Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

She loves it, this rapid association, this desperate coming together, the sense of transgression, of wickedness, a stranger touching her with dirty hands, his cock suddenly in her. Then it’s all over, and she’s left feeling used, soiled, wonderful. But she is not totally indiscriminate. She never goes for unlicensed mini cab drivers; only for drivers of black cabs, men with the Knowledge.

Lately she has come to the conclusion that perhaps poor Charles wasn’t really having affairs at all. She has decided he was probably a genuinely dedicated politician who worked too hard for his own and his family’s good. His mental breakdown and subsequent lengthy incarceration seem to have proved this, but now it is too late. She did not do right by Charles and she knows it. However, life must go on. She has tried hard to forgive herself, and in the main she has succeeded.

She has always felt sorry for Charles, but she was never sorry enough to want to visit him very often in the Mercy Seat, she usually left that to Marilyn. Now that he’s out on the loose somewhere, she prefers not to think about him at all. She knows it will only depress her and she hates to be depressed.

The cool, wet air fails to sober her up. It’s hard to get a cab. A few splash past but they’re all occupied. She decides to shelter for a moment and stands under the canopy of a hotel entrance. She continues to watch the street for taxis. Suddenly a young black man comes out of the lobby. She’s not sure what it is about him, but somehow he looks like a taxi driver. In fact it is Zak, Fat Les’s unsatisfied customer, and he works in the hotel as a bar steward. He needs to do all the work he can in order to pay off his car loan and he has just finished a double shift.

She says to him, “Excuse me, are you a black cab driver?” and he thinks to himself, “Well I’m black and I’m a driver. Two out of three can’t be bad.”

“Where do you want to go?” he asks.

She says Crockenfield, a good twenty miles away. The cab fare there would cost a fortune, and Zak is in need of a fortune.

“It’ll cost,” he says.

“Money’s no object,” she replies.

He tells her to follow him, his car’s round the back of the hotel. She walks beside him, takes his arm. She notices his biceps are hard and thick. She thinks this is going to be fun.

They come to a row of parked cars and she can see there isn’t a black cab amongst them. She realises she must have made a mistake, though she suspects it isn’t such a terrible one. Oh well, she thinks, even if he doesn’t have a black cab she’ll go along with it, just so long as it’s a reasonably smart new mini cab in good condition. If it’s some scruffy, tatty old thing she’ll turn on her heel and depart. Then she sees that her driver is heading straight for a Volkswagen Beetle. Her immediate reaction is to be offended. Who does he think she is? Does she really look like the sort of woman who accepts rides in strange Volkswagens? But then she looks at the car more closely. Volkswagens have been much on her mind of late, one way or another, and now that she sees it more clearly, it isn’t quite as objectionable as she first imagined. It is a pretty spiffy looking Beetle. It has been lowered and painted in metallic turquoise and peppermint green. Oh well, she thinks, this might be a night to remember after all.

She gets into the car. The interior is roomier than she would have imagined and it smells rather sweetly of incense and musk. They have only gone a mile or so when she begins to unbutton her cerise silk blouse and says, “It’s not such a bad body, is it?”

Zak is enough of a gentleman to say, when he’s recovered from the shock, “No, it’s very nice.”

“Why don’t you take a better look,” she says, and she lifts one of her breasts out of her bra for him to see.

“It’s a bit tricky while I’m driving.”

“I understand that you have to keep your eyes on the road,” she says, “but you could always use your sense of touch.”

She takes his left hand and places it on her left breast. They both become aware of her nipple getting hard and pointed.

“What exactly have you got in mind?” Zak asks, and then he takes his hand away because he has to change gear. He does not put it back immediately.

“Well,” she replies, “I was thinking we could find some dark alley and you could park the car and fuck me like a beast.”

“You want me to do that?”

“Now that you mention it, I think I do.”

“Why?”

It seems an absurd question but she doesn’t object to a little shyness in a lover.

“You’re a very sexy man,” she says.

“How can you say that when you don’t even know me?”

“I don’t want to know you. I just want to fuck you.”

“Why?” he asks again.

“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t know; because you’ve got a nice face.”

She sort of means it. He does have a nice face, although that wouldn’t be strictly necessary for the kind of transaction she has in mind.

“I know why it is,” he says. “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”

She is wise enough not to answer. She would have been happy enough to have sex with a white cab driver if one had presented himself, but there’s no denying that this young man’s black skin would add a certain frisson. However, she can tell this is not what he wants to hear.

“I get pretty sick of it actually,” he says. “I get pretty sick of that whole racial, sexual thing, you know, that black men are supposed to be studs with big cocks and that white middle class women go to bed with them as a way of debauching and degrading themselves. I find that all pretty sick and objectionable, as a matter of fact.”

She is surprised by the vehemence of his response, but she has no objection to vehemence.

“It wasn’t your blackness that made me decide to have sex with you,” she says.

“No?” he sneers. “What was it then?”

“If you must know, it was your car.”

“Really?” he asks.

“Yes really.”

“You’re not winding me up?”

“No.”

“Well in that case…”

A few minutes later Zak’s Volkswagen Beetle is parked in an alleyway behind a freezer centre in Streatham, and Marilyn’s mother is being quite extraordinarily friendly to him. Zak is a big man and the car is too cramped to allow the full repertoire of sexual movements, and he has to be content with fellatio. He is soon very content indeed.

♦

Debby has always had the good sense not to try introducing Barry to her friends at the building society. They’re a good and lively bunch and she likes them very much, but she wouldn’t want to inflict Barry on them. She often goes out with them after work on the evenings when she isn’t seeing Barry. In the early days they used to encourage her to bring him along but now they know better. There are occasional campaigns to fix her up with a new, more socialised man, but Debby says, with absolute accuracy, that after Barry most men in the world seem a little ordinary.

She has been thinking about what Barry said to her about their possible futures. He had it quite wrong when he thought she might be looking for a settled, materialistic future. She isn’t looking for a nice house and a nice car, and she certainly isn’t looking for a man to provide them for her, and children do not figure at all in her scheme of things. However, since Barry pressed her into thinking about her hopes and needs, it has been brought home to her that she wouldn’t at all mind widening her horizons a little, the building society and the caravan site making for a rather limiting ambit. However, she would be delighted to share that wider horizon with Barry. She doesn’t want to become Marco Polo but she would quite like to get out and about a bit more. A foreign holiday would do nicely for starters, and she’d even be prepared to pay for him.