Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

‘Sounds like a good thing, sir.’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Sir?’

♦

Marilyn’s mother received Ishmael in the library. It seemed ironic, yet appropriate. She insisted on talking to him alone. Davey had to wait in the kitchen.

She was wearing a blue velour tracksuit, high heels and a lot of gold jewellery. Her hair and face firmly in place. It wasn’t the natural look, but Ishmael supposed it was all right. She was a good-looking woman in her way. Like mother, like daughter, Ishmael mused.

She was standing in the library with a copy of The Boys from Brazil in one hand and a large glass in the other. Ishmael couldn’t tell what was in the glass but from the way she treated it it was precious, it was alcoholic, and there was plenty of it. She didn’t offer Ishmael any of it.

‘Is Ishmael your real name?’

‘It’s real enough.’

‘Marilyn’s told us so much about you. We did rather seem to get off on the wrong foot last time.’

Ishmael relived the hammer hitting him in the groin.

‘Rather.’

‘We do worry about Marilyn.’

‘You think I don’t?’

‘I suspect you do, but hardly in the same way, I feel.’

‘I think my feelings are likely to be superior to any of yours, madam.’

Marilyn’s mother dropped her glass. It smashed. Ice cubes, drink, a slice of lemon and splinters of glass bounced around on the polished wood floor.

‘Would you be an angel and pick that up for me, Ishmael?’

He didn’t see how he could refuse. He knelt and started gathering the debris.

‘You are kind,’ she said.

Then she clubbed him over the head with a soda syphon.

♦

Radclyffe says, ‘We’ve just bombed the factory into absolute buggery. But, frankly, it’s the only decent bit of vehicle plant that we British have got. Oh yes, the bloody Americans carved it up very nicely for themselves. The American Zone just happens to contain the Mercedes, the Opel and the BMW factories, while the Russian Zone also has a BMW factory and an Auto Union plant at Zwickau.

‘We’re left with a more than half-bombed factory, and a pretty half-baked prototype.’

‘I don’t think, with respect, that you’re being quite fair, sir. The prototype seems viable enough. They certainly seemed to be quite acceptable as war vehicles. Damned sturdy little beasts they are too, I’d say.’

Colonel Radclyffe allows himself a smile of gentle satisfaction.

‘I see,’ he says. ‘So you know a good deal more about these vehicles than you were prepared to admit.’

♦

Things moved rather rapidly for Ishmael, though he was in no state to be aware of the fact. He wasn’t even conscious for some of it.

He felt the blow on the back of the head and more or less passed out, though he did have certain memories of various kinds of pain being inflicted on him while he was on the floor of the library so the unconsciousness could not have been absolute. Then he was outside the house and Marilyn’s mother was attacking Enlightenment with a fierce and drunken passion. She had a sledge-hammer which she used to telling effect on every panel of the car. Pieces of chrome and glass showered from it. She had some trouble smashing the windscreen, but not too much trouble.

Ishmael saw this wrecking through a haze of concussion, and then he was bundled behind the wheel. There was much screaming along the lines of ‘Never darken my doorstep again’ and as a parting shot Marilyn’s mother called Ishmael a sexual inadequate which he thought was unnecessary and unfair.

She returned to the house and slammed the door behind her. She probably needed a drink.

♦

‘Only an interested layman’s knowledge, sir,’ says Hirst. ‘Honestly.’

‘So, Hirst, what we have is a prototype which you are obviously rather enthusiastic about and obviously think is viable, a factory as described, and a gang of crazed POWs. Though, of course, they’re ‘Displaced Persons’ now. And this is precisely where you come in.’

♦

The servant woman who had been watching the show came over to the car to speak to Ishmael. He had no need to wind down a window, Marilyn’s mother had smashed that too.

‘You really ought to be getting along now, don’t you think?’ said the woman.

Ishmael agreed.

And then he heard the tyres of a Rolls-Royce turning into the drive. It was Marilyn’s father. Ishmael was filled with remorse. If only he had waited. If only he hadn’t rushed into a quick and futile confrontation with Marilyn’s mother.

Still he was not defeated. He threw open the door of Enlightenment and crossed unsteadily to the Rolls. Marilyn’s father stepped out of his car.

‘You again,’ he said.

‘Me,’ said Ishmael.

Ishmael put out his hand. Marilyn’s father more or less shook it. Ishmael knew he had to speak, to speak eloquently and boldly, to strike a man’s heart and to change that man’s mind.

‘Sir,’ he began. ‘May I call you sir? I want from you something that is the richest prize a man can have, and yet a prize that no man can own. I speak of Marilyn. And please don’t think I want to take her away from you, at least not emotionally. She will be with you always, in your heart and mind, and you in hers, if you let her be free to find her secret self…’

Marilyn’s father wasn’t especially attentive through most of the speech. He went to the boot of his car and started to take something out of it. Ishmael felt his audience slipping away from him.

‘Sir, I want your daughter. Give me her hand. Give me her all.’

Marilyn’s father had lost interest. Ishmael had lost more than that.

It was a shotgun that Marilyn’s father had been getting from the boot of the Rolls-Royce. He loaded it. He looked about to use it. Ishmael had never faced a man with a gun before, but if he couldn’t have Marilyn, what did it matter?

‘Do your worst!’ he cried.

♦

‘Where precisely do I come in, sir?’

‘The British army will be working alongside a group of international flotsam and jetsam, some of them on the brink of madness and starvation. Your Belgian stint should stand you in good stead. Admittedly there’s not much fuel or food or raw materials, and nobody’s going to think very much the worse of you if you decide after a few months that the whole thing was a rotten idea in the first place. But, at the least, your job is to get some vehicles repaired so that our men can use them, get these DPs working, and while you’re at it see if you can’t knock together a few of these people’s cars. We’re crying out for any sort of motorized transport, and I was thinking that one of these Beetle things might make a rather agreeable staff car.

‘See any problem at all, Hirst?’

‘No, sir,’ says Hirst wearily.

‘I’ve arranged some transport for you, Hirst.’

♦

Marilyn’s father paced over to Enlightenment, opened the engine cover and emptied the contents of his shotgun into the air-cooled flat-four unit.

‘You’re the clever little sod who made off with my wallet,’ he said, as though this explained something, then he too went into the house.

‘You really will have to be going now,’ the servant lady said.

Ishmael returned to his driver’s seat and took off the handbrake. The car rolled down the slope of the drive, through the gates and on to the road. It drifted gently and unpowered for a hundred yards or more along Hawk’s Lane. As the road sloped downhill it started to gain speed. He tried to brake. There were no brakes. He wrestled with the steering, tried to pull on the handbrake, and put the car in a ditch. It seemed as good a place as any.

Ishmael slumped over the wheel. His arm rested on the horn boss. The horn didn’t work either.