Crash

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. A cluster of chromium treadles was fastened to a steel pivot clamped to the steering column. An extension on the floor-mounted gear lever rose laterally, giving way to a vertical wing of chromium metal moulded into the reverse of a driver's palm.