♦
Eventually Barry realises he ought to get back to his caravan site and to Charles Lederer. He’s been away longer than he intended. Fat Les says he’ll come over and have a look at the damage to Enlightenment when he gets a quiet moment, though that probably won’t be till the early evening. Barry says he’ll look forward to it. Fat Les also seems extremely keen to cross-question Charles Lederer about exploding Volkswagens, although Barry assures him it will be hard work to get much sense out of the old man.
Barry hurries back. In places the crowds and traffic are now so dense he has to fight his way through. He notices that the music coming from the Gathering of the Tribes is getting louder all the time, but he supposes that’s the way it is with tribal gatherings. He gets to the caravan site, nods to the two caravanners who are manning the roadblock at the gate and tries to enter.
“Here, what’s your game?” the first of them says.
“Game?” asks Barry. “I’m going to my caravan, that’s all.”
“Your caravan? You don’t look the type to be enjoying a caravan holiday.”
Barry scratches his stubble, considers his blue leather motorcycle suit and realises this is true.
“I’m not on holiday,” he says. “I live here.”
“Then why haven’t we seen you around?”
“I’ve been on the road. On a quest.”
“Oh sure.”
“I do live here. Really.”
“It’s all right son, we know what you’re up to. You’re trying to get into the site to do a bit of thieving so you can support your drug habit, aren’t you?”
“No,” Barry protests. “I live here. Be reasonable.”
They laugh at him.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” says one of them. “We’ll stand here blocking your way and if you try to get past us we’ll break both your legs. How’s that for reasonable?”
Barry can tell they mean it. He slinks away, smarting with the unfairness of it all, and wondering how and when he’ll get back in to the site. He’s more concerned than ever about Charles Lederer. He has to think what to do next but can’t think of anything better than going back to Bug Mecca. He reasons that if Charles Lederer does leave the safety of the caravan and go there, then at least there’ll be a chance of spotting him and calming him down, although the crowd is so thick by now he knows it will be all too easy to miss him.
♦
In mid-afternoon Charles Lederer does indeed wake up. The inside of the caravan looks totally alien to him, though the fact that the door is locked seems curiously familiar. Still, caravan doors don’t present much of a problem. He breaks open the lock and steps outside. In the days when Charles Lederer was a Member of Parliament, caravan sites were hardly his stomping ground, and he finds his current surroundings extremely charmless. He decides to leave. The two men on the gate look at him curiously as he walks past them, but they are too busy keeping people out to be concerned with keeping anyone in.
Once in the road Charles Lederer is thrust into a seething if good-natured tumult; people coming and going, dodging in and out of traffic, and he notices that far too many of the cars are Volkswagen Beetles. Different parts of the crowd are heading in different directions, some to the Bug Mecca, some to the Gathering of the Tribes, and although he knows it will cause him pain, he finds himself being irresistibly drawn towards the field of Volkswagens.
He gets to the gate of Bug Mecca where a steward demands an entrance fee, but Charles Lederer gives him a look so wild and demented that the steward waves him in. He moves through the field, past dune buggies and Bajas and convertibles, past T — shirt stalls and club stands. He hears the noise of flat-four engines, he senses the love of Volkswagens, and he becomes completely disorientated. It all gets too much for him. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got there, but a part of him thinks it quite likely that he has died and gone to Hell. He sees a row of chemical toilets and heads for them. He enters a cubicle and locks himself in. He remains there for the rest of the afternoon, thereby making the already inadequate toilet arrangements even worse.
♦
Phelan eventually catches up with some of his skinheads. They are standing in a crowd watching a performance of gamelan music. They are predictably unimpressed and offer up a barrage of loud, sneering comments, mostly to the effect that they’d prefer to hear something by Skrewdriver. Phelan takes Butcher aside and asks how things are going. Butcher notices that he’s carrying a briefcase.
“Things are all right,” says Butcher.
“The new recruits?”
“They’re fine.”
“The Volkswagens?”
“Yeah, they’re fine too.”
“Did you take care of Renata?”
“Yeah we took care of her.”
“One day you’ll have to tell me all about it.”
Butcher shrugs non-committally.
“So, no problems at all?” says Phelan.
“Well I don’t know,” says Butcher. “I think we could be just pissing in the wind here.”
“How’s that?”
“I mean okay, so we can cause a bit of aggro. We can even get into a full blown rumble. But there’s thousands of these New Age buggers. There’s no way we can kick the shit out of all of them.”
“Of course not,” Phelan agrees.
“So what are we doing here?”
Phelan smiles. This is precisely the question he wanted Butcher to ask.
“Physical violence is all very well,” says Phelan, “but it’s far from being the only type.”
Butcher is confused by this notion and looks to Phelan for an explanation. The explanation is forthcoming, and as it unfolds, as Phelan reveals his latest plan for mayhem, Butcher gets a really good, evil feeling. When he has finished explaining, Phelan opens his briefcase to reveal endless bags full of anonymous white pills, the pharmaceutical medium by which his plan will be realised.
Butcher smiles and the briefcase is handed over. Butcher spends the rest of the afternoon distributing the white pills. Some people accept them readily enough as free samples, as though Butcher was some Owsley de nos jours. Others will only accept them when Butcher asks for money, believing they only get what they pay for. Butcher smiles a lot, acts friendly, assures them all that it’s very good stuff. He tells them it’s acid or Ecstasy or amphetamine depending on what they appear to want to hear. Other pills are crushed and the powder gets secretly dropped into batches of fruit juice, into pulse and bean salads, and in one case into a large tank that connects to a tap from which people are drawing drinking water. It is a long, hard afternoon’s work, and Butcher prefers not to delegate, but before long he sees, with great satisfaction, that a lively trade has started in the drugs. Somebody even offers to sell him some.
A couple of the tablets eventually get to Davey via a barefoot hippie with tiger stripes painted on his face, who assures him that this is the very highest quality Ecstasy. Davey has spent most of the day in a vain search for consciousness-changing chemicals and he doesn’t need asking twice. He eagerly swallows a couple of the tablets and waits for astounding results.