Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  From his place on the ground Jazzy felt like some rodent the humans had left bait out for, the time, and not just the time, out of joint. Yes, it was his mother in full throttle alright, and on his knees again, he could make out the grave and beautiful lunacy of her face – ‘After life’s fitful fever, sleep well Mum,’ he muttered under his breath, an autumnal dragonfly that he mistook for a fiery arrowhead blazing past his eye. Creepily and without interest, Petula’s head was bent at an uncomfortable angle and she was looking right through him. She appeared hauntingly ready to embrace the routine mystery of death, her eyes half-closed in the midst of a recitation, Regan slumped at her side, Petula clasping her to her breast protectively like a refugee about to part with her child.

  Hashish had always made Jazzy better at noticing things, if not talking about them, and ecstasy better at talking about them, while noticing nothing. Given his current mental condition, there were a number of unusual features to what he saw in the kitchen that made him doubt whether he observed them at all, as even by the skewed standards of The Heights, they were freakishly off-putting. Regan was pinned to her mother in her pyjamas, her face buried in Petula’s naked embrace – for Petula appeared to have no clothes on, her robe piled in a heap by the windowpane, the juxtaposition of her body with Regan’s, a still life that he had been called upon to paint. Except it was no painting, more of a story, the scene bald and precise, stripped to its essentials, foretelling of a cover their tragedy might one day be bound in, without any of the variables – a mug of coffee here, a bowl of fruit there – that would naturalise the view and put him at ease. Jazzy checked himself, the slalom of doubt was starting to kick in again – the fear that Regan had given him away, Petula having discarded her clothes as part of an elaborate signal to the police who would pounce from the bushes and grab him, and the underlying fear that he still did not know whether he could kill a human being, definitely not his mother, waiting for him like so many showers of shit on the filthy bathmat of his being. Or was he simply hallucinating the entire scene? To hell with it, men died in war: on.

  Striding as calmly as he was able, with nothing to hide, Jazzy entered the house by way of the large glass door that led into the conservatory, and from there into her study and the main interconnecting hallway. There was a good chance that he might bump into his mother by mistake now. It was not the end of the world if he did. Jazzy was under no pressure, other than that he put himself under, to act at once. His mistake had been to try and be too exact; there could be a hundred reasons for him being in the house, and he could use any one of them to explain what he was doing there if asked. He could afford to buy his time. All he needed to do was find a corner to lie low in, or even stalk her from – he the lion and she the prey, with one giant advantage over nature: this time the deer did not know it was the food. The house was his to use as he wished, this would be a process, not a one-off hit and run, and would actually occur, he prayed, before the drugs wore off and he broke down and confessed everything to the ghost of one of the farm cats, who had been following him since he entered the house. To do it or not to do it; soon they would both know.

  *

  Petula gently released her daughter’s head; Regan pulling away very slowly so as to not cause any unintended offence.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Petula bellowed, hoping to scare away their embarrassment, ‘I’ll be dead one day soon and you can tell the whole world what a monster I was. But for today, let’s get those fainthearts over here for food, and then I can tell them myself. I’m good for that at least, aren’t I?’

  She sounded much more doubtful that she had a moment earlier when she had first announced her intention to address the family on the front lawn. Petula scooped up her robe and draped it gracefully over her aching shoulder; the pain in her legs had spread to every thoroughfare of her body, and she resisted the impulse to shiver. Above all, she did not want her eccentric behaviour to be construed as a mistake, and by embracing choreography and deliberate movements she may yet have succeeded in persuading her daughter she was witnessing a calculated display of strength, however bizarre. And that it would be, if Petula could only extinguish the sickening urge to confide that had burnt away at her ever since Regan flew out to New York. She knew she could go either way, let herself down or hold herself up. Survival suggested that she best stay with what she knew. The day would then go as planned. Regan would naturally comply with her request, any waverers would be winkled out and brought to The Heights for lunch at the point of a sword, her daughter could be relied on for that much, leaving her to bask in the glory of a tray full of perfectly formed meringues, and a flurry of return invitations. Which would be wonderful had these considerations not, at some point in the last few minutes, ceased to be of any importance. Under the gaze of eternity, did she actually care if a band of timid fools she was dimly related to came to spend a few strained hours in her company? No. Not really. Not anymore. For the moment they still feared her enough to be coerced, her position was that of a zealot who, lacking the means to convince others, could still waste her own time corralling the unwilling, but short of telling those assembled to eat her shit, and then her food, she had nothing else to offer them. She had never been magnanimous in victory, and as a consequence, had had to keep fighting the same war all over again, every day. The butcher’s bill was justified because, she had always calculated, were she deprived of people she would die. But what if she no longer wanted the people? Power all along had always been too paltry a goal for one equipped with her gifts, but she had always been frightened she would lose it if she strived for something else. That self-imposed break on her development had evaporated.

  ‘You don’t believe that Mum, so please stop saying things like that, you know, that you’ll be dead one day soon…’

  ‘I didn’t say soon, I said one day,’ Petula insisted, wringing the distinction for its full meaning, ‘though perhaps “soon” is what your heart desires Regan? Is it time for Mummy to die and give you some space?’

  ‘Jesus Mum, stop talking like you’re in a mad play, you’re being crazy, nuts. Why do you have to go on about dying, you’re not even that old yet,’ Regan gabbled, immediately regretting the ‘that’ and the ‘yet’. She had watched her mother pick up another aluminium sheet of pills, the days clearly marked but individual tablets torn out of order, which, next to the drawer stuffed full of assorted medical goodies Petula gorged on every day, was an overdose in waiting in any language. Even a careful person would finally end up mixing various quantities and types, and the order of both, with everything from aspirin to barbiturates hypochondriacally over-represented in Petula’s stash, and her mother was not a careful person. ‘Really Mum, there’s just no need, you scare me when you get like this, talking about dying. It’s morbid.’

  ‘To be honest, there is, you know, there is a need,’ Petula said, dry-swallowing a handful of pills she seemed to have selected on the hoof, her preferred cordial for washing them down not for Regan’s eyes, and subsequent judgement. ‘Everyone’s too scared about coming clean about dying these days. When we grew up it was everywhere, in the air, under water, over the top; it had happened to our fathers and grandfathers when they were much younger than you. God, it was as normal as putting your uniform on or having your bum pinched. I’m not pretending to be a hero like they were, of course not, I’ll admit I wanted it, dying I mean, to not happen for as long as I could put it off for, and if it wasn’t going to happen tomorrow then good, because it meant I didn’t have to think about it today. And it’s true. I admit it. That I wanted to go on for ever and ever, like any other healthy-minded person, and wanted you to want me to too…’

  Petula gave her daughter the chance to organically interject with a ‘Hear hear,’ but encountering only ‘Mum, the tense you’re talking in, it’s a bit weird, is there something serious wrong with you?’, she continued:

  ‘The thing is, I didn’t just want immortality for its own sake, I wanted what was best for the goods themselves.
No, don’t look as if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you do, I mean the works, our art, fundamentally for this place; this house, our house, for her, look all around you,’ Petula waved her hand in a self-explanatory circle – Ming plates, Venetian cabinets and an etching of Tracy Emin’s hairy vagina taken in by this regal swoop – ‘all these works, for her, because The Heights is like England. She is a she. I wanted to safeguard the integrity of the entire property and our lands, our whole world; I wanted what was best for these things, and I thought that the best thing for them was me, and then you. The whole point of afternoons like the one we have coming, and the million slogs that went before them, was, I admit it, to nourish my continued existence. Because my stewardship was the best guarantee this place would ever have of being properly appreciated and cultivated and added to where necessary; and to have a legacy, something to show the world that this was us and this is how we lived, yes? And to enjoy them, all this beauty, the trees, crockery, shrubbery and library, all purely for their own good, purely and for themselves, for these views to be ennobled because it was us gazing out at them every bloody day and no one else. But I seem to have got it wrong. Or the wrong way round. All this was just another thing to do, an excuse to get my mind off me…’ Petula’s jaw shook, and with some effort she continued: ‘No, being scared of death is a grownup version of being scared of the dark. You have to search for the appeal of both and be prepared to take their side. Perhaps that’s the thing I called to tell you.’

  ‘I hope I die before you,’ Regan lied.

  ‘Don’t, Regan. What you’ve seen is all you’ll know and all I’ve told you. I’ll see you later,’ Petula claimed, her formidable freckly back already turned to her daughter, as she sought the corridor, her legs twitching like pillars before an earthquake.

  Holding back her sobs so as to avoid impersonating an attention-seeking ghost, her legs stiff enough to snap, Petula shambled down the hallway, towards the far end of the house and store room that doubled as an indoor garage, full of old bicycles, go-carts, board games, school books, pogo sticks and tennis rackets. Beyond her beliefs, which were her own inventions, there were strange forces that she could not understand, that had withdrawn their support, and it was these that had defeated her. Her life had become no more than the shadow cast by her depression. Whereas unhappiness had always felt too much like her enemies’ final vindication for her to accept, Petula saw no reason to keep from herself what she now knew to be irrevocable: soul sclerosis.

  ‘Mediocrities of the world I absolve you all,’ she quietly mithered. It was really quite surprising, she was not facing a person anymore, but drifting naturally into a world of concepts and ideas. She would have to die because she did not have a positive reason left to live, life would not do at all, and she lacked the energy to look back at this moment and deem it significant because of what she would do next. The present was neither special nor secure enough to offer the basis for future redemption.

  Coughing, she noticed a speck of blood in her hand; what had she been doing to her body these past few years? She no longer gave it any thought. A good life well lived is long enough and an inauthentic life already too long. The confederate grey walls and paintings in this section of the corridor had been replaced by her memories, none of which needed to be held to the realistic standards of the present. Petula could look through the watercolours left by various talented guests and enter another world, spying the curtains she had not noticed since her honeymoon in Capri twitch in the breeze, the forecourt full of Bedouin bandsmen in Oman in the moonlight that awaited the guests on her fortieth birthday, and all three children, future enmities still unthinkable, clambering on top of one another at bath-time, their mirth and hers blowing about the place like all her remembered autumns; and as suddenly, their tainted opposite: the curtains torn down in rage, the forecourt punctuated by angry shouts and the children in tears because she could not cope with the affront of having to put on their pyjamas when there were parties she was already late for. Where was the last word? If she could just take the side of the truth and not be forced to defend her own version then she might truly surprise them at lunch, but there was too much to do and she would never get it done in time.

  Ahead Petula watched Jazzy approach her with his head sloped too far into his chest to see his face, then veer sharply into the hall privy and noisily bolt the door. Didn’t he have his own house to take a shit in, she thought mischievously, and then forgot all about him; dazzling spears of sunlight dropping like lightning before her, a drum banging away in the background and voices, hers and others, singing: ‘Come and join our merry throng…’ Petula was ready to join them, for her nature, and the necessity to act upon it to collapse, and to simply float over the carnage in a state of grace. Forget work, the holidays had finally begun!

  *

  It was happening again; Jazzy was inside and too terrified to get out. All the horror of existence lined the corridor, every particle of the house a destabilising reminder that he ought to have brought an exorcist with him, and not a crust of bread and bottle of disinfectant. In his teens this unnecessarily spacious lavatory had been his club house, a den where he could spend many a happy hour re-reading his old 2000ADs and Melody Makers, safe in the smell of his own eggy excrement, his mother bounding up and down the corridor with air freshener telling him to get a move on before the guests arrived. All this, only to one day find himself lodged in a man-sized safe deposit box, hoping that his stay here would be considerably shorter than his illustrious sessions of the past. She had seen him! ‘Shit, what now, what now…’

  Wiping his damp palms on the surprisingly dirty floral hand towel Jazzy attempted to stem the panic and gain stock of his situation. He was too far in to clamber out and not even on the right floor – he had to be upstairs to do what he had to do, and so did she, so his current whereabouts, worse than wrong, were of no help to him unless he was prepared to alter his plan of attack, radically. One could not push someone down the stairs on the ground floor. As he weighed up this information Jazzy was at a loss as to who was actually benefitting from the feedback. His real self was left behind many decisions ago, he could not consult it for help, yet this new voice, breaking down his options into the practical language of a killer, was of little use either – he seemed to need the old him to tell the new him what do to, but the old him would open the bathroom window, crawl out and go home, and if he did that then nothing would ever work for him again.

  ‘Focus, fuck’s sake, focus,’ he grunted under his breath. That was the issue: to stay focused, work out what had to be done, and do it; to terminate with extreme prejudice and never look back.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered, ‘think like a terminator…’

  Winners were never victims, and it was like a victim to give up because events had unravelled in such a way as to require a Plan B. A winner would accept that everyone gets punched and know how to roll with the blows. He was in urgent need of some calm. He pulled a crumpled joint out of his pocket, one he had made just in case, and taking care to not let the smoke carry, lit it bent over the toilet bowl, with the window jarred open.

  Jazzy found it easiest to think of himself back at Tianta that evening relaxing over a much bigger spliff than this one, looking back at the morning as one of his proudest, with what he had yet to do already done, than face the next few minutes as a hostile void that required praxis to fill it. The goal was already in the back of the net even though he had not taken a shot. Except it was not, and wouldn’t be if he stayed there smoking drugs. And despite trying to do something, nothing still prevailed, Jazzy crushing the joint and perspiring over the sink, then retrieving it and straighten it again only to crush it once more in impotent exasperation. Fiercely he splashed cold water over his face and told himself over and over again that he would never be able to pump himself up to this point again; today was his last and only chance to grow as a person and surprise himself. But that still wasn’t a strong enough team talk for what he
had to do. The yellowing slits with bloodshot bullseyes he saw in the mirror were his own; the rest of his face looked like a bright-red broad bean bailing out of a triathlon. It was hopeless; he was hopeless! How long had he already wasted in here? A worryingly long time, because he had already wondered how long he had spent doing nothing a worryingly long time ago. He had to get out and do it, do it and let God judge him, though this was the biggest balls-up of all because he did not know whether he believed in God and a moment like this should at least be crowned by certainty; the certainty that he was doing the right thing. His mind was rejecting him, chattering away like a hundred keyboards operated by a contagion, the keys typing out the same admonition, ‘You silly cunt, you silly cunt, you silly…’

  Events pushed him into a snap decision. There were clippity-clop steps approaching the door again, he was not going to get Petula where he wanted her but one hard shunt onto the floor might do just as well, and if it absolutely came to it, he could always finish things off with the Encyclopaedia Britannica that had been thoughtfully left above the bog. Go, now, yes, do it, for God’s sake go, for the kids and Spider, for that time Tinwood made Evita suffer, yes yes yes, he could hear the whistle, and it was his turn now, the light was green, it was time to jump, out to where legends are made, shrapnel flies, and Victoria Crosses grow… go!

  Jazzy practically fell out of the bathroom, his arms and legs a wobbling jumble of conflicting commands, realising at once that his prevaricating masterplan was shot. The very reality of murder, Jazzy saw, had turned out to be another fantasy in a life of mostly good intentions gone bad; a game in which, because of his secrecy, he had had to call his own bluff, as his old self, his real self, had known all along he would do. He would never lay a finger on his mother. He was not that type of man, and nor would he be called to because it was Regan who slammed straight into him, a look of incriminating guilt spilling over her face, as she dropped a heavy jar of dissoluble sleeping pills to the floor with a sharp crack.