliation still burning in his cheeks; a reddening squall forming over Shatby harbour, her snug in her mother’s Volvo, the hail pelting the bodywork. It was an effort to move forward.

  The habit of self-discipline insured that her body did its best to ignore these distractions, and get on with what was expected of it. Regan began to lose weight again and fraternise with her neighbours in the medieval quad she was housed in: a mix of sporting enthusiasts, brainiacs and self-hating revolutionaries well below the level of Petula’s most average fare. Very little about these ‘new’ characters took Regan by surprise, their identities fitting them like worn laundry that nothing could rescue the faded novelty of. Everywhere she looked it was the same old story as school; the gowns worn to college dinners where grace was still observed, hockey and rowing, lectures in an English heritage site and the services of an agreeable porter who reminded her of a male, whiskered Jenny Hardfield. It was as if, barely out of her second decade, she was already doomed to live her life again in the same musty rags as before. Even her subject, a supposedly innovative borrowing from the Harvard Business School, turned out to be no more than a depressing extension of common sense; a less conscionable sociology for the Nineties that killed conversation dead at a succession of tacky freshers’ balls, her dates more interested in the fact that she had once danced with Crispin Fogle, in any case a lie, than in her ‘funky’ new course.

  During her second year Regan withdrew from college life and moved to a terraced semi-detached student residence in a slightly seedy area near the train station. It was by far the murkiest property she had inhabited, her warring housemates a clumsy parody of whatever family life had previously been played out between its French-mustard-coloured walls. Lost afternoons sipping tea, gobbling up Hobnobs and arguing over which episode of The Fast Show to watch might have shown Regan how the other half of college lived, had she still cared: an irredeemable ordinariness, lightened by marijuana and hiding one another’s socks, filling the vacant columns of her dwindling ambition. House politics – who had eaten whose Ryvita or left pubes in the bath – were a world away from the camaraderie of Nohallows, revealing a tenacious and childlike resolve in Regan to get her own way. Hurtfully her fellow lodgers began to refer to her as ‘Brat’, and in doing so, provided the pretext for the occasional cold fury in which Regan would castigate them all as second-raters, tearfully returning to her room to make pointless conversation with her latest fuck-buddy, picked up at some woeful college event.

  Having broken the taboo of sleeping with someone she cared nothing for the second time she slept with somebody, the former head boy of a Catholic school whom her circle insisted was good-looking, Regan slipped into promiscuity quietly but completely. Convinced she had no sex drive or people skills and thus needed plenty of sex with lots of people to remedy the defect, Regan cantered into horizontal affirmation with the assured nonchalance of a seasoned rider. The overriding flaw in her worldly veneer was her not being able to consult her own judgement; every time she tried to work out whether she was attracted to a boy, fuzzy and indefinite images would emerge of Mingus. Sex quickly became a way of switching these pictures off, Regan consoling herself that her proclivities had at least saved her from falling in love, and thus ruining her young life in the way her mother had frequently warned of. Regan thus remained the same inscrutable force in her relationships as she did outside them, growing no nearer herself in the privacy and privileged attention of her partners, than she had on her own.

  By the time Regan move
d to Pegasus Court, her father’s generous allowance topping up that of her local-authority maintenance grant, minimalism had taken root in all branches of her life, an overriding desire for simplicity, no matter how her reductions twisted or diluted reality, an unwavering constant. The gang of wits that had dubbed her ‘Brat’ adjusted the nickname to accommodate ‘fuck-happy robotic’, Regan’s appearance with knee-length felt boots, leggings and a silver roll-neck if going out, and Nikes, leggings and a bronze turtle neck when staying in, doing little to deflect their snipes, and her hatred of bright but shapeless leisure-wear positively confirming them.

  Even her most loyal confederates had to concede that Regan’s superficial otherness might not amount to anything deeper than borderline autism: a young woman who lived as she danced, exactly and precisely, free of the waft of hyacinths her partners sought to detect in vain, her spirit a grounded betrayal of the ethereality promised by her Waterhousian beauty. Mercifully Regan was modest; lacking the passion to do anything else she did the best she could, her real goals and motives occasionally coming to her in dreams she forgot on waking, the early promise of sophistication having by now faded into an atomised cleanliness similar to that of any other chilly weirdo.

  The sting in the tail of her inverted osmosis was that Regan could feel Petula slipping away, like a crane gliding into the setting sun, without her. For as long as Regan was consciously able to perform the operation, her life had ceased to be a succession of ‘nows’ and consisted of a stream of ‘thens’ whose value consisted in her being able to tell her mother about them later. Her mother’s ever-decreasing interest in her tales hurt – Petula only reaching animation when she detected the seeds of a challenge in Regan’s anecdotal recollections, otherwise content to give every sign that listening to her daughter posed something of a struggle. During Regan’s last trip to The Heights, this trend had crescendoed to insultingly absurd proportions. Regan had only to embark on her narrative stride for Petula to leave and answer the door, reach for the telephone, or rise suddenly to retrieve a boiling kettle, the act of having to hear to the end of a sentence sure to send her mother into fluctuations of unrelated activity. Regan was left with the hurtful intimation that there had been an argument neither could remember having that had nonetheless changed everything.

  ‘…it made it really nice to spend reading week somewhere different this time.’

  ‘Sorry, what was it you were saying?’

  ‘Me and Jeremy, you know, Jeremy and I, we decided to spend reading week in Bath, you remember, where his sister lives, the one you liked, she was wearing some bit of clothing you liked, remember? I went there before when you had to go to that jazz thing in Switzerland; it’s a bit like Cambridge but I actually I prefer it because Bath…’

  ‘Hold on, just a second, I’m going to have to take this, I think it’s from Cory; he’ll be calling from Vancouver, so I simply must. Anyway, I think you’ve told me that story about Roy and his baths before…’

  Regan was practised in distilling complicated emotions into simple expressions of hope, a thick skin the requisite counterpart to putting her clothes on in the morning. Even so she could not resist the impulse to feel sorry for herself, however hard she tried to not allow it to show; she had followed the rules, obeyed the instructions, ignored her heart and distanced herself from unsuitable friends. What more could she do to take her place at Petula’s right hand? Warily she toyed with opening up in such a way as to benefit from advice, a tested way of securing her mother’s attention.

  ‘I do sometimes get a bit lonely at uni, Mum. Like you must living out here I suppose.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Lonely. Living on your own can get lonely can’t it?’

  ‘You must be joking. I don’t get a moment’s peace.’

  ‘But don’t you get tired of being around people all the time?’

  ‘Why should I? We’re meant to be social animals, aren’t we? You’re the one complaining about being lonely, I’m not surprised with that long face darling, I told you moving to that housing estate on the outskirts of town was a peculiar idea. Who’d want to go there when you have all that history on your doorstep? Town’s the place to be at your age, where the action is.’

  ‘It’s not a housing estate, Mum, and anyway, that isn’t the problem, I meant more that…’

  ‘That you don’t have enough friends? That’s the fault of your Nohallows girls, it’s stopped you seeking fresh blood. So long as you know you have them to fall back on, you can’t be bothered to make the effort.’

  ‘Not that. But I do find it hard to really get to know new people, I suppose.’

  ‘Put yourself about a bit love, make them need you more, become invaluable, you know, so that whenever so-and-so needs such-and-such done they call you, otherwise it’ll flop. You get out what you put in, all that nonsense, your gym teachers should really have told you about that long ago. It’s a chore, but the only way you can be sure of grabbing the audience you want is by not giving them any say in the matter, get in their faces, don’t leave them with any choice. That’s the thing. Otherwise you’re wasting your time, and life is all effort and no bloody reward.’

  And for the last term Regan had done precisely that, returning to social functions she had recently thrown over, dating boys in a pedantically old-fashioned way that involved seeing them more than once after she slept with them, eating in pizzerias, shopping in Waitrose, dressing up in Rag week and using her Fiat Uno at the drop of a hat to convey friends to lectures, debates and jamborees; not quite hating every minute of it, but close enough to wonder whether Petula realised one woman’s Daiquiri might be another’s prune juice. It was not as if Regan was blind to her mother’s point – she might have to do all the driving, but the punters were in her car and would have to suffer her presence at the controls whether they liked it or not. Rather, such a service, in one who revealed little, risked relegating her to the status of a trusty appendage. Lacking all will to force her personality on those who came to rely on her, Regan found that her wheels were never really in motion, simply spinning in midair as the remaining term of her last year passed her by.

  Regan was not sure when the phone had started ringing again, only that it had been doing so without interruption in the time it had taken her to rise, clean her teeth, and slug back the better part of a bottle of half-frozen Perrier, gagging as the fizzy current of water tore down her throat and percolated noisily in her taut chest. Still it rang, the Argentinian muttering something in Spanish and pulling the duvet over his ears pathetically. It could only be her mother, the ringing itself reminding Regan of her voice. Only Petula could hold on for so long, despite her calls drying to a weekly overture usually delivered last thing on a Sunday night, for the want of anyone else to relate the weekend’s events to. But if it was Petula it might be important, certainly out of the ordinary, enough for a daughter ravenous for a helping of validation to grab the receiver and intone emotionlessly, ‘Regan Montague here.’

  ‘At last,’ said Petula, ‘what the hell kept you? I thought something had happened. Don’t make me wait like that, I beg you, not that. Oh forgive me darling, I don’t mean to sound mad, I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning; really, oh it’s so, so awful. No, I mean it, simply awful. And terrible too, frankly. Just… just terrible. I never thought I’d see this day, I mean actually be alive if something like this happened to me, to us. Don’t even ask, I can’t believe it’s even really happened. I don’t mean that it hasn’t, only that I can’t believe it. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. Someone I hate. God knows how long it must have been going on for. And it’s my own fault. Always insisting on seeing the good in people. Or being too busy trying to do good to notice the bad under my own nose. Sorry. I know I must sound absurd to you. Oh forgive me!’

  ‘What, Mummy? What is it you’re talking about? What’s happened to you, are you alright?’

  ‘Of course I’m not!’

  ‘Then…’

>   ‘No, I can’t. Just horrible, I’m sorry, no, no, it’s too much. Frankly I’m disgusted, to tell you the truth. Yes, to be frank, disgusted. Sickened. Completely. It’s disgusting.’

  ‘I’m sorry Mum, but what’s disgusting?’

  ‘Have you opened your mail yet?’

  ‘No, I just got up, I’ve been at a…’

  ‘Then go, go now, at once, you’ll see then.’

  ‘See what? What am I supposed to be looking for Mum?’

  ‘A letter of course, he’s sent one to you too, read it and then call me back. At once. Please darling, I need you now. We’re like sisters.’

  And forgetting anything that she may have ever harboured against her mother, Regan bolted out of the door, tumbling down the narrow steps to look for a letter that would explain it all. There, sitting atop a scattering of leaflets offering deeppan pizzas and fried battery hen at discount prices, was a crisp envelope with a foreign stamp on it. There was a desolate air about the scratchy handwriting, the black ink and white paper ominous in the way that only news which considered itself bad could be. Should she open and read it or phone her mother right away? Regan could not remember what order she had been asked to perform her duty in, her gut telling her that even though the letter was addressed to her she was prying in the affairs of others if she pulled it open. Natural curiosity was too great, and ripping apart the edge, Regan sat by the door and experienced, though she was too preoccupied to know it, an unpleasant turning point in her reading life. From that morning on she would be scared of letters, the brush of mail being pushed through the letter-flap, postboxes and red vans innocently going about their business, all of these would make her shudder. Her preferred mode of communication would, like Petula’s, become the telephone, or failing that, yelling out of the window into the street. When she had finished reading she sat where she was for a while, staring up at the milky morning light pouring through the frosted-glass window above the door, and celestial beings, their thin traceable lines moving like ghosts across into the walls separating her flat from the next.