Still life with Volkswagens

Eight. A Book of Common Volkswagens

Barry collects Enlightenment from the grass verge where Charles Lederer abandoned it, and begins a long, slow, melancholy drive back to the caravan site in Filey. The car is still drivable despite the thrashing Charles Lederer gave it, although it is no longer the car it once was.

The man who did all the damage sits beside Barry as he drives. For a long time he has nothing at all to say for himself, but that’s all right with Barry who has plenty to occupy his mind. One of the things he thinks about is that he’ll have to get in touch with Fat Les again in order to get Enlightenment repaired, and his last meeting with Les was hardly cordial. But he spends far more time thinking about Marilyn. A part of him feels he should be out there searching for her, trying to find the villains who have kidnapped her, trying to free her. That certainly ought to make her feel good about him, and yet he knows this is a quest he will not be making. Basically he’s had enough of flogging round the country in a Volkswagen, not knowing where to look or what to look for. He found Charles Lederer when he stopped looking for him, and perhaps it will be possible to find Marilyn by not looking for her at all. It’s a long shot, but it’s all he’s capable of right now. Besides, what’s the point of searching for someone who doesn’t love you, who’s in love with some rich swine who collects Volkswagens.

They are nearly home before Charles Lederer finally speaks. “I’ve been a fool,” he says.

“Yes,” Barry agrees.

“I thought you were my problem. I thought that if I destroyed you, I would be destroying all my problems.”

“Is that what psychiatrists mean when they talk about transference?” Barry asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was just displacement activity.”

“And no doubt you felt the same way about Volkswagens.”

“What do you mean?”

“You felt that if you couldn’t destroy me, you’d destroy a few Volkswagens instead.”

“I never destroyed any Volkswagens,” Charles Lederer says, sounding puzzled.

“Ah,” says Barry, “now I think you’re demonstrating what the psychiatrists call denial.”

“I feel so lost,” Charles Lederer says. “I can’t see what’s at the end of the road.”

Barry peers through the windscreen and although visibility is less than perfect, he can still see the road ahead quite clearly.

“Huh?” he says.

Charles Lederer continues, “I can see only the scrap dealer, the breaker’s yard, the crusher.”

“Not necessarily,” says Barry, and he remembers something the Ferrous Kid told him. “Quite a lot of recycling goes on. There’s a big demand for secondhand parts. A lot of metal gets melted down and used again. It’s a bit like reincarnation I suppose.”

“Is it really?” says Charles Lederer, and then he resumes his silence.

♦

At last they arrive at the caravan site. Barry has mixed feelings about this return. Certainly it’s good to be home and not to have to spend any more days and nights on the road, yet he is not returning on the terms he would have wished. He would have liked to be the returning hero, bringing home Marilyn, his true love. That was not to be, and frankly he can’t ever see Marilyn wanting to live with him in a caravan when she has the chance to live in Carlton Bax’s gentleman’s residence. So instead of bringing home his true love, he’s bringing home his true love’s father. He feels humbled.

He also feels there’s going to be a little difficulty in accommodating Charles Lederer. They can hardly share one caravan, if for no other reason than, as Barry has found out in the course of this return trip, the old man has a disturbingly ripe odour about him. Perhaps that ought to be irrelevant to an aspirant to wisdom such as Barry, and certainly he knows he can’t leave a fellow traveller stranded on the sliproad of life, but he thinks life will be much easier if he can get the old boy set up in a one man tent, preferably on the far side of the site.

The old place looks familiar enough, and yet Barry senses immediately that there’s something different about it. There’s something in the air. There’s a feeling of hussle about it, an animation among the holidaymakers, a hint of anxiety.

The moment Enlightenment appears outside Barry’s caravan, a tiny, familiar figure comes running. It is the Ferrous Kid and he’s extremely excited. He’s glad enough to see Barry, but that isn’t the major cause of his excitement. Barry gives him a cheerful wave but after his long drive he thinks he isn’t quite ready to cope with the kid’s boundless and exhausting energy. However, he needn’t have worried.

“I took your advice,” the kid says happily. “I don’t joyride any more.”

“Oh good,” says Barry.

“Not even responsibly.”

“I’m very glad.”

“Who’s the old guy in the car?”

“Don’t ask,” says Barry.

The kid shrugs then says, “Anyway, you got back just in time.”

“In time for what?”

“There’s a big meeting going on at the site owner’s house. Everyone’s going.”

Barry says he can’t be bothered to go to any meeting with the site owner. How could it possibly be of relevance to him? But the kid is insistent and he grabs Barry by the elbow and hurries him along. As he goes Barry looks back at Charles Lederer, still seated in Enlightenment, and he hopes he’ll not get into trouble before he gets back.

As he walks along with the kid, he sees that people from all over the caravan site are heading in the same direction, and by the time they get to the house they’re part of a crowd. It isn’t a vast crowd, perhaps only a hundred or so strong, but the people look hostile and angry and Barry asks the kid what this is all about. The kid assures him it will be obvious soon enough.

Sam Probert, the site owner, lives in a pleasant but modest stone-clad house only a few hundred yards from the caravan site. There is a white fence and a carefully laid out and tended front garden with a decorative miniature windmill and an ornamental pond. The crowd, however, has no respect for the niceties of garden design. They clamber over the fence and trample all over the lawn and flowerbeds. The arrival of such a mob would bring most proud house owners running to their front door demanding to know what they think they’re doing, but this particular house owner knows exactly what they’re doing. They ring his doorbell and hammer on the glass of the bay window, but Sam Probert declines to appear.

This only maddens the crowd. They become increasingly restless and vocal, and then someone, probably deliberately, knocks over the miniature windmill, which tumbles into the ornamental pond and shatters into plaster fragments. This is quite a crowd pleaser, and one or two people pick up lumps of the plaster and hurl them towards the house, and it is this action which finally brings out the owner. He doesn’t come to the front door, that would be far too risky, but his face does appear at an upstairs window. He looks out nervously and slowly raises the window, fearing that further lumps of plaster might be aimed at his head.

Barry’s dealings with Sam Probert have always been brief and pleasant enough. He has never appeared to Barry to be the sort of man who would provoke such passion and hatred in his neighbours and caravanners. Certainly his appearance placates the crowd a little, but after a while, when he simply stares out and says nothing, they soon become rowdy and incensed again. This is not Barry’s idea of a ‘meeting’ as promised by the kid; rather it provides an opportunity for the crowd to abuse the man at the window. Someone calls him a money-grubbing bastard, and someone else shouts something about forty pieces of silver, but Barry can’t follow this at all. Not surprisingly, the crowd’s antagonism only provokes defiance in Sam Probert, and after listening to a few more insults he’s definitely had enough.

“They’re my bloody fields and I’ll do what I want with them,” he bellows back.

“It’s a disgrace,” says one of the more articulate protesters. “It’ll be chaos. There’ll be noise and smells, and dogs and children, and people revving their engines and loud music and drugs, unprotected sex and people peeing in the street.”

“I’ve hired quite a few chemical toilets,” Sam Probert protests weakly, but this does not satisfy the crowd at all.

Things look as though they might turn decidedly ugly, and Barry wants no part of that, so he manhandles the kid away from the house, to safety.

“I still don’t have a clue what this is all about,” Barry says.

“I think it’s brilliant,” says thef kid. “You know the old bugger also owns two fields adjacent to the site?”

“No, I didn’t,” says Barry.

“Well anyway, he’s rented them both out for this weekend. He’s rented one out to a Volkswagen enthusiasts’ club for some shindig called Bug Mecca and he’s rented the other one out to a bunch of New Age travellers for a Gathering of the Tribes. It should be hell on earth. I can hardly wait.”

♦

The same old scout hut but now with some new Nazi regalia; flags and banners, medals and uniforms, and a more intense air of aggression and stupidity and casual destructiveness emanating from the skinheads. Phelan appears before his boys, his disciples. Tonight he is feeling expansive and he gives them a brief tour of his favourite obsessions; that the Jewish Holocaust was a myth, that Adolf Hitler in fact had a full complement of testicles, and that AIDS can’t be such a bad thing if it kills off gays, drug users and Africans. He can feel his power growing, a strange potent energy that passes from his boys to him.

The skinheads are feeling good too. Thanks to Phelan they have more money than they know what to do with, and they now appear in a stylish, not to say positively mannerist, array of cherry red DMs, Ben Shermans, Crombies and Harringtons. Butcher has even taken to wearing a bowler hat. Phelan is faintly disappointed by this. He was hoping to steer them towards a more paramilitary look, but he doesn’t want to push them too far too fast. There is money for any amount of extra strong lager, for Oi records and for new tattoos of staggering scope and complexity.

Tonight there is almost a party atmosphere, something helped along by the presence of Renata Caswell. She has told Phelan how turned on she gets by a good collection of skinheads and that’s an interest he wants to encourage. She is dressed in the shortest of leather skirts and a Luftwaffe bomber jacket, hardly skinhead gear, but the lads are nevertheless juiced up by her presence. Only Butcher seems to be less than one hundred per cent sanguine. Something is bothering him, and it does have something to do with a woman.

“What happened to the girl?” he asks Phelan.

“What girl would that be?”

“Come on. Don’t fuck about. The one we found in that house. The one we kidnapped for you.”

“She’s being taken care of,” Phelan says.

There is much dirty laughter from the other skinheads, though not from Butcher.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he insists.

Phelan says nothing, just looks across at Renata and smiles. But Butcher won’t be shaken off that easily.

“I mean did you fuck her, or beat her, or kill her, or what?”

“What do you think I am?” asks Phelan. “A monster?”

Even Butcher has to laugh at that.

“Seriously though,” says Phelan, “I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

Butcher isn’t sure either. He already suspects that Phelan gets up to all kinds of things that he’d rather not know about, and the fate of Marilyn Lederer might very well be in that category. But if something terrible’s happened to her then he was a part of it, an accessory, and it’s all very well Phelan saying they’re a new breed of hero and above the law, but the fuzz might see it a bit differently. Till now all he’s really been involved with is fisticuffs and a bit of nicking. Phelan seems to want to push him into some whole different world.

“And anyway,” says Butcher again, “what were we doing in that house anyway? What were we supposed to be looking for?”

“If I told you that,” says Phelan, “then you’d know as much as I do.”

Given time to think about it, Butcher would have realised that remark was neither true nor relevant, but Phelan doesn’t give him any time.

“What does it matter?” he says. “You enjoyed yourself didn’t you, Butcher?”

“Yes,” Butcher admits.

“You enjoyed smashing things up. That’s your talent, your forte.”

“Yes,” says Butcher.

“That’s what I need you for. All of you.”

Phelan’s face adopts a look of fatherly love which both flatters and embarrasses them. Then he gets them to tell him stories of their recent exploits; raiding petrol stations, doing over tobacconist’s shops, video stores, off licences, provoking fights in pubs and clubs, nicking cars, beating up a few Pakis and Jew boys. It does him good to hear it. He glances frequently at Renata to see how she’s reacting to these accounts, and he thinks he sees the patina of sexual arousal on her face.

Even Butcher joins in with the stories and before long he’s much more like his vicious old self, but he still remains more thoughtful than the other skinheads and he says, “Do you know which rumble I enjoyed best?”

“Tell me,” says Phelan, genuinely interested.

“Beating up them New Age travellers.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah,” says Butcher. “There was something really good about it. I think it was because they were like hippies, all dirty and long-haired and spiritual. And like they think they’re better than everybody else, like they’ve found something special and got all the answers. Only they haven’t. It’s not right. It’s not British.”

“Well, I’d agree there,” says Phelan. “What do the rest of you think?”

The rest gradually agree that there was indeed a certain frisson in knocking hell out of the New Age travellers, and the general consensus is that they’d like to do more of it. “Now,” says Phelan, “I just may be able to help you there. It appears there’s going to be a so-called Gathering of the Tribes in the not too distant future.”

“How many are going to be there?”

“Thousands I understand.”

“Bloody hell.”

The eight skinheads realise that even they might have a little trouble putting fear into thousands of New Age travellers.

“You have friends don’t you?” asks Phelan.

They admit that they do.

“So let’s say you bring in some new blood. Let’s say each of you recruits four more like-minded individuals. Each of you will then be a leader of your own quasi-autonomous force. A force that, at a pinch, can be accommodated in a Volkswagen Beetle. Five of you per car makes forty. That ought to be enough, surely. That’s a lot of aggro.”

The skinheads give it some thought. They obviously want to agree with Phelan. They want to believe they are an elite force, a match for a number of old or new hippies. They also like the idea of being leaders.

“Remember,” says Phelan, “that they have no discipline, that they won’t be expecting you, that they’ll be high on drugs, and that they’re racially inferior.”

Butcher says, “All right, you’re On.”

Phelan looks across at Renata so that she can acknowledge how wonderful, how powerful he is. Then he looks back at the skinheads.

“You may be Nazi scum,” he says, “but you’re my Nazi scum.”

♦

Phelan drives home, Renata beside him, his hand playing absent-mindedly on her upper thigh. He doesn’t drive a Volkswagen Beetle, of course. He prefers the plush, solid certainties of a Mercedes, the make of car Adolf Hitler usually chose to travel in, whatever his feelings about the Beetle.

“They’re a wild bunch,” says Renata, referring to the skinheads.

“They’re the future,” says Phelan.

“The future’s going to be dumb but sexy?”

“There are worse futures.”

“That boy called Butcher, he’s interesting,” she says. “He’s not quite like the others.”

“Do you want to fuck him?”

“I want to fuck them all,” she replies, in a manner that might or might not be serious.

“It can be arranged.”

“I bet.”

For now, however, there is other work to be done. They arrive at Phelan’s home. He lives in a strange, grey, bunker-like industrial building, on the edge of London, in a location that might have been chosen for its appalling proximity to roads and traffic. Its entrance is off a giant roundabout, around which cars and lorries swirl at high speed all day and all night. Six lanes of traffic scream past the back of the building, while overhead a flyover carries vehicles to and from the start of the motorway. Exhaust fumes hang over the area. Tyre noise and engine roar and the deep vibration of juggernauts make the place alive with infernal sound and fury. There are no pavements, no public transport, no place for pedestrians. Phelan says he would live nowhere else. It feels modern and technological. It keeps him sharp and in touch, and it’s also extremely private. If you kidnapped, say, a Volkswagen collector and kept him locked in your basement here, nobody would ever find him. If you then kidnapped his girlfriend, or rather got eight of your followers to do so, you could stash her there too. You could keep them both in captivity, play one off against the other, tease and coerce and torment them until they told you what you wanted to know. Not that they’ve told Phelan anything yet. Marilyn Lederer is being every bit as uncooperative as Carlton Bax; pleading ignorance, admitting nothing. And that’s where Renata comes in. He thinks that a woman’s touch may be just what’s needed, that Marilyn will tell her things that she’d never tell him. And in a sense he’s right.

Once inside the bunker, Phelan goes to the trophy room, the place with the flags and the bed and the military Volkswagen that he uses as a prop for their couplings. Meanwhile Renata goes down to the basement, to the locked room where Marilyn is being kept, to see what confessions she can wrest from her. But Phelan is hardly surprised when Renata returns half an hour later looking disappointed, though not, in fact, as disappointed as Phelan thinks she ought to look.

“She says she doesn’t know anything,” Renata reports.

“And do you believe her?”

“You know, I think I probably do.”

“Well, if she doesn’t know anything then she’s no use to me. I’ll have to get rid of her. Maybe I could throw her to Butcher and his friends.”

“Some girls have all the luck,” Renata says and she goes over and kisses Phelan. He grabs her by the hair, with a studied roughness. She smiles through the discomfort. They go to bed, their minds so full of perverse images that tonight they do not even need to use the Gestapo Volkswagen.

♦

Next morning Phelan gets up, washes and cleanses himself with a thorough, military precision. Renata remains in bed, looking worn out, used, satisfied. Phelan dresses, studying himself closely in a number of full length mirrors the whole time. Finally he’s ready to go about his business. He gets the Mercedes and is ready to drive away from the bunker, leaving Renata to her feigned sleep.

Amid the road noise she listens for the slamming of doors and the start of the engine and when she’s sure that he’s gone, she springs from the bed, dresses quickly and carelessly and runs out to her own car, the yellow Volkswagen that Fat Les smashed and then repaired for her. She drives fast and determinedly through the patterning and interplay of traffic until she arrives at Carlton Bax’s gentleman’s residence.

The gate is closed and there is some police tape tied across it to forbid entry, and yet it is unlocked and it moves and opens easily enough at her touch. The front door of the house and the broken French window have been hastily and clumsily boarded up, and entry wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but she isn’t going into the house, she’s going into the garage where Carlton Bax houses his full-size Volkswagens.

She gets out of her car, opens the boot and removes a tool kit. She uses a crowbar to break open the garage door and once inside she heads straight for the state of the art, electric-blue Baja Beetle. Its doors are open and she positions herself in the passenger seat. The car has a modified dashboard of very cool-looking brushed aluminium. It seems a shame to wreck it but that’s what she’s here to do. She takes a hammer and chisel from the kit and knocks the chisel in behind the dash so that it tears away from the frame of the car. She pulls back the metal until there’s just room enough for her to slide her hand inside. She feels around until her hand touches something small, square and plastic. She grabs it, pulls it out, and sees that she’s holding a piece of buried treasure, a computer disc containing the catalogue of Carlton Bax’s Volkswagen collection.

She pockets the disc, gathers up her tools and heads back for her car, then she drives to her own flat, a place she doesn’t get to very much since she’s been involved with Phelan. She is no computer buff and she hopes the information on the disc isn’t encoded, but since Carlton Bax went to the trouble of physically hiding the disc, she imagines the catalogue will give up its secrets easily enough. She hopes her own limited skills and her own PC will be enough. Then, if this catalogue tells her what she thinks it’s going to tell her, she’ll be able to get out, to write her big article or series of articles, expose Phelan and make a big name for herself as the daring and feisty investigative journalist who infiltrated and cracked a neo-Nazi gang.

She slips the disc into her computer, and sure enough, she was right. The disc gives up its information without too much of a fight. The problem is, there’s so much information and most of it is so desperately dull. She spends hour after hour searching through menus and files, through directories and spreadsheets, peering through windows, scrolling through bleak, dry entries that list and describe innumerable items of Volkswagen memorabilia in exhaustive, obsessive detail, complete with dimensions and colours, date and source of acquisition, and value. There are listings and groupings and cross references, and endless footnotes. Only a nut like Carlton Bax could possibly be interested in this stuff, and then she remembers that a nut like Phelan would be very interested in it too. The day passes. She is drowning in data. There are over 300 entries on Volkswagen key rings alone, and she needs to read each one, just in case the item she’s looking for is hidden there. From time to time she calls up the Help function on the menu, but each time it tells her, “No help is available here.”

Day turns into evening. Her eyes are hurting and her back aches from being perched on the edge of her chair. She’s falling asleep. She’s ready to call it a day. It’s all so maddening, so frustrating, and maybe she was wrong, maybe she’s been wasting her time and the information she needs isn’t even here. Then suddenly it is one in the morning, and she realises she must have dozed off, must have slumped down on the keyboard, but in the process she has somehow, inadvertently, given the right command. A really Zen piece of computer operation. She has summoned up a directory called LOCKROOM, a name that even in her weary state she can see is highly promising. She plunges into it. The directory contains a list of files with weird names like PRESLEY, MANSON, BUNDY, none of which she can quite understand, and then she sees it, the entry that makes sense of everything; a file called HITLER. DOC. She calls it up. The entry appears:

Item: Volkswagen automaton

Date of construction: 1938

Dimensions: 300×115×140 mm

Country of manufacture: Germany

Constructed of wood, metal, glass, semi-precious stone, human bone

Maker: Paul Loffler

Previous owner: Adolf Hitler

Value: priceless.

Location: Mrs Lederer

She almost swoons with pleasure.

♦

Here, finally, is Adolf Hitler in the Spring of 1938 in a timber cabin in the woods of Bavaria. He is here to relax from the affairs of state. Eva Braun sits beside him on a Biedermeier love seat, sipping Apfelwein and nibbling Mohnstriezel.

And here is Paul Loffler, one of Germany’s finest, most inventive makers of clocks and automata, and one of Hitler’s favourites. He is here to entertain the happy couple, to amuse and amaze them with his latest wonderful creation. In the past he has made cuckoo clocks out of which pop extinct or mythological creatures — cerberus, a gryphon, a tyrannosaurus rex, a dodo — or an automaton the size of a wedding cake on which lovingly hand-carved figures enact scenes from Wagner’s Ring, synchronised to music played on gramophone records.

Loffler enters carrying a large carpet bag which he places on a small occasional table in front of the Führer. He releases the clasps and opens the neck of the bag before reaching in and producing what looks like a small model of a Volkswagen Beetle, though at that time, of course, he would only have known it as a KdF-Wagen. It is carved from smooth, polished mahogany, with brass fittings for the hub caps, windscreen wipers, door handles and headlamps, and although it has a fabric sun roof, the windows are opaque, made of black glass. It is no more than a foot long.

Loffler holds it out to Adolf Hitler who takes it from him and eyes it carefully. He does not smile. He can see that it is a well-made and skilfully executed model of the car, but somehow he had expected more from Loffler.

Then he notices that there is a small brass winder protruding from the rear of the car, like a cranking handle, that just cries out to be turned, and Hitler duly turns it.

Slowly and smoothly the sun roof rolls back to reveal the interior of the car. There are seats and a steering wheel and a metal gear lever and foot pedals, but there are also two small figures, a man and a woman sitting beside each other on the rear seat.

“They’re carved from real human bone,” Loffler says confidentially.

Adolf Hitler peers at the two tiny figures. They are beautifully carved and they are articulated. They are able to move thanks to an intricate system of threads, wires and armatures, and as the handle turns, they begin to perform. But there is something disturbing about them. First, they are naked, a forgivable artistic licence perhaps since it shows off Loffler’s fine carvings of muscles and flesh; but what seems unforgivable, what in the circumstances would have previously been considered unthinkable, is the fact that the two white figures have been given the faces of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

As Hitler continues to turn the handle, the female figure lowers her head towards the male figure’s crotch where a penis, flatteringly out of scale and disproportionately large, rises towards her mouth. The two bone automata mime an act of vigorous fellatio until, in a sudden rapid conclusion, the female pulls back her head and a shower of sparkling powder — “Genuine diamond dust,” Loffler explains — jets out of the automaton’s penis and coats the face of the miniature Eva Braun. Instantly the sun roof springs back over the car and conceals the two figures. Again it looks like a harmless model of a KdF-Wagen.

Paul Loffler looks extremely pleased with himself, but Adolf Hitler shows a more complex, more equivocal response. His face is not inert, rather it seems to be searching for an appropriate expression. Beneath the moustache, his lips twitch in an uncertain manner that Loffler certainly hopes will turn into an expression of uncontainable pleasure, and sure enough, at length, the Führer does allow his lips to bend into a thin, taut smile.

Later that same day, Paul Loffler is taken out into the woods and, in a spot well screened from the cabin by a row of silver birches, he is shot by a Gestapo officer called Hans Krauss. Adolf Hitler shows his appreciation by giving Krauss an early version of a Kraft durch Freudewagen, a full size one, a car that will eventually find its way, not into Carlton Bax’s locked room, but into Phelan’s bunker.

♦

Renata continues to stare at the entry on the screen. Now she understands. So this is what Phelan has been looking for so hard and so long, why he kidnapped Carlton Bax and Marilyn Lederer; because Bax had got Adolf Hitler’s toy Beetle, and because Phelan wanted to play with it. Ah well, boys will be boys. But what Phelan obviously didn’t know was where to find it, and frankly she’s not sure she’s much wiser for having seen this file. What on earth does ‘Mrs Lederer’ mean as a location? Could that be Marilyn’s mother, Charles Lederer’s wife? Would Carlton Bax really have left his priceless Volkswagen with his girlfriend’s mother? Why not just leave it in the famous locked room?

And then she turns around, away from the screen, and she nearly jumps out of her skin as she sees Phelan is standing behind her, and may have been watching her for who knows how long. His hands are folded casually in front of him and he looks controlled and serene.

“I hate it when people lie to me,” he says.

“I haven’t lied…” she starts to say.

“Yes you have. You said Marilyn Lederer had told you nothing. It looks like she told you more than enough.”

“She didn’t…I was…”

“It’s all right Renata. I’ve known for some time that you weren’t exactly what you appear to be.”

“I always intended to tell you where Hitler’s Volkswagen was.”

“What you intended doesn’t matter at all. You’ve found out what I wanted to know. You see, I want that Volkswagen rather badly. I believe it’s the final thing I need. Once I’ve got it I’ll be ready. I believe it contains serious magic, Renata. It’s my Grail, my lost ark. And thanks to you, Renata, I now know where it is. I ought to be grateful to you.”

Renata stands beside her monitor screen, trying to back away from Phelan. He moves towards her, raising his hand as he approaches. He could be about to slap her, but in fact the hand comes to rest harmlessly on her shoulder. He squeezes her flesh, firmly but not harshly. In other circumstances it might seem affectionate.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Renata says. “You don’t have to do anything about me.”

“Personally I’m not going to do anything to you at all.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a pair of heavy duty handcuffs. He picks up Renata’s right hand and places one cuff around her wrist, gently as though it was a piece of jewellery, then locks it. He shepherds her into, the bedroom and pushes her face down onto the bed. He loops the handcuffs through the metal curves of the brass bedhead then locks in her other wrist. He gets up, walks to the bedroom door. She can hear footsteps and male voices and she turns her head to see Butcher and four other skinheads enter the room. She hasn’t seen these others before. They are Butcher’s friends, his new recruits.

“Do whatever you like to her,” says Phelan. “But make it permanent and don’t be too long about it. Remember there’s a gathering of the tribes you have to get to.”

♦

In some sense I suppose an author is all his characters. I am, I suppose, both Barry Osgathorpe and Fat Les. I am both Charles and Marilyn Lederer. I am the New Age travellers and the neo-Nazis. I ‘am’ these people to the limited extent that I need to impersonate them and live inside their heads for the amount of time it takes to write them. I become them but yet I don’t have to become like them; and this is a blessing. However, there is an important sense in which I am somewhat like Carlton Bax: I’m a Volkswagen collector.

Obviously I’m not in the Carlton Bax league. I don’t claim to be a great or even a very serious collector. I have no garage or warehouse full of classic and historic Beetles. I certainly have no locked room. In fact I don’t, own any ‘real’ Beetles at all at the moment, but my flat is littered with hundreds of toy and model Beetles, Beetle clocks, mugs, egg cups, books, magazines, a few T — shirts, that kind of stuff.

“When people ask me ‘How come?’ I usually say it all started as a joke and it subsequently got out of hand. I imply that I bought myself a couple of toy Beetles when I first owned a real Volkswagen and that it has grown from there. I say that well-meaning friends are always giving me Volkswagen stuff and that the collection has grown of its own volition without any guidance or interference from me.

This is almost entirely untrue. It’s obviously true that there was a moment when I had no model Beetles at all, and there must have been a moment when I suddenly had one or two. However, as soon as I had two or three it became entirely obvious to me that this coujd be the first step towards a vast and significant collection. This may not have been entirely rational. One or two friends have given me Beetles as presents, but I am a difficult person to buy for. Once a collection has reached a certain size the chances are that I already have the more common examples that people are able to buy for me.

From the beginning I have tried to explain and justify the collecting urge, and I tend to say that I collect Beetles, rather than, say, E type Jaguars or Morris Minors, because the Beetle has such an archetypal form. It has penetrated so many countries and cultures. It is ubiquitous and instantly recognisable. I am no great traveller but over the years I’ve been in the United States, France, Morocco, Egypt and Australia, and in every place there have been real Beetles on the roads and model Beetles for sale in the shops or at markets.

Some of the items in my collection become a form of travel souvenir. In Cairo I bought a couple of Beetles moulded out of recycled plastic, out of what looks like shredded and melted down detergent bottles. The moulds must have been too hot, so that the plastic has scorched and turned a slightly revolting shade of blue⁄brown. I remember clearly the Egyptian man who sold them to me, how he seemed to think I wanted to haggle over the price when in fact the price he’d asked was so cheap I just wanted to be sure I’d understood him correctly. They cost so little that I sometimes wish I’d bought dozens of them, taken them home and turned them into some sort of sculpture. I remember being in a gas station in Yuma, Arizona and trying to buy a couple of toy Beetles they had for sale at the counter, but they didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked to buy ‘those Beetles over there’ since they, of course, only knew them as Bugs.

Some of the models in my collection are extremely good, beautifully detailed, made by real craftsmen. Others are very crude, mass produced, designed to be thrown away. But they are all welcome. One of the thrills of these crude representations is to see just how inaccurate a model of a Beetle may be and yet still remain, recognisably, unmistakably, a Beetle. Quality is not a matter of complete indifference to me, but the essential concern is variety and diversity. And this must surely be the reason for collecting anything; a means of asserting difference in a world of mass duplication.

The twenty-odd million real Volkswagen Beetles that have been produced clearly resemble each other in all the important ways; their lines, their profile, their layout. Despite changes in engine capacity or window shape or headlight design, they have far more similarities than they have differences. A Beetle standing alone is one thing, but whenever two or three stand side by side we are able to compare and contrast, to see the different interpretations and patinas wrought upon the cars. Even if the owner doesn’t actively personalise or customise the Beetle directly, it becomes unique by virtue of dents, scrapes and resprays. This is a means by which we humanise a machine.

♦

In 1992 I was telephoned by Catherine Bennett of the Guardian who was writing an article on collecting and collectors. When the article appeared she quoted me as follows:

“I think collecting’s a weird thing, a very uncreative activity,” says Geoff Nicholson, though he has a growing heap of toy Volkswagen Beetles. “I suppose in the real world I’d quite like to collect real Volkswagens, and having models of them kind of puts you in control of a very tiny world. It sounds sort of pathetic and twisted doesn’t it?”

I think I’m prepared to stand by this. However, several things need to be said. First, I’m not sure I do want to own a collection of real Volkswagens. Owning real cars is a demanding, frustrating and expensive business. They go wrong, they need constant attention, and even when looked after properly they still deteriorate and decay. A collection of models or memorabilia doesn’t. It remains intact and, with a modicum of luck, becomes increasingly valuable. Secondly, being in control of a tiny world seems to me exactly what a novelist does so perhaps it isn’t so pathetic and twisted after all. And thirdly, it is an outrage to suggest that my Beetle collection is a ‘growing heap’. My Volkswagens are cherished, loved, kept on shelves, in boxes and display cabinets, so that my flat, it might well be said, looks like a still life with Volkswagens.