James Ballard - Crash

Had Vaughan deliberately followed Catherine, striking her parked car in a first gesture of courtship? I looked at her pale skin and firm body, thinking of Vaughan’s car hurtling towards me among the concrete pillars of the overpass. Like Seagrave, I would have died in an acid death-out.

I opened the passenger door, beckoning Catherine into the seat.

‘Let me drive—the light is clear now.’

‘Your hands. Are you ready yet?’

‘Catherine—’ I took her arm. ‘I need to drive again before it all goes.’

She held her bare arms across her breasts, and peered into the interior of her car, as if searching for the flies which I had described to her.

I wanted to show her to Vaughan.

I started the engine and turned out of the courtyard. As I accelerated, the perspectives of the street swerved around me, leaning away from me as if streamlining themselves. Near the supermarket, a young woman in a plastic coat glowed with cerise light as she crossed the road. The motion of the car, its attitude and geometry, had undergone a marked transformation, as if they had been purged of all accretions of the familiar and sentimental. The surrounding street furniture, the shop-fronts and passers-by were illuminated by the motion of the car, the intensity of the light they emitted regulated by the passage of the vehicle I was driving. At the traffic lights I looked across the seat at Catherine. She sat with one hand on the window-sill. The colours of her face and arms revealed themselves in their clearest and richest forms, as if each blood cell and pigment granule, the cartileges of her face, were real for the first time, assembled by the movement of this car. The skin of her cheeks, the indicator signs guiding us on to the motorway, the cars parked on the roof of the supermarket, were clarified and defined, as if some immense deluge had at last receded, leaving everydiing isolated for the first time, like the features of a lunar landscape, a still-life arranged by a demolition squad.

We drove southwards along the motorway.

‘The traffic—where is everyone?’ I realized that the three lanes were almost deserted. ‘They’ve all gone away.’

‘I’d like to go back—James!’

‘Not yet—it’s only beginning…’

I thought of this image of an empty city, with an abandoned technology left to its own devices, as we drove down the access road where Vaughan had tried to kill me a few days earlier. In the waste lot beyond the damaged palisade the group of abandoned cars lay in the blanched light. I drove past the scarred concrete abutment towards the dark cavern of the overpass, where Vaughan and I had embraced each other among the concrete pillars, listening to the traffic drumming overhead. Catherine gazed up at the cathedral-like vaults of the overpass, like a succession of empty submarine pens. I stopped the car and turned towards her. Without thinking, I took up the posture in which I had sodomized Vaughan. I looked down at my own thighs and abdomen, visualizing Vaughan’s buttocks lifted high against my hips, remembering the tacky texture of his anus. By some paradox, this sex act between us had been devoid of all sexuality.

All that afternoon we drove along the expressways. The endless highway systems along which we moved contained the formulas for an infinity of sexual bliss. I watched the cars leaving the flyover. Each of them carried on its roof a piece of the sun.

‘Are you looking for Vaughan?’ Catherine asked.

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘You’re no longer frightened of him.’

‘Are you?’

‘He’s going to kill himself.’

‘I knew that after Seagrave died.’

I watched her staring at the traffic sweeping down the flyover towards us as we waited on a slip road below Western Avenue. I wanted Vaughan to see her. Thinking of the long dents that scarred the side of Catherine’s car, I wanted to expose them to Vaughan, encouraging him to take Catherine again.

At a concourse filling station we saw Vera Seagrave talking to a girl at the pumps. I turned into the forecourt. Vera’s strong-hipped body, with its hard-working breasts and buttocks, was dressed in a heavy leather jacket, as if she were about to leave on an Antarctic expedition.

At first she failed to recognize me. Her firm eyes cut across me to Catherine’s elegant figure, as if suspicious of her cross-legged posture in the open cockpit of the sports car with its lacerated bodywork.

‘Are you leaving?’ I pointed to the suitcases in the rear seat of Vera’s car. ‘I’m trying to find Vaughan.’

Vera finished her questioning of the girl attendant, completing some arrangement for the boarding of her small son. Still staring at Catherine, she stepped into her car.

‘He’s following his film actress. The police are after him—an American serviceman was killed on the Northolt overpass.’

I put my hand on the windshield, but she switched on the windshield wipers, almost cutting the knuckle of my wrist.

Explaining everything, she said: ‘I was with him in the car.’

Before I could stop her she had moved towards the exit and turned into the fast evening traffic.

Catherine telephoned me from her office the next morning to say that Vaughan had followed her to the airport. As she spoke in her calm tones I carried the telephone to the window. Watching the cars edge along the motorway, I felt my penis stiffening. Somewhere below me, among those thousands of vehicles, Vaughan was waiting at an intersection.

‘He’s probably looking for me,’ I told her.

‘I’ve seen him twice—this morning he was waiting for me in the entrance to the car-park.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I’ll get in touch with the police.’

‘No, don’t.’

Talking to her, I found myself slipping into the same erotic reverie in which I sometimes used to question Catherine about the flight instructor she lunched with, drawing one detail after another about some small amorous encounter, a brief act of intercourse. I visualized Vaughan waiting for her at quiet intersections, following her through car-washes and traffic detours, moving ever closer to an intense erotic junction. The drab streets were illuminated by the passage of their bodies during this exquisitely prolonged mating ritual.

Unable to stay any longer in the apartment while this courtship was taking place, I drove my car to the airport. From the roof of the multi-storey car-park next to the airfreight building I waited for Vaughan to appear. As I expected, Vaughan was waiting for Catherine at the junction of Western Avenue and the flyover. He made no attempt to conceal himself from either of us, pushing his heavy car bluntly into the passing traffic stream. Apparently uninterested in Catherine or myself, Vaughan lay against his door sill, almost asleep at the wheel as he surged forward when the lights changed. His left hand drummed across the rim of the steering wheel, as if reading the road’s braille in its rapid tremors. Following these rippling contours inside his head, he swerved the Lincoln to and fro across the road surface. His heavy face was fixed in a rigid mask, his scarred cheeks clamped rigidly around his mouth. He cut in and out of the traffic lanes, surging ahead in the fast lane until he was abreast of Catherine and then sliding back behind her, allowing other cars to cut between them and then taking up a watchful position in the slow lane. He began to mimic Catherine’s driving, her trim shoulders and high chin, her incessant use of the brake pedal. Their harmonized brake-lights moved down the expressway like the dialogue of a long-married couple.

I sped along behind them, flashing my headlamps at any cars in my way. We reached the ramp of the flyover. As Catherine climbed the ramp, forced to slow down behind a line of fuel tankers, Vaughan accelerated sharply, turning left at the junction. I raced after him, winding through the roundabouts and intersections which the flyover spanned. We jumped a set of traffic lights as the airport traffic closed towards us. Somewhere over our heads Catherine moved along the open deck of the flyover.