Gravity’s Volkswagen

Five

I woke up early in unfamiliar, and as I now saw, rather grubby surroundings. A lot of people had evidently slept in that trailer before me, and many had left their traces in the form of cigarette burns, gouges on the walls and ceilings, and anonymous stains everywhere else. Still I wasn’t going to complain. If money was tight on the movie, who was I to expect special treatment?

I looked out through the trailer’s scratched plastic window and saw a lot of people milling around, the film crew no doubt. They were an unlikely mix of surly, stocky, older white men and bright, lean, hip, multi-ethnic younger people of both sexes. It was hard to imagine how they all got along together, but at that moment they were unified in scooping up the breakfast buffet that was laid out on some trestle tables. I decided to join them.

My focus and concentration wasn’t all it might have been, and it took me for ever to get washed and dressed. But at last, as I was ready and about to go outside and face this strange new world, there was a pounding on the trailer door, which then flew open despite being locked. And there stood Josh Martin, my director. He looked older, fatter, wearier, than in his online picture, but then I suppose we all do. He looked more suntanned too. I said hello: he didn’t.

“These people,” he snarled. “These fucking people.” And he made a grand gesture that seemed to take in the whole world, me included.

“Which people?” I asked.

He looked at me as though only a complete idiot wouldn’t know exactly what he was talking about, and at that moment, right on cue, I became aware of a terrible clanking and hammering. It was coming from near by, though not from inside the trailer park, rather from the speedway next door.

“Take a look at this shit,” he said, and we left the trailer so he could show me what was going on.

In the hot light of morning I could see just how close together the trailer park and the speedway were. Last night the stadium had looked deserted, but now there were many signs of intense though unfathomable activity, people running around carrying power tools and large pieces of plywood. Engines were being revved, sheet metal was being hammered, glass was being pulverised. It all seemed, in fact, very much the sort of noise and activity that might be expected to come from something that called itself a speedway. For that matter, I now saw there were a few Volkswagen Beetles on the other side of the fence, inside the speedway grounds. These weren’t customised or exotically painted like the ones connected with the movie, in fact most of them looked like non-runners, but it suggested to me that the speedway folk might be natural allies rather than the ‘fucking people’ Josh Martin said they were. Of course I knew nothing about it.

At that moment the air was split by the metal seething of a frighteningly powerful electric saw. I jumped several feet.

“That must be hard to live with,” I said.

“Oh you think?” Josh Martin said. “And what if you were trying to make a fucking movie? What if you were trying to record some fucking live fucking sound?”

“I can see your problem,” I said.

“You can’t see the half of it,” he said.

I didn’t doubt that he was right but I couldn’t see what I was supposed to do other than offer abject sympathy. For a moment he became slightly quieter and more thoughtful, more sorry for himself possibly.

“I was told it was abandoned,” he said. “The old abandoned Fontinella Speedway. That’s what everybody always calls it. But now there’s a fucking freak show going on in there.”

He had a point. Now that I’d had a better look, I could see that the people working on the other side of the fence were a wild bunch, all bare chests and shaved heads, tattoos and piercings and overcomplicated facial hair. And by no means all of them were men.

Mostly they were doing things with cars, but they certainly weren’t doing anything as straightforward as repairing them or making them run. Some people were erecting scaffolding towers, building a stage, constructing a couple of ramps. It was too early to make a judgement, but my immediate impression was that everybody on the speedway side of the fence was working much more purposefully and enthusiastically that anybody on the movie set.

“Does the noise ever stop?” I asked.

“Oh sure,” said Josh Martin. “When we’re shooting, then they stop.”

That sounded like a good thing. “Good,” I said.

“Well, let me qualify that,” he said. “What actually happens is that before I say, ‘Action,’ somebody has to go over there with a bagful of cash, and hand it over and that buys us about five minutes of quiet from those bastards. They’ve got me by the prostate.”

I could see it wasn’t a perfect arrangement.

“And it’s making a big fucking hole in the budget,” Josh Martin said angrily. “Still, the author’s here now, everything’s going to be just fucking peachy.”

With that he wandered over to the table where the breakfast buffet had been laid out. He looked at it briefly with disgust and then fell into intense conversation with one of the stocky white men and together they went off, to do something filmic, I assumed, something that had nothing to do with me. I went over to look at the remains of the breakfast and I understood Josh Martin’s disgust. The buffet had been reduced to a few mangled and half-chewed remnants.

“Yeah, you got to get up early in the morning to beat the Teamsters,” said a young female voice behind me.

“Not that the breakfast’s worth getting up early for anyway,” said another voice, a man’s.

I turned and saw two people standing there. They were, there could be no doubt about it, a couple of actors. More than that, given the outfits they were wearing — tattered futuristic jump suits decked out with Volkswagen insignia — they were obviously dressed as characters from my book, from the movie.

The actress was a tall blonde, quirkily good-looking, managing to be simultaneously willowy and muscular. The actor was a dwarf.

“So,” said the woman, “am I the way you pictured Natasha?”

Natasha was the nearest thing my book had to a heroine, or perhaps anti-heroine. She was in love with Troy: the Eva Braun of the story. This flesh-and-blood Natasha looked like a perfectly good piece of casting, but the truth was I didn’t have a very specific idea of how she, or any of my characters, was supposed to look. Maybe some authors have a solid visual image of their creations, but I never do, and especially not of their faces. Sure they have qualities: they’re old or young, fat or thin, good or bad, sexually attractive or not, but that’s about as much detail as I like to give. Partly it’s so that readers can use their imagination to create their own pictures, but it’s also so as not to alienate the less imaginative. If I say a character has red hair, hazel eyes and small breasts, well some people are going to really love those things and think I’m describing a really great-looking woman, but others will hate red hair, hazel eyes and small breasts and therefore not think that the character’s good looking at all. So I tend to use more general or abstract descriptions: she was simultaneously willowy and muscular; and sometimes I just describe someone as ‘attractive’, and let the reader fill in the blanks according to taste.

I didn’t want to get into all that with an actress I was meeting for the first time, so I said, without giving it a great deal of thought, “You’re much sexier than I imagined,” and I felt like a complete idiot the moment it was out of my mouth.

She gave me a complex, ambiguous look and maybe a quarter of a smile. She was evidently flattered but she was also suspicious. Was I just being an arse licker and creep, or was I perhaps being a snide, sarcastic Englishman and implying that she was glossy and vacuous and wrong for the part? I wasn’t doing that, but how could I have convinced her on such limited acquaintance?

“Really,” I said. “You’re much better for the part than I could ever have imagined.”

“I can see I’m going to have to watch you,” she said.

I wasn’t unhappy for her to watch me.

“And what about me?” said the dwarf.

Well, it’s a funny thing isn’t it, I thought to myself. Once upon a time a writer sat in his room back in England, some good while ago, writing a book, and he realised he’d given himself a lot of problems, chiefly that he had too many characters, all of them Volkswagen enthusiasts, and he was having trouble differentiating one from another. Then he thought of a really crass, obvious way of distinguishing one of them: he made him a dwarf. It wasn’t a very original idea, and it took the writer all of three seconds to set down the line, “Ronnie was a dwarf,” yet here and now, a decade or so later, five and a half thousand miles away from home, this thought had been made flesh.

I looked at the actor playing the part of this dwarf character that I’d so casually and so thoughtlessly created, and I didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t tell me,” he said; “you pictured someone shorter.”

I thought he was trying to be funny, so I laughed, though not too hard, in case he wasn’t. Fortunately the dwarf found his own remark just about the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and he slapped me hard on the lower back.

“You’ll get along just fine around here, Ian,” he said, and I did hope he knew what he was talking about.