by Isabella May
Maybe it turned some men on, but the way Georgina was carrying on lately had really gotten his back up. So much so that he’d feigned exhaustion since last weekend, preferring to return to his childhood box room, giving Alice some space at the campsite too. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t given The Love Shack a go. But for him it no longer worked, his libido frozen, locked in a time warp since the move to Aunt Sheba’s. No matter how much Georgina tried to resurrect it, the inescapable fact remained that Alice was in the same ‘house’ now. It changed everything, mainly because it felt inexplicably natural to be living with Alice. And try as he might, he couldn’t keep those visions of bare-footed children – their children – running around a marshmallow-toasting campfire at bay, much less the nagging sensation that he was cheating on her under their very own roof.
And then last night Alice had rung on the doorbell at his mum’s, completely taking him by surprise to return a batch of his old CDs, many of which he’d clean forgotten he’d lent her eight summers ago in Berlin when they’d toured around Europe. It was unbelievable to think she’d prioritised them in her rather limited L.A. to London luggage. But with Heather away at her convention which had now dropped in on the lucky destination of Avebury, he more than welcomed not only the company but the surprisingly successful, and moreish filo pastry stuffed with feta, chickpeas, green olives and bell peppers that Alice rustled them up for supper; giving him the opportunity to knock up a kick-ass Kaffir Lime Sour; cocktail pairing perfection. It opened his eyes to a brand new side of Alice, a dimension that he’d never had chance to get to know. They chatted for hours about their very individual experiences with the band, awestruck at how different their two perspectives had been, despite their physical proximity both onstage and off it. And then he began to understand the real reason she’d fled from Avalonia, something which sparked a rage within that went beyond the level in the hotel reception, taking him to a brand new threshold he didn’t even realise was possible.
“I know it sounds like the very stereotypical claim of a very stereotypical woman,” she said.
“Lennie.”
She remained silent.
“I might have guessed it. Please tell me he hasn’t—”
“Not exactly, no.” She switched from her cocktail to water, as if detoxing herself of every trace of bad memories.
“Look, I believe you already. You don’t need to explain anything to me, or go into details if it’s too lecherous to repeat.” She laid her head on his shoulder and he wrapped her in a warm but big brotherly embrace. They stayed like that a while, comfortable in the stillness of conversation, the beats of Portishead taking the edge off the desire to scratch at the itch until the track faded and River got up to change the CD.
“I wish you’d been there the day we filmed the drinks commercial, you know… in Guadalajara.” She sighed. “That’s when it all started getting a little too out of hand.”
“Go on.” His stomach tightened into one of those unending sailor’s knots. He’d kind of hoped that would be the last of the lowlife’s name pervading the house.
She sat upright, clutching at her glass, baggy cardigan sleeves covering her hands like a pair of mittens. How childlike she looked. How he wished he had been there to protect her.
“I mean it didn’t exactly begin then, he’d been knocking on my door at night for several weeks… and then I guess if I’m really honest about it, ever since day one when Bear and Alex invited us up to Soho to meet him in the recording studio, he’d always had his eye on me… in a slightly unsavoury way. There was this one time when the three of you were late for rehearsals, and he’d propositioned me, you know, kind of like Robert Redford did in that film to Demi Moore… I forget the name of it, but our age gap would have been similar. Anyway, it wasn’t quite a million dollars on the table, but a couple of hundred thousand.” She laughed morosely.
River’s head began to spin and now he wasn’t sure which part of his anatomy felt worse.
“He’d clearly no idea of my roots,” Alice continued, “that I’d come to inherit ten times that amount one day… well, that I always thought I’d come to inherit ten times that amount. I didn’t take him up on his offer, of course. Just ridiculed him, and so did he, but it left me in no doubt that if I’d have given an inch he’d had taken a mile. That should have started the ringing of the alarm bells, shouldn’t it?” She put her fingers to her temple. “If ever there was a time to get out and run back to the countryside and equestrian life, it was then. How could I have been so stupid?”
“I need a cigarette.” River cradled his head. This was all getting way too much.
“I thought you’d given—?”
“Yeah, I had quit, but just for tonight,” he stood, “just for one night,” and grabbed his coat. “I will literally be five minutes, that’s all. The corner shop at the end of the street should still be open.”
Alice curled herself up like a cat, her soft features highlighted by the flickers of the candle on the wooden trunk which served as their dining table. He stole a glimpse of her as he left the room; his hands seemed to stroke the frame of the door in the same way he wanted to caress her body right then. Yes, it was definitely time for fresh air and nicotine before stupidity had its way with him.
***
He lit up his cigarette, parkoured over the bench outside the shop – forgetting his age – and sat there awhile, letting the rush fill his lungs, so bad but so good. A total one off, he promised himself. The streetlights flickered, as if displaying their disapproval, but he puffed on heavily anyway, as if that might somehow help him make sense of his lack of intuition. How could he have been so in tune with Mercedes and the blessed bottle, and yet at the same time, so out of the vibrational range of his friend, the one who needed him to protect her?
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, or what Lennie was making him do to his body after two years smoke-free. Heather would go bananas. Just as well she was away levitating, or meditating around ancient stones and painting mandalas, as bananas as that was anyway. And then he shook his head at the cheek of his ego.
Hypocrite!
Were they ever so very different after all when here he was, infusing drinks with unknown substances: One Chosen One down and two more to go?
***
“There’s more,” Alice started and then paused, deep in thought, when he returned to see her seated, suddenly looking more awake, more radiant than ever. He noticed she’d opened the bottle of red that she’d brought as a sorry-for-hoarding-your-music present, and now she was gesturing to his glass, clearly unsure as to whether she should carry on with her next revelation.
“Fill me up then, why not?” he said. He wouldn’t normally dream of being so uncouth as to mix cocktails with wine, especially considering the headiness of an oaky red after the citrusy punch of their recent tipple, but he knew now wasn’t the time for being uppity. “I thought you implied earlier that he hadn’t touched you physically?”
“No, he didn’t,” she said, passing him his glass which he shunned momentarily to the mahogany chest. “He would have taken his chances one of these days I’m sure, but thankfully I wizened up to it. Anyway, that’s not what I’m talking about.” She tore her eyes from him, took a gulp of her drink and then returned her attention to him again. “What I mean is I’ll give you the backstory later, but it’s water under the bridge now anyway, I escaped. This is a totally different subject.”
River sat on the futon, his second cigarette in one hand, shaking slightly, and Heather’s favourite artisanal lavender-stuffed beaded cushion in the other, if only that might shield him from what was to come.
“God, I don’t even know how to break this to you and the chances are it’s complete and utter nonsense but he claims to be,” she took a deep breath and moved next to him, placing an arm around his neck as if that might offer some comfort, “he says he’s your father.”
River felt his body numb then from head to toe, a trickle at first and then an ove
rall state of momentary paralysis. Finally he broke away from Alice, stood very slowly, both hands covering his face at the very suggestion, hair flopping forward, desperately in need of a cut.
“I know, I know,” she said. “How could that possibly be? I’m just telling you because I think you have a right to know the kind of poison that’s inside his head.”
“Shit,” said River finally, flicking the wavy strands out of his eyes. “Shit… that explains everything. How could I have been so blind to it; the constant referral to me as ‘son’? And the other night when he was chatting with Mum through the… and she slammed it down… and then, oh, hell no…”
Lennie, in three very different ways, had tricked them all like the sweet vermouth in a well-made Cheshire Cat. But in actual fact, he was a Gypsy’s Warning. Why, oh why, had it taken River this long to suss him out, and more to the point, why had Heather kept this dark secret hidden from him his entire life?
Chapter Twenty-One
ALICE
She was appalled with herself for letting it slip out like that, the zesty cocktail and heady wine only speeding up the lightning bolt of a prophecy. And yet she had reached the stage where she could no longer keep such a secret from River, the man she was desperately trying not to fall in love with.
She wasn’t really one for The Royals, despite her very privileged upbringing, but there was something so tragically Wills and Kate about the pair of them. And his return to Heather’s to give her some space – space Alice hadn’t even requested; space she had no desire for – felt about as wrong as the future king and his wife’s infamous temporary separation. Just about the only thing keeping her going right now was the sweet realisation that they did reunite, quickly coming to their senses, and in time she hoped she and River would back each other into inevitability’s corner too, a destination with no escape.
The past week had been a roller coaster of emotion, as clichéd and X-Factor journeyed as it was to admit it.
“Shit.” River had finally spoken after she’d told him Lennie strongly suspected he was his son, a ‘confidence’ he’d revealed to her too many weeks ago now, after Heather had slung the crockery and biscuits at him and they’d scarpered back to the RV and then pegged it to London, before flying back to L.A. “Shit… that explains everything,” he’d continued.
Alice had never been through these kinds of dramas growing up. Life had been a continuous flow of ease and abundance, birthright and immunity, an incessant collection of money and passing ‘Go’. Old Kent Road struggle, EastEnders-like strife, they simply hadn’t existed in her bubble. Now, for the very first time, she was beginning to see the world that had been masked to her. Sure, there was nothing to like about it. And yet the chaos of it, the grapple for something better, the paths and the obstacles to be overcome, all of these things shone brightly like the stars. How much more fulfilling a life when there was something to fight for, when you didn’t have it all served up on a platinum plate.
Little did she know that he’d come back to sit by her side, that Portishead would change to Massive Attack, and that the fast-paced African-inspired vibrations of Angel would mutate into the indecipherable, ethereal lilt of Teardrop. Both had instinctively turned to the other, thirsty for some tenderness, edging closer, ever closer, until her body’s tingles merged with his, lips upon lips, skin on skin, arms nowhere and everywhere all at once, taking in every piece of each other in a frenzy.
He pulled away first, just as the moment was coming to its natural end, courtesy of the song releasing them, changing tempo again to something with the potential to take them in a very different direction. But there was no awkwardness. Nobody blushed or ran off to confession with a priest. It was exactly what it was, two people, the music their vehicle for an outpouring. They slept on opposite couches that night, and he drove her back to the campsite the next morning, chatting, laughing, just good friends, not a question to answer.
No rush, she reminded herself as she stole that kiss from her memory again.
Que sera, sera.
So much wisdom in those Spanish words. Every time she meditated – and she was making a point of doing so regularly lately, through the splashes of indigo as she came closer to perfect alignment with that ever sought after third eye chakra, a mysterious voice, the voice of a woman, would whisper over and over in Spanish, the kind of Spanish accentuation that came only from Latin America, that: Que sera, sera.
And then Alice would hunt for the finer detail, trying to match that kiss up with the snog that they’d shared in Blake’s tent all those years ago, but this felt too shiny and new, too wondrous to compare with what would have undoubtedly been a wrangle with a washing machine. At least that’s how she remembered most of those juvenile brushes.
When she backtracked to Georgina’s recent overnight stay, a place she didn’t plan to reside in for very long at all in her head, she couldn’t help but pick up on the tension between them. She’d minded her own business, of course, as River and Georgina had propped themselves up at the small kitchen worktop eating Sweet and Sour Pork, trying to disguise her revulsion at the thought of the poor animal who’d been slaughtered, as well as her revulsion at Georgina for pretending she didn’t exist, as she took her sushi from the fridge and went to eat it outside in the deckchair with her Kindle – once again – for company.
She missed his company, who was she kidding? The weekend was a drag, Aunt Sheba – and it was hilarious to think of the pleasure she derived from referring to her as her Aunt, too – couldn’t have been more welcoming though, checking up on her several times a day, inviting her into the main house for dinner so she wouldn’t have to eat alone. And wasn’t that a blessing in disguise? She had to laugh at the two very different images she’d been broadcasting to River: Alice the Michelin starred chef, with her Feta Bake Fantastique, and more accurately, Alice the Flaming Disaster in the Kitchen, unable to scramble even an egg without almost setting the place alight. For the former she had craftily purchased from Zara’s bakery.
One night the inevitable did happen. Sheba had proffered a reading of her cards and Alice had found she was unable to resist:
“I’m not going to do your tarot reading though, Alice. Oh no… we’ll use the angel cards instead – did you know I created this set myself?”
Sheba’s smile had been full of pride as she’d pulled a small satin drawstring bag from the sideboard behind her and opened it, gently tipping the pack of cards into her palm. The top illustration was exquisite, causing even Alice to feel a brief twinge of jealousy that River had always been surrounded by such creativity, as opposed to the horsey, empirical world of her own family.
“For that is the way I perceive you.” Sheba went on to study her face with the kind of intent one reserved for reading an exam notice board, and then smiled kindly. “Far be it from me to suggest it, but just like an angel, you my dear, were put on River’s path for good reason.”
“Golly no,” Alice protested. “We’ve been friends since we were knee high to grasshoppers. There’s nothing likely to go on romantically between your nephew and me, not now, not ever. And I’m hardly the goodie-two-shoes you make me out to be either.”
She laughed nervously as Sheba laid down a pale lemon square of silk on the table, and added to that a cherubic looking figurine, presumably some part of the ritual as well as a useful anchor. Such a fuss for something Alice wasn’t even sure she believed in, but no harm in going along with it now. She could certainly use the guidance.
“Beg to differ.”
Sheba finally settled herself into her chair, lowered her head, and raised her eyes to make it clear she wasn’t buying the blatant lie. She formed an excellent double chin as she began to shuffle the deck of cards.
“Aren’t you meant to be impartial if you’re cutting my cards?”
“Technically yes, but you’re the one choosing them, with the help of your angels, of course. They’ll always have you pick out what you need to have reaffirmed. No danger of
me brainwashing you, don’t worry.”
“So they’re surrounding me… right now?”
“Always, Alice, always.” Sheba closed her eyes, drew in a breath, held it some seconds and then exhaled, opening her eyes again to look endearingly into Alice’s. “Okay, so, have a question ready in your head… no need to divulge it to me, and then take the card you feel most drawn to. We’ll repeat this three times as a kind of past, present, future spread.”
Alice’s heart began to race excitedly, her fingers felt an inexplicable magnetic pull drawing them dead centre of the fanned out pack, and she carefully pulled a card out and lay it face up on the table, without even taking a prior peek herself.
“Ha, The Angel of Displacement,” said Sheba. “Does that resonate at all?”
“I was kind of expecting you to do the talking.” Alice was none-the-wiser.
“This magnificent being is telling you that you’ve been living a life that’s, well, not been too true to your higher self for quite some time. Seeing as you left the band and Hollywood behind to return to your hometown, that’s some pretty accurate picking, Alice.”
“Let’s see how the present follows it up then, shall we?”
Alice shifted her posture, upright, eager, ready to see what The Now had to say for itself – despite the fact this was all complete nonsense. Nothing more than beginner’s luck, even if Sheba’s knowing smile as she extended the fan across the table yet again, said otherwise.
Alice’s fingers weren’t so sure what to do this time, hovering back and forth as if she were a kid in one of those modern handmade ice cream parlours, dithering over Cookies and Cream, Mint Choc Chip and Bubble Gum. Finally, intuition had her reaching for the penultimate card on the far left. She didn’t dare tempt fate with an alternative procedure, and gently placed it face up on the silky table top once again without looking.