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 crowded car-park to the test sites. With the research scientist who had greeted us Helen
