Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

Let’s blast those suckers.

They’re going to have to die. Every one of them. All of us in the end, but some of them first. It’s only a gesture but it’s a start.

It’s obvious.

Marilyn’s father knew what he was talking about. He would. He’s got his contacts. The time for talk is past. There are to be no prisoners. No surrender.

The slugs in the library. The velour tracksuit.

Kill the fuckers. Starting now.

Don’t think I can write any more just at the moment…

The record continues,

I wanna be free

Don’t need no more deception

I wanna clean-living girl

With no social infection

I wanna Ford Capri

That’s got fuel injection.

Renata takes the record off before the fuzzed guitar solo cuts in. If they have ever written ‘em like that before she suspects they won’t be writing ‘em like that very much longer. She turns the television on. There is a young black reporter standing in front of a wrecked car in a rural setting. The car could be a Range Rover. The reporter looks ill at ease, like someone only acting the part of a reporter, someone who has been hopelessly miscast.

He says, ‘The sleepy village of Crockenfield was literally rocked last night. This house’ (there is a shot of a large detached house with grounds) ‘called ‘Sorrento’ and owned by Mr Andrew Lederer was fire-bombed, cars such as the one behind me were set alight, there was a chase, shots were fired. Why?

‘The attack was apparently motiveless, nothing was stolen and in the end nobody was hurt, although that in itself seems miraculous. And the only clue is that the attackers left the village in a supercharged Volkswagen Beetle.

‘More curious still, I’ve spent most of the day here in Crockenfield and haven’t been able to find anyone prepared to talk about the episode.

‘Mr Lederer says he is too busy to speak to the media and claims it was merely youthful high spirits on the part of some of his daughter’s friends.

‘Where is his daughter by the way? And how is it that his attractive blonde wife managed to sleep through the entire episode?

‘Here is Constable William Peterson…’

A tense young Constable speaks direct to camera.

‘We heard shots, an explosion or two, and then we saw this Volkswagen leaving the scene at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. Basically we’re baffled.’

Renata feels it would not take very much to basically baffle Constable Peterson. The reporter appears on screen again.

He says, ‘Who fired those shots? Is there some strange vendetta that stalks the village of Crockenfield? Is there a political motive? And just who is hiding what from whom?

‘This is Dudley Johnson, Kent at Six, Crockenfield.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Renata.

♦

Later, Ishmael would be told that it can sometimes take years to recover from a particularly bad trip. In his own case he was unable to leave the boarding house for a few days. Marilyn was a tower of strength. She sat with him a lot, stroked his head, brought him food, and tried to talk him back to normality.

♦

Renata tries to remember more about her hitch-hiker. She recalls the leather jacket, the ghetto-blaster, and some talk of a friend who was mad on Beetles, then a lot of nonsense about a damsel in distress. If she were a real newshound, a real pro, she would be on the phone, in her car, solving the mystery, getting the story, getting a scoop, getting on in her career. If she were even a decent, concerned citizen she would phone the police and give a description of her hitch-hiker.

What she actually does is take a piece of paper from her bureau and scrawl on it:

FACT: The sleepy village of Crockenfield was rocked earlier this month when the home of Mr Andrew Lederer was mysteriously fire-bombed. Police were baffled. The only clue was that the attackers were driving a hot Volkswagen Beetle.

What the hell? She was never claiming to be Norman Mailer. She goes into her bathroom, turns on the immersion heater and decides to leave the phone call to her mother until another day. She decides she needs something stronger to drink than apple juice. She looks at what she has just written.

‘Only another twenty-nine facts to go,’ she says contentedly.

♦

Marilyn had done a marvellous job of reasoning with the landlady of the boarding house. She explained Ishmael’s loud behaviour, his screams, his breaking of the bathroom mirror, and his loudly proclaimed threats to blow up Brighton with his psychic powers, by saying that he had been in the Falklands and had a close friend blown up by an Argentinian mine. She knew the Falklands didn’t have the same cachet as Vietnam but nobody could have mistaken Ishmael for an American vet.

The landlady was pacified at least for a few days. Then Ishmael developed the habit of waking at three in the morning and screaming ‘Kill the parasites’. The landlady put up with it for three nights, and the intensity of his screams was considerably lower by the third night, but then she threw them, very politely, out.

Many girls would feel they had made a mistake if they were taken from home in a petrol-bombing raid and finished up in a Brighton boarding house looking after an acid casualty. Not Marilyn. She took it all in her stride. She took a lot of notes. Ishmael would lie on the bed, listening to the traffic noise, while Marilyn filled reporters’ notebooks with very small handwriting. She had a feeling it might be useful later.

♦

The putty features of Marty Feldman stare out from a newspaper ad for Volkswagen. The skin is grainy, the mouth soft, the eyes pointing to different corners of the page. The ad asserts that since Marty Feldman is extremely ugly his success must be based on talent alone — just like the Volkswagen. Not just a pretty face.

But it’s worth remembering that Feldman’s is a comedian’s face and that a certain ugliness is something that many comedians trade on. Marty Feldman would not have become a successful romantic star, however talented.

Then again, another Volkswagen ad is headlined, ‘After a few years, it starts to look beautiful.’

Bill Bernbach has other things on his mind. He is working on a campaign for the second most successful car-hire company in America. Second most, second best, are hard concepts to sell in America, but he manages—‘We try harder.’

♦

Ishmael and Marilyn were sitting in the cab of the jeep.

‘What do you want to do? Try another boarding house?’

‘OK,’ Ishmael replied.

‘Would you like to go to Hastings? Lewes? Day trip to France?’

Ishmael shrugged.

‘Anything you like,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Marilyn. ‘Let’s go to Fat Les’s garage. You could see how they are getting on with rebuilding Enlightenment.’

Ishmael smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that.’

‘It’ll do you the world of good,’ said Marilyn.

They were both wrong.

Steve is working at the White Oaks Petrol Station off the A30 in Dorset. It’s rural. There’s a big sign up that says ‘We Serve You’. That’s how rural it is.

In America, he thinks, it would all have been different. In America the job would have had some dignity. ‘Pumping gas’ sounds like a decent job. It even sounds romantic. The American words seem so much better, they sound so much more exciting. Trunks, hoods and fenders don’t sound nearly so trivial as boots, bonnets and bumpers.

Steve has never worked in a petrol station before. He finds it all right. It’s dull but it’s easy. There isn’t much to remember. If anybody tries robbing the till you let them have the money. You mustn’t take a lump out of anybody’s paintwork with the petrol nozzle. And you have to make absolutely sure than nobody uses the toilet who hasn’t bought petrol.