"Ballard, J. G - Crash v1 (Txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballard J G)
'The real thing is available free of charge.' I pointed to the yellow programme sheet. 'This should be more interesting - "The Recreation of a Spectacular Road Accident".'
The track was cleared and lines of white bollards were arranged to form the outline of a road intersection. Below us, in the pits, the huge, oil-smeared body of a man in a silver-studded jacket was being strapped into the driver's seat of a doorless car. His shoulder-length dyed-blond hair was tied behind his head with a scarlet rag. His hard face had the pallid and hungry look of an out-of-work circus hand. I recognized him as one of the stuntmen at the studios, a former racing driver named Seagrave.
Five cars were to take part in the re-enactment of the accident - a multiple pile-up in which seven people had died on the North Circular Road during the previous summer. As they were driven to their positions in the field the announcer began to work up the audience's interest. The amplified fragments of his commentary reverberated around the empty stands as if trying to escape.
I pointed to a tall cameraman in a combat jacket who was hovering around Seagrave's car, shouting instructions to him over the engine roar through the missing windshield.
'Vaughan again. He talked to you at the hospital.'
'Is he a photographer?'
'Of a special kind.'
'I thought he was doing some sort of accident research. He wanted every conceivable detail about the crash.'
Vaughan's present role in the stadium seemed that of a film director. As if Seagrave were his star, an unknown who would make Vaughan's reputation, he leaned intently against the windshield pillar, outlining with aggressive gestures some new choreography of violence and collision. Seagrave lolled back, smoking away at a loosely wrapped hash cigarette which Vaughan held for him as he adjusted his straps and the rake of the steering column. His dyed blond hair provided the chief focus of interest in the stadium. From the announcer we learned that Seagrave would drive the target car, which would be cannonaded by a skidding truck into the path of four oncoming vehicles.
At one point Vaughan left him and ran up the stand to the commentator's box behind us. A brief silence followed, after which we were told in tones of some triumph that Seagrave had asked for his closest friend to drive the skidding truck. This last dramatic addition failed to rouse the crowd, but Vaughan seemed satisfied. His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile as he came down the gangway. Seeing Helen Remington and me together, he waved to us as if we were long-standing aficionadoes of these morbid spectacles in the arena.
Twenty minutes later, I sat in my car behind Vaughan's Lincoln as a concussed Seagrave was helped across the parking-lot. The accident re-enactment had been a fiasco - struck by the skidding truck, Seagrave's car had been locked on to the raw fenders like a myopic bullfighter running straight on to the bull's horns. The truck carried him fifty yards before ramming him into one of the oncoming saloon cars. The hard, unshielded collision had brought the entire crowd, Helen and myself to our feet.
Vaughan alone was unmoved. As the stunned drivers clambered from their cars and eased Seagrave from behind his driving wheel Vaughan walked swiftly across the arena, beckoning in a peremptory way to Helen Remington. I followed her across the cinders, but Vaughan ignored me, steering Helen through the crowd of mechanics and hangers-on.
Although Seagrave was able to walk, wiping his greasy hands on his silver overall trousers and groping blankly at the air a few feet in front of him, Vaughan persuaded Helen to accompany them to Northolt General Hospital. Once we had set off I found myself hard pressed to keep up with Vaughan's car, the dusty Lincoln with a rear-mounted spotlight. As Seagrave slumped beside Helen in the back seat, Vaughan drove at speed through the night air, one elbow on the door sill, tapping the roof with his hand. I guessed that in his off-hand way he was testing me to see if he could throw me off; at the traffic lights he watched me in the rear-view mirror as I hauled up behind him, then surged away powerfully across the amber. On the Northolt overpass he moved along at well above the speed limit, casually overtaking a cruising police car on the wrong side. The driver flashed his headlamps, hesitating only when he saw the scarlet rag like a bloodstain across Seagrave's hair and my urgent headlamps behind.
We left the overpass and moved down a concrete road through west Northolt, a residential suburb of the airport. Single-storey houses stood in small gardens separated by wire fences. The area was inhabited by junior airline personnel, car-park attendants, waitresses and ex-stewardesses. Many of them were shift-workers, sleeping through the afternoon and evening, and the windows were curtained as we wheeled through the empty streets.
We turned into the hospital entrance. Ignoring the visitor's car-park, Vaughan pressed on past the casualty department entrance and slammed to a halt in the parking-lot reserved for consultant physicians. He leapt from the driver's seat and beckoned Helen out of the car. Smoothing back his blond hair, Seagrave climbed reluctantly from the rear compartment. He had still not recovered his sense of balance, and rested his huge body against the windshield pillar. Looking at his unfocused eyes and bruised head, I was sure that this was only the latest in a long series of previous concussions. He spat on his oil-stained hands as Vaughan held his head, took Vaughan's arm and lurched after Helen towards the casualty department.
We waited for them to return. Vaughan sat on the hood of his car in the darkness, one thigh cutting off the beam of his nearside headlamp. He stood up restlessly and prowled around the car, head raised above the stares of the evening visitors walking to their wards. Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him. The frustrated actor was evident in all his impulsive movements, and in an irritating way pre-empted my responses to him. Springing on his scuffed white tennis shoes, he roved to the rear of the car and unlatched the trunk.
Disturbed by the reflection of his headlamps in the glass doors of the nearby physiotherapy department, I stepped from my car and watched Vaughan searching through the cameras and flash equipment in the trunk. Selecting a pistol-grip cine-camera, he closed the trunk and sat behind his steering wheel, one leg placed in a glamorous pose on the black asphalt.
He opened the passenger door. 'Come in here, Ballard - they'll be longer than the Remington girl imagines.'
I sat beside him in the front seat of the Lincoln. He peered through the view-finder of the camera, tracking across the entrance of the casualty department. A clutter of photographs of crashed vehicles lay in the dirt on the floor. What most disturbed me about Vaughan was the strange stance of his thighs and hips, almost as if he were trying to force his genitals through the instrument panel of the car. I watched his thighs contracting as he gazed through the camera, buttocks forcing themselves together. Without thinking, I was suddenly tempted to reach forward and take his penis in my hands, steer its head to the luminescent dials. I visualized Vaughan's strong leg flooring the accelerator. The globes of his semen would blot out the stylized intervals on the speedometer counter as the sweep of its arm rose with us while we sped along the swerving concrete.
I was to know Vaughan from this first evening until his death a year later, but the entire course of our relationship was fixed within those few minutes as we waited in the physicians' car-park for Seagrave and Helen Remington. Sitting beside him, I felt my hostility giving way to a certain deference; even, perhaps, subservience. The way Vaughan handled the car set the tone for all his behaviour - by turns aggressive, distracted, sensitive, clumsy, absorbed and brutal. The Lincoln had lost the second gear of its automatic drive - ripped out, as Vaughan explained later, during a road-race with Sea-grave. At times, along Western Avenue, we would sit holding up the traffic in the fast lane, dragging along at ten miles an hour as we waited for the injured transmission to build up speed. Vaughan could behave like some kind of paraplegic, fumbling bluntly with the wheel as if expecting the car to be fitted with invalid controls, feet hanging helplessly as we moved rapidly towards the rear of a taxi waiting at a stoplight. At the last moment he would jerk the car to a halt, mocking his whole role as a driver.
His behaviour with all the women he knew was governed by the same obsessive games. To Helen Remington he usually spoke in an off-hand and ironic way, but at other times he became polite and deferential, confiding to me endlessly in the latrines of airport hotels, inquiring whether she would treat Seagrave's wife and small son or, possibly, himself. Then, distracted by something else, he would dismiss her work and medical qualifications altogether. Even after their affair Vaughan's moods would swing from affection to protracted spells of boredom. He would sit behind the wheel of his car as she walked towards us from the immigration offices, his eyes set in a cold appraisal of hoped-for wound areas.
In the lavatory of the casualty department I stood beside Vaughan at the urinal stalls. I looked down at his penis, wondering if this too was scarred. The glans, propped between his index and centre fingers, carried a sharp notch, like a canal for surplus semen or vinal mucus. What part of some crashing car had marked this penis, and in what marriage of his orgasm and a chromium instrument head? The terrifying excitements of this scar filled my mind as I followed Vaughan back to his car through the dispersing hospital visitors. Its slight lateral deflection, like the rake of the Lincoln's windshield pillars, expressed all Vaughan's oblique and obsessive passage through the open spaces of my mind.
Chapter 10
Above us, along the motorway embankment, the headlamps of the waiting traffic illuminated the evening sky like lanterns hung on the horizon. An airliner rose from the runway four hundred yards to our left, wired by its nervous engines to the dark air. Beyond the perimeter fence long lines of metal poles stood in the untended grass. The tracts of landing lights formed electric fields like the sections of an overlit metropolis. I followed Vaughan's car along the deserted slip road. We were moving through a development zone on the southern fringes of the airport, an unlit area of three-storey apartment buildings for airline personnel, half-constructed hotels and filling stations. We passed an empty supermarket standing in a sea of mud. Along the verge of the road white dunes of builder's shingle rose in Vaughan's headlamps.
A line of street-lamps appeared in the distance, marking the perimeter of this transit and leisure complex. Immediately beyond its margins, in the western approaches to Stanwell, was an area of breakers' yards and vehicle dumps, small auto-repair shops and panel beaters. We passed a parked two-tier trailer loaded with wrecked cars. Seagrave sat up in the rear seat of Vaughan's car, some familiar stimulus reaching his exhausted brain. During the drive from the hospital he lay back against the rear window-sill, his dyed blond hair lit like a nylon fleece by my headlamps. Helen Remington sat beside him, now and then looking back at me. She had insisted that we accompany Seagrave to his home, apparently distrusting Vaughan's motives.
We turned into the forecourt of Seagrave's garage and salesroom. His business, which had clearly seen better times during his brief heyday as a racing driver, specialized in hot-rod and customized cars. Behind the unwashed glass of the show-room was a fibreglass replica of a 1930s Brooklands racer, faded bunting stuffed into the seat.
Waiting until we could leave, I watched Helen Remington and Vaughan steer Seagrave into the living-room. The stunt-driver gazed unclearly at the cheap leatherette furniture, for a moment failing to recognize his own house. He lay back on the sofa as his wife remonstrated with Helen, as if she, the doctor, were responsible for her patient's symptoms. For some reason, Vera Seagrave absolved Vaughan of any responsibility, although - as I realized later and she must have known already -Vaughan was clearly using her husband as an experimental subject. A handsome, restless woman of about thirty, she wore her hair in a simulated Afro wig. A small child watched us all from between her legs, its blunt fingers straying to the two long scars on the mother's thighs exposed by her mini-skirt.
Briefly holding Vera Seagrave's waist as she questioned Helen Remington, Vaughan stepped past to the trio sitting on the twin sofa opposite. The man, a television producer who had made Vaughan's first programmes, nodded encouragingly as Vaughan described Seagrave's accident, but was too glazed by the hash he had been smoking - the body-sweet smoke hung in a diagonal drift across the room - to focus his mind on the possibilities of a programme. Beside him on the sofa a sharp-faced young woman was preparing another joint; as she rolled a small piece of resin in a twist of silver foil Vaughan brought a brass lighter out of his hip pocket. She cooked the resin, and shook the powder into the open cigarette waiting in the roller machine on her lap. A social worker in the Stanwell child-welfare department, she was a longstanding friend of Vera Seagrave.
On her legs were traces of what seemed to be gas bacillus scars, faint circular depressions on the kneecaps. She noticed me staring at the scars, but made no effort to close her legs. On the sofa beside her was a chromium metal cane. As she moved I saw that the instep of each leg was held in the steel clamp of a surgical support. From the over-rigid posture of her waist I guessed that she was also wearing a back-brace of some kind. She rolled the cigarette out of the machine, glancing at me with evident suspicion. I guessed that this reflex of hostility was prompted by her assumption that I had not been injured in an automobile crash, unlike Vaughan, herself and the Seagraves.
Helen Remington touched my arm. 'Seagrave - ' She pointed to the sprawling figures of the blond-haired driver. He had revived and was now playfully tripping up his infant son. 'Apparently there's some stunt-driving at the studios tomorrow. Can you stop him?'
'Ask his wife. Or Vaughan - he seems to call the tune.'
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