J.G. Ballard - Cocaine Nights

'A young woman? No.'

'You didn't see her?' Sanger stared at my face, unsure whether to confide in me. 'Slim, with very short hair, and a gold ring in her lip, wearing a man's dressing-gown. Laurie Fox – she was staying with me during her treatment. I feel responsible for her.'

'Of course.' I searched the empty avenue. 'I'm afraid I haven't seen her. I'm sure she'll come back.'

'Perhaps. She was sitting by the pool as I prepared lunch-then she was gone. Your friend Mr Crawford was here, at your house. I see we're now to be neighbours.' Sanger gazed at the villa, his face as blanched as his silver hair. 'Crawford may have given her a lift.'

I smiled as reassuringly as I could at this troubled man, realizing for the first time the emotional appeal to women of a vulnerable psychiatrist. 'A lift? Yes, I think he might.'

'I assume so. If you see Crawford, if he telephones you, ask him to return her. I promised her father that I would help her. It's important that she take the medication I prescribed.' Sanger massaged his cheeks with one hand, trying to force the blood back into his face. 'Crawford has so many notions of his own. For him a young woman should be…'

'… free to be unhappy?'

'Exactly. But for Laurie Fox unhappiness is not a therapeutic option. I find it difficult to talk to Crawford.'

'I'd guess that he dislikes psychiatrists.'

'We've let him down. He needed our help, Mr Prentice. He still does…'

Murmuring to himself, Sanger turned away from me, slowly clapping his hands at the silent trees.

He was still wandering up and down the road as I carried my suitcases past the sparkling pool. As Elizabeth Shand had promised, a first consignment of furniture had been delivered – a black leather sofa and an elegant Eames chair, a giant television set and a double bed, mattress and linen. But the villa was still pleasingly empty, and the rooms were the white spaces of opportunity I had relished on my first visit.

After leaving my suitcases in the bedroom I strolled around the upper floor, and strayed briefly into the maid's room. From the window I watched Sanger standing on his hill and gazing bleakly at the silent swimming pool, the nightdress in his hands. No longer reflected by the calm water, the light in the compound had grown dimmer, as if its soul had slipped away across the rooftops.

The window was open, and the ash of a loosely wrapped cigarette lay on the sill. I could imagine Crawford signalling to Laurie Fox, letting the scent of cannabis drift towards this young woman entombed in her doses of Largactil. But I was no longer interested in the gloomy psychiatrist and his youthful lover. I assumed that Crawford was with her, speeding in the Porsche to one of his safe houses on the northern perimeter road, to the kind of camaraderie provided by Raissa Livingston.

I unpacked and showered, then helped myself to the tapas in the refrigerator and the Keswick sisters' courtesy bottle of champagne. Sitting on the terrace beside the pool, I looked through the selection of cards pushed through the letter slot. There were advertisements for taxi services and yacht-brokers, estate agents and investment advisers. One card, so freshly printed that its ink was damp, puffed a local mother-and-daughter massage-service – 'Dawn and Daphne, for a new sensation in massage. Deep, intimate, discreet. Will visit, 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.'

So the netherworld of the Residencia Costasol was stepping out into the sun. A mobile phone lay on the table beside me, another useful gift from Betty Shand. I guessed that Crawford had left the massage-service card, knowing that I would be intrigued. Commercial sex demanded special skills from the client as much as from the provider. Self-styled mother-and-daughter teams always made me uneasy, especially in Taipei or Seoul, where too many were real mothers and daughters. However pleasant, with 'mother' pacing the over-eager 'daughter', I often felt that I was the intermediary in an act of incest.

I pushed away the mobile phone, then raised it and dialled the number. A woman's recorded voice with a soft Lancashire accent informed me that there were vacancies that evening, and invited me to leave my telephone number. As I knew, Bobby Crawford made all things possible, assuaged all guilts and drew back the bedspread that lay over our lives and dreams.

The residencia Costasol was celebrating itself, saluting its happy return to life. From the balcony of my office on the first floor of the sports club I watched the line of carnival floats across the plaza, bedecked with flowers and bunting, cheered on by an exuberant crowd whose voices almost drowned the selections from Gilbert and Sullivan relayed from the loudspeakers along the route. A cloud of petals and confetti hung in the air over the revellers' heads, borne aloft by the lungs of the tourists drawn into the Residencia from Estrella de Mar and the resorts along the coast.

For three days all thoughts of security had been abandoned. Intrigued by the first firework displays, the visitors had parked their cars along the beach, and soon overwhelmed the guards at the gatehouse. Martin Lindsay, the retired Life Guards colonel who was the elected mayor of the Residencia Costasol, swiftly consulted his fellow-councillors and ordered the security system to shut down its computers for the duration of the festival. The Costasol Arts Fair, scheduled to last a single afternoon, was now in its second day and showed every sign of outrunning another night.

Towed by Lindsay's Range Rover, a float passed the sports club and began its circuit of the plaza. A black silk banner bearing the legend 'The Residencia Philharmonic Players' wafted above the dozen members of the orchestra, who sat at their music stands, bows working across their violins and cellos while the pianist strummed the keyboard of a white baby grand and a graceful harpist in an ivory evening gown plucked the strings of a harp decked with yellow roses. The medley of Vivaldi and Mozart struggled gamely with the cheers of the tourists raising their glasses outside the crowded cafés of the shopping mall.

Two handsome women members, still in their tennis whites, stepped from my office on to the balcony and gripped the rail, waving their rackets at another float that passed below us.

'Good God! Is that Fiona Taylor?'

'How wonderful – she's completely starkers!' Designed by the Costasol Arts Club, the float carried a mock-up of an artist's studio. Six easels stood at one end of the tableau, artists in Victorian smocks sketching away with their charcoal and crayons. A sculptor, Teddy Taylor, an ear, nose and throat specialist from Purley, worked at his clay table, fashioning a model of his decorous blonde wife. Dressed in a flesh-coloured skinsuit, she posed like Lady Godiva on a stuffed studio horse, smiling broadly at the tourists who wolf-whistled at her.

'Bobby Crawford – he's arrived!' One of the tennis ladies began to shriek, almost knocking my vodka and tonic from the rail. 'Come on, Bobby, let's see you pose!'

A newsreel location van of a Spanish TV channel kept pace with the arts float, its cameraman filming the glamorous sitter in close-up. Bobby Crawford stood behind the cameraman, steadying his arm as the convoy of vehicles turned around the plaza. Rose petals covered his blond hair and black batik shirt, and silver confetti spotted his sweating face and forehead, but he was too happy to brush them away. Grinning broadly, he waved to the tourists, toasting them with a glass of wine handed to him by a passing spectator. When the location van brushed against the float he leapt aboard, almost falling across the easels, picked himself up and embraced the beaming Fiona Taylor.

'Take it off! Bobby, you handsome sod!'

'Off, off off! Charles, order him to strip!'