James Ballard - Crash

‘You’ll tear your gloves.’ I moved her hand away from the grille. ‘I don’t think we should have come here—I’m surprised the police don’t make it more difficult.’

Her strong wrist pressed back against my fingers, out of a kind of wayward irritation, as if she were rehearsing her physical revenge against me. Her eyes lingered on the black confetti scattered across the bonnet and seats.

‘Were you badly hurt?’ she asked. ‘I think we saw each other at the hospital.’

I found it impossible to say anything to her, aware of the almost obsessive way in which she brushed her hair across her cheek. Her strong body, with its nervous sexuality, formed a powerful junction with the dented and mud-stained car.

‘I don’t want the car,’ she said. ‘In fact, I was appalled to find that I have to pay a small fee to have it scrapped.’

She hung around the car, watching me with a mixture of hostility and interest, as if admitting that her motives for coming to the pound were as ambiguous as my own. I sensed that in her refined and matter-of-fact way she was already trying out the possibilities I had opened for her, examining this instrument of a perverse technology which had killed her husband and closed the principal avenue of her life.

I offered her a lift to her surgery.

‘Thanks.’ She walked ahead of me. ‘To the airport, if you could.’

‘The airport?’ I had an odd feeling of loss. ‘Why—are you leaving?’

‘Not yet—though not soon enough for some people, I’ve already found.’ She took off her sunglasses and gave me a bleak smile. ‘A death in the doctor’s family makes the patients doubly uneasy.’

‘I take it you’re not wearing white to reassure them?’

‘I’ll wear a bloody kimono if I want to.’

We took our seats in my car. She told me that she worked in the immigration department at London Airport. Holding herself well away from me, she leaned back against the door pillar, surveying the interior of the car with a critical eye, this apparent resurrection of smooth vinyl and polished glass. She followed my hands as they moved across the controls. The pressure of her thighs against the hot plastic formed a module of intense excitement. Already I guessed that she was well aware of this. By a terrifying paradox, a sexual act between us would be a way of taking her revenge on me.

Heavy traffic jammed the northbound motorway from Ashford to London Airport. The sunlight burned on the overheated cellulose. Tired drivers leaned through open windows around us, listening to the endless newscasts on their radios. Sealed inside their airline coaches, would-be passengers watched the jetliners lifting from the distant runways of the airport. To the north of the terminal buildings I could see the high deck of the flyover straddling the airport entrance tunnel, clogged with traffic that seemed about to re-enact a slow-motion dramatization of our crash.

Helen Remington pulled a cigarette packet from the pocket of her raincoat. She searched the instrument panel for the lighter, right hand moving above my knees like a nervous bird.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Her strong fingers tore away the cellophane. ‘I started to smoke at Ashford—it’s rather stupid of me.’

‘Look at all this traffic—I need every sedative I can lay my hands on.’

‘It’s much worse now—you noticed that, did you? The day I left Ashford I had the extraordinary feeling that all these cars were gathering for some special reason I didn’t understand. There seemed to be ten times as much traffic.’

‘Are we imagining it?’

She pointed to the interior of the car with her cigarette. ‘You’ve bought yourself exactly the same car again. It’s the same shape and colour.’

She turned her face towards me, making no effort now to hide the scar-line on her face. I was well aware of the strong undertow of hostility moving towards me. The traffic stream reached the Stanwell intersection. I followed the queue of cars, already thinking of how she would behave during sexual intercourse. I tried to visualize her broad mouth around her husband’s penis, sharp fingers between his buttocks searching out his prostate. She touched the yellow hull of a fuel tanker beside us, its massive rear wheels only six inches from her elbow. As she read the fire instructions on the tank I stared at her firm calves and thighs. Had she any notion of the man, or woman, with whom her next sex act would take place? I felt my penis stirring as the lights changed. I moved from the fast into the slow lane, taking up my position in front of the fuel tanker.

The arch of the flyover rose against the skyline, its northern ramp shielded by the white rectangle of a plastics factory. The untouched, rectilinear volumes of this building fused in my mind with the contours of her calves and thighs pressed against the vinyl seating. Clearly unaware that we were moving towards our original meeting ground, Helen Remington crossed and uncrossed her legs, shifting these white volumes as the front elevations of the plastics factory moved past.

The pavement fell away below us. We sped towards the junction with the Drayton Park motorway spur. She steadied herself against the chromium pillar of the quarter-window, almost dropping her cigarette on to her lap. Trying to control the car, I pressed the head of my penis against the lower rim of the steering wheel. The car swept toward? its first impact point with the central reservation. Marker lines unravelled diagonally below us, and a car’s horn blared faintly from behind my shoulder. The drifts of broken windshield glass flashed like morse lamps in the sunlight.

Semen jolted through my penis. As I lost control of the car the front wheel struck the kerb of the central reservation, throwing a tornado of dust and cigarette packs on to the windshield. The car swerved from the fast lane and veered towards an airline coach coming out of the roundabout. As the semen oozed from my penis I pulled the car behind the coach. The last tremor of this small orgasm faded.

I felt Helen Remington’s hand on my arm. She had moved into the centre of the seat, strong shoulder pressed against mine, her hand on the wheel over my own. She watched the cars that swerved past on both sides of us, horns sounding.

‘Turn off here—you can drive quietly for a while.’

I wheeled the car on to the slip road that led into the deserted concrete boulevards of a bungalow estate. For an hour we drove through the empty streets. Children’s bicycles and painted carts stood by the gates of the bungalows. Helen Remington held my shoulder, her eyes hidden behind her glasses. She talked to me of her work in the immigration department of the airport, and of her difficulties over the probate of her husband’s will. Was she aware of what had taken place within my car, of the route I had rehearsed so many times in so many different vehicles, and that I had celebrated in her husband’s death the unity of our injuries and my orgasm?

The traffic multiplied, concrete lanes moving laterally across the landscape. As Catherine and I drove from the coroner’s inquest the flyovers overlaid one another like copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other’s backs. A verdict of accidental death had been returned, without any show of interest or ceremony; no charges of manslaughter or negligent driving were brought against me by the police. After the inquest I let Catherine drive me to the airport. For half an hour I sat by the window in her office, looking down at the hundreds of cars in the parking lot. Their roofs formed a lake of metal. Catherine’s secretary stood behind her shoulder, waiting for me to leave. As she handed Catherine’s glasses to her I saw that she was wearing a white lipstick, presumably an ironic concession to this day of death.