Free Crash by J.G. Ballard Page B

scattered across the bonnet and seats.
    ‘Were you badly hurt?’ she asked. ‘I think we saw each other at the hospital.’
    I found it impossible to say anything to her, aware of the almost obsessive way in which she brushed her hair across her cheek. Her strong body, with its nervous sexuality, formed a powerful junction with the dented and mud-stained car.
    ‘I don’t want the car,’ she said. ‘In fact, I was appalled to find that I have to pay a small fee to have it scrapped.’
    She hung around the car, watching me with a mixture of hostility and interest, as if admitting that her motives for coming to the pound were as ambiguous as my own. I sensed that in her refined and matter-of-fact way she was already trying out the possibilities I had opened for her, examining this instrument of a perverse technology which had killed her husband and closed the principal avenue of her life.
     
     
    I offered her a lift to her surgery.
    ‘Thanks.’ She walked ahead of me. ‘To the airport, if you could.’

    ‘The airport?’ I had an odd feeling of loss. ‘Why – are you leaving?’
    ‘Not yet — though not soon enough for some people, I’ve already found.’ She took off her sunglasses and gave me a bleak smile. ‘A death in the doctor’s family makes the patients doubly uneasy.’
    ‘I take it you’re not wearing white to reassure them?’
    ‘I’ll wear a bloody kimono if I want to.’
    We took our seats in my car. She told me that she worked in the immigration department at London Airport. Holding herself well away from me, she leaned back against the door pillar, surveying the interior of the car with a critical eye, this apparent resurrection of smooth vinyl and polished glass. She followed my hands as they moved across the controls. The pressure of her thighs against the hot plastic formed a module of intense excitement. Already I guessed that she was well aware of this. By a terrifying paradox, a sexual act between us would be a way of taking her revenge on me.
     
     
    Heavy traffic jammed the northbound motorway from Ashford to London Airport. The sunlight burned on the overheated cellulose. Tired drivers leaned through open windows around us, listening to the endless newscasts on their radios. Sealed inside their airline coaches, would-be passengers watched the jetliners lifting from the distant runways of the airport. To the north of the terminal buildings I could see the high deck of the flyover straddling the airport entrance tunnel, clogged with traffic that seemed about to re-enact a slow-motion dramatization of our crash.
    Helen Remington pulled a cigarette packet from the pocket of her raincoat. She searched the instrument
panel for the lighter, right hand moving above my knees like a nervous bird.
    ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Her strong fingers tore away the cellophane. ‘I started to smoke at Ashford – it’s rather stupid of me.’
    ‘Look at all this traffic – I need every sedative I can lay my hands on.’
    ‘It’s much worse now – you noticed that, did you? The day I left Ashford I had the extraordinary feeling that all these cars were gathering for some special reason I didn’t understand. There seemed to be ten times as much traffic.’
    ‘Are we imagining it?’
    She pointed to the interior of the car with her cigarette. ‘You’ve bought yourself exactly the same car again. It’s the same shape and colour.’
    She turned her face towards me, making no effort now to hide the scar-line on her face. I was well aware of the strong undertow of hostility moving towards me. The traffic stream reached the Stanwell intersection. I followed the queue of cars, already thinking of how she would behave during sexual intercourse. I tried to visualize her broad mouth around her husband’s penis, sharp fingers between his buttocks searching out his prostate. She touched the yellow hull of a fuel tanker beside us, its massive rear wheels only six inches from her elbow. As she read