Crash

What is it that comes out of a crash? In the wake of Ballard's death, Peter Carty writes a new work of fiction set in a contemporary London art school

Even when the sun is shining like today it is always grey around Vauxhall bridge, dominated by exhaust fumes, lines of traffic crossing the river in concrete defiles, the river itself a turbid ditch slid between obstructively squat buildings. Pedestrians stalk through like captives in a zoo a modernist architect has been let loose over. Somewhere you're relieved to get home from, insulate yourself against with your front door. Hardly anyone lives here so it's an effort for everyone to get to, a struggle in and out of a built environment that's not much of an environment.

Image: This way to the art school?

On down the art college's entrance ramp into another environment that says several things. It says office and studio space and we're not going to do this building up much because as it is it all looks alternative and because we're mean and because we don't want to be seen chucking public money around. But I am a sucker for all this - I should say that at the outset - and the alternative thing bowls me over and sweeps me away with it, the conceit of it all being like a series of warehouse studio spaces glued together to masquerade as an educational establishment, yes I am seduced by it, and by its accompanying illusory freedom to go ahead and to feel free inside here for a little while.

The thing about art college is that I can go in battered and fucked and it's all very boho for everyone. I should be replacing my ripped jacket but the ok-looking newer one I saw in the Salvation Army shop was £25, which seemed high for the Salvation Army. All my carefully chosen precious handouts in my tatty plastic shoulder bag and walking up to the only genuinely alternative (which actually means marginal) person I am to meet today. I know he knows I know he is the only Afro-Carribean I am likely to encounter in here. He's about the same age as I am and if in many ways it looks like it's too late now for me it's certainly too late for him as he sits in his cubicle although maybe he never expected much from the off, and maybe that is what he has to think to himself in there no less bright than me or anyone else in this building.

I sign his visitor's sheet for him and go and have a piss and then perch in the canteen, after carefully telling him that probably the students aren't going to come and find me as per their instructions and in a little while he'll very likely have to help me find them and find the room and find myself, and he seems only slightly doubtful about it all which is nice of him under the circumstances.

I have a brief panic attack there in the canteen, because what I am meant to be about here seems overwhelming and the panic attack is this tiny ongoing edge of my life sputtering up onto the vast and featureless beach that is the present with all of the massive and endless sea of my past behind pressing its vast bulk up against it. Fortunately the feeling passes quickly and I wonder if I can risk having a coffee and whether that might set off another one and I go and look at the price and feel relieved that it's too high for me to want to bother with now, what with the cost of the tube fare here and back, but I'll have one later and I dismiss the craziness that would be walking back home to save the cost of the coffee. I won't claim the tube fares back on expenses because I don't want to bother the person who conjured up this gig for me out of nowhere and has to fill in the forms and who has been very good to me really all told, although I am pretty sure I'll never do this again so I shouldn't care, but I am one of these people who would rather die than embarrass themselves. I did once almost drown because I was too inhibited to shout help help to the lifeguard and even though just now when I pissed it came out slowly it will take me a while to go the doctor because it is easier not to bother with all that and to get prostate cancer if I am going to get it.

There's a Japanese girl walking around in a smashing suit that is canary yellow and black, and after some purposeful to-ing and fro-ing and greeting of people at the other tables she comes up to me and smiles and asks me if I am Peter and I say that I am. I am not completely astonished by her youth and its concomitant at-the-more-or-less-unsullied-start-of-her adult-life-ness (although let's be honest after several years being a student probably she's emotionally damaged) but I do register it and beautiful and astonishing it is. She might be good looking but it is hard to tell for sure because she is young above all.

She leads me up some stairs and over a bridge above the reception area and on the way we're joined by a British Asian student, who tells me he's from Bangladesh and so we have a chat about Bangladesh and he says he's not from Sylhet (where most Bengalis in Britain are from), he's from another part, the west I think he says, and the Sylheti's think people from his part of the country are posh. I think he is posh myself to be honest, he must be posh if he can afford to be on this course that they're all on, but he's alright enough with it.

We arrive at a table in a provisional kind of space next to a high internal wall and there's half a dozen more students round it and I shake hands with them all. They tell me all their names and I forget them all immediately, of course, but I'd like this to be special for them too, this little time we'll spend together around this table and this is one way to do it. I move into another way as I tell them that JG Ballard was a twentieth century man and that I'm a twentieth century man too, and I stand up and twirl myself around just to show that to them, and they like that and we're rolling off and away. I ask them if they liked Crash and of course they did and I say I'd forgotten how explicitly pornographic it was and they like that too, and we talk about futurism and Marinetti's car crash and how that leads into Ballard and after a while I ask if anyone's been in a serious car crash and one of them has, an American girl with long pale blonde hair, and she talks calmly about the way half of the car, the half she wasn't in, was completely destroyed and afterwards she felt very liberated, positive about life and I tell them about mine, when I was nineteen and I got drunk and played chicken in Paris on a bridge over the Seine and how I can still remember flying through the air and I can't bend my left knee properly even now and they're shocked a little but I know they like feeling shocked. We talk about the novel and the psychosis of its narrator and how the narrative is antithetical to humanism and about the intentional fallacy and even so how Ballard was in a Japanese internment camp as a young boy and how he saw many things that a young boy should not see. We talk about trauma and they've never heard of the death drive and it turns out they haven't read any Freud at all, because on this course there's a lot of contemporary theory and I say that they must read some, it's one of the finest experiences for starters it's such fantastic writing because you're there in the study in Vienna with him as he talks to you and takes the odd toke off that cigar. Now and again I have to pause because I start to feel overcome by all of this around this table, but the pauses aren't long and I don't think they notice, they are very young after all. We talk about the private view for Ballard's own exhibition of wrecked cars that he put on before the book and the drunkenness and the vandalism and the sexually abusive behaviour that evening in that arts lab in 1970 and how people could still beunsettled by all that then.

We have a break for coffee and I ask them if they are enjoying the MA and they are and I ask how much it costs and they say that it's different amounts, it's three thousand pounds for most of us and the Japanese girl says it's ten thousand pounds for her and the American girl nods and I think about that, it's barely imaginable, but if say Crash is two hundred pages long if each page was a fifty pound note then that's ten thousand pounds and say if each page of the Communist Manifesto with a decent introductory essay and appendices was also a fifty pound note well then that would be the three thousand but I don't say this to them and I haven't seen a fifty pound note for a while, not that you see them much anyway and I wonder about revolution and whether we should have had one in the 1970s whether these moneyed people would all have been killed or had to flee and would there have been any point to that but that thinking never goes anywhere and these aren't the same people leave them alone they weren't born then they're alright they're fine. And anyway they lose out because a life must have both dark and light to be a life and if people are moneyed and there's no struggle there's no texture in their lives they aren't lives they've created for themselves they haven't been allowed their own lives, this is the capital I have but I don't know if I feel sorry for them.

We discuss the twentieth century avant garde and transgression, and the Bengali boy starts talking about Joy Division for some reason, the fascist nomenclature I think and I tell them I grew up with some of the musicians who were in those men-in-black bands and I talk about those bleak times and how the music connected with the grim beauty of northern post-industrial landscapes, and they're all into that music it's still avant garde it's always going to be and there I was, worried that Ballard was fading into the past already and this session was twentieth century and that's partly why I did my little twirl to get my defence of myself in first, but it's not like that, they're not like that at all, and we talk about some contemporary theory and repetition, and Heraclitus why not, and I catch myself thinking for a moment that this talking here about literature and art is no different in the end in our fleeting being to anything else, to labouring, or shelf-filling, and why should it be except for the barriers around culture, the reason culture is there mostly is to exclude people like me and this is one of the times in my life I've slipped through the barrier and what about the bloke at reception good luck to him all the best mate I wish you were here.

We talk about reenactment in contemporary art and Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy and they like all that, but not as much I don't think as the earlier stuff and then I throw it open and ask them what do you think is going to happen this century where the computer stands for the car and where what is provocative and transgressive is not clear any more. They go quiet I've asked too much of them the century hasn't really got going who can predict the future what can they say I'm worrying I've slung them all out onto the infinite featureless beach I was on earlier but they're not having panic attacks over it they're thoughtful and it's coming to an end now we're almost done, and I tell them that when I was a student the second the course ended that was it, it was as if the lecturers had died or emigrated, and I don't believe in that and here's my email address you can ask me about Baudrillard or whoever if you want and the Japanese girl likes that because she's relying a lot on Baudrillard for her dissertation and I wave good-bye to them as I walk off away towards the little bridge and the stairs.

Peter Carty|<peter.carty AT tesco.net> is a writer and journalist.