Crash

by J. G. Ballard

  Catherine walked me to the lobby. ‘James, you must go to the office – believe me, love, I’m trying to be helpful.’ She touched my right shoulder with a curious hand, as if searching for some new wound which had flowered there. During the inquest she had held my arm in a peculiar grip, frightened that I might be swept sideways out of the window.

  Unwilling to haggle with the surly and baronial taxi-drivers only interested in taking London fares, I walked through the car-park opposite the air-freight building. Overhead, across the metallized air, a jet-liner screamed. When the aircraft had passed I raised my head and saw Dr Helen Remington moving among the cars a hundred yards to my right.

  At the inquest I had been unable to take my eyes away from the scar on her face. I watched her walk calmly through the lines of cars towards the entrance of the immigration department. Her strong jaw was held at a jaunty angle, her face turned away from me as if she were ostentatiously blotting out all traces of my existence. At the same time I had the strong impression that she was completely lost.

  A week after the inquest she was waiting at the taxi rank of the Oceanic Terminal as I drove away from Catherine’s office. I called to her and stopped behind an airline bus, beckoning her into the passenger seat. Swinging her handbag from a strong wrist, she came across to my car, recognizing me with a grimace.

  As we headed towards Western Avenue she surveyed the traffic with frank interest. She had brushed her hair back from her face, openly wearing the fading scar-line.

  ‘Where can I take you?’

  ‘Can we drive a little?’ she asked. ‘There’s all this traffic — I like to look at it.’

  Was she trying to taunt me? I guessed that in her matter-of-fact way she was already assessing the possibilities I had revealed to her. From the concrete aprons of the parking lots and the roofs of the multi-storey car-parks she was now inspecting with a clear and unsentimental eye the technology which had brought about the death of her husband.

  She began to chatter with contrived animation. ‘Yesterday I hired a taxi-driver to drive me around for an hour. “Anywhere,” I said. We sat in a massive traffic jam near the underpass. I don’t think we moved more than fifty yards. He wasn’t in the least put out.’

  We drove along Western Avenue, the service buildings and perimeter fence of the airport on our left. I kept the car in the slow lane as the high deck of the flyover receded in the rear-view mirror. Helen talked about the second life she was already planning for herself.

  ‘The Road Research Laboratory need a medical officer – the salary is larger, something I’ve got to think about now. There’s a certain moral virtue in being materialistic.’

  ‘The Road Research Laboratory …’ I repeated. The newsreels of simulated car-crashes were often shown in television documentaries; these mutilated machines were haunted by a strange pathos. ‘Isn’t that rather too close … ?’

  ‘That’s the point. Besides, I know I can give something now that I wasn’t remotely aware of before. It’s not a matter of duty so much as of commitment.’

  Fifteen minutes later, as we moved back towards the flyover, she came and sat beside me, watching my hands on the controls as we once again entered the collision course.

  The same calm but curious gaze, as if she were still undecided how to make use of me, was fixed on my face shortly afterwards as I stopped the car on a deserted service road among the reservoirs to the west of the airport. When I put my arm around her shoulders she smiled briefly to herself, a nervous rictus of the upper lip which exposed her gold-tipped right incisor. I touched her mouth with my own, denting the waxy carapace of pastel lipcoat, watching her hand reach out to the chromium pillar of the quarter window. I pressed my lips against the bared and unmarked dentine of her upper teeth, fascinated by the movement of her fingers across the smooth chrome of the window pillar. Its surface was marked along its forward edge by a smear of blue paint left by some disaffected production-line worker. The nail of her forefinger scratched at this fretline, which rose diagonally from the window-sill at the same angle as the concrete ledge of the irrigation ditch ten feet from the car. In my eyes this parallax fused with the image of an abandoned car lying in the rust-stained grass on the lower slopes of the reservoir embankment. The brief avalanche of dissolving talc that fell across her eyes as I moved my lips across their lids contained all the melancholy of this derelict vehicle, its leaking engine oil and radiator coolant.

  Six hundred yards behind us the traffic waited on the raised deck of the motorway, the afternoon sunlight crossing the windows of the airline buses and cars. My hand moved around the outer curvature of Helen’s thighs, feeling the open zip of her dress. As these razorlike links cut my knuckles I felt her teeth across my ear. The sharpness of these pains reminded me of the bite of the windshield glass during my crash. She opened her legs and I began to stroke the nylon mesh that covered her pubis, a glamorous veil for the loins of this seriousminded woman doctor. Looking into her face, with its urgent mouth gasping as if trying to devour itself, I moved her hand around her breasts. She was now talking to herself, rambling away like some demented accident casualty. She lifted her right breast from her brassière, pressing my fingers against the hot nipple. I kissed each breast in turn, running my teeth across the erect nipples.

  Seizing me with her body in this arbour of glass, metal and vinyl, Helen moved her hand inside my shirt, feeling for my nipples. I took her fingers and placed them around my penis. Through the rear-view mirror I saw a water-board maintenance truck approaching. It moved past in a roar of dust and diesel exhaust that drummed against the doors of my car. This surge of excitement drew the first semen to my penis. Ten minutes later, when the truck returned, the vibrating windows brought on my orgasm. Helen knelt across me, elbows pressed into the seat on either side of my head. I lay back, feeling the hot, scented vinyl. My hands pushed her skirt around her waist so that I could see the curve of her hips. I moved her slowly against me, pressing the shaft of my penis against her clitoris. Elements of her body, her square kneecaps below my elbows, her right breast jacked out of its brassière cup, the small ulcer that marked the lower arc of her nipple, were framed within the cabin of the car. As I pressed the head of my penis against the neck of her uterus, in which I could feel a dead machine, her cap, I looked at the cabin around me. This small space was crowded with angular control surfaces and rounded sections of human bodies interacting in unfamiliar junctions, like the first act of homosexual intercourse inside an Apollo capsule. The volumes of Helen’s thighs pressing against my hips, her left fist buried in my shoulder, her mouth grasping at my own, the shape and moisture of her anus as I stroked it with my ring finger, were each overlaid by the inventories of a benevolent technology – the moulded binnacle of the instrument dials, the jutting carapace of the steering column shroud, the extravagant pistol grip of the handbrake. I felt the warm vinyl of the seat beside me, and then stroked the damp aisle of Helen’s perineum. Her hand pressed against my right testicle. The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. My finger moved into Helen’s rectum, feeling the shaft of my penis within her vagina. These slender membranes, like the mucous septum of her nose which I touched with my tongue, were reflected in the glass dials of the instrument panel, the unbroken curve of the windshield.

  Her mouth bit my left shoulder, blood marking my shirt like the imprint of a mouth. Without thinking, I struck the side of her head with the palm of my hand.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she gasped into my face. ‘Please, don’t move!’ She steered my penis back into her vagina. Holding her buttocks with both hands, I moved rapidly towards my orgasm. Above me, Helen Remington’s serious faced gazed down at me as if she were resuscitating a patient. The sheen of moisture on the skin around her mouth was like the bloom on a morning wind
shield. She pumped her buttocks rapidly, forcing her pubic bone against mine, then leaned back against the dashboard as a Land-Rover thudded past along the track, sending a cloud of dust against the windows.

  She lifted herself off my penis when it had gone, letting the semen fall on to my crotch. She sat herself behind the steering wheel, holding the wet glans in her hand. She looked around the compartment of the car, as if speculating on any other uses to which she could put our sexual act. Lit by the afternoon sun, the fading scar on her face marked off these concealed motives like the secret frontier of an annexed territory. Thinking that I might reassure her in some way, I took her left breast from the brassière and began to stroke it. Stirred happily by its familiar geometry, I gazed at the jewelled grotto of the instrument panel, at the jutting shroud of the steering assembly and the chromium heads of the control switches.

  A police car appeared on the service road behind us, its white hull rolling heavily through the dips and ruts. Helen sat up and put away her breast with a deft hand. She dressed quickly, and began to remake her face in the mirror of her compact. As abruptly as we had begun, she was now distanced from her own eager sexuality.

  However, Helen Remington clearly felt no concern herself at these out-of-character actions, these sexual acts in the cramped compartment of my motor-car parked in various deserted service roads, culs-de-sac and midnight parkways. When I collected her during the following weeks from the house she had rented in Northolt, or waited for her in the reception lounge outside the airport immigration offices, it seemed incredible to me that I had any kind of sexual involvement with this sensitive woman doctor in her white coat, listening indulgently to the self-defeating arguments of some tubercular Pakistani.

  Strangely, our sexual acts took place only within my automobile. In the large bedroom of her rented house I was unable even to mount an erection, and Helen herself would become argumentative and remote, talking endlessly about the more boring aspects of her work. Once together in my car, with the crowded traffic lanes through which we had moved forming an unseen and unseeing audience, we were able to arouse each other. Each time she revealed a growing tenderness towards myself and my body, even trying to allay my concern for her. In each sexual act together we recapitulated her husband’s death, re-seeding the image of his body in her vagina in terms of the hundred perspectives of our mouths and thighs, nipples and tongues within the metal and vinyl compartment of the car.

  I waited for Catherine to discover my frequent meetings with this lonely woman doctor, but to my surprise she showed only a cursory interest in Helen Remington. Catherine had rededicated herself to her marriage. Before my accident our sexual relationship was almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities. When she stepped out of bed in the mornings she seemed like some efficient mechanic servicing herself: a perfunctory shower; the night’s urine discharged into the lavatory pan; her cap extracted, regreased and once again inserted (how and where did she make love during her lunch-hour, and with which of the pilots and airline executives?); the news programme played while she percolated the coffee …

  All this had now passed, replaced by a small but growing repertory of tendernesses and affections. As she lay beside me, willingly late for her office, I could bring myself to orgasm simply by thinking of the car in which Dr Helen Remington and I performed our sexual acts.

  9

  THIS pleasant domestic idyll, with its delightful promiscuities, was brought to an end by the reappearance of Robert Vaughan, nightmare angel of the expressways.

  Catherine was away for three days, attending an airline conference in Paris, and out of curiosity I took Helen to the stock-car races in the stadium at Northolt. Several of the stunt drivers working on the Elizabeth Taylor feature at Shepperton Studios put on displays of ‘hell-driving’. Unwanted tickets circulated around the studios and our own offices. Disapproving of my affair with the widow of the man I had killed, Renata gave me a pair of tickets, presumably as an ironic gesture.

  Helen and I sat together in the half-empty stand, waiting as a succession of stripped-down saloon cars circled the cinder track. A bored crowd watched from the perimeter of the converted football ground. The announcer’s voice boomed away over our heads. At the conclusion of each heat the drivers’ wives cheered half-heartedly.

  Helen sat close to me, arm around my waist, face touching my shoulder. Her face was deadened by the continuous roar of defective silencer units.

  ‘It’s strange – I thought all this would be far more popular.’

  ‘The real thing is available free of charge.’ I pointed to the yellow programme sheet. ‘This should be more interesting – “The Recreation of a Spectacular Road Accident”. ’

  The track was cleared and lines of white bollards were arranged to form the outline of a road intersection. Below us, in the pits, the huge, oil-smeared body of a man in a silver-studded jacket was being strapped into the driver’s seat of a doorless car. His shoulder-length dyed-blond hair was tied behind his head with a scarlet rag. His hard face had the pallid and hungry look of an out-of-work circus hand. I recognized him as one of the stuntmen at the studios, a former racing driver named Seagrave.

  Five cars were to take part in the re-enactment of the accident – a multiple pile-up in which seven people had died on the North Circular Road during the previous summer. As they were driven to their positions in the field the announcer began to work up the audience’s interest. The amplified fragments of his commentary reverberated around the empty stands as if trying to escape.

  I pointed to a tall cameraman in a combat jacket who was hovering around Seagrave’s car, shouting instructions to him over the engine roar through the missing windshield.

  ‘Vaughan again. He talked to you at the hospital.’

  ‘Is he a photographer?’

  ‘Of a special kind.’

  ‘I thought he was doing some sort of accident research. He wanted every conceivable detail about the crash.’

  Vaughan’s present role in the stadium seemed that of a film director. As if Seagrave were his star, an unknown who would make Vaughan’s reputation, he leaned intently against the windshield pillar, outlining with aggressive gestures some new choreography of violence and collision. Seagrave lolled back, smoking away at a loosely wrapped hash cigarette which Vaughan held for him as he adjusted his straps and the rake of the steering column. His dyed blond hair provided the chief focus of interest in the stadium. From the announcer we learned that Seagrave would drive the target car, which would be cannonaded by a skidding truck into the path of four oncoming vehicles.

  At one point Vaughan left him and ran up the stand to the commentator’s box behind us. A brief silence followed, after which we were told in tones of some triumph that Seagrave had asked for his closest friend to drive the skidding truck. This last dramatic addition failed to rouse the crowd, but Vaughan seemed satisfied. His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile as he came down the gangway. Seeing Helen Remington and me together, he waved to us as if we were long-standing aficionadoes of these morbid spectacles in the arena.

  Twenty minutes later, I sat in my car behind Vaughan’s Lincoln as a concussed Seagrave was helped across the parking-lot. The accident re-enactment had been a fiasco – struck by the skidding truck, Seagrave’s car had been locked on to the raw fenders like a myopic bullfighter running straight on to the bull’s horns. The truck carried him fifty yards before ramming him into one of the oncoming saloon cars. The hard, unshielded collision had brought the entire crowd, Helen and myself to our feet.

  Vaughan alone was unmoved. As the stunned drivers clambered from their cars and eased Seagrave from behind his driving wheel Vaughan walked swiftly across the arena, beckoning in a peremptory way to Helen Remington. I followed her across the cinders, but Vaughan ignored me, steering Helen through the crowd of mechanics and hangers-on.

  Although Seagrave was able to walk, wiping his greasy hands on his silv
er overall trousers and groping blankly at the air a few feet in front of him, Vaughan persuaded Helen to accompany them to Northolt General Hospital. Once we had set off I found myself hard pressed to keep up with Vaughan’s car, the dusty Lincoln with a rearmounted spotlight. As Seagrave slumped beside Helen in the back seat, Vaughan drove at speed through the night air, one elbow on the door sill, tapping the roof with his hand. I guessed that in his off-hand way he was testing me to see if he could throw me off; at the traffic lights he watched me in the rear-view mirror as I hauled up behind him, then surged away powerfully across the amber. On the Northolt overpass he moved along at well above the speed limit, casually overtaking a cruising police car on the wrong side. The driver flashed his headlamps, hesitating only when he saw the scarlet rag like a bloodstain across Seagrave’s hair and my urgent headlamps behind.

  We left the overpass and moved down a concrete road through west Northolt, a residential suburb of the airport. Single-storey houses stood in small gardens separated by wire fences. The area was inhabited by junior airline personnel, car-park attendants, waitresses and exstewardesses. Many of them were shift-workers, sleeping through the afternoon and evening, and the windows were curtained as we wheeled through the empty streets.

  We turned into the hospital entrance. Ignoring the visitor’s car-park, Vaughan pressed on past the casualty department entrance and slammed to a halt in the parking-lot reserved for consultant physicians. He leapt from the driver’s seat and beckoned Helen out of the car. Smoothing back his blond hair, Seagrave climbed reluctantly from the rear compartment. He had still not recovered his sense of balance, and rested his huge body against the windshield pillar. Looking at his unfocused eyes and bruised head, I was sure that this was only the latest in a long series of previous concussions. He spat on his oil-stained hands as Vaughan held his head, took Vaughan’s arm and lurched after Helen towards the casualty department.