The Kindness of Women (27 page)

The traffic crept towards the bridge, but I stopped the car and opened my door, ready to offer my help before the ambulance arrived.

“Daddy…!” Henry warned. “The policeman's shouting at you!”

A fist drummed on the roof over my head. I acknowledged the patrolman's signal, waved encouragingly to Sally and David, and rejoined the queue crossing the bridge. A few pedestrians stood at the kerb, staring idly at the damaged cars. They stepped back, making room for a more appreciative audience that had now arrived. Spectators returning from the air show were leaving their cars in a side street and in the car park of a riverside pub. They gathered around the Jaguar, inspecting the damaged bodywork and the pattern of tyre marks scored into the road with the practised eyes of enthusiasts judging a display of aerobatics. Two cine-cameras recorded the scene, and the police made no attempt to stop them, so impressed were they by the knowledgeability of this sympathetic audience. Yet no one made the smallest effort to help Sally and David, and a man in a flying jacket even protested when an ambulance appeared on the scene and the attendants lifting Sally from the Jaguar blocked the viewfinder of his expensive camera. As I watched, a new street theatre had been born.

*   *   *

During the next weeks, as I drove through central London, I noticed the same thoughtful gaze in the people who gathered at street accidents, as if the secret formulas of their lives were exposed by these random collisions. Office workers on their way to lunch, drivers unloading delivery vans stared at the damaged cars that materialised out of the passing traffic in a fanfare of ringing metal and sounding horns. An attentive audience would invariably form, calmly inspecting the stricken vehicles.

Often I stopped my car and walked through the crowds, struck by the spectators' quiet and measured response. Only ten years earlier everyone would have been pulling with their bare hands at the broken bodywork and crushed roofs, trying to free the injured occupants. Born out of an ecology of violence, acts of numbing brutality now ruled the imaginative spaces of their lives, leaching away all feeling and emotion. Perhaps, in their thoughtful communion with the crashed car, they were trying to come to terms with the televised disasters and assassinations that enfolded their minds and doing what they could to restore a lost compassion.

Where this perverse logic might lead I grasped for the first time when Sally drove me to the opening of the Arts Laboratory at its new premises in Camden Town. Usually I was wary of being a passenger in Sally's spirited but erratic MG and always found an excuse to prevent her driving the children. On this evening, however, she was surprisingly sedate, driving well within the speed limit and keeping a steady eye on the rearview mirror. Anxious for her, I wondered if she was still recovering from the collision after the air show.

“I didn't feel a thing,” she told me, clearly disappointed. “I didn't even see it happen. Suddenly we were sitting there with all this glass and these huge policemen. Not even a scratch—I really feel cheated.”

“You could have gone through the windshield.”

“Jim, it was a bump! You would have enjoyed it. David pulled the wheel over without thinking.”

“I can't believe that…” At the foot of Chertsey Bridge the Japanese stewardesses had stood blinking in the sunlight like hostages tied to a target. “I bet he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“No, that's David. He felt like a shunt. I don't know why the Japanese were there.”

“Sally, he'll kill you.”

“Great! I might like that…” We had stopped on the Westway flyover, and the traffic lights flared across Sally's sallow face and its wild smile. Seeing that she had shocked me, she pressed my hand to the steering wheel. “Don't worry, David wants to get himself killed, he isn't interested in me. He's always trying to hit other cars. Every shunt reminds him of something—the war, I guess. You never talked about your camp, Jim. Did he have a bad time physically?”

“Physically, nothing happened to him at all.”

“And what about you—mentally, maybe?”

“Sally, that was long, long ago.”

“Not for him. Car crashes bring it all back for David. They mean for him what bullfights mean for everyone else—sex and death … Jim, you didn't mind me going off with him? He's your oldest friend, in a way it's not like my picking someone you didn't know.”

“I suppose that's true…”

“I love the pixies. They helped me to grow up. And you. Now you're writing all the time, and I'm so busy with things…” She spoke softly, as if to herself. “Everyone changes, and we're always moving away from each other. Just for once I wish we could all stand still and remember the way things were. There's so much happening, and I want to be part of it all. I want to live everyone's dreams, be right inside them…”

“Sally, you are. But—”

“Jim, I'll always let you fuck me.”

She brushed her ungroomed hair, aware that I might not always want to. Her fingers fiddled with her scarred upper lip, where she had been punched by a casual lover, an evil-tempered underground filmmaker. Looking at her, as she bravely tried to draw herself together, I realised how much she had lost any centre to her life. Shepperton had been the axis of her carousel, where she had warmed herself by the cheerful calliope she had helped to play with my children; but she had moved away to the whirling lights and the rushing air far out on the rim. I was too dull for her, too immersed in the children's games and homework, too steeped in the tumblers of whisky and soda that cheered me and calmed the world, a tradeoff that Sally found too limiting. She needed the world to rush up to her like the waves seething around her waist at Brighton beach.

We drove on, crossed the Marylebone Road, and strayed into the maze of old commercial properties off Camden High Street. As Sally fumbled with the rearview mirror, I sensed that she had deliberately lost her bearings, as if waiting for someone to find us. I searched the skyline of derelict buildings. The Arts Laboratory had moved into a one-time pharmaceutical warehouse; its open concrete decks were the perfect setting for its brutalist happenings and exhibitions, its huge ventilation shafts purpose-built to evacuate the last breath of pot smoke in the event of a drugs raid.

As we turned into a one-way street I saw headlights flash from a waiting car parked in a slip road. It moved towards us, accelerating with the roar of a supercharged engine. I forced the wheel over while Sally stamped at the brake pedal, but the car had swerved past us, its windscreen pillar clipping the mirror from a parked van. In the rush of speed and danger I recognised the silver Jaguar and its deformed fender. Without pausing, it careened out of the one-way street and headed into the night.

“Sally—pull off the street. He may come back.”

Sally lay against the headrest, white hair across her face like a lace of death, stunned by the moment of violence that had opened and closed with the roar of a furnace door. In the darkness the broken mirror rang for a last time against a fender. Depressing the clutch with my foot, I started the stalled engine and steered the car into the loading bay of a disused warehouse.

We sat in the silence, listening to the distant moan of the Jaguar's engine as it hunted the streets, a lover's cry in the night.

“Was that David?” I asked. “Sally, did you see him?”

“He'll be back.” Sally held my arm. “He was trying to warn you.”

“How long has he followed you around?”

“Only sometimes. Then I follow him.” She pressed her hand over mine as I gripped the steering wheel. “It's a game of hide-and-seek. We pretend to crash into each other. Keep out of his way, Jim—once he said you were really Japanese…”

She sat in the darkness, looking at the faded sign on the wall beside us, advertising sets of Edwardian crucibles and alembics. She had spread her thighs, imitating her posture in David's car after the Chertsey Bridge collision. She was sedated and aroused at the same time, adrift within a dream of violence and desire.

“It's snug here. Car crashes always … Jim, you'll have to…”

She took my hand and placed it between her thighs. The cotton gusset was damp with moisture that soaked her skirt, a fluxus brought on by the swerving Jaguar. Arching her back, she pulled the G-string down to her knees and kicked it away among the pedals. She steered my hand to her vulva, settling my ring finger over her clitoris, and spread her arms across the back of the seat, as if reclining in the car after a spectacular accident. When I caressed her thighs, trying to soothe the needle ulcers on her veins, she followed my fingers with her own, searching for the outlines of the wounds that would set their seals into her white skin.

“Jim, one day we'll be in a crash together. I'd like that … think about it now for me.”

She moved diagonally across the seat and raised her thighs to expose her anus, caressing her vulva with her forefinger. I embraced her tenderly, thinking of the years we had spent together. I remembered her running with the horses in the field near the pop festival, her white hair lifting among the horses' tails, her eyes flushed with thoughts of her childhood.

I knelt on the floor of the passenger well, aware of the dashboard panel gleaming against my shoulder, the instrument binnacle jutting forward in the darkness. The stylised interior of the car embraced Sally as intensely as any lover. When my penis entered her vulva she took my hips in her hands, holding me so that only the glans lay between her labia. She pulled the black shoulder straps from her dress and lowered the bodice to free her breasts.

When I caressed them she watched me in an expressionless way, as if she wanted to be violated by a machine. She held my head a few inches from her nipple, tracing out a sign on her breast, the diagram of an undreamed mutilation. She was exposing herself not to me but to the designers of her car, to David Hunter, whose proxy I had become, and to the unknown man who had shaped her childhood. Her fingers scratched at my chest, trying to draw the bandages from a wound, and she tapped her nipple like a nurse drawing blood from a vein. When I came she pressed her breast to my mouth, as if returning to me all the blood that I had lost in the sex-death that filled her dreams.

We lay together as David's Jaguar hunted the streets, a beast pursuing its strange courtship. When the headlamps flared against the walls of the warehouses Sally pressed her head to my shoulder. Sucking her infected arms, she clung to my chest, afraid that she might leave me and run towards the oncoming light.

*   *   *

My exhibition of crashed cars was held for four weeks at the Arts Laboratory, and throughout that time came under continuous attack from visitors to the gallery. One of the few who wholeheartedly approved was Peter Lykiard. When, at Sally's urging, I suggested the exhibition to him, he instantly accepted the project.

“Excellent, Jim … in its way, emotional minimalism at its purest. Warhol would approve.”

In fact, my intentions were the exact opposite. For me, the crashed car was a repository of the most powerful and engaged emotions, a potent symbol in the new logic of violence and sensation that ruled our lives.

In my catalogue notes I wrote: “The marriage of reason and nightmare which dominates the 1960s has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape stride the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an uneasy realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. The death of feeling and emotion has at last left us free to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game … ‘Crashed Cars' illustrates the pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions, but is a source of endless entertainment on our film and television screens.”

Contrary to expectations, setting up the exhibition presented few problems. The automobile graveyards of north London were a treasure house of exhibits, the outdoor storerooms of a technological Louvre. In a Hackney breaker's yard we selected a telescoped Peugeot and a Mini that had rolled down a motorway embankment, whose grass was still growing in its roof sills.

By chance, we found a Lincoln Continental that closely resembled the open-topped limousine in which President Kennedy had met his death. This huge American car had been involved in a massive front-end collision that had driven the radiator grille deep into the engine compartment while leaving the remainder of the car in virtually pristine condition.

Without doubt it was this crushed Lincoln that excited the strongest reactions. The immense black car sat under the clear gallery lights, surrounded by the barest white walls. Although none of the cars would have prompted the slightest concern had they been parked in the street outside, or a moment's grief over the tragic fate of the occupants, within the gallery they became the focus for nervous laughter and angry comment. Visitors who wandered into the gallery and found the cars unexpectedly in front of them began to titter to themselves or swear at the vehicles.

These responses confirmed all my suspicions of everything that an aberrant technology was threading through our lives. Further testing the audience, I hired a topless young woman to interview the guests at the opening party on closed-circuit television. She had originally agreed to appear naked with her microphone, but on seeing the cars decided that she would only bare her breasts—an interesting response in its own right.

Needless to say, all this provoked the guests beyond endurance. No gallery opening in my experience had ever degenerated so quickly into a drunken brawl. Egged on by Sally and David Hunter, the guests poured wine over the cars, tore off the wing mirrors, and began to break the few intact windows. David leapt around the gallery, supervising the mayhem in high good humour. His restless hands hardly left the damaged cars, as if he had at last found his natural habitat.