Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

Next day the King is a little surprised to see the dune buggy still parked on the drive. Once he’s shot a car it generally isn’t much use for anything. He sends for his mechanic and tells him to get rid of the car, how it let him down yesterday.

“Oh, but I took care of it,” the mechanic explains. “It was just the starter motor. They can be temperamental. I fitted a new one, Mr Presley.”

Elvis laughs at him, one of those dirty, mocking, good ol’ boy, Southern laughs.

“It ain’t the starter motor that’s the problem,” Elvis says. “Problem is, I fired a couple of slugs into the critter.”

“Yeah, I know that sir, but it’s no problem,” says the mechanic. “These cars have bullet-proof engines. That’s the way Adolf Hitler wanted ‘em.”

“Adolf Hitler drove a Volkswagen?” Elvis asks.

“He sort of invented it, sir.”

Elvis scratches his armpit inside the white robes.

“You know,” he says, “I thought there was something kinda funny about these things.”

The engine block from that dune buggy, complete with two bullet scars, is, according to rumour, one of the more minor treasures to be found in Carlton Bax’s famous locked room.

It is a quiet afternoon at Fat Volkz Inc, quiet enough that Les can leave work, get in his Transit van, drive along the Essex coast, find a quiet spot and spend a long time staring out to sea. He realises this is probably a sign of creeping middle age. The beach was once a place for playing football, chasing girls and kicking sand in people’s faces — not that he ever did any of these things with much success — but now it has become a place to be alone, a place of peace, tranquillity and spiritual solace. He finds that pretty bloody strange. In the good old days he wouldn’t have known spiritual solace if it had come up and kneed him in the kidneys, but he’s wise enough to accept it now that it’s here.

Les walks along the beach for a mile or so. The weather is blustery and wet. He feels his face reddening in the wind but he doesn’t mind that. He stops walking, sits down on a patch of shingle, and looks out to sea. Small fishing boats and windsurfers scud across the scratched surface of the water. Les feels meditative, content, hypnotised.

He sits like that for a long while, his head clear of thoughts or of any sense of time, so that when he finally looks up he has no idea how long the stranger has been standing beside him. Les’s first impression is that this could well be another police presence. The man is bulky, heavy, stern. He has authority and toughness, and a complete lack of good humour. But when Les looks more closely there are one or two little touches that seem a shade too rococo for the police, the cowboy boots, the belt buckle in the shape of a dog’s skull, the fancy jewellery. None of this looks like plain clothes. But most alarming of all is the scar that runs down from the left corner of his mouth. Something about him scares the hell out of Les.

“Volkswagens,” the stranger says. “They’re great items, aren’t they?”

“If you like that sort of thing,” Les replies.

“Well, I’m sure you do. Aren’t you Fat Les the Veedub King?”

Les nods, not enthusiastically.

The stranger says, “So how do you explain these exploding Beetles?”

“I don’t,” says Les. “I don’t have to.”

“But what kind of maniac do you imagine would do a thing like that?” the stranger asks.

“Just your run of the mill kind of maniac, I guess.”

“If I got my hands on the person doing it. Well…you can imagine.”

Les thinks perhaps it is best not to.

“Adolf Hitler’s favourite car, you know,” says the stranger.

“So I hear, but that’s not why I got into them,” Les replies.

“Adolf Hitler is much misunderstood,” the stranger says. “He knew a lot about the human spirit. He conceived the Beetle. He built the autobahns. He had unfailing dress sense.”

“Oh please,” says Les.

“You don’t think there’s something eye-catching about jackboots, Nazi uniforms, death’s head insignia?”

Les can’t quite understand why this conversation has such marked similarities to the one he had earlier with Cheryl Bronte. As far as that goes, he can’t for the life of him understand why he’s having this conversation at all.

“I’ve never been a snappy dresser,” Fat Les says.

“No,” says the stranger, looking Les over and adjusting the lines of his own suit. “I can see that.”

Les gets to his feet. “Well, I’d best be getting on.”

“No,” says the stranger. “Not until we’ve discussed something.”

Les wonders if he could make a run for it and get to his van. Something tells him this guy isn’t going to be very easy to shake off. He decides he’d better listen to the ‘discussion’.

“Go on then,” says Les.

“My name’s Phelan.”

Les wonders if he ought to be impressed.

“A good friend of mine, well I say a good friend, I tend to think of her more as a sex slave actually, well, she had a bit of a prang in her Volkswagen. Some bastard in a Ford Transit reversed into her. Made a real mess of the car. It’s going to take a skilled craftsman to get it back to normal.”

“I bet,” says Les.

“Is that perhaps the kind of job you could do?”

“Yes,” says Les.

“And could you do it for me cheap?”

“Good work never comes cheap,” says Les.

“I suppose not. Nevertheless, I think I’d like you to do the repair work for me, Les. I’d like you to do a good job at a reasonable price. In fact I’d like you to do it for free. That’ll be all right won’t it Les?”

“I don’t know about that,” says Les.

“Oh, I think you do.”

He grasps Les rather insinuatingly by the shoulder and says, “I’ll tell her to drop the car in. Don’t let me down, Les.”

“Okay,” says Les a little hoarsely. His mouth feels unusually dry.

“I won’t be around for a little while Les. But don’t worry. I’ll be thinking about you. We’ll have another talk just as soon as I get back. I could have all sorts of work to put your way.”

♦

Marilyn’s mother has been drinking. There is nothing unusual about that. Marilyn’s mother is famous for her drinking. She’s famous for being extrovert, for being the life and soul of any and every party. It is a rainy summer night. She walks down the street, she wiggles, she teeters, she giggles at some joke known only to herself. She feels just fine. She knows she drinks too much. She knows it is no good for her body, but she thinks it could all be a lot worse. She could be addicted to much more dangerous things, like tranquillisers or sleeping pills or heroin for heaven’s sake. Whereas in the current arrangement she’s only addicted to drink and sex.

She thinks her husband must be to blame for this. He never had enough time for her. He would say he had to spend all night sittings in the House, and his weekends were always taken up with constituency matters. She was left alone. He didn’t want her there, didn’t even want her to play the good MP’s wife. She was sure he had affairs. She imagined a mistress installed in a studio flat around the corner from the House. She imagined him bedding various female members of the Party faithful. She began to take her revenge.

She began by seducing one or two of Charles’s closer friends. The fact that she was married to their crony seemed to be a large part of her attraction for them. They were enthusiastic, sometimes grateful, always discreet. But discretion somehow wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be wild and scandalous. Rather than enthusiastic, grateful Tories, she decided to plump for dodgy strangers; gardeners, builders, postmen, barmen. When she is particularly drunk and feeling particularly needy she has even been known to offer herself to cab drivers. They always accept. She sits in the cab, on the edge of her seat, loosens her clothing, tells them she is lonely, that her husband is away, that she needs some sympathetic company. Sometimes she invites them into the house at the end of the journey, but more often they drive to some secluded place and do it quickly and fiercely in the back of the cab.