The girl comes to a rapid, faked, orgasm.
♦
Dawn arrived on punctured tyres. Ishmael stood in the library with Davey.
Davey said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
‘Go on, my son.’
‘I know fuck-all about martial arts. I enrolled for the course all right, but the teacher slung me out after two lessons. The wanker said I didn’t have any aptitude for the spiritual dimension.’
‘Oh Davey, Davey.’
On the landing Ishmael met John the Hippy. He looked downcast. Ishmael asked what was the matter.
‘I wish we’d never given you that acid,’ he said.
Harold the former bank manager walked by.
‘I still say we can make a fight of it,’ he said.
‘Bollocks,’ said the Norton twins.
As soon as it was light there was another meeting with the press. It was less dramatic than the previous one. Ishmael said he’d passed a peaceful night and had scrambled egg for breakfast. He was lying. The reporters at the gate held up the morning editions of their newspapers. Marilyn and Ishmael appeared on the front pages of most of them and one headline read ‘HOSTAGES OF LOVE-.
This time the reporters wanted to talk to Marilyn. She had washed her hair and done her make-up; for the occasion. She said she still loved her father, that she thought Ishmael was a very unusual and interesting man, and that her ambition in life was to be a writer.
They appeared on both morning television channels, and there was film of the Crockenfield Blazers holed-up in various locations around the grounds of ‘Sorrento’, though there were conspicuously fewer this morning than there had been the previous afternoon.
♦
Hitler’s nights have been pretty ragged lately, and his wedding night is no different. There are conferences to be held, attempts made at establishing radio contact, plans to be discussed, fires of hope to be stoked, traitors to be denounced. He therefore sleeps little, and when he does so it is not until late the next morning. He eventually falls asleep at seven or eight in the morning to be woken a few hours later by the sound of renewed shelling. He gets up, dresses with the utmost care and correctness, then takes breakfast — coffee and a selection of cakes, chocolate, sponge — party food.
The morning after his wedding he is seated in his study, under a picture of Frederick the Great, waiting for his breakfast to be delivered. Fraulein Manzialy arrives with a tray which is covered by a pink gingham cloth. She removes the cloth with a flourish and presents Adolf Hitler with an exquisite chocolate cake in the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle.
♦
There is a jump in the film and we now see the man and the girl riding in an open car. (Renata cannot fail to notice that it is a rather special Beetle cabriolet, in red metalflake with some tasteful black pinstriping.) On the back seat there are two boxes of groceries, and in the front seats the girl drives with one hand while manipulating her passenger’s cock with the other. There is some rapid editing which offends exact continuity and before long, before very long at all, the man is ejaculating furiously and copiously, and there is sperm dancing across the dashboard, on to the windscreen, on the gear lever, everywhere.
♦
The SAS arrived at ‘Sorrento’ at about ten in the morning. There were helicopters and men hanging from rope ladders and leaping on to the roof. There were smoke bombs, stun grenades and a few rounds of automatic fire. It all took about forty-five seconds.
Very little of the action could be seen from inside the house, but when some of the smoke had cleared it was possible to see Marilyn’s father and half a dozen Crockenfield Blazers being led away, their hands up, their eyes watering, and surrounded by armed SAS men in flak suits with black bags over their heads. Marilyn’s father was put in an ambulance and the others were loaded into a black maria.
♦
Another cut. The car draws to a halt on the edge of a desert. There is sand and scrub. The girl lies on the ground beside the car. This time she is actually naked — shoes, stockings and suspenders are nowhere to be seen. The man seems, curiously, to be fiddling with the groceries, and his reason now becomes apparent. He stands over the girl with an egg in his hand. He breaks the egg so that the yolk falls through the air and lands very precisely on the girl’s left breast — a direct hit. More eggs follow until there is a film of albumen and broken yolks over most of her torso. Events now progress rapidly. Via a series of jump cuts we see ketchup splashed around her neck and shoulders, chicken livers splattered across her thighs, honey coating her chin and cheeks. Baked beans, instant coffee, cling peaches, vegetable oil all follow until she is all but entirely clothed in this (more or less) edible silt.
♦
The front door of ‘Sorrento’ was thrown open and a sea of people flooded into the house. Photographers, cameramen and reporters were at the front of the mob, closely followed by police. Behind them were the ambulance men, the firemen and the sightseers from the village, and finally there was a number of men in very sharp suits with very sharp haircuts, and guns spoiling the neat lines of their jackets.
Everything got filmed and photographed — Marilyn and Ishmael, alone and together, with Fat Les and Davey, with other members of the commune. The house got photographed — every room, including Marilyn’s mother’s exotic bedroom — the garden, the drive, the wagon wheel gates and of course the five Beetles.
Ishmael and Marilyn posed in front of Enlightenment and answered a few last questions. Marilyn took care of the bright, breezy banter, Ishmael restricted himself to hammering home the spiritual message. They made a good team. The media lapped it up. So did the crowd of well-wishers who had gathered.
‘Finally, Ishmael,’ a reporter from ITN asked, ‘after all that you’ve been through, what are your feelings about Mr Lederer?’
Ishmael thought long and hard.
‘I forgive him,’ he said.
The well-wishers cheered and one or two plucked up enough courage to ask Ishmael for his autograph.
♦
The man is now naked and one would assume that he is about to lower himself on to the swamp of food within which there is the naked body of a woman. But that would be a hasty assumption. The camera focuses on his penis which is only semi-erect and slowly a stream of urine emerges. The camera follows its descent and roams over the areas of the girl’s body where urine mixes with food and where a nipple or navel occasionally shows through. The girl does a reasonable job of pretending to enjoy herself.
So far the film has been unusual yet plodding. It is different from the run of the mill blue movie but there has been nothing spectacularly inventive, and nothing, as Max and Renata have been all too aware, spectacularly erotic. Certainly there has been nothing to prepare them for the extraordinary filmic coup that the director pulls off in the dying minutes of the film, a coup which completely transforms the base materials with which he has been working.
The man and woman, she still on her back, he finishing his pee, become aware that someone is approaching. There is a long shot of a stranger walking towards them. The man and woman register mimed alarm.
And then comes the master stroke.
The film suddenly switches into fast motion reverse. Urine streams back into the man’s penis, ketchup leaps back into its bottle, eggs reform themselves. In less than a minute the groceries are whole and returned to the car. The girl is still naked but her body is perfectly clean and she now (in forward motion) slips her fur coat on just as the stranger passes by. There is a final shot of the Beetle driving away along a desert road before the film ends.