Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

“I don’t know where I’ll be,” says Barry.

After Zak has finished putting petrol into Enlightenment, they shake hands and continue their separate journeys. As he goes, Zak tells Barry to get some rest, but Barry has no intention of doing that. Now that the spell has been broken he realises he’s been on a wild goose chase all along. He has been heading in the wrong direction. It has been a detour to nowhere. He realises that it no longer matters to him whether or not he finds Charles Lederer. It doesn’t matter if a few Volkswagens explode. All that matters is love. All right, so he hasn’t achieved his goal of finding her father; but that’s no reason for Marilyn to spurn him. Goals can be changed. Itineraries can be revised. He will go to her, admit defeat, throw himself at her mercy, and if she’s the woman he hopes she is, then she’ll take him to her bosom and love him as he loves her.

Charles Lederer attempts to wander the roads of England. He is angry. He is mad. With his shaved head and his torn clothes he cuts a strange and disturbing figure, invoking, in some, both fear and compassion. He certainly doesn’t look like the sort of person you’d want to give a lift to.

He stands at the roadside with his thumb held out but he no longer has high hopes. Hours pass, traffic passes, night falls. He continues to stand motionless. There is an awe-inspiring, almost religious stillness about him, yet inside his head there is turmoil. The mental images of exploding Volkswagens have receded. They’re now on the far edge of his field of vision. The foreground is full of images of slaughter, violent death, dismemberment. The hatred of Volkswagens set him on the right path, but now he knows who’s really behind his confusion and pain. It’s Ishmael. He is the engineer; the designer of this misery. If Ishmael can be found and destroyed then Charles Lederer knows that everything will be just fine. His life, he trusts, will then reform itself, be made whole again.

He continues to wait, looking for a sign, something that will draw him across distance and history, deliver him to his fate. It arrives in the form of a lift in a double-decker bus painted with scenes from the Tarot. Who else would stop? Who would offer Charles Lederer a lift except someone who saw himself as an outsider, as a maverick? It is Planetary Cliff, and he stops for the old man. The doors open, Charles Lederer steps up and gets in without saying a word. He moves into an unfamiliar space, one of old leather and dirty curtains, of ancient wisdom and masses of amplifiers and speakers, one that smells of dogs and marijuana and petrol fumes.

The driver of the bus introduces himself as Planetary Cliff.

He might once have appeared an appalling individual to someone of Charles Lederer’s station and life experience, but things have changed. They both have partly shaved heads. They’re both ragged and dirty. Planetary Cliff smiles and Charles Lederer smiles back. In some strange way the two men see each other as kindred spirits.

Some time later on a patch of waste ground between a scrap metal dealer and a secondhand tyre lot, at the travellers’ latest camp, Charles Lederer is fed and given drink and a leather jacket to wear. The zip of the jacket is broken and one of the arms is falling off, but it suits him. He looks rather good in it, like some old, cherished witch doctor.

The travellers are at home here on the edge, on the margins, in a place of both waste and reclamation, of dispersal and recycling. They sit around a fire, though the night is not cold and the rainy spell is over. There are too many travellers for Charles Lederer to keep track of, so many children, so many dogs. He can’t work out the relationships between people. There seems to be nothing so concrete as couples or families. They all appear to be friendly enough but nobody talks to him except Planetary Cliff.

“You feeling better?” Cliff asks.

“Yes, I am, actually.”

“You look like you’ve been in the wars.”

“Do I? I suppose I have.”

“We know the feeling.”

“Do you? I thought you young people would be terribly anti-war.”

“Oh sure. You try living in peace and see where it gets you. A lot of people feel threatened by the likes of us wanting to live in peace. That’s why they try to kick the shit out of us.”

“Do they really?”

“Yeah. Like I’m into music as a shamanistic ritual, right? So I say to people, hey, harmony is a balanced fusion of all energies. It’s a hermaphroditic power which acts as a central focus for the polarities which save us from the Abyss. But they just don’t want to listen.”

“I see.”

Planetary Cliff hands his guest a can of lager. Charles Lederer chokes it down. He has never tasted anything quite like it. He wonders how long it is since he last tasted a good malt whisky. Years.

“Where are you headed for?” Planetary Cliff asks.

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Yes. One of my old constituents.”

Planetary Cliff laughs at his use of the word ‘constituent’. Charles Lederer doesn’t want to tell lies. He feels curiously free to be honest with these new people.

“I used to be in politics,” he explains.

“Of course you did. Everyone’s involved in politics. You can’t avoid it.”

“That’s true.”

“Why do you want to find this person?”

“Well, it’s complicated, but I think basically I want to kill him.”

Planetary Cliff laughs nervously.

“I mean it,” says Charles Lederer, and Planetary Cliff can see that he does.

“It might be just as well if you don’t find him, then,” says Planetary Cliff.

“Oh no, I’ll find him all right.”

“What’s he done wrong, this bloke?”

“Everything. You name it. For instance he drives a Volkswagen.”

Planetary Cliff can’t help laughing at this strange, though distinctly oddball character he’s picked up. “Oh well,” he says, “in that case.”

♦

At the end of the evening the travellers return to their various tents and vans and buses. Charles Lederer feels wide awake. He sits by the fire, still looking serene and sage-like, still, by his own account, with murder in his heart. Planetary Cliff doesn’t really think he’s a wanton killer about to murder them all in their beds in the middle of the night, but the old guy is definitely weird and he’d rather have him where he can keep an eye on him. There’s an ancient graffiti-daubed caravan at the corner of the site. It’s full of waste paper, old magazines and newspapers that they have collected to sell for recycling, but there’s just enough room left for one person to sleep in it. Planetary Cliff directs Charles Lederer there and once the old guy’s inside, Cliff locks the door so he’s secure in there till the morning.

Charles Lederer goes in willingly enough but he still doesn’t want to sleep, so he starts looking through the old newspapers and magazines. He has been out of touch for a long time, so that the pictures he sees and the articles he reads are like bulletins from another world; somewhere very strange and unwelcoming. The faces of the politicians, the names of the personalities, the newsworthy items, the language, the range of interests and obsessions are alarmingly unfamiliar to him. He feels a little frightened.

He picks magazines at random from the piles, browses through colour supplements, tabloids, women’s magazines, until suddenly he finds that he has in his hands a copy of a periodical called Volkswagen Universe . He can barely believe that such a thing exists. It is a document of horror. It contains everything he hates and fears; page after page, photograph after photograph of Volkswagens in all their many appalling forms; lovingly, pruriently presented, in garish colours and fetishised states; the worst kind of pornography. His first urge is to burn the magazine but he keeps turning the pages, hypnotised by the thing he loathes. And then things get a lot worse.