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He is sitting on the back seat of a car, somewhere in France It’s a bright blue day, absurdly hot, and the roads are hazed with dust The car looks as though it’s been dragged out of a ditch It is coated in dust flung up by the wheels and scraps of weed are poking out the grille They ease into the automatic car wash and the daylight fades like a dimmer switch Rollers descend from above; close in from the sides The movement is dramatic somehow, like when the curtain rises in the theatre Pushing his forehead to the window, he watches the synchronised columns dervish around the car There are glimpses of the world outside but mostly he sees a wet black flicker This is the first time he’s been through a car wash He is five years old Vibrations travel from washer to window to skull and turn his tongue into a tuning fork Mist pounds against the glass while opaque liquids dribble, slide, are carved off by blades of pressurised air It is strange to be inside, to observe but not feel the raging water and foaming suds, here: the still point in a mechanised storm He is inside a violence which does not touch him The doors are locked It’s like being in a lift as it moves between floors, a state of enforced passivity he can’t will himself out of Caressed, scrubbed, breathed-on, showered: the cleansing envelops but never enters the car He pictures rainwater coating his skin in a liquid sheath, invisible armour How do those water-jets feel? What does the white foam taste like? He feels nothing: his body is air The machine is loud but muffled, a roar that sounds far-off yet visceral, the thud and rush of blood No one is talking His sister is heat-drugged, fast asleep; his parents are staring into the glassy darkness where the road should be Their heads are hollow cases enclosed within the hollow case of the car, which is enclosed within the machine, the city, the world He remembers the diagram of