Several pages followed, showing the crashed sports car in the breaker’s yard, close-ups of the dried bloodstains on the driving and passenger seats. Vaughan himself appeared in one of these photographs, staring down at the car in a Byronic pose, his heavy penis visible in the tight crotch of his jeans.
The last group of photographs showed the young woman in a chromium wheelchair, guided by a friend across the rhododendron-screened lawn of a convalescent institution, propelling her shiny vehicle herself at an archery meeting, and finally taking her first lessons at the wheel of an invalid car. As she pondered the complex, treadle- operated brakes and gear changes I realized the extent to which this tragically injured young woman had been transformed during her recovery from the accident. The first photographs of her lying in the crashed car showed a conventional young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole economy of a cozy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body. I could imagine her sitting in the car of some middle-aged welfare officer, unaware of the conjunction formed by their own genitalia and the stylized instrument panel, a euclid of eroticism and fantasy that would be revealed for the first time within the car-crash, a fierce marriage pivoting on the fleshy points of her knees and pubis. This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car. Three months later, sitting beside her physiotherapy instructor in her new invalid car, she held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris. Her knowing eyes seemed well aware that the space between her crippled legs was constantly within the gaze of this muscled young man. His eyes roved among the damp moor of her pubis as she moved the gear lever through its cage. The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities. As she peered through the window at Vaughan’s camera her canny eyes were clearly aware of his real interest in her. The posture of her hands on the steering wheel and accelerator treadle, the unhealthy fingers pointing back towards her breasts, were elements in some stylized masturbatory rite. Her strong face with its unmatching planes seemed to mimic the deformed panels of the car, almost as if she consciously realized that these twisted instrument binnacles provided a readily accessible anthology of depraved acts, the keys to an alternative sexuality. I stared at the photographs in the harsh light. Without thinking, I visualized a series of imaginary pictures I might take of her: in various sexual acts, her legs supported by sections of complex machine tools, pulleys and trestles; with her physical education instructor, coaxing this conventional young man into the new parameters of her body, developing a sexual expertise that would be an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century. Thinking of the extensor rictus of her spine during orgasm, the erect hairs on her undermuscled thighs, I stared at the stylized manufacturer’s medallion visible in the photographs, the contoured flanks of the window pillars.
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 VHP band of his car radio.
The sequence of pictures formed a record of Vaughan rather than myself, far more of,the landscape and pre- occupations 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 multistorey 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.
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.
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.’
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 knee-high 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
