Crash - Ballard James Graham - Страница 16

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This pleasant domestic idyll, with its delightful promiscuities, was brought to an end by the reappearance of Robert Vaughan, nightmare angel of the expressways.

Catherine was away for three days, attending an airline conference in Paris, and out of curiosity I took Helen to the stock-car races in the stadium at Northolt. Several of the stunt drivers working on the Elizabeth Taylor feature at Shepperton Studios put on displays of 'hell-driving'. Unwanted tickets circulated around the studios and our own offices. Disapproving of my affair with the widow of the man I had killed, Renata gave me a pair of tickets, presumably as an ironic gesture.

Helen and I sat together in the half-empty stand, waiting as a succession of stripped-down saloon cars circled the cinder track. A bored crowd watched from the perimeter of the converted football ground. The announcer's voice boomed away over our heads. At the conclusion of each heat the drivers' wives cheered half-heartedly.

Helen sat close to me, arm around my waist, face touching my shoulder. Her face was deadened by the continuous roar of defective silencer units.

'It's strange – I thought all this would be far more popular.'

'The real thing is available free of charge.' I pointed to the yellow programme sheet. 'This should be more interesting – "The Recreation of a Spectacular Road Accident".'

The track was cleared and lines of white bollards were arranged to form the outline of a road intersection. Below us, in the pits, the huge, oil-smeared body of a man in a silver-studded jacket was being strapped into the driver's seat of a doorless car. His shoulder-length dyed-blond hair was tied behind his head with a scarlet rag. His hard face had the pallid and hungry look of an out-of-work circus hand. I recognized him as one of the stuntmen at the studios, a former racing driver named Seagrave.

Five cars were to take part in the re-enactment of the accident – a multiple pile-up in which seven people had died on the North Circular Road during the previous summer. As they were driven to their positions in the field the announcer began to work up the audience's interest. The amplified fragments of his commentary reverberated around the empty stands as if trying to escape.

I pointed to a tall cameraman in a combat jacket who was hovering around Seagrave's car, shouting instructions to him over the engine roar through the missing windshield.

'Vaughan again. He talked to you at the hospital.'

'Is he a photographer?'

'Of a special kind.'

'I thought he was doing some sort of accident research. He wanted every conceivable detail about the crash.'

Vaughan's present role in the stadium seemed that of a film director. As if Seagrave were his star, an unknown who would make Vaughan's reputation, he leaned intently against the windshield pillar, outlining with aggressive gestures some new choreography of violence and collision. Seagrave lolled back, smoking away at a loosely wrapped hash cigarette which Vaughan held for him as he adjusted his straps and the rake of the steering column. His dyed blond hair provided the chief focus of interest in the stadium. From the announcer we learned that Seagrave would drive the target car, which would be cannonaded by a skidding truck into the path of four oncoming vehicles.

At one point Vaughan left him and ran up the stand to the commentator's box behind us. A brief silence followed, after which we were told in tones of some triumph that Seagrave had asked for his closest friend to drive the skidding truck. This last dramatic addition failed to rouse the crowd, but Vaughan seemed satisfied. His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile as he came down the gangway. Seeing Helen Remington and me together, he waved to us as if we were long-standing aficionadoes of these morbid spectacles in the arena.

Twenty minutes later, I sat in my car behind Vaughan's Lincoln as a concussed Seagrave was helped across the parking-lot. The accident re-enactment had been a fiasco – struck by the skidding truck, Seagrave's car had been locked on to the raw fenders like a myopic bullfighter running straight on to the bull's horns. The truck carried him fifty yards before ramming him into one of the oncoming saloon cars. The hard, unshielded collision had brought the entire crowd, Helen and myself to our feet.

Vaughan alone was unmoved. As the stunned drivers clambered from their cars and eased Seagrave from behind his driving wheel Vaughan walked swiftly across the arena, beckoning in a peremptory way to Helen Remington. I followed her across the cinders, but Vaughan ignored me, steering Helen through the crowd of mechanics and hangers-on.

Although Seagrave was able to walk, wiping his greasy hands on his silver overall trousers and groping blankly at the air a few feet in front of him, Vaughan persuaded Helen to accompany them to Northolt General Hospital. Once we had set off I found myself hard pressed to keep up with Vaughan's car, the dusty Lincoln with a rear-mounted spotlight. As Seagrave slumped beside Helen in the back seat, Vaughan drove at speed through the night air, one elbow on the door sill, tapping the roof with his hand. I guessed that in his off-hand way he was testing me to see if he could throw me off; at the traffic lights he watched me in the rear-view mirror as I hauled up behind him, then surged away powerfully across the amber. On the Northolt overpass he moved along at well above the speed limit, casually overtaking a cruising police car on the wrong side. The driver flashed his headlamps, hesitating only when he saw the scarlet rag like a bloodstain across Seagrave's hair and my urgent headlamps behind.

We left the overpass and moved down a concrete road through west Northolt, a residential suburb of the airport. Single-storey houses stood in small gardens separated by wire fences. The area was inhabited by junior airline personnel, car-park attendants, waitresses and ex-stewardesses. Many of them were shift-workers, sleeping through the afternoon and evening, and the windows were curtained as we wheeled through the empty streets.

We turned into the hospital entrance. Ignoring the visitor's car-park, Vaughan pressed on past the casualty department entrance and slammed to a halt in the parking-lot reserved for consultant physicians. He leapt from the driver's seat and beckoned Helen out of the car. Smoothing back his blond hair, Seagrave climbed reluctantly from the rear compartment. He had still not recovered his sense of balance, and rested his huge body against the windshield pillar. Looking at his unfocused eyes and bruised head, I was sure that this was only the latest in a long series of previous concussions. He spat on his oil-stained hands as Vaughan held his head, took Vaughan's arm and lurched after Helen towards the casualty department.

We waited for them to return. Vaughan sat on the hood of his car in the darkness, one thigh cutting off the beam of his nearside headlamp. He stood up restlessly and prowled around the car, head raised above the stares of the evening visitors walking to their wards. Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him. The frustrated actor was evident in all his impulsive movements, and in an irritating way pre-empted my responses to him. Springing on his scuffed white tennis shoes, he roved to the rear of the car and unlatched the trunk.

Disturbed by the reflection of his headlamps in the glass doors of the nearby physiotherapy department, I stepped from my car and watched Vaughan searching through the cameras and flash equipment in the trunk. Selecting a pistol-grip cine-camera, he closed the trunk and sat behind his steering wheel, one leg placed in a glamorous pose on the black asphalt.

He opened the passenger door. 'Come in here, Ballard – they'll be longer than the Remington girl imagines.'

I sat beside him in the front seat of the Lincoln. He peered through the view-finder of the camera, tracking across the entrance of the casualty department. A clutter of photographs of crashed vehicles lay in the dirt on the floor. What most disturbed me about Vaughan was the strange stance of his thighs and hips, almost as if he were trying to force his genitals through the instrument panel of the car. I watched his thighs contracting as he gazed through the camera, buttocks forcing themselves together. Without thinking, I was suddenly tempted to reach forward and take his penis in my hands, steer its head to the luminescent dials. I visualized Vaughan's strong leg flooring the accelerator. The globes of his semen would blot out the stylized intervals on the speedometer counter as the sweep of its arm rose with us while we sped along the swerving concrete.

I was to know Vaughan from this first evening until his death a year later, but the entire course of our relationship was fixed within those few minutes as we waited in the physicians' car-park for Seagrave and Helen Remington. Sitting beside him, I felt my hostility giving way to a certain deference; even, perhaps, subservience. The way Vaughan handled the car set the tone for all his behaviour – by turns aggressive, distracted, sensitive, clumsy, absorbed and brutal. The Lincoln had lost the second gear of its automatic drive – ripped out, as Vaughan explained later, during a road-race with Sea-grave. At times, along Western Avenue, we would sit holding up the traffic in the fast lane, dragging along at ten miles an hour as we waited for the injured transmission to build up speed. Vaughan could behave like some kind of paraplegic, fumbling bluntly with the wheel as if expecting the car to be fitted with invalid controls, feet hanging helplessly as we moved rapidly towards the rear of a taxi waiting at a stoplight. At the last moment he would jerk the car to a halt, mocking his whole role as a driver.

His behaviour with all the women he knew was governed by the same obsessive games. To Helen Remington he usually spoke in an off-hand and ironic way, but at other times he became polite and deferential, confiding to me endlessly in the latrines of airport hotels, inquiring whether she would treat Seagrave's wife and small son or, possibly, himself. Then, distracted by something else, he would dismiss her work and medical qualifications altogether. Even after their affair Vaughan's moods would swing from affection to protracted spells of boredom. He would sit behind the wheel of his car as she walked towards us from the immigration offices, his eyes set in a cold appraisal of hoped-for wound areas.

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