Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

“You see,” he says, “if we can find her old man and beat a confession out of him and hand him over to Cheryl Bronte, then I’rfl in the clear, right? But we’re going to have to be smart. We’ll have to use all our wits to work out where he is, then hunt him down and trap him like a dog.”

“No,” says Barry quietly.

“Come on Barry, I’m prepared to beg if I have to.”

“That would be undignified,” says Barry. “And it wouldn’t work.”

“You want me falsely accused? Arrested? You want me thrown in jail?”

“No, not particularly,” says Barry. “But, you know, I really don’t give a lot of thought to what happens to people like you, Les.”

Actually, Barry is thinking about how he can get to see some of Marilyn’s television broadcasts. He thinks he might buy a satellite dish, a television, and, of course, a video recorder so he can tape her performances and watch them over and over again in the privacy of his own caravan.

“You’re being a real shit, Barry,” says Les.

“I never claimed to be anything else,” replies Barry.

For a moment it looks as though Fat Les is about to hit him, but Barry looks so weak, so ineffectual, there’d be no joy in it. Les spits a lump of phlegm onto the bonnet of Enlightenment. It lodges just below the Green Beetles logo. Barry does not react.

“You see,” Barry says solemnly, “a journey of a million miles begins with a single step.”

Fat Les looks blank. Then Barry takes three steps towards Enlightenment, gets inside and returns to his pose of meditative calm in the driver’s seat. Les is disgusted. He goes back to his roadster, guns the engine wildly and scrapes a rear wing against a gatepost as he powers angrily away.

It is quite an occasion for Barry Osgathorpe. For once he is not to be found either in his caravan or at the wheel of Enlightenment. It is one o’clock in the morning and he is in the clubhouse of the caravan site. This is a place he normally stays well away from. It is a large, unhomely barn of a place, with plastic tables and stacking chairs and a small stage in one corner where country and western acts perform every Friday and Saturday evening.

Now the place is empty, but Barry is still, in a sense, there to be entertained. The clubhouse has satellite television, and Barry has obtained special permission from Sam Probert, the owner of the site, to be there alone after hours and to watch the weather forecast. Of course Sam Probert thinks Barry is raving mad, but he is not the first to have thought that.

Barry sits on the edge of his seat, watching the big wall-mounted TV screen, waiting for the end of the current programme. Suddenly there’s a tap at one of the clubhouse’s uncurtained windows. Barry leaps up in surprise and is then alarmed that some disturbance might prevent him from seeing Marilyn’s appearance. But he looks over at the window and sees the face of the little boy who calls himself the Ferrous Kid.

“Let me in,” the Kid mouths through the window.

Irritated, flustered, and keeping one eye on the television screen, Barry goes to the door and lets the Kid in.

“What are you doing?” the Kid asks.

“Watching television.”

“I thought this place closed at midnight.”

“Usually it does. There’s a programme I have to see.”

“Don’t tell me, some sort of environmental special, right?”

“Well, the environment certainly comes into it,” says Barry. “Why don’t you shut up and watch?”

The Kid does as he’s told. The pair of them sit there, staring up at the television set, experiencing their different types of anticipation. Then all at once Marilyn fills the screen and her voice is saying, “Tomorrow will be sunny in eastern areas but cloud and showers over exposed western districts will spread across the country during the day. Cloud will thicken in the north…”

But Barry is not at all interested in the words, he’s just absorbing the image, the iconography. She is lovely, shimmering and perfect. He’s tried denying it. He’s tried wishing it away, but the fact remains he’s still as totally obsessed with her as ever. He loves her more than he can possibly express. At the very end of the forecast she says goodbye and winks at the camera. It feels as though it’s meant specially for him.

When the commercials start Barry says to the Kid, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” the Kid replies. “You can never rely on these weather forecasts.”

“I don’t mean the weather,” Barry says. “I mean what do you think of her? ”

It’s only then that the Kid understands. He realises she must be the one who has figured so largely in some of Barry’s traveller’s tales. Actually, he finds her a bit ordinary.

He had been expecting something more, but he decides to be encouraging for Barry’s sake.

“She’s great,” he says. “She really revs my engine.”

“Mine too,” says Barry, completely forgetting about the ecological dangers of a really revved engine.

♦

Marilyn sits off camera. A make-up girl fusses around her face, even though there has been almost no time for it to become disarrayed. Marilyn thinks her performance tonight was a little lack-lustre. In fact it’s been lack-lustre for a while. How could it be otherwise? Her boyfriend has disappeared and her renegade father is blowing up Volkswagen Beetles. But the show must go on, and she has stopped inserting daughterly messages in her weather forecasts. It was a pragmatic decision. It did no good. She has spoken again to the reporter who wanted to break the exploding Beetle story and he has told her that it’s still going on and that the gag is still in place. Perhaps her father has never even seen her broadcasts. Now more than ever she craves prime time.

She feels impotent. She feels desperate, desperate enough to try one last, high-risk gambit. She doesn’t know exactly how she expects it to work. She can’t even be sure it will help at all, but she has made up her mind. She’s going to see Barry Osgathorpe.

She drives all night. The motorways are dark and littered with roadworks. She runs through all her Suzanne Vega cassettes in the course of the drive. She arrives in Filey a little before dawn, but it is light by the time she locates the site and Barry’s caravan.

She doesn’t bother to knock. She simply tries the door and finds it open. She enters quietly, not wanting to wake him yet. He lies there in a cocoon of tangled, frayed, grey sheets. She looks at him closely. Yes, she can still sort of see why she once agreed to sleep with him. Her tastes have moved on a little since then, but it won’t be entirely disagreeable to do it again. She sits on the edge of the bed and strokes his head, just gently enough to bring him out of sleep. His eyes open, he looks at her and he doesn’t even seem surprised to see her.

“You came,” he said. “I had a feeling you would.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Life usually brings a man those things he most truly needs.”

“Well, good,” she says.

“I used to think I didn’t need a weathergirl to know which way the wind blows, but now I see it differently.”

Even given Barry’s penchant for eccentric behaviour, Marilyn is taken aback by this reception. Surely he has a duty to be surprised.

“No doubt you need me too,” he continues, “otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Well yes, there’s something you can do for me. You can find my father.”

“It’ll mean going back on the road, won’t it?”

“Of course.”

“I wouldn’t do that for just anyone.”

“I’m not just anyone.”

“Yes, I’d do it for you.”

“There’s even a reward,” she says.

“Yes?”

A moment later she is in bed with him, and minutes after that, torrents of hot semen are coursing like molten lava down Marilyn’s moist, yielding, eager throat. Barry is impressed. He thinks she must quite like him. And later that same day Enlightenment has fresh tyres, a new battery and is full of petrol. The whitewashed Green Beetles logo has been carefully sponged away. Barry is wearing a familiar blue leather motorcycle suit and he looks every other inch a Road Warrior. He sits in the driver’s seat, starts the engine. A fog of choking, dirty blue exhaust fumes expands behind the car. Barry doesn’t give a shit. He guns the engine some more. A group of children comes running and congregates around the car. “Where are you going Barry?” the Ferrous Kid asks, and Barry replies, “Call me Ishmael.” He floors the accelerator, lets in the clutch, and he’s on the road again.