Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

“No, I don’t. I’ve never heard of Carlton Bax.” Then suddenly something dawns on him. “How do you know my name?”

“From the files,” she says irritatedly.

“What files?”

“Come on Barry, Ishmael, whatever you call yourself these days, you kidnapped the daughter of an English MP, you barricaded yourself in his house, you called a news conference. Okay, so you got away with it, but you have to expect there’ll be a file.”

There it comes again, that old blast of stale air and shameful memories. The alter ego who was Ishmael stalks the stage again. Barry feels dreadful.

“I suppose so,” he admits. “Does that mean you think I’m going around blowing up cars and kidnapping people?”

She looks at him briskly and thoroughly, as if one good look is all it takes to see right into his centre, right through him.

“Actually no,” says Cheryl Bronte. “But we do know from the files that you have an intuitive, maybe even mystical, connection with the Volkswagen Beetle. There aren’t many people like you about. What we want to do is get you back on the road, fuel you up and let you go. Something tells me that you’re going to lead me right where I want to go.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Where I can get my hands on the villains who are causing these explosions and holding Carlton Bax hostage.”

“Are you sure they’re the same people?”

“Not absolutely, but I’m making an intuitive connection of my own there.”

Barry ponders for a while. Cheryl Bronte thinks he’s considering her offer but actually he’s wondering whether he has any chance of making her understand where he’s at these days. He tries. He says, “The only journey worth making is an inward one. The way ahead will only bring you back to the point from which you started. All routes lead to the same destination, to a place you have never left.”

Cheryl Bronte thinks of threatening to book him for wasting police time but contents herself with saying that she’ll see him again. Barry says that will be nice. She walks away with as much dignity and elegance as she can manage and Barry remains at the wheel of Enlightenment and tries to get some sleep.

♦

Street Sleeper was also dedicated to my then wife, my now ex-wife. When we got divorced I felt no need to remove the dedication. We had more going for us than a shared enthusiasm for Volkswagens, but that was not the least of what we had in common.

We had no car when we were first married, and I couldn’t even drive, but we bought a Volkswagen and I learned. In retrospect I don’t really know why we bought a Beetle. We needed a cheap car but we decided we wanted something soulful, and we thought about buying a Mini or even a Morris Minor, but the Beetle got the vote. I wouldn’t do it now. These days I’d buy something cheap and soulless, an old but reliable Volvo or a newish and very cheap Lada or Skoda. But I was young, naive and newly married.

The car we bought, from a slightly too distant acquaintance of my father, turned out to be a lemon. The starter motor only worked intermittently, we once broke a clutch cable in the middle lane of a crawling traffic jam on the Ml, and the engine eventually blew up. We seemed to spend a lot of time parked on the hard shoulders of motorways waiting in the rain for the AA van to arrive; but even that failed to turn me against Volkswagens.

We eventually got rid of the car but by then I was ‘into’ Beetles, indeed I had started writing Street Sleeper . We went to a number of Volkswagen meetings and events and we had a very good time, and by then we were a little more affluent and we decided to buy a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. This is basically a Beetle in a fancy Italian suit. It consists of a more or less standard Beetle chassis, but wrapped around it is a superb, elegant, streamlined body. It looks like a real sportscar, but the Beetle engine ensures it is not. It was a car that I’d admired and idly lusted after since I was a boy, and I still tend to think it’s one of the best-looking cars ever made. My wife loved them too. We searched long and hard for a good secondhand Karmann Ghia, and eventually we picked a good one. And that’s how things were when Street Sleeper was published.

The author biography on the first edition says, “Geoff Nicholson is married, lives in Kent and drives a Type 1 Karmann Ghia.” All this has now changed.

In working out the divorce ‘settlement’ my wife got custody of the Karmann Ghia. I was sorry to say goodbye to it, but it seemed fair enough, and one or two people had always offered the opinion that a Karmann Ghia was something of a lady’s car.

Getting divorced was a surprisingly quick and unbureau-cratic process. My wife and I were hardly the best of friends during this process but we were civil, and we met once in a while for a drink. It even occurred to me that we might have dinner together on the day our decree became absolute, as a sign of our maturity or urbanity or some such nonsense.

However, on that day my wife, to be precise my ex-wife by a matter of some hours, went to visit her grandmother who was in an old people’s home in Kent. The grandmother, for whom I had a lot of affection, suffered from a whole collection of illnesses, the most visible of which was Parkinson’s disease. She was unable to fend for herself physically, but when she first went into the home she was perfectly compos mentis. On that day when my wife went to see her, the old lady was confused and distressed beyond recognition. She looked drugged, miserable and helpless. My wife had a fierce and frustrating argument with members of staff about the fact that this home of theirs was responsible for her grandmother’s rapid and pathetic decline. It was not an argument she could possibly win. She stormed out in tears, got into her Karmann Ghia and drove away. At the first set of traffic lights she had to make a right turn across a dual carriageway of fast-moving vehicles. She was upset, her mind was elsewhere, her timing was bad, and she misjudged the speed of the oncoming traffic. As she made the turn across the carriageway a car ploughed into the front and side of the Karmann Ghia, demolishing it and making it an insurance write-off. The car was woefully under-insured.

That this should happen on the day our divorce was finalised is, I suppose, a surprising though hardly devastating coincidence. Certainly it might be thought appropriate that my wife rid herself of the car and of me on the same day, although if you presented that as fiction I think it might seem a little too glib and facile. Besides, given the state of our marriage, she was by then far fonder of the Karmann Ghia than she was of me.

The next weekend she went out and bought a perfect, immaculately restored Volkswagen Karmann Ghia from a specialist dealer a little way out of Southend.

Debby’s car pulls up beside Enlightenment. She gets out looking brisk and business-like, and homes in on Barry who is still sitting at the wheel of his car. She throws open the passenger door and gets inside. Barry is about to offer a few words of greeting and endearment but she has no time for that. He sees that she’s holding, nay brandishing, two manila envelopes. Her sense of purpose is awe-inspiring, but as yet he can’t begin to guess what that purpose is.

Very determinedly she says, “I’ve been doing some thinking, Barry, and here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to give you the first of these envelopes. You’re going to open it and then I’m going to ask you a question. You’ll give a simple yes or no answer, and that answer will determine whether or not I give you the second envelope. Do you understand?”