Crash

Waiting for me, Vaughan reached into the rear seat of his car for a white sweat-shirt. As he took off his denim jacket the falling light picked out the scars on his abdomen and chest, a constellation of white chips that circled his body from the left armpit down to his crotch. The handholds of complex sex acts had been created by the cars in which he had deliberately crashed for my future pleasure, of strange postures in the back and front seats of cars, peculiar acts of sodomy and fellatio I would perform as I moved across his body from one hand-hold to the next.

Chapter 17

We had entered an immense traffic jam. From the junction of the motorway and Western Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles, windshields leaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western suburbs of London. Brake-lights flared in the evening air, glowing in the huge pool of cellulosed bodies. Vaughan sat with one arm out of the passenger window. He slapped the door impatiently, pounding the panel with his fist. To our right the high wall of a double-decker airline coach formed a cliff of faces. The passengers at the windows resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium. The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

A police car sped down the descent lane of the flyover, headlamps flashing, the rotating blue light on its roof flicking at the dark air like a whip. Above us, on the crest of the ascent lane, two policemen steered the traffic stream from the nearside kerb. Warning tripods set up on the pavement flashed a rhythmic 'Slow… Slow… Accident… Accident… ' Ten minutes later, when we reached the eastern end of the flyover, we could see the accident site below. Lines of cars moved past a circle of police spotlights.

Three cars had collided at the junction of the eastern descent ramp of the flyover and Western Avenue. Around them a police car, two ambulances and a breakdown truck formed a loose corral. Firemen and police engineers worked on the vehicles, oxy-acetylene torches flaring against door and roof panels. A crowd was gathering on the sidewalks, and on the pedestrian bridge that spanned Western Avenue the spectators leaned elbow to elbow on the metal rail. The smallest of the cars involved in the accident, a yellow Italian sports car, had been almost obliterated by a black limousine with an extended wheelbase which had skidded across the central reservation. The limousine had returned across the concrete island to its own lane and struck the steel pylon of a route indicator, crushing its radiator and nearside wheel housing, before being hit in turn by a taxi joining the flyover from the Western Avenue access road. The head-on collision into the rear end of the limousine, followed by roll-over, had crushed the taxi laterally, translating its passenger cabin and body panels through an angle of some fifteen degrees. The sports car lay on its back on the central reservation. A squad of police and firemen were jacking it on to its side, revealing two bodies still trapped inside the crushed compartment.

Beside the taxi, the three passengers lay in a group, blankets swathing their chests and legs. First-aid men worked on the driver, an elderly man who sat upright against the rear fender of his car, face and clothes speckled with drops of blood, like an unusual disease of the skin. The limousine's passengers still sat in the deep cabin of their car, their identities sealed behind the starred internal window.

We passed the accident site, edging forward in the line of cars. Catherine had half hidden herself behind the front seat. Her steady eyes followed the skid lines and loops of bloodstained oil that crossed the familiar macadam like the choreographic codes of a complex gun battle, the diagram of an assassination attempt. Vaughan, by contrast, leaned out of the window, both arms ready as if about to seize one of the bodies. In some recess or locker in the rear seat he had found a camera, which now swung from his neck. His eyes were racing over the three crashed vehicles, as if he were photographing every detail with his own musculature, in the white retinas of the scars around his mouth, memorializing every bent fender and broken bone in a repertory of rapid grimaces and droll expressions. For almost the first time since I met him he was completely calm.