J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Mr Sinclair? Enough of the girls now…'

Sister émilie called from below. I put away the photograph and closed the office door behind me. As I walked down the stairs I noticed that I was still carrying the zebra dress and fishnet tights. Rather than hand them to the nun, I stuffed them into my jacket.

After making my thanks and a cash donation to Sister émilie, who silently bowed to me, I returned to the Jaguar. I drove through the shabby streets of La Bocca, with their melancholy Arab men haunting the doorways. I was glad to be within a twenty-minute drive of the Croisette and its kingdom of light. A smell of cheap perfume filled the car, rising from the zebra bundle on the passenger seat. I stopped by a dustbin outside a supermarket, stepped from the car and slid the garments under the lid.

The teenager's scent, rancid but curiously stirring, still clung to my hands. But I was thinking of the photograph I had seen in Greenwood 's office at the refuge. Frances Baring was dressed in a business suit, but all the others in the group, including Greenwood himself, were wearing their leather bowling jackets.

Dusk came quickly to Cannes, in the few moments that distracted me as I ordered another Tom Collins from the waiter at the Rialto Bar. The sky seemed to tilt, tipping the sun like a slew of glowing ash behind the heights of the Esterel, taking with it the hang-gliders who sailed the evening airs. The hotels along the Croisette retreated into themselves, withdrawing behind their formal facades. The lights had moved offshore. Electric snowflakes marked the Christmas-tree rigging of the yachts moored near the beach, and a blaze of candlepower bathed the two cruise liners anchored in the Napoule Channel.

Shore parties of passengers strolled under the palm trees, too unsteady after their days at sea to risk crossing the Croisette. They stared at the hundreds of Volvo salesmen emerging from a conference at the Noga Hilton, like travellers glimpsing an unknown tribe about to perform its rites of passage with its sacred regalia, the marketing brochure and the promotional video.

Prostitutes came out at dusk, usherettes in the theatre of the night, shining their miniature torches at any kerb that threatened their high-heels. Two of them entered the Rialto and sat at the next table, muscular brunettes with the hips and thighs of professional athletes. They ordered drinks they never touched, killing time before they set off to trawl the hotels.

I, too, was waiting for the clock to move on, but with rather less hope. Jane was chairing another late-evening committee at the clinic, mapping out a further stage in the scheme that would bring, if not immortality, then perpetually monitored health to Eden-Olympia. Our brains, I often told her, would soon need a false ceiling to make room for the ducting demanded by our 'intelligent' lifestyle. Before breakfast we would set ourselves a psychological test, tapping yes-or-no answers to alternative-choice questions, while a standby alarm offered an emergency package entitled 'What to do till the psychiatrist comes'.

As the prostitutes talked to each other in a creole of French and Arabic, their scent drifted over my table, a dream of houris borne by the night-world of the Croisette, the untaxed contraband of the senses in this lazy entrepôt of chance and desire. I needed to escape from Eden-Olympia, with its ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility. The business park was the outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone.

Jane and I rarely made love. The flair she had shown during my days as a virtual cripple had been smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts. She moved naked around our bedroom, in full view of Simone Delage and her husband, flaunting not her sex but her indifference to it.

Cannes offered an antidote to this spartan regime. My parents had been unfaithful, but in the old, unhappy way. My father's affairs complicated his busy life, giving him the harassed existence of a secret agent, forever one step ahead of being unmasked, a fraying conspiracy of rented cars and silent phone calls. He communicated with one lover, the wife of an architect in the same street, by adjusting the roller-blinds, a prearranged code that my mother discovered in a flash of insight worthy of the Bletchley Enigma team. As soon as my father left the house she ran from room to room, raising and lowering the blinds at random.

I remembered the lover's bemused gaze as she drove past, trying to make sense of the baffling signals, and my mother's smile of triumph. Less happily, I once found her ironing a half-burned credit-card receipt she had fished from a lavatory bowl.

The streetwalkers stood up, testing their stilettos before stepping into the night. The younger of the two, a twenty-year-old with eyes wiser than any grandmother's, glanced at me for a microsecond too long, as if ready to fit a car-park quickie into her busy evening schedule.

But sex with prostitutes required a special knack, as I had learned during my RAF days in Germany. My girlfriends in England on the whole seemed to like me, at least on even days of the month, from the sixteen-year-old ballet student who dragged me into the family-planning clinic to the adjutant's secretary who listened good-naturedly as I worried on about my parents' postponed divorce. The Polish whores in the bars outside RAF Mülheim were a different breed, scarcely women at all but furies from Aeschylus who intensely loathed their clients. They were obsessed with the Turkish pimps and their children boarded with reluctant sisters, and any show of feeling disgusted them. Warmth and emotion were the true depravity. They wanted to be used like appliances rented out for the hour, offering any part of themselves to the crudest fantasies of the men who paid them.

But at least they were real, in a way that eluded Eden-Olympia.

I finished my drink, left a 500-franc note on the saucer and stood up to explore the night. I felt surprisingly light-headed, like a dreamer who had strayed onto a film set of tropical palms and cruise liners. At any moment an orchestra would strike up and the crowds on the Croisette, the Volvo dealers and Arab playboys and orthopaedic surgeons, would form themselves into a disciplined, arm-swinging chorus, belting out a big-band hit.

I followed the two prostitutes past the Noga Hilton, curious to see how far I could go before the puritan conscience pulled the plug. Uninspired by the car-dealers, the women locked arms and strode down the Rue Amouretti to the Place Dubois. They paused to scream abuse at a passing motorist, and veered away into the darkness.

Unable to keep up with them, I rested my knee outside Mère Besson. After scanning the evening's menu I set off towards the multi-storey garage near the railway station, where I had parked the Jaguar. A darker Cannes gathered itself around me once I crossed the Rue d'Antibes. Off-duty chauffeurs, Arab pushers and out-of-work waiters filled the narrow bars. They played the fruit machines, their thighs rocking the pintables until the tilt-signs flashed, an eye on the new arrivals who stepped from the Marseilles train, would-be construction workers and pairs of sharp-tempered young women who shouldered their way to the head of the taxi queue. Pimps ambled around the tunnel entrance to the underpass, a cloaca that drained away the festival city's dreams of lust and fortune.

Inhaling the heady air of north African tobacco, and the cheap aftershave of nerve-gas potency, I crossed the Rue Jaurès to the garage. I fed my ticket into the pay-machine as two men and a young girl walked down the concrete ramp towards the street.

With their leather jackets and hard shoulders, the men looked like plainclothes police, and I guessed that they had caught an absconding eleven-year-old trying to board the Paris express.