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.”