‘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.’

AFTER OUR MEETING on the roof of the airport car-park I was continually aware of Vaughan’s presence. He no longer followed me, but seemed to hover like an invigilator in the margins of my life,

stalled in a massive jam

We passed within ten feet of him.

When we reached the television-commercial studios Catherine drove aimlessly around the car-park, reluctant to let me out.

‘I saw you just before the accident,’ I told her. ‘Do you remember? We made love.’‘Are you still involving me in your crash?’

My first need was to end my convalescence and rent a car.

The silence continued. <…>trapped <…> in the hot sunlight, I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped.

‘They are rather like rehearsals. When we’ve all rehearsed our separate parts the real thing will begin.’

I felt an undefined sense of

At any moment the skies might slide …

As I sat in the car beside my wife, my fingers moved across the control panel, switching on the ignition, the direction indicator, selecting the drive lever. I realized that I was almost exactly modelling my responses to the car on the way in which Karen had touched Catherine’s body.

The crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union.

I imagined the ward filled with convalescing air-disaster victims, each of their minds a brothel of images.

THE HARSH BLUE lights of police cars revolved within my mind during the next three weeks as I lay in an empty ward of the casualty hospital near London Airport.

Already I was aware that the interlocked radiator grilles of our cars formed the model of an inescapable and perverse union between us.

Already I felt isolated from the reality of this accident.

I waited for someone to reassure me as I sat there, dressed in another man’s blood

I was still wearing the safety belt I had deliberately fastened to save her from the embarrassment of embracing me.

He died on the bonnet of my car, his blood sprayed through the fractured windshield across my face