Still life with Volkswagens

Two. The Unbearable Lightness of Volkswagens

Barry Osgathorpe is having a dream of sexual inadequacy. In this dream he is falling for a devastating seductress who is an amalgam of Helen Mirren and his old maths teacher, a surprisingly buxom old party, called Miss Cornthwaite. The scene is taking place in a large and completely deserted car showroom, and the Mirren⁄Cornthwaite character is decked out in a length of purple chiffon which seems copious enough but isn’t quite sufficient to hide her nakedness. The seduction is going rather well. Barry has stripped his own clothes off and is down to his underpants. He’s about to take those off too but no, the dream woman says she wants the pleasure of removing them herself. Her fingers scamper up and down his torso. She puts her hand into the waistband of the pants and gently lowers them for him. Down they go, down beyond his knees, down to his ankles, and she looks at his genitals and starts to laugh. It’s quite kindly at first, as if she’s having fun, but soon it becomes mocking, then vicious, and before long it turns into a kind of demonic, hysterical snarl. And now she doesn’t look at all like Helen Mirren, not even like Miss Cornthwaite, more like a snaggle-toothed, vampiric version of Queen Victoria; and he still doesn’t understand what she’s finding so damned funny.

So he looks down at his body and sees, with surprisingly little alarm at first, this being that sort of dream, that his penis has been transformed into a small, pink Volkswagen, about the size of a Dinky toy; and not even an interesting, classic kind of Beetle, but some humdrum, ordinary 1970^s model with a 1200 engine. And he looks more carefully and sees it’s a little rusty and uncared for, and it has no tyres, and oh my God, it appears to be leaking gallons of thick, dirty black oil.

He tells himself to wake up. It’s a struggle. His sleeping mind is strangely reluctant to detach itself from these comic horrors, but at last he is awake. He finds himself alone, it being one of the nights when Debby is not staying with him. It’s the early hours of the morning but he decides to get up. He steps out of the caravan. The air is cool and the grass is wet beneath his bare feet. He has had an idea. He walks over to the side of the caravan, to the place where his Beetle resides. He slowly unfastens the ropes and buckles that keep the car cover in place. Then he takes a corner of the cover and peels it back, slowly, deliberately, with a certain reverence, until the vehicle beneath is fully revealed.

These days Barry tends to distrust people who give their cars names, but once he was happy enough to call this vehicle Enlightenment. It sits wide and low on its thick wheels and tyres. Every part of it is black. There is no chrome, no badging, no metal handles or window frames. Even the headlamps have black covers. Even the windscreen and windows are made of smoked glass. It looks mean and vicious, positively evil, and that had once been precisely the intention.

Barry tries the driver’s door. It has not been open for a while so it sticks at first, but soon he has access to the interior and he eases into the driver’s seat. He puts his hands on the wheel, his feet on the pedals, and he remains there without moving for the next six hours.

Barry sits and thinks about the person he was, a different person for sure, a character called Ishmael. Barry has heard that the American Indians say ghosts appear when someone has not been buried right. And that, he suspects, may be the case with Ishmael. He is a spectre, an undead reminder. The stories Barry tells about him to the children gathered around the steps of the caravan are tales of adventure and estrangement, but they are also ghost stories.

That ghosts are pitiable, uneasy spirits, he would not deny, but he knows they can also be monsters. Ishmael’s search for enlightenment was no mere intellectual enquiry. It was a quest steeped in violence and anger and the smell of leaded petrol. It was not merely the bad guys who got hurt. Some innocent bystanders also suffered, became his victims. But perhaps the real victim was himself.

Halfway through the morning Sam Probert, the owner of the caravan site, comes along, sees Barry, and assumes he has just got into the car and is about to drive off.

“Going somewhere nice?” he asks Barry cheerfully.

“No,” says Barry, “I’m already there.” But he knows he’s lying.

♦

A man answers the phone when Marilyn calls her mother.

She does not recognise the voice, though she certainly recognises the type: young, muscular, surly, impecunious.

“I want to speak to my mother,” Marilyn says sternly.

“Oh, right you are, love. Hang on.” There is a good deal of rustling and mumbling, and the noise of things, very possibly empty gin bottles, being knocked over, before Marilyn’s mother makes it to the phone.

“Yes, cupcake?” she enquires.

“Something strange is going on,” says Marilyn.

“How exciting.”

“No Mother. Carlton’s disappeared.”

“Carlton?”

“My boyfriend. You remember?”

“Oh yes, of course I remember, a very generous young man. He was always giving me presents. It’s a shame he’s gone because you were rather fond of him, weren’t you? You can’t trust them, can you?”

“It’s not like that, Mother. He hasn’t just gone off. He’s genuinely disappeared. He left home a week ago and he hasn’t been seen since.”

“Oh dear,” says her mother.

“And this is the really strange part, there was an explosion in his garage and one of his cars was destroyed.”

“An explosion? Oh dear.”

“Yes, I know it sounds weird. And the police have been round and they’re completely useless. They seem to think the explosion was caused by an electrical fault or some such nonsense and that Carlton’s run off with a floozy.”

“Well, that is a possibility, isn’t it?” says her mother.

“Not if you knew Carlton.”

“I see. What kind of car was it that got blown up?”

“Oh Mother, I’ve told you all this. I wish you’d listen sometimes. You know he collects Volkswagens.”

“Oh dear,” says Marilyn’s mother.

“Why do you keep saying, ‘Oh dear’?”

There is a poignant hesitation before Mrs Lederer asks, “When did you last see your father?”

“More recently than you, I’m sure. But what does that have to do with anything?”

“When?” her mother insists.

“I drove down to the hospital about a month ago. Why?”

“And how was he?”

Marilyn tries to think of a gentle, sympathetic way of putting this, but settles for, “He was barking mad, as usual.”

“Yes, I thought so when I last saw him too. So you’ll be surprised to hear that he’s been returned to the community.”

“Which community?” Marilyn asks, a hint of panic in her voice.

“You know, the community, our community, the world at large.”

“Oh dear,” says Marilyn. “Oh dear me.”

♦

That night Marilyn goes along to the television studio as usual and tries to perform her regular duties as a late night weather presenter. This is not exactly the glittering kind of media stardom that she once had in mind for herself, since her weather bulletins are broadcast well after midnight on a satellite channel, but at least it’s something. She has a small but significant reputation for being vivacious, irreverent, slightly zany. She bounces onto the screen, all primary colours and messed up hair, stands in front of a computer generated image of England and speaks in the rootless, studied, inau then tic, South London accent she reserves for her television appearances.

“Well, it’s going to be a wet one!” she blurts cheerily. “Over here in South — East England there’ll be scattered showers, heavy in places. Moving north there’ll be intermittent drizzle in all parts. In Wales there’ll be a wet start and it’ll be wetter later. In the North — West it’ll be bucketing down, and in Scotland it’ll be a real cats and dogs number. Everywhere there’ll be cloudbursts, downpours and deluges. Let’s face it, whatever you’re doing tomorrow, you’re going to get peed on good and proper. Oops did I really say that?”

So far she has been rushing through her words but now she stops, puts on a serious expression and eyeballs the camera.

“Look,” she says, “I’ve got to end this programme on a personal note, right? Some of you probably know that my Dad’s been locked up in a loony bin these past few years. I mean, you ought to, it’s been in all the bloody tabloids. Anyway, he’s out now, and me and my Mum don’t know where he is. And we’re a bit choked, right? So I just want to say, if you’re out there Dad, watching this, there’s one or two things I want you to know. Basically, I still love ya Dad. I know we’ve had our ups and downs, but it’d be really ace to see you again Dad. Don’t become a stranger. Come home Dad. And if you can’t come home, at least stay out of the rain.”

In the end it is rather a good piece of television. She uses the camera well and towards the end her voice catches in her throat very effectively. Afterwards the floor manager says, to nobody in particular, “If her Dad’s really out there watching weather forecasts like this, at half past two in the morning, he must be even more bonkers than when he was banged up.”

♦

It is raining. To Charles Lederer who is standing with his thumb out at a traffic roundabout somewhere in the West Midlands it feels as though it has been raining forever. His Panama hat has turned to pulp on his head. His blazer and flannels have been made limp and ragged by the rain. His carpet slippers have absorbed so much water they feel like heavy sponges weighing down his legs.

The world looks grey and industrial. He has been in motion from the moment he left the Milton Maynard Mercy Seat. He has a wife out there somewhere, and a daughter too, but he thinks neither would welcome him. He has been hitchhiking, briefly entering other people’s strange, private, mobile worlds. He has been seeing England through glass, through tinted windscreens and streaked side windows. It is not quite the England he used to know. Perhaps something critical has changed during his incarceration. The landscape he sees now looks inhuman, a savage place of ring roads and by-passes and orbital routes, of traffic snarl-ups and crawler lanes solid with eighteen wheeler trucks. Where once he had seen (or had he just imagined?) rolling hills and village greens, there were now parks; industrial parks, retail parks, car parks, theme parks. The ground itself seems to be in some constant state of tumult and mutation. Processes of demolition and rebuilding, of growth and decay, of creation and dereliction, all seem to be occurring at the same time, all cancelling each other out. He could not tell you where he has been and certainly he cannot say where he’s going, a fact that is the cause of some irritation to the people who offer him lifts. He sees the best and worst of people while hitchhiking. Some drivers see an old man in need and are overwhelmingly generous. Others see an old tramp whom they fear will mess up their upholstery. Some drivers buy him coffee and sandwiches, slip a couple of pounds into his hand as they drop him off. Others just shout abuse out of the window as they drive past him; mostly young men with honking voices who call him a wanker because he hasn’t got his own car. Or they slow down as though to give him a lift then, as he hurries hopefully towards the car, drive off at speed. Or they swerve their cars towards him as though trying to run him down. It is a depressing state of affairs.

The rain continues to soak into him. It is starting to get dark, and the traffic is looking ominously thin. There is nothing in sight, no houses, no barns, no petrol stations where he might shelter. A vast truck hauling a container load of petrol, so lumbering yet so fast moving, negotiates the roundabout and fetches up a tidal wave that breaks across Charles Lederer’s chest. Inexplicably, he smiles a little. Perhaps he has the very slightest consolation in knowing he cannot possibly get any wetter.

It occurs to him that he might have to spend the night here. It is rural enough but there’s no hope of comfort or shelter, nowhere you could imagine sleeping. Not that he’s been getting or needing much sleep lately. He has learned that people don’t like you to accept a lift from them and then immediately nod off. The staff of service station restaurants certainly don’t like you falling asleep at their tables. What little sleep he’s had has arrived unbidden, and he has dozed off at the roadside or in a hedge. But sleep has always been fitful, disturbed by the hard ground and the roar of passing traffic.

He thinks he might be about to nod off again now when a pair of low, blurred headlights appear through the rain. Charles Lederer sticks out his thumb, more out of habit than in hope, and the car miraculously stops. It is a Volkswagen Beetle, old and careworn, a bit rusty here and there, belonging to Spider, the boy whose soul Fat Les threatened to take in part exchange. He has not followed through with the plan to have his car completely tarted up by Les. Instead he got him to fit a cheap set of moon disc hubcaps. Very smart they look too, and the best part of it is he can still go around saying his Beetle was worked on by Fat Les. He throws open the passenger door for Charles Lederer.

“Get in, mate,” he shouts. “Quick.”

Charles Lederer hesitates. He moves towards the car’s open door then stops.

“No, I’d probably better not,” he mutters to himself.

“What?” shouts Spider.

“You’re probably not going my way,” Charles Lederer says speaking louder and more clearly.

“In this rain, what does it matter?”

Charles Lederer hovers on the threshold, obviously torn, wanting to get in, and yet it’s as though he’s suffering from some terrible anxiety, some phobia.

“What the hell’s the problem?” Spider shouts.

“Well, this is a Volkswagen, right?”

“Right.”

“I’ve had some bad experiences with Volkswagens.”

“So have I!” says Spider. “Now get in before you catch your death.”

Charles Lederer grits his teeth and forces himself to get in the car. Spider says ‘Well done’ and the car pulls away into the cold grey curtains of rain.

Charles Lederer has been troubled by the problem of what to say to the drivers who give him lifts. A lot of them just want to talk at you and that’s fine by him. Others want to discuss issues, to talk about money or work or cars or politics, all things that once exercised Charles Lederer quite passionately, but today they arouse nothing in him at all. Consequently he finds he is not much of a conversationalist in these matters. But the most objectionable drivers are the ones who insist on questioning him about his life and times. He doesn’t want to tell them all his secrets and yet he doesn’t want to lie. So he just tells them he’s been in a mental home for a few years, and that generally shuts them up very efficiently.

He has none of these problems with Spider. The stereo system in the Volkswagen is too loud to permit conversation, but he doesn’t complain. He is quite happy with his lot. The interior of the car is dry, and warm enough for steam to start to rise from his wet clothes. They drive for an hour or so before Spider abruptly turns off the music and says, “Fancy a burger, old timer?” Charles Lederer thinks it’s best to say yes.

They drive until they come to a highly accurate though utterly ersatz replica of a 1950^s American diner. There is a sweep of cheap stucco, a lot of glass, some multicoloured neon. It is profoundly not Charles Lederer’s kind of place but he runs alongside Spider as they dash across the rain strewn forecourt of movie America, into the diner.

They find a booth. There is a juke box console on the table, and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Charles Lederer finds the menu a mysterious and lurid document, so when he hears his companion ordering a chilli dog he orders one too. It’s easiest that way. They don’t exchange more than a few words all the time they sit there, but it is not an uneasy silence. They recognise they have nothing in common and are grateful for it.

After the food has arrived and been eaten Spider seems in no hurry to leave. That’s fine with Charles Lederer too. They both stare out of the windows at the streaked, black view, and as they innocently watch the rain, the scene suddenly, abruptly dislocates, explodes into yellow and white, like a bleached negative or a smashed fried egg. Spider’s Volkswagen explodes, is savagely ripped apart, flayed into shrapnel. The remains of the car sit twisted and angular, writhing in a ball of scorching orange flame that no amount of rain can extinguish.

Spider’s face hangs open in horror and disbelief. Charles Lederer’s face is beatific, as if he has just seen a miracle.

♦

It is nine o’clock in the evening and Fat Les locks up the workshops and showroom of Fat Volkz Inc, and starts the journey home. His everyday vehicle is a big, battered white Ford Transit, the kind of thing that can burn off quite a few Beetles at the traffic lights. But these days Les can’t be bothered to burn off anybody. Who needs it? Who needs that kind of aggression and competitiveness, that whole small-penis stuff? But that doesn’t prevent others trying to provoke him. Les is a calm, leisurely, laidback driver these days, and that means he is constantly being cut up, overtaken on blind corners and hooted at for being too slow off the mark.

He isn’t feeling particularly ill-disposed towards the world tonight, but it’s been a long day and he’s tired and he’d like to get home smoothly and without hassle. The journey home is a slow, uninspiring, urban and suburban drive, with a lot of lights and stop and give way signs, and he really doesn’t need the kind of clown who’s currently playing silly buggers in the car behind him. The fact that the car’s a fairly good-looking yellow Beetle certainly doesn’t make Les any more sympathetic.

Each time Fat Les comes to a set of lights or a stop sign the driver of the Beetle pulls right up to his rear bumper and then, when Les can go, sounds the horn to tell Les to get a move on, that he’s not driving briskly enough. This happens several times, and despite Les’s willingness to let himself be overtaken, the yellow Beetle never quite manages to get past. When they arrive at the fourth set of red traffic lights Les has had enough. When the lights change to green he doesn’t move. The driver of the Beetle sounds his horn again. Les, quite coolly, raises the engine’s revs on the Transit. He puts the van in reverse, rapidly lets in the clutch and the Transit leaps backwards at some speed. It collides with the front end of the Beetle, completely demolishing it.

There is no damage whatsoever to the Transit, and even if there was, it wouldn’t look especially out of place on the battered old rear end. There are no witnesses and Les reckons that even if the driver reports him to the police, Les will simply say the car ran into the back of him. Who’d believe that a van driver would deliberately reverse into someone behind him at a traffic light?

Les can’t see how the driver of the Beetle is reacting. He or she doesn’t even get out of the car. Les drives away. He feels peculiarly pleased with himself. He savours the fact that destroying Beetles can be every bit as much fun as restoring and recreating them.

♦

Next morning when Fat Les arrives to open up Fat Volkz Inc, there appears to be yet another customer waiting for him. It’s a woman. She doesn’t look like the usual type of punter but Les knows that Volkswagen enthusiasts come in all shapes and sizes. She’s tall, not old, and has cropped red hair. Her body is athletic, perhaps toned up by a little body building. She’s dressed in a long, trailing raincoat over an expensive charcoal two piece, and she wears a pair of very high-heeled alligator skin court shoes. She says, “Good morning, I’m Detective Inspector Cheryl Bronte and I understand you know a thing or two about Volkswagens.”

“Who told you that?” Les asks, never too keen to help the police with their enquiries.

“Everybody tells me that.”

“Must be true then.”

She smiles at him, but it is a smile for her own benefit, not for his.

“Adolf Hitler’s favourite car, right?” she asks.

“In a way,” says Les.

“Is that what you like about them?”

“No,” says Les. “I like the fact I can make a living out of them. Okay?”

“Okay. I’m looking for a friend of yours. Somebody called Carlton Bax.”

“Who’s that?”

“Come on Les, he’s a customer of yours. You did some restoration for him,” and she consults a notebook, “three months ago.”

“If you say so.”

“Yes I do. It was a Kubelwagen. I take it you don’t restore one of those every day.”

“Oh, him,” says Les. “Was his name Carlton Bax? I always forget names. But yeah, okay, so I remember him. He was all right. More money than sense, but all right.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“No. Has he gone missing?”

“How did you know?”

Les looks suitably and indeed genuinely surprised. Of course he has no idea that Carlton Bax has disappeared. Even if it had been reported in the papers, which it still hasn’t, Les, being no great reader, still wouldn’t have known about it.

“I didn’t know,” he protests. “I mean it was the way you said it. How do you mean, disappeared?”

“One day he’s here, the next day he’s not,” says Cheryl Bronte. “That sort of disappeared.”

“Kidnapped?” Les enquires.

“Do you think so?”

“I don’t bloody know, do I?”

“We’re not ruling it out,” says Cheryl Bronte. “We’re not ruling out anything.”

“Well, I hope you find him,” says Les.

“You can’t tell me where he is, then.”

“Of course not,” says Les. “Don’t be silly.”

She gives Les a stare that says silliness is no part of her make up.

“Do you know anything about exploding Volkswagens?” she asks.

“Eh?” says Les.

“You haven’t heard of any Beetles around here being blown up, fire-bombed, that kind of game?”

“This is Southend,” says Les.

“Mmm,” says Cheryl Bronte meaningfully, but Les doesn’t know what she means. “And obviously it’s the kind of thing you’d hear about, being in the trade.”

“Yes,” Les admits.

“Because you see it’s curious isn’t it? There are Volkswagen Beetles blowing up all over the country, but you haven’t heard about it.”

“What?” says Les.

“It’s a coincidence, isn’t it? Or maybe the opposite.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Les, thoroughly confused.

“Well, here’s a number you can ring if and when you hear anything,” Cheryl Bronte says, and she hands Fat Les a card bearing a phone number. “If I don’t hear from you, well, one way or another I’m sure I’ll see you again.”

Les says thank you for the card. It’s a stupid thing to say, but he’s just so glad the conversation is coming to an end. Cheryl Bronte walks away, clacking on her alligator skin heels, and Les is left wondering whether members of the police force normally go around handing out business cards.

♦

Barry has devised a logo for the Green Beetles. It shows, in profile, a Volkswagen Beetle which has had its wheels removed, and has grown large angel-style wings which sprout from the rear of the car’s roof. The initials G.B. flank the design.

He has painted his own rendition of this logo, in whitewash, on the bonnet of Enlightenment. He has done his best, been painstakingly careful, and tried hard to get the drawing of the Beetle as accurate as possible. But Barry is no artist and he knows it. He doesn’t need anybody to tell him that the painting is crude and messy, but that is precisely what the little tyke with the environmentally unfriendly father, the so-called Ferrous Kid, is telling him right now.

“How come it’s got no wheels?” the kid asks.

“Because it doesn’t need them,” says Barry.

“Beg to differ Barry. My Dad says everybody needs wheels.”

“It doesn’t need wheels because it’s not going anywhere.”

“I see,” says the kid, impressed by the unassailable logic of this, but he is soon thinking on his feet again. “What’s the point of a car without wheels?”

“Well, I don’t want to get pretentious about this,” says Barry, “but it seems to me that in today’s world everybody is rushing but nobody’s going anywhere. Everybody’s in such a hurry that they waste their time. Everybody wants to travel but they can’t decide on a destination.”

“Maybe they’re just travelling hopefully,” says the kid.

“But what are they hoping for?”

The kid only has to think for a moment before saying, “I suppose they’re hoping for fun, material wealth and good sex.”

“How old are you?” Barry asks again.

Ignoring him, the kid continues, “Surely it’s worth a bit of a journey in order to find those things.”

“Well, yes and no,” says Barry. “The thing you’re journeying to find is probably where you already are.”

“I think my Dad would say you should get out a bit more.”

“He very probably would.”

“He’d probably say you should get in your car, put your foot down, feel the throb of the engine, the thrill of movement, the rush of adrenalin on the open road. He’d say you’d feel very different about all this green business if you did that. And I agree with him.”

“Do you really?”

“Yeah. So how about it?” says the kid. “The car’s sitting there doing nothing. I can get hold of some petrol if that’s the problem. How about it? Why don’t we go for a bit of joyriding?”

“Why don’t you get your Dad to take you joyriding if it’s so important?”

“Nah,” says the kid. “He’s a miserable bugger. My Mum says he never takes her anywhere.”

This gives the kid a moment of reflection, and as he reflects he stares again at Barry’s ham-fisted logo. One or two thick drips of whitewash are starting to bleed down the car’s bonnet.

“So why the wings?” he asks Barry.

“Because it’s the only way to fly,” Barry replies.

♦

A shiny blue and white Volkswagen camper van, complete with elevating roof, cooker, sink, fridge, awning and chemical toilet, is threading its way through a narrow, dappled, English country lane. At the wheel is Davey, formerly one of Ishmael’s younger, more impressionable disciples. Until last month he worked for an agency that recruits accountancy personnel. It was a steady job but it failed to satisfy the inner man. So he handed in his notice, took his holiday pay, polished up his Volkswagen camper and then took to the roads of England, just the way Ishmael once did.

It’s been pretty good so far. He’s stayed at some attractive and well-appointed camp sites, been invited to one or two interesting barbecues, and chatted quite amicably with his fellow campers and holidaymakers. However, if he was being absolutely honest, he would have to admit it’s been a little tame.

The truth is, Davey has an ambition that he hopes to fulfil on this trip. He knows it might sound a bit silly, but what he’d really like to do is fall in with a group of New Age travellers. He doesn’t want to trespass or damage property or leave behind him a trail of unsanitary toilet arrangements, but he wouldn’t mind at all briefly becoming part of a New Age convoy. He imagines he’d feel rather bucked to be among some exotic people with Mohican haircuts and rings through their noses. He’d share their food and drink, play with their dogs and entertain their barefoot children, discuss numerology and auras. He would walk with them in some ancient places. But mostly what he’d like to do is take some Ecstasy and dance in a field till dawn, while a barrage of techno dance music overtakes his senses and gives him a sense of total unity and love.

It’s easier said than done. As he drives along he very seldom sees the battered old vans, ambulances, army lorries and retired buses that he knows would signal the presence of a hippie convoy. Mostly what he sees are spanking new caravans, reps’ cars, hot hatchbacks. But he still has hopes of finding what he’s looking for.

He is well into the second week of his trip before he sees, in a lay-by not far from Scotch Corner, a little tangle of appropriate-looking vehicles. His heart lifts up. There’s an old gypsy-style caravan, a flatbed truck with a sort of log cabin built on the back, and a double decker bus painted with scenes from the Tarot. At the centre of the lay-by there is a wobbly looking teepee and a handful of tents. A fire churns out white smoke, vast speakers pump out dance music, dogs and children roam free. Ragged but supremely hip-looking men and women sit around being themselves.

Davey pulls into the lay-by and brings his camper to a halt right in the middle of the encampment. The inhabitants ignore him completely. He steps out and smiles broadly at everybody.

“Hey,” he calls. “Anybody know when and where the next rave is?”

He addresses the remark to the whole company and gets no response. Perhaps, he thinks, he is being too general. He approaches a man whose head is shaved at the sides, with his hair tied up in a top knot. He has rings through various parts of his body and any number of tattoos.

“I say,” says Davey, changing tack, “any idea where I can get some E?”

The man laughs wetly through his nose but can’t be bothered to offer an insulting reply. He waves Davey away, wearily, but he isn’t to be dismissed quite that easily.

“Hey,” he says, turning back to the whole group, “I can see you guys are all really chilled out. Mind if I join you for a while?”

This is enough to stir at least one of the travellers into action. A woman gets up from her place by the fire. Davey notices that her hands and feet are caked with black dirt. Her skinny body is wrapped in tatters of big, ill-fitting clothes, but her face, he thinks, is rather sensitive, soft, serene, saintly. He could definitely imagine sharing some space with her. She comes up to him and says, “Fuck off and die you middle class dweeb.”

Davey can take a hint, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t deeply hurt. He climbs into his van and drives away. It seems to him that the travellers looked at his vehicle, his clothes and his haircut, and immediately dismissed him. They thought he didn’t look enough the part. This, in his opinion, is not what New Age travellers should be all about. They should take a looser, more accepting attitude towards their fellows.

But he knows this is a difficult area. Only a few minutes later, a couple of miles along the road, he decides to stop for lunch at one of those large pubs you find marooned beside dual carriageways, with a roomy beer garden and a large piece of historic, agricultural machinery arranged outside the front entrance. He parks, gets out of his van and walks towards the pub, and he sees a group of vicious-looking skinheads.

He does not feel at all accepting of them. There are only half a dozen or so of them, though he doesn’t dare look at them long enough to do any counting. At first he thinks they might be football supporters. Certainly they look like a peer group, a gang. But he knows it isn’t the football season, and the more he thinks about it, the more it appears to him that their shared interests are probably not very sporting.

They have extremely short hair and very big boots, but those things in themselves might not be so very decisive. No, it’s the tattoos that really give them away; the spider’s webs around their necks, the union jacks, the swastikas. These are, unless he’s very much mistaken, neo-Nazis. He submits to a small shudder.

They stand in an invisible, though palpable, cloud of anger, hostility and violent obscenity. They are hyperactive, like a barrel load of monkeys. At the moment they are righting among themselves, but it seems only a matter of time before they find some more proper object. No doubt a Jew or a black or a homosexual or a woman would be ideal, but failing that it seems perfectly likely that they might set about a man in a camper van who could all too easily be mistaken for a middle class dweeb. Davey thinks about scurrying back to the van but suspects that might only draw attention to himself. They would see his fear, and like a pack of dogs they’d know he’d identified himself as a victim. He stands on the forecourt of the pub, equidistant between his van, the pub entrance and the gang of skinheads, and he feels utterly paralysed.

At which point a man emerges from the pub. He is a middle aged man in a rather elegant black suit. The suit is sombre and sober enough but he’s wearing it with highly polished, studded cowboy boots, and he has strange items of adornment; a gold hoop earring, a belt buckle in the shape of a dog’s skull, a number of big, flashy rings on his fingers. His hair is cropped and silver. His face is large but solid and a short deep scar runs mournfully down from the left corner of his mouth. He walks purposefully but coolly towards the gang. At first Davey thinks it might be the landlord of the pub asking them to leave. That would be enormously brave of him, but it soon becomes obvious that a more subtle and convoluted transaction is taking place.

The besuited man talks to the skinheads quietly, slowly, and they immediately fall silent and listen attentively enough. He is apparently a man of few words. After barely a minute he has said all he has to say. He returns to the pub and as he does so the skinheads walk across the car park, over to a shabby white Transit van, their means of transport. They scuffle and throw punches at each other as they pile into the back.

Davey watches as they accelerate away in a screech of gravel and rubber. He’s glad they’ve gone. He saunters into the pub. It is spacious. There are beams and artexed walls, and a booming colour TV is showing a film about hyenas. Davey feels quite reassured. He enjoys a very leisurely ploughman’s lunch and a half of low alcohol lager. He consults his guide to local campgrounds and decides to head for a four star site situated twenty or so miles away. He will have to double back on himself and drive past the lay-by containing the hostile New Age travellers. He thinks he will give them a cheery wave as he passes to show there are no hard feelings.

He leaves the pub and sets off, but as he approaches the lay-by, he realises something is terribly wrong. The camp fire may have been a bit unruly before, but now a big roll of black smoke hangs over the place, and as he gets closer he can see that the entire site is in disarray. The vehicles have been attacked, smashed up, overturned. The teepee and the huddle of tents have been flattened, and there are now no signs of children or dogs. Davey slows the van and he can see some of the travellers. They are sitting or lying around, looking as though, well, as though they’ve just been beaten up by a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads. Several are clutching bloody rags to their faces and heads.

Davey thinks of stopping to offer assistance. After the way they rejected him it would be extremely noble, positively Biblical, to help them out. However, the memory of being called a middle class dweeb is still smarting, and he thinks ‘Sod it’, floors the accelerator and drives on.

♦

Here is Elvis Presley at the wheel of a dune buggy making the movie Easy Come, Easy Go. Now, at heart Elvis will always be a Cadillac man. Even at his funeral he will travel in a white Cadillac hearse with one silver Cadillac limousine in front and sixteen white Cadillac limousines behind. One of the first things he ever did when he became rich and successful was to buy his Momma a pink Cadillac. It probably looked a little loud and out of place on the streets of Memphis, but Hell, the boy has never been one for understatement and his heart was undoubtedly in the right place. Maybe the real problem is that Elvis has trouble expressing affection. When he wants to show people that he loves them he gives them something expensive, like a Lincoln convertible or a pick up truck. On one occasion he spent 950 thousand dollars buying trucks for each and every one of his entourage before the Colonel finally put his foot down.

Elvis loves all kinds of machinery, be it cars or motorcycles or tractors or golf carts. He drives Ferraris and a Stutz Blackhawk and all kinds of Mercedes and any number of muscle cars. But this dune buggy is something different again. Yes, it’s noisy and small, it’s cheap, it’s certainly hard to drive compared with an American automatic, and it’s based on one of those Volkswagen Bug things. He saw plenty of those things when he was stationed in Germany and he wasn’t too impressed. As a matter of fact, when he was in Germany he drove a white BMW which the press nicknamed the Elviswagen. And when he was courting Priscilla, he regularly sent a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to pick her up from her home in Wiesbaden and drive her all the way to his place in Bad Nauheim.

The Volkswagen, then, is just about as un-Elvis a car as you could imagine, and yet as he uses it to drive round the Easy Come, Easy Go movie set, as he ferries girls and friends around the lot, he gradually starts to like it. It’s kinda fun. It’s young and it’s hip and it’s funky. It’s more California than Vegas, and at this point in his career he doesn’t think that’s such a bad thing. He decides he’ll get one for his automobile collection.

At any given moment the best of Elvis’s cars stand on the drive of Graceland, ready and waiting, clean and polished, full of gas, and raring to go. Of course, even the best cars, some would say especially the best cars, can be a little temperamental; but Elvis has no time for other people’s or objects’ temperaments. He has to be able to get into any of his cars, start the engine first time, floor the accelerator and drive away. And if one of those suckers won’t start, he gets angry as hell. Not that he can’t deal with that anger. He has a pretty good way of dealing with it. He simply gets out of the offending car, draws his gun and shoots it. He shoots lots of things, like televisions and stereos and radios, but shooting automobiles is most fun. Of course, it doesn’t make the car any easier to start, but it definitely makes him feel a whole lot better.

He emerges from Graceland, dressed in his karate robes, his hair and sunglasses firmly in place. He walks along the line of cars put there for his consideration, wondering which one he’ll favour today, and he decides it’ll be the good old Volkswagen dune buggy. He climbs in, and it settles a little on its suspension. He turns the key in the ignition and it won’t start. He gets out, swearing under his breath about Kraut technology, takes a thirty-eight from the shoulder holster that he wears under his karate gear and pumps a couple of shells into the engine block. Then he moves on to his next choice, a Ferrari Dino which starts immaculately first time, and he drives away.

Next day the King is a little surprised to see the dune buggy still parked on the drive. Once he’s shot a car it generally isn’t much use for anything. He sends for his mechanic and tells him to get rid of the car, how it let him down yesterday.

“Oh, but I took care of it,” the mechanic explains. “It was just the starter motor. They can be temperamental. I fitted a new one, Mr Presley.”

Elvis laughs at him, one of those dirty, mocking, good ol’ boy, Southern laughs.

“It ain’t the starter motor that’s the problem,” Elvis says. “Problem is, I fired a couple of slugs into the critter.”

“Yeah, I know that sir, but it’s no problem,” says the mechanic. “These cars have bullet-proof engines. That’s the way Adolf Hitler wanted ‘em.”

“Adolf Hitler drove a Volkswagen?” Elvis asks.

“He sort of invented it, sir.”

Elvis scratches his armpit inside the white robes.

“You know,” he says, “I thought there was something kinda funny about these things.”

The engine block from that dune buggy, complete with two bullet scars, is, according to rumour, one of the more minor treasures to be found in Carlton Bax’s famous locked room.