Crash

Chapter 19

Vaughan, Gabrielle and myself visited the motor show at Earls Court. Calm and gallant, Vaughan steered Gabrielle through the crowd, parading his scarred face as if these wounds were a sympathetic response to Gabrielle's crippled legs. Gabrielle swung herself among the hundreds of cars displayed on their stands, their chromium and cellulosed bodies gleaming like the coronation armour of an archangelic host. Pivoting about on her heels, Gabrielle seemed to take immense pleasure from these immaculate vehicles, placing her scarred hands on their paintwork, rolling her injured hips against them like an unpleasant cat. She provoked a young salesman on the Mercedes stand to ask her to inspect a white sports car, relishing his embarrassment when he helped her shackled legs into the front seat. Vaughan whistled in admiration at this.

We moved through the stands and revolving cars, Gabrielle heeling and toeing herself among the motor industry executives and show-girls. My eyes were fixed on her leg brace, on her deformed thighs and knees, her swinging left shoulder, these portions of her body that seemed to beckon towards the immaculate machines on their revolving stands, inviting them to confront her wounds. As she climbed into the cabin of a small Japan-17 ese sedan her bland eyes saw my uninjured body in the same glaucous light as these geometrically perfect machines. Vaughan guided her from one car to the next, helping her on to the stands, into the cockpits of styling department exercises, specialist concept cars, carriage-trade limousines in whose rear seats she sat like the hostile queen of this overactive technarchy.

'Walk with Gabrielle, Ballard,' Vaughan urged me. 'Hold her arm. She'd like you to.'

Vaughan encouraged me to take his place. When he slipped away, on the pretext that he had seen Seagrave, I helped Gabrielle to inspect a succession of invalid cars. I talked in over-formal terms to the demonstrators about the installation of auxiliary controls, brake treadles and hand-operated clutch levers. All the while I stared at those parts of Gabrielle's body reflected in this nightmare technology of cripple controls. I watched her thighs shifting against each other, the jut of her left breast under the strap of her spinal harness, the angular bowl of her pelvis, the hard pressure of her hand on my arm. She gazed back at me through the windshield, playing with the chromium clutch treadle as if hoping that something obscene might happen.

Gabrielle showed no hostility to Vaughan for this, but it was I who first made love to her, in the rear seat of her small car, surrounded by the bizarre geometry of the invalid controls. As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. As I sat with her by the airport fence in her darkened car, her white breast in my hand lit by the ascending airliners, the shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers. Our sexual acts were exploratory ordeals.

As she drove towards the airport I watched her handle the unfamiliar controls. The complex of inverted treadles and clutch levers of the car had been designed for her -implicitly, I guessed, for her first sexual act. Twenty minutes later, as I embraced her, the scent of her body mingled with the showroom odour of mustard leatherette. We had turned off near the reservoirs to watch the aircraft landing. As I pressed her left shoulder against my chest I could see the contoured seat which had been moulded around her body, hemispheres of padded leather that matched the depressions of her brace and backstraps. I slipped my hand around her right breast, already colliding with the strange geometry of the car's interior. Unexpected controls jutted from beneath the steering wheel. A cluster of chromium treadles was fastened to a steel pivot clamped to the steering column. An extension on the floor-mounted gear lever rose laterally, giving way to a vertical wing of chromium metal moulded into the reverse of a driver's palm.

Aware of these new parameters, the embrace of this dutiful technology, Gabrielle lay back. Her intelligent eyes followed her hand as it felt my face and chin, as if searching for my own missing armatures of bright chromium. She lifted her left foot so. that the leg brace rested against my knee. In the i

Through the fading afternoon light the airliners moved across our heads along the east-west runways of the airport. The pleasant surgical odour from Gabrielle's body, the tang of the mustard leatherette, hung in the air. The chromium controls reared in the shadows like the heads of silver snakes, the fauna of a metal dream. Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. Around us the silver controls of the car seemed a tour de force of technology and kinaesthetic systems. Gabrielle's hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone, the imprint of the outer quadrant of the instrument bi

My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this cha

I dreamed of other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile's engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future. What wounds would create the sexual possibilities of the invisible technologies of thermonuclear reaction chambers, white-tiled control rooms, the mysterious scenarios of computer circuitry? As I embraced Gabrielle I visualized, as Vaughan had taught me, the accidents that might involve the famous and beautiful, the wounds upon which erotic fantasies might be erected, the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of unimagined technologies. In these fantasies I was able at last to visualize those deaths and injuries I had always feared. I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections. I visualized the injuries of film actresses and television personalities, whose bodies would flower into dozens of auxiliary orifices, points of sexual conjunction with their audiences formed by the swerving technology of the automobile. I visualized the body of my own mother, at various stages of her life, injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity, so that my incest with her might become more and more cerebral, allowing me at last to come to terms with her embraces and postures. I visualized the fantasies of contented paedophiliacs, hiring the deformed bodies of children injured in crashes, assuaging and irrigating their wounds with their own scarred genital organs, of elderly pederasts easing their tongues into the simulated anuses of colostomized juveniles.