Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” says Renata. “It’s a dirty job, but I could be just the girl to do it.”

♦

Barry pulls into an open air car park in the centre of Petersfield, in Hampshire. It’s a Saturday morning and the place is busy with the cars of people doing their weekend shopping. Enlightenment looks a little out of place among the hatchbacks and the Range Rovers, but Ishmael is used to having a car that looks out of place. Indeed he is used to feeling out of place himself. Dressing in a blue leather motorcycle suit doesn’t exactly help him to feel accommodated. People have a tendency to stare, to giggle, to talk behind his back. He knows that’s par for the course when you’re on a Zen quest.

He looks around him. It’s all so English, so prosperous, so comforting. He sniffs the air, tries to feel the vibes. Is this the sort of place that he might find Charles Lederer? He is still pondering this when he sees a Volkswagen Beetle making extremely rapid and somewhat erratic progress across the car park. The car is a red Super Beetle, with fat wheels, extended wheel arches and a rather ungainly and unfashionable duck’s tail spoiler. It is eye-catching but a bit naff. The car is heading straight for him, appears to be on a collision course, when at the last moment it slows, swerves and screeches to a halt in the parking space beside Enlightenment.

Barry looks towards the car to see what kind of maniac would drive like that, and is a little surprised to find that the driver is barely visible above the top of the dashboard.

Barry remains curious as the driver’s door pops open and a small, extremely youthful figure emerges. It is the boy from the campsite who calls himself the Ferrous Kid.

“Hi dude,” he says.

“My God,” Barry blurts. “But you’re only nine and a half years old.”

“So?”

“So what in God’s name are you doing driving a car?”

“It’s not a car, it’s a Volkswagen,” says the kid, making a conscious allusion to a well-known Volkswagen ad.

“How come you even know how to drive?”

“My Dad taught me. My Dad has many failings, but in fact he’s not bad at teaching people to drive.”

“But it’s illegal for you to drive.”

“Hey Ishmael old pal, don’t we obey a higher set of laws than that?”

“We? Who’s we?”

“You and me Ishmael, we’re two of a kind, aren’t we?”

“No,” says Barry firmly. “I’m not a nine-and-a-half-year-old kid who drives illegally. And as far as that goes, whose car is it anyway?”

“I’m not sure. I mean. I stole it.”

“I think I probably knew that. Why did you steal it?”

“I’m a joy rider,” the kid says confessionally. “And that’s what joy riders do. But you know, I’m not an idiot. I don’t go racing in the street, I don’t play dodgems with police cars, and I certainly don’t run down innocent bystanders. As far as that goes, I don’t run down guilty bystanders either. I’m a very responsible joy rider.”

Barry isn’t sure that this is entirely good news. The notion of stealing cars responsibly is one that he has some trouble with, but he can see no real future in debating the matter.

“But what are you doing here?” he asks.

“I came to see you.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might need help.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you sure? I have a good instinct for finding people. I mean, I found you. I could be your right hand man.”

“Wrong. At best you could be my right hand nine-and-a-half-year-old in a stolen car, which is something I don’t need at all.”

The kid looks crestfallen, positively wounded.

“Okay,” he says a touch sulkily, “if I can’t be your right hand man, maybe I could be your disciple.”

Barry shakes his head and looks at the kid severely.

“Listen,” he says, “I don’t need a disciple, and you shouldn’t want to become one. Be yourself. Take nobody’s word for it. Question everything. Take nothing for granted. Don’t trust anyone under twenty-five. Don’t follow leaders. Be your own man.”

The kid looks close to tears. “But I’m only nine and a half years old,” he says.

Barry cannot deny that. He puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder and says, “That’s why you should go home to your parents.”

“Back to that poxy campsite? That’s not my home. My home is the road.”

Barry is impressed by the kid’s passion, though he doesn’t see how that can make a difference to anything. The kid can see he’s not getting through.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll stop stealing cars. I’ll stop driving under age. Just let me sit next to you as you complete your quest.”

Barry is not made of stone. He has some sympathy for the boy, but he’s absolutely certain that driving round England with a nine-and-a-half-year-old runaway would get him into all sorts of trouble.

He says, “I tell you what I’ll do. We’ll find a phone box, call the campsite, tell your parents you’re okay, then I’ll take you for a quick ride in Enlightenment before dropping you off at the nearest station and packing you off home.” The kid looks at Barry with contempt. He feels betrayed. He says, “Sod that for a game of soldiers.” Then, before Barry can say or do anything the kid climbs in behind the wheel of the stolen red Volkswagen and burns away out of the car park. Barry does not pursue him. Neither of them is quite sure whether this is a victory or a defeat.

♦

Here are eight neo-Nazi skinheads in a white Transit van, a van not unlike the one Fat Les uses as his daily transport, although that shouldn’t be taken to indicate any shared ideology. The van bowls along the road, erratically, travelling too fast, the engine being gunned mercilessly, the gears being mashed, the tyres leaving skids of rubber at moments of manic acceleration and braking. But considering that the driver, known to his friends as Butcher, has half a dozen cans of extra strong lager inside him, the van’s progress perhaps isn’t that erratic at all, at least not until they hit a corner. Then Butcher really goes for it. He puts his foot down, swings the wheel hard round to achieve the maximum centrifugal force, whereupon the seven other skinheads in the back go flying. So does their beer, so do their fists and after they’ve all knocked into each other and called each other cunts and threatened to kill each other, they have a good laugh about it.

These are boys looking for trouble, though some of them are rather old boys. Fighting is certainly one kind of trouble they like, along with a little shoplifting, car theft, burglary and mindless criminal damage, but scaring people is the kind of trouble they do best, and they are genuinely scary. Some are lean as whippets, other are more like bulldogs bred specially for their coldness and viciousness. Their facial expressions indicate fury and dumb insolence. Their necks and temples throb with wild blood. They definitely look the part. But this question of appearance and image is a tricky one and sometimes Butcher worries about it. These days it seems to him, although he wouldn’t put it quite this way, that the semiotics of the skinhead look have become all confused. These days there are homosexuals who have skinhead cuts. Christ, there are even dykes who do! He doesn’t like it at all. It gets him angry. It makes him want to hit something.

He is also aware that this is not exactly a golden age for skinheads, and he often feels like a man out of his time. He wishes he’d been born a bit earlier, in the days when a skinhead could wear a Crombie and a cravat and carry an umbrella and not be thought a ponce; in the days when you could go down to the local fleapit and see A Clockwork Orange ; when the police confiscated your boot laces if you went to the seaside on a bank holiday. He thinks it might have been especially ace to live in a time when Desmond Dekker and Max Romeo and the Upsetters and Judge Dread were regularly top of the pops, not that he’s ever really worked out why it is that skinheads are supposed to hate black people and yet love reggae.