Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

‘I think we’d really better get going,’ he says to Cindy.

‘Am I supposed to know what’s going on here?’

‘Better if you don’t.’

Cindy smiles thinly, turns her eyes to the sky and she drives off.

‘Am I supposed to know where we’re going?’

‘Better if neither of us do.’

They both laugh. They drive in silence for a long time, then Steve says, ‘This is a really nice car. What kind of mileage do you get?’

♦

Here, in a nutshell, as described by Ishmael to the members of Fox’s Farm commune, is The Plan.

He said, ‘There are times when it is necessary to make a gesture. There are times when it is necessary to perform a symbolic act.

‘What do I want my gesture to symbolize?

‘What act do I want to perform?

‘I want to symbolize truth, beauty, goodness, love, light — the usual. I want it to symbolize a triumph over evil, complacency and middle class values.

‘Are you with me so far?

‘The problem — how to find a gesture and an act so powerful, so resonant, so rich in implication, that it can carry and communicate this weight of meaning.

‘Can we blow up the Houses of Parliament? No.

‘Can we cause civil disturbance? No.

‘Can we surround an American Air Force base? No.

‘Why not? Because what is needed is something more aesthetic, more creative, more domestic. More me.

‘I have looked into myself, I have become my own myth. I have plunged down into my own self and I have dredged up from these lower depths the raw material I need for this heroic deed.

‘I think naturally of Enlightenment — a charred hulk, consumed by the fires of evil.

‘I think of Marilyn’s father — a dark one if ever I’ve met one.

‘I think of the Crockenfield Blazers — the serried forces of darkness unless I’m very much mistaken.

‘It all seems very clear to me now. Marilyn’s father and his cronies represent everything that is wrong in this vale of tears, everything that is evil and corrupt and middle class. They dwell in darkness.

‘I know that we must confront that darkness. Let us throw down a challenge. Let us unite ourselves.

‘We will meet them and fight them. Good and evil. Day and night. Heaven and Hell. God and the devil. Me and Marilyn’s father.

‘And if we are beaten? And if we are destroyed? So be it. But at least we’ll have made our point.

‘Symbolic acts are like that.

‘It may not be the final solution, but it’ll do for now.’

Ishmael and Marilyn and Fat Les and Davey stayed at the commune. Ishmael did his best to contribute to commune life but it’s hard to fit in when people insist on treating you like a messiah.

It didn’t worry him, though, since he was heavily concerned with the fine detail of The Plan, as, at one time or another, were most of the other members of the commune. Otherwise they ate, sulked, took drugs and went to work just like ordinary people.

John the Hippy was much as he had been when Ishmael had met him before except he had been using Marilyn’s father’s American Express card to modest but good effect. He now wore a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots, a quartz wrist watch, a silk shirt in flame red, and he carried a top of the range Sony Walkman.

Eric was the name of the tie-wearer who had eventually told Ishmael how to get to Fat Les’s. Eric didn’t get spectacularly less sullen in the time it took to put The Plan into effect and Ishmael learned that he had a career in computers, all of which confirmed his opinion that Eric might not be the man for the big occasion.

The Norton twins, by contrast, looked very handy lads to have on your side. They were probably two very different and very individual boys, but they didn’t seem to be. In fact, Ishmael coyld never tell one from the other. You might have called them Hell’s Angels, certainly they were bikers. They rode big British motorcycles — Nortons, although Ishmael never discovered whether they were actually called Norton or whether that was just a nickname because of the bikes they rode.

They had pot-bellies, beards and long hair and were not the most approachable of people. They didn’t seem to do much except ride their bikes, drink beer, and show their contempt for a pleasingly catholic variety of things — the police, ‘straight’ society, personal cleanliness, the family, drivers of MGs, newspapers and television.

Ishmael sort of liked them.

Tina was the tiny blonde woman who had been so glad to see Ishmael return. She looked about thirteen but could have been forty. Whatever her actual age, she had the distinct air of a runaway. She was very worshipful to Ishmael and he couldn’t help wondering if she liked oral sex.

Caroline was the woman with the nose stud who had talked of being lost. She was very lean, usually carrying some kind of vegetable. Ishmael might once have thought that she had grown it herself organically, but now he assumed it must have been bought at the nearest hypermarket.

‘Are you still lost?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I know anything anymore.’

Mary was the artist. Every commune has to have at least one. She was interested in what you might call natural imagery. Her paintings usually featured the sea and the moon, mountains and suns and deserts, not that they looked like any deserts or mountains or seas that you’d ever actually come across, so Ishmael assumed they had to be symbolic.

He could see there would be a role for her in The Plan.

Harold was sixty. He looked like a derelict bank manager who had dropped out, and that was exactly what he was. He’d taken early retirement and decided to become a hippy. He wasn’t all that much of a hippy. In fact he was another tie-wearer. Sometimes he even wore a suit, but if he did he was sure to subvert the effect by also wearing sandals or hiking boots.

Despite or because of his banking background Harold thought The Plan was a real winner.

There were others who came and went — a white-haired woman who cut everybody’s hair, a pair of teenage punkettes, a Rastafarian in jogging gear who played the harmonica, a couple of used-car salesmen, a female plumber with hair to her waist. They were a chequered crew, but they all saw the good sense of The Plan, and they all loved Ishmael and would follow him anywhere.

♦

Dawn breaks on the morning of 12 September 1974. It is New Year’s Day according to the Ethiopian calendar and in the abandoned Imperial Palace Haile Selassie I listens to the throb of truck engines and the rumble of tank tracks as these vehicles pull into the palace grounds.

It has been a long time coming, this revolution, this deposal by the Provisional Government.

The Emperor receives three battle-dressed soldiers in one of the palace’s less opulent chambers. One of the soldiers reads the act of dethronement, citing despotism, corruption and old age. The soldiers are calm. Their charges are restrained. The ceremony is bloodless.

Haile Selassie is led from the palace and assured that he will be conveyed to a safe place. He is accustomed to being driven in limousines, at the sight of which loyal subjects throw themselves to the ground, but today there is to be no such pomp.

In the driveway is a green Volkswagen Beetle, its engine running, an officer at the wheel. The officer leans over, shoves open the passenger door and tilts the front passenger seat forward so that the Emperor can get in the back.

Until now Haile Selassie has behaved with quiet resignation but this is too much.

‘So it has come to this,’ he protests. ‘Is this really how I am to make my exit? Can you be serious?’ The final indignity.