James Ballard - Crash

At a first glance no recognizable human figures appeared in these photographs, but on the wall above the metal sink beside the window were the enlarged prints of six middle-aged women. I was struck by their marked resemblance to Vera Seagrave, as she might appear in twenty years’ time. They varied from what I guessed was the well-preserved wife of a successful businessman, fox fur around her shoulders, to a menopausal supermarket cashier and an overweight usherette in a braided gaberdine uniform. Unlike the remainder of the photographs, these six pictures had been taken with elaborate care, using a zoom lens trained through windshields and revolving doors.

Vaughan opened the album at random and handed it to me. Leaning back against the door, he watched me as I adjusted the desk lamp.

The first thirty pages recorded the crash, hospitaliza-tion and post-recuperative romance of the young social worker, Gabrielle, who was at that moment sitting on the sofa in Seagrave’s sitting-room and rolling the cigarettes which they were smoking. By coincidence, her small sports car had collided with an airline bus at the entry to the airport underpass not far from the site of my own accident. Her sharp-jawed face, its skin beginning to sag like the first slide of an avalanche, lay back against the oil-smeared seat. Around the crushed car was a group of police, ambulance attendants and spectators. In the foreground of the first photographs a fireman with cutting equipment was severing the right-hand windshield pillar. The young woman’s injuries were not yet apparent. Her expressionless face looked up at the fireman as he held his torch, almost as if waiting for some bizarre sexual assault. In the later photographs the bruises that were to mask her face began to appear, like the outlines of a second personality, a preview of the hidden faces of her psyche which would have emerged only in late middle age. I was struck by the prim lines these bruises formed around her broad mouth. These morbid depressions were like those of a self-centred spinster with a history of unhappy affairs. Later, even more bruises appeared on her arms and shoulders, the marks of the steering column and instrument panel, as if these lovers had beaten her out of an increasingly abstracted despair with a series of grotesque implements.

Behind me, Vaughan still leaned against the door. For the first time since I had met him his body was completely at rest, its manic movements in some way calmed by my immersion in his album. I turned the next pages. Vaughan had compiled an elaborate photographic dossier on the young woman. I guessed that he had chanced upon her accident a few minutes after she had skidded into the rear of the airline bus. The alarmed faces of several Varig passengers peered through the rear window at the crushed sports car which this injured young woman had delivered like a tableau sculpture to the unprotected overhang below their seats.

The next pictures showed her being lifted from the car, her white skirt heavy with blood. Her face leaned emptily against the arm of a fireman raising her from the bloody basin of the driving seat like some insane cultist in the American South baptized in a font of lamb’s blood. A hatless police driver held one handle of the stretcher, his square jaw pushed to one side by her left thigh. Between these two was the darkening triangle of her crotch.

Several pages followed, showing the crashed sports car in the breaker’s yard, close-ups of the dried bloodstains on the driving and passenger seats. Vaughan himself appeared in one of these photographs, staring down at the car in a Byronic pose, his heavy penis visible in the tight crotch of his jeans.

The last group of photographs showed the young woman in a chromium wheelchair, guided by a friend across the rhododendron-screened lawn of a convalescent institution, propelling her shiny vehicle herself at an archery meeting, and finally taking her first lessons at the wheel of an invalid car. As she pondered the complex, treadle-operated brakes and gear changes I realized the extent to which this tragically injured young woman had been transformed during her recovery from the accident. The first photographs of her lying in the crashed car showed a conventional young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole economy of a cozy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body. I could imagine her sitting in the car of some middle-aged welfare officer, unaware of the conjunction formed by their own genitalia and the stylized instrument panel, a euclid of eroticism and fantasy that would be revealed for the first time within the car-crash, a fierce marriage pivoting on the fleshy points of her knees and pubis. This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car. Three months later, sitting beside her physiotherapy instructor in her new invalid car, she held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris. Her knowing eyes seemed well aware that the space between her crippled legs was constantly within the gaze of this muscled young man. His eyes roved among the damp moor of her pubis as she moved the gear lever through its cage. The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities. As she peered through the window at Vaughan’s camera her canny eyes were clearly aware of his real interest in her. The posture of her hands on the steering wheel and accelerator treadle, the unhealthy fingers pointing back towards her breasts, were elements in some stylized masturbatory rite. Her strong face with its unmatching planes seemed to mimic the deformed panels of the car, almost as if she consciously realized that these twisted instrument binnacles provided a readily accessible anthology of depraved acts, the keys to an alternative sexuality. I stared at the photographs in the harsh light. Without thinking, I visualized a series of imaginary pictures I might take of her: in various sexual acts, her legs supported by sections of complex machine tools, pulleys and trestles; with her physical education instructor, coaxing this conventional young man into the new parameters of her body, developing a sexual expertise that would be an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century. Thinking of the extensor rictus of her spine during orgasm, the erect hairs on her undermuscled thighs, I stared at the stylized manufacturer’s medallion visible in the photographs, the contoured flanks of the window pillars.

Vaughan leaned silently against the door. I turned the pages. The remainder of the album, as I anticipated, described the course of my own accident and recovery. From the first photograph, which showed me being carried into the hospital casualty unit at Ashford, I knew that Vaughan had been there when I arrived—later I learned that he listened to the ambulance broadcasts on the VHP band of his car radio.

The sequence of pictures formed a record of Vaughan rather than myself, far more of,the landscape and pre-occupations of the photographer than of his subject. Apart from those photographs of myself in hospital, taken with a zoom lens through the open window as I lay in bed, swathed in more bandages than I realized at the time, the background to all the pictures was the same—the automobile, moving along the highways around the airport, in the traffic jams on the flyover, parked in culs-de-sac and lovers lanes. Vaughan had followed me from the police pound to the airport reception area, from the multistorey car-park to Helen Remington’s house. From these coarse prints it seemed that my whole life was spent in or near the motor-car. Vaughan’s interest in myself was clearly minimal; what concerned him was not the behaviour of a 40-year-old producer of television commercials but the interaction between an anonymous individual and his car, the transits of his body across the polished cellulose panels and vinyl seating, his face silhouetted against the instrument dials.