Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Dr Greenwood was generous with pocket money?’

  ‘Too much. He was sorry for the girls. Dr Serrou gave them one hundred francs, then another hundred francs…’ She shuffled to the door. ‘You stay and look, Mr Sinclair. Maybe you can find something about your friend. Poor Dr Greenwood …’

  When she had gone I stood among the cubicles, inhaling the still potent scent of young women’s bodies. Supervising the troubled teenagers would have required heroic patience. By day Greenwood could check their health, prescribe vitamin supplements and hand out his Alice books, but at nightfall the girls would dress up in their finery and dial the immigrant bars in La Bocca, shrieking as they teased the mystified construction workers.

  I imagined the high jinks in this shabby dormitory, like the tricks that Jane and the women doctors at Guy’s played on the unwary housemen. Remembering how Jane had scuffed through the wards, fingers stained with nicotine, I picked up the zebra frock and the dusty tights. I felt a curious affection for the unknown teenager who had worn them. She would soon forget the earnest English doctor, smiling through his fatigue, who had tried to introduce her to the White Rabbit and the Red Queen.

  I left the dormitory and crossed the landing into a high-ceilinged room that had been Greenwood’s office. The bare desk was flanked by empty medicine cabinets and Arabic posters warning against the dangers of alcohol and tobacco. Jane had told me that Greenwood was treating some of the girls for venereal complaints, and I tried not to think of the childhoods from which he had rescued them.

  I sat behind the desk, and imagined myself dispensing medicines and affection to the girls, until the day when tiredness and despair suddenly fused, and tore up all scripts and scenarios. La Bocca was a long way from Cannes, but separated by a universe from Eden-Olympia.

  I opened the desk drawer and took out a mounted photograph that I assumed had hung from a nearby wall. David Greenwood stood in the centre of a group portrait, his blond hair and pale English face lit like a flag among the suntanned Cannoises. He seemed slightly drunk, not from alcohol but exhaustion, his broad grin failing to mask his unfocused gaze.

  Beside him was a handsome woman with a quirky and defensive smile, fair hair hiding one cheek, whom I had last seen outside the American Express offices in Cannes. Frances Baring leaned against Greenwood’s shoulder, clearly trying to support him. Her eyes were fixed on his face with an expression of concern, less like a lover about to bestow a kiss than a mother helping a child to swallow a difficult morsel.

  Around them stood a confident group of Eden-Olympia executives, familiar to me from the press cuttings Charles had sent. I recognized Michel Charbonneau, chairman of the Eden-Olympia holding company; Robert Fontaine, chief executive of the administration; and Guy Bachelet, the security head. Danger seemed far from their minds as they raised their glasses to Greenwood. They posed for the camera in a large, gilt-ceilinged room furnished with formal Empire chairs, like the antechamber to a presidential suite. Together they seemed to be celebrating a notable achievement, perhaps a large and unexpected donation to the refuge. Yet, apart from Frances Baring, no one was aware that David Greenwood was at the end of his tether.

  ‘Mr Sinclair? Enough of the girls now …’

  Sister Émilie called from below. I put away the photograph and closed the office door behind me. As I walked down the stairs I noticed that I was still carrying the zebra dress and fishnet tights. Rather than hand them to the nun, I stuffed them into my jacket.

  After making my thanks and a cash donation to Sister Émilie, who silently bowed to me, I returned to the Jaguar. I drove through the shabby streets of La Bocca, with their melancholy Arab men haunting the doorways. I was glad to be within a twenty-minute drive of the Croisette and its kingdom of light. A smell of cheap perfume filled the car, rising from the zebra bundle on the passenger seat. I stopped by a dustbin outside a supermarket, stepped from the car and slid the garments under the lid.

  The teenager’s scent, rancid but curiously stirring, still clung to my hands. But I was thinking of the photograph I had seen in Greenwood’s office at the refuge. Frances Baring was dressed in a business suit, but all the others in the group, including Greenwood himself, were wearing their leather bowling jackets.

  18

  The Street of Darkest Night

  DUSK CAME QUICKLY to Cannes, in the few moments that distracted me as I ordered another Tom Collins from the waiter at the Rialto Bar. The sky seemed to tilt, tipping the sun like a slew of glowing ash behind the heights of the Esterel, taking with it the hang-gliders who sailed the evening airs. The hotels along the Croisette retreated into themselves, withdrawing behind their formal facades. The lights had moved offshore. Electric snowflakes marked the Christmas-tree rigging of the yachts moored near the beach, and a blaze of candlepower bathed the two cruise liners anchored in the Napoule Channel.

  Shore parties of passengers strolled under the palm trees, too unsteady after their days at sea to risk crossing the Croisette. They stared at the hundreds of Volvo salesmen emerging from a conference at the Noga Hilton, like travellers glimpsing an unknown tribe about to perform its rites of passage with its sacred regalia, the marketing brochure and the promotional video.

  Prostitutes came out at dusk, usherettes in the theatre of the night, shining their miniature torches at any kerb that threatened their high-heels. Two of them entered the Rialto and sat at the next table, muscular brunettes with the hips and thighs of professional athletes. They ordered drinks they never touched, killing time before they set off to trawl the hotels.

  I, too, was waiting for the clock to move on, but with rather less hope. Jane was chairing another late-evening committee at the clinic, mapping out a further stage in the scheme that would bring, if not immortality, then perpetually monitored health to Eden-Olympia. Our brains, I often told her, would soon need a false ceiling to make room for the ducting demanded by our ‘intelligent’ lifestyle. Before breakfast we would set ourselves a psychological test, tapping yes-or-no answers to alternative-choice questions, while a standby alarm offered an emergency package entitled ‘What to do till the psychiatrist comes’.

  As the prostitutes talked to each other in a creole of French and Arabic, their scent drifted over my table, a dream of houris borne by the night-world of the Croisette, the untaxed contraband of the senses in this lazy entrepôt of chance and desire. I needed to escape from Eden-Olympia, with its ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility. The business park was the outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone.

  Jane and I rarely made love. The flair she had shown during my days as a virtual cripple had been smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts. She moved naked around our bedroom, in full view of Simone Delage and her husband, flaunting not her sex but her indifference to it.

  Cannes offered an antidote to this spartan regime. My parents had been unfaithful, but in the old, unhappy way. My father’s affairs complicated his busy life, giving him the harassed existence of a secret agent, forever one step ahead of being unmasked, a fraying conspiracy of rented cars and silent phone calls. He communicated with one lover, the wife of an architect in the same street, by adjusting the roller-blinds, a prearranged code that my mother discovered in a flash of insight worthy of the Bletchley Enigma team. As soon as my father left the house she ran from room to room, raising and lowering the blinds at random. I remembered the lover’s bemused gaze as she drove past, trying to make sense of the baffling signals, and my mother’s smile of triumph. Less happily, I once found her ironing a half-burned credit-card receipt she had fished from a lavatory bowl.

  * * *

  The streetwalkers stood up, testing their stilettos before stepping into the night. The younger of the two, a twenty-year-old with eyes wiser than any grandmother’s, glanced at me for a microsecond too long, as if ready to fit a car-park quickie into her busy evening schedule.

  But sex with pros
titutes required a special knack, as I had learned during my RAF days in Germany. My girlfriends in England on the whole seemed to like me, at least on even days of the month, from the sixteen-year-old ballet student who dragged me into the family-planning clinic to the adjutant’s secretary who listened good-naturedly as I worried on about my parents’ postponed divorce. The Polish whores in the bars outside RAF Mülheim were a different breed, scarcely women at all but furies from Aeschylus who intensely loathed their clients. They were obsessed with the Turkish pimps and their children boarded with reluctant sisters, and any show of feeling disgusted them. Warmth and emotion were the true depravity. They wanted to be used like appliances rented out for the hour, offering any part of themselves to the crudest fantasies of the men who paid them.

  But at least they were real, in a way that eluded Eden-Olympia. I finished my drink, left a 500-franc note on the saucer and stood up to explore the night. I felt surprisingly light-headed, like a dreamer who had strayed onto a film set of tropical palms and cruise liners. At any moment an orchestra would strike up and the crowds on the Croisette, the Volvo dealers and Arab playboys and orthopaedic surgeons, would form themselves into a disciplined, arm-swinging chorus, belting out a big-band hit.

  I followed the two prostitutes past the Noga Hilton, curious to see how far I could go before the puritan conscience pulled the plug. Uninspired by the car-dealers, the women locked arms and strode down the Rue Amouretti to the Place Dubois. They paused to scream abuse at a passing motorist, and veered away into the darkness.

  Unable to keep up with them, I rested my knee outside Mère Besson. After scanning the evening’s menu I set off towards the multistorey garage near the railway station, where I had parked the Jaguar. A darker Cannes gathered itself around me once I crossed the Rue d’Antibes. Off-duty chauffeurs, Arab pushers and out-of-work waiters filled the narrow bars. They played the fruit machines, their thighs rocking the pintables until the tilt-signs flashed, an eye on the new arrivals who stepped from the Marseilles train, would-be construction workers and pairs of sharp-tempered young women who shouldered their way to the head of the taxi queue. Pimps ambled around the tunnel entrance to the underpass, a cloaca that drained away the festival city’s dreams of lust and fortune.

  Inhaling the heady air of north African tobacco, and the cheap aftershave of nerve-gas potency, I crossed the Rue Jaurès to the garage. I fed my ticket into the pay-machine as two men and a young girl walked down the concrete ramp towards the street. With their leather jackets and hard shoulders, the men looked like plainclothes police, and I guessed that they had caught an absconding eleven-year-old trying to board the Paris express. Neither of the men spoke to the girl, who trotted obediently after them, eyes lowered to the ground.

  They paused in the entrance, the men searching the street. The girl heard the clatter of coins from the pay-machine, and turned to smile at me, as if pleased that I had won a jackpot. She was dressed in a French schoolgirl’s blue skirt and white blouse, dark hair bunched behind her head. With her rouged cheeks, silver lipcoat and mascara she might have been any girl after an hour at her mother’s dressing table. But there was nothing childlike about her gaze, and I knew that she was not on her way to the police station. She took in the passing traffic and the lights of the railway station, and then nodded to the men that she was ready to move on.

  Forgetting the Jaguar, I walked down the ramp and followed the trio as they set off for the underpass. The Paris express was leaving the station, passengers standing at the windows of the couchettes, their cars stacked on the transporter wagons at the rear of the train. I entered the tunnel as the wheels bit into the steel rails over my head, a noise like pain through which the silver-lipped child walked and skipped.

  In the nexus of narrow streets beyond the Boulevard d’Alsace congregated another constituency of the night: Maltese whores and their pimps, transvestites from Recife and Niteroi, runners for the dealers waiting in their cars off the Avenue St-Nicolas, smartly dressed matrons who seemed never to find a client but returned evening after evening, teenage boys waiting for the limousines that would ferry them to the villas of Super-Cannes, the mansions of light that rose above the night.

  After dinner in the Vieux Port, Jane and I would sometimes detour through these shabby streets, amazed by the cool professionalism of the working children and the indifference of the local vice squad who made no attempt to rescue them. Thinking of the refuge at La Bocca, I remembered the zebra-striped dress and fishnet tights, and the Alice library that David Greenwood had so touchingly collected. Here in the Rue Valentin the Red Queen was a brothel-keeper and the only looking-glasses were the smudged mirrors in the whores’ compacts.

  A blond transvestite with the body of a rugby forward stepped into a streetlight, huge feet in a pair of stiletto boots, thighs exposed by minuscule satin shorts. His eyes swept the street, and followed a cruising car driven by a middle-aged man with the face of a depressed bank manager. The car paused and a door opened, and the transvestite dived into the passenger seat, filling the car like a gaudy circus horse.

  A party of Volvo dealers, one with his conference name-tag on his breast pocket, watched the Arab factory workers bargain-hunting among the bored whores. I followed the minders and their schoolgirl to the end of the Rue Valentin, where three unmarked vans were parked in a side street. A door slid back and a driver stepped onto the cobbled road. He spoke to the minders and then beckoned to the girl, who dutifully climbed into the passenger seat.

  From the darkness around me mobile phones bleeped against the static of two-way radios. I glanced into the second van, where a fair-haired youth in a tracksuit sat behind the wheel. He steered his cigarette smoke away from his passenger, a girl of twelve who wore a Marie-Antoinette gown and silk shoes. She stared through the smeary windscreen, fingers playing aimlessly with a tasselled umbrella.

  The schoolgirl I had followed from the garage was listening to the dashboard radio. Her chin bobbed to the disco rhythm, and she seemed cheerful and confident, adjusting the driver’s mirror to check her lipstick, a vision of a child-woman as confusing as the doctor’s daughter with whom I had first made love so many decades ago. That fumbling sex, the miracle of an attic mattress and a sharp-kneed thirteen-year-old biting my shoulder, had been beyond anything my boyish mind could imagine, promises of wonder that only returned when I saw Jane slumming around my hospital bed.

  I opened my wallet and took out the photo-booth picture I had found in the Russian’s shoe after our struggle beside the swimming pool. Even in the garish light of the Rue Valentin I could see the resemblance between the smudged image of a demure and placid child, photographed in a Moscow flat, and the mature schoolgirl rebunching her hair, raised arms pressing her small nipples against her cotton blouse.

  ‘Natasha …’

  I put away the photograph, trying to decide if she would still be here when I brought the Jaguar from the garage. With luck I could pay off her bodyguards, give them the slip and deliver the child to Sister Émilie at La Bocca.

  A black estate car turned off the Rue Valentin and stopped behind the vans. A well-groomed woman in her forties, dressed like a hostess working for a private airline, stepped from behind the wheel. She walked to the nearest van and spoke to the blond driver. He helped Marie-Antoinette from her seat, lifting her by the waist of her embroidered dress, and carried her umbrella as she ran in her silk shoes to the estate car. They left together, the child in the rear seat behind the woman driver, the van following with its headlights dimmed.

  ‘Monsieur…? Ça va …?’

  One of the leather-clad minders strolled towards me, as if ready to discuss the next day’s football matches. He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands over a brass lighter and revealing a high Polish forehead.

  The schoolgirl noticed me, her head nodding at the music. There was a brief smile as she remembered my jackpot win at the garage pay-station. Then she launched into a sales demonstration of herself, raising her chin and r
ocking her shoulders. Her eyes watched my hands, waiting for me to open my wallet.

  I gestured towards the minder. ‘Okay? You wait here with her. I’ll bring my car.’

  ‘Sept mille francs.’

  ‘Sept mille? That’s steep. She must be very young.’

  ‘Seven thousand francs…’ The minder was about twenty years old, with the same pointed nose and chin, and it struck me that he might be the girl’s brother.

  ‘It’s a deal.’ I opened my wallet. ‘Natasha?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Natasha, Nina, Ninotchka, it’s still seven thousand francs. No Mastercard, no platinum Amex.’

  I took all the banknotes from my wallet. Once the girl was in the Jaguar I knew that I could outrun the rusting van. I offered him the loose wad of francs. ‘Three thousand now, the rest later.’

  ‘Later? When you come back from heaven?’ The Pole turned away, dismissing me to the darkness. ‘Later …’

  ‘Wait!’ I took the ampoule of pethidine from my pocket and handed it to him. ‘Take a close look – you’ll find it interesting …’

  He squinted at the label in the darkness, tapped on the windscreen of the van and pointed to the headlamps. Still bobbing to the music, the girl switched on the sidelights. The Pole read the label, and shouted to two men standing in an alleyway next to the shuttered warehouse of a building merchant.

  They stepped from the alley, leather coats greasy in the yellow glare of the sodium lights. The slimmer of the two drew a cigarette from a gold case.

  ‘Greenwood?’

  ‘Da. Eden-Olympia Polyclinic.’

  Cheap teeth gleamed like marked dice. I recognized the Russian who had grappled with me on the lawn. Holding the ampoule in his open palm, he walked towards me with almost soundless steps. I noticed that he wore another pair of expensive shoes from the Rue d’Antibes. Seeing me, he stepped back, aware that my eyes were on his feet.