Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

Great advice even if it doesn’t rhyme.

♦

By 29 April 1945 Hitler has heard that Mussolini and Clara Petacci are dead and that their bodies are hanging in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. He will make sure that he does not end the same way. At the very end it is Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, who is ordered to send two hundred litres of petrol to the Chancellery garden to immolate the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun.

Russian shells burst around the Chancellery, some unidentifiable figures stand in the garden, giving a Nazi salute. A sheet of flame leaps angrily, futilely at the sky, some failed emblem of escape.

♦

At Fox’s Farm a dozen or so sullen communards are eating curried egg while watching television. Their eyes are intent but they see only patterns and shapes. They hear words but the words don’t arrange themselves into comprehensible patterns. The curry tastes of everything and nothing. They are smashed out of their heads.

In one of the farm’s outbuildings, behind locked doors, Fat Les has spent the evening lowering a tarted Cal-look Beetle. He starts the engine. The space begins to fill with carbon monoxide. It wouldn’t be so hard after all. He turns on the car radio. There is a phone-in programme on Parkinson’s disease. He changes station. No Wagner, instead there is The Who, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. He turns off the engine. Not worth it for the sake of that little shit Ishmael.

♦

An old man’s hands on a steering wheel, the skin mottled with liver spots, the wheel bound in textured leather. Ivan Hirst parks his BMW in a lay-by on the A57. Cars go by. Pretty people. Tanks full of petrol, heads full of lager and materialism. In-car stereos pump out middle-of-the-road music. Ivan Hirst lights his pipe, unwraps a Yorkie bar. It’s a full life.

♦

Marilyn sits at her newly acquired word-processor. She is home from Oxford for the weekend. She is attempting to be a writer. Her fingers magic-up words on the screen.

To the Germans it is the Kafer, to the Dutch the Kever. Yugoslavians speak of the Buba, the French of the Coccinelle. But by any name be it Bug or Beetle, or Maggliolino, or Escarabajo, or Fusca, the Volkswagen sits at the crossroads of history, roads that lead to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to the concentration camp and the atomic bomb site. And there at these crossroads stood I, hand in hand with Ishmael…

§

She hears her mother downstairs. A clink of glass, a rattle of ice cubes. Mummy is making Martinis. Marilyn decides to join her.

♦

Renata is the proud driver of a Porsche 911. She has handed in her notice at Cult Car . She doesn’t know what career she will fail in next but she has enough money from the sale of Ishmael’s story for this not to be a pressing concern.

♦

Renata did slip Ishmael a few hundred pounds out of her fee. He used it to rent a caravan on a small site near Filey.

It was late in the year. The weather was cold and the rent was cheap. Enlightenment was parked beside the caravan. He didn’t use it much any more. Sometimes he would sit in the driver’s seat, the engine not running, his hands on the wheel, his mind full of old dreams. He was not ‘home’ but there was nowhere else he wanted to be.

He cooked simple meals on the Calor gas stove. Sometimes he walked by the sea. Sometimes he listened to the radio. Sometimes he read a motoring magazine. Time passed, but not quickly.

Then one day he was sitting on the step of his caravan when a red Ford Capri approached. It stopped at the entrance to the site and a woman got out. Ishmael knew her. He ought to have done. It was Debby. She had never looked better. She was fashionably dressed. She had had her hair done short and stylish. She had also evidently learned to drive.

‘Debby,’ he said, when she reached the caravan.

‘Barry,’ she said.

They touched hands and soon found themselves in a passionate embrace, holding each other desperately. They went into the caravan, took their clothes off and got into the narrow bunk.

And then Debby did a most uncharacteristic thing. Before Ishmael knew where he was there were torrents of hot semen coursing like molten lava down Debby’s moist, yielding, eager throat. She kissed him thickly on the mouth, leaving his lips streaked with his own sperm.

‘Oh Debby,’ Ishmael said. ‘There was Mount Fujiyama in my own carport the whole time, but I had to travel very far before I knew where home was.’

‘Barry,’ Debby said after a moment’s consideration, ‘you do talk a lot of crap.’

That was the nicest thing anybody had said to him for a very long time.

EOF