as if endlessly wrapping a parcel. During the day this senile old dear was the nurses’ pride, but at night, when no visitors were present, she was humiliated over the bedpan and callously ignored by the two nuns knitting in the staff room.
The sister cut short her reprimand and turned on her heel. A young woman wearing a dressing-gown and a white-coated doctor stepped through the door of a private ward reserved for ‘friends’ of the hospital: members of the nursing staff, doctors and their families. I had often seen the man before, always bare-chested under his white coat, moving about on errands not much more exalted than my own. I assumed that he was a graduate student specializing in accident surgery at this airport hospital. His strong hands carried a briefcase filled with photographs. As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards, pornographic X-ray plates and blacklisted urinalyses. A brass medallion swung on his bare chest from a black silk chord, but what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence. I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.
He looked me up and down, taking in every detail of my injuries with evident interest, but I was more concerned with the young woman moving towards me on her stick. This aid was clearly an affectation, a postural disguise that allowed her to press her face into her raised shoulder and hide the bruise marking her right cheekbone. I had last seen her as she sat in the ambulance beside the body of her husband, staring at me with calm hatred.
‘Dr Remington—?’ Without thinking, I asked her name.
She came up to me, changing her grip on the stick as if ready to thrash me across the face with it. She moved her head in a peculiar gesture of the neck, deliberately forcing her injury on me. She paused when she reached the doorway, waiting for me to step out of her way. I looked down at the scar tissue on her face, a seam left by an invisible zip three inches long, running from the corner of her right eye to the apex of her mouth. With the naso-labial fold this new line formed an image like the palm-lines of a sensitive and elusive hand. Reading an imaginary biography into this history of the skin, I visualized her as a glamorous but overworked medical student, breaking out of a long adolescence when she qualified as a doctor into a series of uncertain sexual affairs, happily climaxed by a deep emotional and genital union with her engineer husband, each ransacking the other’s body like Crusoe stripping his ship. Already the skin picked in a palisade of notches from her lower lip marked the arithmetic of widowhood, the desperate calculation that she would never find another lover. I was aware of her strong body underneath her mauve bathrobe, her rib-cage partly shielded by a sheath of white plaster that ran from one shoulder to the opposite armpit like a classical Hollywood ball-gown.
Deciding to ignore me, she walked stiffly along the communication corridor, parading her anger and her wound.
During my last days in the hospital I did not see Dr Helen Remington again, but as I lay in the empty ward I thought constantly of the crash that had brought us together. A powerful sense of eroticism had sprung up between me and this bereaved young woman, almost as if I unconsciously wished to re-conceive her dead husband in her womb. By entering her vagina among the metal cabinets and white cables of the X-ray department I would somehow conjure back her husband from the dead, from the conjunction of her left armpit and the chromium camera stand, from the marriage of our genitalia and the elegantly tooled lens shroud.
I listened to the nurses arguing in the staff room. Catherine visited me. She would soap her hand from the toilet bar in its wet saucer inside my cupboard, her pale eyes staring through the flower-filled window as she masturbated me, left hand holding an unfamiliar brand of cigarette. Without any prompting, she began to talk about my crash, and the police inquiries. She described the damage to the car with the persistence of a voyeur, almost nagging me with her lurid picture of the crushed radiator grille and the blood spattered across the bonnet.
‘You should have gone to the funeral,’ I told her.
‘I wish I had,’ she replied promptly. ‘They bury the dead so quickly—they should leave them lying around for months. I wasn’t ready.’
‘Remington was ready.’
‘I suppose he was.’
‘What about his wife?’ I asked. ‘The woman doctor? Have you visited her yet?’
‘No, I couldn’t. I feel too close to her.’
Already Catherine saw me in a new light. Did she respect, and perhaps even envy me for having killed someone, in almost the only way in which one can now legally take another person’s life? Within the car-crash death was directed by the vectors of speed, violence and aggression. Did Catherine respond to the image of these which had been caught, like a photographic plate or the still from a newsreel, in the dark bruises of my body and the physical outline of the steering wheel? In my left knee the scars above my fractured patella exactly replicated the protruding switches of the windshield wipers and parking lights. As I moved towards my orgasm she began to soap her hand every ten seconds, her cigarette forgotten, concentrating her attention on this orifice of my body like the nurses who attended me in the first hours after my accident. As my semen jerked into Catherine’s palm she held tightly to my penis, as if these first orgasms after the crash celebrated a unique event. Her rapt gaze reminded me of the Italian governess employed by a Milanese account executive with whom we had stayed one summer at Sestri Levante. This prim spinster had lavished her life on the sexual organ of the two-year-old boy she tended, for ever kissing his small penis, sucking the glans to engorge it, showing it off with immense pride.
I nodded sympathetically, my hand on her thigh below her skirt. Her pleasantly promiscuous mind, fed for years on a diet of aircraft disasters and war newsreels, of violence transmitted in darkened cinemas, made an immediate connection between my accident and all the nightmare fatalities of the world perceived as part of her sexual recreations. I stroked the warm belly of her thigh through a tear in the crotch of her tights, then slipped my forefinger around the coif of blonde pubic hair that curled like a flame from the apex of her vulva. Her loins seemed to have been furnished by an eccentric haberdasher.
Hoping to soothe away the hyper-excitement which my crash had generated in Catherine—now ever-larger in memory, more cruel and more spectacular—1 began to stroke her clitoris. Distracted, she soon left, kissing me firmly on the mouth as if she barely expected to see me alive again. She talked on and on as if she thought that my crash had not yet occurred.
Chapter 5
‘You’re going to drive? But your legs—James, you can barely walk!’
As we sped along the Western Avenue clearway at over seventy miles an hour Catherine’s voice sounded a reassuring note of wifely despair. I sat back in the leaping bucket seat of her sports car, watching happily while she fought her blonde hair out of her eyes, slim hands swerving to and from the leopard-skin glove of the miniature steering wheel. Since my accident Catherine’s driving had become worse, not better, as if she were confident now that the unseen powers of the universe would guarantee her erratic passage down these high-speed concrete avenues.
I pointed at the last moment to a truck looming in front of us, its refrigerated trailer bounding from side to side on over-inflated tyres. Catherine drove her small foot on to the brake pedal, pulling us around the truck into the slow lane. I put away the rental-car company brochure and gazed through the perimeter fence at the deserted standby runways of the airport. An immense peace seemed to preside over the shabby concrete and untended grass. The glass curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain.
‘You’re renting a car—how long for?’
‘A week. I’ll be near the airport. You’ll be able to keep an eye on me from your office.’
‘I will.’
‘Catherine, I’ve got to get out more.’ I drummed at the windshield with both fists. ‘I can’t sit on the veranda for ever—I’m beginning to feel like a potted plant.’
