Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  Regan could not recall how she got to her car, remembering only that she hoped her legs would carry her that far, and that if she fell, she did not end up eating gravel and being sectioned. The weeks that followed were no better. What intellectual life that survived her inferno of inward recrimination was spent checking the internet for varying definitions of madness, schizophrenia, bipolar personality disorders, dementia, Alzheimer’s and mixtures of all five – a medical explanation for her mother’s behaviour occasionally bringing her a crumb of comfort; the hope that a hidden illness may have begun a degenerative disease of the brain easy to reconcile with the facts, if not with the way they made her suffer. Daily, Regan resisted turning the television on and sitting in front of it doing nothing, or simply lying in bed and not moving; a lethargic demotivation replacing the prosaic dependability of her being. Bizarrely, once having forced herself into the office, her work was the one constant she could still rely upon herself to engage with normally, performing her tasks no better or worse than before, the terror that Mingus would call again forcing her to explain her terrible life to him, or of her ringing him to volunteer the same, keeping her awake and wired till five. However there was little disguising the shell-shock of one who had been through too much to ever talk of it, which preceded and overshadowed her every utterance – whatever words she managed being empty replacements for more important ones that would not come.

  Twice in a month Petula called her back to The Heights on the pretext of discussing an important matter again, once in a flood of tears, which continued throughout her stay precluding any confession, the wasted journey creating the need for a second trip where her mother finally promised to tell all. Nothing came of number two either except stilted and mechanical meals with people Regan may or may not have barely known, registering no impression on her as she was not there, or anywhere. Where Regan went to, she could not remember, becoming aware of her self agin only as she floated back to her food, imagining her knife and fork stuck in her mother’s back, neck, or wedged into her lower abdomen: a human carvery with nothing left on the plate. And then she would shudder all over, and pass the salt, as someone was always bound to want it. Her belief in her wretched destiny was now so singular, and her mother’s place in it so secure, that nothing else appeared to be required of her. She knew an event would occur to set her free, but as it was beyond her power to instigate it, there was nothing else to do but passively accelerate towards inevitability with open, if somewhat floppy, arms.

  Jazzy was having no better time of it than his sister. He was all over the place, lacking the singleness of purpose that required one who wanted to kill to graduate to the status of murderer. This was especially evident on those mornings when he would have quite happily called out ‘good morning’ to his mother, even if by the afternoon he wanted to bury a hatchet in her head, the ever-changing tenor of his temperament never so obvious as when he had to rely on himself to alter a situation. This inconsistency was more than a stumbling block; it meant that he had to be in the mood to kill to actually be able to do it, as well as believe in the need to, which was by far the easier part, as the theoretical case was watertight. Finality, though, had never sat well with him. What if, after he’d done the deed, he wanted it undone? How would he know how he would feel in a week, and who knew if how he felt then was any more representative of his true feelings than what he felt now? Or perhaps neither of those were the final truth and for that he’d have to wait another month? Never having gone anywhere in his life, Jazzy had never had to consider reversibility before, let alone an absolute and irreversible plan that he had not talked about for years first.

  There was much, though, in his favour; almost too much. Unlike most killers, his problem was not one of trying to lull the victim to a quiet spot to do away with her, or arranging an obscure pretext for a rendezvous out of the blue, but being positively spoilt for choice and context. Not a day passed that did not brim over with opportunities to dispatch Petula into the next life, and not just any opportunities but nigh-on perfect ones where she would not know it had happened, far less who delivered the blow.

  These opportunities brought the inevitable day closer, which only increased Jazzy’s anxiety. His initial drive to do what must be done, settled and certain, gave way to panic as he realised that even if he did not always feel the need, the show must go on (he increasingly thought in these euphemisms) for the sake of honour, self-respect, freedom and the future etc. Enjoying natural advantages meant that he would have to do better than copy plots straight out of Columbo, Magnum or Miss Marple, as no murderer had ever made it out of those reels without a police escort. Thuggery and violence, despite his hair-trigger temper, had never come naturally to him, and he suspected he would not be able to go through with an act that physically hurt Petula, in cold blood, especially if he looked her in the eye first and did not kill her straight out. The end would have to be swift, sudden and instantly conclusive. That ruled out Spider’s suggestion, which owed a liberal debt to an episode of Crimewatch they had sat through stoned – a ‘break-in’ where a husband smothered his wife in her sleep under the guise of a burglary, so as to deflect police suspicion from an ‘inside’ job. Spider suggested Jazzy do likewise, entering through a top-floor window and stealing stuff to do full justice to the approach, whilst deflecting the finger of suspicion toward the criminal communities of Kingston-upon-Hull by ‘leaving’ a torn shard of a Hull City strip at the crime scene. So far as Jazzy knew no one suspected he wanted to kill his mother, so there was no suspicion to divert, and the logistical drama of smashing into a house that remained unlocked twenty-four-seven was not only unnecessarily risky, but the sort of thing only a moron would try. He did not say this to Spider, preferring to move the conversation to what he had come to think of as the ‘mechanical’ model.

  If he were to fix the relevant parts in one of Petula’s cars, which were death traps from the minute she got into them drunk on the best of nights, he would be saved from having to lay a hand on her, or witness the final smash, skid or splat. But here Jazzy remembered a book he had long ago taken to heart, Crime and Punishment, and the dangers of unintended consequences, namely, additional deaths that followed from the justified first. One began by putting to death the king, and ended with the head of a Danton. A car going out of control, even on the farm, might take bystanders with it, and he wanted no one’s blood on his hands apart from Petula’s, who he had come to see as practically responsible for her own death. This still left him with the easiest and most ignoble route of all: a firm push down the stairs. Like a car crash, a fall was a very plausible way for Petula to die all of herself, without the subject of murder being so much as raised by the coroner. His mother’s legs had long lost all suppleness, and the injury at Regan’s party made it impossible for her to bend her right one at all. Yet she still stumbled about in all directions drunk, scaling the steps, often by crawling, to get to her bedroom, with no thought or idea of where she was. And the getting-down, if anything, was even more perilous. One evening Jazzy had found himself at the top of the steps watching her spend the better part of twenty minutes trying to get up, comatose and completely unaware of his presence, The Heights having so many means of entry and exit that it was impossible for even a vigilant person to keep tabs on who was coming in or going out. With just the gentlest of taps, she would have gone bowling back down, breaking her neck at the bottom, waiting there for him to find her in the morning, horrified but with an all-too-plausible explanation at hand. Who wouldn’t have seen it coming, once the unfortunate facts surrounding her incipient alcoholism were made more known?

  Yet he did not feel ready for it, for in truth he still wanted time to talk to people, to bring it up in the pub, canvass opinion, and go home and have another long think about the transvaluation of all values, if not quite in those terms or that order. But what was there to think about when he already had the perfect motive matched by the ideal opportunity? It was exhausting, and to his biting disappoin
tment he watched himself sink into the familiar cycle of tearing at the bit before hiding behind it, wanting to throw off his shackles then ask for them back, and swim intrepidly towards the light, in the hope that someone else would draw the curtains and prevent him before it was too late. Could it be that, like a long-colonised and oppressed people, he was not ready for the freedom he had for so long sought?

  Disgust at what filled his mind, minute by minute, made him unusually self-critical. He did not want to admit to himself that he had become warped, mean, nasty or weird, though he could not ignore the fact that he was at the very least sick. Only part of anyone’s life was about what they did; Jazzy understood that the better bit of it was to do with the qualities brought out by the endeavour, and how a person engaged with and developed these findings. Plotting the death of a family member endowed him with a shiftiness and a reflex to apologise for anything he could, be it treading on an ant or closing a door too decisively, lamentable and ascendant character traits he hoped he would be rid of once it was all over. Petula, meanwhile, incorrectly read her son’s nervousness as a confused desire to apologise to her, and ask for forgiveness for being such an ungrateful shit. Her assumption, loudly broadcast in his hearing, sealed her fate – Jazzy’s pride shredded by Petula telling Spider that he must man up and admit that his treatment of her had been negligent, immature and churlish: he would not find her too grand to accept his apology, so long as it was heartfelt and repeated every few weeks. Jazzy was stung in every place he could hurt; Spider looked to him as her protector and provider, and, more than anyone, believed in his ability to be more than he was. Naturally he was terrified that his indecision would destroy that, exposing him as a waffling bigmouth who lacked the ruthlessness to do as he said. In this he was most mistaken; Spider was much too kind to push and hold him to his threat as Jill might have, or judge him in any way at all, not really caring whether he killed his mother or not, so long as he was happy. As in the case of so many others, she connived in Jazzy’s infantilisation, which, like his wearing shorts in winter, reinforced his image as the eternal man-boy, who like a child learning in the fear and thrall of not knowing, would never sacrifice naivety for the corrupt wisdom that would bring success. Under his salt-of-the-earth mask lay all the twisted bitterness a life could endow one with – and it was his acceptance of this lifelong deception, along with Petula’s last insult, that endowed Jazzy with the strength to act, since if he could hide something so large as his true existence behind two dimensions, then he could get away with anything, even murder. He would do it: he had to before she said anything else; he had to.

  Petula, of course, did not make it any harder for him by being nice, quite the opposite, and as the familiar cycle of rages, tepid conciliation and amnesia resumed, Jazzy noticed that he had started to observe her as a person who would no longer always be there. He really was going to do it. If he was a child, then his mother was a baby who did not know what she stood to lose by losing her life, in her arrogance believing there were people without whom things would not be the same, and others without whom there would be nothing at all, identifying with the latter. As such she denied death, and life for anyone else after her death, while he understood both as no more than time moving in a forward direction; individuals aged to keep abreast of life, then died to give it its due. Jazzy would be the spoke and enforcer of the great wheel of being. All roads led back to this: loving and being loved were at the heart of his well-earned existence – the house was wasted on meaningless dinner parties and gatherings, it would be different when it was his, the grounds thrown open for international seminars on orphans and landmines, prosthetic limbs and malarial vaccines, humanity not society being the new final frontier. Jazzy gave himself until the end of the week, the month at most, and no longer. Then he would act: he had to!

  Jazzy had been pondering this sort of tomorrow, when he noticed a letter that must have been shuffled under the door without his noticing. He left his joint burning on the ashtray, a giant glass hand he had swapped a box of his creatures for at a recent craft fair, and slowly rose. His face felt parched and pulled and he had no idea how long he had been sat there exploring what kind of world would be built in Petula’s absence. It was a dream he fell into so often these days that it perforated all he did. The house was empty and the children and their rescue pups were out, which may not have been the case when he first sat down, whenever that had been. As he never tired of saying, the dope was getting stronger these days, and if you weren’t careful, it was hard to know where you were with it. He watched the letter and giggled nervously – the writing on the card was Petula’s and he was reluctant to touch it for fear of being cursed, the existence of the supernatural seeming more likely to him now than ever before.

  At length he picked it up. It was an invite, an expensively produced card, decorated with a herd of Rackham-like gnarly goats, asking him and Spider and the children, not individually named, to ‘Sunday Family Lunch’. It was now Saturday, the lunch only a day away; what was going on? Jazzy’s first thought was that they must be making up numbers, the initial choices having not replied or pulled out – Petula had certainly been complaining of something of the kind, citing ingrates and fly-by-nights. Otherwise he was stumped. His brood had never been invited en masse to the house for a formal meal before, usually eating leftovers in her kitchen on a Sunday night, when the scraps were dumped outside their front door, wrapped in tinfoil like a takeaway order. Any talk of them being part of any family was absurd. Petula’s snubs, though not unwelcome (Jazzy hated dinner parties), played a reliable role in his tirades against her, and unless she was trying to make amends, it was impossible to see what she was playing at here. But perhaps that was what she was playing at; a last-minute attempt at redemption, or possibly a trap of a subtle kind, which could end in a fatal softening of his resolve? It was a thought that had always haunted him, that his mother could actually read his mind, and always, even as he plotted her demise, knew what was afoot.

  Feeling ill, an indigestive flame lighting in his gut, Jazzy pulled open the front door and stepped outside for air. The full weight of his thinking was a difficult thing to move from one subject to the next, and he was frightened some kinesis had occurred in the Montague universe without his noticing. The wind had picked up and was howling down the chimney, as if a squad of gargoyles had flown off the battlements of Notre Dame and nested in the brickwork, slamming the front door shut like a slap across the back of his neck. Where had he put the spare keys? Jazzy stumbled down on all fours and was checking under a crumbling brick surrounded by weeds, with a view to try the watering-can next, when he noticed a car snaking its way up the drive, slowing at the bends in a way most unlike Petula.

  Inside the new BMW Regan was adrift in a trance; a discombobulation of memories and meanings, most commonly experienced when falling asleep, meant her drive up from London was a sublime and sometimes hallucinatory experience, a letter dated a fortnight earlier from Mingus, that she had not the courage to open, stuffed in the glove compartment. The pressure of the easterly wind was pounding away against her little car, steering the vehicle towards the wild grassy verges, bringing her back to herself enough to spy a mystifying configuration. The paddock in which Caligula, the farm donkey, had been kept, before overdosing and expiring on a bunch of grapes some lout had fed her, was flanked by four figures in black, who had entered into it, and were advancing menacingly towards her. Pausing in unison by the new fence Jazzy had put up running parallel to the existing one, presumably to forestall Caligula coming back from the dead and kicking her way out to freedom, the figures looked up at Regan and signalled at her to watch. Then, forming a line, they each took hold of the fence with both hands, as if it were a rail that would protect them from the elements, the wind having grown ever stronger, burrowing under their clothes and peeling back their hair. They were prudent to, as no sooner had they aligned in a chain, then the gale tore into them with a new ferocity, lifting their feet and entire bodies
off the ground so that all four were holding on for what seemed like dear life, the storm pummelling and blowing them about like Lowry figures in a painting by Chagall. Presently Regan could make out who they were, their heads cast backwards so she heard their upside-down screams and laughter. Herself, though younger; her mother, the same; Evita as she had never seen her; and Jazzy as he always was.

  On the tempest blew, throwing them skywards like a tiger that had got hold of a box of dolls, or laundry about to be unpegged and irretrievably lost, without their once losing their grip and being carried away. Regan could tell it was a contest, who would let go first? But wouldn’t it, as the ferment tore the clothes off their backs, be a relief to let go and fly? And then she saw herself cut loose, flung up into the eye of the storm, far past the black clouds, through to the stillness that lay behind them, and the others too, disappearing one by one after her, into the dark hole, until the storm subsided, and it was as if they never were.

  Regan’s car came off the track and thudded to a juddering halt, stalling just short of the first post, marking the start of the fence. Revving in fright, she reversed skittishly back on to the track, and set off again towards the house. To her alarm she saw Jazzy once more, this time in his C&A dressing gown standing outside his house looking puzzled, a key dangling stupidly from what looked like a dog chain in his hand, and, making sure it was him by yelling her own name at the top of her voice, she slowed down and unwound her window to ask him, still yelling, if he was okay. There was a lack of preparation on both their faces. Regan never normally did this, Jazzy never normally replied, she never normally went into his house for a cup of tea, he never normally asked her, but all of this happened, and once inside, they sat inches away from disclosure, their mugs nearly touching, wondering who would start first.