completely at ease, as if my obsessions with the endlessly multiplying vehicles had at last been relieved.
Vaughan, by contrast, seemed to have lost interest in the accident. Holding his camera above his head, he pushed roughly through the spectators making their way down the bridge. Catherine watched him jump the last six steps and dart among the tired police. Her clear interest in Vaughan, her eyes avoiding my own but fixed continually on his scarred face as she held tightly to my arm, neither surprised nor upset me. Already I sensed that the three of us had yet to make the most of this crash, play its quickening possibilities into our own lives. I was thinking of the scars on my own body and on Vaughan’s, handholds for our first embraces, and of the wounds on the bodies of the survivors of the crash behind us, contact points for all the sexual possibilities of their futures.
The last of the ambulances drove away, its siren wailing. The spectators returned to their cars, or climbed the embankment to the break in the wire fence. An adolescent girl in a denim suit walked past us, her young man with an arm around her waist. He held her right breast with the back of his hand, stroking her nipple with his knuckles. They stepped into a beach buggy slashed with pennants and yellow paint and drove off, horn hooting eccentrically. A burly man in a truck-driver’s jacket helped his wife up the embankment, a hand on her buttocks. This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners.
Catherine leaned against the rear body panel of the Lincoln, crotch pressed against the chromium fin moulding. She kept her head away from me.
‘Are you going to drive? You’re all right, aren’t you?’
I stood with my feet apart, hands on my breast bone, inhaling the floodlit air. I could feel my wounds again, cutting through my chest and knees. I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain. My body glowed from these points, like a resurrected man basking in the healed injuries that had brought about his first death.
I knelt by the nearside front wheel of the Lincoln. Streaks of a black gelatinous material smeared the fender and wheel housing, marking the muddied disc of the whitewall tyre. I touched the gummy residues with my fingers. A heavy dent marked the wheel housing, the same deformation produced on my own car some two years earlier when I had been hit by a German shepherd dog running blindly across a street. I had stopped a hundred yards ahead and walked back to find two schoolgirls vomiting into their hands over the dying dog.
I pointed to the smears of blood. ‘You must have hit a dog—the police may impound the car while they have the blood analysed.’
Vaughan knelt beside me and inspected the bloodstains, nodding sagely. ‘You’re right, Ballard—there’s an all-night car-wash in the airport service area.’
He held the door open for me, his steady eyes without any show of hostility, as if calmed and relaxed by the accident we had passed. I sat behind the wheel, waiting for him to walk around the car and sit beside me, but he pulled open the rear door and climbed in with Catherine.
As we set off, his camera landed on the front seat. Its invisible silver memories of pain and excitement distilled themselves on their dark reel as, behind me, Catherine’s most sensitive mucous surfaces quietly discharged their own quickening chemicals.
We drove westwards towards the airport. I watched Catherine in the rear-view mirror. She sat in the centre of the rear seat, elbows forward on her knees, looking over my shoulder at the speeding lights of the expressway. At the first traffic lights, when I glanced at her, she smiled at me reassuringly. Vaughan sat like a bored gangster behind her, his left knee leaning against her thigh. One hand rubbed his groin absent-mindedly. He stared at the nape of her neck, running his eyes along the profiles of her cheek and shoulder. That Catherine should choose Vaughan, whose manic style summed up everything she found most unnerving, struck me as perfectly logical. The multiple car-crash we had seen had sprung the same traps in her mind as in mine.
At the north-west airport entrance I turned the car into the service area. On this peninsula between the perimeter fence and the access roads to Western Avenue was an encampment of car-hire firms, all-night cafeterias, airfreight offices and filling stations. The evening air was crossed by the navigation lights of airliners and maintenance vehicles, by the thousands of headlamps flowing along Western Avenue and the flyover. The jarring light across Catherine’s face made her seem part of this midsummer nightmare, true creature of the electric air.
A line of cars waited their turn to pass through the automatic car-wash. In the darkness the three nylon rollers drummed against the sides and roof of a taxi parked in the washing station, water and soap solution jetting from the metal gantries. Fifty yards away, the two night attendants sat in their glass cubicle beside the deserted fuel pumps, reading their comic books and playing a transistor radio. I watched the rollers sweeping across the taxi. Hidden inside the cabin as the soapy water sluiced across the windows, the off-duty driver and his wife were invisible and mysterious mannequins.
The car ahead advanced a few yards. Its brake-lights illuminated the interior of the Lincoln, covering us with a pink sheen. Through the driving mirror I saw that Catherine was leaning against the rear seat. Her shoulder was pressed tightly into Vaughan’s. Her eyes were fixed on Vaughan’s chest, at the scars around his injured nipples shining like points of light.
I edged the Lincoln forward a few feet. Behind me lay a block of darkness and silence, a condensed universe. Vaughan’s hand moved across a surface. I went through the pretence of withdrawing the car’s radio aerial. The accident below the flyover, in a position almost symmetrically opposite to my own, and the thudding of the rollers had pre-empted my responses. The possibilities of a new violence, even more exciting for only touching my mind rather than my nerve endings, was reflected in the deformed sheen of the chromium window pillar beside my wrist, the dented panels of the Lincoln’s hood. I thought of Catherine’s past infidelities, liaisons always visualized in my mind but never observed.
An attendant left the pay-box and walked to the cigarette machine beside the lubrication bay. His reflection in the wet concrete merged with the lights of the cars passing along the expressway. The water jetted from the metal gantry across the car in front of us. The soap stream hit the bonnet and windshield, hiding two air hostesses and a steward in its liquid glaze.
When I turned around I saw that Vaughan was holding in his cupped hand my wife’s right breast.
I eased the car forward into the empty bay, concentrating on the controls. The last liquid dripped from the stationary rollers in front of me. I wound down my window and searched in my pockets for the coins. The plump meridian of Catherine’s breast jutted forwards in Vaughan’s hand, the nipple inflated between his fingers as if about to feed a platoon of eager male mouths, the lips of countless lesbian secretaries. He stroked the nipple gently, brushing the supernumerary nipples, no larger than delicious warts, with the ball of his thumb. Catherine looked down at this breast with rapt eyes, as if seeing it for the first time, fascinated by its unique geometry.
Our car was alone in the washing bay. Around us the forecourt was deserted. Catherine lay back with her legs apart, her mouth raised to Vaughan, who touched it with his lips, laying each scar in turn against her mouth. I felt that this act was a ritual devoid of ordinary sexuality, a stylized encounter between two bodies which recapitulated their sense of motion and collision. Vaughan’s postures, the way in which he held his arms as he moved my wife across the seat, lifting her left knee so that his body was in the fork between her thighs, reminded me of the driver of a complex vehicle, a gymnastic ballet celebrating a new technology. His hands explored the back of her thighs in a slow rhythm, holding her buttocks and lifting her exposed pubis towards his scarred mouth without touching it. He was arranging her body in a series of positions, carefully searching the codes of her limbs and musculature. Catherine seemed still only half aware of Vaughan, holding his penis in her left hand and sliding her fingers towards his anus as if performing an act divorced from all feeling. She touched his chest and shoulders with her right hand, exploring the patterns of scars on his skin, handholds which his crashes had designed specifically for this sexual act.
A voice shouted. Ggarette in hand, one of the attendants was standing in the wet darkness, beckoning to me like the flight commander of an aircraft carrier. I inserted my coins in the pay slot and closed the window. Water jetted on to the car, clouding the windows and shutting us into its interior, lit only by the lights from the instrument panel. Within this blue grotto Vaughan lay diagonally across the rear seat. Catherine knelt across him, skirt rolled
