Watching these desultory collisions, I remembered my own crash and the exhibition at the Arts Laboratory. I still assumed that the exhibition had been designed to test the psychology of its audience, but David took for granted that its sole purpose had been to incite myself. Was my accident, in which I was lucky not to be killed, an attempt to die in an erotic death pact with Sally?

David had suggested as much, when he and Sally visited me in Roehampton hospital. Looking up from my bed at this deteriorated couple, of whom I was so fond, I realised that I had exploited them in the same way that Dick Sutherland and Lykiard had exploited me. I wanted to help them, but the insane roller-coaster of the sixties had seized our lives and swept us headlong between its screaming rails.

The last cars on the circuit heaved against each other like the bored bison wallowing in the mud pit beside the railroad bridge at Moose Jaw. I thought of the Hell Drivers in Shanghai before the war and the spectacular collisions staged by the casual Americans. Across the years their spirit seemed to hover over this modest track, and over the greatest of all motorised tragedies, Kennedy’s death by motorcade. I could still remember individual frames of the Zapruder film, endlessly anatomised on television and in a thousand magazine exposés. Had the events in Dealey Plaza been no more than the most elaborate of a series of staged accidents prefigured on that Shanghai race course of my childhood?

Chilled by the winter air, the spectators shuffled their feet on the wooden stands. Nostrils quickened in the drifting smoke and engine fumes. The advertised highlight of the afternoon was the re-creation of a spectacular road accident, a multiple collision on a Manchester overpass in which a dozen vehicles had been involved.

As a curtain-raiser, there would be a women’s event, and the crowd moved forward for a closer view. Sally and a group of women drivers, all in striped silk jackets, faces made up like streetwalkers, were gripping the roof sills of their cars and sliding their legs through the drivers’ windows. The spectators, heavy men in leather coats, pushed past me to the rail. They settled their hands deep in their pockets. They had come only for the women’s event, a figure-of-eight destruction course filled with jolting impacts, when every penis in the arena would be clenched within a hand.

In the Camera Lens

12

IN THE CAMERA LENS

“A film festival,” Dick Sutherland remarked over our third rum collins at the Copacabana Palace Hotel, “gives you a fair idea of what the future will be like.”

“Beautiful but unapproachable women, frazzled men, and a million dreams held together by hype?”