The Half Life of Stars (12 page)

‘Morning, Claire. You sleep OK?’

I wasn’t expecting anyone to be up yet, but Tess is already making pancakes in the kitchen.

‘I love pancakes, don’t you? They’re the best. I could eat this entire stack if you let me. Here, let me fix you some coffee.’

I don’t say anything. It’s just her and me. I sit down.

‘Sorry about last night,’ she says, sweetly. ‘I can be a bit full-on when you first meet me. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’m actually a very shy type of person. I’m hoping the breast augmentation will help out with that. You know, showcase the true inner me.’

She smiles, hands me a cracked mug of coffee.

‘Well, that’s OK.,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry. And thanks, you know, for…’

‘…the hot wax?’

I nod.

‘Sure, no problem. Did it hurt?’

‘Yeah, it did. A little bit.’

She grins. She has some advice.

‘So, you might want to think about taking a Valium the next time. Just ask me. Whenever. I’ve got plenty. When I get my bikini line waxed I always make sure to take a couple of Valium before they start. You have to try it, it’s fantastic. They could whip off both your eyebrows and all your ass hair while they were at it. You’d barely feel a thing.’

Tess piles half a dozen sweet smelling pancakes on to my plate, loads me up with blueberries and a generous slug of maple syrup, and sprinkles the dish with sugar and cinnamon. She watches
me intently, she’s keen to know what I think.

‘They’re delicious,’ I say, meaning it. ‘Really, they’re very, very good.’

‘I know,’ she says, contentedly. ‘I’m a great cook. It’s part of what Huey loves so much about me. It’s weird, though, him and me,’ she says fixing herself a plate. ‘The two of us are always arguing with each other. We’re always splitting up and getting back together again. Once a month at least, sometimes twice. Huey says I annoy him, which is rich, you know what I’m saying? Because
he’s
the one that annoys me.’

‘The bald thing?’

‘No.’

‘The hat thing?’

‘No.’

‘The noise? The chattering teeth?’

‘No, not so much.’

She narrows her eyes.

‘I’d have to say, if I had to pick one thing, it’s more the way that he likes to do anal all of the time. In all of my years, of
all
the men I’ve slept with, I’ve never met a guy so into anal.’

‘Right, uh…I see.’

‘Then, of course, there’s his taste in music. He’s crazy for modern jazz, like Michael is, right? And I can’t stand the stuff, never could. Why not have a tune? Would it kill them? Would it kill them to put the notes into some kind of an agreeable order?’

I shake my head. I don’t think it would.

‘Anyway,’ she says, popping a blueberry into her mouth, ‘despite all of that, the jazz and the anal and the coupons and everything…’

‘The coupons?’

‘Huey collects coupons. He has a drawer full of them. Money off of soup, soap, foot spray, sanitary towels…there’s nothing you can think of to buy, that Huey won’t have a coupon for it somewhere. I can hardly stand to go shopping with him any more. It takes him so long to sort through them.’

‘Wow, that must be…’

‘Annoying, right? It’s annoying. But I still happen to think that we’re soul mates. I still happen to think we’re meant to be. Must be the same with you and Michael. I mean, divorcing and getting back together all over again. You must have something special, the two of you, like Elizabeth Taylor and…?’

‘Richard Burton?’

‘Yeah,
right
. Richard Burton. I loved him in
The Godfather
, didn’t you? He was
so
good-looking when he was younger. It’s such a shame he let himself get fat. He was gross, right? Totally gross.’

Tess sighs hard and lays down her fork. Apart from the blueberry and a dab of syrup that she’s licked off her index finger, she’s barely taken a bite. She rubs her stomach, indicating that she’s full and throws her uneaten pancakes into the bin. She immediately sets about making fresh batter: for Huey, for Michael, for me if I’m still hungry, for the pleasure of stirring and frying. Her own reward, it turns out, is entirely confined to the preparation.

‘So,’ she says, cracking another egg into the bowl, ‘I’ve been thinking some about you and your runaway brother, Michael told us the whole story last night. It’s so sad, and also a little weird if you don’t mind me saying so.’

Weird. She thinks
my
life is weird.

‘Anyway,’ she says, getting busy with the whisk. ‘I’ve been thinking that there’s someone you ought to go see.’

‘Really, who?’

‘My psychic, Madam Orla. She does my cards for me every couple of months. She’s so tuned in, it’s actually frightening. For example, she told me that Huey and I would end up getting back together last year, and we did. And this was when we were going through a really rough patch, so no one could really have predicted it.’

‘I see.’

‘And another time she told me my career was about to take off. And the very next day
who
should I bump into?’

‘The friend of Lenny Kravitz’s hairdresser?’

‘
Exactly
. How’d you guess? Don’t you think that’s impressive? Don’t you think that’s spot on? You have to let her read your tarot cards, Claire. She has a long wait list these days but I’m a regular. If I call her up now I can probably get us an appointment for this afternoon.

‘Tess…I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

‘Trust me, you’ll love her. I can tell you two would really hit it off. And she’s got like this sixth…no,
wait
, it’s more like a
seventh
sense or something. I bet she’ll have a good idea where your brother’s at.’

I let Tess down as gently as I can. I realise she’s trying to do a nice thing but frankly, I don’t have time to waste on some cheap, back-room psychic and the musings of an anorexic dope head. I tell her that I have a lot of things to do today. I have to visit the port and talk to the harbour master, and I want to visit the apartment block where my family used to live. Tess is pretty nice about it all. She says we can see Madam Orla another time. She thinks she’ll call her up anyway, just to check. She thinks Miami Beach must have changed a fair bit since I was last here. I tell her that it has.

‘More hotels, right? More high rise? And not so many old people. You’ll notice that right away when you go out today, there’s far less retirees down here now. You know what they used to call Miami Beach in the old days?’ she says, ‘before it got itself all spruced up and rejuvenated?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t know.’

‘God’s waiting room, that’s what they called it. Don’t you think that’s kind of creepy? Doesn’t that sort of creep you out? I mean I like old people well enough, the cute ones, but I don’t like the idea of the whole island filled up with them. I mean you’ve got to admire this place, right? For reinventing itself like it has. Twenty years ago it was all decrepit and dangerous and full of old folk, and now it’s shiny and hip and full of models. And all it took was a TV programme and a lick of paint. Don’t you think that’s amazing? You see how easily it can happen, right?’

I nod. I tell her that I do.

‘Michael says your dad worked in construction,’ she says. ‘When you lived over here. Is that right?’

‘Sort of. He was overseeing the refurbishment of one of the big hotels on Ocean Drive. It was a total wreck before they started.’

‘How come he ended up here?’ she says, quizzically. ‘I’m guessing art deco was his thing, right?’

‘Not really, not that I know of. It all happened pretty quickly, us coming out here. I’m not even sure how he got the job.’

‘See,’ says Tess, slapping her hands together. ‘That’s what’s so
great
about Miami. It’s such a welcoming kind of place. There’s so many different types of people living down here, all different types of persuasions and nationalities. What do you call that? When you’ve got a totally interesting mix of different peoples?’

‘Diversity?’

‘
Exactly
. You got it in one. That’s what I like the best, the diversity. For instance, you can go get yourself a table at a restaurant and you’ll just as likely find yourself sitting next to De Niro or Stallone as you would find yourself sitting next to me and Huey. You can be anything you like in Miami. It’s a real equal opportunities kind of place. It just helps, you know, if you’re beautiful and rich, but that’s like anywhere, right?’

I don’t have time to offer up an answer. There’s a sudden piercing scream from down the hall that sounds like it’s coming from the bathroom. It’s followed by a frantic, high-pitched whine.

‘Jesus, no,’ says Tess. ‘Not again.
Huey!
Go check on the snake.’

‘Come on, it’s not
that
bad, is it?

‘Michael, they’re freaks, they’ve got no boundaries. He’s weird, he’s neurotic, she’s nosey, she doesn’t eat. She makes a living letting tourists pose with her pet boa constrictor.’

‘You want to go to a hotel? Fine then, we’ll go to a hotel.’

‘It could have killed you. It could have squeezed you to death.’

‘It only got as far as my leg. It looked a lot worse than it was.’

‘That’s why you screamed so loudly is it? That’s why you were trying to poke its eye out with your toothbrush?’

‘Look, I’ll check out some prices, but it’s not going to be cheap.
We’re right in the middle of high season.’

‘And he’s sexually deviant, did you know that?’

‘The
snake
?’

‘No, not the snake, Michael,
Huey
. Tess says he only does anal sex.’

‘Well…strictly speaking, that’s not…
deviant
, exactly. I mean, if that’s what he’s into…’

We’re stood on the corner of Collin’s Avenue in the baking heat, waiting for our rental car to be delivered. I’m having something approaching a mild panic attack. It could be the jet-lag or the effects of last night’s joint, but I suspect that it’s something far worse. My palms are sweating and my lungs are seizing up and my words feel tight in my throat. I’m hopelessly out of my depth here. Marooned in this strange city, with all of its bad memories, my brain feels under attack. I just can’t seem to get my bearings. It all looks so much different than it did. I’m not sure I know how to do this. I’m not sure I know how to start. I feel like I’m sliding down the insides of a giant greasy pipe that’s about to deposit me into the ocean.

‘Come on,’ says, Michael, gently. ‘The car will be here in a minute, you’ll feel much better when we’re mobile. And we have a plan don’t we, the two of us?’

I nod, he strokes the back of my neck.

‘We’ll visit the port first, then we’ll go to your old apartment building…and tomorrow we’ll find the hotel where your dad worked.’

I stare into my ex-husband’s face. Concentrate hard on his mouth and his lips. On his eager, uncomplicated eyes.

‘Better now?’

I think so. A little bit.

‘
Hey
, here it comes, that’s our car?’

Low. Shiny. Black. Topless. Delivered by a man in silver shades.

‘What is it?’

‘Mustang.’

‘Convertible?’

‘Of course.’

‘Isn’t that going to cost me a lot more money?’

‘Look, I know it’s a bit more expensive than we talked about. But we’re in Miami. It’s the law. We’re duty bound to drive a soft top.’

They come here from all over the world: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama; Cyprus, Bangladesh and Brazil. They come weekly from Melbourne and Darwin, bi-monthly from Yokohama and Hong Kong. Every nine days they sail in from Casablanca; every eleven, from Santa Cruz. Cargo ships, tramp ships, freighters, tankers, and mail boats eager with parcels. Twenty metres, thirty metres, one hundred metres long; capacity fifty thousand metric tons. The
Marie
, the
Mathilde
, the
Columbine
, the
Quetzal
; the
Delight
, the
Deluxe
and the
Ever Decent
. Hulking containers, piled high like Lego bricks, stowed neat and tidy on their bows. Red cranes, black hulls, blue-painted railings; their great engines wheezing in the sun. The world flows through this place every hour of every day, it is an axis on which the earth turns. But we can’t get close to them, these adventures, these vessels. We can’t get anywhere near.

Michael and I wait at the visitor’s desk. There are documents to be queued for, appointments to be made and ID cards to be handed out. It could take all day, but you’re from England, they say. Well in that case, it could take all week. There is no one here with time spare to talk to us and we’re getting in their way, we can feel it: the indolent slowing down the industrious. But if we want to, if we need to, there’s another office we can visit, a place where we can check out the current shipping schedules. And this, I think, is all I really need. To know this ship arrived and departed, just like the German said it did: to know for certain that it was here.

The
Grunhilde
docked in Miami on Christmas Eve, she stayed in port less than twenty-four hours. No one will talk to us about
stowaways. It’s a sensitive issue–drug smuggling, immigration–and security here is brisk and tight. But it’s clear that this thing could be done, couldn’t it? One man? In a trunk, in a case, in a crate? If he had the money and the time and the sheer determination, an individual, a person, could have done this?

What person? What man? If we think a crime’s been committed in the Port of Miami, then they’d like to know all about it. Forget it, we laugh. It’s purely hypothetical. In truth, we were only wondering–you know, just the two of us–if such a thing were even possible. They’d like us to wait where we are. They have time to speak to us, now. But we can’t hang around, we must be going. Didn’t we say, we’re running late. For what? For something. A swim, a meal, a drink; a sudden burning desire to visit Mickey and the gang at Magic Kingdom. We’re tourists, we’re dumb, we don’t want to be causing any trouble, and the last thing we’d want to do is upset the authorities.

We retreat as fast as we can; the cruise ships honking and bellowing behind us, warning them not to let us go. But it’s too late now, we’re back on the road, heading out towards the golden beaches. I’m wondering if Daniel left this same way. In a truck? In the boot of a car? And where would he have gone to, that first night, that first hour? Where exactly would he have ended up?

‘Where to, Shorty?’ says Michael. ‘Where do you want to head next?’

‘North,’ I say. ‘Let’s go further north. All the way up to Sunny Isles.’

Michael puts his foot down and accelerates, and the hot air blasts hard against our faces. I have black sunglasses on and a scarf around my head, I look like Grace Kelly’s mutant sister. We look to all the world like we’re enjoying ourselves–the soft top down, the radio on–but deep down I’m overcome with nerves. The apartment building where my teenage self lived seems almost mythical to me now. I sometimes wonder if the five of us were ever there. The open plan rooms, the rough concrete balcony,
the air conditioning unit with the furred up vents that coughed like a consumptive in the night. My mothers tights drip-drying in the bathroom. My brother’s socks stinking up the hall. My father with his feet up and a beercan in his hand flicking through the weather channels like a man possessed. He liked to watch CNN in the evenings because you could find out what the weather was doing back at home. He dearly liked to keep track of it. If it was raining in London, he’d say, don’t you miss the rain? If it was sunny he’d say don’t you miss the English summer?

My mother didn’t seem to miss any of it. At least, she never joined in with any of his lamentations. She just kept quiet and got on with things: waxing her legs, poisoning the cockroaches, making sure the five of us were halfway presentable; Sylvie’s long hair brushed and bunched, Daniel’s sports kit neatly folded and half ironed. These memories seem wilted to me somehow, and I dearly want them to shine. As different as it is now, this city, this place, a piece of our history is etched into it. It’s the last place we lived as a complete family.

Beyond the gaudy splendours of South Beach, the island begins to exhale, sagging like a new year’s eve Christmas tree, weighed down with one too many baubles. You travel through time as you travel south to north, from the art deco thirties to the beige-coloured seventies, then back round again to the fifties. The buildings are tired up here; sloppy, run down. Why make the effort, who’d be coming up here to see them? They are your middle-aged uncle in his favourite pyjamas surprised when you come round to visit unannounced. They are the pot luck dinner that you pull from the fridge, cold ham and chicken with leftovers. Beyond the golf courses and the high rises and the last good restaurant, beyond the slick of Golden Beach and Bal Harbour. The bulldozers have their eye on these low rise condos and cheap motels, but the original buildings are blessedly plain here. They are scruffy and worn, and I like them.

‘This part more like you remember it?’ says Michael, noticing my smile.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I think I recognise some of it.’

‘Think your building will still be here?’

I don’t know. I can’t say. New development is everywhere, but I dearly hope so.

Siesta Pines has been spruced up. By this I mean its exterior has been painted a mixture of almond pink and key-lime green. The European-style shutters–they are fake, they don’t open or close–are sickly and bright, and the plaster walls are muted and salt stained. I stare at the building like I would at a ghost, but it was here all along, always has been. It simply carried on its life without us. The disaster,
our
disaster didn’t touch it. Michael takes my hand and we walk round the scrubby gardens to the pool. There’s a locked gate there now, there didn’t use to be, and we have to wait for someone to leave before we can make our way inside. The chairs around the sun deck take my breath away. Some are new–white, with candy striped fabric seats–but a few are scratched and old and bottle green. Hard moulded plastic that makes your bottom ache, whose surface sticks to your skin when you perspire.

‘Stop making that noise, do you have to make that noise?’

‘It isn’t me, Mum, it’s the
seat
.’

The pool, was it always this colour, this washed out and grimy grey-blue? I remember it being clearer and brighter. The tiles that line it are exactly the same, though–that flirty mermaid still swimming on the bottom, her blond curls spilling down her narrow back. I spent hours in this swimming pool staring at her through my goggles: eye to eye, nose to nose, face to face. I’d poke my tongue out and pull all kind of faces but she never did anything but smile back at me. I liked it that she smiled, I appreciated it. I valued her blessed lack of moods.

At the rear of the building the old awnings have all been torn down. They used to flap around like flags when it was windy, and if ever there was a strong and sudden gust in the night, the noise would wake me out of my sleep. Three flights up is our apartment. I can see it, right now: our front door, our old window
frames, our same brass knocker, our doorbell. And I feel…what exactly? Crushingly, overwhelmingly homesick.

‘You want to go and ask if we can look around? You want to knock on the door?’

It turns out that I do.

There’s no answer–there’s nobody home–so we rise up on tiptoes and peer through the sheer net curtains. Whoever lives here now has shocking taste. Swirly gold carpets, a mess of florals and pastels, and sofas still dressed in their tough plastic covers. The layout is exactly the same as it was when we lived here: over to the right, the tiny kitchen where we’d all crowd together to eat our breakfast; down to the left, along the hallway, my parents’ room with its little en suite shower room. How happy was my mother to see that? To have a place to wash and dress and put on make-up that wasn’t blighted by the mess and dirt of her children.

‘Hey, what is it? Are you crying?’

I don’t know, I hadn’t realised that I was. But over to the left is another narrow doorway, it used to say
Claire’s room–Stay out!
I remember how relieved I was when I stepped inside this flat, how pleased I’d felt about getting my own place to sleep. Daniel and I had been forced to share a bedroom after Sylvie came along and I couldn’t wait to have my privacy back. What surprised me, what shocked me, what I didn’t expect, was that I found it hard to sleep alone. The truth was–and I’d never have admitted this to Daniel–that for the first month or so, I sort of missed him. There were nights in the old house back in London when I’d been all too glad to have him around.