J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Some of the jobs weren't in anyone's office. More like the couch in the next-door sitting room.' I pointed to a row of polaroids set against the inkstand. In one of the prints a stout blonde in a low-cut cocktail gown leaned towards the camera, lips parted in a parody of vampdom. In the next a dark-haired teenager sat naked on the verge of a swimming pool, her small breasts in silhouette.

'Pretty, isn't she?' Frances stared at the miniature image. 'The office junior?'

'I hope so. It's a strange photo to send to a personnel manager.'

'That depends on the kind of personnel Olga was recruiting.'

Frances moved my hand over her nipple. 'Do you find her attractive?'

'Olga Carlotti? She's lying face down with her brains across her knuckles.'

'The office junior.'

'Attractive? Yes, but a little young. Fourteen, fifteen…?'

'Who's counting? She reminds me of Jane.'

'Come on…' I gazed into the block of night air between the apartment buildings. Logic and reality curved at Marina Baie des Anges, warped by a relativity that applied to more than time and space. 'Jane is twenty-eight.'

'With the body of a teenager. I almost fancy her myself.'

'Simone Delage got there first. Jane's found the head girl she always needed to look up to.'

'But you still have sex?'

'We live in a company house. I don't think it's allowed.'

'That's why I moved here. Is she faithful?'

'As far as I know. A month before we married she had a fling with a surgeon at Guy's. That shook me, but Jane coped with it very well. Unfinished business, she told me, very common among brides…'

'Let's not talk about Jane.' Frances traced the scars on my knees with a finger, as if rethinking the incisions. 'Will she be awake when I drive you back?'

'I doubt it. She sleeps soundly.'

'The sort of sleep that leaves puncture marks?' Frances took the glass from my hand and sat up. 'Let's go back to bed. We have unfinished business of our own…'

I followed her into the bedroom, and wandered over to the bookshelf as she slipped into the bathroom. There was a row of textbooks on French property law, and a single copy of Through the Looking-Glass. As I turned the well-thumbed pages, smiling at the Tenniel illustrations, I realized that this was the first copy in Greenwood 's Alice library that anyone had read.

I lay beside Frances, admiring her sprawled figure in the overhead mirror. She seemed to fly across a darkened sky, a nymph from a baroque ceiling asleep on a passing cloud. As she gazed at her reflection, hands behind her head, I ran my fingers over the hollows of her armpits, eddies in the smooth skin that flowed to her hips. Her body was still unpacking itself for me. The small scars below her chin, the erect right nipple that seemed to have a life of its own, the strong ribcage and blonde pubic pelt were a raid on my senses.

She turned to face me, tactics decided. She cupped a hand around my penis, fingers feeling for its root, and weighed my testicles like a stockwoman with an elderly breeding bull.

'You're still tense, Paul. Think about the robbery. If the mirror bothers you I can turn off the light.'

'Leave it on – I've got two of you to look at.'

'David liked doing that. Which was the real me, he used to ask… philosophy in the boudoir. The mirror was his idea.'

'David's?' My fingers paused as they grazed in the damp watermeadow between her thighs. 'I'm impressed.'

'At times he surprised himself. That's what I want you to do, Paul. I want you to shock yourself.'

'And what about you, Frances? What shocks you?'

'Nothing about sex ever shocks women. At least, men's kind of sex. We clean up after you, like those charladies with brooms who follow the coronation coach.' She kissed my mouth, curious about the taste of my lips, and then tested my still-flaccid penis, nodding like a serious-minded child with some difficult homework. 'Let's concentrate on you. We'll open a few doors. That robbery excited you. What else is there?'

'Try me. Turn a key.'

'I will… do you want to beat me?' She lay on her stomach, looking over her shoulder at her image in the mirror, and smacked her plump bottom. 'I've got a nice rump – deliciously spankable, David used to say. There's a dressing-gown cord in the bedside table.'

' Frances…' I caressed the white skin, glad to find no trace of weals. 'The last thing I'm going to do is hurt you.'

'Do you want to tie me up? We'll go into the bathroom, you can rope my wrists to the bidet taps and bugger me. Some people like fucking in bathrooms. All that baptism and absolution. Paul?'

'Not for me. No religious streak. Frances, I'm sorry – it'll come back.'

'It hasn't gone away.' She lay beside me, the moisture from my lips glistening on her breasts, talking in a low but firm voice. 'We're relaxing, Paul, so you don't need to worry. What about stealing? That was something you did as a boy. And those hazings in the RAF that got you going? Think about flying your first solo, and the big erection in the cockpit. Do you want to see me fucked by another man? Maybe it's too soon for that. We'll wait till you need me more. Do you want to watch Jane being fucked? It's every husband's dream. Yes, Paul, you're waking up… think about Jane being fucked by Halder or Alain Delage. Fucking someone else makes her a stranger again, stranger and more interesting. There are things between them you'll never know. Not the old bathroom smells and the sheets stained with your cock. Someone else's semen lying between you… yes, you like that. Paul, do you want me to pee or shit on you? A little warm sprinkle?'

'Frances, dear…' I held her breasts as she squatted across me, and felt the warm urine on my thighs, hotter than I expected from her cold hands. A quick scent, sweet and ammoniacal, rose from her pubis. ' Frances, give up…'

'No, we don't give up.' She blew the damp hair from her eyes.

'Let your mind drift… you're on the taboo coast, there are dark harbours here. We'll find the door, the special one…'

She stopped, and stared with a look of frustration at my limp penis, then sprang from the bed towards the bathroom.

'Don't move. I'll be back.'

' Frances, please – no shit.'

'No shit, don't worry.'

When the door closed I heard her rooting through the laundry basket. I moved from the urine-damp patch. Beyond the terrace the apartment buildings of Marina Baie des Anges made their curved passage through the night. I had disappointed Frances, though she was taking my failure in good part. Jane still hovered somewhere within my mind, but she had begun to fade from me. My visceral response to the Cardin robbery seemed to justify infidelity. The contingent world, as always, rewrote the rules and sanctioned everything.

I heard Frances switch off the bathroom light. The door opened, and her hand reached to the wall switch, dimming the bedside lamp.

'Right…' Frances stood beside the bed, swaying to the faint North African music that came from an apartment above us.

'Don't tell me you're asleep.'

'I've never been more awake.'

I sat up and leaned against the quilted headboard, feeling its buttons in my back. Frances raised her arms to the ceiling mirror, as if about to join her second self among the clouds. She wore a zebra-striped cocktail dress that exposed her crutch, a parody of a gun-moll's gown in a gangster musical. The cheap fabric clasped her hips and waist, and the plunge neckline almost bared her breasts. Her legs were sheathed in a tattered pair of fishnet tights, holes as large as my hand around patches of pale skin. A slash of two-tone lipstick, scarlet and mauve, turned her mouth into a lurid grimace, a tough-teen fad I had seen in the bars of La Bocca, a convent girl's notion of a streetwalker's smile, alienating and alluring.