The Three of Us (18 page)

‘That's not considered high risk in England,' he mutters. ‘You may have mild food poisoning then, but in any case there's no danger. Call me back if you feel any worse.'

Terrified I may have poisoned the foetus, I lie in bed and weep.

Friday, 25 September

Peter

One of the main attractions of writing for
National Geographic
was to avoid the bustling deadlines and occasional danger of hard news.

But my plan for a safer, more in-depth journalism seems to have rebounded. On this trip I've been shot at several times, mostly in fairly ludicrous circumstances and mostly unintentionally: A fusillade in honour of an assassinated Zulu warlord went awry when a stoned gunman lost his footing on the freshly dug grave soil and scattered bullets at head height. Then a traditional Zulu stick-fight turned anarchic when a warrior walloped the referee, and a general fire fight ensued. And this was supposed to be a safe ‘anthropological' story.

Saturday, 26 September

Joanna

Back in Manhattan Meredith calls to suggest supper, to cheer me up in Peter's absence. ‘But we'll have to go Chinese,' she says, ‘I'm only eating lightly steamed vegetables.'

I've grown familiar with Meredith's food fads, which usually stem from passing allergies, and decide not to pursue this one. But she's determined to tell me anyway. ‘I've discovered I'm allergic to dairy,' she continues.

‘How did you find out?' I ask.

‘Oh it's kind of obvious. I've been feeling toxic for some time,' she says vaguely. ‘You know, bloated and nauseated and, well, I went to see Madonna's herbalist last week and she said I was suffering from yeast-takeover.' She stops and then whispers conspiratorially, ‘Meat is truly poison, darling, and so is dairy. From now on I'm only eating living foods.'

‘Living foods?'

‘Raw things, darling, uncooked fruits or very lightly steamed vegetables and I'm really into tofu. You should try it. Really. It would make you feel so much better.'

Saturday, 26 September

Peter

I arrive in Miami at dawn and am bounced from the immigration line and sent for ‘secondaries'. I am getting quite experienced at the dreaded secondaries, and obediently follow the sign to a great hall presided over by immigration officers, who sit behind a counter elevated out of punching reach, so that I have to stand on tiptoe to hand up my documents. Then I sit for several hours, among large, remarkably patient families of Mexicans and Colombians, Haitians and Brazilians, waiting to be grilled further on our intentions, should we be permitted to enter the USA.

Eventually my number is called and I am directed to a glass-walled office in which sits an immense female Latino officer.

‘Good morning,' I say.

She nods without looking up as she frowns over my dog-eared letter from the US Embassy, explaining that I am in effect the ‘common law' husband of a resident alien.

‘The Federal Government', she explains, as many immigration officers have done to me before her, ‘recognizes no such thing.'

I nod meekly.

‘It's simple,' she says, as though addressing a backward child. ‘Either you're married or you're not. Which is it?'

‘Not,' I admit.

‘Then ya gotta problem,' she says, tapping her biro on her intricately doodled blotter. ‘Ya can't just keep on comin' in an' out as a tourist. I mean you're practically
livin'
here!'

‘Well, I thought the letter from your Consul in the London Embassy explained the situation.'

‘Yeah well,
that's
the State Department.
This
', she says tapping the badge pinned to her blouse, ‘is the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We got our own rules.'

‘My girlfriend is six months pregnant,' I appeal.

She shrugs, unmoved, and I realize that this woman has probably heard every single species of hard-luck story and special pleading imaginable to humanity. I cannot compete with refugees and torture victims. Nothing I say is going to have the slightest effect on her. I decide that my best hope is to play a waiting game. The hall behind me is filling up with what appears to be most of the contents of a flight from Bogotá, and the officers have to keep the line moving along – quotas to maintain, performance goals to achieve.

‘Well?' she says, almost disappointed that I don't seem to be dancing the tacitly agreed steps of our immigration tango, where I beseech and she ruminates. Instead I affect resignation.

‘Well, of course, it's up to you,' I admit.

I begin idly to flick through the pages of my passport, examining the stamps and noticing that the smaller and less important the country, the more florid and attention-seeking the stamp.

‘Oh, all right,' she humphs. ‘I'll give you six months, but you sort this out, right?'

I thank her and shoulder my way through the teeming ranks of the Third World, many of whom, I fear, are as close to their American dream as they will ever come.

Sunday, 27 September

Joanna

We are pursuing my fantasy of renting somewhere warm after the baby's birth, somewhere to recuperate in the sun. But we are constrained by all sorts of limits: we must stay in the USA, where our health insurance works, and we must be somewhere accessible by land, as my doctor has frightened me with new evidence linking early air travel with infant cot death syndrome. And it must be somewhere warm in January. So we settle on Florida, a twenty-hour train journey by Amtrak Sleeper.

My current plot is to rent a small conch house in the old town of Key West. I have never been there, but I imagine a month of lazy days with the baby strapped to Peter's chest, gurgling contentedly, while we breakfast over the newspapers in an open-fronted café on Duval Street, a favourite hangout of Hemingway's in the 1930s. In the afternoons I intend to swim my way back to pre-maternal trimness in the warm turquoise shallows. My chief influence for Operation Key West is Alison Lurie's novel,
The Last Resort,
in which everyone seems to live in pastel-painted wooden houses weighed down by crimson boughs of bougainvillaea.

Key West's added attraction is that it's always been a writer-rich environment – home to more Pulitzer Prize-winning authors than anywhere in the States. At least that's what people keep telling us, but other than Hemingway we've had some difficulty finding out just who these other writers are. The only writer mentioned in my Florida guidebook is the poet Robert Frost, who used to spend his summers there in a small cottage, which is now a Heritage House Museum.

Peter has agreed to Operation Key West on condition that we do a recce first. So after spending several hours on KeyWest.com, I have set up a series of meetings with real estate agents, all of whom claim to have exactly what we're looking for. Now I am in Miami waiting for Peter to join me en route from Africa. There is only one problem: Hurricane Georges has arrived in the Keys to meet us.

Tuesday, 29 September

Peter

We are in South Beach, waiting for Hurricane Georges to blow itself past the Keys, so we can drive down there to find somewhere suitable for Joanna to stage a warm-weather postpartum recovery. Our gilded cage is the Delano Hotel, the twenty-storey temple of South Beach Art-Deco, swathed in the all-white velvet bondage of its over-designed confines. In our small corner room the floors and walls and curtains are white, the bedspread and towels and robes are white, the TV and hi-fi are white. White, white, white. This is what it must be like to go snow-blind.

In the late morning we take the ghostly red-lit lift to the white mausoleum of the lobby and pick up the newspapers at the hotel shop. There, in amongst the emergency toiletries, Joanna discovers a small box labelled anal floss. She thinks it must be a joke, but this is South Beach and I'm not so sure.

We stroll down Ocean Drive to the News Café, to breakfast on eggs and home fries and large glasses of juice made from pulped Florida oranges. The sound system throbs with Vivaldi and Debussy. It is barely ten a.m. and the electronic billboard on top of a nearby high-rise tells us that the temperature is already 93 degrees.

As we read the papers over coffee, sculpted youths with bare midriffs and bodies pierced with jewellery, rollerblade or scoot on skateboards down the avenue of palm trees. Convertible cars with their tops peeled down cruise slowly by, once, twice, their occupants absorbing glances gratefully. Even the huge chromed tractor unit of a juggernaut joins the passing parade, looping back to make several unnecessary passes. It is a boulevard of attention seekers.

We walk back to the Delano, crossing the sidewalk to seek out the broken shelter of the shady side. Back at the hotel we descend to the pool, which is lined by squads of white-uniformed waiters and attendants. Beyond is a wooden fence and the beach, but few feel the need to venture out there, content to wallow here, in our own amniotic sac.

Our companions are hard-bodied gays, and louche, overweight middle-aged businessmen, whose skins are irradiated to carcinogenic ruddy brown husks. They are escorted by much younger gum-chewing girlfriends, who sport artificial breasts which rear up from their lurid bikini cups like clenched buttocks, and lone tendrils of tanga strap which snuggle in the clefts of their real bums. Their nails are long and curved and painted to match the colour of their bikinis, lime green or candy pink. Their hair is big and aggressively blonde. The girls seem perfectly comfortable being ogled by the rest of us. They float on Lilos around the pool languidly exhibiting their wares. One of them, I notice, has a tattoo on her calf and I swim closer to examine it. It is a bank of roses, and under them the word ‘Princess'.

Next to the fat men there is an absolutely vast young man, a great pear of a body layered by a black suit and tie and wrap-around Ray-Bans. He is obviously a bodyguard and he sits in the sun fairly spurting sweat.

So our day passes, as we wait for Hurricane Georges to clear the Keys and make Key West accessible again. The news reports say that no one is being let in, except for locals.

Wednesday, 30 September

Joanna

It is so hot I can hardly bear to leave the air-conditioned sanctuary of the hotel. Peter has insisted on booking a convertible, imagining he is something out of
Miami Vice,
but every time the automated roof yawns open I nearly pass out with the heat. So we cruise around with it tightly battened down and the air-con on full blast. To make matters worse my only summer maternity dress is lined with acetate, which sticks to my thighs every time we go out.

Miami is America's most popular location for fashion shoots and skinny Ford models mill around the hotel lobby and out on the veranda, giggling like schoolgirls, their jumble of long loose limbs held together only by their string bikinis. I feel more pregnant than ever, among these gambolling sylphs. Lounging under an umbrella by the green Gunite pool, I realize we haven't seen a single child, either at the hotel or strolling down Ocean Boulevard. Miami Beach is even less of a breeding ground than the West Village.

Wednesday, 30 September

Peter

We leave early in the morning to see how near Key West we can get before we are turned back. The drive seems interminable, through the suburban sprawl of south Miami, but at last we are in the Keys, with the blacktop road rollercoasting up over causeways flanked by azure seas – real azure, not touched-up, brochure azure. Soon signs of the hurricane damage appear; posses of cherry pickers poke up at the fractured technological tentacles of overhead electricity cables and telephone wires; broken branches and trees line the roadside. We pass a trailer park which has been splintered and torn and splayed open like a wound for passers-by to peer inside.

Then the traffic slows to a halt and we are at the police cordon. I open the window to let the muggy air pollute the chilled recycled air inside and hand our press cards to the black state trooper. He scans them through the narrow slit between the rim of his hat and the top of his Ray-Bans, and compares us with an expression of incredulity that anyone would voluntarily go to Key West at a time like this. Then he waves us through.

OCTOBER

The baby now has eyebrows and some hair on her head, and she is continuing to gain weight.

If the baby is a boy, his testes have formed and are beginning their descent out of his body and into the scrotum, but they are still located inside the abdomen.

Now that the baby is about five months old, she will be able to use her own immune system to help defend herself against infection.

BabySoon.com

Thursday, 1 October

Joanna

After cruising the chaos of Key West the only accommodation we find open is the Southernmost Guest House. It is a grand, grey-fronted Victorian house, trimmed with filigree, run by a garrulously hospitable grandma. She is wearing a V-necked black net top, exposing a good deal of improbably pneumatic cleavage.

‘Surgically enhanced and why not, hey?' she laughs gaily, squeezing her shoulders together proudly to give us the full effect, before reaching for a key on a huge wooden fob. ‘Welcome to the only house on the street to have electricity!'

We follow her up the stoop and onto the first-floor balcony, past a wooden love seat swinging lazily from the eaves. The tiled room is excessively fussy, with lacy tablecloths draped across every surface. Empty champagne bottles – the souvenirs of many a honeymoon – line the bookshelf, next to vases of silk flowers. On the table sits a giant brandy snifter, in the bottom of which languishes a china mouse, presumably trapped. But we notice none of these things, just the welcome roar of the air-conditioner and the deliciously chilled air.