Crash

The last group of photographs showed the young woman in a chromium wheelchair, guided by a friend across the rhododendron-screened lawn of a convalescent institution, propelling her shiny vehicle herself at an archery meeting, and finally taking her first lessons at the wheel of an invalid car. As she pondered the complex, treadle-operated brakes and gear changes I realized the extent to which this tragically injured young woman had been transformed during her recovery from the accident. The first photographs of her lying in the crashed car showed a conventional young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole economy of a cozy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body. I could imagine her sitting in the car of some middle-aged welfare officer, unaware of the conjunction formed by their own genitalia and the stylized instrument panel, a euclid of eroticism and fantasy that would be revealed for the first time within the car-crash, a fierce marriage pivoting on the fleshy points of her knees and pubis. This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car. Three months later, sitting beside her physiotherapy instructor in her new invalid car, she held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris. Her knowing eyes seemed well aware that the space between her crippled legs was constantly within the gaze of this muscled young man. His eyes roved among the damp moor of her pubis as she moved the gear lever through its cage. The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities. As she peered through the window at Vaughan's camera her canny eyes were clearly aware of his real interest in her. The posture of her hands on the steering wheel and accelerator treadle, the unhealthy fingers pointing back towards her breasts, were elements in some stylized masturbatory rite. Her strong face with its unmatching planes seemed to mimic the deformed panels of the car, almost as if she consciously realized that these twisted instrument binnacles provided a readily accessible anthology of depraved acts, the keys to an alternative sexuality. I stared at the photographs in the harsh light. Without thinking, I visualized a series of imaginary pictures I might take of her: in various sexual acts, her legs supported by sections of complex machine tools, pulleys and trestles; with her physical education instructor, coaxing this conventional young man into the new parameters of her body, developing a sexual expertise that would be an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century. Thinking of the extensor rictus of her spine during orgasm, the erect hairs on her undermuscled thighs, I stared at the stylized manufacturer's medallion visible in the photographs, the contoured flanks of the window pillars.

Vaughan leaned silently against the door. I turned the pages. The remainder of the album, as I anticipated, described the course of my own accident and recovery. From the first photograph, which showed me being carried into the hospital casualty unit at Ashford, I knew that Vaughan had been there when I arrived – later I learned that he listened to the ambulance broadcasts on the VHP band of his car radio.

The sequence of pictures formed a record of Vaughan rather than myself, far more of,the landscape and pre-occupations of the photographer than of his subject. Apart from those photographs of myself in hospital, taken with a zoom lens through the open window as I lay in bed, swathed in more bandages than I realized at the time, the background to all the pictures was the same -the automobile, moving along the highways around the airport, in the traffic jams on the flyover, parked in culs-de-sac and lovers lanes. Vaughan had followed me from the police pound to the airport reception area, from the multistorey car-park to Helen Remington's house. From these coarse prints it seemed that my whole life was spent in or near the motor-car. Vaughan's interest in myself was clearly minimal; what concerned him was not the behaviour of a 40-year-old producer of television commercials but the interaction between an anonymous individual and his car, the transits of his body across the polished cellulose panels and vinyl seating, his face silhouetted against the instrument dials.