Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  Robinson’s esoteric reason for picking Regan above all others was that she found her absent air unthreatening, complementing the saccharine violence of her own finely-strung personality. And as an added bonus, Robinson had noticed from the invite that The Magus, like Regan, was from Yorkshire (Robinson had turned down a number of invitations issued by Regan on her mother’s behalf to stay at The Heights), offering an opportunity to try out her northern accent on the plane, with a possible seduction of the wunderkind in mind; the commercial potential of this union easily worth letting down her Caledonian fanbase for.

  Regan knew enough of The Magus’s ascendancy to know that this camera-shy, limelight-avoiding recluse was her very own Mingus, his stage name a silly magician’s contrivance that appealed to his sense of the stupid. News of the show did not then come as a mind-altering shock, though to hear him coyly alluded to by Robinson still made her want to rush to the office kitchen and puke, her cheeks abruptly changing colour once she had dropped the receiver. Until that morning Regan had watched Mingus’s rise from afar and nervously, avoiding his Hoxton Gallery and White Cube opening, the early Saatchi shows and public commissions, and even the giant wooden etchings of a lake, an anomaly in his work, that decorated the headquarters of the Halifax Building Society. To her enormous relief he courted an air of inscrutable elusiveness, avoiding having his picture taken or appearing in public, which was all to the good, as double-page interviews in the Sunday supplements would have scared her from entering a newsagent’s. By keeping her distance Regan could pretend that it was not really Mingus all this was happening to, and that it was perfectly bearable that she was not at his side to enjoy her portion of his glory. Interestingly Regan also noticed that his rise was as profound a source of discomfort to her mother, who never mentioned it, as it was to her. Rather than take credit for a man she knew as a little boy, an open goal for Petula if ever there was one, the subject was ignored to a point where Jenny Hardfield – justifiably proud that her son’s glass installations of dead cattle, empty pint glasses and torn condoms were on their way to making him a millionaire – dared not share her joy when the two women bumped into each other. Whether Petula could not stand the success of one who had not relied on her to achieve it, or was in some obscure way envious of the attention he had garnered, Regan could not make out – the closest they came to broaching the subject were her mother’s numerous broadsides against ‘the curse of crappy conceptual installations that you find everywhere like fox turds, I mean, where the hell is the joy in that?’ Regan had to admit that she did not like this development in modern art any more than she enjoyed dwelling on the garbage it was based on. Mingus’s work may have been more sincerely felt than the tacky rubbish his context-switching contemporaries lifted off the skip and stuck in galleries, though it was not, in Regan’s mind, any less dull or ugly for that distinction. Even if she was mistaken, and Mingus’s masterwork, a room in the Tate Modern that replicated what she knew very well to be the original interior of the St Elmo’s Fire, long since pulled down on Shatby pier, was as the critics proclaimed a multi-functional advance on Duchamp’s Fountain, she would not have missed an episode of Friends to visit it again. She prized Mingus for the soul that brushed past hers, its trace lying dormant over her own ever since she had seen daylight, blinked and scuttled back into the dark. The external expressions or trappings of that life-force, like the applause of the art mob that claimed to have discovered him, were a matter for a world that did not know what she did: that the broken air-conditioning units or painted ping-pong balls in chrome cages could shatter and rust; it was the boy she loved.

  Robinson’s phone call punctured an embryonic wall separating her secret existence from a real person she now had no excuse not to interact with; to remain passive as good as running away from a chance, at last, to direct her life towards the object of her reverence. In rejecting Mingus, Regan had tried one route: to become someone her mother would approve of; why? Because in doing so she would remain someone her mother was not jealous of, a price she was willing to pay to court her approval. It was time to accept, not having sought one herself, that life was offering her a second chance; the intensity of this knowledge convincing Regan that she would risk everything that sustained her, but could never bring ultimate happiness, and fly out with Robinson that Monday, come what may.

  In the event, simply by not contradicting Robinson, a car, tickets and reservations at the newly opened Soho House New York were arranged, and their seats on Concorde, only months from being decommissioned, booked. The office in London did not like it; a black mark Regan could live with, never having done anything to court outright dislike before, beyond exhibiting more conscientious, thorough and punctual behaviour than the average cultural-industry worker felt comfortable with. The decision made, Regan teemed with hesitancy. To follow through or not to? Within the hour she was on the phone again, her weekly conference call with the old Nohallows girls, who, in true contrary form, she hoped would tell her to pull out and come to her senses once she had announced her news.

  These four young women, outside of her memory of Mingus, and the reality of Petula, were the only constant in Regan’s life, their lasting friendship a rare source of enduring pride and reassurance. Regular ‘reunions’ were a shared joke, as there was no need to reunite a group who had never stopped seeing one another; a blizzard of postcards, phone calls and group holidays steeling them through their individual life-trials far past an age where school ties fray; newer replacements never threatening the primary bond forged on the hockey fields of Nohallows. Less kindly, Regan had gone from being the gang’s beacon and intimidating figurehead to the girl they all secretly worried about and felt slightly sorry for. She sensed this, though hoped it was her paranoia working overtime, as to be an object of pity was only one step up from the revulsion Jazzy and Evita inspired in her mother. Nevertheless Regan’s leadership of the gang had dissolved into an honorary role, and the thought that the others were ahead of her on life’s way, and she left behind, a constant self-reproach, culminating in her suggestion that they should meet for a weekend at The Heights for the first time since the unfortunate death of Rex Wade. Regan had designed this break as a way of showing her friends how content she was with her freewheeling independence, beholden to no man and glad to be single, putting any ideas that she was on her way to bitter spinsterhood out of their minds. The weekend had also been carefully picked and arranged to not include Petula, who was due to be away shooting grouse with Tim Rice near Oban, leaving Regan in a position she had rarely been able to take advantage of before; enjoying the freedom of The Heights without Petula. Fortunately, her impending trip to New York would not interfere with their jolly, and might even have endowed her with genuine happiness to share with her friends, were it not for the perverse desire to sabotage her adventure, before it had begun.

  The dynamic of the girls’ friendship had altered only a little over the years, Regan’s silences quietly interpreted over time as awkward rather than above it all; otherwise the girls bantered as before, taking only the slightest notice of their individual fortunes and circumstances. Each shared enough in common with all to prevent formal sub-alliances or factions from developing within their set. Diamanda was cynical, brash and single; the lead singer in an all-girl Clash-covers act who had toyed with lesbianism, her main income coming from her modelling career. Men, she liked to say, were nothing more than sluts and cunt-teases, good only for starting wars and carrying her into cabs when wasted. Daisy had married a much older man, a successful architect and sincere Methodist whom they all teased her mercilessly about, but liked well enough; her five children and converted barn in Surrey were the closest any of them had come to achieving conventional bliss. Mathilda and Eloise were more fragile and less set on their courses: the former having been left with triplets by a serially unfaithful husband, a racing car driver, whom she was in the process of divorcing; the latter a successful television comedienne who had used her excessive girth for
her act to an unfortunate degree, and whose primetime show would in all likelihood be axed if she ever now lost weight.

  Despite their differences, Regan still feared that she was the odd-woman-out, the others comfortable in, or at least honest about, whatever unhappinesses they encountered, displaying a refreshing levity she could not ape. Privately she apprehended that Daisy and Diamanda’s opposition secretly united them; Elouise shared Diamanda’s performing background and Mathilda related to Daisy’s domesticity. Added to that, Daisy’s love for her children ran through and was intimately connected to her love for her husband; she loved them from the start because she already loved him – meanwhile Mathilda had circumnavigated her husband and become quite separate from him to the point where her feelings towards her children could not save their union, but as a mother was still closer to Daisy than Regan ever could be. And most unfairly, Diamanda, ostensibly Regan’s best and oldest friend, was too amused by life to share her anxieties, busy making a joke of everything like Elouise, whose self-disgust had always been her route to popularity. True, just as at school, they all enjoyed setting themselves apart from the scaly rump of humanity, yet alone amongst them, aloof withdrawal for Regan was not an act, but an alienated fact. Thankfully her depressing digressions on isolation, usually framed in an anecdote indirectly alluding to her having no other real friends, could always be cut short by one of them making her laugh, dissolving distance and stroking the hairs of her doubt back into an orderly gradient.

  Biding her time while peering into the soupy muck of her hot chocolate, the powdered milk collecting round the sides of the cup like elderly spit, Regan dug her plastic spoon into her palm and waited for an opening, her heavy and irregular breathing a hint that she had more to say than usual, though not a strong enough sign for her friends to stop talking.

  ‘You’re at a personal best aren’t you? I watched you last night and thought I’d never seen you so big. How do you keep putting it on?’

  ‘Posh ice cream.’

  ‘And you can still have sex? Neil, the sleazy div, what happened, did he succumb or stick with someone smaller in the end?’ Diamanda asked Elouise.

  ‘He came to me, of course he came to me, he’s my skinny counterpart, he thinks I’m a niche and we help complete each other.’

  Talk had so far been dominated by Diamanda and Elouise; the latter having proudly announced that she was sleeping with a television anchor-man known to them all, and married to a more famous television anchor-lady they all despised.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Funnily enough he was completely pissed and it was my turn to be totally sober. I had to take his trousers off for him, he was a mess, blabbing that he didn’t know what he was doing and that he’d never cheated on her before. Which must be bollocks. He’s too practised.’

  ‘Rather you than me, it sounds horrible.’

  ‘No, he pulled it together after a bit. The disappointing part for me is not being able to see what’s going on anymore. I just can’t get that bird’s-eye perspective since I put on the extra pounds.’

  ‘Who can without mirrors?’

  ‘Don’t either of you just want to forget about yourselves for a moment and simply enjoy what’s happening to you, directly I mean?’ interrupted Daisy, determined to remain part of the conversation. ‘The last thing I want to see if I’m horny is me naked. I just don’t see what’s so kinky about watching what you’re doing when you’re making love.’

  ‘Making love? Please, please stop making me sick; thinking of you getting horny, and that could only mean with your husband, which means I have to think of him too, is too sicky for pictures.’

  ‘So it’s alright for you to yak about it all the time and not me? Just because you think seedy and gross is cool?’

  ‘Only if it was with someone interesting. I still remember when you used to pick up Korean students in nightclubs Mrs Tinder!’ said Elouise, her voice a thin squeak packed in thick casing, ‘You were filth, I don’t care what you tell the world or you husband these days, preaching your gospel of parsimonious mating to people who don’t know your dark heart. Once filth always filth.’

  ‘You’re vile.’

  ‘There, go easy on Mrs Tinder,’ said Diamanda, ‘if she’s made a life decision to pretend she enjoys having intercourse with her children’s father then that’s up to her. Even if it means lying to old friends shamelessly.’

  ‘Life decisions, Diamanda? Please? You haven’t even made any to regret!’

  ‘I’ve made two, only two,’ Mathilda cut in, her lisp complimenting the slur that was the result of prematurely middle-aged drinking habits, ‘who I married and where I work. Those were the only two. And they took turns at being shit, and were even sometimes shit at the same time. And you’ve no idea how much thought went into those decisions either…’

  ‘Those are the two, the only two, most people make, and most people regret,’ Daisy said kindly, in a way that suggested she did not go in for such errors, adding with pained languor, ‘You know, you did do the right thing telling him to leave, Mathilda. Duncan was never any good. We all hated him from the off, especially Diamanda. He was a proper bastard, a cliché.’

  ‘That’s why I like small decisions,’ Diamanda cut in quickly, ‘so I can change course before a good thing deteriorates into a shit one; you know, when the same parts you loved to start with begin to assemble in a different way that looks decidedly shitty? And I like the beginnings, what’s so important about going on forever and ever until the end? Two or three good times early on, move on, meet someone else, fail again, There’s no shortage of takers, we’ve hardly met anybody yet!’

  ‘Some of us like permanence Diamanda, and don’t want to keep chopping and changing all the time. I want what makes me happy to survive as long as I do and to even outlast me,’ said Daisy, impatiently, but with faked annoyance. She knew what her friend thought, knew that she did not agree, and that this unbridgeable chasm would make absolutely no difference to either of their lives or friendship.

  Diamanda snorted, ‘Try writing a novel then. You can’t be talking about people when you say things like that. What’s permanent?’

  ‘Maybe she means a novel? It’d be as difficult as making a dream interesting; I don’t know how anyone can read one let alone write one. I haven’t finished a book since the twins were born,’ groaned Mathilda.

  ‘Oh, you know, there’s always when they’re are asleep,’ Daisy laughed, ‘I’m halfway through Proust now.’

  ‘I’m too pissed to even understand what’s on the telly by the time the kids have gone to sleep.’

  ‘What the hell are we talking about anyway?’ asked Diamanda, ‘I’ve only got half an hour until my shoot, someone say something interesting please, or else I’ll have to accept that you’re all just a bad habit I can’t kick.’

  Regan took the plunge, ‘I’m going to New York on Monday.’

  ‘So what? We can all go on airplanes now sweetie, now that we’re big girls. And you’re not the only one who’s been to America now, the rest of us have caught up too!’

  ‘I know why you’re going,’ Elouise interrupted in a shrill accent that she took to personify the New York art world, ‘because there’s some really interesting white building they just put up that you have to go and stand in and look at the ceiling of?’

  ‘Has someone been lying to you about the constancy of the coke out there?’

  ‘I bet you they’ve promised you something, haven’t they Regan?’ carried on Elouise, ‘Fly over there for free, be fucking bored out of your mind, come back, but at least you didn’t have to pay for the flight out or the canapés, am I right? Corporate cack in excess? Trust me, you’d have a better night out at the Clapham Grand.’

  Regan was used to their overflowing spirits washing through her usual evasions, and rather than follow her opening remark with what she had intended to say – ‘I am not sure I should, I think I’m making a mistake’ – she felt a surge of boastful pride re
place her hesitancy. Whether it was because she found her own thinking wonderful when she reached the subject of Mingus, or because a decision was tantalisingly close to being aired – the actualisation of self-invention simply a few words away – would be a question she would save for the plane ride over. She blurted: ‘I’ve been invited to an opening at The Gagosian for your information, by the artist whose show it is. And I am taking Charlene Robinson.’

  ‘An artist? What, you mean one of your mum’s mates? And why’s Robinson in the picture, I thought you said she was a bloody harpy?’

  Regan beamed inwardly, ‘No, one of my mates actually, Mingus, you remember him, he’s called The Magus now but it’s the same guy. And Robinson’s just along for the ride, she thinks I am great for some reason. There are people who do you know!’

  ‘Hang on, you’re not going out to fuck someone, are you?’

  ‘What? No! What are you on?’

  ‘Mmmmm, sounds very much like a transatlantic booty call to me!’

  ‘Fuck off! I can’t believe you sometimes!’

  ‘But then what? Something similar, to test the water right? Mingus… Magus, oh that guy! Jesus Regan, you’re so fucking transparent! I honestly don’t know why you bother!’

  ‘You’re thinking what I’m thinking Diamanda?’ laughed Eloise.

  ‘Pure serendipity! Of course she means him! The one she fell in love with when she was about four!’

  ‘What are you talking about? I never did!’

  ‘Oh come on, it’s obvious, you’ve practically said as much when you’re pissed, thousands of times!’

  ‘I don’t ever remember saying anything of the kind to you, any of you! When have I ever talked about him?’