James Ballard - Crash

He strode away to the car-park.

These potent confusions of fiction and reality, summed up in the pathetic but sinister figure of Seagrave disguised as the screen actress, remained in my mind all afternoon, even overlaying my response to Catherine when she came to collect me.

She chattered pleasantly to Renata, but was soon distracted by the coloured photographs on the walls, sections of custom-built sports cars and de luxe saloons which appeared in a dealer commercial we were making. These emblematic portraits of tail-fin and radiator grille, body panel and windshield hood, air-brushed in vivid pastel and acrylic colours, seemed to fascinate her. Her good-humoured tolerance of Renata surprised me. I led her into the cutting room, where two young editors were working on the rough cut. Presumably Catherine was convinced that within this visual context some kind of erotic junction between Renata and myself was inevitable, and that if she herself were left in this office, working among the contour photographs and layouts of fender assemblies, she too would have formed a sexual liaison, not only with the two young editors, but with Renata as well.

She had spent the day in London. In the car outside, her wrists were keyboards of perfumes. What had first struck me about Catherine was her immaculate cleanliness, as if she had individually reamed out every square centimetre of her elegant body, separately ventilated every pore. At times the porcelain appearance of her face, an over-elaborate make-up like some demonstration model of a beautiful woman’s face, had made me suspect that her whole identity was a charade. I tried to visualize the childhood that had created this beautiful young woman, the perfect forgery of an Ingres.

This passivity, her total acceptance of any situation, was what had attracted me to Catherine. During our first sex acts, in the anonymous bedrooms of the airport hotels, I would deliberately inspect every orifice I could find, running my fingers around her gums in the hope of seeing even one small knot of trapped veal, forcing my tongue into her ear in the hope of finding a trace of the taste of wax, inspecting her nostrils and navel, and lastly her vulva and anus. I would have to run my forefinger to its root before I could extract even a faint scent of faecal matter, a thin brown rim under my fingernail.

We set off for home in our separate cars. At the traffic lights on the access road to the northbound lanes of the motorway I watched Catherine resting her hands on the steering wheel. Her right index finger picked at an old adhesive label on the windshield. Waiting beside her, I watched her thighs move against each other as she pressed the foot-brake.

As we drove along Western Avenue I wanted her body to embrace the compartment of the car. In my mind I pressed her moist vulva against every exposed panel and fascia, I crushed her breasts gently against the door pillars and quarter windows, moved her anus in a slow spiral against the vinyl seat covers, placed her small hands against the instrument dials and window-sills. The junction of her mucous membranes and the vehicle, my own metal body, was celebrated by the cars speeding past us. The complex of an immensely perverse act waited upon her like a coronation.

Almost mesmerized by this reverie, I was abruptly aware of the dented fender of Vaughan’s Lincoln only a few feet behind Catherine’s sports car. Vaughan surged past me, crowding along the roadway as if waiting for her to make a mistake. Startled, Catherine took refuge in front of an airline bus in the nearside lane. Vaughan drove alongside the bus, using his horn and spotlights to force the driver back, and again cut in behind Catherine. I moved ahead along the centre lane, shouting to Vaughan as I passed him, but he was signalling to Catherine, pumping his headlamps at her rear fender. Without thinking, Catherine pulled her small car into the courtyard of a filling station, forcing Vaughan into a heavy U-turn. Tyres screaming, he swung around the ornamental flower-bed with its glazed pottery plants, but I blocked his way with my own car.

Excited by all this, Catherine sat among the scarlet fuel pumps, her eyes flashing at Vaughan. The wounds on my legs and chest ached from the effort of keeping up with them. I stepped from my car and walked across to Vaughan. He watched me approach as if he had never seen me before, scarred mouth working on a piece of gum as he gazed at the airliners lifting from the airport.

‘Vaughan, you’re not on a bloody stunt track now.’

Vaughan made a brief pacifying gesture with one hand. He hooked the gear lever into reverse. ‘She enjoyed it, Ballard. It’s a form of compliment. Ask her.’

He reversed in a wide circle, almost running down a passing pump attendant, and set off across the early afternoon traffic.

Vaughan was right. Catherine’s sexual fantasies began more and more to involve him. At night, as we lay together in our bedroom, we approached Vaughan through the pantheon of our familiar partners like Vaughan himself tracking us through the lobbies of the terminal buildings.

‘We must get some more hash.’ Catherine looked up at the traffic lights sweeping across the windows. ‘Why is Seagrave so obsessed with these film actresses? You say he wants to crash into them?’

‘Vaughan put the idea into his head. He’s using Sea-grave in some experiment.’

‘What about the wife?’

‘She’s under Vaughan’s thumb.’

‘And you?’

Catherine lay with her back to me, buttocks pressed into my groin. As I moved my penis I looked past my scarred navel at the cleft between her buttocks, as immaculate as a doll’s. I held her breasts in my hands, her rib cage crushing my wristwatch into my forearm. Catherine’s passive stance was deceptive; from long practice I knew that this was the prelude to an erotic fantasy, a slow and circular inspection of some fresh sexual quarry.

‘Am I under his thumb? No. But it’s difficult to know where the centre of his personality is.’

‘You don’t resent him taking all those photographs? It sounds as if he’s using you.’

I began to play with Catherine’s right nipple. Not yet ready for this, she took my hand and placed it around her breast.

‘Vaughan annexes people to him. There’s still a strong element of the TV personality about his whole style.’

‘Poor man. These girls he picks up—some of them are just children.’

‘You keep coming back to them. It isn’t sex that Vaughan is interested in, but technology.’

Catherine pressed her head into the pillow, a familiar gesture of concentration.

‘Do you like Vaughan?’

I moved my fingers to her nipple again and began to erect it. Her buttocks moved on to my penis. Her voice was pitched on a low, thick note.

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘He fascinates you, doesn’t he?’

‘There is something about him. About his obsessions.’

‘His flashy car, the way he drives, his loneliness. All the women he’s fucked there. It must smell of semen…’

‘It does.’

‘Do you find him attractive?’

I drew my penis from her vagina and placed the head against her anus, but she pressed it back into her vulva with a quick hand.

‘He’s very pale, covered with scars.’

‘Would you like to fuck him, though? In that car?’

I paused, trying to delay the orgasm rushing like a tidal race up the shaft of my penis.

‘No. But there is something about him, particularly as he drives.’

‘It’s sex—sex and that car. Have you seen his penis?’

As I described Vaughan to her I listened to my voice rising slightly above the sounds of our bodies. I itemized the elements that constituted Vaughan’s image in my mind: his hard buttocks held within the worn jeans as he rolled himself on to one hip to leave the car; the sallow skin of his abdomen, almost exposing the triangle of his pubis as he lounged behind the steering wheel; the horn of his half-erect penis pressing against the lower rim through the damp crotch of his trousers; the minute nodes of dirt he picked from his sharp nose and wiped on the indented vinyl of the door panel; the ulcer on his left index finger as he handed me the cigarette lighter; his hard nipples through the frayed blue shirt brushing against the horn boss; his broken thumbnail scratching at the semen stains on the seat between us.