Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

In Berwick Upon Tweed a raven-haired housewife and mother of two is about to take her moss green 1976 Beetle to a while-you-wait MOT centre. In a way she hopes the car will fail, because then she can get rid of it and her husband will let her buy a new Fiat Panda. She loads the kids into the back of the car, turns the key in the ignition; and nothing at all happens. The kids now say they need to pee. She gets them out of the car, takes them into the house, and picks up the phone to tell her husband that the car’s let her down again ; at which point the car explodes in a ball of orange and ivory fire.

In Lytham St Anne’s an estate agent is pleasuring a female radiologist on the back seat of her cherry red Beetle convertible. They are hot for each other, but they begin to find the space too confined. They decamp to the beach and move behind a dune. At the very moment she is about to come a deafening bang tells her that her beloved Beetle has been reduced to twisted scrap metal.

In Bath a fifty-year-old jazz trumpeter is emerging from a club where he was playing. It hasn’t been a great night. The audience was sparse and the other musicians were unsympathetic. He just wants to get home. His battered Jeans Beetle is parked in a dark side street near to some derelict warehouses, not the kind of place you’d choose to park your car, but, you know, who’s going to steal a twenty-year-old Volkswagen? He turns the corner into the side street and sees a smouldering, burned out shell where his Beetle used to be.

Not far from Wellingborough, a recent engineering graduate is trying out a new set of telephoto lenses on his camera. He parks his 1955 six volt, oval window Beetle in a rural spot and takes a series of photographs of it, getting further away each time and using ever more powerful lenses. He now has on the five hundred millimetre, is employing a tripod, and is some distance away from his car. Nevertheless, as he peers through the camera’s viewfinder he feels distinctly too close for comfort when the car explodes in flames. But he is so far away that all he can do is watch it burn.

In Yeovil a thirty-year-old legal secretary has been trying for weeks to sell her pink and green, J registered Beetle with polkadot interior. Lots of people have been to see it but they were all time wasters and tyre kickers. Nobody has made a serious offer. She is depressed. She needs the money as part of the deposit on the flat she’s buying with her boyfriend. She goes to bed wishing she could just be rid of the damned thing, and when she wakes up the next morning the car is no more than a blackened wreck sitting in the road.

Volkswagen Beetles start exploding all over the country. In the home counties and in the Midlands and the West Country, on the South Coast and in the North — West, all across the Pennines and the Mendips and the Cotswolds, Beetles start going up in flames. It seems to make no difference what style or year or condition they are. Whether they’re old bangers or customised specials or models of historical importance, they’re all just as likely to go up in a big bang. A lonely street corner, a suburban driveway, a supermarket car park; suddenly there’s an unattended Volkswagen Beetle and a short time later Volkswagen components are careering through the air, coiled in flame and black smoke. Inevitably this causes stress to a few proud owners and to a few insurance agents, but in the general criminal morass of car theft, joyriding and vandalism it will be some time before anyone realises a pattern is being established here.

Carlton Bax has gone missing. And in his absence, the police are severely hampered in their attempts to investigate the explosion in his garage. One of his Volkswagens has indeed been destroyed, the military Kubelwagen, and it appears to have been a clever and professional job. Just enough explosive was used to destroy the vehicle completely, but the car next to it is more or less intact.

However, with the car reduced to scrap metal, it becomes apparent that it was parked on top of a metal trap door. The explosion, it also appears, might have been designed to blow open that trap door as much as to destroy the vehicle.

Blown open it most certainly is, and through the gaping, jagged hole a subterranean chamber is visible. Is this Carlton Bax’s famous locked room? Police shine torches into the void to reveal a completely empty space. The chamber has been thoroughly cleaned out, and Carlton Bax is the only one who could tell anybody if that is indeed the locked room of legend, and what, if anything, it contained.

♦

As the shrewd reader will either know or have worked out by now, this is the second novel I have written about Volkswagens and Barry Osgathorpe. The first, called Street Sleeper , was originally dedicated to five different people. That was because it was my first book and I had no idea whether I’d ever write another one, much less get it published, so I thought it was as well to dedicate it to quite a few people while I had the chance.

One of those dedications read, ‘For Andy who gets run down’. Andy was a friend of mine, an actor and briefly a stand-up comedian. He had been walking along a street in Alnwick, Northumberland, when a passing Ford Capri with bald tyres and a reckless driver had ‘mounted the pavement’, knocked him down and broken his leg. It was a serious accident. He spent a lot of time laid up, obviously couldn’t work as an actor, and eventually got some rather measly compensation from the driver’s insurance company.

The leg healed, my book was published and as a sort of celebration, Andy and I, my wife and his girlfriend (who happened to be the daughter of a comparatively well-known television sitcom actor) went out for dinner together. I was feeling fairly pleased with myself for having my first book published and I was no doubt a little smug about it too. Andy at that time was acting in a deeply worthy play about homosexual child abuse, performing to non-existent audiences at a venue in Kennington. I had done my time as a writer of fringe plays and I had rapidly come to the conclusion that however worthy the subject matter, putting on plays that nobody came to see wasn’t something actually worth doing. This was not an opinion I felt any reluctance about expressing.

At a critical point in the evening my wife and I mentioned that we’d recently seen a porn movie in which the hero had fellated himself; an old trick perhaps but one that nevertheless still causes some surprise. Andy’s girlfriend offered the opinion that pornography was ‘a bad thing’, an opinion that on balance I tend to share, but I asked her why. And she said it was a bad thing because it exploited the actors and actresses who appeared in it. I then, in a spirit of intellectual enquiry, asked her to explain the difference between the way actors and actresses were exploited in pornography compared with the way they were exploited in fringe theatre or, for example, in television sitcoms.

Well, this did not go down too well with Andy. He threw a fit. He became violently angry and I was accused of many things, but essentially of being complacent and politically incorrect. We might easily have come to blows, but we didn’t, and a part of me stayed peculiarly calm throughout. I managed to walk rather than flounce out of the restaurant. My wife remained behind. I remember that as I left, Andy told me not to be overdramatic, that it would all blow over in a day or two. In many ways I wish it had, but I have never spoken to him since that day.

Several years passed. Then one day I was watching television and a commercial came on that I’d never seen before. A man’s car has run out of petrol in the middle of nowhere. He’s seen trudging along a deserted road, mile after mile, carrying an empty petrol can, looking for a petrol station. Then suddenly he sees a figure walking along the road, coming towards him from the opposite direction. It’s another man, an archetypal Frenchman wearing a beret and also carrying an empty petrol can. He too has obviously been trudging along the road mile after mile. There is obviously no petrol station for miles in either direction.