Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"

Автор книги: James Graham Ballard

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Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown

A ¹discharged ²Broadmoor ³patient ⁴compiles ⁵‘Notes ⁶Towards ⁷a ⁸Mental ⁹Breakdown’ ¹⁰, recalling ¹¹his ¹²wjfe’s ¹³murder ¹⁴, his ¹⁵trial ¹⁶and ¹⁷exoneration ¹⁸.

1

The use of the indefinite article encapsulates all the ambiguities that surround the undiscovered document, Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, of which this 18-word synopsis is the only surviving fragment. Deceptively candid and straightforward, the synopsis is clearly an important clue in our understanding of the events that led to the tragic death of Judith Loughlin in her hotel bedroom at Gatwick Airport. There is no doubt that the role of the still unidentified author was a central one. The self-effacing ‘A’ must be regarded not merely as an overt attempt at evasion but, on the unconscious level, as an early intimation of the author’s desire to proclaim his guilt.

2

There is no evidence that the patient was discharged. Recent inspection of the in-patients’ records at Springfield Hospital (cf. footnote 3) indicates that Dr Robert Loughlin has been in continuous detention in the Unit of Criminal Psychopathy since his committal at Kingston Crown Court on 18 May 1975. Only one visitor has called, a former colleague at the London Clinic, the neurologist Dr James Douglas, honorary secretary of the Royal College of Physicians Flying Club. It is possible that he may have given Dr Loughlin, with his obsessional interest in manpowered flight, the illusion that he had flown from the hospital on Douglas’s back. Alternatively, ‘discharged’ may be a screen memory of the revolver shot that wounded the Gatwick security guard.

3

Unconfirmed. Dr Loughlin had at no time in his ten-year career been either a patient or a member of the staff at Broadmoor Hospital. The reference to Broadmoor must therefore be taken as an indirect admission of the author’s criminal motives or a confused plea of diminished responsibility on the grounds of temporary madness. Yet nothing suggests that Dr Loughlin considered himself either guilty of his wife’s death or at any time insane. From the remaining documents – tape-recordings made in Suite B17 of the Inn on the Park Hotel (part of the floor occupied by the millionaire aviation pioneer Howard Hughes and his entourage during a visit to London) and cine-films taken of the runways at an abandoned USAAF base near Mildenhall – it is clear that Dr Loughlin believed he was taking part in a ritual of profound spiritual significance that would release his wife forever from the tragedy of her inoperable cancer. Indeed, the inspiration for this strange psychodrama may have come from the former Broadmoor laboratory technician and amateur dramatics coach, Leonora Carrington, whom Loughlin met at Elstree Flying Club, and with whom he had a brief but significant affair.

4

A remarkable feature of Dr Loughlin’s confinement at Springfield is how little he conforms to the stereotype of ‘patient’. Most of his fellow inmates at the Unit of Criminal Psychopathy are under some form of restraint, but Loughlin’s behaviour is closer to that of a member of staff. He has informal access to all the facilities of the Unit, and with his medical training and powerful physique often stands in as an auxiliary nurse, even on occasion diagnosing minor ailments and supervising the administration of drugs. Characteristic of Loughlin is the high level of his general activity. He is forever moving about on errands, many of barely apparent significance, as if preparing for some important event in the future (or, conceivably, in the past). Much of his thought and energy is occupied by the construction of imaginary flying machines, using his bed, desk and personal cutlery. Recently, when his attempts to streamline all the furniture in the dayroom unsettled the other patients, Dr Grumman encouraged Loughlin to write about his experiences as a weekend pilot. For the first time Loughlin was prepared to consider any aspect of his past, and immediately came up with a title, Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

5

What method Dr Loughlin employed in the preparation of this document has not been revealed, or indeed whether a single word exists other than the title. Given the powerful repressive forces at work, it seems likely that the author will employ any method other than that of straightforward narration. A clue may be found in Loughlin’s previous experience as editor of the Proceedings of the Institute of Neurosurgery, and the habit of meticulous attention to editorial detail which he brought with him to Springfield. One manifestation of this obsession is his custom of annotating the books in the hospital library with copious footnotes.

Several pages of the 1972 edition of The British Pharmacopoeia Codex, particularly those referring to anti-carcinogenetic drugs, have been so annotated that every word has been footnoted with imaginary aviation references.

6

Why Loughlin chose this term, with its suggestion of a preparatory sketch, to describe the most important and traumatic events of his life remains unclear. However, it is now known that this was not the only such document that he prepared. Two years earlier, during the first of his marital difficulties, Loughlin had kept a speculative diary, describing in minute detail the events of his personal and professional life. It seems that he was already aware of the erratic nature of his behaviour and of the recurrent fugues, each lasting several days, from which he would emerge in an increasingly dissociated state. At one point, after his wife’s first nervous collapse, Loughlin secretly hired a private investigator to follow him, posing as her lover. Mr R. W. Butterworth of the Advance Detection Agency testified at Kingston Crown Court that he followed Loughlin and Leonora Carrington as they drove at random around eastern Suffolk, visiting one abandoned airfield after another. In his February 1975 Diaries (a few weeks before his wife’s death) Loughlin describes his attempt to hire the main No .2 runway at London Airport: "’Don’t you understand, man, I only need it for half an hour. There’s a special cargo going out." Airport manager totally baffled. "What, for heaven’s sake?" But I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t know then.’

7

Implicit in Loughlin’s use of the preposition is the sense that he deliberately moved to meet his breakdown, constructing it of his own volition. This is confirmed by his behaviour in the months leading to his wife’s death. Loughlin appears to have decided on a radically new course of action to save his wife, literally within the extreme metaphor of his own insanity. His wife’s subsequent murder, his own breakdown and the entire period of his incarceration at Springfield must thus be regarded as a terminal metaphor, a labyrinth building itself from within which he began at last to unravel by writing Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

8

Again (cf. footnote 1) the use of the indefinite article underlines Loughlin’s distance from his own crisis, which he now (January 1975) regarded as a complex of events and possibilities existing outside himself. Leaving his wife who was bedridden in their Hendon apartment, cared for by Dr Douglas, her old friend and former lover – Loughlin embarked on a series of extended excursions around London and the Home Counties. Usually accompanied by Leonora Carrington, he visited the Mullard radio-observatory near Cambridge and the huge complex of early warning radar installations on the Suffolk coast. For some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination. All these he seems to have approached as the constituents of ‘A’ mental breakdown which he might choose to recruit at a later date.

9

How far the events of this period (January to March 1975) were mentalised by Loughlin is hard to decide. To some extent all the factors surrounding Judith Loughlin’s death – even the identity of her husband – may be said to be fictions of an over-worked imagination, as meaningless and as meaningful as the elaborate footnotes in BP Codex. Was Judith Loughlin suffering from cancer of the pancreas? What was the role of the young lexicographer and icedance champion, Richard Northrop, whom Loughlin treated at the London Clinic for migraine? The unmistakable elements of some kind of homo-erotic involvement hover in the background of their relationship. It may be that the apparent physical closeness of the two men masks the fact that they were one and the same man. Their holiday together, the three distressing weeks spent at the Gatwick hotel, and the shot fired at the airport security guard, inevitably recall Rimbaud and Verlaine, but Loughlin may well have passed the time there on his own waiting for his wife to appear with her lover, devising the identity of the lexicographer as a psychic ‘detonator’. It is known that he spent much of his spare time stumbling around the airport ice rink.

10

A vital role seems to have been played during these last days by the series of paintings by Max Ernst entitled Garden Airplane Traps, pictures of low walls, like the brick-courses of an uncompleted maze, across which long wings have crashed, from whose joints visceral growths are blossoming. In the last entry of his diary, the day before his wife’s death, 27 March 1975, Loughlin wrote with deceptive calm: ‘Ernst said it all in his comment on these paintings, the model for everything I’ve tried to do…

“Voracious gardens in turn devoured by a vegetation which springs from the debris of trapped airplanes… Everything is astonishing, beart-breaking and possible… with my eyes I see the nymph Echo…”

Shortly before writing out these lines he had returned to his Hendon apartment to find that his wife had set off for Gatwick Airport with Dr Douglas, intending to catch the 3.15 p.m. flight to Geneva the following day. After calling Richard Northrop, Loughlin drove straight to Elstree Flying Club.

11

The extent to which Loughlin retains any real ‘recall’ of the events leading to his wife’s death is doubtful. On occasions his memory is lucid and unbroken, but it soon becomes evident that he has re-mythologised the entire episode at Gatwick, as revealed in the following taped conversation between himself and Dr Grumman.

GRUMMAN: You say that you then drove to Elstree. Why?

LOUGHLIN: I had rented an aircraft there – a Piper Twin Comanche.

GRUMMAN: I see. Anyway, you then flew across London and on down to Gatwick, where you paralysed the airport for an hour by buzzing all the BEA jets parked on the ground.

LOUGHLIN: I knew that if I could find Judith’s plane I could somehow fuse my aircraft with hers, in a kind of transfiguring

GRUMMAN: …crash? But why?

LOUGHLIN: I was convinced that I could fly her to safety. It was the only way she would survive her cancer.

GRUMMAN: What actually happened?

LOUGHLIN: I landed and skidded into the nose-wheel of a VC1O. Richard Northrop pulled me out. We had some sort of disagreement – he resented my dependence on him, and my involvement with Judith – and then the security guard was accidentally shot.

12

Although there is no doubt that Judith Loughlin had been married to her husband for three years, their relationship was never close, and she in no way could be regarded as ‘his’. Before her marriage she had been involved in a longstanding liaison with Dr Douglas, whom she continued to see even after the latter’s engagement and marriage in 1974. A successful barrister, self-willed and ambitious, she found herself increasingly unsympathetic towards Loughlin’s erratic mental behaviour and incipient alcoholism. It is almost certain that but for her death she would have divorced Loughlin the following year. Viewing her charitably, one may say that her actions that fatal afternoon in the bathroom of her Gatwick hotel had been provoked by years of marital unhappiness.

13

Careful reconstruction of the events surrounding the murder of Judith Loughlin on 28 March 1975, indicates that she had arrived at Gatwick with Dr Douglas the previous day. They passed the night in room 117 of the Skyport Hotel, intending to take the 3.15 p.m. flight to Geneva the following afternoon. It was while they were having lunch in the hotel restaurant that Loughlin appeared at the airport, already in an extreme state of alcoholic distress. He began a futile search among the parked airliners for the Trident jet then being prepared for the 3.15 flight, possibly intending to hijack the plane or even to blow it up with himself aboard. In the course of this search the security guard was shot. Loughlin then made his way to the Skyport Hotel, and by some ruse located and entered his wife’s room. Befuddled by a heavy overdose of alcohol and amphetamines, he decided to revive himself in a bath of cold water. He was lying unconscious in the bath, fully clothed, when Judith Loughlin returned alone to her room after lunch.

14

All the evidence collected indicates that Judith Loughlin’s decision to murder her husband was a sudden response to the sight of him slumped unconscious in her bath. Shocked by the damage he had done to the room – in his rage Loughlin had torn apart Dr Douglas’s clothes and suitcases – she apparently decided to put an end to the sufferings of this unhappy man. Unfortunately she had reckoned neither with Loughlin’s powerful physique – the moment she pressed his head below the bath water he leapt up and seized her – nor with the total transformation that had taken place within her husband’s mind. Already he seems to have decided that she was leaving him only in the sense that she was dying of pancreatic cancer, and that he might save her by constructing a unique flying machine.

15

Questions as to the exact person indicated by this pronoun have been raised since the moment Loughlin was rescued from the fire blazing in room 117. It was first assumed from the ravings of the injured man that he was an airline pilot. He was sitting on the burning bed in the tandem position behind the charred body of a similarly seated woman, as if giving her pilot tuition. His wife had been forcibly trussed into a flying suit and wore helmet and goggles. She was identified by the double-helix of her intra-uterine device. Thanks to his sodden clothes, only Loughlin’s hands and feet had been burned. The furniture in the room had been arranged to form a rough representation of an aircraft, perhaps inspired by the elaborate aeronautical motifs in the bedroom decor.

16

Not surprisingly, the trial exposed all the contradictions inherent in this puzzling case. Questions as to ‘Loughlin’s’ identity continued to be raised. There was no evidence that he was a qualified pilot, though a Private Pilot’s Licence in his name was found in a locker at Elstree Flying Club, perhaps left there as part of a false identity carefully fabricated by him. Certainly he was obsessed with aviation, as his use of aircraft manufacturers’ names for his medical colleagues indicates. Nor was there any real confirmation that he was a physician, particularly when we consider his lavish use of meaningless pseudo-medicalese (e.g. ‘serotonin ¹⁹and ²⁰protein-reaction ²¹suppressor ²²m.v.d. ²³’ etc.).

17

This afterthought, attached to the previous 16 words with their apparently straightforward description of the events leading up to his trial, almost certainly indicates the author’s real intent in compiling his ambiguous history.

18

The author’s evident conviction of his own innocence, like his earlier belief that he had been discharged from hospital, may be taken as an expression of hope for the future. Meanwhile he continues with his busy round of activities in the Unit of Criminal Psychopathy, constructing his bizarre ‘aircraft’ and tirelessly editing the footnotes with which he has annotated so many of the medical textbooks in the library. Ultimately the entire stock will have been provided with a unique gloss. As all these books are out-of-date, like the 1972 BP Codex, little harm is done. Most of his complex annotations have been shown to be complete fictions, an endlessly unravelling web of imaginary research work, medical personalities and the convoluted and sometimes tragic interrelationships of their private lives. Occasionally, however, they describe with unusual clarity a sequence of events that might almost have taken place. The patient seems trapped between what his psychiatrists call ‘paradoxical faces’, each image of himself in the mirror reinforcing that in the glass behind him. The separation of the two will only be achieved by the appearance of the as yet incomplete document Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, of which we possess only an 18-word synopsis and its set of footnotes. It seems possible that although the synopsis conceals a maze of lies and distortions, it is a simple and incontrovertible statement of the truth.

1976

The 60 Minute Zoom

2.15 P.M.

Lioret de Mar, Apartamentos California

I am looking into a silent world. Through the viewfinder of this cinecamera, set at its maximum field, I can see the Hotel Coral Playa three hundred yards along the beach, covered by a desert light so glazed that it would embalm Pharoah. It’s incredible that the sea is only a few feet to the right of frame – with this dense powdery light we could be at Karnak, in that tourist hotel by the necropolis where Helen befriended her Stuttgart dentist and first set in train this epic of the amateur camera. The ultimate home movie, perhaps, but so far everything has gone well, thanks to $2500’s worth of Nikon Zoomatic and an obliging Barcelona camera specialist. Renting this apartment was the only difficult moment delivering a second key to my door, did the suspicious Swedish manager catch a glimpse of the complex tripods and clamps I was assembling by the bedroom window? Like the barbette of some sinister assassination weapon, which it is in a way. But this second-rate apartment building provides the only suitable vantage point. The fifteen-storey faade of the Coral Playa must exactly fill the opening sequence – in an hour the automatic zoom will carry me along the carretera, past the hundreds of parked cars and beached speedboats, to within three feet of my target within the bedroom of our tenth-floor hotel suite. A miracle of Japanese lens-cutting. Thinking of the electrifying image, worthy of Bergman or Polanski, that will be the climax of this film almost derails my mind. I listen to the faint susurrus of the zoom motor, the sound of well-bred Osaka matrons at a flowerarrangement course. Despite everything, the degrading but exciting months of anger and suspicion, I feel the first hint of an erection.

2.19 P.M.

Already I am closer to the Coral Playa, the equivalent of perhaps 200 yards away. For the first time I can pick out our own suite, Helen’s black water-skis arranged like runes on the balcony. Now and then something flicks through the afternoon light, a bottle-top or cigarette packet flung from one of the unseen apartment blocks on the left. Lying here on a raised couch in the darkened bedroom, it is hard to believe that the Coral Playa exists at all except as a figment of this view-finder. But the rectilinear faade of the hotel is sharper. The fifteen floors are each taking on a separate identity. There are differences of tone, subtle declensions of balcony geometry that hint at the personalities of the people behind them. The varying angles of the shutters, the beach umbrellas and bikinis hanging on improvised lines, constitute an elaborate personal notation, a complex of ciphers that would send a semiologist into trance. Almost no sky surrounds the hotel, and half the lurid electrographic sign on the roof has been cut away. The image of the hotel’s faade, its 150 balconies, is an increasingly abstract entity. As yet there is no sign of movement Helen will still be on the bed where I left her, a towel around her head, reading her shower-damp copy of American Vogue as I set off ostensibly for Barcelona. The guests are still finishing their gaspacho and paella in the hotel restaurant. In the main ground-floor entrance I can identify several of my neighbours sitting in the armchairs and talking to the lobby clerks. They resemble bored marionettes, unable to sustain their roles in this drama in which I have cast them. My main concern is with the two balconies of our suite and the cluster of adjacent rooms. Already the dark interiors are beginning to lighten, I can just distinguish the internal doors that lead to bathrooms and corridors Wait… While my attention is fixed on my own bedroom, impatient for Helen to make her first appearance as the star of this film, I almost fail to notice that a man in a red bath-robe is standing on a balcony five floors above. An American journalist named Anderson, he is looking down at the entrance drive, where a black Mustang has pulled into one of the diagonal parking spaces. The over-heated carapace is about to flow like tar, and for a moment I am too distracted to notice the young man hefting flippers and snorkel from the rear seat. Rademaekers! Panicking, I realize that the young Danish heart surgeon has returned half an hour earlier than I estimated. My zoom may close in on a shot bolt!

2.24 P.M.

I have calmed myself, straightened the damaged blind and re-aligned the tripod. In the last few minutes the scene before me has been totally transformed. Rademaekers has gone straight to the American’s room, where he wanders about gesticulating with the flippers. Drink in hand, he seems unlikely to be visiting Helen in the next hour. The Nikon purrs smoothly, carrying me ever nearer the Coral Playa. Little more than an apparent hundred yards from me, the hotel has become a hive of activity as the guests return from the dining room and prepare for siesta. Already I recognize dozens of my neighbours in their bedrooms, the men taking off their shoes, the women testing the beachtowels on the balconies and examining their teeth in the dressing-table mirrors. These commonplace but almost meaningless activities have an extraordinary fascination, for years I have watched them in a hundred hotels. But now I am glad that Helen has failed to make her entrance. With her entrenched rationality, her over-calculated approach to life in general and the needs of her sexuality in particular, she has always failed to understand the real significance of my obsession with the private behaviour of my neighbours. She cannot grasp that this aimless minor traffic around their bodies, the applications of sun-oil, the dabbing of scent into this or that fossa, represent a continuing authentication of their physical selves, a non-vocal gossip about their armpits and pudenda that no kinaesthetic language, beyond those provided by the instructions on a deodorant or lady-shaver, has yet been found to express. Fifty units of intense private activity, they edge closer to me. On the second floor the young wife of a Marseilles lawyer undresses to reveal a breastless brown body like a catamite’s, sits in bed with the sheet over her knees forming a white pyramid, a geometry of remarkable chasteness from which I move my eyes only when I notice that, at last, the central balcony of the film has been mounted by my wife.

2.28 P.M.

A shame that there is no sound-track. Rather than the Polanski or Fellini of the home movie I shall have to become its D. W. Griffith. With his architectural obsessions he would have appreciated the special merits of this film. I am now looking at the faade of the Coral Playa from a distance of fifty yards. Haifa dozen floors are visible, a cluster of balconies at whose centre stands my wife. Wayward and erotic, faithless spouse but excellent travelling companion, she is gazing, uncannily, straight towards my camera. The powdery light has cleared, and every detail of the hotel is exposed with the vividness of an hallucination – the rust stains leaking from the balcony rails, the drying swimsuits and discarded paperbacks on the balcony tables, the unfamiliar brands of towel picked up in some provincial Mono-Prix. Oblivious of this plethora of detail swarming around her, Helen is brushing her hair with a reflex hand, revealing the strong muscles of her neck and making the greatest play with her profile for the benefit of the audience watching her from the balconies above and below. For all this attention, she is dressed discreetly in my white towelling robe, no doubt a signal to someone in my absence. Moving my eyes from her, I notice that on the surrounding balconies stands the full complement of her admirers, that troupe of beach-partners, one of whom will play the supporting role in this film. Penelope with her suitors, and I with my Nikon-bow. Even the ever-faithful Argus is there in the bedroom behind her, the dented but still inflated rubber sea-lion which Helen bought me, with cruel irony, two years ago at Venice Lido, and which I, refusing to be outdone, have cared for devotedly ever since, much to her exasperation…

2.32 P.M.

Helen has loosened my beach-robe, exposing the entire upper hemisphere of her right breast. There is a quickening of heads and eyes. I feel a familiar surge of excitement as I make a last inventory of my rivals. Rademaekers, the pedantic Danish surgeon who took her snorkelling yesterday, has returned to his room three floors diagonally above ours. Even as he hunts for a clean shirt in his wardrobe he is still holding one of the flippers, like a sea-born land creature clinging obsessively to an obsolete organ. I eliminate him, and move to his neighbour, a thirty-year-old Brighton antique dealer, whose speedboat, during our first week, sat reversing in the shallows ten yards from the beach where Helen and I lay under our umbrellas. Engaging but unscrupulous, he too is taking in his opposition principally Fradier, the Paris comic-strip publisher two floors above, leaning on his balcony rail beside his attractive wife while openly admiring Helen. But Fradier is moving out of frame, and by the logic of this film can be dropped from the cast-list. As the camera moves nearer I approach the main stage of this vertical drama – a tier of fifteen balconies distributed among five floors, Helen at the centre. Two floors below her, bare-chested in the fierce sunlight, is a minor Italian film actor who arrived only yesterday, bringing with him an anthology of dubious sexual techniques which he had already displayed for Helen in the hotel bar after dinner. His profession would make him my chief suspect, but he too is about to move out of frame, exiting from this reductive fable.

Helen is scrutinizing her eyes in a lacquered hand-mirror. She plucks a stray hair from her brow-line with the ruthlessness she always applies to her own body. Even thirty feet away, hovering in the air like an invisible angel, I find this violence unnerving. I realize that I have only been fully at ease with my wife while watching her through the viewfinder of a camera – even within the private space of our various hotel rooms I prefer her seen through a lens, emblematic of my own needs and fantasies rather than existing in her own right. At one time this rightly outraged her, but recently she has begun to play along with my obsession. For hours I watch her, picking her nose and arguing with me about something as I lie on the bed with a camera to my eye, fascinated by the shifting geometries of her thighs and shoulders, the diagrams of her face.

Helen has left the balcony. She tosses the mirror on to the bed, gazes with a pensive frown at the fading but still cheerful expression on the face of the sea-lion, and walks straight through the suite to the front door. Almost before I stifle a shout she has disappeared into the corridor. For the moment I am paralysed. Under my beach-robe she is naked.

2.36 P.M.

Where is she? The camera is closing with the Coral Playa at an unsettling speed. I wonder if the Nikon engineers have at last over-reached themselves. I seem to be no more than ten feet from the faade of the hotel, I can almost reach out and touch the balconies. Only three of the suites are now in frame, our own sandwiched between the Lawrences above us, an affable English couple from Manchester, and a forty-year-old Irish pharmacologist below with whom we have made no contact. These three have involuntarily gate-crashed their way into my film. Meanwhile Helen could be anywhere in the hotel, with Rademaekers or the antique dealer, even with the comic-strip publisher if Mme Fradier has left for the beach. Fumbling with the tripod, I am about to realign the camera when Helen reappears, standing in the centre of the Lawrences’ sitting room. Barefoot, hands in the pockets of my white beach-robe, she is talking to Lawrence, a handsome, sandy-haired accountant wearing nothing more than a string swim-slip over his ample crutch. But where is his wife? Is she in the hotel pool, or hidden from me by the lowered bedroom shutter, joining in the conversation through the open door? Confused by this unlikely tryst, I am ready to stop the camera when Lawrence and Helen embrace. I catch my breath, but their kiss is merely a light peck. With a wave, Helen takes a magazine from him and steps into the corridor. Thirty seconds later, as Lawrence wanders around the sitting room patting his groin, Helen re-enters our suite. After a pause, she leaves the door ajar. Her actions are calm and unrushed, but totally conspiratorial. With aching relief, my loins are at full cock long before the heavily built figure of the Irish pharmacologist steps deferentially into the sitting room and locks the door behind him.

2.42 P.M.

Reverie of pain, lust and, above all, child-like hate, in which the slights and antagonisms of a lifetime are subsumed in this unresolvable confrontation between fear and desire, the need and refusal to face the basilisk stare of Helen’s sexuality… all these modulated by the logic of the zoom, by the geometries of balconies and the laminated gleam of a fashion magazine on a white sheet, the terrifying reductive authority of the encroaching lens. By now the entire frame of the viewfinder is filled by our hotel suite, I seem to be no more than three feet from the nearer of the two balconies, watching Helen and her lover like a theatre-goer in a front stall. So close am I that I fully expect them to incorporate me in their dialogue. Still wearing my beach-robe, Helen strolls around the sitting room, talking away matter-of-factly as if demonstrating a new domestic appliance to a customer. The pharmacologist sits on the white plastic settee, listening to her in an agreeable way. There is an unforced casualness, a degree of indifference so marked that it is hard to believe they are about to copulate on my bed. Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and the two figures have an increasingly abstract relationship to each other, and to the rectilinear forms of the settee, walls and ceiling. In this context almost anything is possible, their movements are a series of postural equations that must have some significance other than their apparent one. As the man lounges back Helen slips off my robe and stands naked in front of him, pointing to the burn marks left by her shoulder straps.