“Renée?” Whir commercial fridges, the roar of a plane already in flight; multiple hand-dryers whooshing from the open restroom, the flush of the mile-high toilet whistling human waste into the atmosphere, pulverised at thirty-thousand feet over the pristine waters of the Caribbean; bleeping deep-fat fryers a cumulative alarm taking off a baby’s wails, the plane going down in distress; chatter in so many languages it amounts to none: “separado… chegar… souvenirs…” “Renée?”
The girl wakes from the dreams of her cellphone, looks, stands up, stumbles bloodshot to the Starbucks counter, takes her tray, and begins the return journey to her borrowed table. The rear legs of the white plastic chair squeak against the airport tiles as she takes her seat. She takes her phone back out, unlocks it, and her thoughts pick her up again exactly where they’d left off: Miami unrecognisable from its most up-to-date Google map—how to find the hostel? She needs to book something for tonight. The hostel—the only cheap—well, everything’s relative—the only cheap accommodation in Miami’s South Beach. She’d pulled up on her Shadow outside the peeling-paint gates, ridden right through the pedestrian door, the gate clattering under her wheels, the exhaust’s roar resounding back-and-forth across the courtyard. She cut the throttle and pulled off her helmet and felt her then-long hair fall back around her ears and saw Candy for the first time, running towards her from reception, screaming, who the hell do you think you are! What the hell do you think you’re doing… Booking.com doesn’t have anything in South Beach at anything close to hostel prices. She scrolls through each photo of each property, recognizes nothing. She isn’t sure now what she remembers. No photos of peeling-paint gates. Their bar. If she can find their bar, if she can remember their walk from the hostel to the bar, if she can retrace it in reverse… She kills Booking.com and brings back Google Maps. The dive bar was just two streets back from Ocean Drive, she remembers. She remembers being surprised that you could get a cold beer—even a PBR—for one dollar in a bar just two streets back from Miami’s Ocean Drive—one dollar plus a dollar tip. She remembers telling people this, telling herself this, over the years. But, two streets back…included the alleys between streets? She taps out “bar,” slides her fingers together until the whole doubted area is on the screen—alleys included, just to be sure—then, “Search this area”… The red marks appear and nothing looks right. She scrolls through each photo of each bar, recognizes nothing. No dive bars in South Beach. Tourist bars, cocktail bars, hipster bars… Closed down? The Burger King. If she can find their Burger King, if she can retrace their walk from the hostel to the Burger King, or the Burger King to the bar… The best Burger King in the world! It wasn’t even “Burger King”! It was “Whopper Bar”! You could build your own whopper, customise it exactly how you wanted! Everything was new; everything was black, not the usual red; lit low like a bar, with electronic displays instead of the usual boards—none of this seems very spectacular now, but it had then, when Candy took her for the first time and they stuffed their hangovers into a shared and shallow grave. “Search this area”… There is a Burger King, more or less on the crossroads where she imagined it to be, and in one of the photos she sees the words, “Whopper Bar,” but in the photos everything is worn and grubby; everything is the usual red, not black; and it is on the wrong side of the street. Moved? She reads the reviews, scrolls back in time: it doesn’t seem to have moved. It seems to have always been on the wrong side of the street. Could it be she remembers it wrong? No, maybe she’s coming at it from the wrong way. She turns the map ninety degrees, ninety degrees, ninety degrees—her Earth spinning on its backstreet crossroad axis—maybe she remembers it wrong. Then how can she trust any of this? It’s all a blur. There had been another bar, fish-market blue walls and Cuban accents and propping herself up by the rail in the bathroom stall, squeezed in with Ricky doing cocaine with strangers and her and Candy “staying clean” for each other looking into Candy’s grey-green reassuring eyes looking back into her and the waves lapping over their naked legs as they sit knotted to one another in the surf that knocks them roughly back and forth and makes them taste salt water on each other’s lips, the sal gruesa sand demerara when wet wouldn’t let go of Candy’s thighs, Candy’s tan-line “gracias a Miami,” their bodies their lips pressed against each other the water between their legs…the shoulder-high stack of beach beds where they’d lain together up top, on their backs, staring up at the stars melting like milk into coffee the dawn sky and Ricky reappearing (how had he found them?) and jumping up there with them and telling them about the guy he’d been with tonight and the three of them choking with laughter on the dregs of the dawn then she looked around and saw they were surrounded again by sunbathing and fitness and it was day.
And that night they met again at the bar. A Sunday, because they were alone among the hallowed pews. At some point in the early hours the August heat-wave broke and the rain came down in blankets that spanked hard the alley behind the bar and Candy took the girl’s hand and even though she didn’t want to get wet she let herself be dragged out into it and they danced drenched under the one streetlight where the alley met the road and it was so hot that, even at night, an hour later they were dry. Now in the States it would be winter. Miami is in the tropics isn’t it? Will it be cold? Probably. But very cold? Will the beach still be beautiful? What if when she gets there she still doesn’t recognise anything? What if she can’t find any of it, any trace? What if it’s all dead? It has all died, hasn’t it. Last time she heard Candy’s voice, flip-phone pressed against her cheek, battery running low, leaning on a redwood, Candy’s voice telling her she’d already left her job at the hostel, that she was leaving Miami. For good. This trip is a mistake. How could she have been so stupid? She’d sat for too long. She lifts her seat up and back as she stands. Her arse is numb. “…last boarding call for flight sea-em-two-five-six to Miami-Fort Lauderdale… Renée… please report to gate…” the tannoy is calling as the girl, already through passport control, steps into the revolving doors, steps out of the revolving doors into the warm coconut Panama City dawn.
As the bus crosses the Puente de Las Américas she recognises the views of the Canal, as if it were just yesterday. The girl. Renée.
Roy Duffield wrote you Bacchus Against the Wall (Anxiety, 2023). He loves to talk to strangers: https://linktr.ee/royduffield
