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.At the last moment, as the policeman stepped from his car, I ignored Vaughan's protest and accelerated forwards.Tired of the Lincoln, Vaughan borrowed other cars from the airport parking lots, using a set of trade passkeys which Vera Seagrave had given him.We let ourselves in and out of these day-parked vehicles, whose owners were in Paris, Stuttgart or Amsterdam, driving them back to their parking places in the evening when we had finished with them.By this time I was unable to rally myself and make an effort to stop Vaughan.As obsessed with his hard body as he himself was with the bodies of automobiles, I found myself locked into a system of beckoning violence and excitement, made up of the motorway and traffic jams, the cars we stole and Vaughan's discharging sexuality.During this last period with Vaughan I saw that the women he brought to the car each evening had begun to resemble more and more closely the colouring and figure of the film actress.The dark-haired schoolgirl resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor, while the other women represented her at successively older stages.Crash - J G Balard-0020CrashChapter 19Vaughan, 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]