Still life with Volkswagens

Five. Gravity’s Volkswagen

On the shores of Loch Ness a junior road safety officer parks his maroon, 1971, Beetle, gets out, locks up and ambles down to the water’s edge. For a long time he scrutinises the ripples puckering the loch’s surface and concludes that he does not believe in monsters. He decides to return to his Volkswagen and feels in his trouser pocket for the keys. They are not to be found. Maybe he’s dropped them, or maybe he’s left them in the ignition and locked himself out of the car. He doesn’t want to admit this second option so starts searching the ground at his feet, thereby missing the sight of his car exploding; although he certainly hears it, and a flying wing mirror narrowly misses his left ear.

At a DIY warehouse on the ring road outside Norwich, a fifty-five-year-old ex-merchant seaman, now an Inspector of Taxes, parks his gold and black Beetle and enters the store to buy tiles, grouting, a new set of screwdrivers, five litres of brilliant white vinyl emulsion and a pair of dimmer switches. He likes to browse, and also has a debate with himself about whether to have plain white dimmers or to go for the brass versions. Consequently he’s in the store a good forty minutes, and when he comes out there’s very little left to see of his exploded Beetle.

In Tideswell, in Derbyshire, a young couple — he’s a rep for a kitchen equipment company, she’s an aerobics instructor — are being shown round by the owner of a detached, three-bedroomed, stone-built property. He admires the original sash windows and the spacious breakfasting kitchen. She is less sure about the whisper-peach bathroom suite. He asks how big the garage is. The owner says it’s plenty big enough for his grey, 1976 Volkswagen Beetle. A moment later he has neither Beetle nor garage.

A traffic warden born in Bombay some forty-five years ago, who knows six languages including conversational Maltese, spots a rusty, cream-coloured Beetle parked on a double yellow line outside a chemist’s in St Albans. He assumes the owner, probably young, probably not well off, possibly collecting a prescription, won’t be parked for long, so he decides not to issue a parking ticket and he continues on his round. When he gets to the street corner he thinks again, wonders if the car’s still there, and decides that if it is he’ll go back and give it a ticket after all. When he turns to look, he sees the Beetle burning brightly as a bonfire.

In Central London, Mal and Becky have decided to take the plunge and go to a fetish party in a subterranean nightclub in a dark street not far from Tottenham Court Road. They’re lucky enough to find a spot nearby where they can park their white, 1970, Karmann-bodied Beetle convertible, and they enjoy an evening at the club which, although undeniably unique, is perhaps a little less wild than they were expecting. It’s two in the morning when they return to their car. It is, of course, a black, smouldering hulk. They wonder if any taxi drivers will stop at this time of night to pick up two people dressed head to foot in black rubber bondage gear.

♦

And so Barry Osgathorpe, now styling himself as Ishmael, begins a new journey into Vastness. The first few hundred miles are a peculiar blend of the nostalgic and the alien. There is something strange about the car and the roads, the feel of driving, the idea of movement, and yet there is something utterly familiar. The sensations are not brand new and yet it has been so long since he experienced them that they arrive fresh and revitalised.

But gradually he gets accustomed to the sensations and they become increasingly pleasurable. The adrenalin starts to flow and he feels the old excitement. He feels the G forces, the acceleration, the electrical impulses moving rapidly through the spinal cord, the increase in muscle tone. He feels alert and in control. Sometimes he even feels like his old self.

He tries to apply understanding and self-discipline as he drives, and on occasions this leads to a very welcome sense of ease and tranquillity. Sometimes the driving is like a form of meditation. There is Mindfulness and detachment, an absence of desire, an end to craving.

Some things have definitely changed in the years since Ishmael was last on the road. There seems to be more of everything: more vehicles, more roadworks, more service areas, more speed restrictions. The traffic patterns have changed. The cars all look so sporty, so futuristic, so Japanese; and they all run on unleaded petrol. (Barry can’t actually use unleaded fuel in Enlightenment since it would damage the valves of his old Volkswagen engine, but that’s not the point.)

In the lobbies of the motorway services where there used to be kids playing violent and destructive video games, there are now machines that will print business cards for you. Barry supposes this is progress of a sort, though he wonders what kind of businessman gets halfway down the motorway and suddenly decides he needs a new set of business cards.

On the motorways he doesn’t see too many Beetles. That’s understandable. They may have been designed for Hitler’s autobahns but they aren’t quite up to the cut and thrust, the sudden accelerations and brakings of modern English motorway driving. But off the motorways, in the heart of England, he’s pleased to see there are still plenty of them, more than ever it seems, in all their forms and in all conditions.

He looks hard at people as they drive their cars, and whereas, if he believed Phelan, he might expect to find faces taut with mania or tension or aggression, in fact he sees ordinary people going about their ordinary business. They are insulated from the outside world. They are perhaps a little inert, a little weary from the strain of concentration but in the main he sees — and this would once have been a most unwelcome surprise — people just like him. In fact there are times when he feels a powerful sense of unity with his fellow human beings. He likes that.

As he travels he sees a few acts of driving insanity, some dangerous breaking of the speed limits, some vicious cutting up, the occasional act of suicidal overtaking, but chiefly he is struck by the enormous good sense of it all. For all the dangers and risks, the frustrations and competing needs of driving, the cars continue to move, the traffic continues to flow. People do, sooner or later, get where they want to go. Sometimes Barry admires and envies other drivers since they have specific destinations and itineraries whereas he has very little idea at all where he’s going. Not that he minds. He’s on a quest, not a motoring holiday. He has a goal, of course, to find Charles Lederer; but that is something quite different from simply having a destination.

He scans the faces of the hitchhikers waiting on motorway sliproads. He surveys the customers eating in the cafes and fast food outlets and motorway cafeterias. He stands in car parks and shopping malls and city streets and he looks around him knowing that one day he will turn and face Charles Lederer. He knows it is a strange search, a strange process by which the two of them will be delivered to each other, two random particles whose paths must eventually cross, but somehow he knows it will happen.

He no longer expects life to be easy or logical, yet it is still odd to think that whereas he once travelled along these roads looking for eternal verities, he is now simply looking for a strange, disturbed old man who blows up Volkswagens. Well, why not? Times change. The world moves on. You have to go with the traffic flow.

At first he listens to a lot of radio, to the phone-ins and the traffic news and the shipping forecasts, the chart shows and the consumer advice programmes, but after a while he gets bored. It all starts to sound like static, like interference or white noise. He decides to keep the radio turned off and to listen to his own internal sound.

He sees the dead bugs on the windscreen and wonders how a true Zen follower could ever be a motorist. If you believe in reincarnation then every time you drive along the motorway you have no choice but to slaughter hundreds of your ancestors. He tries not to let this bother him. He drives on. He obeys the laws. He sees the signs. He negotiates accident black spots and bottle necks and blind corners. He deals with contraflow systems and sleeping policemen. He pays and displays, he waits here when red light shows, he gives way to oncoming traffic in the middle of the road.

Occasionally he talks to people; to waitresses in caffs, to cashiers in petrol stations, to fellow travellers, but he tries to keep these conversations brief and not to the point. He now knows the value of brevity and superficiality. Where once he might have talked about inner wisdom and the Way, he now prefers to talk about the weather or the price of petrol. This is not because he has abandoned his search for truth and wisdom, but rather because he now knows that these apparently banal conversations contain just as much wisdom as any discussion about God or the meaning of life. He knows that the world can be seen in a grain of sand, so why shouldn’t it also be found in a traffic cone or in a couple of litres of overpriced four star? He never asks people to share their personal philosophies with him. And neither does he ever ask anyone if they’ve seen Charles Lederer. He’s on a search but it’s not that kind of search.

He goes on, crossing and recrossing the country, driving on motorways and A roads and B roads, on urban clearways and country roads and single tracks with passing places, visiting cities and villages, passing through new towns and conurbations and seaside resorts. Sometimes at night he finds a quiet, lonely spot and sleeps in the back of Enlightenment, but Marilyn sent him on his way with a healthy chunk of money, and there are nights that he spends in a motorway Travel Lodge or hotel.

Sometimes he feels lonely. There are times when he wouldn’t mind having a little company: and given the choice, he would, of course, always choose Marilyn as his companion. Sometimes he sends her a postcard. She has given him her address and it sounds very fancy indeed. She says she’s staying at a friend’s place and he’s pleased that she has such generous friends. The simple act of writing to her helps stave off the loneliness.

There are also times when he feels a little guilty about using up fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere in his search, but somehow he can cope with the guilt. The quest is everything. He knows, with an unshakeable certainty, that he will find Marilyn’s father. And once he’s found him it will all happen. Marilyn will be happy, and then she will surely take him to her heart. She will be grateful and she will love him because of what he has done for her. They will then be happy together; perfected, elevated and enlightened. And if it requires a little bit of air pollution, a touch of global warming, to bring about that end, then so be it. Barry puts the pedal to the metal and motors on.

♦

Carlton Bax sits in darkness. He is being kept in the dark, in isolation, in captivity. He is blindfolded by bands of hot, thick, woollen cloth, and his hands are tied behind him. His legs are free so that he can stand and he can walk, but there is nowhere for him to go. He has paced the room, measured it out, and it is less than four paces in either direction. There is no chair, no bed. It is an airless place, a basement or cellar he thinks, a place without windows or fresh air, and increasingly it smells of himself, of his bodily waste. At first he thought he would never be able to sleep here because of the cold, the discomfort and his own anxiety, but it is amazing what changes exhaustion can bring.

He tries to listen for clues, something that will tell him where he is; voices perhaps or music or birds, but all he can hear is a distant and unidentifiable rumbling. Food arrives at irregular intervals and at that time someone unties his hands, though the blindfold always remains in place. He feeds himself and uses the slop bucket if necessary and then he’s retied and left alone again. The man who brings the food, who unties his hands, never says a word, and yet Carlton feels that he knows his jailer. It is always the same person, a man, someone young but heavy and slow-moving, someone whose breath sometimes smells of cigarettes and sometimes of onions. Occasionally Carlton will try to make conversation but there is never any reply. This is not the one who does the talking. The one who does speak, who asks the questions, is someone quite different, someone older, surer of himself, someone far more confident and frightening.

Carlton Bax hasn’t been beaten, not really. He certainly hasn’t been hurt. He was kicked and punched a little at the beginning, but it felt like a warning not a methodology. And then the interrogation began. A man’s voice — dry and strong and very patient — kept asking, still asks, the same things over and over again. And Carlton Bax makes the same replies over and over again.

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No I don’t.”

“The Volkswagen. Where’s the Volkswagen?”

“Which Volkswagen? I own dozens of Volkswagens.”

“You know which Volkswagen.”

“No I don’t.”

“I think you do.”

“No I don’t.”

“I think you’ll tell us sooner or later.”

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

And so it goes on, so it repeats itself. A series of meetings, of interviews, interrogations, always the same, the same steady voice with the same questions, Carlton Bax’s own voice becoming increasingly plaintive, saying nothing, admitting nothing. Carlton doesn’t see where this can go, nor where it will end.

Will they soon begin to beat him in earnest? Will there be torture with cigarettes and ice and electricity? Will they cut off a finger, or a testicle? Will they kill him when they finally decide he isn’t going to tell them what they think he knows? And who are ‘they’? Are they just criminals? Opportunist kidnappers? Or is there some wider brief, and is his kidnapping part of some greater, grander movement?

Surely, he thinks, there must be people out there looking for him by now; police, his family, Marilyn. He wonders how she is, whether she misses him as much as he’d like her to. He thinks of his gentleman’s residence and his magnificent collection of Volkswagen memorabilia, and it all becomes too much to bear. Tears form in his eyes but the black blindfold won’t let them fall. It absorbs them completely.

He tries to imagine a future, a time when all this will be over. He walks round the room, slowly but as if with a purpose, and he walks straight into the slop bucket. It falls over. Piss and shit mark the floor of the room like streams and islands; but he cannot see this. He stands motionless now and listens, and he realises that the strange rumbling he can hear, muffled and up above the head, is the sound of heavy traffic.

♦

The phone rings. Marilyn answers. “Hello,” she says eagerly, urgently, hope and desperation twined around her voice. At first nobody speaks at the other end. Could it be? She says, “Carlton?”

“No. It’s me. Ishmael.”

“Oh. Hello Barry. Have you found my father yet?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Are you getting warm?”

“Well, I could be.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the road.”

“Don’t be tiresome, Barry.”

“I’m out there. I’m white-lining, I’m on the hard-shoulder, on the speed limit. I’m following my inner directives.”

“And this is going to help you find my father?”

“Let me put it this way, Marilyn; the path of indirections leads to the same destination as the hasty shortcut.”

“Are you on something, Barry?”

“I’m on the road.”

“Of course you are. I know that. Why did I bother to ask?”

“It’s all right Marilyn. I’m following a course of random moves.”

“Oh great.”

“It is. You see we’re all heading for the same place. All of us. It’s just a question of finding where the paths cross. Once I’ve done that I’ll be right where your father is.”

“Is this really going to work, Barry?”

“Yes. It has to. I know that if I don’t find your father then you’ll think less of me. I couldn’t bear to have you think less of me.”

“Stay in touch, Barry,” she says, the hope having largely been erased from her voice, the desperation taking over.

“Call me Ishmael,” he says. “Please.”

Marilyn soon discovers something of the nature of his random moves. He starts sending her postcards. They reveal a strange and erratic progress. She receives picture postcards of Canterbury, St Ives, Fleetwood, the M52 at Huddersfield. However, the photograph on the front never matches the postmark on the back. A postcard of the Salcombe foot ferry arrives from Staffordshire. A postcard of the Birmingham University Students’ Union building is sent from Alnwick. Barry’s messages are brief but suitably opaque. “All roads are one,” he writes, “with the possible exception of the M18.” He writes, “Greetings from the crawler lane.” He writes, “There are serious delays on the motorway to sapience.” Marilyn is getting fed up.

What’s worse is that Barry is looking increasingly like her best bet. The police are offering her no joy, no hope, no consolation. Carlton’s family assume he is off on some madcap, playboy escapade and will return unharmed. If he’d really been kidnapped there’d be a ransom note, a set of demands. She has mentioned her plight to some of her colleagues at the television company and, to her dismay, nobody thinks there’s a story in it. And as if that wasn’t enough her producer has been on her back saying she’s underperforming. She isn’t sparky enough for him any more. What’s happened to the old zany extrovert self, he wants to know. As if it isn’t obvious.

It is late. Alone in Carlton’s gentleman’s residence now, Marilyn feels so lonely, so helpless and bereft. As on every other recent evening she is drinking Brandy Alexanders and watching videos of the Herbie movies. It feels like a downward slide.

Then a bell rings. She isn’t expecting anyone, and yet she feels that anyone who would be ringing Carlton’s bell at this time of night must surely have some connection with him, however vague, and might just possibly offer some clues. A little unsteadily she goes into the hall and looks at the video monitor which gives her a picture of her visitor. She sees a woman standing outside the gate. She is alone. She wears a leather jacket and leggings and a big studded belt. Marilyn doesn’t know her at first and yet there’s something definitely familiar about her. Marilyn throws the switch that opens the gate and the visitor walks in. Marilyn greets her at the front door.

“Hello, I’m Renata Caswell,” she says.

“My God, so you are.”

“You remember? I’m the one who exposed your friend Ishmael for the dangerous little charlatan he was.”

“I remember it all,” says Marilyn.

“Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to you about Carlton.”

Those are the magic words, the open sesame. If she can’t have Carlton, if she can’t know that he’s safe, then she’ll have to make do with talking about him. It will only be a small pleasure but it will be as great as any she’s got. Marilyn invites Renata in. They go into the kitchen, a room only lightly marked by Carlton Bax’s mania for Beetles. Apart from the Beetle salt and pepper pots, the Beetle mugs, the beetle cookie jar and the Beetle tea towels, it looks like a fairly normal kitchen. Renata can barely hide her disappointment.

“What do you want to say about Carlton?” Marilyn asks.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about him, that’s all.”

Marilyn is desperate to talk about him but she still has the dignity to ask, “Why?”

“Oh,” says Renata breezily, “I think I might like to write a piece about him.”

Marilyn looks daggers at her and she drops her breezi-ness.

“Okay,” she says, “I know he’s gone missing. Maybe I could help. Maybe I could stir public sympathy, stir some public outrage about the fact that the police are doing so little. It just might help to find him.”

“How do you even know that Carlton’s missing? It hasn’t been in any of the papers.”

“I have my sources.”

“I bet you do. And I bet you have to protect them.”

“Of course.”

Nevertheless, Marilyn talks to her about Carlton. She talks about his kindness, how inherited wealth hasn’t spoiled him, about certain conflicts he experienced when he refused to toe the line and become another cog in the Bax family empire. She mentions his education and his first unsuccessful marriage. She denies that he was ever a playboy or gambler or self-destructive drinker. Renata jots down a few shorthand notes but she doesn’t seem quite as interested as she ought to be if she’s really planning to write a campaigning article. All this amounts to little more than background. Surely Renata could have got all this from a cuttings library.

“And what about the Volkswagen collection?” Renata asks.

It’s asked politely enough but somehow Marilyn knows that Renata Caswell is more interested in the Volkswagens than in the man; a problem Marilyn has seen before. And when she asks to be shown round the collection, Marilyn fears Renata will be writing another article, the latest in a series, that depicts Carlton as some sort of poor little rich boy, ageing but immature, childishly eccentric, with more money than sense.

“There have been an awful lot of boring articles about the collection,” Marilyn says, but she still agrees to show it to Renata.

The tour begins. Marilyn points out items that she has learned are of interest to visitors: a KdF saver’s card; a model of a Beetle made out of cigarette packets by a German prisoner of war who had worked on Dr Porsche’s prototypes before the war; a number of pre-war Volkswagen badges designed by Franz Xavier Reimspiess showing the familiar interlocking Volkswagen logo but here it is surrounded by the DAF cogwheel design.

Renata seems intensely and genuinely interested, and Marilyn has witnessed this before too. Carlton was always showing his collection to visiting enthusiasts, and although Marilyn understands this enthusiasm intellectually, she can’t exactly share it, and it seems strange to find any such enthusiasm in a woman like Renata.

“Is there a catalogue?” Renata asks, innocently enough.

“A what?”

“I mean there must be a filing system or an archive or a computer disc maybe that lists anything and everything in the collection.”

“How would I know?” says Marilyn. “It’s Carlton’s collection, not mine.”

“But surely, a collection of this size…”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” says Renata, and although Marilyn can’t see that it’s such a shame, it’s about now she realises that Renata Caswell must know a great deal more than she’s telling.

“Are you saying that Carlton’s disappearance is because of the collection?”

Renata has to ruminate carefully before she says, “That’s what my sources seem to suggest.”

“But I don’t understand. How could that be?”

Renata takes a deep breath before saying, “Well, what if Carlton had some piece of unique Volkswagen memorabilia, something impossibly rare, something utterly priceless that some rival collector would want very badly indeed. And what if that other collector tried to buy it, and what if he begged and pleaded and cajoled, maybe even threatened; but Carlton wouldn’t part with it. Well, if he wanted it badly enough he might think the only way to get it was to steal it. But that wouldn’t work. Carlton wasn’t stupid. If he knew someone wanted to steal something he’d keep it doubly safe, maybe off premises, maybe in some kind of vault, in some sort of locked room. Yes?”

“And what if the rival collector was aware of all this. Well, the next step might be to try to locate this locked room and break into it. But locating it wouldn’t be easy. You’d need Carlton to tell you where it was, and that’s the last thing he’d want to tell you. So someone might pick him up, knock him around a little, tell him he’ll be released just as soon as he spills the beans. And if he didn’t spill them, then this could go on for a very long time, and this rival collector could get very angry and very dangerous indeed.”

“Is all this true?” Marilyn demands.

“It’s what my sources suggest.”

“Do you believe them?”

“I think so.”

“And where does my father fit into all this?”

“Your father?”

Something tells Marilyn that she should keep at least some information to herself, so she says no more about her father and nothing at all about Barry. Instead she asks, “But how could this be? How could anyone want a piece of Volkswagen memorabilia so very badly? What sort of item could possibly be that important or that desirable?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” says Renata. “It’s a dirty job, but I could be just the girl to do it.”

♦

Barry pulls into an open air car park in the centre of Petersfield, in Hampshire. It’s a Saturday morning and the place is busy with the cars of people doing their weekend shopping. Enlightenment looks a little out of place among the hatchbacks and the Range Rovers, but Ishmael is used to having a car that looks out of place. Indeed he is used to feeling out of place himself. Dressing in a blue leather motorcycle suit doesn’t exactly help him to feel accommodated. People have a tendency to stare, to giggle, to talk behind his back. He knows that’s par for the course when you’re on a Zen quest.

He looks around him. It’s all so English, so prosperous, so comforting. He sniffs the air, tries to feel the vibes. Is this the sort of place that he might find Charles Lederer? He is still pondering this when he sees a Volkswagen Beetle making extremely rapid and somewhat erratic progress across the car park. The car is a red Super Beetle, with fat wheels, extended wheel arches and a rather ungainly and unfashionable duck’s tail spoiler. It is eye-catching but a bit naff. The car is heading straight for him, appears to be on a collision course, when at the last moment it slows, swerves and screeches to a halt in the parking space beside Enlightenment.

Barry looks towards the car to see what kind of maniac would drive like that, and is a little surprised to find that the driver is barely visible above the top of the dashboard.

Barry remains curious as the driver’s door pops open and a small, extremely youthful figure emerges. It is the boy from the campsite who calls himself the Ferrous Kid.

“Hi dude,” he says.

“My God,” Barry blurts. “But you’re only nine and a half years old.”

“So?”

“So what in God’s name are you doing driving a car?”

“It’s not a car, it’s a Volkswagen,” says the kid, making a conscious allusion to a well-known Volkswagen ad.

“How come you even know how to drive?”

“My Dad taught me. My Dad has many failings, but in fact he’s not bad at teaching people to drive.”

“But it’s illegal for you to drive.”

“Hey Ishmael old pal, don’t we obey a higher set of laws than that?”

“We? Who’s we?”

“You and me Ishmael, we’re two of a kind, aren’t we?”

“No,” says Barry firmly. “I’m not a nine-and-a-half-year-old kid who drives illegally. And as far as that goes, whose car is it anyway?”

“I’m not sure. I mean. I stole it.”

“I think I probably knew that. Why did you steal it?”

“I’m a joy rider,” the kid says confessionally. “And that’s what joy riders do. But you know, I’m not an idiot. I don’t go racing in the street, I don’t play dodgems with police cars, and I certainly don’t run down innocent bystanders. As far as that goes, I don’t run down guilty bystanders either. I’m a very responsible joy rider.”

Barry isn’t sure that this is entirely good news. The notion of stealing cars responsibly is one that he has some trouble with, but he can see no real future in debating the matter.

“But what are you doing here?” he asks.

“I came to see you.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might need help.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you sure? I have a good instinct for finding people. I mean, I found you. I could be your right hand man.”

“Wrong. At best you could be my right hand nine-and-a-half-year-old in a stolen car, which is something I don’t need at all.”

The kid looks crestfallen, positively wounded.

“Okay,” he says a touch sulkily, “if I can’t be your right hand man, maybe I could be your disciple.”

Barry shakes his head and looks at the kid severely.

“Listen,” he says, “I don’t need a disciple, and you shouldn’t want to become one. Be yourself. Take nobody’s word for it. Question everything. Take nothing for granted. Don’t trust anyone under twenty-five. Don’t follow leaders. Be your own man.”

The kid looks close to tears. “But I’m only nine and a half years old,” he says.

Barry cannot deny that. He puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder and says, “That’s why you should go home to your parents.”

“Back to that poxy campsite? That’s not my home. My home is the road.”

Barry is impressed by the kid’s passion, though he doesn’t see how that can make a difference to anything. The kid can see he’s not getting through.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll stop stealing cars. I’ll stop driving under age. Just let me sit next to you as you complete your quest.”

Barry is not made of stone. He has some sympathy for the boy, but he’s absolutely certain that driving round England with a nine-and-a-half-year-old runaway would get him into all sorts of trouble.

He says, “I tell you what I’ll do. We’ll find a phone box, call the campsite, tell your parents you’re okay, then I’ll take you for a quick ride in Enlightenment before dropping you off at the nearest station and packing you off home.” The kid looks at Barry with contempt. He feels betrayed. He says, “Sod that for a game of soldiers.” Then, before Barry can say or do anything the kid climbs in behind the wheel of the stolen red Volkswagen and burns away out of the car park. Barry does not pursue him. Neither of them is quite sure whether this is a victory or a defeat.

♦

Here are eight neo-Nazi skinheads in a white Transit van, a van not unlike the one Fat Les uses as his daily transport, although that shouldn’t be taken to indicate any shared ideology. The van bowls along the road, erratically, travelling too fast, the engine being gunned mercilessly, the gears being mashed, the tyres leaving skids of rubber at moments of manic acceleration and braking. But considering that the driver, known to his friends as Butcher, has half a dozen cans of extra strong lager inside him, the van’s progress perhaps isn’t that erratic at all, at least not until they hit a corner. Then Butcher really goes for it. He puts his foot down, swings the wheel hard round to achieve the maximum centrifugal force, whereupon the seven other skinheads in the back go flying. So does their beer, so do their fists and after they’ve all knocked into each other and called each other cunts and threatened to kill each other, they have a good laugh about it.

These are boys looking for trouble, though some of them are rather old boys. Fighting is certainly one kind of trouble they like, along with a little shoplifting, car theft, burglary and mindless criminal damage, but scaring people is the kind of trouble they do best, and they are genuinely scary. Some are lean as whippets, other are more like bulldogs bred specially for their coldness and viciousness. Their facial expressions indicate fury and dumb insolence. Their necks and temples throb with wild blood. They definitely look the part. But this question of appearance and image is a tricky one and sometimes Butcher worries about it. These days it seems to him, although he wouldn’t put it quite this way, that the semiotics of the skinhead look have become all confused. These days there are homosexuals who have skinhead cuts. Christ, there are even dykes who do! He doesn’t like it at all. It gets him angry. It makes him want to hit something.

He is also aware that this is not exactly a golden age for skinheads, and he often feels like a man out of his time. He wishes he’d been born a bit earlier, in the days when a skinhead could wear a Crombie and a cravat and carry an umbrella and not be thought a ponce; in the days when you could go down to the local fleapit and see A Clockwork Orange; when the police confiscated your boot laces if you went to the seaside on a bank holiday. He thinks it might have been especially ace to live in a time when Desmond Dekker and Max Romeo and the Upsetters and Judge Dread were regularly top of the pops, not that he’s ever really worked out why it is that skinheads are supposed to hate black people and yet love reggae.

Up ahead, standing in a lay-by with his thumb out, is some pathetic looking old geezer. “Hey,” Butcher says to the others, “this’ll be a laugh.” He stops the van and flings open the door for the hitchhiker. “Get in squire.” Even the most desperate and trusting of hitchhikers might be reluctant to get into a van containing eight drunken skinheads, but Charles Lederer simply says, “This isn’t a Volkswagen, is it?” They assure him it isn’t and he gets in.

Half an hour later, without stopping, they throw him out of the back of the van. He has been laughed at, mocked, abused, threatened and sprayed with beer. He has been slapped and kicked though not given a serious beating. His weakness, his inability to fight back, has saved him from that. But the skinheads have committed one unusual act of violence to his appearance; they have shaved his head. For all their practice, it hasn’t been done very skilfully. There are nicks and cuts on his scalp and there are a few tufts of grey hair that they have missed, but nevertheless, the point has been made.

Butcher drives on feeling somehow more whole after this shared act of comic aggression. Charles Lederer lies at the side of the road, his fingertips exploring his newly bared scalp. He does not look like a real skinhead any more than he looks like a certain kind of homosexual. If anything he looks like a victim of Nazi atrocities, which in a sense he is. But as he lies there on the ground with the lorries rolling by, he wonders if perhaps the time has come to cease being a victim.

♦

The skinheads arrive at a Little Eater family restaurant some way off the A6. At first they don’t go inside. It is one of those places with a children’s playground, with a climbing frame and a slide in the shape of a baby elephant. The skinheads soon scare off the children playing there and begin having their own robust fun all over the playground. They improvise a game of football with some empty beer cans, but it soon degenerates into rugby, into kick boxing, into all-in wrestling. A harmless Sikh family walk by and are jeered and sworn at. A couple of skinheads climb to the top of the slide and urinate so that a long, narrow waterfall of piss sweeps down it and cascades from the elephant’s trunk.

They are too occupied to notice the wicked-looking black Beetle parked beside the restaurant, and at first Barry, who is inside about to tuck into a ranch style ail-American breakfast, doesn’t really notice the skinheads either. But eventually he becomes aware of their raised voices and he looks at them through the window, and like everybody else in the Little Eater, he hopes they don’t come inside.

These hopes are not realised. They enter the restaurant. They don’t wait to be seated. Amid much effing and blinding they descend and sprawl across four tables, light up cigarettes in a non-smoking area and look around them, proud of their capacity to cause offence.

Some customers, the ones who have either finished their breakfasts or not yet ordered, decide to leave immediately. The ones who remain try to pretend that the skinheads are invisible, that there’s nothing untoward happening. Barry falls somewhere between these two camps. He can’t leave because he’s only just started his breakfast, but neither can he make the imaginative leap that would allow him to pretend that the skinheads aren’t there.

They meanwhile, after much difficulty, argument, high jinks and obscenity, manage to place an order with the waitress. Essentially they have ordered two of everything, with double orders of chips and extra grease. Now they discover the delights of the squeezable ketchup bottles and squirt each other with long red streams of tomato sauce. They also manage to squirt a family at the next table. The father, as meekly as possible, says, “Steady on now lads,” is sworn at savagely and immediately escorts his family from the premises. The place is emptying fast, the more so when the skinheads begin mooning and giving Nazi salutes. It is no time at all before the only customers still in the Little Eater are the skinheads and Barry. Barry tries to stay calm. He orders another pot of coffee from the waitress and it arrives soon enough, there being rather few other diners to be served.

It would be impossible to ignore the storms of anarchy and aggression bursting out on the other side of the restaurant, so Barry doesn’t try. He begins to watch the skinheads closely. It is not done out of idle curiosity. It’s an active, intrusive sort of watching and soon enough they become aware of Barry’s gaze. And then they start looking back, and then they get up from their tables and move over to Barry’s. They surround him. They’re very quiet now, the lull before all manner of storms.

“What are you looking at?” one of them asks.

“You,” Barry replies accurately enough.

“Why? You fancy us or what?”

“Yeah, he looks like a puff doesn’t he?”

“Looks a bit Jewish too.”

“And maybe he’s got a touch of the tar brush about him.”

One of them now stands close beside Barry, turns his back, shoves out his backside and farts wetly in the direction of Barry’s face.

Barry ignores this and says, “I’m staring at you because you’re spoiling my ranch style all-American breakfast.”

Even they see the funny side of that. They laugh like drains, or at least they pretend to. They enjoy Barry’s quip so much that two of them are moved to spit onto his plate where half his breakfast remains uneaten.

“And I’m thinking,” Barry continues without missing a beat, “you know, given enough time and enough love, I’m sure you people could be turned into decent, warm, likeable human beings. The problem is, I don’t have that amount of time. So why don’t you just go away and leave us all in peace?”

“Who’s us all? There’s only you here. You’re on your own, pal.”

“Ultimately we’re all on our own,” says Barry.

“You know,” says Butcher, “this guy’s really starting to fuck me off.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” says Barry, and in one movement he picks up the pot of coffee and hurls it so that a hot, black wave of coffee flies through the air at eye level and breaks across the faces of the nearest three skinheads. Barry is already up and running out of the Little Eater, out across the car park towards Enlightenment. The skinheads race after him and he only wins the race by a short head, but that’s enough. Now he’s in his car, locking the door, starting the engine. The skinheads are furious, delirious with rage. They beat on the windows, kick his doors, but he drives through them at speed, clipping at least one of them with his right front wing. They decide to give chase. They pile into their white van, seething, howling, spitting. Butcher takes the wheel. He shoves the key into the ignition, turns it savagely, floors the accelerator, and absolutely nothing happens. He keeps trying, becoming apoplectic with frustration. He beats his fist against the wheel, against the dashboard, against the roof. Finally he headbutts the windscreen. It hurts like Hell but he doesn’t mind that. There is still no starting the van’s engine. Barry and Enlightenment are now half a mile down the road.

“Christ!” says Butcher. “If only everything in life was as reliable as a fuckin’ Volkswagen.”

♦

After I wrote Street Sleeper people got the impression that I was ‘interested’ in Volkswagens. Sometimes I would protest about this and say that I was only interested in Volkswagens in the way that, say, Herman Melville was ‘interested’ in white whales. But most of the time I let it go. I found that a great many people had had a Volkswagen in their lives at one time or another, they’d owned one or driven one or learned to drive in one or had a boyfriend or girlfriend who’d owned one, and they were all very keen to tell me their Volkswagen stories. I was happy enough to listen, although at the time I had no idea that I’d ever be writing a sequel to Street Sleeper. Some were fairly ordinary motoring stories about breakdowns or difficult journeys or seductions or driving tests, but the following was in quite a different league. A man called Hilton Cunliffe was in Holland in 1945 with the British Army, driving out the Germans, gradually destroying the sites from which the sub-sonic VI and supersonic V2 flying bombs were being launched against Britain. Hilton was a traffic marshal and somehow he’d got his hands on a captured Schwimmwagen, the amphibious, military version of the Beetle. His job was simply to drive it back to HQ, but the vehicle wasn’t very healthy and it was a long slow journey. The road was rutted and very narrow, barely more than a single track, and a certain amount of other traffic was also using it, so that once in a while a faster-moving army truck headed in the same direction would come up behind him and be unable to get past. When that happened he’d pull the Schwimmwagen over to the side of the road and let the truck go by. This happened many times in the course of the journey, and after a while the pulling over became more or less automatic. As soon as he heard the sound of a truck behind him, he’d pull over without so much as looking round. This happened innumerable times.

So once again he heard what he thought was the sound of another approaching truck, and more or less without thinking, he pulled over; just in time to see a VI flying bomb ‘overtake’ him and explode thirty yards up the road.

♦

The above is a true story, at least it’s as true as I can make it. The story wasn’t told to me directly but came via my friend Steve who worked in road safety in Sheffield. Incidentally, Steve is one of the other dedicatees for Street Sleeper and so far we haven’t fallen out. When I decided that I wanted to include Hilton Cunliffe’s story in this book I asked Steve if he could check the exact details of it; the year, the place in Holland, the name of Hilton Cunliffe’s regiment and so forth. Steve tried, but it was too late, Hilton had died in the years between my hearing the story and wanting to retell it.

♦

In 1934 when Ferdinand Porsche signed the contract to develop the German people’s car, the Type 60 as it was then known, his design business operated from office premises and he had no workshops. Therefore the prototypes had to be built in the garage of his own home in Stuttgart. The pictures show this to have been a fairly grand place and the garage was no doubt roomier than most. He built both a saloon and a cabriolet version of the Type 60, but in order to distinguish between the two models he called the saloon the VI and the cabriolet the V2.

This seems somehow significant, though I’m not entirely sure how. The VI in Porsche’s designation stood for Versuch — experimental. The V in Hitler’s V1^s and V2^s stood for Vergeltungswaffe — retaliatory weapon. It’s also worth noting that the VI was known in England as the Doodlebug.

Of course, if it had been a V2 rocket coming up the road behind Hilton Cunliffe, it would have been flying faster than the speed of sound, he would never have heard it, never have pulled over and never known what hit him.