J. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories

‘She only sang, of course,’ Jane added. ‘Until my father came.’ She blew bubbles into her glass. ‘So you think I give them what they want at the Casino. By the way, what do you see?’

‘I’m afraid I’m your one failure,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Except you.’

She dropped her eyes. ‘That sometimes happens,’ she said. ‘I’m glad this time.’

A million suns pounded inside me. Until then I’d been reserving judgment on myself.

Harry and Tony were polite, if disappointed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Harry said sadly. ‘I won’t. How did you do it?’

‘That mystical left-handed approach, of course,’ I told him. ‘All ancient seas and dark wells.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Tony asked eagerly. ‘I mean, does she burn or just tingle?’

Jane sang at the Casino every night from eleven to three, but apart from that I suppose we were always together. Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and cafι terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.

On other evenings we’d go down to one of the quiet bars at Lagoon West, and have supper out on the flats, and Jane would tease the waiters and sing honeybirds and angelcakes to the children who came in across the sand to watch her.

I realize now that I must have achieved a certain notoriety along the beach, but I didn’t mind giving the old women — and beside Jane they all seemed to be old women — something to talk about. During the Recess no one cared very much about anything, and for that reason I never questioned myself too closely over my affair with Jane Ciracylides.

As I sat on the balcony with her looking out over the cool early evenings or felt her body glowing beside me in the darkness I allowed myself few anxieties.

Absurdly, the only disagreement I ever had with her was over her cheating.

I remember that I once taxed her with it.’

Do you know you’ve taken over five hundred dollars from me, Jane? You’re still doing it. Even now!’

She laughed impishly. ‘Do I cheat? I’ll let you win one day.’

‘But why do you?’ I insisted.

‘It’s more fun to cheat,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it’s so boring.’

‘Where will you go when you leave Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her. She looked at me in surprise. ‘Why do you say that? I don’t think I shall ever leave.’

‘Don’t tease me, Jane. You’re a child of another world than this.’

‘My father came from Peru,’ she reminded me.

‘But you didn’t get your voice from him,’ I said. ‘I wish I could have heard your mother sing. Had she a better voice than yours, Jane?’

‘She thought so. My father couldn’t stand either of us.’

That was the evening I last saw Jane. We’d changed, and in the half an hour before she left for the Casino we sat on the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music remained with me even after she’d gone, hanging faintly in the darkness around her chair.

I felt curiously sleepy, almost sick on the air she’d left behind, and at 11.30, when I knew she’d be appearing on stage at the Casino, I went out for a walk along the beach.

As I left the elevator I heard music coming from the shop. At first I thought I’d left one of the audio switches on, but I knew the voice only too well. The windows of the shop had been shuttered, so I got in through the passage which led from the garage courtyard round at the back of the apartment house.

The lights had been turned out, but a brilliant glow filled the shop, throwing a golden fire on to the tanks along the counters. Across the ceiling liquid colours danced in reflection.

The music I had heard before, but only in overture.

The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely.

Arched forwards into it, her head thrown back, was Jane. I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it.

‘Jane!’ I shouted over the noise. ‘Get down!’ She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame.

While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up.

‘Where’s Jane?’ Harry asked. ‘Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.’ They both turned towards the music. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Tony peered at me suspiciously. ‘Steve, anything wrong?’

Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started towards the rear entrance.

‘Harry!’ I shouted after him. ‘Get back!’

Tony held my shoulder. ‘Is Jane in there?’

I caught them as they opened the door into the shop.

‘Good God!’ Harry yelled. ‘Let go of me, you fool!’ He struggled to get away from me. ‘Steve, it’s trying to kill her!’

I jammed the door shut and held them back.

I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size.

The next day it died.

Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterwards the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernambuco.

So if any of you around here keep a choro-florist’s, and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat.

Neither of us was watching the play too closely when I first noticed the slip. I was stretched back in front of the fire with the crossword, braising gently and toying with 17 down (‘told by antique clocks? 5, 5.’) while Helen was hemming an old petticoat, looking up only when the third lead, a heavy-chinned youth with a 42-inch neck and a base-surge voice, heaved manfully downscreen. The play was ‘My Sons, My Sons’, one of those Thursday night melodramas Channel 2 put out through the winter months, and had been running for about an hour; we’d reached that ebb somewhere round Act 3 Scene 3 just after the old farmer learns that his sons no longer respect him. The whole play must have been recorded on film, and it sounded extremely funny to switch from the old man’s broken mutterings back to the showdown sequence fifteen minutes earlier when the eldest son starts drumming his chest and dragging in the high symbols. Somewhere an engineer was out of a job.

‘They’ve got their reels crossed,’ I told Helen. ‘This is where we came in.’

‘Is it?’ she said, looking up. ‘I wasn’t watching. Tap the set.’

‘Just wait and see. In a moment everyone in the studio will start apologizing.’

Helen peered at the screen. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen this,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we haven’t. Quiet.’

I shrugged and went back to 17 down, thinking vaguely about sand dials and water clocks. The scene dragged on; the old man stood his ground, ranted over his turnips and thundered desperately for Ma. The studio must have decided to run it straight through again and pretend no one had noticed. Even so they’d be fifteen minutes behind their schedule.