by Isabella May
Her eyes flickered, as if registering this remark about Lee’s newfound abundance, but if she’d made the financial connections, she certainly wasn’t letting on. Thank God for that. It wasn’t that he’d never planned to tell her, and it certainly wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, but it was Lee’s secret, and hardly your bog standard one at that.
“I think we both know it would be best not to tempt fate… I’ll take the first coach, you must stay on and celebrate, it’s your duty as Best Man, you can’t not fulfil it. Who knows, perhaps Georgina will show up again, a few drinks… you, I mean, not her… in her condition… and suddenly life with a ready-made family will look a lot rosier.”
“Just stop this, Alice, stop it!”
Silence, until in a distant field a cow mooed. It seemed to be telling him to tell her something, anything, even if his words were to spew out in a pile of utter drivel.
“I’m out of my mind, life’s been so tough that at times – and I can hardly believe I am saying this… but at times I have been ever so slightly close to understanding just how a man could take his life.”
Now she looked at him, eyes reluctant to let themselves become shiny, it was a trait of hers he knew too well.
“I love you, Alice Goldsmith… I wanted to tell you that day in the market in Prague, but you’d only have said I was returning the compliment, matching your words… and besides, I loved you too much to keep you away from your beloved mulled wine for a second longer.”
Alice climbed to sit next to him on the gate, keeping a safe distance apart. It was a start of sorts. He somehow stifled the urge to smile and he definitely didn’t dare inch closer. She was still a wild animal, wilder than she’d been that day when he’d rescued her from the strawberry fields. And yet as they sat there in the rural Somerset Levels’ silence, watching herons stoop low to take their fill from the water; watching waiters annoyingly deposit the last of the Eggnogs before the claxon called for one and all to huddle to graze on caviar… and Alice a gourmet slice of nut roast; watching Hayley and one TV Executive called Bob enjoying a thoroughly cheeky snog beneath the sails of a quaint windmill, River knew that he and Alice had turned a corner.
Somehow destiny had brought them back together. And now, much like the millers who had ground their crops for long enough, he wasn’t so much determined to make hay while the sun was shining, as flour – preferably of the self-raising variety, of course. Which was quite the corniest of puns given their location, yet somehow there was no better way of summing things up.
Soon it would be their time.
Chapter Forty
RIVER
A few days before the Christmas party at the one and only cocktail bar on Glastonbury’s High Street, the one and only cocktail bar in Glastonbury, and Somerset’s cocktail bar of the year, Lee had not only worked his notice at the supermarket, but was made manager of River’s establishment, in a move which raised more than a few local eyebrows. And stock control had never known a swifter way of life.
But of course none of this came as a surprise to River. In fact, it had all been part of his master plan, concocted fairly recently, all things considered, but since when did a plan require a four year BA Honours degree to be a good one? Lee’s love of cocktails couldn’t have been plainer for all to see, he had certainly been frequenting the bar with all the gusto of a zebra visiting a watering hole, he’d learnt every process and procedure of every fusion on the menu under River’s steely gaze – admittedly only for home recreational purposes, but still, those skills were transferable. The Magical Mañana had worked its regional magic, and so had River. It was time to move on, and what better send off than a Yuletide bash?
The party was in full swing already, despite the doors only having opened half an hour ago. The book club had started a little too early on the cracker pulling, fifty pound notes hitting the floor like confetti – Lee had secretly funded those, no more tacky plastic festivities for anything he linked his name to, being more or less his precise choice of words when River had caught him tying gold and silver bows around their middles. The travel agents were bopping away in a corner whilst intermittently supping on Lee’s delectable Homemade Irish Cream, their actions slightly less frantic than they had been during their first visit to the bar, their garments slightly more in keeping with the fashion too. And the Rigby-Chandlers had not only insisted on paying for their own drinks, but standing outside the door gifting the Christmas shoppers with free champagne cocktails, causing River to rub his eyes more than a dozen times.
River and Alice had gathered everybody back inside so he could make a thank you speech, before things got too chaotic, the crowd of well-wishers had clapped and whistled – many with momentary tears in their eyes for it was the first they’d heard of River and Alice’s departure – soon dissipating once they learned Lee and Jonie would be the new faces behind the bar.
And then in breezed Aunt Sheba.
It wasn’t that River hadn’t invited her, rather he hadn’t expected her to put herself in the way of forgiveness’s temptation, and after all the recent drama in his own life, he’d rather she stayed at home if there was even a smidgen of a chance of round two of the dreaded Sting Thing.
“Well, it is the season of goodwill to all men and women,” said Aunt Sheba, removing her spruce green fingerless gloves. “And I want to spend as much time with you both as I can now you’re off on a new adventure… wherever that may be, although, I can’t deny the thought of having my roomiest caravan back to advertise online for anybody wishing to purchase a late Christmas break at high season prices, doesn’t delight.”
“Don’t ask me where we’re headed,” said Alice with a grin. “I swear your nephew’s brainwashed me, but I’m learning to go with it, I guess it was always going to happen with a mother like his… I mean your sister… I mean—”
“Come on, that’s enough waffle, group snog under the mistletoe,” Aunt Sheba insisted in an elaborate ploy to change the conversation.
River and Alice found themselves cocooned in her henna tattooed bosom beneath one of the scant sprigs in the bar. Thankfully Lee hadn’t gone to town on the flora, much as he’d threatened.
Aunt Sheba released them at River’s insistence they’d be back for the holidays, upon which he made his escape to the bar to admire the gathering, to take some discreet and un-staged snaps of the partygoers for old time’s sake.
“You did good in this place, I only hope I can be a fraction as successful,” said Lee, as River clicked away, angling his iPad this way and that, intent on capturing not just the people but the bar’s every nook and cranny. “Who’d have thought it though, hey, me… a cocktail bar manager, with my gorgeous wife by my side? If you’d told me that this time last year I’d have spurted my pint of cider all over you.”
“You and me both,” River laughed, and then, quite without warning, his laissez-faire attitude of the past couple of months caught up with him. “I’m just heading down to the skittle alley, something I need to check up on… keep doing your thing.” He double clucked his tongue and winked at Lee in the manner of a vexing uncle.
Once outside in the snappy air, River ran, careful to avoid skidding along the slippery path in his tread-free party shoes. He panned the horizon as usual, unlocked the skittle alley door and let himself in, creeping, quite unnecessarily, in the air with which he’d grown accustomed, over to the cupboard in the corner.
“Shit, no!” he almost screamed.
Everything looked as it always had done, except for one very minor but important detail; the lock was on back to front. He’d never have hung it like that. Somebody had been in there, or at least made an attempt. He took the small key from his pocket, opened the padlock and cursed himself, this time with every expletive under the sun. At first everything seemed perfectly normal, but a quick scan confirmed his suspicions: The tartan blankets were in a different order. And he knew this because the top one should have been Bruce Modern, which in red tartan terms was a pattern wit
h sizeable squares. But instead he was looking at Heather’s Cochrane Modern blanket, its tartan pattern made up of smaller lines and squares. Only someone with the attention to detail of a cocktail bartender would notice this, but to River it spelt one word.
Trouble.
All of which led to the inescapable fact that he’d been robbed of the bottle, as well as the world’s greatest idiot for not having bothered to check up on its status and condition since Terry had knocked back his Magical Mañana. River removed the top blanket anyway, heart thudding, rendering him queasy, dizzy at the thought of the elixir being in the wrong hands.
Who could have done it? He’d been meticulous with the keys. The only possible explanation had to be the picking of a lock. As with the missing translation, naturally his mind was rife with accusations for Georgina, and yet he couldn’t quite find the facts to stack up. She’d never shown a single sign of knowing what he was up to, her only venture into the backyard being to park her rear on a deckchair to read trashy magazines.
Then perhaps somebody had followed him from Mexico, had been on his case ever since day one? It was the only feasible answer.
Great.
So he was like the guy in The Celestine Prophecy now… or Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code, with the perpetrator always too many steps ahead of him.
“It is true, you’ve been a little… hmm… shall we say ‘haphazard’ this time, but then you are still serving your apprenticeship.”
“Mercedes?”
River stepped back from the cupboard and spun around several times, head flitting up and down, around and around, in a bid to locate her elusive voice. For he swore he wasn’t imagining that trickle of words, whatever it was coming from.
“Get back in the bar, get ready to leave and trust me. All will come good in the end; all will become clear very quickly. Rights wronged in moments. But for goodness sake, mi chiquito, tell Alice this time and let her be in charge of the bottle’s hiding place.”
“But the bottle’s gone, someone’s stolen it.”
“Did you miss the first part of my instruction? Get back in the bar, get ready to leave and trust me.”
“Okay, okay.” River held his hands up like a criminal turning himself in. “I trust you, I’ll do it, I’m going.”
He knew the drill by now, much as any normal person would have locked him up months ago. And so he marched up the path, on tiptoes, dodging the icy bits, eager to see how this mystery would play out. It was pretty clear that Mercedes knew something he didn’t, something that was soon to reveal itself. So far her track record had been accurate enough, so what other option was there but to put his faith in her once again?
“I’m back,” he almost sing-songed to Lee.
“About time, what was that all about? Forget to put something on the inventory?”
“No, no, everything’s good. I just wanted to… y’know, have a moment.”
“You are sure about this, starting over so quickly, leaving me here to steer the ship?”
“As sure as I’ll ever be… you, me, the bashing up of the bar… it was written in the stars that day.”
They both smiled, River simultaneously cringing at himself for nabbing Mercedes’ quote, but under the current circumstances, it was wholly appropriate. And then Lee surprised him completely by going in for a semi-man hug which didn’t quite take off in the way man hugs were intended but ended up as several slaps on the back.
“All right, calm down!”
They stood there awhile like that; a silent metaphor for out with the old and in with the new, a friendship restored to something even better than its former glory. Lee’s eyes were ablaze with joy and fixed on his wife, River’s were transfixed by Alice, wondering where life would take them, relinquishing the very thought of worrying about the current location of one bottle, lest Mercedes boom out over the loudspeaker next, scaring them all out of their wits. He let his eyes move over to his Aunt Sheba as he took a drink of his final cocktail in this bar – damn that Frisky Bison for making its way into his glass again – but he’d allow himself approximately a third of its goodness, he was driving soon, after all. Aunt Sheba stood a distance from Heather and Terry, the spirituous apples danced on his tongue, and Sting’s ‘Free’ began to blast out on the sound system.
“Right, that’s it. If that isn’t a flippin’ sign, I don’t know what is,” he overheard a voice sounding very much like Heather’s declare. And sure enough as his head followed its direction, there she was, abandoning her Ginger Rabbit on a table like an exclamation mark, walking over to grab her long lost sister, rigid crab-like pincers held out before her, the kind that would not take no for an answer.
River swore his jaw was about to hit the floor. This was unbelievable, a decades-long feud on the brink of becoming history, all because of a song. But then someone made a grab for him, and it didn’t take him long to work out that it wasn’t Alice, whose arms were otherwise engaged as she topped up trays of Irish Cream at the far side of the bar. The two spindly hands continued, threatening to tickle his chest through his thin white shirt:
Cassandra.
Ooh, that woman. Forever creeping up behind him when he least expected it.
“I’m starting up a travelling library service again for the local villages,” she said, letting him go at last and spinning him around as if they were about to take to the floor on Strictly, which she could flaming well forget, he’d played the charming Anton du Beke with her for long enough.
Tonight he was Alice’s. All Alice’s, and in many ways their ‘going away car’ moment, a piece of cinema he had endlessly visualised over the past couple of weeks, couldn’t not put his beloved in mind of one of those vintage after-the-wedding-reception cars, a move he thought portended well for their new life together. Of course, there was the slight issue that he still insisted upon driving a mustard rust bucket. Some things, reassuringly, never changed.
“And I just wanted to let you know,” Cassandra continued, bringing him right back down to Earth as she’d clearly intended, “that actually, it’s with the help of Lord and Lady Rigby-Chandler. You see, they don’t know that I know that they know that this little charitable, do-good PR stunt of theirs is going to help more visitors tune into the TV to see their castle in ruins appearing on that documentary soon with your future stepfather, but if you can’t scratch one another’s backs from time to—”
“Oh absolutely, Cassie, I couldn’t agree more, what a wonderful idea.”
And it was, though he was loath to admit it. But never mind that, who in God’s name had he left in charge of the music?
Just as Sting morphed into Mariah Carey, who began to croon out about all she wanted for the festive season, the door to the bar opened with an almighty bang. Lee welded himself to the far corner of the bar, an act that told River all he needed to know – in both senses of the word.
“Very high-gurr this is; isn’t it?” said the outsider.
River was sure Blake was trying to say ‘hygge’, the Danish word for ‘cosy’ as he set foot inside The Cocktail Bar for the second time since River had made it his. Behind him, Georgina revealed herself, clad in a cranberry-red coat, her hand clutching at her swollen stomach – its shape now an ever-expanding figgy pudding.
Here we go again.
But then he remembered Mercedes’ reassuring words and a strange but welcome calm descended upon him.
Everyone else fell quiet then too, except River. Because unlike the last time Blake took issue with his right as a human being to be, do and have what he wanted; to live his life, River was no longer scared.
“So… you found out I made Lee a manager, and now you’re here to let us know about it. Let’s give him a round of applause everybody.”
All around him people slowly began to clap, faces looking from one to the other, clearly unsure where any of this was going; all excluding Terry who just looked utterly miffed at the audacity of his grown children to keep throwing not so much spanners, but entire toolk
its in the works.
“You’re sounding a bit surer of yourself than last time, Jackson. But what did I tell you? Should’ve taken heed of my warning: I’m the mallet, you’re the mole, remember?”
“Then go ahead and do your best.” River stepped forward, a willing volunteer.
“Yeah,” Lee echoed confidently all of a sudden, un-gripping his limbs from the bar’s counter, “I’m not your puppet anymore. Bring. It. On. Hopkins.”
“Oh yeah… back for round two are we? Some people never learn, do they?”
A thunder that was unmistakably Hayley’s threatened to take down not so much Blake but the entire bar as well. But River wasn’t about to let her play Wonder Woman today. Blake and his sister were his excess baggage and if they’d chosen to set the scene here, he was more than prepared to deal with it.
“Do his best? Do our best, I think you’ll find… oh yes, there have been any number of us involved in this little Operation dubbed ‘Payback’,” yelled Georgina, fire crackling in her eyes as she attempted to woo the crowd. “How’s about this then ladies and gents, will this do you?”
She opened her coat to reveal not just another layer swaddling her rotund stomach, but a bottle; River’s bottle, strapped to her side with a belt. She yanked it free and held it up high as if she were in a courtroom defending her brother: “River Jackson here… the town’s beloved former indie swooner… he’s only been contaminating your drinks.”
River knew it was crucial to keep his cool now despite the inevitable shockwave of this image. Somehow he had to keep hold of Mercedes’ assurance; somehow this was all going to blow over in moments.
He hoped.
Voices chirped and gasps rang out around the room. Alice looked to her love for an answer, he couldn’t give her one. Heather looked downright ashamed taking him right back to the teenage time when he’d furtively added dope to her vegan brownies, getting all of her kundalini yoga class completely off their heads. Everybody else just merged into one single being, reeling at the way he had let them all down. And Georgina began to open her mouth to carry on, at which point those former chirps and gasps became loud ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ and ‘did you just see thats?’ – with a whole range of colourful expletives thrown into the mix besides.