knees. On the deserted roof of a Northolt multi-storey car-park I waited by the balustrade. In the rear seat of
the car Vaughan arranged her limbs in the posture of the dying cashier. His strong body, crouched across her
in the reflected light of passing headlamps, assumed a series of stylized positions.
Vaughan unfolded for me all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic
of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue.
For Vaughan each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, in the complex geometries of a dented fender,
in the unexpected variations of crushed radiator grilles, in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel
forced on to a driver's crotch as if in some calibrated act of machine fellatio. The intimate time and space of
a single human being had been fossilized for ever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass.
A week after the funeral of the woman cashier, as we drove at night along the western perimeter of the
airport, Vaughan swerved on to the verge and struck a large mongrel dog. The impact of its body, like a
padded hammer, and the shower of glass as the animal was carried over the roof, convinced me that we were
about to die in a crash. Vaughan never stopped. I watched him accelerate away, his scarred face held close to
the punctured windshield, angrily brushing the beads of frosted glass from his cheeks. Already his acts of
violence had become so random that I was no more than a captive spectator. Yet the next morning, on the
roof of the airport car-park where we abandoned the car, Vaughan calmly pointed out to me the deep dents in
the bonnet and roof. He stared at an airliner filled with tourists lifting into the western sky, his sallow face
puckering like a wistful child's. The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of
an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much
more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?
Even this first death seemed timid compared with the others in which Vaughan took part, and with those
imaginary deaths that filled his mind. Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised a terrifying almanac of
imaginary automobile disasters and insane wounds - the lungs of elderly men punctured by door handles, the
chests of young women impaled by steering-columns, the cheeks of handsome youths pierced by the
chromium latches of quarter-lights. For him these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from a
perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind like exhibits in the
museum of a slaughterhouse.
Thinking of Vaughan now, drowning in his own blood under the police arc-lights, I remember the
countless imaginary disasters he described as we cruised together along the airport expressways. He dreamed
of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating
children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of
alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of
petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the haemorrhages of
their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reaction vessels. Vaughan
devised the massive rear-end collisions of sworn enemies, hate-deaths celebrated in the engine fuel burning
in wayside ditches, paintwork boiling through the dull afternoon sunlight of provincial towns. He visualized
the specialized crashes of escaping criminals, of off-duty hotel receptionists trapped between their steering
wheels and the laps of their lovers whom they were masturbating. He thought of the crashes of honeymoon
couples, seated together after their impacts with the rear suspension units of runaway sugar-tankers. He
thought of the crashes of automobile stylists, the most abstract of all possible deaths, wounded in their cars
with promiscuous laboratory technicians.
Vaughan elaborated endless variations on these collisions, thinking first of a repetition of head-on colli-
sions: a child-molester and an overworked doctor reenacting their deaths first in head-on collision and then
in roll-over; the retired prostitute crashing into a concrete motorway parapet, her overweight body propelled
through the fractured windshield, menopausal loins torn on the chromium bonnet mascot. Her blood would
cross the over-white concrete of the evening embankment, haunting for ever the mind of a police mechanic
who carried the pieces of her body in a yellow plastic shroud. Alternatively, Vaughan saw her hit by a
reversing truck in a motorway fuelling area, crushed against the nearside door of her car as she bent down to
loosen her right shoe, the contours of her body buried within the bloody mould of the door panel. He saw her