"Juliana, right?" I said when I finally looked up at her face.
"Yeah, hi."
2
"She's Puerto Rican," Jake explained when I went back into the bedroom. "Well, her maman is."
So Juliana was part of his plan to sleep with one of every nationality in the world.
"What happened to Virginie?" Somewhere deep in my memory of the previous night there was a conversation about him breaking up with his French girlfriend.
Jake's brow furrowed. This was a delicate subject. "Oh man, that Virginie, she blessed me so much." In Jake's case, I knew that "blessed" was not a good thing. He was using the French word blesser, meaning "hurt."
"What did she do?"
"She had no respect for my posy." His usual gripe against the world. "I had the custom to send her a poem by text all the mornings. I told you before."
"Did you?" I must have blocked out the horror of what he'd put the poor girl through. His poems were basically gynecological reports with the romanticism taken out.
"Yeah, and you know what? I discovered that she was effacing them."
"Deleting them?"
"Yeah, man. Incroyable, no?"
"Yes," I said, thinking, no, it was very, very croyabk. Deleting his poems was as natural a defense mechanism as closing your eye when a mosquito tries to head-butt your cornea.
"Yeah, I ask her to see her phone so I can copy them for myself, and she said she effaced them. So I larg'd her."
"You larg'd her?" That was a new one for me. I just hoped that it didn't involve violence.
"Yeah. How do you say? Elbowed her?"
"Gave her the elbow, you mean. And what are you doing in Miami? I thought you were going to get straight on a Greyhound at Orlando airport?"
"Yeah." He looked pained. "I depensed all the money." Meaning he'd spent it. "I only had enough to get to Miami. I was thinking you can maybe take me to Nevada in your car?"
"In the Mini? But diere's only just room for Alexa, me and our luggage. And I'm not going to Nevada, anyway."
"Yes, you said you're going to Las Vegas."
"Las Vegas is in Nevada?" It was funny. I'd never thought of Las Vegas as being in a state. It was just Las Vegas, like Washington is just Washington.
"Yeah, man." Jake took a satisfied suck on his cigar. He seemed to think he'd earned his seat in the car by explaining the city's location.
"I'll have to talk to Alexa about it," I said. If she ever came back, that was. "Now can you go and see if it's safe for me to take a shower, please?"
When I got outside into the sunlight, with my hair wet and my T-shirt sticking to my soggy back, Jesus was just walking on to the cafe terrace. He was wearing a bleached white suit and a pastel-blue polo shirt, looking as though everything about him, including his skin and hair, had just been freshly dry-cleaned.
"Dude," he said, a touch less manically than usual.
"Hi, Jesus. Where are the dancers?"
"Aagh." He gave a sigh of disgust and flopped down into a chair at the large table that had been laid out for our brunch. "Fucken headcases."
"What's wrong?"
"They give me some shit about Dun-firm-witch, Dun-witch-farm ..."
"Dunfermline? Yes. I was going to talk to them about it."
"Whatever. Forget it, man, they all losers, anyway." He flicked his hand across the table like a king dismissing a bunch of boring courtiers.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, this is great exposure for them, right? They dance in public, everyone sees them. And they want me to pay them. Then they start busting my balls about this Dun-shithole. Forget them, man. I fired their asses."
"So we have no dancers? Christ, Jesus."
"We find some dancers. Miami's full of dancers."
"Not Scottish dancers."
"What's the difference? It's all dancing, right? Just different music. Hey, babe!" He forgot instantly about my troubles as a girl glided past, doing what looked like a solo tango.
Understandably, at such short notice, Suraya couldn't put her finger on a Scottish dancing group nearer than Nova Scotia. She seemed to have problems concentrating, anyway. Her neighbor had offered to lend her his scooter while he hitched a ride to work with a friend, but she wasn't sure it was wise to accept the loan. And she was far more interested in my view of her moral dilemma than in my panic at not having an event to put on.
Shit, I thought, I was going to have to drive around South Beach with a megaphone, calling for volunteers.
Which gave me an idea.
I was just about to make the necessary call when my phone began buzzing. The screen showed an American number. Alexa, maybe, calling from chez her new friends?
"Alexa?" I said, but all I heard in reply was some male laughter. I hung up.
A couple of seconds later, a tall, suntanned guy with a low-cut sleeveless singlet and an obviously waxed chest was grinning down at me out of the sun. He was carrying a laptop like an open book, and held it out for me to see.
It was tough to make out details in the strong sunlight, but I saw enough to make me close my eyes and want to slip into a nice, comforting hangover.
"It's you, right? Paul? We love your photos." He pointed to a small guy sitting at a nearby table. The friend had a short-haired dachshund on his lap. Both man and dog were wearing black-leather waistcoats and collars. The guy waved with one hand, and wagged the dog's paw at me with the other.
"No, it's not me," I said, trying to close the laptop and usher its owner away.
"But we just called the number. You answered."
I opened the computer again. There, beneath the photo of me in my frilly collar and kilt, was my phone number. The worst had happened. The Men in Skirts website had got hold of my name and number. Someone in England was going to die for this.
"What is that?" Jesus was looking over my elbow at the screen.
"He's famous," my admirer said. "It's Paul, the undercarriage of the month." He pointed to the part of the picture that had earned me my title.
The next five minutes felt like watching myself get circumcised. Jesus alternated between croaking in pantomime horror and screaming with laughter. He summoned Juliana—who was now dressed and at work—and practically everyone else at the cafe to admire my knees.
Beyond the palm trees, a flight of pelicans skimmed above the shoreline. I prayed for one of them to come a hundred yards inland and crap on Jesus's head, but fate had turned against me, and no birds answered my call.
3
"Tony!" I called out.
This was the rescue call I'd eventually put in, and as before, the leader of the Miaminis had come up trumps. A mere half hour after I phoned him, he was stepping out of his Mini and giving me a thumbs-up.
I was at the brunch table with Jesus and the two kilt fans, Sven (waxed chest) and Greg (dachshund man). Jake had come down to join us and was chewing meditatively at his cigar.
Tony was accompanied by a gangly, heavy-breasted woman called Birgit whom he introduced as a keen Scottish-dancing fan. She was as tall as me and dressed in a shapeless T-shirt and profoundly unsexy drawstring trousers, but I fell in love with her as soon as she sat down and told me that she had two women friends who were also Queens of the Highland Fling.
"The math is simple," she said. "We need at least four men and four women to put on a convincing display."
"Sorry guys," Tony said. "I'm a driver, not a dancer."
"Hey, you've done more than enough lifesaving over the past two days," I told him. "Looks like I'll have to dance, after all." The two kilt fans clapped. "Jake, if you don't dance you're going straight on a plane back to Paris." Jake blew a smoke ring in mute agreement. "Jesus, how about you?"
"Me?" Jesus refused point blank to do any dancing that didn't involve rubbing his groin up against a woman.
"We're in," Sven said. Greg nodded.
So we had the full male complement. All we needed was one more woman.
"Yooliana!" Jesus beckoned
, and Juliana came over.
"You like to dance, huh, babe?" Jesus cajoled.
"Ye-ah?" Juliana sensed that there was a plot against her. It wasn't difficult, because six men and one woman were gaping expectantly at her.
"OK. You learn some Scotch dances this afternoon, you do the dancing shows tonight, I make sure you get pay plus share of tips, OK?" Jesus might look like a brainless himbo, but he knew how to pitch a deal.
" 'Kay." Juliana didn't need to think twice about it.
Against all odds, it looked as though we were game on.
All I needed now were some costumes. Pursuing his role as savior of lost causes, Tony offered to guide me to a costume-rental place, and we set off right away in a minor Mini convoy, the two cars nipping through the late-morning traffic toward downtown Miami.
As we crossed the bridge to the mainland, I caught my first sight of all those waterside homes you see in the celeb mags. Set along the shore of the circular island in the bay there were Italian palazzos, Spanish haciendas, colonial mansions, and a fifty-room tropical log cabin. Each had parking space for a yacht and a powerboat. But from the road you could practically gaze into their living room windows. And these supposed dream homes looked out onto a smoke-belching line of moored cruise ships apparently waiting for a sea-lane traffic light to change. Beyond the smoking ships was a container port, which was colorful—a sort of 3-D Mondrian painting—but surely not worth paying millions to look at.
The two Minis crisscrossed the modern high-rise office blocks until we came to a warehouse underneath a soaring overpass. A neon sign on the roof said "Partys R Us." Three mannequins dressed as a fairy tale princess, a vampire, and a conquistador were standing out front on the sidewalk. I pulled up alongside Tony, who gave me his signature thumbs-up—a double one this time.
His magic worked again, and we emerged twenty minutes later with eight sets of approximately Scottish clothing, consisting of reddish kilts (made in Guatemala, no doubt the tartan of the McGonzalez clan) and loose white shirts. I'd had to guess at sizes, but the kilts were adjustable, and the shirts roomy enough to fit anyone, even though the diminutive Sven was probably going to look as if he'd been swallowed by a giant pillow.
I'd almost made it back to South Beach—alone this time—when my phone lit up on the car seat beside me. It was a message from Elodie. As soon as I stopped at a red light, I called her back.
"I am in Miami," she said. "At the airport. I need you to pick me up." What? I thought. Didn't her dad's wildly over-generous allowance and Clint Highway's credit card cover an airport taxi?
Elodie must have changed out of her winter clothes on the plane. She was looking almost as undressed as when she was my flatmate in Paris and used to wander about our apartment in nothing but her knickers. Her flowery top was more revealing than most bikinis and, although it seemed barely possible, her skirt was even shorter than the one I was wearing on the website. With her in the passenger seat of the Mini, I was really glad Alexa had switched the car over to manual. It gave me an excuse to look down at those slim brown thighs every time I shifted gears.
"Oh, Paul, this car, it is so cool" she said, jiggling around in the seat as if trying to find the best position for a bit of drive-through amour. She smiled approvingly at everything around her. The highway signs directing us to South Beach, the rush of cars heading into town, even the scraggy backyards of the low-income housing we could see from the airport road. Miami was doing its sunny magic trick, making the winter feel like a good place to be. It certainly made a change from Alexa's recent bouts of grumpiness and sarcasm.
"So you haven't seen her since last night?" Elodie asked, with her usual mixture of sympathy and relish.
"No. I've left at least three messages since, but she's not answering."
"Give her a few hours. She is a woman. She needs to decide for herself when she will forgive you. I will call her as soon as I get to the hotel." Elodie had booked herself into one of the posh oceanfront places.
"So are you here just to visit your friend, or are you doing some business?" I asked her.
"Oh, just to see my friend. I will help her with her show at the Alliance tomorrow."
"Show? What kind of show?"
"Oh, pff." She threw up her arms dismissively. "A fashion show."
"What, Chanel dresses and stuff?"
"Oh no, lingerie."
I almost crashed into the back of a school bus.
"Lingerie? In a language school?"
"Yes. Not very sexy lingerie, probably. Just ordinary French underwear. I will be modeling some of it myself. Afterward, we will sell the underwear." I presumed she meant they'd have supplies of the lines they were modeling, though I didn't put it past Elodie to auction off the actual knickers worn during the show.
She turned to look at the heap of costumes in the back of the car. "Are you really going to dance yourself?"
"Yes." I tried to sound enthusiastic. "Just to help out. They were one man short."
"So all the others are authentic Scotch? A professional dance group?"
"Oh yes, totally authentic, and totally professional."
What is it they say? If you're going to tell a lie, go for the big one?
4
There was a noisy crowd filling the Clearview's terrace and the sidewalk beyond. The purple neon made everyone's teeth and eyeballs shine, and the high proportion of white clothing gave an ultraviolet glow to the bobbing, chattering mass of people.
My own white shirt and almost equally white legs were glowing too as I moved among them, handing out Visit Britain Now You Lovely Yank Bastards (or something like that) booklets, none of which acknowledged the existence of winter sleet and sub-Miami temperatures. Here, at dusk, it was so warm that iced whiskey cocktails felt pleasantly refreshing. Back in England, they would only have accelerated the onset of hypothermia.
I kept an eye out for Alexa—who, thanks to Elodie's intervention, had promised to be here for the first show— and for anyone who looked at all like a politician in need of schmoozing. On both counts I drew a blank. I did, though, meet plenty of people who were delighted to shake my hand, pat me on the back, and welcome me to Miami. Lots of them wanted me to autograph the booklets as if I'd written them myself. And a few even asked me to sign myself as undercarriage of the month. Yes, word had gotten around and, to judge by the number of booklets that people hung on to rather than ditching in the nearest bin, it looked as though Scotland was soon to see a sharp upturn in visits from Floridian kilt fans.
Still, I wasn't happy.
"There's absolutely no one from City Hall, is there?" I asked Jesus, who was in the indoor lounge, rubbing his nose on a woman's neck.
"No worries, my frenn," he said, not removing his nose from the neck. "They will come; you will schmooze them."
I left him to it and went to inspect my troops, who were giggling nervously in one of the unfinished bedrooms upstairs. Kilts were being readjusted, sleeves rolled up, and shirttails tucked in to give the right degree of bagginess. They looked a pretty mismatched army, and several of them had obviously been getting Dutch courage out of a Scotch bottle,
As promised, Birgit's two friends had completed our lineup. They were called Shweeanna and Mary. Shweeanna was a history teacher who'd done her master's dissertation on the clearance of the Highlands by my evil forefathers, but she seemed to have forgiven me. Mary was a small woman of about forty with a boy's body and—amazingly—an authentic Scottish accent. So I hadn't told Elodie a complete lie, after all. Mary was originally from Clydebank, where her dad had been an unemployed shipbuilder. She and Birgit had spent an hour preshow running us through the basic steps. Birgit's large chest bouncing on Mary's head looked like a small boy trying to knock coconuts out of a tree, but we'd got the basic idea. It seemed to me that if you just kept twirling, you couldn't go too far wrong.
Seeing that we were in America, I felt we had to do the communal prayer thing.
"Huddle up, team," I said, and we lin
ked arms, bowed heads and bonded. "For what we are about to do, may the Lord of the Dance forgive us," I said, and we whooped. Even more so when Sven spun me on my heels and began giggling at my back.
"Look guys," he laughed, and gathered the dancers behind me. They all joined in the hilarity and began pulling at my shirt.
"What are you up to back there?" I asked, and they started to hand me a colorful harvest of Post-its with names and phone numbers. It seemed that my website fans had come prepared.
"OK, you start now? We got three shows to do, people." Jesus burst in, clapping his hands like a true theater manager. He high-fived us as we filed out the door.
I felt a wave of butterflies come up the stairwell and hit me in the stomach. Oh well, I thought, you're a long way from home. None of these people will ever see you again, apart from Jake, Alexa, and Elodie. If Alexa's even here. I breathed deeply and headed down toward the Scottish accordion music that was wafting in on the Atlantic breeze.
When we got outdoors into the purple neon night, I sensed the banks of digital cameras and phones pointing at me, waiting for my undercarriage to show. As I reeled and jigged, there was a collective intake of breath and a flutter of hopeful camera flashes every time I lifted a knee.
When—only once—I fell over, the lenses pointed toward my raised kilt like a swarm of rectal thermometers.
The others were doing a valiant job. Sven and Greg tended to put too much ass bumping into the traditional Scottish dances, though at least for once the dance called the Gay Gordons lived up to its name. Jake was almost totally lacking in rhythm, which explained a lot about his poems, but he was motivated by the chance to grab hold of a multinational group of women, and performed gamely. Juliana was a natural dancer, and she and Shweeanna swung their hips in a way that would have repopulated the Highlands in no time.
And then, after three dances, any remaining nervousness changed to laughing euphoria when half a dozen people from the crowd joined in and turned our display into a party. By the end of our half-hour show, there were almost as many people dancing as watching. Tables had been pushed aside, and Birgit was calling the steps rather than massaging people's heads with her chest. During the final Strip the Willow, I was delighted to cross arms with a breathless, smiling Alexa, followed by her new friends Cherry and Gayle. I was, though, less delighted to see a male face I knew from somewhere. I couldn't quite place him, but I was aware that I didn't like him for some reason.
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