This only maddens the crowd. They become increasingly restless and vocal, and then someone, probably deliberately, knocks over the miniature windmill, which tumbles into the ornamental pond and shatters into plaster fragments. This is quite a crowd pleaser, and one or two people pick up lumps of the plaster and hurl them towards the house, and it is this action which finally brings out the owner. He doesn’t come to the front door, that would be far too risky, but his face does appear at an upstairs window. He looks out nervously and slowly raises the window, fearing that further lumps of plaster might be aimed at his head.
Barry’s dealings with Sam Probert have always been brief and pleasant enough. He has never appeared to Barry to be the sort of man who would provoke such passion and hatred in his neighbours and caravanners. Certainly his appearance placates the crowd a little, but after a while, when he simply stares out and says nothing, they soon become rowdy and incensed again. This is not Barry’s idea of a ‘meeting’ as promised by the kid; rather it provides an opportunity for the crowd to abuse the man at the window. Someone calls him a money-grubbing bastard, and someone else shouts something about forty pieces of silver, but Barry can’t follow this at all. Not surprisingly, the crowd’s antagonism only provokes defiance in Sam Probert, and after listening to a few more insults he’s definitely had enough.
“They’re my bloody fields and I’ll do what I want with them,” he bellows back.
“It’s a disgrace,” says one of the more articulate protesters. “It’ll be chaos. There’ll be noise and smells, and dogs and children, and people revving their engines and loud music and drugs, unprotected sex and people peeing in the street.”
“I’ve hired quite a few chemical toilets,” Sam Probert protests weakly, but this does not satisfy the crowd at all.
Things look as though they might turn decidedly ugly, and Barry wants no part of that, so he manhandles the kid away from the house, to safety.
“I still don’t have a clue what this is all about,” Barry says.
“I think it’s brilliant,” says thef kid. “You know the old bugger also owns two fields adjacent to the site?”
“No, I didn’t,” says Barry.
“Well anyway, he’s rented them both out for this weekend. He’s rented one out to a Volkswagen enthusiasts’ club for some shindig called Bug Mecca and he’s rented the other one out to a bunch of New Age travellers for a Gathering of the Tribes. It should be hell on earth. I can hardly wait.”
♦
The same old scout hut but now with some new Nazi regalia; flags and banners, medals and uniforms, and a more intense air of aggression and stupidity and casual destructiveness emanating from the skinheads. Phelan appears before his boys, his disciples. Tonight he is feeling expansive and he gives them a brief tour of his favourite obsessions; that the Jewish Holocaust was a myth, that Adolf Hitler in fact had a full complement of testicles, and that AIDS can’t be such a bad thing if it kills off gays, drug users and Africans. He can feel his power growing, a strange potent energy that passes from his boys to him.
The skinheads are feeling good too. Thanks to Phelan they have more money than they know what to do with, and they now appear in a stylish, not to say positively mannerist, array of cherry red DMs, Ben Shermans, Crombies and Harringtons. Butcher has even taken to wearing a bowler hat. Phelan is faintly disappointed by this. He was hoping to steer them towards a more paramilitary look, but he doesn’t want to push them too far too fast. There is money for any amount of extra strong lager, for Oi records and for new tattoos of staggering scope and complexity.
Tonight there is almost a party atmosphere, something helped along by the presence of Renata Caswell. She has told Phelan how turned on she gets by a good collection of skinheads and that’s an interest he wants to encourage. She is dressed in the shortest of leather skirts and a Luftwaffe bomber jacket, hardly skinhead gear, but the lads are nevertheless juiced up by her presence. Only Butcher seems to be less than one hundred per cent sanguine. Something is bothering him, and it does have something to do with a woman.
“What happened to the girl?” he asks Phelan.
“What girl would that be?”
“Come on. Don’t fuck about. The one we found in that house. The one we kidnapped for you.”
“She’s being taken care of,” Phelan says.
There is much dirty laughter from the other skinheads, though not from Butcher.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he insists.
Phelan says nothing, just looks across at Renata and smiles. But Butcher won’t be shaken off that easily.
“I mean did you fuck her, or beat her, or kill her, or what?”
“What do you think I am?” asks Phelan. “A monster?”
Even Butcher has to laugh at that.
“Seriously though,” says Phelan, “I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”
Butcher isn’t sure either. He already suspects that Phelan gets up to all kinds of things that he’d rather not know about, and the fate of Marilyn Lederer might very well be in that category. But if something terrible’s happened to her then he was a part of it, an accessory, and it’s all very well Phelan saying they’re a new breed of hero and above the law, but the fuzz might see it a bit differently. Till now all he’s really been involved with is fisticuffs and a bit of nicking. Phelan seems to want to push him into some whole different world.
“And anyway,” says Butcher again, “what were we doing in that house anyway? What were we supposed to be looking for?”
“If I told you that,” says Phelan, “then you’d know as much as I do.”
Given time to think about it, Butcher would have realised that remark was neither true nor relevant, but Phelan doesn’t give him any time.
“What does it matter?” he says. “You enjoyed yourself didn’t you, Butcher?”
“Yes,” Butcher admits.
“You enjoyed smashing things up. That’s your talent, your forte.”
“Yes,” says Butcher.
“That’s what I need you for. All of you.”
Phelan’s face adopts a look of fatherly love which both flatters and embarrasses them. Then he gets them to tell him stories of their recent exploits; raiding petrol stations, doing over tobacconist’s shops, video stores, off licences, provoking fights in pubs and clubs, nicking cars, beating up a few Pakis and Jew boys. It does him good to hear it. He glances frequently at Renata to see how she’s reacting to these accounts, and he thinks he sees the patina of sexual arousal on her face.
Even Butcher joins in with the stories and before long he’s much more like his vicious old self, but he still remains more thoughtful than the other skinheads and he says, “Do you know which rumble I enjoyed best?”
“Tell me,” says Phelan, genuinely interested.
“Beating up them New Age travellers.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah,” says Butcher. “There was something really good about it. I think it was because they were like hippies, all dirty and long-haired and spiritual. And like they think they’re better than everybody else, like they’ve found something special and got all the answers. Only they haven’t. It’s not right. It’s not British.”
“Well, I’d agree there,” says Phelan. “What do the rest of you think?”
The rest gradually agree that there was indeed a certain frisson in knocking hell out of the New Age travellers, and the general consensus is that they’d like to do more of it. “Now,” says Phelan, “I just may be able to help you there. It appears there’s going to be a so-called Gathering of the Tribes in the not too distant future.”