The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  “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.

  Towards the evening’s end the party took an uglier turn. Sally was nearly raped in the rear seat of the Continental by an overboisterous tableau sculptor for whom she was mimicking the postures of the President’s widow. Carried away by the excitement, David urged the topless girl to interview her during the heat of the assault.

  “Sally, this is live TV! Tell the viewers how you feel!” David dragged the cameraman after him, snatched the microphone, and rammed it through the passenger window into Sally’s enraged face. “Over to you, Sally! Let’s have a commentary in your own words…”

  By the time Cleo Churchill and I had rescued Sally, the party was spilling into the street, the guests searching for an even larger exhibition. Straightening her torn dress, Sally lunged at the drunken sculptor with her shoe and hobbled away on a broken heel through the scattered wine bottles. She grimaced at the image of herself on the television screen and disappeared with a cry into the night.

  “Is Sally safe?” Cleo avoided the wine dripping from the roof of the Lincoln and slammed the passenger door with relief. “You’ve proved something, Jim—though I don’t know what. Was it worth it?”

  “As an experiment? I think so.” I knew that she disapproved of the exhibition and had gamely come along to give me support. “At least they never stopped looking at the cars, which is more than you can say for most gallery openings. Dick Sutherland wants to film all this for his new series. When he gets back from the States they’ll stage the party again at the Television Centre, with studio extras playing the guests.”

  “Heaven forbid … Don’t let him use you all the time.” Unsettled by the violent evening, Cleo wiped the wine from her hands. She pointed to the monitor screen transmitting a picture of the empty gallery. “You’re on TV now—isn’t that enough?”

  “Broadcast TV, Cleo—Dick feels the idea deserves an audience of millions.”

  “I thought it had one. You know, out in the streets, the real thing?”

  “Cleo, this is the real thing … But I’m glad you came. Can I give you a lift home?”

  “Jim dear, I think not. This is one evening when I wouldn’t trust your driving…”

  Cleo stood in front of the camera, using the screen as a mirror as she checked the wine stains on the sleeves of her dress. The electronic colours had separated slightly and reminded me of my acid vision when I had seen Cleo robed in a train of light as she strolled through the trees beside the river. My Moreau princess, who turned the starlings into peacocks and calmed the air with her graceful hands. I wanted to invite her to Shepperton again, drawn by her intelligence and forthright mind.

  But Cleo was nervous of me, aware that I was doggedly following a dangerous logic of my own. If death had outstared life, which the world seemed to believe, I could rest my case. In a desperate sense Miriam would be alive again, Kennedy would drive triumphantly through Dealey Plaza, the casualties of the Second World War would rest in their graves, and a Chinese youth at a rural railway station would at last have conveyed his desperate message to me.

  * * *

  The exhibition ran its four-week course. During this time the cars were continually abused by outraged visitors. A Hare Krishna sect stormed into the gallery and threw a tin of white paint at the Lincoln. Meanwhile, Sally and David continued their courtship, hunting each other across the city in the same way that David and I had once played hide-and-seek in the streets of Shanghai, a game too important to be brought to an end.

  On the evening that the exhibition closed I was driving back to Shepperton along the Hammersmith flyover, when I saw Sally’s MG speeding down the exit ramp in front of me. I had spent the afternoon at the gallery, supervising the removal of my battered exhibits, whose distressed condition—they were covered with paint and graffiti, their seats soaked in urine—shocked the hardened car-breakers when they arrived with their tow truck. At first they refused to accept the vehicles, their eyes opened to the barbarities of modern art. The cars might be destined for the compactor and the blast furnace, but as they dragged them into the street they were already cleaning them protectively.

  While I drove along the flyover I wiped the last of the white paint from my hands and watched Sally’s sports car speeding through the traffic, a defective taillight winking at the dusk. In the past, whenever I saw her on the roads to the west of London, I was sure that she was on her way to Shepperton. Now I guessed that she was off to see David at Fair Oaks airfield, and for a moment I felt a small part of that loss I had known after Miriam’s death. Sally at least would smile at me again; we would make love and remain as fond of each other as ever. But the last things she wanted were sympathy and affection. She needed David’s unresolved aggressions and his outbursts of erratic humour when he would slap her face for her if she played the difficult child.

  Beyond Twickenham the traffic began to open out. As we passed the rugby stadium Sally moved into the fast lane, forcing an overtaking car to brake. Headlights flared against the bounding tail of the MG,
and Sally pushed a derisive finger through a tear in the canvas hood, sending a shower of embers from her cigarette into the night air. Reluctantly, she moved over to allow the faster car to pass her, then swerved back into his slipstream, her headlamps flooding the driver’s mirror.

  Left behind in a line of slower cars, I waited until we reached the next roundabout, accelerated past an idling truck, and set off after Sally. She glanced in the rearview mirror, and I wondered if she had seen me, but she was repairing the makeup to her eyes and lips.

  I thought of her with David, making love on his air bed, as she had often told me, under the wings of his Cessna in the silent hangar. A reverie of jealousy and desire filled my mind, regret that I had lost Sally to this winged man, anger at myself for being so prudishly afraid of her needle ulcers and thieving …

  Escaping from my hands, the car leapt across the road and touched the tail of the MG. Our fenders locked as we careened along the carriageway. Startled, Sally crouched away from the wild headlights and the hurtling mass of the car that had leapt out of the night. Cigarette in her mouth, she pulled away to my left, overran the soft shoulder, and then swerved in front of me as she lost control of the small steering wheel.

  Trying to avoid a collision, I braked sharply into the fast lane. As the car veered to the right I felt a front tyre burst and deflate. The wheel wrenched itself from my hands. The car side-slipped across the dual carriageway, and the flattened tyre struck the central reservation, hurling the vehicle onto its side. It demolished an illuminated traffic sign, rolled onto its back, and carried on along the oncoming lane.