Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  He broke off as the drone of a publicity plane rose from the valley below. He snatched at the air, trying to seize the miniature aircraft, no larger than a gnat against his outstretched hand.

  ‘Those planes. Paul, don’t you find them annoying? Like all the graffiti at Eden-Olympia – a fifty-million-dollar office building and a few francs’ worth of paint turn it into something from the Third World.’

  ‘When Eden II opens you’ll have larger problems on your mind.’

  ‘You’re right, Paul. It’s an enormous challenge. Still, we have to press on. The therapy classes unsettle you, but they’ve proved their worth.’

  ‘For the moment. Too many people know that something nasty happens after dark at Eden-Olympia. Sooner or later, the authorities will act.’

  ‘Of course they will. It’s a gamble we had to take.’ Penrose took my arm, moving me closer to the observation rail. He had perspired heavily during the aerial protest at Eden II, and the wind lifted a stale scent of unease and frustration from his damp shirt. ‘I don’t want you to worry, Paul. Forget about going back to London. I need you here – you’re one of the few people I can trust. You’ve seen the truth of what we’re doing, and that’s why you’ve never betrayed the therapy programme.’

  ‘I’m an observer. Frances tells me I’m too dull and normal for Eden-Olympia.’

  ‘Normal? Careers have foundered trying to define what that means. Be careful, we’ve moved into a world where it’s dangerous to be normal. Extreme problems call for extreme solutions. As it happens, the therapy programmes aren’t needed now. We’re scaling them back.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Penrose’s offhand tone surprised me. ‘Why? Are they getting out of control?’

  ‘No, but Eden II changes everything. What worked so well for a small group of elite professionals can’t be applied to a huge population. Eden II will employ 20,000 people. I don’t want to start a race war – or not yet. That Green pilot was a warning. Besides, we have to look ahead. A titanic battle is about to begin, a Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies. Everything is for sale now – even the human soul has a barcode. We’re driven by bizarre consumer trends, weird surges in the entertainment culture, mass paranoias about new diseases that are really religious eruptions. How to get a grip on all this? We may need to play on deep-rooted masochistic needs built into the human sense of hierarchy. Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union were Sadeian societies of torturers and willing victims. People no longer need enemies – in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free …’

  He drove cautiously down the hillside towards Grasse, allowing other cars to overtake us, waving them on with a large hand. He seemed tired but at peace. I realized that he had conducted a private experiment, taking himself up to a high place and offering himself the kingdoms of the new earth. He had accepted the offer, and was already working out his strategy for dealing with the huge possibilities that Eden II brought with it.

  When we reached Eden-Olympia he scarcely noticed the fresh graffiti aerosolled across the glass doors of the administration building.

  He dropped me at the house, gripping my arm as I stepped from the car.

  ‘I’m glad you came, Paul. You’ve helped me a great deal.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘There’s a small thing you can do. I’m worried about Frances. Some of my medical records have gone missing.’

  ‘The videotapes?’

  ‘Exactly. They’re highly confidential; we wouldn’t want them in the wrong hands. Do tell Frances that the therapy programmes are coming to an end.’

  ‘She’ll be glad to hear it.’

  ‘Good. When are you next seeing her?’

  ‘Tonight. I’m picking her up at Marina Baie des Anges. She’ll be impressed.’

  ‘Invite her out to dinner. Explain that it may take a little time. She’s obsessed with David Greenwood, and nothing else matters to her. That’s dangerous for us.’

  ‘It makes sense. She loved the man.’

  ‘So did I.’ Penrose’s smile slipped from his face. He stared at his hands, then pulled back his sleeves and exposed the scars on his forearms. ‘It’s true, Paul. I owe him my life.’

  ‘You were on the target list, along with Berthoud. If he’d seen you he would have killed you.’

  ‘He did see me. I never told you.’ Penrose nodded to himself. ‘He shot Berthoud through the glass door, stepped forward and saw me bleeding on the floor in the corridor. I can still remember his eyes. He wasn’t in the least mad, you know.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he kill you? He certainly planned to. You were the architect of everything he hated.’

  ‘I know.’ Penrose gripped the steering wheel, listening to the throaty quaver of the sports car’s engine. ‘I’ve thought about it ever since. He wanted me to face what I’d done. For a few moments he was completely sane …’

  39

  A New Folklore

  KURT WEILL’S ‘SURABAYA JOHNNY’ boomed from the CD player propped against the pillows. Jane swayed around the bedroom, a lurid figure in a spangled crimson minidress and stiletto heels. A frizz of lacquered black hair rose in a retro-punk blaze from her forehead, above kohled eyes and a lipsticked mouth like a wound.

  I sat among the debris of discarded underwear, admiring Jane’s stamina and panache. Overwork and pethidine had coarsened her face, and she seemed a decade older than the young woman who had driven me down to Cannes.

  ‘Jane, I love the costume. You look wonderfully … I’d say decadent, if that wasn’t so passé.’

  ‘Tarty.’ She cocked a hip and pointed a carmined fingernail at my eyes. ‘Miss Weimar, 1927.’

  ‘The Delages will love it. You’re going out with them?’

  ‘On the town.’ She began to bump and grind, and tripped over a pair of thigh-length boots. ‘Hell, too many feet in this room. Where’s my gin?’

  ‘By the phone.’ A full tumbler stood on the bedside table. ‘Save it for later.’

  ‘I’m the doctor here.’ She swayed and smiled, as if recognizing me across a noisy room. ‘Stop worrying, Paul. The human body’s capacity for painkillers is almost unlimited.’

  ‘How much pain are you in?’

  ‘None. Wonderful, isn’t it? Dr Jane is in control.’

  ‘I hope Dr Jane isn’t driving. Where are the Delages taking you?’

  ‘Dinner at … somewhere terribly smart. They’ll pretend I’m a poule they picked up in the street. Then an open-air costume party.’

  ‘And you’re going as …?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  She vamped around me, sitting on my lap and moving away before I could embrace her, a dizzying slide of silk and flesh. ‘How was the ground-breaking ceremony?’

  ‘Impressive. All the top brass were there. A plane pulling a Green banner dropped a small bomb on us.’

  ‘How funny. And how sad. Nothing can stop Eden-Olympia. Wilder must have been thrilled.’

  ‘A bit subdued. The Wild West phase is over. Life will be a lot quieter here. Any chance of you taking a long break?’

  ‘Paul …’ Jane glanced at me through the mirror, sympathetic but distant, like a mother watching a handicapped child. ‘Go back to London? For what? Some health centre in Clapham?’

  ‘Why put it like that? We’d be together again.’

  ‘They need me here. The project is expanding.’

  ‘Good. But they need you for other things.’

  ‘Such as?’ Jane switched off the CD player. ‘Selling stolen pharmaceuticals? Doing female circumcisions for rich Sudanese?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that. They’re more subtle.’

  ‘Paul … where drugs and sex are concerned, no one is that subtle.’ She walked over to me and placed her hands on my cheeks. ‘You’ve spent too long here. Take Frances to London with you. Now it’s my turn to fly …’

  I watched her hunt through a drawer and pick out her most garish
handbag. She embraced me fiercely before she left. When I winced, uneasy with this bogus affection, she looked at me with sudden concern.

  ‘Paul? Is your knee acting up? Start taking your shots again. You were happier then.’

  ‘That was the problem.’

  ‘Are you seeing Frances tonight?’

  ‘We’re having dinner at Tétou. There’s some good news to celebrate.’

  ‘Give her my love. And use my car. Sorry about the Jag. All this graffiti everywhere. Alain thinks the wrong people are getting into Eden-Olympia.’

  Later, as I drove the Peugeot along the RN7 to Villeneuve-Loubet, I listened to the echoes of Lotte Lenya inside my head and remembered Jane’s advice. With or without Frances Baring, I would soon be back in London. As Eden II spread its parks and artificial lakes across the Var plain a more workaday future would arrive. The winding-down of Penrose’s therapeutic programme marked a defeat for him and the triumph of the contingent world, the inescapable reality of corridor rivalries and executive washrooms, the relativities of status and success. After a long day at Eden II, the notion of psychopathy would seem almost folkloric in its quaintness.

  40

  The Bedroom Camera

  ‘FRANCES, THERE’S GOOD news …’

  Using the spare key, I let myself into her apartment at Marina Baie des Anges. The standard lamp in the hall shone onto a clutch of financial journals, but the other rooms were in darkness. Her car keys lay in the silver tray on the hall stand. I opened the door into the kitchen, and caught an odd odour in the air, a medley of cheap aftershaves that were almost familiar.

  ‘Frances …? I’ve booked Tétou.’

  Was she in bed with another man, perhaps the pilot of the Green protest plane? An image formed in my mind of her lying naked beside her lover, both frozen with embarrassment, the man reaching for his shoes beneath the bed and coming up with one of my lost sandals …

  I eased open the bedroom door. Frances lay asleep across the pillows, an arm stretched out like a child’s. In the light of the nearby balconies I could see her white teeth, lips drawn in a sleeping smile. The shower ran in the bathroom, a soft patter like distant rain.

  Careful not to wake her, I stepped across the darkened room. I sat on the bed beside her, trying to stop the mattress from sighing under my weight. My hand touched the linen sheet, then flinched from a patch of wetness. The sodden fabric of the under-blanket was still warm, as if soaked with a sticky soup.

  ‘Frances …?’

  Her eyes were open, but the pupils were unfocused. The beam of the La Garoupe lighthouse swept the marina, and I stared down at Frances’s bruised face, at her open mouth with its broken teeth and the blood on her forehead. The beam touched her eyes, animating them for the last time, like a passing headlight shone through the windows of an empty building.

  ‘Jesus … God …’ I fumbled with the switch of the bedside lamp and flicked it on, only to find that the bulb was missing. I left the bed and stepped to the door, searching the shadows for the wall switch.

  A hand gripped my wrist, forcing my fingers against the wall. A slim but athletic man in an Eden-Olympia uniform stepped from the hall and pinned me against the fitted wardrobe. I wrenched myself from him, and raised a fist to strike his face, but he clamped his hand over my mouth, trying to calm me.

  ‘Mr Sinclair … take it easy. I’m with you.’

  ‘Halder?’ As the lighthouse beam crossed the room I recognized the security guard. I reached again for the switch but Halder knocked away my arm.

  ‘Leave it, Mr Sinclair. They’re watching the apartment – once the lights go on they’ll be up here in seconds.’

  ‘Who? Halder …?’

  ‘The people waiting for you. They knew you were coming.’

  ‘Frances …’ I stepped towards the bed and stared down at her disjointed arms. Blood covered her breasts in a bodice of black lace. I held her wrist, feeling the loose tendons almost torn from the bones in her struggle, and searched for a pulse.

  ‘Frances, please … Halder, she’s still breathing. Call an ambulance. There’s a chance …’

  Halder steadied me in his strong hands. ‘She’s dead, Mr Sinclair. She died half an hour ago.’

  ‘Wait. How did she die?’ I let her hand fall onto the bloodstained pillow, pulled back the sheet and stared at her broken body. Around her waist was the zebra-striped dress. A man’s crumpled dinner jacket lay between her legs, silk facings torn from its lapels by a pair of frantic hands.

  ‘It’s Greenwood’s. Halder, someone wore it while they killed her …’

  I stepped back, and almost knocked over a metal tripod standing by the bedside table. My foot crushed a piece of brittle plastic.

  ‘A video? Good God, what were they doing here?’

  ‘Making a film.’ Halder took a lightbulb from his pocket and placed it on the table. ‘A film of a very ugly kind.’

  ‘The dress from La Bocca?’

  ‘A costume. I don’t think she wanted to wear it. She put up a real fight. Now, let’s go. If they find you here they’ll kill you as well. Then say you murdered her.’

  ‘Hold on. Were you here when they …?’

  ‘No. I arrived ten minutes ago. The front door was off the latch. They didn’t know you had a spare set of keys. I’m sorry, Mr Sinclair. She was dead when I found her.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘The … lover … used a knife. It’s in the shower, having the prints washed away. They’ll say you made your snuff movie and were washing the knife when they broke in.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘People working for Eden Olympia – under Alain Delage’s orders.’

  ‘And if we leave now?’

  ‘They’ll call it a burglary that went wrong. They can deal with you another time.’

  I picked up the dinner jacket and laid it across the dead woman’s shoulders, David Greenwood’s final embrace. Halder waited as I stared at Frances for the last time, brushing away the clumps of blonde hair from her scalp that covered the pillow. When the La Garoupe beam turned between the apartment buildings her bruised face seemed to switch itself on and off. The quirky lips had flattened themselves against her teeth, and her features were those of a child of ten. As she grew cold she became younger, slipping away from herself and withdrawing into a greater darkness, carrying in her broken hands the only memories she would take with her into the night.

  The doors of the elevator closed, and Halder turned towards me, staring at the blood on my hands as if trying to convince himself that I had taken no part in Frances’s death. His slim face was as narrow as an axehead, and his eyes were aroused, roving above his flared nostrils. I was still dazed by the spectacle of the dead woman and the camera tripod beside the bed, and pushed Halder away when he tried to wipe the blood from my chin.

  The doors opened at the ground floor, where a dozen residents waited to board the lift. They moved forward, then stopped when they saw me surrounded by a gallery of blood-stained figures multiplied by the mirrors. A woman with a small child shrieked at me, a reflex of panic, and a security man in the lobby strode towards us.

  Halder pumped the buttons, and held the doors together when the guard drummed on the echoing metal. ‘Mr Sinclair … we have to clean you up. You’ll never get out of here.’

  He pressed the emergency button, waited for the doors to open and seized my arm. We emerged onto the floor above the mezzanine. We crossed the landing to a service door, closed it behind us and made our way down a metal staircase used by the maintenance staff. Beyond a freight lift were the swing doors at the rear of a restaurant.

  We stepped into the clatter of the kitchen, momentarily blinded by the haze of fat and steam. Everyone was shouting at once as scullions hauled racks of plates and cutlery. In the butchery a sous-chef bent over a work table, picking his fillet steaks as the carver in a bloodied apron sliced at the leaking red muscle.

  A side of lamb hung from the wall, and Halder seized my hands
and pressed them to the marbled flesh.

  ‘Halder …?’

  ‘Move it around, feel the flesh … there’s a security man nosing about.’

  Halder walked away from me, sidestepping a line of metal trolleys. Exhausted, I rested against the waxy meat when the security guard emerged from the pantry doors and scanned the crowded work space. His gaze touched me briefly as I pretended to wrestle with the carcass, my bloodied hands gripping the foreknuckles. He spoke to Halder, who pointed to the rear staircase and the freight lift.

  A few minutes later, in the staff washroom behind the cold store, Halder watched from the door while I cleaned the blood from my arms and face. Reluctantly I washed away the last traces of Frances that clung to my skin. The swirling water in the deep stone sink carried the dark grains of her blood into the rushing vortex.

  Halder turned off the taps and stuffed paper towels into my hands. He was tense but poised, like a gymnast powdering his palms as he prepared to seize the parallel bars.

  ‘That’s enough.’ He pushed me from the sink as the last blood rilled away. ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘On the slip road near the garage exit. Jane’s small Peugeot – someone trashed the Jag.’

  ‘I did. It was too easy to follow.’ He kicked back the door and propelled me towards the freight lift. ‘They would have used it as part of the frame. I’m parked in the basement – we’ll go down and wait there. The guard who saw you in the lobby must have called the police.’

  ‘Halder, I need to find Jane.’

  ‘I know.’ Halder stared at me while the huge lift, almost as large as an aircraft carrier’s, sank towards the basement. ‘It’s taken you a long time, Mr Sinclair …’

  We sat in the front seat of the Range Rover, watching the cars leave and enter the garage. I could smell the detergent on my hands, and tried to remember the scent of the young woman who lay dead in her bedroom, far above me in the curving night.

  ‘Mr Sinclair?’ Halder steadied me when I swayed against the door. ‘Hold on for a few minutes. We’ll get you out of here.’