Still Life with Volkswagens by Geoff Nicholson

Author:Geoff Nicholson [NICHOLSON, GEOFF]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC052000
ISBN: 9781468305838
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Here are eight neo-Nazi skinheads in a white Transit van, a van not unlike the one Fat Les uses as his daily transport, although that shouldn’t be taken to indicate any shared ideology. The van bowls along the road, erratically, travelling too fast, the engine being gunned mercilessly, the gears being mashed, the tyres leaving skids of rubber at moments of manic acceleration and braking. But considering that the driver, known to his friends as Butcher, has half a dozen cans of extra strong lager inside him, the van’s progress perhaps isn’t that erratic at all, at least not until they hit a corner. Then Butcher really goes for it. He puts his foot down, swings the wheel hard round to achieve the maximum centrifugal force, whereupon the seven other skinheads in the back go flying. So does their beer, so do their fists and after they’ve all knocked into each other and called each other cunts and threatened to kill each other, they have a good laugh about it.

These are boys looking for trouble, though some of them are rather old boys. Fighting is certainly one kind of trouble they like, along with a little shoplifting, car theft, burglary and mindless criminal damage, but scaring people is the kind of trouble they do best, and they are genuinely scary. Some are lean as whippets, other are more like bulldogs bred specially for their coldness and viciousness. Their facial expressions indicate fury and dumb insolence. Their necks and temples throb with wild blood. They definitely look the part. But this question of appearance and image is a tricky one and sometimes Butcher worries about it. These days it seems to him, although he wouldn’t put it quite this way, that the semiotics of the skinhead look have become all confused. These days there are homosexuals who have skinhead cuts. Christ, there are even dykes who do! He doesn’t like it at all. It gets him angry. It makes him want to hit something.

He is also aware that this is not exactly a golden age for skinheads, and he often feels like a man out of his time. He wishes he’d been born a bit earlier, in the days when a skinhead could wear a Crombie and a cravat and carry an umbrella and not be thought a ponce; in the days when you could go down to the local fleapit and see A Clockwork Orange; when the police confiscated your boot laces if you went to the seaside on a bank holiday. He thinks it might have been especially ace to live in a time when Desmond Dekker and Max Romeo and the Upsetters and Judge Dread were regularly top of the pops, not that he’s ever really worked out why it is that skinheads are supposed to hate black people and yet love reggae.

Up ahead, standing in a lay-by with his thumb out, is some pathetic looking old geezer. ‘Hey,’ Butcher says to the others, ‘this’ll be a laugh.’ He stops the van and flings open the door for the hitchhiker.

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