Crash - Ballard James Graham. Страница 18

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.'

'I don't think we should.'

The television producer called out, 'Seagrave is doubling now for all the actresses. It's that beautiful blond hair. What do you do for a brunette, Seagrave?'

Seagrave flicked at his son's minuscule penis. 'Shove it up her arse. Hash first, make a tight little suppository, then ramrod it home. Two trips for the price of one.' He peered reflectively at his grimy hands. 'I'd like to get them all in those cars we have to drive. What do you think of that, Vaughan?'

'We will, one day.' There was a surprising hint of deference in Vaughan's voice as he looked down at the stunt-driver. 'We'll do that.'

'With those cheap bloody harnesses we have to wear.' Seagrave drew on the loosely packed cigarette Vaughan passed to him. He held the smoke in his lungs as he stared at the mountain of derelict cars at the bottom of his garden. 'Can you see them, Vaughan, in one of those high-speed pile-ups? Doing a really groovy rollover. Or a hard head-on job. I dream about that. It's your whole thing, Vaughan.'

Vaughan smiled reassuringly, a metallic grimace. 'You're right, of course. Who do we start with?'

Seagrave smiled through the smoke. He ignored his wife, who was trying to calm him, and stared with level eyes at Vaughan. 'I know who I'd start with…'

'Maybe.'

'… I can see those big tits cut up on the dash.'

Vaughan turned away abruptly, almost as if he were afraid of Seagrave stealing a march on him. The scars on his mouth and forehead carried his face beyond ordinary feeling. He glanced at the other sofa, where his television producer and the crippled young woman, Gabrielle, were passing a cigarette to and fro.

I turned to go, deciding to wait for Helen in my car. Vaughan followed me through the door. He held my arm in a strong grip.

'Don't leave yet, Ballard, I want you to help me.'

As he surveyed the scene I had the sense that Vaughan was controlling us all, giving each of us what we most wanted and most feared.

I followed him down the corridor into a photographic workshop. He beckoned me into the centre of the room, closing the door.

This is the new project, Ballard.' He waved confidently around the room. 'I'm doing a special television series as part of the spin-off.'

'You've left the N.C.L.?'

'Of course – the project is too important.' He shook his head, ridding himself of the association. 'A large government laboratory isn't equipped to handle something like this, psychologically or otherwise.'

Pinned to the walls and lying on the benches among the enamel pails were hundreds of photographs. The floor around the enlarger was littered with half-plate prints, developed and cast aside once they had yielded their images. As Vaughan hunted around the central table, turning the pages of a leatherbound album, I looked down at the discarded prints below my feet. Most of them were crude frontal pictures of motor-cars and heavy vehicles involved in highway collisions, surrounded by spectators and police, and close-ups of impacted radiator grilles and windshields. Many had been taken by an unsteady hand from a moving car, showing the blurred outlines of angry police and ambulance attendants, remonstrating with the cameraman as he swerved past them.

At a first glance no recognizable human figures appeared in these photographs, but on the wall above the metal sink beside the window were the enlarged prints of six middle-aged women. I was struck by their marked resemblance to Vera Seagrave, as she might appear in twenty years' time. They varied from what I guessed was the well-preserved wife of a successful businessman, fox fur around her shoulders, to a menopausal supermarket cashier and an overweight usherette in a braided gaberdine uniform. Unlike the remainder of the photographs, these six pictures had been taken with elaborate care, using a zoom lens trained through windshields and revolving doors.

Vaughan opened the album at random and handed it to me. Leaning back against the door, he watched me as I adjusted the desk lamp.

The first thirty pages recorded the crash, hospitaliza-tion and post-recuperative romance of the young social worker, Gabrielle, who was at that moment sitting on the sofa in Seagrave's sitting-room and rolling the cigarettes which they were smoking. By coincidence, her small sports car had collided with an airline bus at the entry to the airport underpass not far from the site of my own accident. Her sharp-jawed face, its skin beginning to sag like the first slide of an avalanche, lay back against the oil-smeared seat. Around the crushed car was a group of police, ambulance attendants and spectators. In the foreground of the first photographs a fireman with cutting equipment was severing the right-hand windshield pillar. The young woman's injuries were not yet apparent. Her expressionless face looked up at the fireman as he held his torch, almost as if waiting for some bizarre sexual assault. In the later photographs the bruises that were to mask her face began to appear, like the outlines of a second personality, a preview of the hidden faces of her psyche which would have emerged only in late middle age. I was struck by the prim lines these bruises formed around her broad mouth. These morbid depressions were like those of a self-centred spinster with a history of unhappy affairs. Later, even more bruises appeared on her arms and shoulders, the marks of the steering column and instrument panel, as if these lovers had beaten her out of an increasingly abstracted despair with a series of grotesque implements.

Behind me, Vaughan still leaned against the door. For the first time since I had met him his body was completely at rest, its manic movements in some way calmed by my immersion in his album. I turned the next pages. Vaughan had compiled an elaborate photographic dossier on the young woman. I guessed that he had chanced upon her accident a few minutes after she had skidded into the rear of the airline bus. The alarmed faces of several Varig passengers peered through the rear window at the crushed sports car which this injured young woman had delivered like a tableau sculpture to the unprotected overhang below their seats.