Cocaine Nights. J. G. Ballard

remain British for ever.’

      I had begun to think about Frank, who remained British but in a Spanish cell. As I joined the line of waiting cars I remembered our childhood in Saudi Arabia twenty years earlier, and the arbitrary traffic checks carried out by the religious police in the weeks before Christmas. Not only was the smallest drop of festive alcohol the target of their silky hands, but even a single sheet of seasonal wrapping paper with its sinister emblems of Yule logs, holly and ivy. Frank and I would sit in the back of our father’s Chevrolet, clutching the train sets that would be wrapped only minutes before we opened them, while he argued with the police in his sarcastic professorial Arabic, unsettling our nervous mother.

      Smuggling was one activity we had practised from an early age. The older boys at the English school in Riyadh talked among themselves about an intriguing netherworld of bootleg videos, drugs and illicit sex. Later, when we returned to England after our mother’s death, I realized that these small conspiracies had kept the British expats together and given them their sense of community. Without the liaisons and contraband runs our mother would have lost her slipping hold on the world long before the tragic afternoon when she climbed to the roof of the British Institute and made her brief flight to the only safety she could find.

      At last the traffic had begun to move, lurching forward in a noisy rush. But the mud-stained van in front of me was still detained by the Guardia Civil. A soldier opened the rear doors and hunted through cardboard cartons filled with plastic dolls. His heavy hands fumbled among the pinkly naked bodies, watched by hundreds of rocking blue eyes.

      Irritated by the delay, I was tempted to drive around the van. Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating. Intrigued by her lazy sexual confidence, I smiled as she fingered her mascara and lightly brushed the undersides of her eyelashes like an indolent lover. Who was she – a nightclub cashier, a property tycoon’s mistress, or a local prostitute returning to La Linea with a fresh stock of condoms and sex aids?

      She noticed me watching her in my rear-view mirror and snapped down her sun vizor, waking both of us from this dream of herself. She swung the steering wheel and pulled out to pass me, baring her strong teeth as she slipped below a no-entry sign.

      I started my engine and was about to follow her, but the soldier fumbling among the plastic dolls turned to bellow at me.

      ‘Acceso prohibido …!’

      He leaned against my windshield, a greasy hand smearing the glass, and saluted the young woman, who was turning into the police car park beside the checkpoint. He glared down at me, nodding to himself and clearly convinced that he had caught a lecherous tourist in the act of visually molesting the wife of his commanding officer. He moodily flicked through the pages of my passport, unimpressed by the gallery of customs stamps and visas from the remotest corners of the globe. Each frontier crossing was a unique transaction that defused the magic of any other.

      I waited for him to order me from the car and carry out an aggressive body-search, before settling down to dismande the entire Renault until it lay beside the road like a manufacturer’s display kit. But he had lost interest in me, his spare eye noticing a coach filled with migrant Moroccan workers who had taken the ferry from Tangier. Abandoning his search of the van and its cargo of dolls, he advanced upon the stoical Arabs with all the menace and dignity of Rodrigo Diaz out-staring the MOOR at the Battle of Valencia.

      I followed the van as it sped towards La Linea, rear doors swinging and the dolls dancing together with their feet in the air. Even the briefest confrontation with police at a border crossing had the same disorienting effect on me. I imagined Frank in the interrogation cells in Marbella at that very moment, faced with the same accusing eyes and the same assumption of guilt. I was a virtually innocent traveller, carrying no contraband other than a daydream of smuggling my brother across the Spanish frontier, yet I felt as uneasy as a prisoner breaking his parole, and I knew how Frank would have responded to the trumped-up charges that had led to his arrest at the Club Nautico in Estrella de Mar. I was certain of his innocence and guessed that he had been framed on the orders of some corrupt police chief who had tried to extort a bribe.

      I left the eastern outskirts of La Linea and set off along the coast road towards Sotogrande, impatient to see Frank and reassure him that all would be well. The call from David Hennessy, the retired Lloyd’s underwriter who was now the treasurer of the Club Nautico, had reached me in my Barbican flat the previous evening. Hennessy had been disturbingly vague, as if rambling to himself after too much sun and sangria, the last person to inspire confidence.

      ‘It does look rather bad … Frank told me not to worry you, but I felt I had to call.’

      ‘Thank God you did. Is he actually under arrest? Have you told the British Consul in Marbella?’

      ‘Malaga, yes. The Consul’s closely involved. It’s an important case, I’m surprised you didn’t read about it.’

      ‘I’ve been abroad. I haven’t seen an English paper for weeks. In Lhasa there’s not much demand for news about the Costa del Sol.’

      ‘I dare say. The Fleet Street reporters were all over the club. We had to close the bar, you know.’

      ‘Never mind the bar!’ I tried to get a grip on the conversation. ‘Is Frank all right? Where are they holding him?’

      ‘He’s fine. On the whole he’s taking it well. He’s very quiet, though that’s understandable. He has a lot to think over.’

      ‘But what are the charges? Mr Hennessy …?’

      ‘Charges?’ There was a pause as ice-cubes rattled. ‘There seem to be a number. The Spanish prosecutor is drawing up the articles of accusation. We’ll have to wait for them to be translated. I’m afraid the police aren’t being very helpful.’

      ‘Do you expect them to be? It sounds like a frame-up.’

      ‘It’s not as simple as that … one has to see it in context. I think you should come down here as soon as you can.’

      Hennessy had been professionally vague, presumably to protect the Club Nautico, one of the more exclusive sports complexes on the Costa del Sol, which no doubt depended for its security on regular cash disbursements to the local constabulary. I could well imagine Frank, in his quizzical way, forgetting to slip the padded manila envelope into the right hands, curious to see what might result, or omitting to offer his best suite to a visiting commandant of police.

      Parking fines, building-code infringements, an illegally-sited swimming pool, perhaps the innocent purchase from a dodgy dealer of a stolen Range Rover – any of these could have led to his arrest. I sped along the open road towards Sotogrande, as a sluggish sea lapped at the chocolate sand of the deserted beaches. The coastal strip was a nondescript plain of market gardens, tractor depots and villa projects. I passed a half-completed Aquapark, its excavated lakes like lunar craters, and a disused nightclub on an artificial hill, the domed roof resembling a small observatory.

      The mountains had withdrawn from the sea, keeping their distance a mile inland. Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer. White-walled Andalucian pueblos presided over the greens and fairways, fortified villages guarding their pastures, but in fact these miniature townships were purpose-built villa complexes financed by Swiss and German property speculators, the winter homes not of local shepherds but of Düsseldorf ad-men and Zürich television executives.

      Along most of the Mediterranean’s resort coasts the mountains came down to the sea, as at the Côte d’Azur or the Ligurian Riviera near Genoa, and the tourist towns nestled in sheltered bays. But the Costa del Sol lacked even the rudiments of scenic or architectural charm. Sotogrande, I discovered, was a town without either centre or suburbs, and seemed to be little more than a dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools. Three miles to its east I passed an elegant apartment building standing on a scrubby bend of the coastal road, the mock-Roman columns and white porticos apparently imported from Las Vegas after a hotel clearance sale, reversing the export to Florida and California