Still life with Volkswagens

One. Gentlemen Prefer Volkswagens

He is dreaming. It is an erotic dream of sorts. It happens. The bombs go off. The balloon goes up. The car is blown apart from within. It is all slow-mo and freeze frame, a carnival of special effects, brightness dancing and hanging in space, shimmering, spinning tinsel, particles that curl and leapfrog, fragments of vehicle that shuffle and reshuffle, furling and unfurling in the dented air; electrical components, shards of glass, slices and slithers of upholstery and optional extras, tatters of fabric and machine. It is all fallout. There is a great levelling, a loss of organisation, a bringing down to size.

He stirs. He wakes up. He is not sure who he is. He is not sure who is the owner of the dream.

♦

At the Milton Maynard Mercy Seat — one of the home counties’ more discreet and unostentatiously fashionable asylums — a group consisting of a dozen or so inmates is playing I Spy. They are a varied though unexceptional group of patients. They display a predictable set of symptoms. There are a few medical or psychological surprises to be found in their amalgams of depression, schizophrenia, neurosis, compulsive, obsessive and self-destructive behaviour. A couple of them claim to be receiving messages from other planets but that too is par for the course.

The only one who looks out of place is Mr Charles Lederer, but he does not look that way because he is displaying signs of some new or unusual mental condition, rather the reverse. He cuts a sane, dapper figure amid the pyjamas and dressing gowns. He is wearing a blazer and a wide-brimmed Panama. None of the other inmates recognises his tie as that of the Garrick Club, but it is a tie he is perfectly entitled to wear. His shirt is a freshly laundered white and his flannels have razor sharp creases. Only the lack of a belt for his trousers and the fact that he’s wearing tartan carpet slippers without socks, reveal anything of his situation.

He would tell you, if you asked, that he used to be a well-respected figure in English public life; a back-bench Tory MP and director of a handful of extremely profitable companies. But it all changed when a man in a Volkswagen stole his daughter, slept with his wife, invaded his house, turned the media against him and caused his incarceration. You would probably listen politely to these colourful fantasies. They might sound like the all too typical ramblings of a disordered mind. In Charles Lederer’s case, however, they are nearly all true.

A large, shapeless, sad-faced woman called Magenta, whose hormones are severely out of control, is currently leading the game. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with b,” she says enthusiastically. Once such obvious contenders as basket, book, bristles, biro, button and bulbs have been eliminated and everyone has admitted defeat, Magenta tells them that the b in question stands for ‘bare bottom’.

“But we can’t see anybody’s bare bottom,” Charles Lederer reminds her gently but authoritatively, and even as he says it he realises his error.

“Oh yes you can,” Magenta shouts and she stands up, drops her loose, white, sexless pyjama trousers and reveals an almost equally loose, white, sexless bottom. A flurry of sniggering, schoolyard mirth flushes through the group, and, not for the first time, Charles Lederer wonders if playing I Spy is really a valid form of therapy. But he doesn’t have much time to think about it since the group has decided it’s now his turn to spy something. He accepts graciously.

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with v,” he says.

The group agrees that’s a tough one. Vase, Vaseline, Vimto and Valium are all suggested.

“No,” says Charles Lederer. “You’ll never get it.”

“In that case there’s no point guessing, is there?” says Magenta, and Charles Lederer agrees.

“It’s a Volkswagen that I spy with my little eye,” he says triumphantly.

“Where?” asks Magenta.

“Yes, where?” the others all demand, keen to know where there might be a Volkswagen lurking.

“I spy it with my mind’s eye,” he answers.

That throws the rest of them into confusion. They have to think about that, and thinking is not necessarily their strong suit.

“Well, I can’t see it,” says a short, middle-aged, baby-faced bruiser of a patient.

“Yes you can,” Charles Lederer insists. “It’s a fairly early model, black in colour with white wall tyres. You can see it if you try. You can see its humped back and those headlamps like nasty, slitty eyes.”

And Magenta says, “Yes, I can see it now. I can see it with my inner eye.”

“Of course you can,” says Lederer.

“Me too,” says another patient, then another, and before long the whole group has focussed its various inner eyes on some phantom Volkswagen of their collective unconscious.

“Yes,” Charles Lederer continues, “just look at that evil, sloping front end, and hear the horrid death rattle of its air-cooled engine. And smell those clouds of noxious exhaust fumes. Terrible, isn’t it?”

The others tend to agree. A couple of them choke on the imagined fumes.

“But wait,” he continues. “What’s that sitting on the passenger seat? It’s a package. A suspect package. I wonder what’s in it. I wonder if it contains a couple of pounds of highly unstable plastic explosive. And could that ticking noise be coming from some sort of timing device? Yes, I think it could. Look, on the seat right beside the package there’s an alarm clock, and wires attached to a detonator, and you can hear the seconds ticking away. When the big hand gets to twelve it’ll be all over for that cursed Volkswagen Beetle. There’ll be an almighty bang. There’ll be fire, flames, black smoke. Metal and glass will be sent flying like so much filthy dandruff.”

Several of his listeners gasp. They are all becoming tense and agitated. Charles Lederer’s verbal picture has cut right through their placid, generalised sedation.

“Look at the clock,” he says, “Only ten seconds to go now. Let’s count them down together, shall we? Ten, nine, eight…”

They recite the countdown in unison, but the feeling is not of a downward motion, rather of a steep ascent, of a spring being tightened. “Seven, six, five…” One or two have their eyes closed by now, and one or two others have their fingers in their ears waiting for the big bang. “Four, three, two…” Only Charles Lederer remains impassive, his head high, both his lips commendably stiff. “One…”

There’s a half moment of hesitation, of sweet but frightening anticipation, a sense of simultaneous horror and joy at what will be unleashed when the dreaded word zero is said.

“Zero,” says Charles Lederer.

Volkswagens explode violently and picturesquely all across a dozen disturbed psyches. Mania and hysteria gush out of the patients. There is screaming, mayhem, the tearing of clothes and hair, a certain amount of foaming at the mouth, and Magenta decides to beat her head repeatedly against an electric radiator. It takes several hours, the use of half a dozen straitjackets, some strong arm tactics by the hospital staff, and a whole sweetshopful of drugs, before order is again imposed. Only Charles Lederer has remained calm throughout, and that’s because he knows he’s in a lot of trouble.

♦

Here is Barry Osgathorpe sitting on the steps of his eighteen foot ‘Homemaker’ caravan, on a site not far from Filey, in Yorkshire. This is an award-winning site. The shower blocks and laundry facilities are first rate, and it is in all the best guide books. Barry looked at quite a few residential sites before choosing this one, but spurned them because they were all full of old hippies. This one does have a handful of longterm residents like himself but they are a neat, well-mannered group, mostly retired and very caravan-proud. But the site caters mostly for mobile holidaymakers who stay a couple of nights, or a week at most, then travel on. Barry likes this. He likes the transience even if he personally remains firmly fixed.

The owner of the site, a bald, avuncular, only intermittently competent man called Sam Probert, quite likes having Barry there as a sort of eccentric in residence. Once in a while Barry will attempt to perform some odd jobs around the place, and in return Sam Probert makes a small reduction in the rent.

A car is parked next to Barry’s caravan. You cannot see the car properly since it is wrapped in one of those fitted car covers, but there can be no doubting from the shape that it’s a Volkswagen Beetle, rather a special one actually, one with the nickname ‘Enlightenment’, although Barry hasn’t driven it for a few years, not even removed the cover for some months. In recent times Barry has rather changed his feelings about Volkswagens and life on the road.

As he sits outside his caravan he is surrounded by a small crowd of children, the offspring of the holidaymakers at the site. This is not an unusual occurrence. Barry enjoys something of a reputation as a harmless eccentric and quite a good storyteller. The kids gather round and he talks to them.

“Don’t call me Ishmael,” he says. “That’s not my name, not any more. I was called that once but it was a long time ago. It was a good enough name for a Zen Road Warrior, as I then styled myself, but now I’m my old self again, Barry Osgathorpe, and that’s a good enough name for me.”

And then he tells some rather tall and lurid stories about his life on the road, tales of car chases and petrol bombings, of violent confrontations with police and other members of ‘straight’ society, of crowds of people who briefly followed and worshipped him, of strange practices with sex and drugs, of a woman called Marilyn whom he loved and lost, of how he had once very nearly had his own chat show on television.

The kids eat it up, and indeed he does tell the stories with an undeniable flair. Whether any of the kids believe the stories to be true is debatable, but that doesn’t spoil their enjoyment. However, having told these action-packed adventures he always says, “And let that be a lesson to you kids. Remember that speed kills. Remember that the motorcar is not our friend. And be sure to tell your parents to drive with care.”

Generally the kids let him get away with this. They are perfectly accustomed to having inappropriately worthy morals tagged onto the end of stories they hear. But on this occasion, as the troop of kids wanders away, one of them stays behind to ask Barry some questions, and Barry is initially rather pleased by this.

“What’s so wrong with motorcars?” the kid asks directly.

He is a cheerful but serious, red-haired little tyke, no more than ten years old, with dirty knees and a blue American football shirt.

“Well,” says Barry very patiently, “for one thing they use up the earth’s precious resources.”

The kid thinks for a moment and says, “But my Dad says that these days motorcars are designed to be recycleable. Almost every part can be melted down and reused.”

“I don’t know about that,” says Barry.

“Well, my Dad does. He says from that point of view they’re one of the most ecologically friendly products we have.”

“Well, I’d want to see some chapter and verse on that,” says Barry, “but in any case they emit toxic gases and contribute to the greenhouse effect and global warming.”

“My Dad says it’s not quite as simple as that. Did you know for example that Roger Revelle, the only begetter of the theory of the greenhouse effect, changed his mind shortly before his death?”

“Er, no,” says Barry.

“He recanted. He said, and I think I’m quoting accurately, “The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses.” Basically he was saying, play it cool.”

“How old are you?” Barry asks.

“Nine and a bit,” says the kid.

“What’s your name?”

“They call me the Ferrous Kid.”

“Do they really?”

“Well no, but I wish they would.”

“Okay Ferrous,” says Barry, “I’ll try to make it simple for you. Look at it this way; we’ve only got one planet. We must share it with all the animals and trees and birds, and with every other living thing.”

“Well, my Dad says that wildlife thrives alongside every stretch of motorway in the world.”

“Does he indeed?” says Barry. “Well you tell him from me that motorways are evil, ugly things that scar and mutilate the landscape.”

The kid thinks for a while before replying, “I think my Dad would say ‘not necessarily’. I think he’d say go take a look at some of the freeway architecture in Los Angeles, and tell him if some of that doesn’t constitute a brilliant work of art.”

“I think I can answer that for him without going to Los Angeles, thank you very much,” Barry says tartly.

“And my Dad would certainly say that some cars are works of art. He’d say look at a 1938 Talbot Lago T150SS with the Figoni and Falaschi body, look at a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Piccadilly Roadster, even look at a perfect example of a humble Volkswagen Beetle, and tell him if that isn’t a thing of beauty. And then he’d say isn’t it worth a bit of pollution for the sake of beauty? Okay, he’d say, certain problems attach to the motorcar but it’s not exactly the work of the devil.”

Barry has gone into a world of his own. It seems to be the mention of the Volkswagen Beetle that did it. Then he’s swiftly back on the case.

“That,” he says, “is a matter of debate. When you see how many people die every year because of the motorcar, I think even your Dad would have to admit that it’s an evil thing.”

“Well,” says the kid thoughtfully, “I think my Dad would say that AIDS and cancer and heart disease and diabetes kill people too. And I think he’d say he’d rather snuff it quickly and cleanly in a road accident than hang around dying of some long, slow, terrible wasting disease.”

Barry thinks for a long time. The kid has actually, finally said something he agrees with, and of course, the mention of the Volkswagen Beetle is still much on his mind.

“Maybe I should meet your Dad,” he says.

“No,” says the kid. “He’s a complete dickhead. That’s what my Mum says anyway.”

♦

There is one woman whom Barry did not love and lose. Her name is Debby, Barry’s current, and extremely longstanding, girlfriend. He certainly hasn’t lost her, since she comes to his caravan several evenings per week and stays the night, but he’s not sure that he really loves her either. He’d like to, because he believes love is the greatest thing, and Debby seems to think very highly of him. She moved to Filey in order to be near him. She got a job in a local building society and shares a flat in town with three of the other girls from work. Barry would like to think that his relationship with her is a good thing and that it has a future, but he has his doubts. Tonight, having dined on several different varieties of Pot Noodles, he asks her, “Are you sure I’m really what you’re looking for?”

“I’m not sure I’m exactly looking for anything,” she replies.

“But you know I don’t have any money or any prospects.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she admits.

“Five years from now, ten years from now, I could still be living in this caravan.”

“Would that be so terrible?”

“I thought you might consider that a terrible way to spend the next ten years.”

“I might,” she said, “but I have a perfectly pleasant shared flat in town.”

“Yes, but if you wanted a nice house, a nice car, lots of nice children, well, I just might not be your man.”

“But you are my man.”

“But I never want to go anywhere or do anything.”

“Well, I admit I wouldn’t mind going for a drive once in a while, but Barry, where is all this leading?”

“I was just thinking that if you met another bloke, through work say, someone with money and a career, and if he could offer you more than me, and if you decided he was what you were looking for, well…I’d understand.”

“I know you would. That’s what’s so special about you Barry. You’re so wise, so sympatico.”

“Well, I try to be.”

“But wouldn’t you miss me if I went off with someone else?”

“Well of course I would,” he says hastily. “But if you really felt you had to go…”

“And wouldn’t you miss this?”

And Debby proceeds to perform various moist and intimate acts on Barry’s body that he would most certainly miss in their absence, and before long there are torrents of hot semen coursing like molten lava down Debby’s moist, yielding, eager throat. Barry would have to admit that his sex life with Debby is fine, in fact it’s really rather spectacularly good, but he sometimes wonders if there is more to life than that. From time to time Debby tries hard to assure him there is not.

♦

Next morning Charles Lederer is called into the office of Dr D.K. Hendricks, the director and presiding genius of the Milton Maynard Mercy Seat. The doctor is surprisingly cordial. He smiles a lot. He wants Charles Lederer to know that he isn’t angry. He’s a little disappointed perhaps, but certainly not angry. He wants Charles Lederer to know he’s a friend. Charles Lederer remains unconvinced.

“Why did you do it Charles?” the doctor asks.

No reply is forthcoming.

“Was it a way of getting at me? If so that’s perfectly understandable. I appreciate that you will harbour certain unresolved hostile feelings towards your doctor. And who’s to say you shouldn’t express that hostility?”

Charles Lederer continues his silence.

“Some of the other patients may have suffered severe setbacks as a result of your actions, Charles. You may have destroyed months of diligent, painstaking care and treatment. But that’s all right, so long as we all understand why.”

At this point he notices that Charles Lederer is carrying a scrapbook, and he’s holding it as though it is the crown jewels. Hendricks chooses to ignore it.

“Could it be that you hate me, Charles?” he asks. “Could it be that you’d like to see me dead? And if so, why? Could it be that I remind you of your father? Or possibly of yourself.”

But Charles Lederer is not listening. He has become deeply engrossed in his scrapbook. He’s turning the pages carefully and precisely, his eyes devouring the patchwork of cuttings and photographs inside the book.

“What have you got there, Charles?” Hendricks asks at last.

“This? Oh, I like to think of this as my Bible.”

Dr D.K. Hendricks is always quick to spot the use of religious imagery in his patients’ conversation. He doesn’t approve of it at all. “Show me,” he says.

Charles Lederer won’t hand over the scrapbook, it’s far too precious for that, but he holds it up and opens it so that Hendricks can see one of the pages. It contains a newspaper cutting with the headline Torrential Rain Leaves Hundreds Dead In Rio’ and there’s a photograph of a street in Rio de Janeiro that has been transformed by a mud slide into a wrecked, silted-up disaster zone. Hendricks gives it only a cursory glance. He hopes Lederer isn’t developing a morbid fascination with death and disaster.

“Show me another page,” he says.

“No,” says Lederer. “Not yet. You haven’t looked closely enough at the first page. You see, right there on the edge of the picture, up to its axles in mud, there’s a Volkswagen Beetle.”

Dr D.K. Hendricks nods, but not in comprehension.

“Or here,” says Charles Lederer, and he turns a page. This headline ‘Simmering Hatred In London’s East End’. It’s a story about racial hatred and violence, about neo-Nazis, and there’s a photograph of some Indian vigilantes walking down an East End street, and right on the corner of the street there’s a Volkswagen.

“Here’s a photograph of some looters in the L.A. riots loading up their Beetle with stolen beer and videos. Here’s a picture of the Berlin Wall being erected and there’s a Volkswagen right in the middle of it. Here’s a photograph showing the aftermath of a volcanic explosion in the Philippines…”

“Yes, yes, I get the idea,” Hendricks snaps.

“You see the pattern.”

“I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that constitutes a pattern,” Hendricks replies.

“Yes, you have,” Charles Lederer insists. “Isn’t it obvious? Wherever there’s trouble there’s always a Volkswagen. The Volkswagen is therefore quite clearly the car of the devil. In which case we clearly have a duty to destroy it.”

“I see,” says Dr D.K. Hendricks.

“Good. So you’re on my side.”

“Of course I’m on your side, Charles. I always have been. The question is whether or not you’re on mine. There’s something I’d like you to have a look at for me.”

He goes to a filing cabinet and pulls out a ring binder. In it are a series of Rorschach ink blots.

“I’ve looked at your scrapbook Charles, now take a look at mine.”

He flips open the binder and shows Charles Lederer the first ink blot.

“You do understand, Doctor!!” he says joyfully.

“Tell me what you see,” Dr D.K. Hendricks says with suspicion.

“I see what’s there,” Lederer says. “I see a Volkswagen, of course. Very early, maybe a prototype, or even one of the first military versions.”

“And this one?”

Lederer smiles knowingly. If the doctor wants to have fun with his little game then he’s quite prepared to play along.

“I see a convertible with its top down, with American specification bumpers.”

“And this?”

Charles Lederer’s joy is almost unconfined. There among the ink-blot splatters he sees something strange but not entirely unfamiliar. He sees an exploding Volkswagen Beetle, just like the one he’s been seeing in his mind’s eye for so long. He tells this to Hendricks who slams the ring binder shut. Lederer is grinning at him in a conspiratorial way that is making him both nervous and angry.

“Do you know what I think, Charles?” he asks.

“Yes,” says Charles Lederer. “You think much as I do. You think the Volkswagen Beetle is a Satanic abomination that ought to be destroyed. Yes?”

“Not exactly, Charles.”

Lederer looks disappointed and confused.

“What I actually think,” Hendricks continues, “is that you’re wasting my time. I think you’re trying to wind me up. I think, to put it colloquially, you’re taking the piss. I think you’re trying to mock me and all my years of work. I think you’re trying to destroy my life, my work, my very being.”

Lederer denies it vehemently. He looks shocked and appalled and sorry that the doctor has turned against him so abruptly. But Dr D.K. Hendricks is not going to be fooled by that.

“You know what else I think?” he says.

“No, doctor.”

“I think you’re ready to go back into the community.”

♦

Again Barry is sitting on the stoop of his caravan, and again half a dozen kids are gathered round. It is all going well until one of them asks, “What’s the big deal about Volkswagens anyway?”

Barry is lost for words. “Well,” he says, “they’re you know, they’re sort of absolutely…it.”

The kids look at him expectantly and he tries, he really tries, to be more articulate, to describe the special appeal and the uniqueness of the Volkswagen Beetle. But his heart and head are too full of feelings and contradictions to allow him to get out anything coherent. He struggles on for a while but it’s useless. Fortunately, the Ferrous Kid is there and he is able to help.

“Well,” he begins, “my Dad says the biggest deal about the Volkswagen Beetle is that in terms of numbers sold, it’s the most popular and successful car there’s ever been or is ever likely to be. They’ve manufactured and sold about twenty-two million of them.

“And my Dad says the origins of the Beetle are a pretty good story in themselves. Back in the 1930^s Adolf Hitler conceived of a people’s car as part of his National Socialism and he employed Dr Ferdinand Porsche to create the car for him. He called it the Kraft durch Freudewagen; the Strength Through Joy car. However, by the time the Second World War started the car still wasn’t in production, although the factory made military versions throughout the war years. And at the end of the war it was the British army, mostly in the person of Major Ivan Hirst, who finally got production rolling. In 1949 they gave the factory back to the Germans, and the rest is history.

“My Dad says the Beetle’s a design classic. It’s not pretty in the ordinary sense but it has a basic simplicity to it that’s very appealing. Even people who find it downright ugly will admit that its eccentricity is part of its charm. Visually it strikes a strange balance between the reassuring and the sinister.

“But my Dad says because it’s so ubiquitous, so much part of the scenery, that means it’s also, in a sense, rather blank. That means it’s easy for people to stamp their personality on it. In lots of ways the Beetle is like a kit car; bits can be removed and added quite easily. It’s relatively simple to customise and modify it and make it your own.

“My Dad says you should beware of anthropomorphism, but he says the Volkswagen Beetle does have real character, and in a world where consumer products are increasingly dreary and empty, that counts for a lot. Don’t you agree Barry?”

“Yes. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“My Dad probably could,” says the kid, and Barry doesn’t argue.

♦

Sometimes people staying at the caravan site ask Barry what kind of Beetle he has under that car cover.

“It’s just a Beetle,” he says dismissively, but that only whets their appetite.

“Does it run?” they ask.

“Oh probably. I don’t know for sure any more.”

“You mean you don’t drive it?”

“That’s it.”

“Want to sell it?”

“I’d rather sell my soul.”

Then, sometimes, real Volkswagen enthusiasts will come by and say, “Hey that looks like an interesting model. Is it the 1600 with fuel injection?”

“No,” says Barry.

“What is it then?”

“It’s sort of a custom model,” he says weakly.

But that only gets them more excited. “Lemme see it,” they demand.

“No, it’s kind of an unfinished project, I’m not ready to show it…”

“Go on, just a quick look.”

Once again Barry says no and the Beetle enthusiast pleads for just a little peek, and maybe he grabs a corner of the car cover and attempts to turn it back to reveal the car beneath. At which point Barry gets a wild, intense, murderous look on his face, and, if the enthusiast has any sense, he drops the cover pretty damn quick.

Sometimes people invite Barry to join a Volkswagen-owners’ club. Membership, they assure him, will bring with it all sorts of benefits; companionship, travel, sports and outdoor activities, as well as trade discounts and offers of technical assistance. There are clubs of many different persuasions. Some have an historical bent, some go camping, some surfing. Some clubs are for purists, and others are for those who like to attack their Beetles with a power saw, hack off unnecessary items like roofs and wings, and then paint them in hideous colours.

Barry always says he is much happier sitting on the steps of his caravan, with his car kept safely under wraps. But as he sits there considering his conversation with the kid who has the ecologically unsound father, he comes up with what he thinks is a great idea.

He will form a club called the Green Beetles. They will be a group of supremely eco-friendly Volkswagen enthusiasts. They will love and cherish their motorcars. They may clean and polish them once in a while, even sit in them from time to time with their friends and families. The important thing is; they will never drive them. They will leave their cars parked next to their house or caravan, never start the engines, never pollute mother earth with their deadly fumes.

And the best part of all from Barry’s point of view is the fact that this club, by definition, will never have any meetings, get-togethers or swapmeets. It will have no badges, no subscriptions, no officials, no committees, no membership cards or newsletters. Anybody who owns a Beetle but doesn’t drive it can automatically consider himself a member. It appeals enormously to the Zen sage within Barry, even if not to the dormant Zen Road Warrior.

♦

Carlton Bax, a scion of the Bax property and banking dynasty, and its sole heir, has successfully turned himself into one of England’s, if not the world’s, foremost Volkswagen collectors. He is a man of middle years but he still likes to think of himself as something of a playboy. Certainly devoting his life to the Volkswagen seems pleasingly boyish and irresponsible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.

He wakes early in the bedroom of his London house, a place he always refers to as his ‘gentleman’s residence’. His girlfriend, Marilyn, daughter of one Charles Lederer, love object of one Barry Osgathorpe, sleeps in the bed beside him. The room is dark. He doesn’t know what time it is. He reaches out and turns on the bedside lamp. The lamp is in the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, is made of blue porcelain, and is surprisingly accurate in its detailing. Light spills out through the windows and windscreen and through holes where the headlights should be. Then he consults the bedside clock, also Beetle-shaped, and sees that it’s ten o’clock. He decides to get up, although on many other mornings he might decide to stay where he is. He doesn’t bother to wake Marilyn.

He goes into the bathroom, sits on the cold toilet seat, thumbs through a copy of the magazine Volkswagen Universe while he’s waiting, a magazine that has recently featured an article about the Bax collection. When he’s finished he pulls a flurry of toilet paper from its holder. This holder too is shaped like a Beetle, the rear half anyway; the axle between the rear wheels serving as a core to hold the toilet roll. That over with, he steps into the shower, turns on the water. He draws the shower curtain. It is mostly transparent but it’s decorated with a pattern of primary-coloured Beetles that career down it as though it is a busy motorway without lane markings. He starts to soap himself with a brand new block of soap that is, again, Beetle-shaped. He gets through a lot of these, since a single shower will wear away the distinctive contours and styling lines, and that won’t do.

After his shower, Carlton Bax goes to his dressing room. As he walks along the connecting corridor he is pleasantly aware of the array of toy and model Beetles that line the walls, secure in their locked and illuminated display cabinets. He barely looks at them but their mere presence gives him a kick. All the great manufacturers are represented here, as well as all the minor and obscure ones. All the examples are in perfect condition, mint and boxed where appropriate, the die-cast and the tinplate, the rarities and the promotionals and the one-offs, the mass produced and the craftsman made. There are Beetles made of plastic and wood and glass and rubber, some fought for at auction, others sought out in obscure and surprising corners of the world, handmade in Nigeria or Egypt or Mexico. The collection spreads throughout the house. Many items are valuable beyond belief. Together they are priceless.

He begins to dress. First he puts on jockey shorts with Beetle motifs. Then he dons a pair of trousers, ordinary enough in themselves, but at least the belt has a brass buckle in the shape of a Beetle. Now he has to choose a T — shirt from several drawerfuls of possibilities, each of them displaying some different manifestation of Volkswagen culture. Some show faithful illustrations of Beetles in all styles and from all historical periods. Some show wild, customised versions. One shows an exploded flat-four engine. Some advertise Volkswagen dealers or specialists; Volksbitz, Bugmania, Wolfsburg World, Air-cooled Heaven, Bugs to Go, Fat Volkz Inc. Others commemorate various Volkswagen events and meetings, various Bug-ins and Bug-jams and Bug-O-Ramas, national charity cruises, show-and-shines and drag weekends. He decides on a yellow T — shirt with an appliqued cartoon of a dragster Beetle, massive tyres at each corner, flames exploding from the exhaust pipes, and at the wheel a slavering, red-eyed monster from outer space dressed in full Nazi regalia. There are certain events to which you couldn’t wear a T — shirt like that but today Carlton is not going to any such event.

Once dressed, he goes downstairs past the library with its unparalleled collection of Volkswagen books, histories, magazines and technical manuals. And he can’t resist sticking his head into the billiards room for the sheer pleasure of seeing the part of the collection that lives there.

Around the walls of the panelled room, Volkswagen memorabilia are displayed like hunting trophies. Here are serried rows of hubcaps and steering wheels laid out to demonstrate changes in design and function. Likewise with speedometers and foot pedals, crankshafts and tail light assemblies, wing mirrors and distributor caps. Above the mantelpiece three plaster Volkswagens fly in a diagonal line, like a trio of ducks. Elsewhere are Beetle tea towels, Beetles that are really decanters containing Jim Beam, special recordings and video tapes of the Beetle in all its forms.

There is a desk in the corner with Beetle stationery, a Beetle ruler, a Beetle sellotape dispenser, a Beetle stapler, a Beetle pencil sharpener and a Beetle rubber. There is a small model of a Beetle set in a cube of clear plastic to act as a paperweight. There are badges of a hundred or more Volkswagen owners clubs from all round the world. Finally there are posters, postcards, stickers, calendars, sales brochures, caps, shoulder bags; the works.

Now it is time for breakfast. He prepares himself a boiled egg. When it’s had its three and a half minutes he puts it into a shiny black Beetle egg cup, then adds salt and pepper from Beetle-shaped shakers. He pours coffee from a Beetle-shaped coffee pot, and drinks it out of a mug with a design proclaiming ‘Fifty Years of the Beetle’. He eats a biscuit which he takes from his Beetle-shaped cookie jar, and when he’s finished he lights a cigarette with his Beetle cigarette lighter, subsequently flicking his ash into a Beetle ashtray.

The phone rings. That too is in the shape of a Beetle. “Hello?” he shouts into the receiver. He has to shout since the microphone is rather insensitive. “Hello who is this?” he demands.

The voice on the other end sounds angry, confused, threatening, and yet completely inarticulate.

“If you have something to say, say it,” Carlton Bax shouts, and in the absence of a coherent reply he slams the phone down.

He finishes his cigarette. He feels in his pocket to confirm that his car keys are there, dangling from an enamel Beetle-shaped key fob. Ready now, he leaves his house, trots down the steps from the front door, and goes out to the garage. Actually there are two garages. One is a long, low building at the rear of the house converted from a former stable block. It contains ten or so Beetles, and as such is hardly in itself the home of a major collection, but Carlton has made sure that these few cars are very, very special.

To begin with there is a 1937 Series 30 prototype, conceived so early in the Beetle’s development that it doesn’t even have a rear window. There’s a Rometsch-built taxi, one of the few Beetles ever to be made with four doors. Here is a Hebmuller convertible used by the Munich fire department in the 1950^s. There’s a military Kubelwagen, as used by Hitler’s troops in the Second World War. Here are a couple of immaculate and completely original split-windows. There’s a Beetle-based ‘stretch-limo’, made by welding a couple of extra ‘middles’ into an ordinary saloon. There’s one of the many stunt cars used in the Herbie films; this is one that comes apart in the middle yet still continues to run. Here’s a cream and grey, lowered, louvred, dressed-up Cal look Beetle, so slick, so sexy, so shiny, so lacquered as to appear pornographic. Here is a state of the art, electric-blue Baja Beetle with its exposed engine and its stinger exhaust and its big knobbly tyres just waiting to eat up the desert.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Carlton Bax lets it be known that he has other garages in secret locations around the country, in Europe and even in America, as well as whole warehouses full of desirable Volkswagen goodies. Nor does he deny the existence of a famous, or infamous, ‘locked room’ somewhere in his house, a room that is reputed to contain memorabilia of such rarity and value as to be positively dangerous. It contains unnamed, possibly unspeakable, possibly magical, Volkswagen items that a man might lose his reason over, that a man might certainly kill or be killed for. But even while he admits the room’s existence he will not reveal its location, and he insists that its contents are strictly for his eyes only.

But today Carlton Bax doesn’t go to the garage containing his rare Volkswagens. He goes instead to a garage at the front of the house. There is a trompe l’oeil painting of an oval window Beetle on the garage door. He now unlocks and opens it to reveal…a pristine metallic grey Range Rover.

“Volkswagens are all very well to collect,” Carlton Bax thinks to himself, “but I wouldn’t really want to drive one.”

♦

A little way out of Southend, at the end of a neat, well-tended suburban street, there is a surprisingly, even suspiciously, clean and flawless Volkswagen emporium. The building is an exhilarating piece of Odeon-style seaside deco, painted a gleaming, snow-blinding white, with curving windows, asymmetrical balconies and sundecks, and curling staircases enclosed in glass-walled towers.

The spotless, marble-tiled showroom houses a row of three superb Volkswagen Beetles. They have been restored, resprayed, and generally tarted up, and the for sale signs on their windscreens reveal prices that defy belief. The workshops out the back, away from the street, are every bit as clean and well-ordered as the showroom. Tools and engine components, accessories and body panels are stacked and stored with military precision; very German. This is not some fly-by-night, rough and ready, underneath the arches kind of operation; and even the customers have a clean, sharp and, of course, deeply fashionable, look to them.

In fact the only thing that looks untidy and out of place in this setting is a podgy, shambling, greasy-haired man, who for all that he doesn’t appear to belong, still roams around looking as though he owns the place. And he does. His name is Fat Les. This is his kingdom, and the sign on the outside of the premises says, “Fat Volkz Inc.” There are no signs saying that he specialises in flat-four engine rebuilds, in complete renovations, in radical paintwork, Resto-Cal customs, etc etc. There is no need for any such sign. If you need Fat Les’s services you’ll already know all about him.

The years have been kind to Les. Once he ran his Volkswagen business from a garage in a set of railway arches. A few good business decisions, a boom in the Beetle market, the help of a couple of backers, and a monstrous bank loan, have ensured a few changes, and mostly for the better. He doesn’t miss the squalor, and he certainly doesn’t miss the poverty. He likes his new clean and efficient lifestyle. He likes the business. He likes the hip, cool image. He likes the small team of smart young guys who work for him. It’s just that sometimes he can’t stand the sight of Volkswagen Beetles.

♦

A more or less typical customer arrives asking to speak to Fat Les. He is young, has a wacky haircut, Bermuda shorts, big trainers and a baseball cap worn back to front. Les steps out of the office. The customer, who introduces himself as Spider, wants to shake Les by the hand and say what an honour it is to meet him. Fat Les goes through the motions of being an incredibly minor celebrity then asks Spider what he can do for him.

“Well,” says Spider, “I’ve got a Beetle out there.” Les looks out through the plate glass of the showroom window and sure enough there’s a Beetle parked outside. It looks old and careworn, a bit rusty here and there, sitting a touch softly on its suspension. At the most, it would make a cheap runabout.

“I was thinking of having it done up a bit,” says Spider. “I was thinking of having it Resto-Cal. I was thinking about Empis and pearl lacquer, and flared wings, and one piece electric windows and a sun roof.”

“Yeah,” says Les. “I can do that for you.”

“And then,” Spider continues, “I was thinking about hotting up the engine, say a BBT 1914, with an Eagle cam, 041 heads, twin 40 Dellortos.”

“Sure,” says Les. “I can do that.”

“And my girlfriend says it’s got to have a nice interior, you know, maybe grey and blue leather, and midnight blue carpets, and a big stereo — detachable. Oh, and shaved door handles and central locking and a damn good alarm system.”

“No sweat,” says Les. “When do you want me to start?”

“Well, I was hoping you’d give me a quote first.”

Les looks at him with pity and contempt and says nothing.

“I guess this is going to cost me, right?” says Spider.

Les nods.

“I guess it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg, right?”

Les considers for a while before saying, “I think I might have to take your soul in part exchange.”

“Oh well,” says Spider, “in that case I’ll have to think about it.”

♦

Later that same day Les confronts one of his previous customers, and he is not a satisfied customer. He arrives in a pretty spiffy looking Beetle. It has been lowered, given a two-tone paint job in metallic turquoise and peppermint green, given suicide doors, an upgraded engine and heavy duty suspension. It stops abruptly outside the showroom, with a metallic clank. Hip hop music pumps out of the stereo and the driver gets out, a gangly young black man with Lycra cycling shorts and a pair of sunglasses that cost as much as some secondhand cars. His name is Zak. Les remembers a time when a young black guy wouldn’t have been seen dead in a Volkswagen Beetle; far, far too uncool. Times change.

Zak strides up to Fat Les and says, “Les, old pal, I’m not happy.”

Les, who is not a man for the old pals act, replies, “What is it? Piles?”

Zak would like to laugh, break the ice, establish a rapport with Les, but he can’t, and then he sees that Les isn’t laughing either.

“It’s the car,” he says.

“Get away,” replies Les. “What seems to be the problem?”

Les is always careful to use words like ‘seem’.

“Well, the paintwork for a start,” says Zak.

“Yeah, it’s a bit of a bloody eye-sore isn’t it, but it’s what you asked for.”

“I don’t mean the colour. I mean it’s starting to bubble.”

“Well, of course it’s starting to bubble.”

“But you only did the respray three months ago.”

“Well, it was only cheap respray,” says Les.

“No it wasn’t,” says Zak.

“Take it from me, it was a cheap respray. And on a twenty-year-old car. Put a cheap respray on a twenty-year-old car and the chances are it’s going to bubble. In fact, even if you’d stripped it back to the bare metal and given it a full rustproofing you’d probably still be standing here saying the same thing, and that would have cost you twice as much money. So basically, I’ve saved you a wad of cash, right?”

Zak is not quite dumb enough to accept this. He wonders if it would do him any good to get angry, but he suspects not. He has other complaints to air. The quality of the respray is the least of his problems.

“And the performance,” he says. “I keep getting burned off at the lights by everything; Ladas, 2CVs, Ford Transits, everything.”

“Well,” says Fat Les, “that’s probably because you’re driving a Beetle.”

“But I thought that with all the engine modifications I’d be the hottest thing on the road.”

“Did I tell you that?” Les enquires.

“Well no, not in so many words.”

“Not in any words,” Les adds.

“And you know,” the hapless Zak continues, “it won’t handle or go round corners very well, and it doesn’t stop the way I’d like it to, and it has a few flat spots and it stalls a lot when it’s cold.”

Fat Les looks at him with a certain sympathy, as though he understands and knows what the trouble is.

“Yep,” he says, “that sounds like a Volkswagen Beetle.”

Zak looks very unhappy indeed.

He says, “Look, I could get really bloody upset about this, because I think you could be ripping me off, man. I think you might take me for a mug. Like you think I’m ignorant and stupid and don’t know anything about cars. And I think you might be doing that because I’m black.”

Fat Les looks at him mournfully.

“No,” he says. “I treat all my customers the same way.”

♦

After he’s gone half a mile or so Carlton Bax hears a sudden muffled bang. It’s difficult to tell how far away it is or even which direction it’s coming from. But it isn’t the sort of bang you become very alarmed about or stop your car for. It certainly doesn’t occur to Carlton Bax that it comes from the direction of his own home, and even if it had, he certainly wouldn’t have reason to suspect that it had actually come from his own garage. It would never in a million years occur to him that what he had heard was the sound of one of his own precious Volkswagens exploding, which is precisely what it is.

He drives on oblivious. The traffic isn’t heavy. He has the radio tuned to a phone-in on female eating disorders. He’s feeling buoyant and optimistic. When he hears another, infinitely smaller noise coming from behind his seat in the Range Rover, a kind of metallic rustling, he assumes it can be nothing more serious than an empty drinks can rolling around on the floor. He is completely wrong.

He arrives at a red traffic light and stops. He begins to turn around to see precisely what caused the noise and the moment he does so he becomes aware of a human presence and feels something metallic pressed into his neck. He isn’t exactly familiar with the sensation of a gun barrel against his flesh but that is undoubtedly what it feels like. He freezes. He looks in the rear view mirror but can see nothing. Then a voice belonging to someone who was obviously hiding behind the seat, a voice that is so plain and neutral as subsequently to be unidentifiable, says, “Good morning Mr Bax. Just do what I tell you and you won’t get hurt.” Carlton Bax has no desire to get hurt. The lights change and he drives off following directions to some fearful and unknown destination.

♦

And that, essentially, is the beginning of everything. A famous Volkswagen collector disappears, and one of the Beetles in his collection is blown up. That would be strange enough in itself, but there are other forms of strangeness. The explosion in Carlton Bax’s garage is only the first of a great many.

In Kilburn, in London, an old man with only half a set of teeth and with soup stains on his navy blue jacket is washing his white, absolutely standard 1972 Beetle. He has owned it for sixteen years and it has only covered 30,000 miles. These days he barely uses it at all, never goes anywhere, but he still enjoys washing it. He’s finished now, and the car looks good. He puts his cloths and sponge in his bucket and turns to go back into the house. Suddenly the car explodes behind him, heat scorching his back like a flame-thrower.

In Berwick Upon Tweed a raven-haired housewife and mother of two is about to take her moss green 1976 Beetle to a while-you-wait MOT centre. In a way she hopes the car will fail, because then she can get rid of it and her husband will let her buy a new Fiat Panda. She loads the kids into the back of the car, turns the key in the ignition; and nothing at all happens. The kids now say they need to pee. She gets them out of the car, takes them into the house, and picks up the phone to tell her husband that the car’s let her down again; at which point the car explodes in a ball of orange and ivory fire.

In Lytham St Anne’s an estate agent is pleasuring a female radiologist on the back seat of her cherry red Beetle convertible. They are hot for each other, but they begin to find the space too confined. They decamp to the beach and move behind a dune. At the very moment she is about to come a deafening bang tells her that her beloved Beetle has been reduced to twisted scrap metal.

In Bath a fifty-year-old jazz trumpeter is emerging from a club where he was playing. It hasn’t been a great night. The audience was sparse and the other musicians were unsympathetic. He just wants to get home. His battered Jeans Beetle is parked in a dark side street near to some derelict warehouses, not the kind of place you’d choose to park your car, but, you know, who’s going to steal a twenty-year-old Volkswagen? He turns the corner into the side street and sees a smouldering, burned out shell where his Beetle used to be.

Not far from Wellingborough, a recent engineering graduate is trying out a new set of telephoto lenses on his camera. He parks his 1955 six volt, oval window Beetle in a rural spot and takes a series of photographs of it, getting further away each time and using ever more powerful lenses. He now has on the five hundred millimetre, is employing a tripod, and is some distance away from his car. Nevertheless, as he peers through the camera’s viewfinder he feels distinctly too close for comfort when the car explodes in flames. But he is so far away that all he can do is watch it burn.

In Yeovil a thirty-year-old legal secretary has been trying for weeks to sell her pink and green, J registered Beetle with polkadot interior. Lots of people have been to see it but they were all time wasters and tyre kickers. Nobody has made a serious offer. She is depressed. She needs the money as part of the deposit on the flat she’s buying with her boyfriend. She goes to bed wishing she could just be rid of the damned thing, and when she wakes up the next morning the car is no more than a blackened wreck sitting in the road.

Volkswagen Beetles start exploding all over the country. In the home counties and in the Midlands and the West Country, on the South Coast and in the North — West, all across the Pennines and the Mendips and the Cotswolds, Beetles start going up in flames. It seems to make no difference what style or year or condition they are. Whether they’re old bangers or customised specials or models of historical importance, they’re all just as likely to go up in a big bang. A lonely street corner, a suburban driveway, a supermarket car park; suddenly there’s an unattended Volkswagen Beetle and a short time later Volkswagen components are careering through the air, coiled in flame and black smoke. Inevitably this causes stress to a few proud owners and to a few insurance agents, but in the general criminal morass of car theft, joyriding and vandalism it will be some time before anyone realises a pattern is being established here.

Carlton Bax has gone missing. And in his absence, the police are severely hampered in their attempts to investigate the explosion in his garage. One of his Volkswagens has indeed been destroyed, the military Kubelwagen, and it appears to have been a clever and professional job. Just enough explosive was used to destroy the vehicle completely, but the car next to it is more or less intact.

However, with the car reduced to scrap metal, it becomes apparent that it was parked on top of a metal trap door. The explosion, it also appears, might have been designed to blow open that trap door as much as to destroy the vehicle.

Blown open it most certainly is, and through the gaping, jagged hole a subterranean chamber is visible. Is this Carlton Bax’s famous locked room? Police shine torches into the void to reveal a completely empty space. The chamber has been thoroughly cleaned out, and Carlton Bax is the only one who could tell anybody if that is indeed the locked room of legend, and what, if anything, it contained.

♦

As the shrewd reader will either know or have worked out by now, this is the second novel I have written about Volkswagens and Barry Osgathorpe. The first, called Street Sleeper, was originally dedicated to five different people. That was because it was my first book and I had no idea whether I’d ever write another one, much less get it published, so I thought it was as well to dedicate it to quite a few people while I had the chance.

One of those dedications read, ‘For Andy who gets run down’. Andy was a friend of mine, an actor and briefly a stand-up comedian. He had been walking along a street in Alnwick, Northumberland, when a passing Ford Capri with bald tyres and a reckless driver had ‘mounted the pavement’, knocked him down and broken his leg. It was a serious accident. He spent a lot of time laid up, obviously couldn’t work as an actor, and eventually got some rather measly compensation from the driver’s insurance company.

The leg healed, my book was published and as a sort of celebration, Andy and I, my wife and his girlfriend (who happened to be the daughter of a comparatively well-known television sitcom actor) went out for dinner together. I was feeling fairly pleased with myself for having my first book published and I was no doubt a little smug about it too. Andy at that time was acting in a deeply worthy play about homosexual child abuse, performing to non-existent audiences at a venue in Kennington. I had done my time as a writer of fringe plays and I had rapidly come to the conclusion that however worthy the subject matter, putting on plays that nobody came to see wasn’t something actually worth doing. This was not an opinion I felt any reluctance about expressing.

At a critical point in the evening my wife and I mentioned that we’d recently seen a porn movie in which the hero had fellated himself; an old trick perhaps but one that nevertheless still causes some surprise. Andy’s girlfriend offered the opinion that pornography was ‘a bad thing’, an opinion that on balance I tend to share, but I asked her why. And she said it was a bad thing because it exploited the actors and actresses who appeared in it. I then, in a spirit of intellectual enquiry, asked her to explain the difference between the way actors and actresses were exploited in pornography compared with the way they were exploited in fringe theatre or, for example, in television sitcoms.

Well, this did not go down too well with Andy. He threw a fit. He became violently angry and I was accused of many things, but essentially of being complacent and politically incorrect. We might easily have come to blows, but we didn’t, and a part of me stayed peculiarly calm throughout. I managed to walk rather than flounce out of the restaurant. My wife remained behind. I remember that as I left, Andy told me not to be overdramatic, that it would all blow over in a day or two. In many ways I wish it had, but I have never spoken to him since that day.

Several years passed. Then one day I was watching television and a commercial came on that I’d never seen before. A man’s car has run out of petrol in the middle of nowhere. He’s seen trudging along a deserted road, mile after mile, carrying an empty petrol can, looking for a petrol station. Then suddenly he sees a figure walking along the road, coming towards him from the opposite direction. It’s another man, an archetypal Frenchman wearing a beret and also carrying an empty petrol can. He too has obviously been trudging along the road mile after mile. There is obviously no petrol station for miles in either direction.

The Frenchman in the beret was Andy. He was right for the part, having one of those lumpy, humorous, hangdog faces. This was enough of a surprise in itself, but the commercial had a punchline to deliver. As the two men exchanged mournful glances, a car flashed past them and a caption appeared on the screen. “If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen.”

When the paperback edition of Street Sleeper was published I had the dedication ‘For Andy who gets run down’ removed.