Still life with Volkswagens

Three. The Perfumed Volkswagen

It is a quiet afternoon at Fat Volkz Inc, quiet enough that Les can leave work, get in his Transit van, drive along the Essex coast, find a quiet spot and spend a long time staring out to sea. He realises this is probably a sign of creeping middle age. The beach was once a place for playing football, chasing girls and kicking sand in people’s faces — not that he ever did any of these things with much success — but now it has become a place to be alone, a place of peace, tranquillity and spiritual solace. He finds that pretty bloody strange. In the good old days he wouldn’t have known spiritual solace if it had come up and kneed him in the kidneys, but he’s wise enough to accept it now that it’s here.

Les walks along the beach for a mile or so. The weather is blustery and wet. He feels his face reddening in the wind but he doesn’t mind that. He stops walking, sits down on a patch of shingle, and looks out to sea. Small fishing boats and windsurfers scud across the scratched surface of the water. Les feels meditative, content, hypnotised.

He sits like that for a long while, his head clear of thoughts or of any sense of time, so that when he finally looks up he has no idea how long the stranger has been standing beside him. Les’s first impression is that this could well be another police presence. The man is bulky, heavy, stern. He has authority and toughness, and a complete lack of good humour. But when Les looks more closely there are one or two little touches that seem a shade too rococo for the police, the cowboy boots, the belt buckle in the shape of a dog’s skull, the fancy jewellery. None of this looks like plain clothes. But most alarming of all is the scar that runs down from the left corner of his mouth. Something about him scares the hell out of Les.

“Volkswagens,” the stranger says. “They’re great items, aren’t they?”

“If you like that sort of thing,” Les replies.

“Well, I’m sure you do. Aren’t you Fat Les the Veedub King?”

Les nods, not enthusiastically.

The stranger says, “So how do you explain these exploding Beetles?”

“I don’t,” says Les. “I don’t have to.”

“But what kind of maniac do you imagine would do a thing like that?” the stranger asks.

“Just your run of the mill kind of maniac, I guess.”

“If I got my hands on the person doing it. Well…you can imagine.”

Les thinks perhaps it is best not to.

“Adolf Hitler’s favourite car, you know,” says the stranger.

“So I hear, but that’s not why I got into them,” Les replies.

“Adolf Hitler is much misunderstood,” the stranger says. “He knew a lot about the human spirit. He conceived the Beetle. He built the autobahns. He had unfailing dress sense.”

“Oh please,” says Les.

“You don’t think there’s something eye-catching about jackboots, Nazi uniforms, death’s head insignia?”

Les can’t quite understand why this conversation has such marked similarities to the one he had earlier with Cheryl Bronte. As far as that goes, he can’t for the life of him understand why he’s having this conversation at all.

“I’ve never been a snappy dresser,” Fat Les says.

“No,” says the stranger, looking Les over and adjusting the lines of his own suit. “I can see that.”

Les gets to his feet. “Well, I’d best be getting on.”

“No,” says the stranger. “Not until we’ve discussed something.”

Les wonders if he could make a run for it and get to his van. Something tells him this guy isn’t going to be very easy to shake off. He decides he’d better listen to the ‘discussion’.

“Go on then,” says Les.

“My name’s Phelan.”

Les wonders if he ought to be impressed.

“A good friend of mine, well I say a good friend, I tend to think of her more as a sex slave actually, well, she had a bit of a prang in her Volkswagen. Some bastard in a Ford Transit reversed into her. Made a real mess of the car. It’s going to take a skilled craftsman to get it back to normal.”

“I bet,” says Les.

“Is that perhaps the kind of job you could do?”

“Yes,” says Les.

“And could you do it for me cheap?”

“Good work never comes cheap,” says Les.

“I suppose not. Nevertheless, I think I’d like you to do the repair work for me, Les. I’d like you to do a good job at a reasonable price. In fact I’d like you to do it for free. That’ll be all right won’t it Les?”

“I don’t know about that,” says Les.

“Oh, I think you do.”

He grasps Les rather insinuatingly by the shoulder and says, “I’ll tell her to drop the car in. Don’t let me down, Les.”

“Okay,” says Les a little hoarsely. His mouth feels unusually dry.

“I won’t be around for a little while Les. But don’t worry. I’ll be thinking about you. We’ll have another talk just as soon as I get back. I could have all sorts of work to put your way.”

♦

Marilyn’s mother has been drinking. There is nothing unusual about that. Marilyn’s mother is famous for her drinking. She’s famous for being extrovert, for being the life and soul of any and every party. It is a rainy summer night. She walks down the street, she wiggles, she teeters, she giggles at some joke known only to herself. She feels just fine. She knows she drinks too much. She knows it is no good for her body, but she thinks it could all be a lot worse. She could be addicted to much more dangerous things, like tranquillisers or sleeping pills or heroin for heaven’s sake. Whereas in the current arrangement she’s only addicted to drink and sex.

She thinks her husband must be to blame for this. He never had enough time for her. He would say he had to spend all night sittings in the House, and his weekends were always taken up with constituency matters. She was left alone. He didn’t want her there, didn’t even want her to play the good MP’s wife. She was sure he had affairs. She imagined a mistress installed in a studio flat around the corner from the House. She imagined him bedding various female members of the Party faithful. She began to take her revenge.

She began by seducing one or two of Charles’s closer friends. The fact that she was married to their crony seemed to be a large part of her attraction for them. They were enthusiastic, sometimes grateful, always discreet. But discretion somehow wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be wild and scandalous. Rather than enthusiastic, grateful Tories, she decided to plump for dodgy strangers; gardeners, builders, postmen, barmen. When she is particularly drunk and feeling particularly needy she has even been known to offer herself to cab drivers. They always accept. She sits in the cab, on the edge of her seat, loosens her clothing, tells them she is lonely, that her husband is away, that she needs some sympathetic company. Sometimes she invites them into the house at the end of the journey, but more often they drive to some secluded place and do it quickly and fiercely in the back of the cab.

She loves it, this rapid association, this desperate coming together, the sense of transgression, of wickedness, a stranger touching her with dirty hands, his cock suddenly in her. Then it’s all over, and she’s left feeling used, soiled, wonderful. But she is not totally indiscriminate. She never goes for unlicensed mini cab drivers; only for drivers of black cabs, men with the Knowledge.

Lately she has come to the conclusion that perhaps poor Charles wasn’t really having affairs at all. She has decided he was probably a genuinely dedicated politician who worked too hard for his own and his family’s good. His mental breakdown and subsequent lengthy incarceration seem to have proved this, but now it is too late. She did not do right by Charles and she knows it. However, life must go on. She has tried hard to forgive herself, and in the main she has succeeded.

She has always felt sorry for Charles, but she was never sorry enough to want to visit him very often in the Mercy Seat, she usually left that to Marilyn. Now that he’s out on the loose somewhere, she prefers not to think about him at all. She knows it will only depress her and she hates to be depressed.

The cool, wet air fails to sober her up. It’s hard to get a cab. A few splash past but they’re all occupied. She decides to shelter for a moment and stands under the canopy of a hotel entrance. She continues to watch the street for taxis. Suddenly a young black man comes out of the lobby. She’s not sure what it is about him, but somehow he looks like a taxi driver. In fact it is Zak, Fat Les’s unsatisfied customer, and he works in the hotel as a bar steward. He needs to do all the work he can in order to pay off his car loan and he has just finished a double shift.

She says to him, “Excuse me, are you a black cab driver?” and he thinks to himself, “Well I’m black and I’m a driver. Two out of three can’t be bad.”

“Where do you want to go?” he asks.

She says Crockenfield, a good twenty miles away. The cab fare there would cost a fortune, and Zak is in need of a fortune.

“It’ll cost,” he says.

“Money’s no object,” she replies.

He tells her to follow him, his car’s round the back of the hotel. She walks beside him, takes his arm. She notices his biceps are hard and thick. She thinks this is going to be fun.

They come to a row of parked cars and she can see there isn’t a black cab amongst them. She realises she must have made a mistake, though she suspects it isn’t such a terrible one. Oh well, she thinks, even if he doesn’t have a black cab she’ll go along with it, just so long as it’s a reasonably smart new mini cab in good condition. If it’s some scruffy, tatty old thing she’ll turn on her heel and depart. Then she sees that her driver is heading straight for a Volkswagen Beetle. Her immediate reaction is to be offended. Who does he think she is? Does she really look like the sort of woman who accepts rides in strange Volkswagens? But then she looks at the car more closely. Volkswagens have been much on her mind of late, one way or another, and now that she sees it more clearly, it isn’t quite as objectionable as she first imagined. It is a pretty spiffy looking Beetle. It has been lowered and painted in metallic turquoise and peppermint green. Oh well, she thinks, this might be a night to remember after all.

She gets into the car. The interior is roomier than she would have imagined and it smells rather sweetly of incense and musk. They have only gone a mile or so when she begins to unbutton her cerise silk blouse and says, “It’s not such a bad body, is it?”

Zak is enough of a gentleman to say, when he’s recovered from the shock, “No, it’s very nice.”

“Why don’t you take a better look,” she says, and she lifts one of her breasts out of her bra for him to see.

“It’s a bit tricky while I’m driving.”

“I understand that you have to keep your eyes on the road,” she says, “but you could always use your sense of touch.”

She takes his left hand and places it on her left breast. They both become aware of her nipple getting hard and pointed.

“What exactly have you got in mind?” Zak asks, and then he takes his hand away because he has to change gear. He does not put it back immediately.

“Well,” she replies, “I was thinking we could find some dark alley and you could park the car and fuck me like a beast.”

“You want me to do that?”

“Now that you mention it, I think I do.”

“Why?”

It seems an absurd question but she doesn’t object to a little shyness in a lover.

“You’re a very sexy man,” she says.

“How can you say that when you don’t even know me?”

“I don’t want to know you. I just want to fuck you.”

“Why?” he asks again.

“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t know; because you’ve got a nice face.”

She sort of means it. He does have a nice face, although that wouldn’t be strictly necessary for the kind of transaction she has in mind.

“I know why it is,” he says. “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”

She is wise enough not to answer. She would have been happy enough to have sex with a white cab driver if one had presented himself, but there’s no denying that this young man’s black skin would add a certain frisson. However, she can tell this is not what he wants to hear.

“I get pretty sick of it actually,” he says. “I get pretty sick of that whole racial, sexual thing, you know, that black men are supposed to be studs with big cocks and that white middle class women go to bed with them as a way of debauching and degrading themselves. I find that all pretty sick and objectionable, as a matter of fact.”

She is surprised by the vehemence of his response, but she has no objection to vehemence.

“It wasn’t your blackness that made me decide to have sex with you,” she says.

“No?” he sneers. “What was it then?”

“If you must know, it was your car.”

“Really?” he asks.

“Yes really.”

“You’re not winding me up?”

“No.”

“Well in that case…”

A few minutes later Zak’s Volkswagen Beetle is parked in an alleyway behind a freezer centre in Streatham, and Marilyn’s mother is being quite extraordinarily friendly to him. Zak is a big man and the car is too cramped to allow the full repertoire of sexual movements, and he has to be content with fellatio. He is soon very content indeed.

♦

Debby has always had the good sense not to try introducing Barry to her friends at the building society. They’re a good and lively bunch and she likes them very much, but she wouldn’t want to inflict Barry on them. She often goes out with them after work on the evenings when she isn’t seeing Barry. In the early days they used to encourage her to bring him along but now they know better. There are occasional campaigns to fix her up with a new, more socialised man, but Debby says, with absolute accuracy, that after Barry most men in the world seem a little ordinary.

She has been thinking about what Barry said to her about their possible futures. He had it quite wrong when he thought she might be looking for a settled, materialistic future. She isn’t looking for a nice house and a nice car, and she certainly isn’t looking for a man to provide them for her, and children do not figure at all in her scheme of things. However, since Barry pressed her into thinking about her hopes and needs, it has been brought home to her that she wouldn’t at all mind widening her horizons a little, the building society and the caravan site making for a rather limiting ambit. However, she would be delighted to share that wider horizon with Barry. She doesn’t want to become Marco Polo but she would quite like to get out and about a bit more. A foreign holiday would do nicely for starters, and she’d even be prepared to pay for him.

When Barry took the cover off his Volkswagen she felt quite optimistic. She felt that perhaps they were changing and growing as a couple, that Barry too was feeling a renewed need to be footloose and fancy free, but it hasn’t turned out that way. All he ever does is sit there at the wheel of the damned car, going nowhere. It isn’t enough for her.

Since he brought it up, she realises she’s been more than fair to Barry. There are, she knows, many girlfriends who’d be egging him on to get a job. They’d be asking him to take them out wining, dining and dancing. They’d be criticising him for having no interests, no ambitions, no prospects. But she isn’t like that. She stands by her man. She’s there for him. She takes care of his sexual needs which, while not particularly outrageous, are certainly specific and demanding. Not every girl in the world would do that for him. She still wants him to be happy, she would just like to be a bit happier herself.

She begins in what she thinks is quite a subtle way. She buys a new road atlas and waves it around conspicuously when she’s with Barry. She leaves it lying around open to reveal route planners, mileage charts, maps of town centres. She traces journeys. She makes little pointed comments such as, “Anglesey, now there’s a place I’ve never been to.” She’s trying to fire Barry’s imagination. When all this fails she is reduced to saying, “Why don’t you just have a look at these bloody maps, Barry? We could go somewhere. It wouldn’t kill you. I’d even be prepared to do the driving.”

Barry takes the atlas, holds it, weighs it in his hands, looks at it as though it is an artefact from another time and culture, possibly even from another planet. Then he says, “Wasn’t it E.F. Schumacher who wrote that a man who uses an imaginary map thinking it a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all?”

“But this is a real map,” Debby insists.

“Ah, but what do we mean by real?”

At this point, despite all her considerable love and respect for Barry, she asserts the reality of the atlas by pulling it away from him and beating him over the head with it for a while.

Barry is rather taken aback by this. He says, “Later I’ll forgive you for that, but right now I’m very hurt.”

“Good,” she says, “I’m glad.”

“You’re glad that you hurt me?”

“Yes,” she says, “it’s called being cruel to be kind.”

He looks at her sadly, pathetically, like a lost puppy. So she hits him again, this time to be cruel. It turns out not to be one of their happiest nights together and Barry ends up having to sleep in the back seat of Enlightenment. In some peculiar way he realises that is perhaps what he wanted all along.

♦

Davey has developed a rather ambivalent attitude towards hitchhikers. He has picked up several of them on this trip, and while he doesn’t exactly resent having given them lifts, they have all proved to be very disappointing company. He thought they might be good company and good, chatty conversationalists. In his supremely optimistic moments he has even fantasised about picking up some amazing, young, bony New Age type female who would initiate him into the mysteries of her world. She would surely be prepared to tell him how to go about taking Ecstasy and dancing in a field. It looks like it is not to be.

The incident with the neo-Nazi skinheads remains painfully with him. It appears he was on the edge of something utterly foul. No doubt skinheads would enjoy beating up New Agers in any circumstances but it seems now that the man at the pub, he of the dark suit, silver hair and scar, somehow motivated and organised the lot in the car park. Davey knows he isn’t in any way culpable, and he knows he couldn’t have intervened, but it still disturbs and occasionally depresses him.

What’s more, he hasn’t come across any other New Age travellers. It is beginning to dawn on him that he could spend this whole summer just missing them, driving around the campsites of England like any other boring holidaymaker. Before he set off he liked to think he would have an instinct for finding them, but that has proved to be far from the case. And all this rain hasn’t been helping. No doubt travellers stay put when it rains, and these recent downpours have been so bad that the elevating roof of his camper has sprung a leak in a couple of places.

He is driving along the coast road between Great Yarmouth and Cromer. It isn’t raining at the moment but that looks like a very temporary state of affairs. The road is empty and the sky sags down, and he pulls into a lay-by to stare out at the slate coloured sea. He sits there for some time before he becomes aware of a figure standing at the other end of the lay-by. It is an old man, his face streaked with dirt, his clothes covered in mud. He has no luggage and he is standing bolt upright, but his eyes are closed and Davey realises that the man is asleep on his feet.

It is, of course, Charles Lederer, though Davey doesn’t recognise him. He has no reason to. They only encountered each other briefly and it was a long time ago.

Davey looks at him with a certain distaste. At heart he would prefer not to have such a filthy, disgusting character in his nice clean Volkswagen van, but his failure to play the good Samaritan to the New Age travellers after they’d been beaten up by the skinheads makes him a lot more sympathetic. He sounds his horn. Lederer’s eyes pop open and he is abruptly awake. He looks around him lost and frightened. Slowly he settles and sees that Davey is beckoning him, inviting him to come over to the van. Charles Lederer has even less reason to recognise Davey than Davey has to recognise him, so he ambles slowly over towards the van.

Davey winds down his window and says, “You need a lift?”

“Well, I’m not absolutely certain,” says Lederer, “but I think so, yes.” His voice is exhausted and comes from very far away.

“Where are you going?” Davey asks.

“Where are you going?”

This isn’t the easiest question to answer so Davey says, “Just along the coast a little ways.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be going too.”

It seems to Davey that this is a little presumptuous of the old man, but even as Lederer speaks, he looks in danger of falling asleep again. He looks ill and paper thin and Davey’s heart goes out to him.

“When did you last sleep in a bed?” Davey asks.

After a long pause, “I can’t remember.”

“And when did you last eat?”

“Oh, comparatively recently, certainly in the last few days.”

Davey sees his duty. He opens up the big, sliding side door of the van and tells Charles Lederer to get in and take a seat. Clambering in is a difficult job for his stiff, tired limbs but he makes it. Davey opens a tin of oxtail soup and heats it on the van’s Calor gas stove. He gets bread rolls from the storage compartment under one of the seats and gives them and the soup to Charles Lederer. For a man who has been so long without food he seems peculiarly uneager. Perhaps he is suspicious, or perhaps he just has impeccable table manners.

“This is terribly kind of you,” says Lederer. “Very Christian.”

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

“You’re not a Christian?” Lederer asks.

“I don’t know what I am. I think I may be part of a brand new breed, sort of pagan, pantheist, humanist, hedonist.”

“Hedonist?” Lederer repeats.

“Yes, but that’s the hardest part.”

The moment Charles Lederer finishes his soup he slumps in the seat, his head cocks onto his shoulder and he falls asleep again. Davey watches and is moved. He’s glad to be there when he’s needed. He looks closely at his guest and sees that the slippers he’s wearing are split right open. His blazer has lost its buttons and his trousers are held up by safety pins and some rope. Gradually however, Davey also becomes aware that a malevolent odour is seeping out of Lederer’s unwashed body and clothes. He doesn’t want the smell in his van but neither does he want to wake the old man from what is obviously much-needed sleep. It is not a peaceful or untroubled sleep, however. From time to time Charles Lederer twitches, jerks his legs, moans something indistinct but urgent-sounding.

Davey doesn’t move from the lay-by, lets Lederer sleep for several hours, into the late afternoon, but then he decides it’s time he was moving on and finding a caravan site for the night. His guidebook says there’s a well-equipped place about fifteen miles along the coast. He gently shakes the old man awake. Again he sees that lost, startled expression.

“Look,” says Davey, “I’m going to make a suggestion.”

Lederer looks extremely apprehensive.

Davey continues, “Why don’t you come along to the campsite with me. They’ve got showers and sinks. You could get cleaned up, have a shave, and you could get rid of those stinking old clothes and I’ll give you some of my old jeans and shirts and trainers. And I’ll give you a proper hot meal, and after that, well, after that you can go on your way.”

Lederer looks distrustful. He says, “And what do I give you?”

“Nothing. You don’t have anything, do you?”

“So why are you offering to do this? What will you be getting out of it?”

“A good feeling,” says Davey.

Charles Lederer weighs that up for a long time before he says, “Well, thank you very much. That would be most acceptable.”

At first they don’t talk much as they drive. Davey has thrown the windows wide open to disperse his passenger’s smell. Now that he’s awake, Lederer is vibrantly restless. He refuses to wear a seatbelt and bounces up and down erratically in his seat like an eager child.

“I used to tell them,” he says at last, “in the House, I used to tell them that public transport wasn’t the answer.”

“Yes?” says Davey, not listening.

“I used to say that public transport would be all very well if it wasn’t full of the public.” He laughs rather uncontrollably at his own joke. “People want to shut themselves up in little tin boxes, and I say good for them. Best place for them. This is a very pleasant vehicle.”

“Yes, I like it,” says Davey.

Suddenly Charles Lederer throws himself back in his seat. Davey fears he might have been stung by a wasp, or even had a heart attack.

“Stop this vehicle at once!” Lederer shouts.

Instinctively Davey slams on the brakes and the van slews to a halt.

“I’ve just seen. I’ve just realised,” says Lederer. “You’ve been very kind, very generous, but now I realise this vehicle, it’s a Volkswagen isn’t it!!”

“Well yes,” says Davey.

With that Charles Lederer lets out a scream, flings open the passenger door and sprints away from the van, over a barbed wire fence and into a field of cows. He moves at top speed, his limbs flapping as he goes. Davey is surprised he can move so fast and watches as he recedes without ever looking back.

Davey waits for a long time and at last realises there’s nothing to be done. The old man has gone for good. He closes the passenger door and drives on to his intended campsite. That evening he falls into conversation with a group of German tourists who assure him that Germany is one of the world’s great liberal democracies. That night it pours with rain again.

Barry Osgathorpe is sitting at the wheel of Enlightenment when a voice outside the car shouts, “What a wicked-looking Beetle!” Barry thinks, ‘Not again’ but turns his head to find that the person offering the opinion on his car is not the usual sort who offers such opinions. This is a middle-aged man in an immaculate black suit, with silver hair and a scar at the corner of his mouth. The man is somehow so impressive, so authoritative-looking and sounding that Barry can only say, “Well, thanks very much.”

“Do you mind if I pop in beside you?”

And before Barry can say yes or no the man is sitting next to him in the car, and making himself very comfortable.

“I think it’s the blackness of this vehicle that’s so impressive,” the man says. “It’s the smoothness, the sense of a whole. It has a power, an elemental, archetypal quality, a sense of sculptural integrity.”

Barry stares at the man, checks his facial expression for irony or mockery, but he can find no trace of either.

“Well, yes,” says Barry, “that’s pretty much the way I see it too.”

“Of course you do,” the man says, then adds, “God, I really love Volkswagen Beetles.”

He says it not as though he is expressing some happy enthusiasm, but rather as though he is confessing to a deep, dark obsession.

“The name’s Phelan,” he says, and he extends a hand to be shaken. Barry takes it and says, “Call me Barry.”

“I’m just like you, Barry,” he says. “I love my own Beetle so much that I could just sit in it all day long, experiencing that sense of pleasure, that feeling of strength through joy, Kraft durch Freude.”

Barry nods. He is almost tempted to ask the man what kind of Beetle he owns, but he resists.

“Only a genius could have created a machine like the Beetle,” the man continues. “But of course you know all this.”

“Yes,” says Barry.

“Good. Since you know the history I won’t be doomed to repeat it.”

The man laughs lifelessly and Barry says, “I’m not intending to repeat anybody’s history, least of all my own.”

“Very good,” says the stranger. “You want new experiences. You’re ready for the next step. You’re ready to move on. Maybe I can be of service.”

Barry fears he may be about to try selling him his services as a removal expert, or as an insurance broker, or possibly as some kind of pimp. None of these will be at all welcome so he says, “I don’t think that seems very likely.”

“Of course it doesn’t seem likely. Nor did it ever seem likely that a car conceived in pre-war Nazi Germany would go on to conquer the world. But it did, didn’t it?”

Barry is not sure that the Beetle actually conquered the world, and even if it did, he’s not sure that world conquest is per se such a very good thing. He prefers to believe that the Beetle was a well-made, slightly unusual, not too expensive, reasonably soulful car that gave pleasure and service to a very great number of people, even if it also caused pollution, congestion and death to a certain number of others. Nevertheless, he doesn’t argue with the man, not that the stranger is really waiting for any response from Barry.

“I’m a pretty good judge of character,” the man says. “I can see you’re not some boring, run of the mill Beetle enthusiast. I can see that you have some spirit, some unconventional attitudes.”

Not even Barry can deny that.

“You’re one of us,” the stranger says.

“I don’t know who you are,” Barry says.

“Don’t you? I think perhaps you do.”

Barry insists that his ignorance is authentic, and the stranger takes this as another cue to hold forth.

“Look Barry,” he says, “you and I know it’s hell out there. There are too many people competing for too few resources.”

Barry has to agree.

“But it’s more complicated than that. It isn’t just a question of reducing numbers, or of slicing the pie more evenly as some fools might suggest. The problem is that the wrong people are in control.”

“You can say that again,” Barry agrees.

“You’re like me Barry. You look at all these people and what do you see? Do you see your equals? Do you see creatures made in God’s image? I don’t think so Barry. I think you see a lot of useless clutter. Don’t you think a lot of that clutter could be tidied away?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Barry says.

“Oh, I think you have,” Phelan says insinuatingly. “Haven’t you ever thought to yourself that the world would be a much better place if only there were more people like you in it?”

“I suppose so.”

“I’m here to tell you Barry, that there are more people like you in the world than you might think. Take a drive round the M25 Barry. What traits are displayed by your fellow man? Aggression, selfishness, bad temper, competitiveness, madness brought on by stress. That’s not what the world ought be like, is it?”

“No,” Barry admits.

“When Adolf Hitler conceived the idea of the autobahn that’s not what he had in mind at all. He saw long straight fast motorways uncluttered by riff raff and deviants.”

“What?” says Barry.

“You’re a good citizen, aren’t you Barry? You’re law abiding, moral, politically middle of the road, not sexually or socially deviant. You’re male and you’re white.”

“Well, to an extent,” Barry stutters.

“Why deny it Barry? Why be ashamed? You don’t want the world left in the hands of extremists and perverts, do you? Of course you don’t. In your heart of hearts you’re just like me, just like us. You know that Adolf Hitler was right.”

“About motorways?”

“About everything. He designed the Beetle didn’t he?”

“Well, he had a certain amount of help from Ferdinand Porsche, not to say the British Army.”

“Of course he did. We all need a little help, Barry. I need yours. You need mine.”

Barry is about to deny this vehemently, but there’s no stopping the stranger now. He continues, “I have a dream Barry, a vision if you like, and you could be part of it.”

“What sort of vision?” Barry asks, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

“Well,” says the stranger, “I see us as a band of supermen, roaming this great country of ours in chariots of fire, by which of course I mean Volkswagen Beetles. We would be dominant. We would be loved, feared, worshipped. We would be as Gods, Barry. Or should I call you Ishmael?”

“No, don’t call me Ishmael!” Barry insists. “How do you even know about Ishmael?”

“I know all about you Barry. What do you say? Do you want to be a superman?”

Barry prides himself on being slow to anger, but a strange milkshake of emotions is frothing inside him. Its ingredients include pain, annoyance, anger, disgust. He looks the stranger right between the eyes and says, “You’re one of those bloody neo-Nazis, aren’t you?”

Phelan smiles condescendingly as if to indicate that Barry’s response is pathetic and childish. There’s nothing neo about me,” he says.

“Get out of my Beetle,” Barry says, white and trembling with anger.

The man shrugs and gets out immediately and quite willingly. He closes the door gently behind him. He moves round to the driver’s side of the car. He starts to walk away, but when he’s twenty yards away from Barry he turns and says, “You can take the Nazi out of the Volkswagen, but can you take the Volkswagen out of the Nazi?”

After he’s gone, it takes Barry quite a while to come to the conclusion that this is an almost entirely meaningless remark.

♦

He kneels in the dark beside the big iron bed. His ankles, wrists and throat are ringed with studded leather. A latticework of steel chains connects these points of restraint. Their metallic rattle stirs with his every movement. The links touch his body as coldly as a mistress.

His body is tied in a sheath of black and red leather, a construction of straps and buckles, thongs and studs that encloses and holds him, yet leaves him more vulnerable, more truly naked, than ever. Genitals and buttocks are left bare. Access is guaranteed. There will be no resistance. His body, where it shows, is marked with small cuts, bruises, ‘love bites’. Around his biceps are swastika armbands.

The room is stiflingly hot and smells of rubber, metal, hot oil, sweat. It is swathed in patchy candlelight. The candles flicker in twisted, wrought iron holders, and wax decays and carves itself into white, brittle stalagmites. All the walls are draped thick with flags. Some bear German eagles, some death’s heads, some crisscrossed with swastikas. The flags creep over the ceiling and hang over the bed like a red and black canopy. The rest of the room is decorated with swords, guns, axes, chalices, examples of Nazi uniform. There is an oak table into which SS flashes have been carved, then a series of exhibits have been laid out on its surface; rubber truncheons, riding crops, canes, cords, gas masks, dildos made of wood and metal and ivory.

Suddenly he knows she has entered the room. He knows even before he hears her footsteps, loud and precise, militaristic and decadent. He doesn’t turn round, he doesn’t need to. He knows the games, the rules, the costume. He knows she will be dressed immaculately in Hitlerian kitsch, fancy dress that is sexier and more exotic than any real uniform; some baroque combination of knee boots and breeches, bare breasts, braiding, a service dagger.

She is approaching. When she is near enough she prods his buttocks with the shiny tip of her right boot. She moves it into more intimate space, pushes in between his thighs, forcing his legs open.

“Well, Phelan,” she says, “what shall we do with you today?”

It is a rhetorical question. She pulls a knotted silk cord that dangles at the side of the bed, and one of the ‘walls’ of flags draws back to reveal a small anteroom. It is the size of, say, a domestic garage, and it contains, spotlit and on a raised dais, a silkily black Volkswagen cabriolet. More properly it should be called a Kraft durch Freudewagen, a Strength Through Joy car, since this car dates from the model’s very earliest days. In fact, this is a vehicle once owned and driven by a Gestapo officer called Hans Krauss, a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, who received the car in exchange for certain special services rendered to the Führer.

Phelan is pulled to his feet and led across the room by the chain at his neck. He stands briefly beside the car, like a driver about to plunge into a dark, bottomless ocean. She pushes him down onto the front passenger seat, onto the very spot where he knows a murderous Gestapo officer once planted his taut, black-uniformed buttocks. The thought brings him an orgasm rather sooner than he would have liked.

Nevertheless, he has to say, “Thank you Miss Renata. Thank you so much.”

♦

A yellow Volkswagen with a demolished front end is delivered by tow truck to Fat Volkz Inc. The driver of the truck manoeuvres and unhitches the Volkswagen so that it stands forlorn and skewed on a patch of gravel adjacent to the workshops. The owner of the car has been sitting in the cab of the truck, but now she descends. She is no longer dressed in Nazi gear, although her black leather jacket, her leggings and her black high heels still look mean and sexy enough for most people.

Les surveys the damage to the Volkswagen. It is a terrible, squashed, tangled mess. He feels quite proud of himself for having caused it. On the other hand, he knows it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work to get it back into shape.

“Hello Les,” says the woman.

Les is quite used to having strangers address him by his first name. He says hello in return.

“Why did you do it, Les?” she asks.

“Do what?”

“Reverse into me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh. Come on Les.”

The way she talks suggests a friendliness, a familiarity that he doesn’t understand. He’s pretty sure he’s never met her before. He’d certainly have remembered her if she’d been one of his previous customers.

“Do I know you?” he asks.

“I’m Renata Caswell,” she says.

He considers the name for a moment, and it does sound ever so vaguely familiar, but he can’t place it and he remains none the wiser.

“You seen anything of your friend Ishmael?” she asks.

Ishmael. The very name hurts him. He remembers a time when his life was entangled with that of Ishmael. They drove too fast. They drank lager. They fire-bombed stuck up twats in Range Rovers. It all seems a long time ago, but not quite long enough.

“I was the journalist who finally exposed Ishmael,” she tells Les. “I’m the one who stopped him turning into a complete little Hitler.”

It all comes flooding back like a bad Indian meal. There was a time when Ishmael looked like becoming some sort of cult leader. It was Renata who found out that he’d once appeared in a coprophiliac porn movie and that, mercifully, ended his ambitions. Fat Les hadn’t absolutely seen why you couldn’t be both a cult leader and a bit part player in a coprophiliac porn movie. After all, to the true believer all things are holy, even coprophiliac porn movies. But he still knows that he was a damned fool ever to have got involved with the little jerk Ishmael, and it still makes him both angry and embarrassed.

“No, I haven’t seen him,” says Les.

“Pity,” says Renata.

“I don’t think so.”

Les walks round to the other side of the Volkswagen and pretends to be examining the chassis for twisting or hidden damage.

“This is a real mess,” he says. “Look, why don’t I give you a good price for it and take it in part exchange on a restored one?”

“That’s not the deal,” says Renata. “That’s not what he wants.”

“Who’s he? Your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“But you’re his sex slave, right?” says Les with a snigger.

“Did he say that?”

“Yeah he did.”

“He’s full of little ironies, isn’t he?”

Les has no idea what she means.

“Have the police been bothering you?” she asks abruptly.

“The police don’t bother me,” says Les.

“But they’ve been around, haven’t they? Asking you about Volkswagens that go bang in the night.”

“Yeah,” he says a little angrily. He really doesn’t want another conversation about exploding Volkswagens, nor about kidnapped Volkswagen collectors.

“Are you still a journalist?” he asks.

“I’m just a lady of leisure,” she replies.

“Must be nice to have a rich boyfriend.”

“It’s okay, but he’s not my boyfriend.”

Les leans against the busted Beetle. This is a job he doesn’t want at all. It feels as though he’s paying a very high price for a simple, if illegal and destructive, bit of reversing.

“It’s a pity he can’t afford to buy you a decent car,” says Les.

“He can,” she says dismissively. “But he chooses not to. He loves Volkswagen Beetles. I think he’s crazy. I think they’re crummy, overrated, overpriced.” She watched Les’s face closely to see if he reacts. He doesn’t.

She continues, “If the police happen to think you’ve been blowing up Volkswagens, well so what, I wouldn’t worry too much. But if Phelan thinks you’ve been blowing them up, then you’re in serious shit, Les.”

“And what about this Carlton Bax geezer?” says Les. “Am I supposed to have kidnapped him too? Am I supposed to shit myself if Phelan thinks I kidnapped him?”

“Oh, that’s okay, Les. He knows you didn’t kidnap him.”

♦

Another day. Barry is still sitting at the wheel of Enlightenment. He is in a meditative state, focussed but alert. He is gradually aware of another approaching presence, a woman in a long raincoat worn over a charcoal grey suit. He has no idea that she’s a policewoman, but he can tell that she thinks rather highly of herself. Putting in appearances at a caravan site is clearly some way beneath her dignity. She tries to sweep effortlessly towards Barry and his car, but the local topography of paths and lawns, picnic tables, barbecues and children’s paddling pools works against her.

When she gets to the car, she tilts her head down at Barry and says, “Good morning. I’m Detective Inspector Cheryl Bronte. Is this your car?”

“No, I’m just keeping it warm for a friend,” he says with uncharacteristic sarcasm.

She ignores this insolence.

“You wouldn’t want to lose it would you? You wouldn’t want it to explode, for instance, would you?”

“Well of course not. Although, of course, if it did, well, you know, it’s only a material object isn’t it? It wouldn’t be the end of the world, unless, of course, I happened to be inside it at the time, but you know, how likely is it to explode?”

His reply doesn’t seem to make her happy at all. “I see the tax has expired,” she says casually.

“Oh yes, years ago.”

“I suppose you do have insurance and a current MOT.”

Barry laughs. “Of course not.”

“But you do have a licence.”

“Somewhere, I’m sure.”

“I have every right to get very nasty about this,” says Detective Inspector Cheryl Bronte. “Driving a car without insurance or an MOT is a serious business.”

“I know,” he says. “But I’m not driving a car. Surely you must have noticed. I’m not driving at all.”

“So what the bloody hell are you doing?”

“Saving the world in my own small way.”

Cheryl Bronte walks round the car. There is no doubt that the tyres, exhaust and lights are in various states of illegality. What really catches and holds her attention, however, is the Green Beetle logo. She looks at it closely, as though its messily executed design might offer up some latent, secret meanings.

“Are you a neo-Nazi?” she asks Barry.

“No,” says Barry, offended.

“Are you into uniforms, jackboots, shaven heads, that sort of thing?”

“Well of course not.”

“Or maybe Nazi regalia, flags, whips, death’s heads, swastikas, the ark of the covenant.”

“Not me,” says Barry.

“Then good for you, Barry. If there’s one thing worse than a Nazi in my book, it’s a neo-Nazi. So what does this insignia of yours mean? What does GB stand for? Are you trying to invoke the greatness of Great Britain to come to the aid of some threadbare, sicko Nationalism of yours?”

Barry tries, and he’s aware that he’s not making a great fist of it, to explain the Green Beetles and their logo, and about using inactivity in the service of a better world. Cheryl Bronte listens very carefully, but Barry isn’t sure she understands a word of it.

“That’s the problem with symbols isn’t it?” she says when he’s barely halfway through his intended explanation. “They can mean just about anything you want them to mean. A union jack flying above Buckingham Palace has a rather different resonance from a union jack tattooed on some yobbo’s forehead. When Kipling uses the swastika it is a holy symbol. When it appears on the side of a Volkswagen it means something rather different, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose so,” says Barry.

“But you say your symbol is just another bit of half-brained conservationism.”

“Well…”

“A man sitting alone in a Volkswagen that’s going nowhere. What do you think that might symbolise?”

“I don’t know. Not everything has to be symbolic, does it?”

“Or how about an exploding Volkswagen,” Cheryl Bronte enquires. “Is that a symbol?”

“What is all this about exploding Volkswagens?” says Barry.

Cheryl Bronte suddenly looks mighty serious. She says, “Every night we lose a few more: a couple in Coventry, a handful in Middlesex, one or two in Whitley Bay. It’s making the police look very stupid.”

Barry is finding all this very confusing and he can’t see why any of it is at all relevant to him.

“There could be some bunch of neo-Nazis behind it, couldn’t there?” she continues. “Or it could be some con-servationists, couldn’t it? If cars are evil why not blow them up? Neo-Nazis, eco-freaks, they’re all much the same to me.”

Barry is about to protest bitterly about this slur on the Green lobby, but decides against it.

“But, of course,” says Cheryl Bronte, “you don’t know anything about exploding Volkswagens, do you?”

“No.”

“And you don’t know anything about the kidnapping of Carlton Bax, do you Barry?”

“No, I don’t. I’ve never heard of Carlton Bax.” Then suddenly something dawns on him. “How do you know my name?”

“From the files,” she says irritatedly.

“What files?”

“Come on Barry, Ishmael, whatever you call yourself these days, you kidnapped the daughter of an English MP, you barricaded yourself in his house, you called a news conference. Okay, so you got away with it, but you have to expect there’ll be a file.”

There it comes again, that old blast of stale air and shameful memories. The alter ego who was Ishmael stalks the stage again. Barry feels dreadful.

“I suppose so,” he admits. “Does that mean you think I’m going around blowing up cars and kidnapping people?”

She looks at him briskly and thoroughly, as if one good look is all it takes to see right into his centre, right through him.

“Actually no,” says Cheryl Bronte. “But we do know from the files that you have an intuitive, maybe even mystical, connection with the Volkswagen Beetle. There aren’t many people like you about. What we want to do is get you back on the road, fuel you up and let you go. Something tells me that you’re going to lead me right where I want to go.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Where I can get my hands on the villains who are causing these explosions and holding Carlton Bax hostage.”

“Are you sure they’re the same people?”

“Not absolutely, but I’m making an intuitive connection of my own there.”

Barry ponders for a while. Cheryl Bronte thinks he’s considering her offer but actually he’s wondering whether he has any chance of making her understand where he’s at these days. He tries. He says, “The only journey worth making is an inward one. The way ahead will only bring you back to the point from which you started. All routes lead to the same destination, to a place you have never left.”

Cheryl Bronte thinks of threatening to book him for wasting police time but contents herself with saying that she’ll see him again. Barry says that will be nice. She walks away with as much dignity and elegance as she can manage and Barry remains at the wheel of Enlightenment and tries to get some sleep.

♦

Street Sleeper was also dedicated to my then wife, my now ex-wife. When we got divorced I felt no need to remove the dedication. We had more going for us than a shared enthusiasm for Volkswagens, but that was not the least of what we had in common.

We had no car when we were first married, and I couldn’t even drive, but we bought a Volkswagen and I learned. In retrospect I don’t really know why we bought a Beetle. We needed a cheap car but we decided we wanted something soulful, and we thought about buying a Mini or even a Morris Minor, but the Beetle got the vote. I wouldn’t do it now. These days I’d buy something cheap and soulless, an old but reliable Volvo or a newish and very cheap Lada or Skoda. But I was young, naive and newly married.

The car we bought, from a slightly too distant acquaintance of my father, turned out to be a lemon. The starter motor only worked intermittently, we once broke a clutch cable in the middle lane of a crawling traffic jam on the Ml, and the engine eventually blew up. We seemed to spend a lot of time parked on the hard shoulders of motorways waiting in the rain for the AA van to arrive; but even that failed to turn me against Volkswagens.

We eventually got rid of the car but by then I was ‘into’ Beetles, indeed I had started writing Street Sleeper. We went to a number of Volkswagen meetings and events and we had a very good time, and by then we were a little more affluent and we decided to buy a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. This is basically a Beetle in a fancy Italian suit. It consists of a more or less standard Beetle chassis, but wrapped around it is a superb, elegant, streamlined body. It looks like a real sportscar, but the Beetle engine ensures it is not. It was a car that I’d admired and idly lusted after since I was a boy, and I still tend to think it’s one of the best-looking cars ever made. My wife loved them too. We searched long and hard for a good secondhand Karmann Ghia, and eventually we picked a good one. And that’s how things were when Street Sleeper was published.

The author biography on the first edition says, “Geoff Nicholson is married, lives in Kent and drives a Type 1 Karmann Ghia.” All this has now changed.

In working out the divorce ‘settlement’ my wife got custody of the Karmann Ghia. I was sorry to say goodbye to it, but it seemed fair enough, and one or two people had always offered the opinion that a Karmann Ghia was something of a lady’s car.

Getting divorced was a surprisingly quick and unbureau-cratic process. My wife and I were hardly the best of friends during this process but we were civil, and we met once in a while for a drink. It even occurred to me that we might have dinner together on the day our decree became absolute, as a sign of our maturity or urbanity or some such nonsense.

However, on that day my wife, to be precise my ex-wife by a matter of some hours, went to visit her grandmother who was in an old people’s home in Kent. The grandmother, for whom I had a lot of affection, suffered from a whole collection of illnesses, the most visible of which was Parkinson’s disease. She was unable to fend for herself physically, but when she first went into the home she was perfectly compos mentis. On that day when my wife went to see her, the old lady was confused and distressed beyond recognition. She looked drugged, miserable and helpless. My wife had a fierce and frustrating argument with members of staff about the fact that this home of theirs was responsible for her grandmother’s rapid and pathetic decline. It was not an argument she could possibly win. She stormed out in tears, got into her Karmann Ghia and drove away. At the first set of traffic lights she had to make a right turn across a dual carriageway of fast-moving vehicles. She was upset, her mind was elsewhere, her timing was bad, and she misjudged the speed of the oncoming traffic. As she made the turn across the carriageway a car ploughed into the front and side of the Karmann Ghia, demolishing it and making it an insurance write-off. The car was woefully under-insured.

That this should happen on the day our divorce was finalised is, I suppose, a surprising though hardly devastating coincidence. Certainly it might be thought appropriate that my wife rid herself of the car and of me on the same day, although if you presented that as fiction I think it might seem a little too glib and facile. Besides, given the state of our marriage, she was by then far fonder of the Karmann Ghia than she was of me.

The next weekend she went out and bought a perfect, immaculately restored Volkswagen Karmann Ghia from a specialist dealer a little way out of Southend.