Crash

The visitors wandered away to the tea tent. I followed Vaughan towards the crashed car. He stepped between the chairs, spitting his chewing-gum on to the grass. I knew that he had been even more affected by the test crash and the slow-motion film than myself. Helen Remington watched us, sitting alone among the chairs. Vaughan stared down at the shattered car, almost about to embrace it. His hands roved along the torn bonnet and roof, the muscles of his face opening and shutting like manacles. He bent down and peered into the cabin, scanning each of the mannequins. I waited for him to say something to them, my eyes moving from the dented curvatures of the bonnet and fenders to the cleft of Vaughan's buttocks. The destruction of this motor-car and its occupants seemed, in turn, to sanction the sexual penetration of Vaughan's body; both were conceptualized acts abstracted from all feeling, carrying any ideas or emotions with which we cared to freight them.

Vaughan scraped the flaking fibreglass from the driver's face. He wrenched the door open and edged his thigh on to the seat, one hand holding the distorted steering wheel.

'I've always wanted to drive a crashed car.'

I took the remark to be a joke, but Vaughan appeared to mean it seriously. Already he was calmer, as if this act of violence had drained some of the tensions from his body, or pre-empted whatever violent behaviour he had suppressed for so long.

'All right,' Vaughan announced, dusting the fibreglass from his hands. 'We'll leave now – I'll give you a lift.' When I hesitated he said, 'Believe me, Ballard, one car-crash looks like another.'

Was he aware that I was duplicating in my mind a series of sexual postures between Vaughan and myself, Helen Remington and Gabrielle which would re-enact the death-ordeals of the mannequins and the fibreglass motorcyclist? In the urinal beside the car-park Vaughan deliberately exposed his half-erect penis as he stood well back from the stall, flicking out the last drops of urine on to the tiled floor.

Once away from the Laboratory he recovered all his aggressiveness, as if bis appetite was quickened by the passing cars. He rolled the heavy car along the access road to the motorway, holding the battered bumpers a few feet behind any smaller vehicle until it moved out of his way.

I tapped the instrument panel. 'This car – a ten-year-old Continental. I take it that you see Kennedy's assassination as a special kind of car-crash?'

'The case could be made.'

'But why Elizabeth Taylor? Driving around in this car, aren't you putting her in some danger?'

'Who from?'

'Seagrave – the man's half out of his mind.'

I watched him drive along the last stretches of the motorway, making no effort to slacken his speed despite the warning signs.

'Vaughan – has she ever been in a car-crash?'

'Not a major crash – it means that everything lies in the future for her. With a little forethought she could die in a unique vehicle collision, one that would transform all our dreams and fantasies. The man who dies in that crash with her…'

'Does Seagrave appreciate this?'

'In his own way.'

We approached a major trunk roundabout. For almost the first time since we had left the Road Research Laboratory Vaughan applied the brakes. The heavy car swayed and went into a long right-hand slide which carried it across the path of a taxi already making its way around the island. Flooring the accelerator, Vaughan swerved in front of it, tyres screaming over the blaring horn of the taxi. He shouted through his open window at the driver and pressed on towards the narrow canyon of the northbound slip road.

As we settled down Vaughan reached behind him and lifted a briefcase off the back seat.

'I've been testing people for the programme with these questionnaires. Tell me if I've left anything out.'

Chapter 14

As the heavy car moved through the London-bound traffic I began to read the questionnaires which Vaughan had prepared. The subjects who had completed the forms represented a cross-section of Vaughan's world: two computer programmers from his former laboratory, a young dietitian, several airport stewardesses, a medical technician at Helen Remington's clinic, as well as Sea-grave and his wife Vera, the television producer and Gabrielle. From the brief curriculum vitae elicited from each subject I saw, as I expected, that they had all at some time been involved in a minor or major automobile crash.

In each questionnaire the subject was given a list of celebrities from the worlds of politics, entertainment, sport, crime, science and the arts, and invited to devise an imaginary car-crash in which one of them might die. Scanning the list offered, I saw that most of the figures were still alive; a few were dead, some of these in auto-crashes. The names gave the impression of having been picked at random from a quick recall of newspaper and magazine headlines, television newscasts and documentaries.