The film shows a room which is elegant in a masculine sort of way — a few art deco objects, a lot of mirrors which manage to avoid showing the camera, a rattan three-piece suite and a nest of glass tables.
A bulky, middle-aged man is lying on the floor under one of the tables. He is wearing nothing but a leather dog-collar and a latex posing pouch. A second, younger, man is seen. He is removing a blue leather motorcycle suit. He walks awkwardly, reluctantly across the room to where the man and the table are. He squats above the glass top, his naked buttocks visibly straining to shit.
‘Seen enough?’ Renata asks.
♦
‘I’ve seen more than enough,’ said Ishmael.
‘Ishmael!’ Marilyn shrieked. ‘How could you do it?’
‘It wasn’t easy.’
‘But how could you do this to me?’
‘I didn’t know you then.’
‘Talk about feet of clay,’ Davey sneered.
‘I didn’t know it was being filmed.’
‘Is that supposed to make a difference?’ Marilyn demanded.
‘I never had you down for a shirt-lifter, I really didn’t,’ Davey continued.
‘I never lifted my shirt,’ Ishmael protested. ‘I just took off my leathers. My heart wasn’t in it. You could see that from the film. I was only in it for the money.’
‘Some spiritual guide you turned out to be,’ said Davey. ‘Not just an ordinary shirt-lifter, but one who does it with shit for money.’
Marilyn said, ‘Ishmael, I hope you realize it’s all over between us, instantly and for ever.’
‘Hey, don’t go all middle class on me.’
‘And what’s wrong with being middle class?’
‘Oh no,’ Ishmael moaned. Had all his words been in vain?
Renata had been watching all this with barely restrained fury. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know there are going to be a few broken hearts over this, but really I’m more concerned with the hordes of press and the ‘fans’ who are out there dying for a chance to see you.’
‘Is this blackmail?’ Ishmael asked. ‘How much money do you want for the tape?’
‘I don’t want money, and besides this obviously isn’t the only copy of the tape.’
‘And I’d make damn sure I found one,’ said Davey. ‘And I’d make damn sure everybody saw it and knew that their new chat-show host was a filthy pervert.’
‘I’m at your mercy,’ Ishmael said. ‘Go on then, crucify me.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Renata. ‘But I do have one or two ideas.’
♦
It was just as well that Ishmael and Marilyn hadn’t got round to signing the BBC contract. The BBC were understandably furious when Ishmael informed them that he wouldn’t now be signing, and suspected some dirty trickery was taking place. But an anonymous note containing a still from the incriminating video arrived on the Director-General’s desk one morning. The BBC were so relieved at their narrow escape that they promised Marilyn a job as a researcher after her graduation, and they assured Ishmael that there were no hard feelings.
Ishmael? He turned down every deal he’d been offered. He had to. That was one of Renata’s conditions. He did no television, no radio, no interviews, endorsed no products, made no after dinner speeches. He did sell his story, however. He refused to deal with any writer except Renata Caswell of Cult Car. That surprised a lot of people.
A Sunday tabloid bought the story, paid well, and turned the story into a three-part serial. Ishmael didn’t write it, of course. Renata wrote it and he put his name to it. He had to. The story must have sold quite a few newspapers since there was still lots of public interest in Ishmael, but the story was not quite the one that people wanted to hear. It contained the hot news that Ishmael was going to renounce the world. As follows:
Today I don’t wear leather. I shave every day. I eat healthfoods and I abhor violence. I suddenly found myself in a position of potentially awesome power. I could have become an idol, an international tv star, a leader of men. But I looked into my soul and something told me that this was not the way. I found I’d made a mistake. I realized that all this pop-religion I’d been spouting was so much drivel. I had been deceiving myself. I decided not to deceive anyone else.
If I have any message left to give the world, it’s this,
Don’t follow leaders
Watch for parking meters.
Great advice even if it doesn’t rhyme.
♦
By 29 April 1945 Hitler has heard that Mussolini and Clara Petacci are dead and that their bodies are hanging in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. He will make sure that he does not end the same way. At the very end it is Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, who is ordered to send two hundred litres of petrol to the Chancellery garden to immolate the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun.
Russian shells burst around the Chancellery, some unidentifiable figures stand in the garden, giving a Nazi salute. A sheet of flame leaps angrily, futilely at the sky, some failed emblem of escape.
♦
At Fox’s Farm a dozen or so sullen communards are eating curried egg while watching television. Their eyes are intent but they see only patterns and shapes. They hear words but the words don’t arrange themselves into comprehensible patterns. The curry tastes of everything and nothing. They are smashed out of their heads.
In one of the farm’s outbuildings, behind locked doors, Fat Les has spent the evening lowering a tarted Cal-look Beetle. He starts the engine. The space begins to fill with carbon monoxide. It wouldn’t be so hard after all. He turns on the car radio. There is a phone-in programme on Parkinson’s disease. He changes station. No Wagner, instead there is The Who, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. He turns off the engine. Not worth it for the sake of that little shit Ishmael.
♦
An old man’s hands on a steering wheel, the skin mottled with liver spots, the wheel bound in textured leather. Ivan Hirst parks his BMW in a lay-by on the A57. Cars go by. Pretty people. Tanks full of petrol, heads full of lager and materialism. In-car stereos pump out middle-of-the-road music. Ivan Hirst lights his pipe, unwraps a Yorkie bar. It’s a full life.
♦
Marilyn sits at her newly acquired word-processor. She is home from Oxford for the weekend. She is attempting to be a writer. Her fingers magic-up words on the screen.
To the Germans it is the Kafer, to the Dutch the Kever. Yugoslavians speak of the Buba, the French of the Coccinelle. But by any name be it Bug or Beetle, or Maggliolino, or Escarabajo, or Fusca, the Volkswagen sits at the crossroads of history, roads that lead to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to the concentration camp and the atomic bomb site. And there at these crossroads stood I, hand in hand with Ishmael…
§
She hears her mother downstairs. A clink of glass, a rattle of ice cubes. Mummy is making Martinis. Marilyn decides to join her.
♦
Renata is the proud driver of a Porsche 911. She has handed in her notice at Cult Car. She doesn’t know what career she will fail in next but she has enough money from the sale of Ishmael’s story for this not to be a pressing concern.
♦
Renata did slip Ishmael a few hundred pounds out of her fee. He used it to rent a caravan on a small site near Filey.
It was late in the year. The weather was cold and the rent was cheap. Enlightenment was parked beside the caravan. He didn’t use it much any more. Sometimes he would sit in the driver’s seat, the engine not running, his hands on the wheel, his mind full of old dreams. He was not ‘home’ but there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
He cooked simple meals on the Calor gas stove. Sometimes he walked by the sea. Sometimes he listened to the radio. Sometimes he read a motoring magazine. Time passed, but not quickly.