J.G. Ballard - Cocaine Nights

'You're right. Paula Hamilton will soon have to move to Marbella. Where to now?'

I waited for him to reply, but he had momentarily fallen asleep, head almost on my shoulder. As a child Frank had often slept against me while I did my homework. With his unlined face and blond eyebrows, Crawford resembled a large adolescent boy, and I imagined him playing in the precincts of Ely Cathedral, innocent and visionary eyes already gazing beyond the flat fenland to the waiting world beyond.

He woke with a grimace, surprised that he had slept. 'Charles, I'm sorry… I dropped off.'

'You look tired. Sleep here – I'll walk myself around the block.'

'We'll move on. One last call.' He lay back, rallying himself with an effort. 'It's been hard work – out every night, some close shaves too. If Cabrera catches me…'

'Bobby, relax and go back to Estrella de Mar. Everything's up and running here.'

'No… I can't leave them yet.' He rubbed his eyes and cheeks, forcing the blood back into his facial muscles, and then turned to face me. 'Well, Charles, you know what's going on. Are you with me?'

'I'm running the club. Or going through the motions.'

'I mean the complex as a whole. The larger scheme of things.' Crawford spoke slowly, listening to his own words. 'It's a noble project – Frank understood that.'

'I'm still not sure.' I switched off the engine and gripped the wheel, trying to steady myself. 'I shouldn't really be here. It's difficult to see what lies in store.'

'Nothing. You've seen it all, at Estrella de Mar and now the Residencia. You haven't grasped it yet, but you're sitting in an outpost of the next century.'

'Massage parlours, gambling, and ten thousand lines of cocaine? It sounds rather old-fashioned. All you need next is rampant inflation and deficit financing.'

'Charles…' Crawford took my hands from the steering wheel, as if even the stationary car was too much for my confused view of the road ahead. 'A real community has created itself here. It rose spontaneously out of people's lives.'

'Then why the drugs and burglaries and whoring? Why not step back and let everyone get on with it?'

'I wish I could.' Almost despairingly, Crawford stared at the villas that surrounded us in the residential avenue. 'People are like children, they need constant stimulation. Without that the whole thing runs down. Only crime, or something close to crime, seems to stir them. They realize that they need each other, that together they're more than the sum of their parts. There has to be that constant personal threat.'

'Like Londoners in the Blitz? Wartime camaraderie?'

'Exactly. After all, war is a kind of crime. There's nothing like finding someone else's shit in your swimming pool. Before you know it you've joined the neighbourhood watch scheme and taken your old violin out of its case. Your wife starts fucking you with real pleasure for the first time in yean. It works, Charles 'But it's a fierce recipe. Isn't there any other way? You could preach to them, become the Savonarola of the Costa del Sol.'

'I've tried it.' Crawford gazed glumly at himself in the rear-view mirror. 'No Messiah can compete with the siesta hour. Crime has a respectable history – Shakespeare's London, Medici Florence. Warrens of murder, poisons and garrotting. Name me a time when civic pride and the arts both flourished and there wasn't extensive crime.'

'Ancient Athens? Mathematics, architecture and the state as political philosophy. Was the Acropolis crawling with pimps and pickpockets?'

'No, but the Greeks had slavery and pederasty.'

'And we have satellite television. If you left Estrella de Mar crime would appear spontaneously. This coast is a hotbed of petty criminals and crooked politicians.'

'But they're Spanish and Maghrebian. The Mediterranean shoreline is a foreign country to them. The real natives of the Costa del Sol are the British and French and Germans. Honest and law-abiding to the last man, woman and Rottweiler. Even the East End crooks grow honest when they settle here.' Aware of the stale sweat rising from his clothes, Crawford turned on the car's fan. 'Trust me, Charles. I need your help.'

'You've… got it. So far.'

'Good. I want you to keep running the club. I know you have time on your hands, and I'd like you to expand a little.'

'My kung fu is pretty rusty.'

'Not kung fu. I'd like you to start a film club.'

'Nothing easier. There's a video-rental store in the shopping mall with a good classics selection. I'll order a hundred copies of The Battleship Potemkin.'

Crawford closed his eyes to the thought. 'That's not the kind of club I have in mind. People have to learn to switch off their TV sets. I want a club where people make their own films, learn how to storyboard a narrative, how to handle close-ups, dollies, pans and tracking shots. Film is the way we see our world, Charles. There are two retired cameramen living here who worked on British features for years. There's also a husband and wife documentary team – they can teach film classes. I want you to be the producer, keep an overview of everything, steer funding to the right places. Betty Shand is keen to support the arts. So much is happening, and it needs to be recorded.'

I watched him expand on this luminous project, genuinely unaware that an accurate documentary about the Residencia Costasol would be the single greatest testimony against him at his trial, and send him to Zarzuella jail for the next thirty yean. I thought of the porno-film he had helped to make at his apartment, and guessed that he had something similar in mind, part of that web of corruption he was spinning across the people of the complex.

'I understand… vaguely. What's the subject of these films?'

'Life in the Residencia. What else? There's a kind of amnesia at work here-an amnesia of self. People literally forget who they are. The camera lens needs to be their memory.'

'Well…' I was still doubtful, reluctant to find myself running a pornographic film company. But I needed to enter the innermost circle of the criminal syndicate controlled by Elizabeth Shand, Crawford and David Hennessy if I were to find the arsonist responsible for the Hollinger fire. 'I'll give it a go. There must be a few professional film actors living here. I'll ask around at the club.'

'Forget the professionals. They're less flexible than amateurs. In point of fact, I have someone in mind.' Crawford sat forward and switched on the wipers and window-wash, clearing the morning's accumulated debris from our view. He had recovered his energies, as if he needed to touch bottom before springing to the surface. 'She's going to be a great star, Charles. As it happens, she lives next door to the house I've found for you. We'll drive there now. I know you'll be intrigued – she's very much your sort of woman He turned the ignition key and waited for me to move off, smiling like the bruised and boyish visionary who had ransacked his schoolmates' lockers, leaving behind a treasure of incitement and desire.

'Your new home, Charles. Take a look. Handsome, isn't it?'

'Very. Are you going to burgle it?'

'Only when you've settled in. You'll be happy here. I want to get you away from the Club Nautico. Sometimes one can have too many memories.'

We approached the gates of an untenanted villa in a quiet residential avenue three hundred yards to the west of the central plaza. An estate office's signpost impaled the square of yellowing grass beside the empty swimming pool. Unoccupied since its construction, the house seemed almost ghostly in its faded newness, haunted by the human occupants who had never lived in its vacant rooms but left their imprints like patches of fog on an exposed photographic film.

'It's an imposing place,' I commented as we stepped from the car. 'Why has no one lived here?'