Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination Read Online Free PDF Page A

fettered by artificial rules, regulations and strange markings imposed from without rather than within.
     
    “Okay, Bazzer,” she said instead. “I’ll do it by six o’clock.”
     
    Elan had not yet called to nix the OceansApart story, so she thought it wouldn’t do any harm to nip quickly down to the harbor to take a look, just in case, so that if Elan did happen to call and say yes, then she would have some more material. Plus, she could be picking up more local color for the Sunday Times piece while she was at it. It was nine already, but she figured that if she got back from the OceansApart by ten-thirty, she’d still have seven and a half hours to write the article for Barry. And spell-check it. And e-mail it. But it would definitely be fine. Definitely. That was only about two hundred words an hour. And she could run! It was, after all, vital to exercise.
    Unfortunately, Olivia did not have a proper grasp of the passage of time. In fact, both Barry and Kate had noted on several occasions that Olivia thought time was personal, that it moved at the speed she wanted it to. Their view was that this was not a belief compatible with being a newspaper journalist with deadlines to meet and so on.
     
    Jogging along the South Shore Strip, even at breakfast time, was like flipping through radio channels: a different beat blaring out from each café. Waiters were hosing down the pavements, gardeners blowing away leaves. The lines of hooting cars were gone, the party people only recently tucked into bed. Olivia passed a café playing p. 25 salsa music; inside, everything—walls, tables, plates, menus—was covered in the same lurid jungle print; the waitress, even at that hour, was wearing a leopardskin, halter-neck catsuit. She crossed the road to get a better view of the campy grandeur of the Versace mansion and the art deco hotels—whites, pinks, lilacs, oranges—the Pelican, the Avalon, the Casa Grande, curves and funnels suggesting trains and ocean liners. It was hot already, the shadows of the fluttering palm trees crisp against the white pavement. She started working out her piece as she ran.
    “Think Miami is full of old people’s condos, the hum of electric wheelchairs and people shooting each other? Think again!” . . .
    “Suddenly there are more revamped art deco hotels everywhere!” . . .
    “If Paris is the new elevator music, Miami is the new Eminem.” . . .
    “If Manchester is the new Soho, then Miami is the new Manhattan.” . . .
    “If Eastbourne had a makeover from Ian Schrager and Stella McCartney, then forced all its inhabitants into a giant tanning booth . . .”
    Oh God. She couldn’t do this stuff anymore. It was nonsense. It didn’t mean anything. She had to find a proper story.
     
    At the south end of the strip were huge apartment blocks, and behind them, gliding smoothly, she could see a huge ocean liner. She must be close to the docks. She jogged along the street, the area becoming rougher and tattier, until she reached the water at South Pointe Park, where the deep shipping lane passed straight in front of the apartments and marina. The liner was moving fast, its bulbous rear disappearing towards the docks: big, but not the OceansApart. She peered at the skyline beyond it: the tower blocks of downtown Miami, the arched bridges of the highways crisscrossing the big expanses of water, the cranes marking the docks. She started to run towards them, but they were farther away than they seemed; she p. 26 kept thinking she was so nearly there, it would be stupid to turn back.
    She had stopped at the end of a traffic bridge, trying to get her breath and pushing a damp strand of hair from her forehead, when she suddenly realized that what she had thought was an office block beyond the liner was in fact the OceansApart. Here, in the harbor, it dwarfed all the other ships around it, making them look like toys or miniatures. It was monolithic. It looked too big to be safe, as