Crash

We reached the accident site at Harlington half an hour later, and parked on the grass verge below the overpass. Three cars had collided in the centre of a highspeed intersection. The first two vehicles – a customized fibreglass sports car and a silver Mercedes coupe – had struck each other in a right-angle collision, ripping away their nearside wheels and crushing their engine compartments. The fibreglass sports car, an anthology of every bulbous and fin-shaped motif of the 1950s, had then been hit in the rear by a chauffeur-driven government saloon. Shaken but uninjured, the young woman driver in her green uniform was helped from her vehicle, which had buried its bonnet in the rear end of the sports car. Sections of tattered fibreglass lay around the crushed fuselage, like discarded styling exercises in a designer's studio.

The driver of the sports car lay dead in his cockpit, as two firemen and a police constable worked to free him from the buckled overhang of the instrument panel. The woman's leopard-skin coat which he was wearing had been torn back to expose his crushed chest, but his white platinum hair was still neatly held together by a nylon hair-net. On the seat beside him, like a dead cat, lay a black wig. Seagrave's slim and exhausted face was covered with shattered safety glass, as if his body were already crystallizing, at last escaping out of this uneasy set of dimensions into a more beautiful universe.

Only five or six feet away from him, the woman driver of the silver Mercedes coup6 lay sideways across her seat below the broken windshield. The crowd of spectators pressed around and over the two cars, almost toppling the ambulance men trying to lift the woman from her crushed driving compartment. From a policeman pushing past with a blanket I heard her name, that of a former television presenter, several years past her bloom but still an occasional performer on panel games and late-night talk shows. As she was propped into a half-sitting position I recognized her face, pallid and drained now like an -old woman's. A lace-work of dried blood hung from her chin, forming a dark bib. As she was placed on a stretcher, the spectators stared respectfully at the injuries to her thighs and lower abdomen, making way for her when she was carried to the ambulance.

Two women in headscarves and tweed coats were pushed aside. Arms outstretched, Vaughan plunged between them. His eyes seemed to be out of focus. He seized one of the handles already held by an attendant, and swept along with it to the ambulance. The woman was lifted into the back of the vehicle, breathing jerkily through the crust of blood over her nose. I nearly shouted to the police, convinced from the agitated way in which Vaughan bent over the recumbent woman that he was about to draw his penis and use it to free her blood-filled mouth passage. Assuming from his overwrought state that Vaughan was some kind of relative, the attendants stood back for him, but a policeman who recognized Vaughan punched him in the chest with the palm of his hand and shouted to him to move along.

Vaughan hovered around the closing doors, ignoring the constable, then made off through the crowd in a sudden swerve, his bearings lost for the moment. He forced his way to the crushed fibreglass sports car and looked down uncertainly at Seagrave's body, dressed in its coronation armour of fractured glass, a suit of lights like a dead matador's. His hands gripped the windshield pillar.

Confused and shaken by the stunt-man's death and the tags of the film actress's clothing – themselves the props of a calculated collision – still lying around the car, I followed Vaughan through the spectators. He wandered blankly around the silver Mercedes, eyes fixed on the bloodstains smeared across the seat and instrument panel, examining every piece of the strange litter that had materialized from nowhere after the crash. His hands made small movements through the air, marking out the trajectories of the internal impacts within the car as Sea-grave struck it, the mechanical moments of the second collision between this minor television personality and her instrument panel.

Later, I realized what had most upset Vaughan. This was not Seagrave's death, but that in his collision, still wearing Elizabeth Taylor's wig and costume, Seagrave had pre-empted that real death which Vaughan had reserved for himself. In his mind, from that accident onwards, the film actress had already died. All that remained now for Vaughan was to constitute the formalities of time and place, the entrances of her flesh to a wedding with himself already celebrated across the bloody altar of Seagrave's car.

We walked back to the Lincoln. Vaughan opened the passenger door, staring at me as if he had never seen me clearly before.

'Ashford hospital.' He motioned me on. They'll take Seagrave there when they've cut him loose.'