‘What is it Mum?’ Jazzy had noticed his mother’s attention wander away from the path of greater intimacy, and was already beginning to miss the most powerful ten minutes he would ever share with her.
‘Oh nothing… those, over there,’ Petula pointed at a cluster of peonies, their stalks not entirely solid enough to carry the weight of the flowers bursting at their heads, ‘they’re the bright shoots of everlastingness, aren’t they? So beautiful, so reassuring, all will be well, yes, all will be well…’
‘It will be Mum, it will be, be sure of it. From now on.’
‘Of course it will… In fact, if you feel up to it, you might mention to our runaway when you see him that the Philippines is no longer a land of lawless opportunity, they have extradition laws now, I’ve read about them, and he’d be better off trying his luck somewhere else, New Guinea I think. More his line.’
‘Philippines?’
‘Oh, I’ll explain later!’
Jazzy smiled wisely, it was an expression Petula could imagine taking people in, should he have recourse to do so in future, along with an earthy charm he might like to cultivate.
‘The world will be too small a place for the runaway by the time we’re through with him. This is only the start Jasper.’
‘Jazz,’ called Spider, ‘babe, are you good, everything okay?’ ‘Yes babe,’ bellowed back Jazzy with a great sense of occasion, ‘today everything is good. We’re a family again.’
Petula winced, for as much as the sentiment touched her, the blustering finality with which it had been conveyed did not. All this was stalling, she was standing at the start of a new act, and needed to be alone again in peace to prepare for the next step, and then for all the ones after that.
‘Go Jazz, here are my keys, keep your mind on the job, and God bless you. Now go.’
CHAPTER TEN,
coupling and coming.
Petula’s problems were about to take another unexpected turn.
Jeremy gazed across the narrow gap that separated his knees, thighs and compressed genitals from Regan’s, and marvelled again at how he could not find this girl more enticing, her physical existence meeting many if not most of his requirements for formal earthly perfection. To observe her at this distance was to run his eyes over a menu of sexually enticing positives: narrow and viciously pruned eyebrows, toothpick-thin lips, blonde thickets of hair piled upon her head like dainty pineapples and a sculpturally finished carriage that looked to have been lifted from the Galleria Borghese; all bound in skin-tight velour tracksuit, completed by her maker’s crowning achievement – thin, probing fingers that Jeremy really ought to have built into his morning masturbatory tussle, squeezing the fleshy circumference of his jutting cock, instead of politely observing them on the steering wheel of her Punto, tapping away in time to the inoffensive chart-hop dilution Regan preferred to the gangsta-rap compilations he had assembled for their journey. Then again, Regan might have actually considered finding him a bit more attractive herself; could he be any less so than the acned toads, hedge-creatures and greasy nonentities she wasted herself on? Jeremy knew that this was to miss the point of their relationship, yet it was a point his vanity enjoyed flying over, allowing his ego an airing before being caged within the sulky-superior silences he usually expressed it through. Besides, he knew he was attractive, not simply because when he asked people they usually replied in the affirmative, though that was certainly a relevant part of his conviction, but from the deepest sort of lusting after oneself.
From an aesthetic point of view, Regan had picked her ‘special friend’ with a similar care to that she took with her clothes, her human attire combining the same qualities of comfort and decor as the inanimate kind, Jeremy a mute Sancho Panza to her stunned Quixote, their deficiencies of character the pull and limit to how well they worked together. Taken on their visual impact alone, they were a success, looking as though they ought to be a couple who would come to a happy end several years hence. Jeremy was tall, and though conscious of it to the point of stooping slightly, offered an instantly recognisable silhouette, his giant elemental shoulders and trunk sending plenty of undergraduate hearts aflutter. He was easy to spot, lunkishly barging to the front of a queue or appearing from under a bridge on the towpath where he took his solitary and sullen walks. His features were solidly assembled and brick-like, built to an exact if rather universal specification for balanced male handsomeness that Regan deluded herself into thinking was an acquired taste of her own. Though spurning athletics and team games of every kind, his figure was equal to tossing a caber, a bunch of muscles seemingly constructed without the help of any exercise, other than the hours he spent at the obscure gym he and Regan frequented, popping out of his vests with careless virility. This near-caricature of complete masculinity was accentuated by his unusual fetish for clothes that were at least a size too small for him. A visible brief line, and a penis he could not stop fiddling about with, its outline crushed in his spray-on jeans like a broken bar of chocolate, were too absurdly sure a way of announcing he was gay to be confused for it. Regan loved the vulgarity but was not turned on, conscious as she was of the sheer number of vulgar townies who would approach them on a night out, her companion a beacon to the basest forms of lechery, fielding off multiple inquiries about whether he was a personal trainer, Chippendale or adult-film industry worker, every time they visited a club. This fanfaric sideshow detracted from the relationship they were not having, the juncture between it being too early for them to embark on one, and then too late, traversed suddenly.
Jeremy had heard there was no such thing as an impossible sexual combination but he and Regan were, he had to admit, looking an increasingly unlikely one. He reproached himself for not having made his move on the first occasion they shared a bed together after a night on the town. The two drunken clubbers had collapsed onto Regan’s polar-white eiderdown, just inches away from an exploratory kiss. Then for some reason Jeremy could not remember, he had started to tell a story about a relatively dull acquaintance of theirs, perhaps to add some credit to his own role in a largely pointless anecdote about swapping coats. Regan fell asleep as he was talking, and he had lain there, watching her, scared that to wake her and try now would only be tragic or disappointing. The following evening it was Jeremy’s turn to pass out, following a round of tequila shots on an empty stomach, the alcohol working too well to offer the Dutch courage it was downed for. Botched misses and squandered chances piled up, other lovers coming and going to ease the disappointment, as instead of the revelatory intimacy their initial attraction had gleefully anticipated, their chemistry remained stubbornly tepid, if occasionally furtive. In six months the closest they got to doing ‘it’ had been talking about it in the hope of birthing an act that would not come of itself. Regan, developing a tall tale she had eavesdropped over her mother’s table, told Jeremy, stoned, that her fantasy was to have rough love made to her on a beach as a line of men, Magnificent Seven style, took turns to stand on a rock and masturbate over her and her lover’s rutting bodies. It was a heartwarming lie, Regan expecting a layer of the filth she had heard so much about to rub off on her, and having done so, finally inspire Jeremy to pin her against a wall and fulfil his biological duty. Jeremy, not to be outdone, though missing the point entirely, slowly reeled off an exaggerated director’s cut of his sexual history, tongues and fingers counting as lays in his telling, played out in places boys who did not have anywhere to go back to would use: the floor of a secondary school at four in the morning, the empty garage of a relative, a Church altar, a suburban footpath. These drearily episodic tales did little to raise the temperature between the potential lovers, and nor did a pornographic film they sat awkwardly through, the actors ugly beyond words. In the meantime they became friends, the first of the opposite sex either had properly made, for Mingus, whatever he was, had never counted as anything so straightforward as a chum in Regan’s reckoning. Tenderness gradually clouded the erotic component of their relationship, bringi
ng about the filial bond Jeremy had dreaded in its place; coziness a damning admonishment to his thwarted testosterone.
Despite choosing a Business Ethics course with the ambition of one day managing a nature reserve, Cambridge, or at least the university and its environs, was an intimidating proposition for Jeremy, however much he tried to conceal it with diffident and sometimes pouting bravado. Regan quickly grasped this fundamental insecurity, perceiving how the college and its communal rituals challenged her friend’s natural shyness and desire for a privacy he had never known. Both Jeremy’s parents had met at their local bank where they had been tellers from enrolment to retirement, his brothers resentful planks who saw women as their enemy, his sisters older and always pregnant, their home a cramped nettle-green bungalow on the outskirts of Swindon. Jeremy freely confessed to her that the sum of his family’s collective existence was to live quietly, understand absolutely nothing, and die quietly. It was a fateful path he lived in half-hearted terror of, lapping up Regan’s tales of The Heights and of Petula’s experiments in public taste with relish. Being in Regan’s company was as good as renouncing the maudlin genealogy of his forbears; his father’s grey hush puppies, his mother’s hair nets and shower caps, his bunk bed and yellowing Formula One duvet, all flushed away; a world so thin that it would take a Montague or two to thicken it to a width he could be proud of.
Jeremy did not require Regan to issue her invitation to The Heights again, not even when he was told that their plans had been brought forward and they were to leave in an hour, all on account of her mother having been unexpectedly heartbroken. As he had often pretended his parents had divorced simply to make them sound more interesting, Jeremy was stimulated at the thought of encountering a real-life tragedy in progress. What did it matter that he had failed to obtain his oats with Regan? He knew from experience that finally getting to sleep with the object of one’s dreams was a hollower victory than the wait prepared one for, enticing potential so often lost in the crudity of its obtainment. To be held at arm’s length with Regan was still preferable to the alternative – a relationship with another slapper he would have to apologise to his mates for. And who knew, perhaps on her own turf Regan might grow into a friskier proposition, luring him onto a four-poster bed like some latter-day Anne Boleyn, with the promise of an orgasm that would last three quarters of an hour and a peerage at the end of it.
Embarrassed at the extent of his imaginative impertinence, Jeremy tried to strike a deliberate note of wonder. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this far north before,’ he said, ‘the funny thing is, near where I come from, they do these adverts for bread, and basically pretend that our town is in the north, you know, the whole lie is set a hundred years ago, and they pretend that’s where the bread is made.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Shaftesbury, it’s called “Gold Hill”, an old cobbled street that the advert says is in Yorkshire, because it looks like it should be. The voiceover is shit too, some old paedo telling you how they baked it in the old days.’
‘But you’re from Wiltshire aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, but the two places are practically next to each other. Wiltshire, Dorset. You can catch a bus in five minutes.’
‘Right.’
‘Alright, so maybe they’re not that close, but you told me you were from London when I met you!’
‘You wouldn’t have believed me if I said I came from where I do.’
‘Correct. I figured you for somewhere like Cheltenham or Henley.’
‘People don’t get the Yorkshire connection because they’re always looking for the wrong thing. Not me basically.’
‘Like what?’
‘Leeds United, Nora Batty, Alan Bennett, Little and Large. I don’t have the accent, the attitude or look, nor does Mum or many of the people we know, not the ones we know really well anyway. Maybe my brother does, sort of… actually I wouldn’t know how to describe him, anyway, don’t worry, we probably won’t even see him.’ Regan felt a nauseous rustling in her chest, like an intruder forcing open a door she wished to keep shut. The thought of Jazzy always seemed the first step in a journey she would rather not embark on, her lack of compassion for his ‘predicament’ a source of embarrassment to them both.
Jeremy helped himself to another fruit gum, shards of the sticky sweet entwined in his teeth. ‘Posh people are the same all over, they’re like their own country,’ he mused in the slightly childlike, even feminine voice he sometimes adopted with Regan, and never used round anyone else. ‘You’ve all got more in common with each other than you have with any of the ordinary people you live near.’ It bothered him that he had never found a natural way of talking, silence always feeling the most natural state for him to remain in.
‘We’re not that posh,’ Regan replied, ‘trust me, compared to some of the people we know we’re like, like the worst most lowly peasants, you know? Nothing special. Common even.’
‘That,’ said Jeremy professorially, ‘remains to be seen!’
He reclined in his seat with the assurance of a judge at a private members’ club, and bringing his knees up to the dashboard with an insolence he did not really feel, attempted to whistle along clumsily to the music. In truth he was really on-edge. The ticklish prospect of finally meeting Petula was daunting. Would she consider him a groaningly dull upstart from a far-off place no one had heard of? There was not much use in opening with the Hovis gambit, that was for sure, which put into sharp focus how little he had to say for himself – nothing amusing, intelligent or intriguing at any rate. What if she saw him as a potential son–in-law and delivered the full treatment: ‘So, you think you can marry my daughter, do you?’ Did he really know how to fend off the unfriendly attentions of a woman who ranked the great, fashionable and creative in her address book? Would she even deign to notice him at all? He could only go down in Regan’s estimations once Petula had shown him up as a mediocrity, yet he had to try, even if his chances were no better than a tulip surviving a nuclear winter, he still had to try.
It was safest to put off any more second guessing until it was too late to worry, which he calculated would be some minutes before they finally arrived for high-tea, supper, dinner or whatever it was the Montagues called their late-afternoon meal. Out on the road the landscape and weather were growing ever more alien. He was right; they were definitely in the north now, and Jeremy imagined how the air, inaccessible in a car travelling at nearly ninety with the windows up, must feel: clear, cleansing and sharp, like a ghost stroking his face. Maybe that was what entering Regan on a lonely moor would be like, surrounded by a flock of goats and the skull of a kite, the oceanic purge his body owed to itself reaching its final consummation, Regan lying under him, her haunted eyes staring into his, knowing she would never be so satisfied again. His penis began to harden, and tactfully, he drew his hand over his crotch. The motorway appeared to be the dividing line. To his right Teesside; all pillars of smoke, defiant chimneys and winking lights, sullen in the browning cloud, the industrial working class challenging the flâneurs of Mockery Gap to neither forget nor write them off; and then the other side, where they were headed, a maze of crooked black lanes and craggy slate walls that led into the mountainous expanses of North Yorkshire and The Heights. Destiny, Jeremy thought, that was the most effective way of controlling his nerves, to accept that he was doing no more than being driven towards his fate, already too late to plead nerves or insanity.
‘Let me get my tape on,’ he said reaching back and rifling in his bag, ‘Yorkshire needs to hear it.’
‘Needn’t worry,’ said Regan, ‘my Mum has probably already got it.’
She watched Jeremy pinken and curve away catlike in his seat.
‘But I haven’t,’ she added, ‘please, let’s put it on.’
*
Jazzy was no fan of towns in general, nor Shatby in particular. Indulging in his weakness for misrepresentative generalisations, he regarded mid-size dwellings as a poor substitute for the ext
remes of the city or countryside, their existence a challenge to his view that life was an all-or-nothing affair, rather than the confused patchwork of compromises that kept a roof over his head. Because of his prejudice against places of average population, Jazzy had tried to give Shatby a wide berth, its continual presence at his operational frontiers an unwelcome reminder of a parallel route he might at any time be forced to take, should Petula give him his marching orders. It was typical that Noah had chosen a location that he would have had no desire to visit of itself, or even on account of his present mission, for which he felt ill-exposed and unprepared.
And what was Shatby anyway? It was not distinguished by narrow cobbled streets, a beautiful ruin or two, an abbey whose bells provided order through windy October nights, a worldclass oyster restaurant and a tidy marina, nor a resurgent newage community selling crystals, gems and spells from nicely smelling boutiques; none of that was Shatby yet this was where Noah had decided the next era of Montague history should be made! Crippled by an ugly working harbour, resembling a Soviet era port, and large connecting A-roads that split its sea-side tack and low-rise bungalows from the newer tower blocks that could have been lifted from Sheffield or Leeds, Shatby was low on magic and high on loss, the moors just far enough away to make the walk there along the duel carriageway lethal, and as Jazzy indicated to turn into the old town, he made the resolution to never come here again. He had met his match: Shatby had out-depressed him.
For Jazzy the weedy bank of shabby granite council houses foretold humiliating failure, a grey army looking down upon a soon-to-be-vanquished foe, compelling him to move his van to the opposite side of the road and park outside a boarded-up semi, its overgrown and untended garden comfortingly like his own. The grubby particulars of seaside life – a seagull tearing apart a turquoise crust of bread, the news emporium selling peanut brittle instead of papers and the drizzly Februaries that could never be told apart – were all harder for Jazzy to bear than the rural grime he felt safely camouflaged in. With an air of minding his own business, he thundered awkwardly across the top of the old town to the war memorial that overlooked the central thoroughfare which led to the seafront, the two sections of Shatby immortalised by Wrath as ‘a dead body held up by a broken leg’, a copper bust of the poet parked at the centre of the prominent traffic island. Down below, amongst the fading Edwardian hotels, sat The Elephant’s Nest, once a fashionable place to take tea and gobble ‘little rascals’, gnarly current cakes that could blind a gull if launched with enough malicious force. Naturally Jazzy had never entered the place, though he knew the twee Brontë Museum next door with its collection of spooked dolls, a dozen for each sister, staring out to sea with their eyes of blackened plastic, and the pier where an upmarket shop that prepared North Sea skate in breadcrumbs and lemon, instead of batter and vinegar, had opened next to Chinkies, now renamed The Oriental Rose. Jazzy had no use for any of these seafront consolations, heading straight for Saint Elmo’s Fire, a garish American theme bar announced in shocking pink and yellow lettering, partly hidden by the broken Fifties slot machines and jukeboxes stuck outside as ornaments. It commanded a partial, though disguised, view of the entrance to The Elephant’s Nest, and it was here that Jazzy ordered his first pint of the day, a flat American pilsner that smelt as if it had come from a vat the brewers had burped in. Jazzy quickly ordered another and, ignoring the other drinkers, a cross-section of the elderly, unemployed and soon-to-be-institutionalised, took a stool along the thin bar that ran next to and along the window.
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