Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twenty-Nine

Transvestism is a tricky word, a tricky concept and, as I now know, an even trickier reality. There’s no denying that as I put on Leezza’s flame-red wig and her flame-retardant suit with the big false breasts sewn inside, I did feel some frisson of transgression. I can’t say there was any sexual pleasure in that, in fact no pleasure of any kind, but I certainly did feel that I was doing something wrong.

I also found it hard to believe that I made a convincing woman. My gait and posture were surely all wrong and I thought the wig only made my features look even more angular and masculine. Still, as Motorhead Phil told me, red hair and big boobs broadcast a loud, clear message that tends to drown out the background hum of more subtle, more telling signals. He assured me that by the time I’d put on the crash helmet and the diamante wraparound sunglasses, the crowd (none of whom was going to get near enough to inspect me and question my gender assignment) would be seeing me as all woman.

This made him much happier than it did me, and I didn’t altogether believe him. I was also a little concerned about the ethics and potential consequences of trying to deceive a large, volatile, paying crowd of automotive-freak-show enthusiasts, but the truth was I had far bigger things to worry about.

Leezza’s Beetle would no doubt have felt awkward and unfamiliar in any circumstances — it was built specially to fit her — but operating it while wearing these odd items of feminine disguise presented a whole other set of problems. I was very glad indeed that Leezza’s outfit didn’t include high heels, hot pants, thigh boots or any of a thousand and one other possible female accessories.

I’d had only the very briefest amount of time to get used to the car. Predictably, the drying out and reassembling had taken much longer than predicted. I’d driven the Beetle just a few times around the lumpy, crumbling circuit of track at the speedway, but I hadn’t as yet made a jump. The one I was about to undertake, in public, in front of a crowd, ‘on stage’ as it were, would be the first of what I, and everyone else, suspected might be a very short series.

The freak show, I had been told, must go on. A broken foot, even Leezza’s broken foot, was no reason to stop the fun. The main reason the show had to go on, however, was because Motorhead Phil had sold an amazing number of tickets for the final Sunday, and it wasn’t in his nature to give refunds. As far as the audience was concerned the entertainment would be going ahead exactly as planned and advertised. A sexy red-headed woman would be jumping her car over Barry and an ever-lengthening row of Beetles, right up until the moment when she didn’t. Replace ‘sexy red-headed woman’ with ‘overwhelmingly nervous English novelist’ and that was what they were still going to get.

I had been chosen to impersonate Leezza because…well, not for any good reason that I could fathom, since there were surely people attached to the automotive freak show who had some experience of these things, certainly more than I did, since I had none whatsoever, but Motorhead Phil said I had to do it because the whole thing had been my idea. I knew that wasn’t true, and I did protest just a little, but Motorhead Phil was a hard man, an impossible man, to argue with. Given that I had none of Leezza’s skills or experience, the event did promise to be a good deal riskier, and perhaps more exciting, and far more likely to end in failure, although by this time, notions of success and failure had become impossibly confused in my mind.

I sat in the car on the speedway’s tarmac, and I tapped the accelerator lightly, revved the engine just a little. Even through my terror and cold sweat it sounded great. It was fiercely, violently responsive but not out of control. It was a beast you could do business with even if you couldn’t fully tame it, and when it came down to it, why would you want to? Its wildness was its attraction. It was ready to rock, ready to race, ready to soar, far readier than I would ever be, but our fates and our destinations were now absolutely connected.

I tried to remind myself of all the things Leezza had told me over the last few days. She had been my mentor, my driving and flying instructor, and if I was a slow learner, I was also — in the interests of self-preservation if nothing else — a studious and deeply committed one. And above all else I told myself what Leezza had insisted on from the beginning, that this whole thing wasn’t personal, wasn’t about the person in the car. It was about forces in motion, about the laws of physics and gravity, of trajectory mechanics. If you understood those and went along with them, the outcome was guaranteed.

It all sounded like perfectly good advice, in a way it even sounded reassuringly like common sense, but there was still the question of whether my alliance with these timeless, immutable, non-negotiable laws was all it needed to be. I had a pretty good idea of what I was supposed to do: what had to be done. I knew, at a theoretical level, all about the required speed, about the direction, the angle of ascent, about the required rate of acceleration, but I still had actually to do it. If I did it wrong, if I lost my bottle, well that would be the moment when, instead of the show being about immutable laws of nature, it would become all too much about me. And about Barry, too.

The speedway was packed. The crowd was excited and loud and beered up. Motorhead Phil made some kind of announcement over the PA. I wasn’t really able to listen, but I could tell it went on much longer than it needed to. DJ Ballard was manning the decks and was playing something he thought appropriate: could it have been ‘Moby Dick’? ‘You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings’? ‘Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong’? I couldn’t make it out, and I didn’t try too hard. I had other things to do.

I put my foot down and the Beetle seemed to crouch, to sink into the ground and grip it with a positive, feral firmness, and then the car surged forward. The process had started. We were on our way, and there was no coming back. I knew the car was moving incredibly fast, and yet I had little sense of the vehicle itself. The world had turned into motion blur, as if I was being sucked into the pinched mouth of a circular tunnel. Ahead of me there was an eye of clarity, the take-off ramp, my target, and everything else was out of focus, forcing me to concentrate on the bull’s eye ahead. It looked perfectly still, and of course it was, even though it was approaching so rapidly, or rather because I was approaching it.

I felt an unexpected coldness right in the middle of my chest as though someone was pressing an icy fist into my solar plexus, and my flesh and bones were too soft to resist. Nobody had told me about that. It was strange and scary but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant, and it was definitely a distraction, and then…

…and then I was off the ramp and airborne and I felt, well I felt a great many things, most of them oblique and ambiguous, but the main one was relief. Look, I wasn’t a complete idiot; I didn’t think that nothing could now go wrong, or that I’d achieved anything that could be called ‘success’, or that all my problems were over, but at least, at last, the dice were cast. I was no longer responsible. I was no longer even trying to stay in control: other forces had taken over. What would be would be. To be airborne at all was such an achievement. Whether I landed nose first or arse first, regardless of what those vaginal teeth painted on the front of the car sank themselves into, whether I crashed and burned, literally or metaphorically, at least I’d made it, however briefly, however incompetently, by whatever fluke, into the air. That was something. That was a lot.

A screaming came across the sky. It was the sound of an air-cooled, flat-four, horizontally opposed Volkswagen engine. But now it was an engine without purchase or purpose. It was the power behind a falling Beetle. The car was out of its element. Its wheels were spinning but only in air. It had some velocity, some thrust, some momentum, but it was only a predestined dying fall. It was on a one-way trip, down to earth, and I was nothing but a passenger.

There was no road noise, no tyre squeal, none of the reassuring sounds of contact. You couldn’t have called it quiet, you couldn’t have called it peaceful, but for a moment there I was suspended in a little cone of what felt like stillness and was in reality rapid forward motion.

And although my time in the air was minimal, a second or two at most, I still had the leisure to notice, to discover, with amazement rather than pleasure, that another set of mechanics (fluid, I supposed, and popular too) were obeying their own laws inside my body, inside my blood, and as I savoured my disconnection from earth, a dense and serious erection asserted itself between my legs, inside my feminised flameproof suit. Nobody had told me about that — Leezza probably didn’t even know — but it did suggest that Barry had been on to something when he said there was a deeply sexual aspect to all this.

I’d been warned not to do anything dramatic while the car was in the air, that anything I might be inclined to do, either out of panic or dumb instinct, things like slamming on the brakes or yanking the steering wheel, would either do nothing or might lead to disaster. I had even been warned not to look down, and from up there, with the sunglasses and the crash helmet and the fake red hair falling over my face, it was hard to see much of anything. Even so I did direct my eyes downwards and I became aware of rapid, purposeful activity on the ground, some people running towards the line of Beetles, some running away from it. I could only have guessed what was going on down there, and I had no time to guess.

I crashed. Of course I did. How could anyone ever have expected me to do anything else? I was an amateur, a novice, a virgin, an incompetent. What else could I have done? I was obeying the laws of nature, of my own nature too.

But I didn’t crash all that badly. I didn’t crash lethally, and I didn’t crash on top of Barry and his Beetle. In fact I came nowhere near him. There were thirty Beetles side by side in the line for that jump, Barry in the thirtieth of course: we were nowhere near any version of the world record. And I cleared nine of the thirty with complete ease. That was surely a cause for celebration. If you’d told me a couple of weeks earlier that I’d be jumping a car over nine Beetles, or eight, or actually even one, I’d have been amazed and thought you were crackers. Jumping over nine Beetles was surely not something to be sneered at.

However, as is the way with these things, the problem was Beetle number ten. You might say that numbers eleven to thirty were all problems as well, but most of them were problems I never actually encountered. I didn’t get that far. I crash-landed inelegantly, ineptly, yet surprisingly safely, on top of the tenth Beetle, a bright orange saloon with its windows already busted out. And of course my car’s momentum guaranteed that I made a pretty ugly mess by smashing into Beetles number eleven, twelve and even thirteen.

For a while, quite a long while, my world was a chaos of crashing, sliding, buckling, uncontrolled air and metal, but in the end, in the very end, eventually, inevitably, everything stopped. The series of impacts and ricochets, actions and counteractions came to a halt. The flying Beetle and I were still, grounded, and if not entirely intact — and I was certainly in better shape than the car — then at least we hadn’t been utterly destroyed.

I waited anxiously, not daring to move, scarcely daring to breathe, expecting something else to happen, a climax, a petrol leak, flames, an explosion, a stroke, a heart attack, but nothing did. Guys came running, some bearing a stretcher and some with fire extinguishers, but they weren’t needed. I needed nothing at all. I was OK. I hadn’t died. That seemed rather important to me at the time. And I obviously hadn’t killed Barry: in a way that was more important still. I hadn’t done precisely what I’d set out to do, I hadn’t done what people wanted me to do, what people had paid to see, but I’d done something very important: I’d survived. There was plenty of satisfaction in that.

I stood up unsteadily in the car, holding myself up on the roll cage, and I waved to the crowd. There was a little bit of booing, but less than you might have expected. Yes, some of them were disappointed, they hadn’t been given exactly what they were promised, but they’d seen something that wasn’t such a terrible approximation. They’d seen a flying Beetle, a crash, a red-haired, big-boobed woman waving to them. Wasn’t that enough?

Leezza’s car was a terrible mess, a wreck; there would be no subsequent jump. I was delighted. My nerve had held once, I wasn’t sure it would have held again. But some people’s nerves, I discovered, hadn’t even made it through that one jump of mine. I looked along to the end of the row of Beetles, in Barry’s direction, towards the thirtieth car. I thought a wave, a shrug, a handshake, maybe an apology, would have been in order. But I couldn’t see Barry. There was a scrum of people around his Beetle but he was not in it.

The story, which it took me a good while to work out, was as follows. Both Motorhead Phil and Barry had, in a strange sort of way, more confidence in me than I’d had in myself. They really thought I was going to clear all the Beetles except one, that I was really going to fly over twenty-nine cars and descend precisely on top of Barry. As my Beetle, Leezza’s Beetle, had approached the take-off ramp, Motor-head Phil couldn’t stand it any longer. He’d panicked, rushed across the track to Barry’s car, used his incredible strength to pull off the driver’s door and then, Samson-like, tried to push apart the sides of the doorway to create a large round hole, big enough for the equally large round Barry to escape through. Motorhead Phil made the hole all right, but his efforts were wasted, superfluous. Barry too had cracked under the strain. Suddenly he wanted to live, he wanted it very much indeed, and he decided to make his own way out of the Beetle. For one reason or another — depression, increased metabolism caused by all the excitement and anxiety, loss of appetite caused by pining for the faithless Leezza — he had lost some weight. This, plus a steely determination to escape and a previously unimagined ability to compress himself, meant that while Motorhead Phil was demonstrating his strength on the driver’s side of the car, Barry was able to kick open the passenger door and squeeze out that way.

I wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or insulted by their estimation of my driving skills, but either way, I could see they had a point. As Barry so eloquently put it, “It’s one thing to be crushed to death in a Beetle by the woman you love, but being crushed to death in a Beetle by an English novelist in drag — gimme a break.”