Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

He comes to an article about some famous Volkswagen collector, someone by the name of Carlton Bax. There are pictures of his house and his garage; room after room of the Volkswagen and all its terrible works; actual cars, models, representations, memorabilia, images and replicas, the whole sick, disgusting business. It makes him want to scream. And then things become intolerable. Right in the middle of this article, photographed right in the middle of one of these hideous rooms of Volkswagens, is his own flesh and blood, his own daughter, Marilyn. The caption reads, “Zany weather girl Marilyn Lederer, Carlton Bax’s other half says, ‘Volkswagens most definitely R us’.”

When Planetary Cliff comes to the caravan in the morning, he sees that a superhuman effort, a hideous strength, has been used to break open the lock, and Charles Lederer is long gone.

♦

Dawn. The sky is the colour of a washed out white T — shirt. The air is still, the day peaceful. There is a roaring sound: intense, fierce, but very far away. If you stand still and watch the horizon, the source of the noise will eventually appear, though not for a while. First the roaring becomes louder and more distinct, and reveals itself not to be a single sound, but an amalgam of eight similar though distinct noises; engine noises, a harsh metallic din of eight flat-four air-cooled engines, throbbing inside eight all-black, wicked-looking Volkswagen Beetles, not that you would know that yet. It is a sound modified and processed by silencers and sports exhausts, changed and distorted by harsh gear changes and wild over-revving.

Soon they appear; in a haze of pale azure exhaust smoke, tyre noise and violent oversteer. They arrive at your premises, at your shop, your forecourt, at your warehouse or bakery or pub or restaurant. If you’re lucky you’ll still have time to run, to get the hell out of there.

They stop in a frenzy of skid and brake squeal and handbrake turns. The engines are not switched off but the drivers’ doors are thrown open and eight adrenalin-charged skinheads lumber out. They are armed with crowbars, baseball bats, home-made Molotov cocktails. They are here to rob you, certainly, but also to terrorise, to create havoc and panic, and not just to you alone.

They are not entirely discriminating. They undoubtedly prefer it if the shop is run by Turks or Cypriots, if the warehouse contains saris, if the bakery is Jewish, if the pub is full of West Indians, if the restaurant has a gay clientele. But they don’t allow themselves to get bogged down in ideology. They will attack white folks too if they don’t like the look of them. They might say, if they were articulate, that they hate deviance from the racial and political status quo, but you know how it is when the feeling’s on you, any port in a storm, beggars can’t be choosers. If they’re in the right mood they’ll attack anything and everything, including each other.

After their raids and forays they return to Phelan with their loot and their stories. For Phelan it is a dream come true. His boys are now mobile and in action; tough, hard, clean-living lads driving across the country in the supreme flowering of Nazi technology. Phelan admires their capacity for improvisation. For example, after a raid on an Indian-run off-licence in semi-rural Sussex, they find themselves driving beside a village green on which a cricket match is being played. Without debate, as though with a single mind, they leave the road and perform various driving stunts across the centre of the cricket pitch, leaving it rutted with deep swirling tyre tracks. Phelan finds that wonderfully inventive, even if not entirely politically consistent, cricket, after all, being a beloved piece of the English heritage.

Butcher is enjoying his new lifestyle. It’s all so much better since he stopped driving that poxy van, and especially since he doesn’t have seven other drunken skinheads falling around in the back and distracting him. He has money, not serious money, but enough to pay for some new boots and new tattoos. But more importantly, now that he spends much of his time alone at the wheel of his own vehicle he feels so much sharper, more in control, so much more in touch with who he is.

♦

Zak is filling up the petrol tank of his metallic turquoise and peppermint green Volkswagen when he sees the eight Nazi Beetles, or rather when the eight skinhead drivers first see him. Zak can see there’s something familiar about the cars. They look very much like that Beetle he stopped to help on the M25. But he thought that was a complete one-off. How come there are now eight exactly like it? There’s something sinister and alarming about them, particularly about the way he can’t see in through the smoked windows, can’t see the drivers, and there’s something positively threatening about the fact that they all pull into the petrol station and park behind, in front and beside him, so that he can’t possibly drive his own car away. And he doesn’t like the way none of the drivers has got out. The cars just sit there, engines revving, poised and predatory.

The tank of Zak’s Beetle is now full. He clanks the nozzle back into its holder and goes into the office to pay. Perhaps, he thinks and hopes, by the time he’s paid, everything will be all right, the other Beetles will have gone, or at least will have moved so as to give him room to make an exit.

It is not to be. When he returns to his Beetle, the other cars are still there, right where they were before, but the eight skinheads have now got out, and their appearance immediately tells him that things are anything but all right. They have not stopped for petrol, and in fact they are examining his Beetle with close attention. They’re now scrutinising the exhaust system, looking underneath at the floorpan, checking out the wing mirrors, the doors, stroking the paintwork to feel its smoothness. Zak doesn’t like this at all. They don’t look like typical Volkswagen fans. They don’t look like the kind of boys you can discuss technical tips with. He fears they might be planning to steal his car, or worse still vandalise it. He hardly relishes confronting a gang of skinheads but he doesn’t see that he has any choice. He has to say and do something. He takes a deep breath.

“Hi,” he says in as unconfrontational way as he can manage.

Nobody returns his greeting but one of the skinheads says, “We’re just admiring your motor.”

“Well thanks.”

“Some work went into this. And some money.”

“I’ll say.”

“I’m surprised you can afford it,” says Butcher.

“Well you know how it is…”

“Well no,” says Butcher, “I don’t. Because basically you’re not the type of person we like to see driving a car like this.”

“Huh?”

“We tend to think that people like you aren’t worthy to drive the Führer’s car.”

“Hey,” says Zak, “just let me get in my car and I’ll be on my way.”

“No you won’t.”

One of the skinheads blocks his path. Another grabs his arm, another thumps him in the kidneys. Before they’ve finished with him he’s been kicked, punched, robbed and pissed on. They don’t touch his car.

“I know why you’re doing this,” he shouts after them as they walk away to their cars. “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”

“Too bloody right,” says Butcher as he gets into his Beetle and drives away at the head of his dark convoy.

♦

Davey has just about had enough. He’s been on the road for a long time now and it looks as though he could arrive at the end of the summer without having made any friends at all in the New Age traveller community. It seems all too likely that he’s never going to take Ecstasy, never going to dance in a field till dawn, never going to feel a sense of cosmic unity and an awareness of his place on mother earth. He’s well cheesed off. Maybe he’ll sell the van, get his old job back, then next year he can go on one of those singles holidays where everybody spends the whole time drinking and shagging, though with his luck he’ll probably not make any friends there either.