Almost mesmerized by this reverie, I was abruptly aware of the dented fender of Vaughan's Lincoln only a few feet behind Catherine's sports car. Vaughan surged past me, crowding along the roadway as if waiting for her to make a mistake. Startled, Catherine took refuge in front of an airline bus in the nearside lane. Vaughan drove alongside the bus, using his horn and spotlights to force the driver back, and again cut in behind Catherine. I moved ahead along the centre lane, shouting to Vaughan as I passed him, but he was signalling to Catherine, pumping his headlamps at her rear fender. Without thinking, Catherine pulled her small car into the courtyard of a filling station, forcing Vaughan into a heavy U-turn. Tyres screaming, he swung around the ornamental flower-bed with its glazed pottery plants, but I blocked his way with my own car.
Excited by all this, Catherine sat among the scarlet fuel pumps, her eyes flashing at Vaughan. The wounds on my legs and chest ached from the effort of keeping up with them. I stepped from my car and walked across to Vaughan. He watched me approach as if he had never seen me before, scarred mouth working on a piece of gum as he gazed at the airliners lifting from the airport.
'Vaughan, you're not on a bloody stunt track now.'
Vaughan made a brief pacifying gesture with one hand. He hooked the gear lever into reverse. 'She enjoyed it, Ballard. It's a form of compliment. Ask her.'
He reversed in a wide circle, almost running down a passing pump attendant, and set off across the early afternoon traffic.
Chapter 12
Vaughan was right. Catherine's sexual fantasies began more and more to involve him. At night, as we lay together in our bedroom, we approached Vaughan through the pantheon of our familiar partners like Vaughan himself tracking us through the lobbies of the terminal buildings.
'We must get some more hash.' Catherine looked up at the traffic lights sweeping across the windows. 'Why is Seagrave so obsessed with these film actresses? You say he wants to crash into them?'
'Vaughan put the idea into his head. He's using Sea-grave in some experiment.'
'What about the wife?'
'She's under Vaughan's thumb.'
'And you?'
Catherine lay with her back to me, buttocks pressed into my groin. As I moved my penis I looked past my scarred navel at the cleft between her buttocks, as immaculate as a doll's. I held her breasts in my hands, her rib cage crushing my wristwatch into my forearm. Catherine's passive stance was deceptive; from long practice I knew that this was the prelude to an erotic fantasy, a slow and circular inspection of some fresh sexual quarry.
'Am I under his thumb? No. But it's difficult to know where the centre of his personality is.'
'You don't resent him taking all those photographs? It sounds as if he's using you.'
I began to play with Catherine's right nipple. Not yet ready for this, she took my hand and placed it around her breast.
'Vaughan annexes people to him. There's still a strong element of the TV personality about his whole style.'
'Poor man. These girls he picks up – some of them are just children.'
'You keep coming back to them. It isn't sex that Vaughan is interested in, but technology.'
Catherine pressed her head into the pillow, a familiar gesture of concentration.
'Do you like Vaughan?'
I moved my fingers to her nipple again and began to erect it. Her buttocks moved on to my penis. Her voice was pitched on a low, thick note.
'In what way?' I asked.
'He fascinates you, doesn't he?'
'There is something about him. About his obsessions.'
'His flashy car, the way he drives, his loneliness. All the women he's fucked there. It must smell of semen…'
'It does.'
'Do you find him attractive?'
I drew my penis from her vagina and placed the head against her anus, but she pressed it back into her vulva with a quick hand.
'He's very pale, covered with scars.'
'Would you like to fuck him, though? In that car?'
I paused, trying to delay the orgasm rushing like a tidal race up the shaft of my penis.
'No. But there is something about him, particularly as he drives.'
'It's sex – sex and that car. Have you seen his penis?'
As I described Vaughan to her I listened to my voice rising slightly above the sounds of our bodies. I itemized the elements that constituted Vaughan's image in my mind: his hard buttocks held within the worn jeans as he rolled himself on to one hip to leave the car; the sallow skin of his abdomen, almost exposing the triangle of his pubis as he lounged behind the steering wheel; the horn of his half-erect penis pressing against the lower rim through the damp crotch of his trousers; the minute nodes of dirt he picked from his sharp nose and wiped on the indented vinyl of the door panel; the ulcer on his left index finger as he handed me the cigarette lighter; his hard nipples through the frayed blue shirt brushing against the horn boss; his broken thumbnail scratching at the semen stains on the seat between us.