J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Paul? Still here?'

I placed my feet on the tiled floor. Clasping her hips, I drew her towards me. The acrylic fabric slid like oiled rubber in my hands. I felt the torn mesh of her tights, searching for the pools of smooth skin among the nail-catching threads.

I pressed my lips to the gusset, inhaling the odour of adolescent hormones and cheap perfume that clung to the fabric, the heady, derailing reek of pubescent girls that had filled the refuge, the smells of dust and the ancestral dirt of dormitories, the jarring clash of unwashed underwear discarded by the Alice-reading girls.

'Paul…' Frances stopped me when I searched behind her back for the zip. Holding my now erect penis, she waited as I pressed my face to her pubis, breathing the stale scents on the stained fabric. 'I'll leave the dress on – it took a miracle to get into… How are you?'

'Young again…'

Darkness curved around the apartment towers of Marina Baie des Anges, one night enclosing another as the realms of physics and the dreamtime merged into each other. The last trains of balcony lights bent into themselves as the people of the cliff face lowered their blinds for bed. A jazz piano sounded faintly from a roof terrace, overlaid by the siren of a cruise liner avoiding a flotilla of fishing craft, carbide lamps over their sterns.

Still wearing the zebra dress, Frances had slept beside me. Her smudged make-up, the streaks of mascara and lipstick on her chin turned her face into an amiable kabuki clown's. She brushed the hair from her eyes and stared at herself in the ceiling mirror.

'Paul? I'll drive you home.'

'I'll find a cab – the concierge can call one.'

'It's better if I take you. Anyway, I need to look in somewhere first.' She ran a hand across my chest, then kissed my nipple in a show of affection. 'You really woke up. I hope it wasn't just this nasty little frock.'

She sat up and let me lower the zip, then eased the tight sheath over her shoulders. She tossed it onto a chair, where it settled into itself, desire deflating.

'Yuck – I'll throw it away.'

'Don't. I like it.'

'Why? I'll get it dry-cleaned. No? Isn't that going a little far?'

Curious to know everything about me, she examined my face in the pale light, her finger tracing the contours of my cheeks and chin. She had moved me a few squares across the board inside her head, at the cost of enormous effort, but her confidence in herself had returned.

'Where did you get the dress?' I asked, certain that I had thrown it away after leaving the refuge. 'And the tights?'

'Not in the Rue d'Antibes. They were in a rubbish bin near La Bocca. '

'You were following me?'

'No. But a lot of people are.'

'Why?'

'They think you may find something.'

'About Greenwood?'

'Maybe. Or something about you.' She sighed and scratched an ear, concerned for my naivety. On the way to the bathroom she collected the zebra dress, and briefly posed with it. 'Your friend Halder saw you stuff it into the bin. He was a bit shocked, so he passed it to me. Of course, I knew exactly what it meant. Does it suit me?'

'After midnight? Absolutely.'

'It makes me look twelve.'

'Thirteen. There's a difference.'

'I suppose there is. Have you ever had sex with a thirteen-year-old?'

'As it happens, I have.'

'Really? I'm impressed. You don't look the type.'

'I was twelve at the time. She was my girlfriend. I always did exactly what she told me.'

'Sensible little chap,' Frances commented. 'No wonder I like you.'

'One day she said we were going to have sex. So we did.'

'Thirteen years old. Any others since then?'

'Of course not.'

'Why "of course"? Let your imagination go out to play. You're not a paedophile.'

'Does that make it all right?'

'In a way, I think it does.'

We sped along the RN7 towards Antibes, past the Casino hypermarket at Villeneuve-Loubet and the Fort Carré. The ceramics shops sat in the darkness, their terracotta urns facing each other across the road like chesspieces. I lay back in the passenger seat of the BMW and let the night air rush into my face, thinking affectionately of Frances. She made love in the same single-minded way that she drove her car, firmly gripping the controls and scanning the road ahead for unexpected potholes.

She was still using me, for reasons I was too tired to fathom, but my head felt clearer than it had for months.

We left Golfe-Juan and its marina, a white city asleep on the water. Near the old Ali Khan mansion, where the prince had first noticed Rita Hayworth's fading mind, Frances turned off the RN7. We began to climb the steep road that led towards the billionaire heights of Super-Cannes. Luxury villas as lavish as palaces stood in their groomed parks. On the wrought-iron gates, surveillance cameras crouched like hawks.

Frances fumbled over the repeated gear changes as we struggled towards the high corniche. She stalled the engine beneath a sallow array of sodium lights at the junction with the Vallauris road.

' Frances, do we need to come this way? It's like Everest without the charm.'

She started the engine again, and tapped a folder filled with property brochures that lay on my lap. 'I promised to leave these with Zander. He's at the Villa Grimaldi – the bigwigs at Eden-Olympia do their entertaining there.'

'They'll all be asleep. It's 3.30. Four hours from now they'll be at their desks.'

'Not tomorrow. They're holding some kind of reunion dinner. Look around the place – you won't have to talk to them.'

We turned off the corniche road and stopped on a gravel forecourt like a moonlit beach. Two security men in Eden-Olympia uniforms checked Frances 's pass and waved us forward as the gates opened. Screened by tall cypresses, the Villa Grimaldi stood above its sloping lawns, a former palace hotel of the belle époque. We passed the car park, where chauffeurs dozed over their steering wheels, and followed the drive towards a side entrance. A black Range Rover clumsily straddled a flowerbed, its tyres flattening the rose bushes. Isolated figures patrolled the lawns, like shadows free to play among themselves for a few hours each night. Behind the shrubbery sounded the low-pitched murmur of radio traffic, a soft anatomy of the night.

'Give me five minutes.' Frances switched off the engine and took the brochures from me. 'Use the men's restroom – there's some expensive aftershave. Jane might spot that La Bocca pong…'

We stepped through the conservatory entrance of the former hotel. The glass-ceilinged lounge was lit by the moon, and upholstered chairs were drawn around a concert platform where dust covers concealed a grand piano. A single standard lamp shone in the central hallway. Statues of condottieri stood in their airless niches, darkness flaring in their eye sockets and nostrils.

A steward carrying a tray of glasses and a bottle of Armagnac greeted Frances and gestured towards an interior courtyard, where a dinner party was still in progress. The four remaining guests sat in shirtsleeves around a table loaded with the debris of a lavish midnight breakfast. Spent champagne bottles lay on their sides among a clutter of silver cutlery and lobster claws.

The guests were senior executives at Eden-Olympia. Besides Pascal Zander, I recognized the chairman of a German merchant bank and the chief executive of a French cable company.

The fourth man was Robert Fontaine's successor, an affable American named George Agassi, to whom I had briefly spoken in Jane's office. They were pleasantly high, but in an almost self-conscious way, as if they were members of a tontine blessed by the unexpected death of two or three of its members. An aggressive male banter crossed the night air, watched at a distance by the stewards. Only Zander was drunk, barking at a steward to light his cigar, white shirt open to the waist, its silk facings smeared with shellfish. He raised his glass to Frances when she handed the brochures to him, and opened a folder at random. As he questioned her about the property his left hand began to feel her thighs.