Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

“I mean did you fuck her, or beat her, or kill her, or what?”

“What do you think I am?” asks Phelan. “A monster?”

Even Butcher has to laugh at that.

“Seriously though,” says Phelan, “I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

Butcher isn’t sure either. He already suspects that Phelan gets up to all kinds of things that he’d rather not know about, and the fate of Marilyn Lederer might very well be in that category. But if something terrible’s happened to her then he was a part of it, an accessory, and it’s all very well Phelan saying they’re a new breed of hero and above the law, but the fuzz might see it a bit differently. Till now all he’s really been involved with is fisticuffs and a bit of nicking. Phelan seems to want to push him into some whole different world.

“And anyway,” says Butcher again, “what were we doing in that house anyway? What were we supposed to be looking for?”

“If I told you that,” says Phelan, “then you’d know as much as I do.”

Given time to think about it, Butcher would have realised that remark was neither true nor relevant, but Phelan doesn’t give him any time.

“What does it matter?” he says. “You enjoyed yourself didn’t you, Butcher?”

“Yes,” Butcher admits.

“You enjoyed smashing things up. That’s your talent, your forte.”

“Yes,” says Butcher.

“That’s what I need you for. All of you.”

Phelan’s face adopts a look of fatherly love which both flatters and embarrasses them. Then he gets them to tell him stories of their recent exploits; raiding petrol stations, doing over tobacconist’s shops, video stores, off licences, provoking fights in pubs and clubs, nicking cars, beating up a few Pakis and Jew boys. It does him good to hear it. He glances frequently at Renata to see how she’s reacting to these accounts, and he thinks he sees the patina of sexual arousal on her face.

Even Butcher joins in with the stories and before long he’s much more like his vicious old self, but he still remains more thoughtful than the other skinheads and he says, “Do you know which rumble I enjoyed best?”

“Tell me,” says Phelan, genuinely interested.

“Beating up them New Age travellers.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah,” says Butcher. “There was something really good about it. I think it was because they were like hippies, all dirty and long-haired and spiritual. And like they think they’re better than everybody else, like they’ve found something special and got all the answers. Only they haven’t. It’s not right. It’s not British.”

“Well, I’d agree there,” says Phelan. “What do the rest of you think?”

The rest gradually agree that there was indeed a certain frisson in knocking hell out of the New Age travellers, and the general consensus is that they’d like to do more of it. “Now,” says Phelan, “I just may be able to help you there. It appears there’s going to be a so-called Gathering of the Tribes in the not too distant future.”

“How many are going to be there?”

“Thousands I understand.”

“Bloody hell.”

The eight skinheads realise that even they might have a little trouble putting fear into thousands of New Age travellers.

“You have friends don’t you?” asks Phelan.

They admit that they do.

“So let’s say you bring in some new blood. Let’s say each of you recruits four more like-minded individuals. Each of you will then be a leader of your own quasi-autonomous force. A force that, at a pinch, can be accommodated in a Volkswagen Beetle. Five of you per car makes forty. That ought to be enough, surely. That’s a lot of aggro.”

The skinheads give it some thought. They obviously want to agree with Phelan. They want to believe they are an elite force, a match for a number of old or new hippies. They also like the idea of being leaders.

“Remember,” says Phelan, “that they have no discipline, that they won’t be expecting you, that they’ll be high on drugs, and that they’re racially inferior.”

Butcher says, “All right, you’re On.”

Phelan looks across at Renata so that she can acknowledge how wonderful, how powerful he is. Then he looks back at the skinheads.

“You may be Nazi scum,” he says, “but you’re my Nazi scum.”

♦

Phelan drives home, Renata beside him, his hand playing absent-mindedly on her upper thigh. He doesn’t drive a Volkswagen Beetle, of course. He prefers the plush, solid certainties of a Mercedes, the make of car Adolf Hitler usually chose to travel in, whatever his feelings about the Beetle.

“They’re a wild bunch,” says Renata, referring to the skinheads.

“They’re the future,” says Phelan.

“The future’s going to be dumb but sexy?”

“There are worse futures.”

“That boy called Butcher, he’s interesting,” she says. “He’s not quite like the others.”

“Do you want to fuck him?”

“I want to fuck them all,” she replies, in a manner that might or might not be serious.

“It can be arranged.”

“I bet.”

For now, however, there is other work to be done. They arrive at Phelan’s home. He lives in a strange, grey, bunker-like industrial building, on the edge of London, in a location that might have been chosen for its appalling proximity to roads and traffic. Its entrance is off a giant roundabout, around which cars and lorries swirl at high speed all day and all night. Six lanes of traffic scream past the back of the building, while overhead a flyover carries vehicles to and from the start of the motorway. Exhaust fumes hang over the area. Tyre noise and engine roar and the deep vibration of juggernauts make the place alive with infernal sound and fury. There are no pavements, no public transport, no place for pedestrians. Phelan says he would live nowhere else. It feels modern and technological. It keeps him sharp and in touch, and it’s also extremely private. If you kidnapped, say, a Volkswagen collector and kept him locked in your basement here, nobody would ever find him. If you then kidnapped his girlfriend, or rather got eight of your followers to do so, you could stash her there too. You could keep them both in captivity, play one off against the other, tease and coerce and torment them until they told you what you wanted to know. Not that they’ve told Phelan anything yet. Marilyn Lederer is being every bit as uncooperative as Carlton Bax; pleading ignorance, admitting nothing. And that’s where Renata comes in. He thinks that a woman’s touch may be just what’s needed, that Marilyn will tell her things that she’d never tell him. And in a sense he’s right.

Once inside the bunker, Phelan goes to the trophy room, the place with the flags and the bed and the military Volkswagen that he uses as a prop for their couplings. Meanwhile Renata goes down to the basement, to the locked room where Marilyn is being kept, to see what confessions she can wrest from her. But Phelan is hardly surprised when Renata returns half an hour later looking disappointed, though not, in fact, as disappointed as Phelan thinks she ought to look.

“She says she doesn’t know anything,” Renata reports.

“And do you believe her?”

“You know, I think I probably do.”

“Well, if she doesn’t know anything then she’s no use to me. I’ll have to get rid of her. Maybe I could throw her to Butcher and his friends.”

“Some girls have all the luck,” Renata says and she goes over and kisses Phelan. He grabs her by the hair, with a studied roughness. She smiles through the discomfort. They go to bed, their minds so full of perverse images that tonight they do not even need to use the Gestapo Volkswagen.

♦

Next morning Phelan gets up, washes and cleanses himself with a thorough, military precision. Renata remains in bed, looking worn out, used, satisfied. Phelan dresses, studying himself closely in a number of full length mirrors the whole time. Finally he’s ready to go about his business. He gets the Mercedes and is ready to drive away from the bunker, leaving Renata to her feigned sleep.