J.G. Ballard - Cocaine Nights

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 solemnly 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.'