Crash

By this time I was certain that if the screen actress never died in a car-crash, Vaughan had created all the possibilities of her death. From these hundreds of miles and sexual acts, Vaughan was selecting certain needed elements: a section of the Western Avenue flyover, examined through my own accident and the death of Helen Remington's husband, marked in a sexual notation by an act of oral copulation with a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl; the off-side fender of a black American limousine, marked by the pressure of Catherine's arm against the left door-sill and celebrated by the sustained erection of a middle-aged prostitute's nipple; the actress herself stepping from her car and stumbling briefly against the half-open window, her grimace recorded by Vaughan through the zoom lens of his cine-camera; elements of accelerating cars, changing traffic lights, swaying breasts, varying road surfaces, clitorises held gently like botanical specimens between thumb and forefinger, the stylization of a thousand actions and postures as he drove – together these were stored in Vaughan's mind, ready to be recalled and fitted into whatever weapon of assassination he devised. Vaughan questioned me repeatedly about the actress's sexual life, about which I knew nothing, urging me to enlist Catherine in a literature search of defunct movie magazines. Many of his sexual acts were clearly models for what he imagined her own to be within the automobile.

However, Vaughan had already worked out the imaginary sexual acts within the automobile of a host of famous personalities – politicians, Nobel prizewinners, international athletes, astronauts and criminals – just as he had already conceived their deaths. As we strolled together through the airport parking lots, searching for a car to borrow, Vaughan would cross-examine me about the ways in which Marilyn Monroe or Lee Harvey Oswald would probably have had intercourse in their cars, Armstrong, Warhol, Raquel Welch… their choice of vehicle and model year, their postures and favourite erogenous zones, the freeways and autostradas of Europe and North America along which they moved in Vaughan's mind, their bodies funded by their limitless sexualities, love, tenderness and eroticism.

'… Monroe masturbating, or Oswald, say – left- or right-handed, which would you guess? And what instrument panels? Was orgasm reached more quickly with a recessed or overhanging binnacle? Vinyl colour-contouring, windshield glass, these are factors. Garbo and Diet-rich, there's a place for the gerontological approach. The special involvement of at least two of the Kennedys with the automobile… ' Always he deliberately side-stepped into self-parody.

However, during my last days with Vaughan his obsessions with the crashed car became increasingly disordered. His fixation on the screen actress and the sex-death he had devised for her seemed to make him all the more frustrated when this hoped-for death failed to occur. Instead of driving along the motorway we sat in a deserted parking lot behind my apartment house in

Drayton Park, watching the leaves of the plane trees carried through the falling light across the wet macadam. For hours Vaughan listened to the police and ambulance broadcasts, his long body fretting as he flicked at the overloaded ashtray, stuffed with reefer stubs and an old sanitary tampon. Caring for him, I wanted to stroke his scarred thighs and abdomen, offering him the automobile injuries carried by my own body in place of those imaginary wounds he wished upon the actress.

The crash that I most feared – after Vaughan's own death, already a coming reality in my mind – took place on the Harlington clearway three days later. As the first garbled references to the multiple injuries of the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor, were made on the police broadcasts, and cancelled shortly afterwards, I knew whose death-ordeal we were about to witness.

Vaughan sat patiently beside me as I pushed the Lincoln westwards to the accident site. He stared with resigned eyes at the white trades of the plastics factories and tyre warehouses along the clearway. He listened to the details of the three-vehicle collision on the police frequency, steadily turning up the volume as if wanting to hear the final confirmation broadcast at full crescendo.