Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

♦

Ishmael was beginning to be the good guy. All right, so he’d lied through his teeth, but there is more than one way to defeat the forces of night, more than one symbolic act that can be performed. And he knew that he’d handled the press with considerable panache and charm, and as he stood there addressing his public, with reporters hanging on his words, recording them and writing them down, he felt very at home.

Night fell. The siege continued. The police trained lights on the house. Marilyn’s father and the Crockenfield Blazers were quiet for most of the night, but they would let off occasional random shots to show they were still in business.

Inside ‘Sorrento’ the siege victims gathered round the television. Recordings of Ishmael’s interview were on every bulletin. He watched himself with pleasure. He was somewhat masked by Marilyn and the sound was poor, but taking all the difficulties into consideration, he thought it was great television.

The media were now telling a simple and appealing story. Ishmael and his followers, whom the television news had dubbed the Children of Enlightenment, or even C of E, were harmless but eccentric zealots who had popped in on Andrew Lederer just at the very moment that he had gone completely off his head and started wanting to shoot everything in sight. If a passing policeman hadn’t raised the alarm there might well have been an orgy of death.

Fat Les sat in a swivel chair, drinking neat gin, and reflected that the part about the orgy of death was all too true, and he knew whose death it was likely to have been.

After a clip of Ishmael speaking there was a studio discussion with a couple of MPs and a psychiatrist and they offered the opinion that with the pressure of modern politics being so extreme it was a wonder that some politician hadn’t snapped before now.

♦

Renata and Max, her current — for want of a better word — lover, sit on Max’s tubular steel settee. They have drinks, joints, and a hand inside each other’s clothing. It is late. The Abbey Road album is on the stereo and they are watching, as they often do, a sample from Max’s extensive collection of blue videos.

♦

Night passed slowly in ‘Sorrento’. Ishmael talked with Fat Les.

‘You know,’ Fat Les said, ‘I think we were all fucking insane to be conned by your glib tongue in the first place.’

‘You weren’t conned,’ Ishmael replied calmly.

‘What could we have hoped to achieve? How could we have hoped to take on this lot? They’re armed for Christ’s sake!’

‘Winning and losing aren’t the only issues. Win or lose it would still have been symbolic.’

‘Symbolic, my arse.’

‘You had your free will, Les. You didn’t have to do what I asked.’

♦

Max adjusts the contrast as the film, which has no titles, shudders into life. There is an external establishing shot of a supermarket. A young, wholesome-looking girl in a fur coat is seen to enter. We enter with her and see her wandering between the rows of merchandise, selecting items and slipping them under her coat. The camera lets us glimpse that she is naked beneath the coat — well, functionally naked, naked but for the high heels, suspender belt and stockings that this genre demands.

She selects items carefully for their phallic nature — a cucumber, bananas, a bottle of ketchup. This goes on for a while until a man (a customer? store detective? supermarket employee? — the film fails to make this clear) begins to follow her up and down the aisles.

The glimpses of nakedness which were previously just for the camera are now directed at the man, and the girl becomes increasingly teasing and explicit. She runs the cucumber up and down her thigh and pokes it around in her pubic region. The man takes the hint and before long he is penetrating her with a handily shaped bottle of olive oil.

The girl comes to a rapid, faked, orgasm.

♦

Dawn arrived on punctured tyres. Ishmael stood in the library with Davey.

Davey said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘Go on, my son.’

‘I know fuck-all about martial arts. I enrolled for the course all right, but the teacher slung me out after two lessons. The wanker said I didn’t have any aptitude for the spiritual dimension.’

‘Oh Davey, Davey.’

On the landing Ishmael met John the Hippy. He looked downcast. Ishmael asked what was the matter.

‘I wish we’d never given you that acid,’ he said.

Harold the former bank manager walked by.

‘I still say we can make a fight of it,’ he said.

‘Bollocks,’ said the Norton twins.

As soon as it was light there was another meeting with the press. It was less dramatic than the previous one. Ishmael said he’d passed a peaceful night and had scrambled egg for breakfast. He was lying. The reporters at the gate held up the morning editions of their newspapers. Marilyn and Ishmael appeared on the front pages of most of them and one headline read ‘HOSTAGES OF LOVE-.

This time the reporters wanted to talk to Marilyn. She had washed her hair and done her make-up; for the occasion. She said she still loved her father, that she thought Ishmael was a very unusual and interesting man, and that her ambition in life was to be a writer.

They appeared on both morning television channels, and there was film of the Crockenfield Blazers holed-up in various locations around the grounds of ‘Sorrento’, though there were conspicuously fewer this morning than there had been the previous afternoon.

♦

Hitler’s nights have been pretty ragged lately, and his wedding night is no different. There are conferences to be held, attempts made at establishing radio contact, plans to be discussed, fires of hope to be stoked, traitors to be denounced. He therefore sleeps little, and when he does so it is not until late the next morning. He eventually falls asleep at seven or eight in the morning to be woken a few hours later by the sound of renewed shelling. He gets up, dresses with the utmost care and correctness, then takes breakfast — coffee and a selection of cakes, chocolate, sponge — party food.

The morning after his wedding he is seated in his study, under a picture of Frederick the Great, waiting for his breakfast to be delivered. Fraulein Manzialy arrives with a tray which is covered by a pink gingham cloth. She removes the cloth with a flourish and presents Adolf Hitler with an exquisite chocolate cake in the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle.

♦

There is a jump in the film and we now see the man and the girl riding in an open car. (Renata cannot fail to notice that it is a rather special Beetle cabriolet, in red metalflake with some tasteful black pinstriping.) On the back seat there are two boxes of groceries, and in the front seats the girl drives with one hand while manipulating her passenger’s cock with the other. There is some rapid editing which offends exact continuity and before long, before very long at all, the man is ejaculating furiously and copiously, and there is sperm dancing across the dashboard, on to the windscreen, on the gear lever, everywhere.

♦

The SAS arrived at ‘Sorrento’ at about ten in the morning. There were helicopters and men hanging from rope ladders and leaping on to the roof. There were smoke bombs, stun grenades and a few rounds of automatic fire. It all took about forty-five seconds.

Very little of the action could be seen from inside the house, but when some of the smoke had cleared it was possible to see Marilyn’s father and half a dozen Crockenfield Blazers being led away, their hands up, their eyes watering, and surrounded by armed SAS men in flak suits with black bags over their heads. Marilyn’s father was put in an ambulance and the others were loaded into a black maria.