Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

He is dreaming. It is an erotic dream of sorts. It happens. The bombs go off. The balloon goes up. The car is blown apart from within. It is all slow-mo and freeze frame, a carnival of special effects, brightness dancing and hanging in space, shimmering, spinning tinsel, particles that curl and leapfrog, fragments of vehicle that shuffle and reshuffle, furling and unfurling in the dented air; electrical components, shards of glass, slices and slithers of upholstery and optional extras, tatters of fabric and machine. It is all fallout. There is a great levelling, a loss of organisation, a bringing down to size.

He stirs. He wakes up. He is not sure who he is. He is not sure who is the owner of the dream.

♦

At the Milton Maynard Mercy Seat — one of the home counties’ more discreet and unostentatiously fashionable asylums — a group consisting of a dozen or so inmates is playing I Spy. They are a varied though unexceptional group of patients. They display a predictable set of symptoms. There are a few medical or psychological surprises to be found in their amalgams of depression, schizophrenia, neurosis, compulsive, obsessive and self-destructive behaviour. A couple of them claim to be receiving messages from other planets but that too is par for the course.

The only one who looks out of place is Mr Charles Lederer, but he does not look that way because he is displaying signs of some new or unusual mental condition, rather the reverse. He cuts a sane, dapper figure amid the pyjamas and dressing gowns. He is wearing a blazer and a wide-brimmed Panama. None of the other inmates recognises his tie as that of the Garrick Club, but it is a tie he is perfectly entitled to wear. His shirt is a freshly laundered white and his flannels have razor sharp creases. Only the lack of a belt for his trousers and the fact that he’s wearing tartan carpet slippers without socks, reveal anything of his situation.

He would tell you, if you asked, that he used to be a well-respected figure in English public life; a back-bench Tory MP and director of a handful of extremely profitable companies. But it all changed when a man in a Volkswagen stole his daughter, slept with his wife, invaded his house, turned the media against him and caused his incarceration. You would probably listen politely to these colourful fantasies. They might sound like the all too typical ramblings of a disordered mind. In Charles Lederer’s case, however, they are nearly all true.

A large, shapeless, sad-faced woman called Magenta, whose hormones are severely out of control, is currently leading the game. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with b ,” she says enthusiastically. Once such obvious contenders as basket, book, bristles, biro, button and bulbs have been eliminated and everyone has admitted defeat, Magenta tells them that the b in question stands for ‘bare bottom’.

“But we can’t see anybody’s bare bottom,” Charles Lederer reminds her gently but authoritatively, and even as he says it he realises his error.

“Oh yes you can,” Magenta shouts and she stands up, drops her loose, white, sexless pyjama trousers and reveals an almost equally loose, white, sexless bottom. A flurry of sniggering, schoolyard mirth flushes through the group, and, not for the first time, Charles Lederer wonders if playing I Spy is really a valid form of therapy. But he doesn’t have much time to think about it since the group has decided it’s now his turn to spy something. He accepts graciously.

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with v,” he says.

The group agrees that’s a tough one. Vase, Vaseline, Vimto and Valium are all suggested.

“No,” says Charles Lederer. “You’ll never get it.”

“In that case there’s no point guessing, is there?” says Magenta, and Charles Lederer agrees.

“It’s a Volkswagen that I spy with my little eye,” he says triumphantly.

“Where?” asks Magenta.

“Yes, where?” the others all demand, keen to know where there might be a Volkswagen lurking.

“I spy it with my mind ’s eye,” he answers.

That throws the rest of them into confusion. They have to think about that, and thinking is not necessarily their strong suit.

“Well, I can’t see it,” says a short, middle-aged, baby-faced bruiser of a patient.

“Yes you can,” Charles Lederer insists. “It’s a fairly early model, black in colour with white wall tyres. You can see it if you try. You can see its humped back and those headlamps like nasty, slitty eyes.”

And Magenta says, “Yes, I can see it now. I can see it with my inner eye.”

“Of course you can,” says Lederer.

“Me too,” says another patient, then another, and before long the whole group has focussed its various inner eyes on some phantom Volkswagen of their collective unconscious.

“Yes,” Charles Lederer continues, “just look at that evil, sloping front end, and hear the horrid death rattle of its air-cooled engine. And smell those clouds of noxious exhaust fumes. Terrible, isn’t it?”

The others tend to agree. A couple of them choke on the imagined fumes.

“But wait,” he continues. “What’s that sitting on the passenger seat? It’s a package. A suspect package. I wonder what’s in it. I wonder if it contains a couple of pounds of highly unstable plastic explosive. And could that ticking noise be coming from some sort of timing device? Yes, I think it could. Look, on the seat right beside the package there’s an alarm clock, and wires attached to a detonator, and you can hear the seconds ticking away. When the big hand gets to twelve it’ll be all over for that cursed Volkswagen Beetle. There’ll be an almighty bang. There’ll be fire, flames, black smoke. Metal and glass will be sent flying like so much filthy dandruff.”

Several of his listeners gasp. They are all becoming tense and agitated. Charles Lederer’s verbal picture has cut right through their placid, generalised sedation.

“Look at the clock,” he says, “Only ten seconds to go now. Let’s count them down together, shall we? Ten, nine, eight…”

They recite the countdown in unison, but the feeling is not of a downward motion, rather of a steep ascent, of a spring being tightened. “Seven, six, five…” One or two have their eyes closed by now, and one or two others have their fingers in their ears waiting for the big bang. “Four, three, two…” Only Charles Lederer remains impassive, his head high, both his lips commendably stiff. “One…”

There’s a half moment of hesitation, of sweet but frightening anticipation, a sense of simultaneous horror and joy at what will be unleashed when the dreaded word zero is said.

“Zero,” says Charles Lederer.

Volkswagens explode violently and picturesquely all across a dozen disturbed psyches. Mania and hysteria gush out of the patients. There is screaming, mayhem, the tearing of clothes and hair, a certain amount of foaming at the mouth, and Magenta decides to beat her head repeatedly against an electric radiator. It takes several hours, the use of half a dozen straitjackets, some strong arm tactics by the hospital staff, and a whole sweetshopful of drugs, before order is again imposed. Only Charles Lederer has remained calm throughout, and that’s because he knows he’s in a lot of trouble.

♦

Here is Barry Osgathorpe sitting on the steps of his eighteen foot ‘Homemaker’ caravan, on a site not far from Filey, in Yorkshire. This is an award-winning site. The shower blocks and laundry facilities are first rate, and it is in all the best guide books. Barry looked at quite a few residential sites before choosing this one, but spurned them because they were all full of old hippies. This one does have a handful of longterm residents like himself but they are a neat, well-mannered group, mostly retired and very caravan-proud. But the site caters mostly for mobile holidaymakers who stay a couple of nights, or a week at most, then travel on. Barry likes this. He likes the transience even if he personally remains firmly fixed.