Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

“How old are you?”

“Nine and a half.”

“Well let me assure you child, there’s nothing cosmopolitan about me,” he says proudly and makes a dignified withdrawal.

The Ferrous Kid thinks this may turn out to be one of the great weekends of his young life. He sees all these Beetles arriving, in all their myriad styles and finishes, and his heart feels big within his chest. He stands at the edge of the Bug Mecca, watching all those gorgeous Beetles, and he feels spoiled for choice. Which one will he steal first?

♦

Phelan needn’t have worried about his boys. The gang of skinheads are soon on the job of causing localised outbreaks of casual aggro. They enter the Gathering of the Tribes, split up into small groups and start creating trouble. Some of them pinch girls’ bottoms and squeeze their breasts. Some start pissing very conspicuously onto a row of tents where people are still sleeping. Others get into a fight over the price of food with the owner of a vegetarian food stall. A fortune teller’s tent gets turned over. A couple of skinheads go up to Planetary Cliff and say that if he knows what’s good for him he’ll play a lot of music by the Upsetters in the course of the day. Planetary Cliff, of course, has plenty of reasons to hate and fear skinheads, especially since they beat him up in a lay-by at the beginning of the summer, but the ones who speak to him, being new recruits, weren’t part of that attack, and besides. Cliff isn’t averse to a bit of reggae now and then, so he doesn’t argue.

The skinheads move through the crowd, knocking food and drink from people’s hands, pushing people out of the way, and if anyone protests they threaten serious violence. None of this is exactly evil, and much of it isn’t even directly confrontational. The threats so far remain just threats, and when resisted the skinheads tend to back down. They don’t want a pitched battle, not yet. But word soon gets out that they’re around and looking for trouble, and even though they’re few enough in number, they still manage to create a feeling of unease and distrust, and that is exactly as intended.

♦

And still they come. Zak arrives in the late morning in his metallic turquoise and peppermint green Beetle with the suicide doors. He’d been contemplating bringing it along to Bug Mecca with a view to selling it, but since his brush with the skinheads he feels it’s his duty to keep the car. If he got rid of it now, that would be as good as letting the neo-Nazis win. But he has a much better reason for coming. The memory of his sexual encounter with Mrs Lederer is still very vivid, and that encounter seemed to take place entirely because of the car he drives. He could handle some more encounters like that one, and if the kind of women who melt at the sight of a man in a cool Volkswagen are to be found anywhere, they are surely to be found at an event like Bug Mecca. He has high hopes for the weekend.

♦

Eventually Barry realises he ought to get back to his caravan site and to Charles Lederer. He’s been away longer than he intended. Fat Les says he’ll come over and have a look at the damage to Enlightenment when he gets a quiet moment, though that probably won’t be till the early evening. Barry says he’ll look forward to it. Fat Les also seems extremely keen to cross-question Charles Lederer about exploding Volkswagens, although Barry assures him it will be hard work to get much sense out of the old man.

Barry hurries back. In places the crowds and traffic are now so dense he has to fight his way through. He notices that the music coming from the Gathering of the Tribes is getting louder all the time, but he supposes that’s the way it is with tribal gatherings. He gets to the caravan site, nods to the two caravanners who are manning the roadblock at the gate and tries to enter.

“Here, what’s your game?” the first of them says.

“Game?” asks Barry. “I’m going to my caravan, that’s all.”

“Your caravan? You don’t look the type to be enjoying a caravan holiday.”

Barry scratches his stubble, considers his blue leather motorcycle suit and realises this is true.

“I’m not on holiday,” he says. “I live here.”

“Then why haven’t we seen you around?”

“I’ve been on the road. On a quest.”

“Oh sure.”

“I do live here. Really.”

“It’s all right son, we know what you’re up to. You’re trying to get into the site to do a bit of thieving so you can support your drug habit, aren’t you?”

“No,” Barry protests. “I live here. Be reasonable.”

They laugh at him.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” says one of them. “We’ll stand here blocking your way and if you try to get past us we’ll break both your legs. How’s that for reasonable?”

Barry can tell they mean it. He slinks away, smarting with the unfairness of it all, and wondering how and when he’ll get back in to the site. He’s more concerned than ever about Charles Lederer. He has to think what to do next but can’t think of anything better than going back to Bug Mecca. He reasons that if Charles Lederer does leave the safety of the caravan and go there, then at least there’ll be a chance of spotting him and calming him down, although the crowd is so thick by now he knows it will be all too easy to miss him.

♦

In mid-afternoon Charles Lederer does indeed wake up. The inside of the caravan looks totally alien to him, though the fact that the door is locked seems curiously familiar. Still, caravan doors don’t present much of a problem. He breaks open the lock and steps outside. In the days when Charles Lederer was a Member of Parliament, caravan sites were hardly his stomping ground, and he finds his current surroundings extremely charmless. He decides to leave. The two men on the gate look at him curiously as he walks past them, but they are too busy keeping people out to be concerned with keeping anyone in.

Once in the road Charles Lederer is thrust into a seething if good-natured tumult; people coming and going, dodging in and out of traffic, and he notices that far too many of the cars are Volkswagen Beetles. Different parts of the crowd are heading in different directions, some to the Bug Mecca, some to the Gathering of the Tribes, and although he knows it will cause him pain, he finds himself being irresistibly drawn towards the field of Volkswagens.

He gets to the gate of Bug Mecca where a steward demands an entrance fee, but Charles Lederer gives him a look so wild and demented that the steward waves him in. He moves through the field, past dune buggies and Bajas and convertibles, past T — shirt stalls and club stands. He hears the noise of flat-four engines, he senses the love of Volkswagens, and he becomes completely disorientated. It all gets too much for him. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got there, but a part of him thinks it quite likely that he has died and gone to Hell. He sees a row of chemical toilets and heads for them. He enters a cubicle and locks himself in. He remains there for the rest of the afternoon, thereby making the already inadequate toilet arrangements even worse.

♦

Phelan eventually catches up with some of his skinheads. They are standing in a crowd watching a performance of gamelan music. They are predictably unimpressed and offer up a barrage of loud, sneering comments, mostly to the effect that they’d prefer to hear something by Skrewdriver. Phelan takes Butcher aside and asks how things are going. Butcher notices that he’s carrying a briefcase.

“Things are all right,” says Butcher.

“The new recruits?”

“They’re fine.”

“The Volkswagens?”

“Yeah, they’re fine too.”

“Did you take care of Renata?”

“Yeah we took care of her.”