Cocaine Nights

by J. G. Ballard

  The residencia costasol had come to life. A sun-bleached cadaver of a community, lying inertly beside a thousand swimming pools, had raised itself on one elbow to taste the quickening air. Waiting for Crawford to begin his morning inspection tour, I sat in the Citroen and listened to the eager chorus of hammers nailing together the proscenium arch of the open-air theatre beside the marina. Led by Harold Lejeune, a sometime marine surveyor at Lloyd's Register of Shipping, a team of enthusiastic carpenters was putting together a creditable copy of an end-of-pier playhouse.

  Lejeune squatted astride the crown pole, baseball cap rakishly across his head, nails clamped in his strong teeth as he waited for the last section of the pitched gable to be hoisted into place. A furious salvo of hammerheads signalled the raising of the roof by this work-gang of former accountants, lawyers and middle-managers.

  Below them, shielding their ears from the din, their wives were unrolling the bolts of silky bombazine that would form the side and rear walls of the theatre. A group of energetic daughters unloaded a stack of collapsible metal chairs from a pick-up truck beside the quay, adding them to the rows of seats that faced the stage.

  The Marina Players were about to mount their first production, a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, which would alternate with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

  Future productions included plays by Orton and Coward, all to be directed by Arnold Wynegarde, a Shaftesbury Avenue veteran, their amateur casts stiffened by several one-time stage professionals.

  Green shoots of a forgotten metropolitan culture were poking through the property developer's plaster and lath. When the hammers paused briefly from their work I could hear the strains of Giselle from the gymnasium, where a ballet class of younger wives were practising their fouettés and arabesques. They would end the session bouncing in their leotards to a rock number, then lie panting by the swimming pool.

  In the five weeks since Crawford had taken me on my first tour of the complex a remarkable transformation had occurred. Refurbished restaurants and boutiques had opened in the shopping mall, briskly profitable as they prospered under Elizabeth Shand's steely gaze. An impromptu arts festival had conjured itself from the air, drawing troupes of eager volunteers from the sleepy afternoons.

  The Residencia Costasol had decided that it needed a facelift. A rush to activity of every kind was on, the quest for a new civic pride expressed in parties and barbecues, tea-dances and church services. Newsletters circulated on the e-mail computer screens, inviting residents to stand for a new municipal council and its projected sub-committees.

  The sounds of serve and volley came from the tennis courts, where Helmut drilled his eager pupils, and there was a heavy splash in the swimming pool as Wolfgang demonstrated a jackknife and reverse swallow to his diving class. Water-skis, trampolines and exercycles were being moved by the groundsmen from forgotten storerooms under the gymnasium. Below the arched bridge of the coastal road the first yachts of the morning were setting out for the open sea. The once-silent marina echoed to the strains of capstan and hawser as hulls weakened by osmosis were drained and varnished by Andersson and his Spanish repair team.

  Meanwhile, in the centre of the marina, a fire-ravaged sloop was lashed to a steel lighter, the half-submerged hulk of the Halcyon. Its charred mast and blackened sails presided over the waterways, urging the yachtsmen of the Residencia Costasol to reef their sails and search for the keenest winds and steepest seas.

  A hand held my shoulder, then clasped my temples before I could raise my head, pinning me to the driving seat of the Citroen. I had fallen asleep in the car, and someone had slipped into the seat behind me.

  'Bobby…!' I pushed his hand away, angered by his brutal humour. 'That's a -'

  'Mean trick to play?' Crawford chuckled to himself like a child savouring a favourite joke. 'Charles, you were sound asleep. I hired you as my bodyguard.'

  'I thought I was your literary adviser. You were supposed to be here at ten.'

  'Pressing work. All kinds of things are happening. Tell me, what were you dreaming about?'

  'Some sort of… fire-storm. The yachts in the marina were blazing. God knows why.'

  'Strange. Did you wet the bed as a child? Never mind. How's everything at the club? It sounds busy.'

  'It is. Membership's up to three hundred, with another fifty application forms in. There's already a waiting list for the courts.'

  'Good, good…' Crawford scanned the pool, smiling at the sight of so many handsome women oiling themselves in the sun. Wolfgang was demonstrating a back-flip, whipping the board under his feet with a crack that roused everyone from their seats. 'Handsome fellow-any Greek sculptor would have given his eye-teeth to stick him in a frieze. It looks great, Charles. You've done a superb job. You may not realize it, but your real ambition is to run a nightclub in Puerto Banus.'

  He patted my back and gazed at the busy scene, smiling in an almost innocent way, delighted by these signs of civic renewal and at that moment wholly unconscious of the means he had used to achieve them. Despite myself, I was glad to see him. As always I felt buoyed by his evangelical zeal and his selfless commitment to the people of the Residencia. At the same time I was still sceptical about his belief that the crime wave he had launched was the engine of change. The theatre and sports clubs, like their counterparts at Estrella de Mar, flourished as a result of some small but significant shift in people's sense of themselves, a response to something no more radical than simple boredom. Crawford had seized on the coincidence to give vent to a latent strain of violence in his make-up, an almost childlike faith that he could provoke the world to rise on its toes and respond in kind. Just as he had willed the tennis machine to beat him, he now urged the Costasol complex to rally itself against the secret enemy within its walls.

  Yet his affection for the residents was unfeigned. When we left the sports club and drove past the Marina Players he reached over me and sounded the Citroen's horn. He waved his baseball cap at Lejeune and his fellow-carpenters on the roof and whistled at the wives tacking up their bombazine.

  'When do the tickets go on sale?' he shouted cheerily. 'Let's do a drag version – I'll play Lady Bracknell…' He lay back in the rear seat and clapped his hands. 'Right, Charles, we're off. Let's visit your new home. You're now a paid-up resident of the Costasol complex.'

  I was watching the women in the rear mirror. Charmed, as always, by Crawford's handsome and easy style, they waved until he was out of sight.

  'They need you, Bobby. What happens when you return to Estrella de Mar?'

  'They'll keep going. They've found themselves again. Charles, have more faith in people. Think about it-a month ago they were dozing in their bedrooms and watching replays of last year's Cup Final. They didn't realize it, but they were waiting for death. Now they're putting on the plays of Harold Pinter. Isn't that an advance?'

  'I suppose it is.' As we passed the marina I pointed to the blackened wreck of the Halcyon, lashed like a corpse to the lighter. 'Frank's sloop – why not have it removed? It's an eyesore.'

  'Later, Charles. One mustn't rush these things. People need constant small reminders. It keeps them on their toes. Now, look at that…' He pointed to the ornamental roundabout where the western boulevard entered the plaza. 'A volunteer police patrol…'

  A jeep in freshly painted khaki camouflage was parked by the verge. A resident in his sixties stood between the headlamps, clipboard in hand, checking the numbers of passing cars. A one-time bank manager from Surrey named Arthur Waterlow, he sported an RAF moustache and calf-length white socks that resembled the gaiters of a military policeman. Sitting erectly behind the steering wheel, radar-gun in hand, was his seventeen-year-old daughter, an intense young woman who flashed the jeep's lights at any car that exceeded the twenty miles per hour speed limit. They had called at the sports club the previous day. Pleasantly surprised by the facilities, both had applied for membership.

  'Licence checks, my God…' Crawford saluted them sole
mnly from the rear seat, like a general being chauffeured into an army base. 'Charles, maybe we can offer them our computer? Build up a fresh database of all vehicles in the Residencia and their exact locations.'

  'Is that wise? It smacks to me of officiousness. You'll be giving him tips next on the Kowloon interrogation technique.'

  'He's a bank manager – he doesn't need any tips on interrogation. You have to understand, a community must have its busybodies, its subscription collectors and committee bores, all those people you and I run a mile from. They're the cement, or at least the grouting. They're as vital as plumbers and TV maintenance men. One obsessive with a PC and a printer, turning out a residents' association newsletter, is worth more than a dozen novelists or boutique operators. It isn't shopping, or the arts, that makes a community but that duty we all owe to each other as neighbours. Once lost, it's hard to bring back, but I think we're getting there. You can feel it, Charles.'

  'I can. Believe me, I listen to them at the club. There are projects galore-a local newspaper, a citizens' advice bureau, kung fu classes, hypnotherapy, everyone seems to have an idea. There's a retired Jesuit priest who's ready to hear confessions.'

  'Good. I hope he's busy. Hennessy tells me there are plans for a rival sports club.'

  'There are. We're not exclusive enough for some people's taste. The Residencia Costasol may look homogeneous, but it has the class structure of Tunbridge Wells. You'll have to see Betty Shand about a big cash injection. We need six more tennis courts, new gym equipment and a paddling pool for the toddlers. Hennessy agrees.'

  'Then you're both wrong.' Crawford reached across my shoulder and steered the Citroen around an erratic elderly cyclist who had taken to two wheels under the apparent impression that they were part of some folkloric heritage. 'Too many tennis courts are always a mistake. They tire people out and prevent them getting up to mischief. Likewise all those parallel bars and vaulting horses.'

  'It's a sports club, Bobby.'

  'There are sports and sports. What we need is a disco-and a mixed sauna. The club's evening activities are more important than the daytime ones. People need to stop thinking about their own bodies and start thinking about other people's. I want to see them coveting their neighbours' wives, and dreaming of illicit pleasures. We'll talk about this later. First, we need to get on with the job of laying down the infrastructure. There's a lot of work to be done, Charles… Take the next right turn and put your foot down. Let's give Waterlow's daughter something to get indignant over.'

  The infrastructure, as I knew, belonged to that other and more quickening realm that lay below the surface of the Residencia Costasol, a reversed image of the amateur theatricals, cordon bleu classes and neighbourhood watch schemes. As we sped towards the perimeter road I waited for Crawford to signal a halt before setting off to vandalize a parked car or spray-paint obscenities on a garage door.

  But he had moved from this phase of primary spadework to the larger strategic task of laying down his administrative network, his bureaucracy of crime. In time-honoured fashion, the three pillars of his regime were drugs, gambling and illicit sex. As our house calls revealed, he had soon recruited his team of dealers – Nigel Kendall, a retired Hammersmith vet, an unblinking man in his early forties with a silent wife perpetually dazed by Paula Hamilton's tranquillizers; Carole Morton, a predatory hairdresser from Rochdale who ran the refurbished beauty salon at the shopping mall; Susan Henry and Anthea Rose, two widows in their thirties who had already set up a small agency direct-selling exotic underwear and perfumery around the complex; Ronald Machin, a one-time police inspector who had resigned from the Met after bribery allegations; Paul and Simon Winchell, both in their late teens, sons of one of the more prominent Residencia families, who supplied the youth trade.

  Under the guise of delivering the latest property brochures, Crawford slipped his manila envelopes through their letterboxes. Opening his sales rep's suitcase while he was ringing Machin's doorbell, I found a stack of information wallets emblazoned with 'The Residencia Costasol – for Investment Opportunities and Peace of Mind', each a compact pharmaceuticals kit packed with cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, amyl nitrite and barbiturates.

  His gambling syndicate ran in parallel, a still modest operation overseen by Kenneth Laumer, a retired Ladbroke's executive who already e-mailed a financial services newsletter to the Residencia's six hundred personal computers. Encouraged by Crawford, he now offered a betting service based on the Italian football leagues. He had expanded his operations by recruiting a team of Costasol widows to serve as his door-to-door numbers runners. The first roulette and blackjack evenings had been held in Laumer's converted dining room, though Crawford had intervened to ban the rigged wheel and marked cards.

  Closest to Crawford's evangelical heart, since it directly involved the women of the Residencia, was illicit sex. Handprinted cards had begun to appear in telephone kiosks around the complex, inviting volunteers with massage skills and escort agency experience to phone a number in Estrella de Mar – in fact, the Baalbeck Lebanese restaurant. Unsettled by the spate of burglaries and car thefts, a few of the Residencia's widows and divorcees began to put their talents to work on the community's behalf. Flabby musculatures were kneaded into shape, stomachs hardened after the couch-bound television years, double chins conjured away by probing fingers. As the masseuses worked at their clients' bodies in the shaded bedrooms, blood pressures soon rose, heartbeats quickened, and extra services found their way on to the credit-card bills.

  'Nothing is more natural,' Crawford assured me when we neared the end of the morning rounds. 'Where sexual desire is concerned, nature already provides the infrastructure. All I'm doing is stimulating the traffic. Think how much better everyone looks.'

  'You're right. Paula Hamilton will soon have to move to Marbella. Where to now?'

  I waited for him to reply, but he had momentarily fallen asleep, head almost on my shoulder. As a child Frank had often slept against me while I did my homework. With his unlined face and blond eyebrows, Crawford resembled a large adolescent boy, and I imagined him playing in the precincts of Ely Cathedral, innocent and visionary eyes already gazing beyond the flat fenland to the waiting world beyond.

  He woke with a grimace, surprised that he had slept. 'Charles, I'm sorry… I dropped off.'

  'You look tired. Sleep here – I'll walk myself around the block.'

  'We'll move on. One last call.' He lay back, rallying himself with an effort. 'It's been hard work – out every night, some close shaves too. If Cabrera catches me…'

  'Bobby, relax and go back to Estrella de Mar. Everything's up and running here.'

  'No… I can't leave them yet.' He rubbed his eyes and cheeks, forcing the blood back into his facial muscles, and then turned to face me. 'Well, Charles, you know what's going on. Are you with me?'

  'I'm running the club. Or going through the motions.'

  'I mean the complex as a whole. The larger scheme of things.' Crawford spoke slowly, listening to his own words. 'It's a noble project – Frank understood that.'

  'I'm still not sure.' I switched off the engine and gripped the wheel, trying to steady myself. 'I shouldn't really be here. It's difficult to see what lies in store.'

  'Nothing. You've seen it all, at Estrella de Mar and now the Residencia. You haven't grasped it yet, but you're sitting in an outpost of the next century.'

  'Massage parlours, gambling, and ten thousand lines of cocaine? It sounds rather old-fashioned. All you need next is rampant inflation and deficit financing.'

  'Charles…' Crawford took my hands from the steering wheel, as if even the stationary car was too much for my confused view of the road ahead. 'A real community has created itself here. It rose spontaneously out of people's lives.'

  'Then why the drugs and burglaries and whoring? Why not step back and let everyone get on with it?'

  'I wish I could.' Almost despairingly, Crawford stared at the villas that surrounded us in the residential avenue.
'People are like children, they need constant stimulation. Without that the whole thing runs down. Only crime, or something close to crime, seems to stir them. They realize that they need each other, that together they're more than the sum of their parts. There has to be that constant personal threat.'

  'Like Londoners in the Blitz? Wartime camaraderie?'

  'Exactly. After all, war is a kind of crime. There's nothing like finding someone else's shit in your swimming pool. Before you know it you've joined the neighbourhood watch scheme and taken your old violin out of its case. Your wife starts fucking you with real pleasure for the first time in yean. It works, Charles 'But it's a fierce recipe. Isn't there any other way? You could preach to them, become the Savonarola of the Costa del Sol.'

  'I've tried it.' Crawford gazed glumly at himself in the rear-view mirror. 'No Messiah can compete with the siesta hour. Crime has a respectable history – Shakespeare's London, Medici Florence. Warrens of murder, poisons and garrotting. Name me a time when civic pride and the arts both flourished and there wasn't extensive crime.'

  'Ancient Athens? Mathematics, architecture and the state as political philosophy. Was the Acropolis crawling with pimps and pickpockets?'

  'No, but the Greeks had slavery and pederasty.'

  'And we have satellite television. If you left Estrella de Mar crime would appear spontaneously. This coast is a hotbed of petty criminals and crooked politicians.'

  'But they're Spanish and Maghrebian. The Mediterranean shoreline is a foreign country to them. The real natives of the Costa del Sol are the British and French and Germans. Honest and law-abiding to the last man, woman and Rottweiler. Even the East End crooks grow honest when they settle here.' Aware of the stale sweat rising from his clothes, Crawford turned on the car's fan. 'Trust me, Charles. I need your help.'

  'You've… got it. So far.'

  'Good. I want you to keep running the club. I know you have time on your hands, and I'd like you to expand a little.'