Megan picked me up in the car she’d hired. I wore the clothes I’d been wearing for my walk on the pier, the only difference being knee-length elastic stockings to combat the danger of post-operative blood clots. Outside, in the car park, I sucked in the first free-range, non-conditioned air in ten days. It had a touch of the sea in it as well as the ever-present American smell of petrol. My chest felt tight, my legs felt weak, my breathing felt shallow but I felt great. Megan stowed my bag and helped me into the car without any fuss.
She drove straight to a bar more or less attached to the marina. It had an outdoor area with tables shaded by umbrellas. The air was salty; surf beat on the sand; close your eyes, ignore the accents, and you could have been in a Manly beer garden. Megan ordered a pitcher of light beer.
‘It’s even more pissy than at home,’ she said. ‘But I thought you should start quietly. Would you believe I had to show ID to get a drink in here the other night? What’s the legal drinking age-thirty?’
The beer came. I poured; we touched glasses. ‘I think it’s twenty-one,’ I said. ‘Be glad you don’t look your age.’
‘You look OK, Cliff. A bit pale.’
‘I’ll sit in the sun and clean my gun.’
‘You’re going to miss it, aren’t you?’
The beer was thin and sweet but it still had enough bite to feel like a drink, a return to one of the great consolations of life. ‘I suppose I will, but in a way this could be some sort of signal. Time for a change.’
‘You’ve had a few of them-banned for life and. . Lily.’
‘Shit’s like luck, someone told me. It comes in threes.’
Megan had found a first-floor serviced apartment in a small block on Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach. It cost a lot, but Lily had left half of everything she had to me. Her house in Greenwich was worth close to a million and she had some blue chip shares. Even after the lawyers and financial advisers had taken their bites, Tony and I were left comfortably fixed. I’d given Megan a substantial deposit on a flat in Newtown but left before I heard what she’d bought. Along with the money I inherited some guilt, because I’d never known that Lily had made that gesture.
‘One floor up,’ Megan said as she keyed in at the security door. ‘Gives you a bit of a view and you said they
want you climbing stairs.’
‘Right, and one flight sounds about enough just now.’
The flat had two bedrooms, a sitting room, bathroom and kitchen, all fitted out in US modern. There was a big fridge, a microwave, cable TV and DVD player and recorder. Sliding glass doors opened onto a balcony that gave me a view of the pier, the beach and the Pacific Ocean. That helped to make the price very reasonable.
‘I stocked the fridge and the cupboards,’ Megan said. ‘You’ve got a month with an option to extend. How d’you like it?’
I put my arm around her broad shoulders and kissed the top of her head, which wasn’t very far down. ‘You done good,’ I said.
‘A woman comes in to clean every second day unless you put a notice on the door that you don’t want it. All paid for.’
‘I’ll have to try and make it worth her while. Grot the place up a bit.’
Her look and tone were severe. ‘Don’t skite. The way you are, you couldn’t make the bed.’
That’s Megan.
They’d told me that I’d be exhausted on my day of release. I wasn’t. We went out for lunch and then I was. I slept for a couple of hours and then went through the tedious process of the exercises. Arms up, deep breaths, rotate shoulders-again and again and again. And then it was on to the bloody nozzle and ball game-three balls inside plastic tubes. Suck to get them moving.
Megan laughed as she saw me struggle to hold the balls in suspension. On the third try I kept them up longer than I had in the hospital.
‘Hey, that’s pretty good.’
‘I’m going to try out for the bypass Olympics.’
She stayed for three days-cooked me up some meals- bolognese sauce, a couple of hot curries, a stroganov-and froze them. I didn’t ask her about the break-up with her boyfriend, but she volunteered that she’d be moving into the Newtown flat as soon as she got back. Who with? I wanted to say but I didn’t. Maybe no one, and she’d tell me when she was ready. I thanked her too often, tried to give her some money, which she refused, and saw her off.
I settled into a regime of walks, exercises, more walks, more exercises. At first I was slow, doing not much more than a shuffle, but, as the physios had promised, improvement came rapidly. After two weeks I discarded the elastic stockings and was walking pretty freely. I stayed on flat surfaces for a while, then gradually tried myself on small inclines. In the beginning I had to stand still to allow the ubiquitous rollerbladers to avoid me, but eventually I was nimble enough to avoid them. If there was a better place for rehabilitation than San Diego, I didn’t know it. The temperature hovered around the seventies in the day and there was a sea breeze at night. It didn’t rain.
I had some blood tests and reported to Dr Epstein who expressed his satisfaction.
‘You’re making remarkable progress. Blood pressure good, rhythm excellent, rate the same. Your heart is functioning really well. Cholesterol’s coming back into line.
You’ll have to stay on the medications for the rest of your life. You realise that, don’t you?’
‘Doesn’t worry me,’ I said. ‘Just to have a rest of my life’s the bonus.’
‘I’ll refer you to a man in Sydney for you to stay in touch with.’
Dr Epstein put his hand on my chest and ordered me to cough.
‘That sternum’s solid,’ he said. ‘You can do pretty much anything you did before. You worked out, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Nothing too solid.’
‘Give it another couple of weeks and get back to it. You’re going to feel ten years younger.’
So apparently I could get back to normal life. But what was that, with my career as a private enquiry agent effectively brought to a full stop? I put such thoughts on hold as I went about the rehabilitation full steam. Ocean Beach pier, the structure everyone is so proud of, is about a mile and a half long, taking in the main length and the two cross pieces-a perfect walking track with interesting things to look at along the way: the Vietnamese men and women, fishing for food, with their basic equipment; the others, for sport, with their high-tech rods and reels; the professionals in their high-powered boats. At the right times of day the bodysurfers were out and the windsurfers and the board riders.
It was the longest I’d ever stayed in one place in the US and I found it growing on me. Almost everything was commercialised, privatised, corporatised, except the people. They came in all shapes and sizes and colours and varied from aggressive semi-sociopaths to the utterly normal men and women you can find anywhere. Television was appalling, but books were cheap.
After a few days of walking the pier I had people to nod to-the guy from the bait shop, the professional photographer, other walkers. Then I met, or re-met, Margaret McKinley.
2
I was sitting on a bench near the end of the pier reading. Megan had left a pile of paperbacks she’d picked up and one was The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. I was keen to read it because, in a way, Winslow had brought me to San Diego. His book, The Winter of Frankie Machine, was one of the best crime novels I’d ever read, and the description of the San Diego waterfront was so graphic and compelling I’d taken it into my head to go there as I slowly wended my way back up the west coast towards a flight to Australia. In the book, Frankie Machine ran the bait shop on the pier. The area had lived up to the description and it was lucky for me I’d been there when I had the heart attack. If I’d been driving around LA, as I was a few days before, things could have been very different.