Vermilion Sands

by James Graham Ballard

  For the first time she looked directly into my face, her eyes alert and adult above the white adolescent mask. ‘I live nearby’, she said, ‘in one of the houses along the lake. There was music playing and people dancing.’

  As the chauffeur opened the door of the car for her I saw that the seats were filled with playtoys and sonic jewels. They drove off together like two adults playing at being children.

  Two days later I heard music coming again from the abandoned nightclub. As I sat on the veranda in the evening this faint night-music began, the dry metallic sounds muffled by the powdery air. I walked along the shore through the darkness. The beachcombers had gone, but Raine Channing wandered through the tables of the nightclub, her white gown drawing empty signatures in the sand.

  A sand-yacht was beached in the shallows. Beside it a bare-chested young man watched with hands on hips. His powerful thighs stood out under his white shorts in the darkness, the thermal surf breaking the dust into ripples around his feet. With his broad face and smashed Michelangelesque nose he resembled some dark beach-angel. He waited as I approached, then stepped forward and walked past me, almost brushing my shoulder. The oil on his back reflected the distant lights of Vermilion Sands as he moved among the dunes towards the nightclub.

  After this rendezvous I assumed that we would see no more of Raine Channing, but the next morning when I arrived at the shop in Vermilion Sands I found Georges waiting nervously by the door.

  ‘Mr Samson, I tried to telephone you – Miss Channing’s secretary has been calling, everything she bought has gone berserk! Nothing fits, three of the gowns are growing out of weave –

  I managed to calm him down, then spoke to Raine’s secretary, a tart-toned Frenchwoman who sharply informed me that the entire wardrobe of two evening gowns, a cocktail dress and three day-suits which Raine had purchased from ‘Topless in Gaza’ had run to seed. Why this should have happened she had no idea. ‘However, Mr Samson, I suggest you drive out immediately to Miss Channing’s residence and either replace each item or reimburse the total purchase price of six thousand dollars. The alternative –’

  ‘Mlle Fournier,’ I insisted stiffly with what little pride I could muster, ‘there is no alternative.’

  Before I left, Georges brought out with elaborate care a cyclamen sports-suit in a shantung bio-fabric which he had ordered for one of our millionaire customers.

  ‘For my good name, Mr Samson, if not for yours – at moments such as these one should show the flag.’

  The suit clung to me like a willowy, lace-covered cobra, shaping itself to my chest and legs. Its colours glowed and rippled as it explored the contours of my body. As I walked out to my car people turned to look at this exquisite gliding snakeskin.

  Five minutes after our arrival at Raine Channing’s villa it had quietened down considerably, hanging from my shoulders like a wounded flower. The atmosphere at the villa seemed set for disaster. The young chauffeur who took my car whipped it away with a snarl of tyres, his eyes moving across my face like razors. Mlle Fournier greeted me with a peremptory nod. A sharp-faced Frenchwoman of about forty, she wore a witch-like black dress that seethed around her angular shoulders with the movements of a shrike.

  ‘An entire wardrobe ruined, Mr Samson! Not only your own gowns, but priceless originals from Paris this season. We are out of our minds here!’

  I did my best to calm her. One danger with bio-fabrics is that they are prone to stampede. Moments of domestic crisis, a cry of anger or even a door’s slam, can set off a paroxysm of self-destruction. My own suit was already wilting under Mlle Fournier’s baleful eye. As we went up the staircase I smoothed the ruffled velvet of the curtains, settling them into their niches. ‘Perhaps they’re not being worn enough,’ I temporized. ‘These fabrics do need human contact.’

  Mlle Fournier gave me a surprisingly arch glance. We entered a suite on the top floor. Beyond the shaded windows was a terrace, the painted surface of the sand-lake below it. Mlle Fournier gestured at the open wardrobes in the large dressing-room. ‘Human contact? Precisely, Mr Samson.’

  Everywhere there was uproar. Gowns were strewn across the facing sofas. Several had lost all colour and lay blanched and inert. Others had felted, their edges curled and blackened like dead banana skins. Two evening dresses draped over the escritoire had run rogue, their threads interlocking in a macabre embrace. In the wardrobes the racks of gowns hung in restive files, colours pulsing like demented suns.

  As we watched I sensed that they were uneasily settling themselves after some emotional outburst earlier that morning. ‘Someone’s been whipping them into a frenzy,’ I told Mlle Fournier. ‘Doesn’t Miss Channing realize one can’t play the temperamental fool near these fabrics?’

  She gripped my arm, a barbed finger raised to my lips. ‘Mr Samson! We all have our difficulties. Just do what you can. Your fee will be paid immediately.’

  When she had gone I moved along the racks and laid out the more damaged dresses. The others I spaced out, soothing the disturbed fabrics until they relaxed and annealed themselves.

  I was hunting through the wardrobes in the bedroom next door when I made a curious discovery. Packed behind the sliding doors was an immense array of costumes, faded models of the previous seasons which had been left to die on their hangers. A few were still barely alive. They hung inertly on their racks, responding with a feeble glimmer to the light.

  What surprised me was their condition. All of them had been deformed into strange shapes, their colours bled like wounds across the fabric, reflecting the same traumatic past, some violent series of events they had witnessed between Raine Channing and whoever had lived with her in the years past. I remembered the clothes I had seen on a woman killed in a car crash at Vermilion Sands, blooming out of the wreckage like a monstrous flower of hell, and the demented wardrobe offered to me by the family of an heiress who had committed suicide. Memories such as these outlived their wearers. There was the apocryphal story of the murderer absconding in a stolen overcoat who had been strangled by the garment as it recapitulated the death-throes of its owner.

  Leaving these uneasy relics to their dark end, I went back to the dressing-room. As I eased the last of the disturbed gowns on to their hangers the terrace door opened behind me.

  Raine Channing stepped out of the sun. In place of her clinging white fur she now wore a bio-fabric bikini. The two yellow cups nestled her full breasts like sleeping hands. Despite the clear evidence of some fierce row that morning, she seemed composed and relaxed. As she stared at the now placid tenants of her wardrobe, her white face, like a devious adolescent’s, more than ever resembled a surgical mask, the powdered child-face of a Manchu empress.

  ‘Mr Samson! They’re quiet now! You’re like …’

  ‘St Francis calming the birds?’ I suggested, still annoyed at having been summoned to Lagoon West. I gestured towards the sealed wardrobes in her bedroom. ‘Forgive me saying so, but there are unhappy memories here.’

  She picked up my jacket and draped it over her naked shoulders, a gesture of false modesty that none the less held a certain charm. The fabric clung to her like a pink flower, caressing her breasts and arms.

  ‘The past is something of a disaster area, I’m afraid, Mr Samson. I know I brought you out here under false pretences. Something went wrong this morning, and you are the only neighbour I have.’ She walked to the window and gazed over the painted lake. ‘I came back to Vermilion Sands for reasons that must seem crazy.’

  I watched her warily, but something about her apparent frankness destroyed caution. Presumably the midnight lover of the sand-yacht had left the scene, no doubt in a holocaust of emotions.

  We went on to the terrace and sat in the reclining chairs beside the bar. During the next hours, and the many that followed in that house without mirrors above the painted lake, she told me something of her years with Gavin Kaiser, and how this young genius from the fashion world had found her singing at the open-air nightclub at Lagoon Wes
t. Seeing in this beautiful fifteen-year-old the apotheosis of the teenage cult, Kaiser had made her his star model for the bio-fabric fashions he designed. Four years later, at the age of nineteen, she had her first face lift, followed by even more extensive plastic surgery in the years immediately after. When Kaiser died she came back to Lagoon West, to the house near the deserted nightclub.

  ‘I left so many pieces of myself behind in all those clinics and hospitals. I thought perhaps I could find them here.’

  ‘How did Kaiser die?’ I asked.

  ‘From a heart attack – they said. It was some sort of terrible convulsion, as if he’d been bitten by a hundred rabid dogs. He was trying to tear his face to pieces.’ She raised her hands to her own white mask.

  ‘Wasn’t there some doubt …?’ I hesitated.

  She held my arm. ‘Gavin was mad! He wanted nothing to change between us. Those face-lifts – he kept me at fifteen, but not because of the fashion-modelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.’

  At the time, however, I hardly cared why Raine Channing had come back to Lagoon West. Every afternoon I would drive out to her villa and we would lie together under the awning by the bar, watching the changing colours of the painted lake. There, in that house without mirrors, she would tell me her strange dreams, which all reflected her fears of growing young. In the evenings, as the music began to play from the deserted nightclub, we would walk across the dunes and dance among the sand-strewn tables.

  Who brought this record-player to the nightclub with its one unlabelled disc? Once, as we walked back, I again saw the young man with the powerful shoulders and broken nose standing by his sand-yacht in the darkness. He watched us as we walked arm in arm, Raine’s head against my chest. As she listened to the music jewel in her hand, Raine’s eyes stared back like a child’s at his handsome face.

  Often I would see him at noon, sailing his sand-yacht across the lake a few hundred yards from the shore. I assumed that he was one of Raine’s past lovers, watching his successor with a sympathetic curiosity and playing his music for us out of a bizarre sense of humour.

  Yet when I pointed him out to Raine one afternoon she denied that she knew him or had even seen him before. Sitting up on one elbow, she watched the sand-yacht beached three hundred yards away along the shore. The young man was walking along the tideline, searching for something among the broken hypodermic vials.

  ‘I can tell him to go away, Raine.’ When she shook her head, I said: ‘He was here. What happened between you?’

  She turned on me sharply. ‘Why do you say that?’

  I let it pass. Her eyes followed him everywhere.

  Two weeks later I saw him again at closer quarters. Shortly after midnight I woke on the terrace of Raine’s villa and heard the familiar music coming from the deserted nightclub. Below, in the dim light, Raine Channing walked towards the dunes. Along the beach the thermal rollers whipped the white sand into fine waves.

  The villa was silent. Mlle Fournier had gone to Red Beach for a few days, and the young chauffeur was asleep in his apartment over the garages. I opened the gates at the end of the dark, rhododendron-filled drive and walked towards the nightclub. The music whined around me over the dead sand.

  The nightclub was empty, the record playing to itself on the deserted stage. I wandered through the tables, searching for any sign of Raine. For a few minutes I waited by the bar. Then, as I leaned over the counter, the slim-faced figure of the chauffeur stood up and lunged at me, his right fist aimed at my forehead.

  Sidestepping into his arm, I caught his hand and rammed it on to the counter. In the darkness his small face was twisted in a rictus of anger. He wrenched his arm from me, looking away across the dunes to the lake. The music whined on, the record starting again.

  I found them by the beach, Raine with her hand on the young man’s hip as he bent down to cast off the yacht. Uncertain what to do, and confused by his off-hand manner as he moved around Raine, I stood among the dunes at the top of the beach.

  Feet moved through the sand. I was staring down at Raine’s face, its white masks multiplying themselves in the moonlight, when someone stepped behind me and struck me above the ear.

  I woke on Raine’s bed in the deserted villa, the white moonlight like a waiting shroud across the terrace. Around me the shadows of demented shapes seethed along the walls, the deformed inmates of some nightmare aviary. In the silence of the villa I listened to them tearing themselves to pieces like condemned creatures tormenting themselves on their gibbets.

  I climbed from the bed and faced my reflection in the open window. I was wearing a suite of gold lamé which shone in the moonlight like the armour of some archangelic spectre. Holding my bruised scalp, I walked on to the terrace. The gold suit adhered itself to my body, its lapels caressing my chest.

  In the drive Raine Channing’s limousine waited among the rhododendrons. At the wheel the slim-faced chauffeur looked up at me with bored eyes.

  ‘Raine!’ In the rear seat of the car there was a movement of white-clad thigh, a man’s bare-backed figure crouching among the cushions. Angered by having to watch the spectacle below in this preposterous suit, I started to tear it from my shoulders. Before I could shout again something seized my calves and thighs. I tried to step forward, but my body was clamped in a golden vice. I looked down at the sleeves. The fabric glowed with a fierce luminescence as it contracted around me, its fibres knotting themselves like a thousand zips.

  Already breathing in uncertain spasms, I tried to turn, unable to raise my hands to the lapels that gripped my neck. As I toppled forwards on to the rail the headlamps of the car illuminated the drive.

  I lay on my back in the gutter, arms clamped behind me. The golden suit glowed in the darkness, its burning light reflected in the thousand glass panes of the house. Somewhere below me the car turned through the gates and roared off into the night.

  A few minutes later, as I came back to consciousness, I felt hands pulling at my chest. I was lifted against the balcony and sat there limply, my bruised ribs moving freely again. The bare-chested young man knelt in front of me, silver blade in hand, cutting away the last golden strips from my legs. The fading remnants of the suit burned like embers on the dark tiles.

  He pushed back my forehead and peered into my face, then snapped the blade of his knife. ‘You looked like a dying angel, Samson.’

  ‘For God’s sake …’ I leaned against the rail. A network of weals covered my naked body. ‘The damn thing was crushing me … Who are you?’

  ‘Jason – Jason Kaiser. You’ve seen me. My brother died in that suit, Samson.’

  His strong face watched me, the broken nose and broad mouth making a half-formed likeness.

  ‘Kaiser? Do you mean your brother –’ I pointed to the lamé rags on the floor. ‘– that he was strangled?’

  ‘In a suit of lights. What he saw, God knows, but it killed him. Perhaps now you can make a guess, Samson. Justice in a way, the tailor killed by his own cloth.’ He kicked the glowing shreds into the gutter and looked up at the deserted house. ‘I was sure she’d come back here. I hoped she’d pick one of the beachcombers but you turned up instead. Sooner or later I knew she’d want to get rid of you.’

  He pointed to the bedroom windows. ‘The suit was in there somewhere, waiting to live through that attack again. You know, I sat beside her in the car down there while she was making up her mind to use it. Samson, she turns her lovers into angels.’

  ‘Wait – didn’t she recognize you?’

  He shook his head. ‘She’d never seen me – I couldn’t stand my brother, Samson. Let’s say, though, there are certain ciphers in the face, resemblances one can make use of. That record was all I needed, the old theme tune of the nightclub. I found it in the bar.’

  Despite my bruised ribs and torn skin I was still thinking of Raine, and that strange child’s face she wore like a mask. She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeate
d themselves, trapping her into this grim recapitulation of Kaiser’s death.

  Jason walked towards the bedroom as I stood there naked. ‘Where are you going?’ I called out. ‘Everything is dead in there.’

  ‘I know. We had quite a job fitting you into that suit, Samson. They knew what was coming.’ He pointed to the headlamps speeding along the lake road five miles to the south. ‘Say goodbye to Miss Channing.’

  I watched the car disappear among the hills. By the abandoned nightclub the dark air drew its empty signatures across the dunes. ‘Say goodbye to the wind.’

  Studio 5, The Stars

  Every evening during the summer at Vermilion Sands the insane poems of my beautiful neighbour drifted across the desert to me from Studio 5, The Stars, the broken skeins of coloured tape unravelling in the sand like the threads of a dismembered web. All night they would flutter around the buttresses below the terrace, entwining themselves through the balcony railings, and by morning, before I swept them away, they would hang across the south face of the villa like a vivid cerise bougainvillaea.

  Once, after I had been to Red Beach for three days, I returned to find the entire terrace filled by an enormous cloud of coloured tissues, which burst through the french windows as I opened them and pushed into the lounge, spreading across the furniture and bookcases like the delicate tendrils of some vast and gentle plant. For days afterwards I found fragments of the poems everywhere.

  I complained several times, walking the three hundred yards across the dunes to deliver a letter of protest, but no one ever answered the bell. I had only once seen my neighbour, on the day she arrived, driving down the Stars in a huge El Dorado convertible, her long hair swept behind her like the head-dress of a goddess. She had vanished in a glimmer of speed, leaving me with a fleeting image of sudden eyes in an ice-white face.

  Why she refused to answer her bell I could never understand, but I noticed that each time I walked across to Studio 5 the sky was full of sand-rays, wheeling and screeching like anguished bats. On the last occasion, as I stood by her black glass front door, deliberately pressing the bell into its socket, a giant sand-ray had fallen out of the sky at my feet.