Many girls would feel they had made a mistake if they were taken from home in a petrol-bombing raid and finished up in a Brighton boarding house looking after an acid casualty. Not Marilyn. She took it all in her stride. She took a lot of notes. Ishmael would lie on the bed, listening to the traffic noise, while Marilyn filled reporters’ notebooks with very small handwriting. She had a feeling it might be useful later.
♦
The putty features of Marty Feldman stare out from a newspaper ad for Volkswagen. The skin is grainy, the mouth soft, the eyes pointing to different corners of the page. The ad asserts that since Marty Feldman is extremely ugly his success must be based on talent alone — just like the Volkswagen. Not just a pretty face.
But it’s worth remembering that Feldman’s is a comedian’s face and that a certain ugliness is something that many comedians trade on. Marty Feldman would not have become a successful romantic star, however talented.
Then again, another Volkswagen ad is headlined, ‘After a few years, it starts to look beautiful.’
Bill Bernbach has other things on his mind. He is working on a campaign for the second most successful car-hire company in America. Second most, second best, are hard concepts to sell in America, but he manages—‘We try harder.’
♦
Ishmael and Marilyn were sitting in the cab of the jeep.
‘What do you want to do? Try another boarding house?’
‘OK,’ Ishmael replied.
‘Would you like to go to Hastings? Lewes? Day trip to France?’
Ishmael shrugged.
‘Anything you like,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Marilyn. ‘Let’s go to Fat Les’s garage. You could see how they are getting on with rebuilding Enlightenment.’
Ishmael smiled.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘It’ll do you the world of good,’ said Marilyn.
They were both wrong.
Eight
Steve is working at the White Oaks Petrol Station off the A30 in Dorset. It’s rural. There’s a big sign up that says ‘We Serve You’. That’s how rural it is.
In America, he thinks, it would all have been different. In America the job would have had some dignity. ‘Pumping gas’ sounds like a decent job. It even sounds romantic. The American words seem so much better, they sound so much more exciting. Trunks, hoods and fenders don’t sound nearly so trivial as boots, bonnets and bumpers.
Steve has never worked in a petrol station before. He finds it all right. It’s dull but it’s easy. There isn’t much to remember. If anybody tries robbing the till you let them have the money. You mustn’t take a lump out of anybody’s paintwork with the petrol nozzle. And you have to make absolutely sure than nobody uses the toilet who hasn’t bought petrol.
People either treat him like dirt or as if he is a mechancial genius. Either way he has a lot of very dull conversations with customers. He tries hard but it all comes down to the same old things, ‘Fill her up?’, ‘Nice car’, ‘What kind of mileage do you get?’ It’s very dull.
♦
Marilyn drove the jeep. She had to take a very indirect route to avoid going anywhere near Crockenfield. They drove via Dartford, through the tunnel. They went round the M25 and up the Mil into Cambridgeshire. They drove past the motel where Marilyn had shown Ishmael her tattoo. They went to a family restaurant just off the motorway and had a bread roll with honey while the musak played ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and ‘The Best Things in Life are Free’.
They went within a few miles of Fox’s Farm and considered visiting the commune but they were too eager to get to Fat Les’s Vee-Dub kingdom.
In his mind’s eye Ishmael could see the railway arch, a collection of Beetles and Beetle parts, and in his mind’s ear he could hear Wagnerian opera.
The reality, however, was somewhat different.
They drove along the mud track beside the railway arches, past a mass of weeds and a few derelict bits of motorcar. And there should have been a few parked Beetles and a big cheery hand-painted sign saying ‘Fat Les — the Vee-Dub King’. But there wasn’t.
Ishmael wondered for a moment if he had given Marilyn wrong directions and they had come to the wrong place, some other railway arch. Where the kingdom should have been there was only a mass of smoking wood and charred metal. Everything was burned black. Ishmael looked into the arch and could see the wrecks of two Beetles — one Enlightenment, the other belonging to Fat Les. Everything was destroyed.
♦
Steve has a regular customer called Mr Kyle. He knows his name from his credit card. He is smooth, over-weight, with permed hair. He drives a Lotus.
‘Shall I fill her up?’ Steve asks.
Kyle grunts.
‘Four star?’
‘Well of course four star.’
‘Nice car.’
‘Just put the petrol in, son.’
Son? Steve is twenty-eight. He has a beard and the makings of a beer-gut. He knows twenty-eight is no age to be wasting his life serving petrol but when there’s a recession on and you can’t think of anything you’d rather be doing for a living, well, people think you ought to be grateful. Steve isn’t grateful exactly, but a job’s a job.
He dreams of meeting women in sports cars. He dreams they will be young, rich and delinquent.
He has hopes of one girl who buys petrol from him. She is short, wears a few articles of tight clothing and drives a Volkswagen Beetle cabriolet, the roof always down.
‘Nice car,’ he says.
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve always fancied a car with a soft top.’
‘Soft top? Oh, we call them rag-tops or drop-heads.’
‘You’re American?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘That’s fantastic.’
‘What’s so fantastic?’
‘You know, American cars, freeways, Route 66. Fantastic.’
She smiles at him. He isn’t sure if it’s a real smile or just condescension. He convinces himself that it is real.
‘Say, do you know anything about cars?’
‘Yes,’ he lies.
‘Well when I brake, the car has a definite pull to the right. You know anything about that?’
‘I think you’d better go to a Volkswagen specialist. Beetles can be tricky.’
‘I guess.’
Steve spends the rest of the shift kicking himself. All right, so he didn’t know anything about the brakes on a Volkswagen, but he could have bluffed. He could have offered to give the car a test drive and see exactly how bad the problem was, then after driving around with her for half an hour he could have asked for her phone number, then he could have told her to go to a Volkswagen specialist.
♦
‘Is this really where you’ve brought me?’ Marilyn asked.
There was no sign of Fat Les or Davey. Ishmael and Marilyn went inside the arch, picking their way through the wreckage. There were charred girlie calendars, a smouldering tartan sleeping-bag. They held hands as they stood together in the ruins.
‘Who could have done this?’ Marilyn asked.
Then a voice behind them said, ‘I’ve got one or two very shrewd ideas.’
It was Fat Les. He and Davey were standing outside the arch, wearing overalls, their faces and hair black with soot.
‘It happened the night before last,’ Fat Les said. ‘I was asleep. I heard someone breaking in. I went to have a look. I got coshed. When I came round the place was on fire. They’d poured petrol everywhere and set fire to it. I could have been killed. I managed to drag Davey out. Just.’