Cocaine Nights

by J. G. Ballard

'My kung fu is pretty rusty.'

  'Not kung fu. I'd like you to start a film club.'

  'Nothing easier. There's a video-rental store in the shopping mall with a good classics selection. I'll order a hundred copies of The Battleship Potemkin.'

  Crawford closed his eyes to the thought. 'That's not the kind of club I have in mind. People have to learn to switch off their TV sets. I want a club where people make their own films, learn how to storyboard a narrative, how to handle close-ups, dollies, pans and tracking shots. Film is the way we see our world, Charles. There are two retired cameramen living here who worked on British features for years. There's also a husband and wife documentary team – they can teach film classes. I want you to be the producer, keep an overview of everything, steer funding to the right places. Betty Shand is keen to support the arts. So much is happening, and it needs to be recorded.'

  I watched him expand on this luminous project, genuinely unaware that an accurate documentary about the Residencia Costasol would be the single greatest testimony against him at his trial, and send him to Zarzuella jail for the next thirty yean. I thought of the porno-film he had helped to make at his apartment, and guessed that he had something similar in mind, part of that web of corruption he was spinning across the people of the complex.

  'I understand… vaguely. What's the subject of these films?'

  'Life in the Residencia. What else? There's a kind of amnesia at work here-an amnesia of self. People literally forget who they are. The camera lens needs to be their memory.'

  'Well…' I was still doubtful, reluctant to find myself running a pornographic film company. But I needed to enter the innermost circle of the criminal syndicate controlled by Elizabeth Shand, Crawford and David Hennessy if I were to find the arsonist responsible for the Hollinger fire. 'I'll give it a go. There must be a few professional film actors living here. I'll ask around at the club.'

  'Forget the professionals. They're less flexible than amateurs. In point of fact, I have someone in mind.' Crawford sat forward and switched on the wipers and window-wash, clearing the morning's accumulated debris from our view. He had recovered his energies, as if he needed to touch bottom before springing to the surface. 'She's going to be a great star, Charles. As it happens, she lives next door to the house I've found for you. We'll drive there now. I know you'll be intrigued – she's very much your sort of woman He turned the ignition key and waited for me to move off, smiling like the bruised and boyish visionary who had ransacked his schoolmates' lockers, leaving behind a treasure of incitement and desire.

  23 Come and See

  'Your new home, Charles. Take a look. Handsome, isn't it?'

  'Very. Are you going to burgle it?'

  'Only when you've settled in. You'll be happy here. I want to get you away from the Club Nautico. Sometimes one can have too many memories.'

  We approached the gates of an untenanted villa in a quiet residential avenue three hundred yards to the west of the central plaza. An estate office's signpost impaled the square of yellowing grass beside the empty swimming pool. Unoccupied since its construction, the house seemed almost ghostly in its faded newness, haunted by the human occupants who had never lived in its vacant rooms but left their imprints like patches of fog on an exposed photographic film.

  'It's an imposing place,' I commented as we stepped from the car. 'Why has no one lived here?'

  'The owners died before they could leave England, and there was some sort of family dispute over probate. Betty Shand picked it up for a song.'

  Crawford unlocked the gates and strolled along the drive ahead of me. The kidney-shaped pool resembled a sunken altar reached by the chromium ladder. Votive offerings of a dead rat, a wine bottle and a sun-bleached property brochure waited for whatever minor deity might claim them. The garden of unwatered palms and bougainvilleas was blanched by the heat. Dusty windows, through which no one had ever stared, now sealed off the unfurnished rooms.

  Crawford gripped the estate office's sign and worked the post to and fro. He wrenched it from the dry soil and threw it to the ground. Climbing the tiled steps to the front door, he took a set of keys from his pocket.

  'You'll be glad to know that we won't break in – it seems strange going in through the front door, almost illicit. I want you to experience the Residencia Costasol at first-hand. The mysteries of life and death hover over villas like this…'

  He let us into the silent interior. Sunlight fell through the unshaded windows, blunted by the dust. The empty rooms lay around us, their white walls enclosing nothing, ready for dramas of boredom and ennui, the meaningless flicker of a thousand football matches. Devoid of all furniture and ornaments, the house lacked any clear function. The fitted kitchen resembled a survival station, part intensive care unit, part medical dispensary. As Crawford watched me approvingly I realized that his character-reading was all too accurate-I already felt at ease in the villa, free of the encumbrances of the past, the terminal moraine of memories that lay for ever around my feet.

  'Charles, you've come home…' Crawford beckoned to me, urging me to stroll around the large living room. 'Enjoy the sensation-strangeness is closer to us than we like to think.'

  'Perhaps it is. Empty houses have a special magic. I'm not sure if I want to live here. What about the furniture?'

  'Delivered tomorrow. White-on-white drapes, chrome and black leather, absolutely you. Betty Shand's choice, not mine. Meanwhile, let's see the next floor.'

  I followed him up the stairs, where the landing divided into wide corridors and an exposed concrete terrace like a side-chapel of the sun. I walked around the empty bedrooms and their mirror-walled bathrooms, trying to imagine how newly-arrived residents would respond to these motionless interiors, cut off from the world by their security systems and sensors. The outer desert of the Residencia Costasol was reflected in the inner desert of these aseptic chambers. The lighter gravity of this strange planet would numb the brain and maroon the residents in their armchairs, eyes clinging to the horizon lines of their television screens as they tried to stabilize their minds. By forcing a window or jemmying a kitchen door Crawford had broken the spell, and the clocks would begin to race again…

  'Bobby…?' Leaving the master-bedroom, and its view over the palm garden and tennis court below, I searched the corridor. The nearby bedrooms were empty, and I at first assumed that he had abandoned me to the house as part of some teasing experiment. Then I heard him moving around a small back bedroom that overlooked the kitchen courtyard.

  'Charles, I'm in here. Come and see – it's rather unusual…'

  I stepped into the unfurnished room with its miniature bathroom scarcely larger than a broom cupboard. Crawford stood by the window, peering through the slatted blades of a Venetian blind.

  'The maid's room?' I asked. 'I hope she's pretty.'

  'Well… we haven't thought of that, yet. But it does have an interesting view.'

  Crawford's fingerprints were visible on the dusty vanes as he parted them for me. Beyond the kitchen courtyard lay the tennis court, its clay surface recently swept and chalked. A crisp new net hung between the posts, and a tennis machine similar to the Club Nautico's stood at the baseline, waiting for its first opponent.

  But Crawford was not admiring the tennis court he had generously prepared for me. To our left, beyond the perimeter wall that followed the drive down to the avenue, was the neighbouring estate, a trio of handsome bungalows grouped like motel cabins around a shared swimming pool. For once the flat terrain of the Residencia Costasol had yielded to rising ground, a modest hill that gave the three dwellings a pleasant view over the surrounding gardens and brought the pool within clear sight of the window through which we peered.

  Light trembled across the palm trunks and dappled the walls of the bungalows, reflected from the broken water. A teenaged girl stepped from the pool and stood bare-breasted on the verge, fingers squeezing the water from her nose. Her blonde hair lay across her shoulders like fraying hemp. Shouting to hersel
f, she ran along the verge and dived noisily into the water.

  'She's lovely, isn't she, Charles? Beautiful, in a damaged way. You should be able to do a lot with her.'

  'Well…' I watched the teenager splashing in the shallow end, whooping at the rainbows lifting from her palms. 'She's certainly sweet.'

  'Sweet? My God, you've moved in some tough circles. I wouldn't call her sweet.'

  I watched the girl playfully slapping the water, and then realized that Crawford was gazing beyond the pool to a sun-shaded table beside the nearest bungalow. A slim, silver-haired man with a matinee idol's handsome profile stood beside the umbrella in a silk dressing-gown. He waved to the girl in the pool and raised his glass, admiring her eager but unskilled dives. Little more than thirty feet away, I could see the wistful smile on his thin lips.

  'Sanger? So these are the bungalows he owns 'His Garden of Eden.' Crawford bit the grimy vane with his teeth. 'He can play God, Adam and the serpent without having to change his fig-leaf. One of the bungalows is the office where he sees his patients. The other he lets to a Frenchwoman and her daughter – the girl in the pool. The third he shares with his latest protegee. Look under the umbrella.'

  Sitting in a deckchair beneath the parasol was a young woman in a cotton nightdress of the type issued in hospital emergency wards. One arm rested on a clutch of unread paperbacks, exposing the infected puncture-holes that covered the inner surface from wrist to elbow. She fiddled with an empty medicinal glass, as if unable to focus on anything around her until she had received her next dose. Her dark hair had been shaved almost to the scalp, exposing the bony scars that ran above her temples. When she turned to stare at the pool the gold rings in her right nostril and lower lip caught the sun, briefly lighting her sallow face. Her toneless cheeks reminded me of the heroin addicts I had seen in the prison hospital in Canton, unconcerned by the death penalties they faced because they had already taken their seats in the tumbril.

  Yet as I stared at this deteriorated young woman I sensed that some kind of wayward spirit was struggling to rouse itself from the deep Largactil trance into which Sanger had cast her. She seemed morose and sullen, but now and then her eyes would fix themselves on some interior image, a memory of a time when she had been alive. Then an almost louche smile quirked her lips, and she turned her head to gaze in an amused and even mischievous way at the sedate bungalows and their filtered pool, a princess in her tower searching for a chemise to wave, a prisoner of the medical profession's good intentions. Her true home was the druggies' squat and the pus-stained mattress, a realm of shared needles and absent hopes where moral judgements were never made. Against the backdrop of the Residencia Costasol, with its impeccable villas and sensible citizenry, she held out the promise of a free and unrooted world. For the first time I understood why Andersson and Crawford had so treasured Bibi Jansen.

  'Interested, Charles?' Crawford asked. 'Our white lady of H.'

  'Who is she?'

  'Laurie Fox – she was working in a club in Fuengirola until Sanger found her. Father's a doctor at a local clinic; after his wife died in a road crash he began to share his heroin habit with Laurie. She's appeared in a couple of low-budget TV series made out here.'

  'Any good?'

  'The series were shit, but she looked good. Has the right kind of bones in her face.'

  'And now she's with Sanger? How does he do it?'

  'He has special talents, and special needs.'

  The French teenager shrieked and dived. The shattered water sent a burst of light across the garden. Laurie Fox flinched and searched for Sanger's hand. He stood behind her, stroking her short-cropped hair with a silver-backed brush. Trying to soothe her, he loosened the nightdress and rubbed sun cream into her shoulders, his fingers as gentle as a lover's. She took his hand and wiped the oil away, then placed it over her breast.

  The frankness of her erotic response, the unashamed way in which she used her sex, seemed to unsettle Crawford. The plastic vanes slipped from his grip and danced against the window, but he controlled himself and steadied them. His heavy breath blurred the dusty glass as he panted quietly, partly in anger and partly in admiration and sensual pleasure.

  'Laurie…' he murmured. 'She's your star, Charles.'

  'Are you sure? Can she act?'

  'I hope not. We need a special kind of… presence. Your film club will love her.'

  'I'll think about it. You have met her?'

  'Of course. Betty Shand owns half the club in Fuengirola.'

  'Well, maybe. She looks happy enough with Sanger.'

  'No one is happy with Sanger.' Crawford rapped the glass with his fist, then stared fixedly at the psychiatrist. 'We'll get her away from him. Laurie needs a different sort of encouragement.'

  'Such as…?'

  I waited for Crawford to reply, but he was watching Sanger like a hunter in a hide. The psychiatrist was walking towards the pool with a dry towel. As the French girl stepped from the water he draped the towel around her, gently drying her shoulders as he gazed at her growing nipples. Hidden in the towelling, his hands lingered over her breasts and bottom, then gathered her hair into a damp coil that he laid over the nape of her neck.

  The small bedroom was strangely silent, as if the entire villa was waiting for our response. I realized that both Crawford and I were no longer breathing. His chest was still, and the muscles of his face seemed ready to burst through his cheeks. Usually so relaxed and amiable, he was about to drive his forehead through the glass. His fierce resentment of Sanger, his envy of the affection the psychiatrist was bestowing on the young woman, made me certain that he had come into conflict with the psychiatric profession in the past, perhaps during his last days in the army.

  The French teenager returned to her bungalow, and Sanger strolled back to the pool-side table. He took Laurie Fox's hand, lifting her from the chair, and wrapped a comforting arm around her as they walked into the bungalow behind them.

  Metal louvres tore and clattered against the window. Ripped from the wall by Crawford's hands, the blind lay on the floor at our feet, a trembling mass of plastic vanes. I stepped back, trying to take Crawford's arm.

  'Bobby? For God's sake 'It's all right, Charles. I didn't mean to upset you…' Crawford calmed me with a ready smile, but his eyes moved around Sanger's compound. He was working out the sight-lines between the bungalows, and I was sure that some brutal challenge was about to be mounted.

  'Bobby… there are other girls like Laurie Fox. Just as stoned and just as weird. Fuengirola must be full of them.'

  'Charles… don't panic' Crawford spoke quietly, his sense of irony returning. He flexed his shoulders like a boxer and grimaced over his torn hands, smiling at the blood. 'There's nothing like a violent reflex now and then to tune up the nervous system. For some reason, Sanger really gets to me.'

  'He's just another flawed psychiatrist. Forget about him.'

  'All psychiatrists are flawed-believe me, Charles, I've had to cope with the poor devils. My mother took me to one in Ely. He thought I was a budding sociopath and liked bruising myself. Father knew better. He understood that I loved him, despite that strap.'

  'And what about the army psychiatrists in Hong Kong?'

  'Even more amateurish.' Crawford turned to watch me in his most level way, eyes searching my face. 'For what it's worth they used even stronger terms.'

  'Like "psychopathy"?'

  'That sort of thing. Hopelessly muddled. They don't realize that the psychopath plays a vital role. He meets the needs of the hour, touches our graceless lives with the only magic we know.'

  'And that is?'

  'Charles… come on. I must have some professional secrets. Let's get back to the club and sign up all those eager new members.'

  As I followed him to the door he turned and smiled his most winning smile at me, then clasped my face in his hands and left his bloody fingerprints on my cheeks.

  24 The Psychopath as Saint

  'Inspector cabrera…?' I stood i
n the doorway of my office at the sports club, surprised to see the young policeman sitting at my desk. 'I was expecting Mr Crawford.'

  'He's difficult to find. Sometimes here, sometimes there, but never in between.' Cabrera adjusted the mouse beside my computer keyboard, scanned the menu and scrolled through the membership list, his lips pursed almost in disapproval. 'The club is very popular, Mr Prentice-so many new members in so little time.'

  'We've been lucky. Still, the facilities are excellent. Mrs Shand has put a lot of money into the club.'

  I waited for Cabrera to rise from my chair, but he seemed content to remain behind my desk, as if curious to see everything from my perspective. He turned in the swivel chair, and gazed at the crowded tennis courts.

  'Mrs Shand is a fine businesswoman,' Cabrera acknowledged. 'For years the Residencia Costasol was asleep, and now, suddenly… how could Mrs Shand know when it would wake?'

  'Well, Inspector…' Cabrera's aggressive gaze unsettled me, like his youthful face with its too obvious hint of intellectual thuggery. 'Business people have a feel for this sort of thing. They can read the psychology of a particular street corner or sidewalk. Can I help you, Inspector? I'm not sure when Mr Crawford will be back. There's no problem with work permits, I hope? Our staff are all EC nationals.'

  Cabrera raised himself slightly from my chair, trying to find in its geometry some clue to my own activities. He frowned at the monotonous sound of the tennis machine. 'No one is ever sure about Mr Crawford – a tennis coach who has a machine to do his work for him. You at least remain in one place.'

  'My job is here, Inspector. I still sleep at the Club Nautico, but I'm moving my things to the Residencia this afternoon. Mrs Shand has rented a villa for me – next-door to Dr Sanger, as it happens. I looked over the house yesterday afternoon.'

  'Good. Then we will know where you are.' Cabrera's glance took in my smartly-cut safari suit, run up for me by an Arab tailor in Puerto Banus. 'I wanted to ask if you had heard from your brother?'