Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

When Barry took the cover off his Volkswagen she felt quite optimistic. She felt that perhaps they were changing and growing as a couple, that Barry too was feeling a renewed need to be footloose and fancy free, but it hasn’t turned out that way. All he ever does is sit there at the wheel of the damned car, going nowhere. It isn’t enough for her.

Since he brought it up, she realises she’s been more than fair to Barry. There are, she knows, many girlfriends who’d be egging him on to get a job. They’d be asking him to take them out wining, dining and dancing. They’d be criticising him for having no interests, no ambitions, no prospects. But she isn’t like that. She stands by her man. She’s there for him. She takes care of his sexual needs which, while not particularly outrageous, are certainly specific and demanding. Not every girl in the world would do that for him. She still wants him to be happy, she would just like to be a bit happier herself.

She begins in what she thinks is quite a subtle way. She buys a new road atlas and waves it around conspicuously when she’s with Barry. She leaves it lying around open to reveal route planners, mileage charts, maps of town centres. She traces journeys. She makes little pointed comments such as, “Anglesey, now there’s a place I’ve never been to.” She’s trying to fire Barry’s imagination. When all this fails she is reduced to saying, “Why don’t you just have a look at these bloody maps, Barry? We could go somewhere. It wouldn’t kill you. I’d even be prepared to do the driving.”

Barry takes the atlas, holds it, weighs it in his hands, looks at it as though it is an artefact from another time and culture, possibly even from another planet. Then he says, “Wasn’t it E.F. Schumacher who wrote that a man who uses an imaginary map thinking it a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all?”

“But this is a real map,” Debby insists.

“Ah, but what do we mean by real?”

At this point, despite all her considerable love and respect for Barry, she asserts the reality of the atlas by pulling it away from him and beating him over the head with it for a while.

Barry is rather taken aback by this. He says, “Later I’ll forgive you for that, but right now I’m very hurt.”

“Good,” she says, “I’m glad.”

“You’re glad that you hurt me?”

“Yes,” she says, “it’s called being cruel to be kind.”

He looks at her sadly, pathetically, like a lost puppy. So she hits him again, this time to be cruel. It turns out not to be one of their happiest nights together and Barry ends up having to sleep in the back seat of Enlightenment. In some peculiar way he realises that is perhaps what he wanted all along.

♦

Davey has developed a rather ambivalent attitude towards hitchhikers. He has picked up several of them on this trip, and while he doesn’t exactly resent having given them lifts, they have all proved to be very disappointing company. He thought they might be good company and good, chatty conversationalists. In his supremely optimistic moments he has even fantasised about picking up some amazing, young, bony New Age type female who would initiate him into the mysteries of her world. She would surely be prepared to tell him how to go about taking Ecstasy and dancing in a field. It looks like it is not to be.

The incident with the neo-Nazi skinheads remains painfully with him. It appears he was on the edge of something utterly foul. No doubt skinheads would enjoy beating up New Agers in any circumstances but it seems now that the man at the pub, he of the dark suit, silver hair and scar, somehow motivated and organised the lot in the car park. Davey knows he isn’t in any way culpable, and he knows he couldn’t have intervened, but it still disturbs and occasionally depresses him.

What’s more, he hasn’t come across any other New Age travellers. It is beginning to dawn on him that he could spend this whole summer just missing them, driving around the campsites of England like any other boring holidaymaker. Before he set off he liked to think he would have an instinct for finding them, but that has proved to be far from the case. And all this rain hasn’t been helping. No doubt travellers stay put when it rains, and these recent downpours have been so bad that the elevating roof of his camper has sprung a leak in a couple of places.

He is driving along the coast road between Great Yarmouth and Cromer. It isn’t raining at the moment but that looks like a very temporary state of affairs. The road is empty and the sky sags down, and he pulls into a lay-by to stare out at the slate coloured sea. He sits there for some time before he becomes aware of a figure standing at the other end of the lay-by. It is an old man, his face streaked with dirt, his clothes covered in mud. He has no luggage and he is standing bolt upright, but his eyes are closed and Davey realises that the man is asleep on his feet.

It is, of course, Charles Lederer, though Davey doesn’t recognise him. He has no reason to. They only encountered each other briefly and it was a long time ago.

Davey looks at him with a certain distaste. At heart he would prefer not to have such a filthy, disgusting character in his nice clean Volkswagen van, but his failure to play the good Samaritan to the New Age travellers after they’d been beaten up by the skinheads makes him a lot more sympathetic. He sounds his horn. Lederer’s eyes pop open and he is abruptly awake. He looks around him lost and frightened. Slowly he settles and sees that Davey is beckoning him, inviting him to come over to the van. Charles Lederer has even less reason to recognise Davey than Davey has to recognise him, so he ambles slowly over towards the van.

Davey winds down his window and says, “You need a lift?”

“Well, I’m not absolutely certain,” says Lederer, “but I think so, yes.” His voice is exhausted and comes from very far away.

“Where are you going?” Davey asks.

“Where are you going?”

This isn’t the easiest question to answer so Davey says, “Just along the coast a little ways.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be going too.”

It seems to Davey that this is a little presumptuous of the old man, but even as Lederer speaks, he looks in danger of falling asleep again. He looks ill and paper thin and Davey’s heart goes out to him.

“When did you last sleep in a bed?” Davey asks.

After a long pause, “I can’t remember.”

“And when did you last eat?”

“Oh, comparatively recently, certainly in the last few days.”

Davey sees his duty. He opens up the big, sliding side door of the van and tells Charles Lederer to get in and take a seat. Clambering in is a difficult job for his stiff, tired limbs but he makes it. Davey opens a tin of oxtail soup and heats it on the van’s Calor gas stove. He gets bread rolls from the storage compartment under one of the seats and gives them and the soup to Charles Lederer. For a man who has been so long without food he seems peculiarly uneager. Perhaps he is suspicious, or perhaps he just has impeccable table manners.

“This is terribly kind of you,” says Lederer. “Very Christian.”

“I don’t know about that,” says Davey.

“You’re not a Christian?” Lederer asks.

“I don’t know what I am. I think I may be part of a brand new breed, sort of pagan, pantheist, humanist, hedonist.”

“Hedonist?” Lederer repeats.

“Yes, but that’s the hardest part.”

The moment Charles Lederer finishes his soup he slumps in the seat, his head cocks onto his shoulder and he falls asleep again. Davey watches and is moved. He’s glad to be there when he’s needed. He looks closely at his guest and sees that the slippers he’s wearing are split right open. His blazer has lost its buttons and his trousers are held up by safety pins and some rope. Gradually however, Davey also becomes aware that a malevolent odour is seeping out of Lederer’s unwashed body and clothes. He doesn’t want the smell in his van but neither does he want to wake the old man from what is obviously much-needed sleep. It is not a peaceful or untroubled sleep, however. From time to time Charles Lederer twitches, jerks his legs, moans something indistinct but urgent-sounding.