Crash (10 page)
Authors: J.G. Ballard
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 VHF band of his car radio.
The sequence of pictures formed a record of Vaughan rather than myself, far more of the landscape and preoccupations
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 multi-storey 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.
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 multi-storey 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.
The leitmotiv of this photographic record emerged as I recovered from my injuries: my relationships, mediated by the automobile and its technological landscape, with my wife, Renata and Dr Helen Remington. In these crude photographs, Vaughan had frozen my uncertain embraces as I edged my wounded body into its first sexual encounters since the accident. He had caught my hand stretching across the transmission tunnel of my wife’s sports car, the inner surface of my forearm dented by the chromium gear lever, my bruised wrist pressing against the white flank of her thigh; my still-numb mouth against Renata’s left nipple, lifting her breast from her blouse as my hair fell across the window-sill; Helen Remington sitting astride me in the passenger seat of her black saloon, skirt hitched around her waist, scarred knees pressing against the vinyl seat as my penis
entered her vulva, the oblique angle of the instrument panel forming a series of blurred ellipses like globes ascending from our happy loins.
entered her vulva, the oblique angle of the instrument panel forming a series of blurred ellipses like globes ascending from our happy loins.
Vaughan stood at my shoulder, like an instructor ready to help a promising pupil. As I stared down at the photograph of myself at Renata’s breast, Vaughan leaned across me, his real attention elsewhere. With a broken thumbnail, its rim caked with engine oil, he pointed to the chromium window-sill and its junction with the overstretched strap of the young woman’s brassiere. By some freak of photography these two formed a sling of metal and nylon from which the distorted nipple seemed to extrude itself into my mouth.
Vaughan’s face was without expression. Childhood boils had left an archipelago of pockmarks across his neck. A sharp but not unpleasant smell rose from his white jeans, a blend of semen and engine coolant. He turned through the photographs, now and then tilting the album to emphasize an unusual camera angle for me.
I watched Vaughan close the album, wondering why I was unable to rouse myself into at least a parade of anger, remonstrate with him for this intrusion into my life. But Vaughan’s detachment from any emotion or concern had already had its effect. Perhaps some latent homo-erotic element had been brought to the surface of my mind by his photographs of violence and sexuality. The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality. Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive response to my crash.
I looked down at Vaughan’s long thighs and hard buttocks. However carnal an act of sodomy with Vaughan would have seemed, the erotic dimension was absent. Yet this absence made a sexual act with Vaughan entirely
possible. The placing of my penis in his rectum as we lay together in the rear seat of his car would be an event as stylized and abstracted as those recorded in Vaughan’s photographs.
possible. The placing of my penis in his rectum as we lay together in the rear seat of his car would be an event as stylized and abstracted as those recorded in Vaughan’s photographs.
The television director came hazily to the door, a wet cigarette unravelling between his fingers.
‘V. – can you fix this? Seagrave messed it up.’ He drew emptily on a crack on the side of the cigarette, and nodded to me. ’The nerve centre, eh? Vaughan makes everything look like a crime.’
Vaughan put down the camera tripod he was oiling and expertly tucked the tobacco into the cigarette, pouring back the grains of hash that landed on his palm. He licked the paper with a sharp tongue that darted from his scarred mouth like a reptile’s. His nostrils sucked at the smoke.
I looked through a batch of freshly developed prints on the table below the window. They showed the familiar face of the film actress, photographed as she was stepping from her limousine outside a London hotel.
‘Elizabeth Taylor – are you following her?’
‘Not yet. I need to meet her, Ballard.’
‘As part of your project? I doubt if she’ll be able to help you.’
Vaughan sauntered around the room on his uneven legs.
‘She’s working at Shepperton now. Aren’t you using her in a Ford commercial?’
Vaughan waited for me to speak. I knew that he would act on any evasion. Thinking of Seagrave’s grim concussion-fantasy – the film stars forced to crash their own stunt-cars – I decided not to answer.
Seeing all this cross my face, Vaughan turned to the
door. ‘I’ll call Dr Remington for you – we’ll talk about this again, Ballard.’
door. ‘I’ll call Dr Remington for you – we’ll talk about this again, Ballard.’
He handed to me, presumably as a pacifier, a bundle of well-thumbed Danish sex magazines. ‘Have a look at these – they’re more professionally done. You and Dr Remington might enjoy them together.’
Gabrielle, Vera Seagrave and Helen were in the garden, their voices drowned by the blare of aircraft taking off from the airport. Gabrielle walked in the centre, her shackled legs in a parody of a finishing-school carriage. Her pallid skin reflected the amber street-lights. Helen held her left elbow, steering her gently through the kneehigh grass. It suddenly occurred to me that during all the time I had spent with Helen Remington I had never discussed her dead husband with her.
I looked through the colour photographs in the magazines; in all of them the motor-car in one style or another figured as the centrepiece – pleasant images of young couples in group intercourse around an American convertible parked in a placid meadow; a middle-aged businessman naked with his secretary in the rear seat of his Mercedes; homosexuals undressing each other at a roadside picnic; teenagers in an orgy of motorized sex on a two-tier vehicle transporter, moving in and out of the lashed-down cars; and throughout these pages the gleam of instrument panels and window louvres, the sheen on over-polished vinyl reflecting the soft belly of a stomach or a thigh, the forests of pubic hair that grew from every corner of these motor-car compartments.
Vaughan watched me from the yellow armchair as Seagrave played with his small son. I remember his face, detached but serious, as Seagrave unbuttoned his shirt and placed the child’s mouth on his nipple, squeezing the hard skin into the parody of a breast.
MY MEETING with Vaughan, and the album of photographs documenting my accident, had quickened all my memories of that trauma of dreams. Going down to the basement garage a week later, I found myself unable to point the car in the direction of the studios at Shepperton, almost as if the vehicle had been transformed during the night into a Japanese uni-directional toy, or fitted like my own head with a powerful gyroscope that pointed only towards the foot of the airport flyover.
Waiting for Catherine to leave for her flying lesson, I drove my car towards the motorway, and within a few minutes had trapped myself in a traffic jam. The lines of stalled vehicles reached to the horizon, where they joined the clogged causeways of the motor routes to the west and south of London. As I edged forward, my own apartment house came into sight. Above the rails of the sitting-room balcony I could actually see Catherine moving about on some complex errand, making two or three telephone calls and scribbling away on a pad. In an unexpected way she seemed to be playing at being myself – already I knew that I would be back in the apartment the moment she left, taking up my convalescent position on that exposed balcony. For the first time I realized that sitting there, halfway up that empty apartment face, I
had been visible to tens of thousands of waiting motorists, many of whom must have speculated about the identity of this bandaged figure. In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death.
had been visible to tens of thousands of waiting motorists, many of whom must have speculated about the identity of this bandaged figure. In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death.
The traffic stirred slowly towards the Western Avenue interchange. I lost sight of Catherine as the glass curtain-walling of the high-rise apartment blocks moved between us. Around me the morning traffic lay in the fly-infested sunlight. Strangely, I felt almost no sense of anxiety. That profound feeling of foreboding, which had hung like the overhead traffic lights over my previous excursions along the motorways, had now faded. Vaughan��s presence, somewhere around me on these crowded causeways, convinced me that some kind of key could be found to this coming autogeddon. His photographs of sexual acts, of sections of automobile radiator grilles and instrument panels, conjunctions between elbow and chromium window-sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artefacts, the codes of a new marriage of sensation and possibility.
Vaughan had frightened me. The callous way in which he had exploited Seagrave, playing on the violent fantasies of this punch-drunk stunt-driver, warned me that he would probably go to any lengths to take advantage of the immediate situation around him.
I accelerated as the traffic reached the Western Avenue interchange, then moved northwards at the first right-hand junction towards Drayton Park. Like an up-ended glass coffin, the apartment block lifted into the sky over my head as I drove back into the basement garage.
In the apartment I wandered about restlessly, searching for the dictation pad on which Catherine recorded her telephone calls. I wanted to intercept any messages from her lovers, not out of sexual jealousy, but because these affairs would cut irrelevantly across whatever Vaughan was planning for us all.
Catherine had been untiringly generous and affectionate to me. She continued to urge me to see Helen Remington, so much so that at times I thought she was laying the ground for a free consultation, marked by strong lesbian overtones, about some obscure gynaecological complaint — the intercontinental pilots with whom she fraternized probably carried more diseases than all the terrified immigrants herded through Helen Remington’s bureaux.
Searching for Vaughan, I spent the morning haunting the approach roads to the airport. From the parking aprons of the filling stations along Western Avenue I watched the oncoming traffic. I hung about the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal, hoping to see Vaughan trail a visiting pop star or politician.
In the distance the traffic moved sluggishly along the exposed deck of the flyover. For some reason I remembered Catherine saying once that she would never be satisfied until every conceivable act of copulation in the world had at last taken place. Somewhere in this nexus of concrete and structural steel, this elaborately signalled landscape of traffic indicators and feeder roads, status and consumer goods, Vaughan moved like a messenger in his car, his scarred elbow resting on the chromium window-sill, cruising the highways in a dream of violence and sexuality behind an unwashed windshield.
Giving up my attempt to find Vaughan, I drove to the
studios at Shepperton. A large breakdown truck blocked the gates. The driver hung from his cab, shouting at the two commissionaires. On the back of the truck lay a black Citroën Pallas saloon car, its long bonnet crushed by a head-on collision.
studios at Shepperton. A large breakdown truck blocked the gates. The driver hung from his cab, shouting at the two commissionaires. On the back of the truck lay a black Citroën Pallas saloon car, its long bonnet crushed by a head-on collision.
‘That terrible machine.’ Renata joined me in the sunlight as I parked my car. ‘Did you order it, James?’
‘It’s needed for the Taylor film – there’s a crash sequence being taken this afternoon.’
‘She’ll drive that car? Don’t tell me.’
‘She’ll drive another car – this one is used for the post-crash sequences.’
Later that afternoon I thought of Gabrielle’s crippled body as I looked down over the make-up woman’s shoulder at the infinitely more glamorous and guarded figure of the screen actress sitting behind the wheel of the crashed Citroën. At a discreet distance the sound and lighting men watched her like spectators at a real accident. The make-up woman, a refined girl with a reassuring sense of humour – so unlike those casualty ward nurses whose opposite number, in a sense, she was – had worked for more than hour on the simulated wounds.
The actress sat motionlessly in the driving seat as the last brushstrokes completed the elaborate lacework of blood that fell from her forehead like a red mantilla. Her small hands and forearms were streaked with the blue shadows of simulated bruises. Already she was assuming the postures of a crash victim, her fingers weakly touching the streaks of carmine resin on her knees, thighs delicately raised from the plastic seat cover as if flinching from some raw mucous membrane. I watched her touch the steering wheel, barely recognizing the structure.
In the dashboard locker below the buckled instrument panel lay a woman’s dusty suède glove. Did the actress sitting in the car under her death-paint visualize the real victim injured in the accident that had crushed this vehicle – some Francophile suburban housewife, perhaps, or Air France stewardess? Did she instinctively mimic the postures of this injured woman, transforming in her own magnificent person the injuries of a commonplace accident, the soon-forgotten bloodstains and sutures? She sat in the damaged car like a deity occupying a shrine readied for her in the blood of a minor member of her congregation. Although I was twenty feet from the car, standing beside a sound engineer, the unique contours of her body and personality seemed to transform the crushed vehicle. Her left leg rested on the ground, the door pillar realigning both itself and the dashboard mounting to avoid her knee, almost as if the entire car had deformed itself around her figure in a gesture of homage.
The sound engineer turned on his heel, jarring my elbow with his boom microphone. As he apologized a uniformed commissionaire jostled past me. An altercation had broken out on the opposite corner of the highway junction which had been built on this outdoor set. The young American assistant producer was remonstrating with a dark-haired man in a leather jacket, trying to take a camera away from him. As the sunlight glanced off the zoom lens I recognized Vaughan. He was leaning against the roof of a second Citroën, staring at the producer and now and then fending him off with a scarred hand. Beside him, Seagrave was sitting on the bonnet of the car. His blond hair was tied in a knot on the top of his
head, and over his jeans he wore a woman’s fawn suède driving coat. Beneath his red polo-necked jumper a well-stuffed brassière formed the contours of two large breasts.
head, and over his jeans he wore a woman’s fawn suède driving coat. Beneath his red polo-necked jumper a well-stuffed brassière formed the contours of two large breasts.
Seagrave’s face had already been made up to resemble the screen actress’s, mascara and pancake darkening his pale skin. This immaculate mask of a woman’s face resembled a nightmare parody of the actress, far more sinister than the cosmetic wounds at that moment being applied to her. I assumed that Seagrave, wearing a wig over his blond hair and the same clothes as the actress, would drive this intact Citroën into a collision with the third vehicle containing a mannequin of her lover.
Already, as he watched Vaughan from behind his grotesque mask, Seagrave looked as if he had been obscurely injured in this collision. With his woman’s mouth and over-bright eyes, his dyed blond hair fastened into a bun on top of his head, he resembled an elderly transvestite caught drunk in his boudoir. He watched Vaughan with some resentment, as if Vaughan had forced him to dress up each day in this parody of the actress.
Vaughan had pacified the assistant producer and the commissionaire, without having to surrender his camera. He gave Seagrave a cryptic signal, his scarred mouth breaking into a smile, and sidestepped towards the production offices. As I approached, he beckoned me forwards, incorporating me into an instant entourage.
Behind him, forgotten now by Vaughan, Seagrave sat alone in the Citroën like a distraught witch.
‘Is he all right? You should have photographed Seagrave.’
‘I did – of course.’ Vaughan slung the camera on to his right hip. Wearing the white leather jacket he resembled a handsome actor more than a renegade scientist.
‘Can he still drive a car?’
‘As long as it moves in a straight line for him.’
‘Vaughan, get him to a doctor.’
‘That would spoil everything. Besides, I can’t spare the time. Helen Remington has seen him.’ Vaughan turned his back on the set. ‘She’s joining the Road Research Laboratory. There’s an Open Day in a week’s time – we’ll all go together.’
‘That’s the sort of frolic I can well do without.’
‘No, Ballard – you’ll find it reassuring. It’s a vital section in the television series.’
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.
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.
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.
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