Crash

by James Graham Ballard

  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 Citroen 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 transves-tite 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 Citroen like a distraught witch.

  ‘Is he all right? You should have photographed Sea-grave.’

  ‘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.

  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.

  Chapter 12

  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 th
is, 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.

  ‘Is he circumcised?’ Catherine asked. ‘Can you imagine what his anus is like? Describe it to me.’

  My description of Vaughan continued, more for Catherine’s benefit than for my own. She pressed her head deep into the pillow, right hand in a fierce dance as she forced my fingers to manipulate her nipple. Although stirred by the idea of intercourse with Vauehan, it seemed to me that I was describing a sex act involving someone other than myself. Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers—a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum—but in the stvl-ization of posture achieved between Vaushan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest.

  ‘Would you like to sodomize him? Would you like to put your penis right into his anus, thrust it up his anus? Tell me, describe it to me. Tell me what you’d do. How would you kiss him in that car? Describe how you’d reach over and unzip his trousers, then take out his penis. Would you kiss it or suck it straightaway? Which hand would you hold it in? Have you ever sucked a penis?’

  Catherine had taken over the fantasy. Whom did she see lying beside Vaughan, herself or me?

  ‘… do you know what semen tastes like? Have you ever tasted semen? Some semen is saltier than others. Vaughan’s semen must be very salty…’

  I looked down at her blonde hair that covered her face, at her hips kicking as she carried herself towards her orgasm. This was one of the first times that she had envisaged me in a homosexual act, and the intensity of the fantasy surprised me. She shuddered through her orgasm, her body in a rigor of pleasure. Before I could reach out to embrace her she turned over, lying face downwards to let my semen run from her vagina, then pulled herself from the bed and stepped briskly into the bathroom.

  During the next week, Catherine drifted through the departure lounges of the airport like a queen in rut. Watching her from my car as Vaughan kept her within his aberrant gaze, I felt my loins surging, my penis pressing against the steering wheel.

  Chapter 13

  ‘Have you come?’

  Helen Remington touched my shoulder with an uncertain hand, as if I were a patient she had worked hard to revive. As I lay against the rear seat of the car she dressed herself with abrupt movements, straightening her skirt around her hips like a department-store window-dresser jerking a garment on to a mannequin.

  On our way to the Road Research Laboratory I had suggested that we park among the reservoirs to the west of the Airport. During the previous week Helen had shifted her field of interest away from me, as if allocating myself and the accident to a past life whose reality she no longer recognized. I knew that she was about to enter that period of unthinking promiscuity through which most people pass after a bereavement. The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality. During the first months after his death she moved through a series of rapidly consumed affairs, as if taking the genitalia of all these men into her hands and her vagina would in some way bring her husband back to life, and that all this semen mixed within her womb would quicken the fading image of the dead man within her mind.

  The day after her first sexual act with me, she had taken another lover, the junior pathologist at Ashford Hospital. From him she moved through a succession of men: the husband of a fellow woman doctor, a trainee radiologist, the service manager at her garage. What I noticed about these affairs, which she described in an unembarrassed voice, was the presence in each one of the automobile. All had taken place within a motor-car, either in the multi-storey car-park at the airport, in the lubrication bay of her local garage at night, or in the laybys near the northern circular motorway, as if the presence of the car mediated an element which alone made sense of the sexual act. In some way, I assumed, the car re-created its role in the death of her husband within the new possibilities of her body. Only in the car could she reach her orgasm. Yet one evening, as I lay in my car with her on the roof of the multi-storey car-park at Northolt, I felt her body stiffen in a rictus of hostility and frustration. I placed my hand on the dark triangle of her pubis, the moisture turning it silver in the darkness. She pulled her arms away from me and stared at the cabin of the car, as if about to tear her exposed breasts on this trap of glass and metal knives.

  The deserted reservoirs lay around us in the sunlight, an invisible marine world. Helen wound up her window, shutting out the noise of a climbing airliner.

  ‘We won’t come here again—you’ll have to find somewhere else.’

  I had felt the same fall in excitement. Without Vaughan watching us, recording our postures and skin areas with his camera, my orgasm had seemed empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue.

  In my mind I visualized the cabin of Helen’s gar, its hard chrome and vinyl, brought to life by my semen, transformed into a bower of exotic flowers, with creepers entwined across the roof light, the floor and seats lush with moist grass.

  Looking across at Helen, as she accelerated along the open deck of the motorway, I suddenly wondered how I could hurt her. I thought of taking her again along the route of her husband’s death—perhaps this would reengage her sexual need for me, rekindle whatever erotic hostility she felt for me and the dead man.

  As we were guided through the gates of the Laboratory Helen sat forward over the steering wheel, her slim arms holding it in a strange grip. Her body formed an awkward geometry with the windshield pillars and the angle of the steering column, almost as if she were consciously mimicking the postures of the crippled young woman, Gabrielle.

  We walked from the crow
ded car-park to the test sites. With the research scientist who had greeted us Helen discussed projected Ministry legislation on anti-roll bars. Two lines of damaged cars had been drawn up on the concrete. The bodies of plastic mannequins sat in the crumpled hulls, their faces and chests splintered by the collisions, wound areas marked in coloured panels on their skulls and abdomens. Helen stared at them through the empty windshields, almost as if they were patients whom she hoped to treat. As we strolled through the gathering visitors in their smart suits and flowered hats Helen reached through the starred windows and caressed the plastic arms and heads.

  This dreamlike logic hung over the entire afternoon. In the bright afternoon light the several hundred visitors took on the appearance of mannequins, no more real than the plastic figures which would play the roles of driver and passengers in a front-end collision between a saloon car and a motorcycle.

  This sense of disembodiment, of the unreality of my own muscles and bones, increased when Vaughan appeared. In front of me, the engineers were shackling the motorcycle to the cradle which would be propelled along its steel rails towards the saloon car seventy yards away. Metering coils led from both vehicles to the recording devices set up on a line of trestle tables. Two cine-cameras were in position, the first mounted alongside the track, lens aimed at the point of impact, the second pointing downwards from an overhead gantry. A video-tape device was already playing back on to a small screen a picture of the engineers adjusting the sensors in the car’s engine compartment. A family of four mannequins sat in the car—a husband, wife and two children—coils attached to their heads, chests and legs. Already the anticipated injuries they would suffer had been marked on their bodies; complex geometric shapes in carmine and violet zoned across their faces and thoraxes. An engineer settled the driver for the last time behind his steering wheel, arranging his hands in the correct ten-to-two position. Over the loudspeaker system the commentator, a senior principal scientific officer, welcomed the guests to this experimental crash and jocularly introduced the occupants of the car—’Charlie and Greta, imagine them out for a drive with the kids, Scan and Brigitte…’