Page 43 of The Cocktail Bar
Chapter Twenty-Three
RIVER
When you are raised in a town like Glastonbury you are different, marked with an indelible ink, somehow more spiritually tuned in and turned on. Well, unless you are Blake – or Georgina, as River was realising more and more with the passing days. And that’s why the news of Lennie’s potential promotion to father hardly surprised him.
River was waiting in the living-room for Heather, perching like a canary on the window sill, feet resting on the coffee table trunk when she walked back through the door after her convention.
“Bit late, aren’t you?” he remarked.
“Hi Riv, how’s the bar?” She barely looked at him, wrapped up in raincoat and bags as she was. “And what are you doing here anyway? Oh, do watch you don’t infringe on the spacing of my set of Buddhas on the ledge there, won’t you? I thought you and Alice were still staying at The Guinevere? Ooh, have you found a house? How exciting… sorry, yes, I got side-tracked with Terry. He’s going to be staying tonight, you know, as in… in my room… in my bed… under my duv—”
“I’m pleased for you, Mum, really, that’s great. But I think it’s about time you filled me in on the past before you get carried away with the future.”
“What do you mean?” Heather stopped for the first time to study her son properly, she appeared genuinely confused.
“What I mean is this: is there a distinct possibility that my former band manager could be my father, in your esteemed opinion?” He lifted the smallest of the Buddhas and cradled it in his palm, transferring it from hand to hand as if weighing up Heather’s possible responses.
“So you know.”
The colour drained from her face then and she crumpled onto the futon, dropping her Tibetan and hemp holdalls at her feet. How she’d hemmed everything into them as opposed to a suitcase for her gargantuan excursion, River had no idea.
“It wasn’t exactly hard to put two and two together,” he chirped, setting the figure back down again with its spiritual friends.
“Look,” she sighed, her initial breeziness long since gone, “I never said anything that night when he paid you a visit, because although he’s undoubtedly the guy I had a one night stand with at the festival thirty-five summers ago—”
“He’s wh… hang on… are you saying youslept with him… at… atGlastonbury?”
What was it with the freakin’ festival’s ability to make everyone forget themselves? But then River realised this was the most ridiculous of questions.
“I’m afraid I was a complete mess at that time,” her head wobbled at the recollection, “searching for myself… all too often in the arms of a stranger. The thing is: your real father could be any one of three men as it… as it turns out.” She tempted a peek at her son, her face a picture of regret.
River felt like one of those ten pound diving bricks the swimming instructor used to lob in the pool, sinking slowly in a giant chlorine vat devoid of air; that and the girl from theMamma Miafilm. Although unfortunately for him, there was no wedding to Alice reeling in the other two male contenders for father, for a knees-up the evening before a ceremony atop a pretty Greek island hill.
Actually, make that fortunately. If ever anything permanently romantic happened between them, after the rigidity of their ‘contractual’ obligations with the band, he was sure they’d both had their fill of rules and regulations. Partners-for-however-long-they-stayed-happy-together would be marital status enough. But it was as good as wishful thinking anyway. He couldn’t even begin to compete with the type of men from her past, and as for that kiss which had sprung forth from nowhere on the very futon he was also now parking his backside on, well, as meaningful as he’d wanted it to be on Alice’s part, he gaged it came only from her pity; which was a fact that had him don an immediate iron veneer, impenetrable to feelings, for however long he could keep up the act.
“I’m as sure now as sure can be,” Heather reminded him his thoughts were leading him astray yet again, “I always knew the guy’s name began with ‘L’. It’s hard to forget a face when you’ve been—”
“La-la-la-la-la, all right, Mum, I get the picture, no need to go into the finer points.” River childishly stuck his fingers in his ears.
“Much as you despise him,” Heather shouted to make herself heard, “the music in his blood has clearly been passed down to you. And you’re each as stubborn as the other.”
“That’s as may be,” he said, elbows on thighs, hands now curled up into tight balls and resting on his chin, “but fortunately I didn’t inherit his sleaziness… if indeed he is my pops after all. And what about the other two, any clue of their whereabouts, any photos of your time together so I can hunt for traces of myself in their long lost faces?”
“I’m sorry, River.” Heather began to shake and then tears streamed quickly down her cheeks. “You had a right to know and I should have told you a very long time ago. I always said I would when you turned thirteen. But the truth is I was a right harlot back then, a lost soul, constantly looking for reassurance from a male, I was embarrassed to let you in on that. What kind of a role model would you have thought me?”
“It’s okay, Mum. Come here.” He hugged her close to him, astounded at his ability to accept such a major fuck up. “Maybe I’m a freak of nature… and that would be a very literal description if he is my dad, but family are the ones you choose to spend your time with. You have been MumandDad to me. And that’s always been enough. It’s been more than enough, because you’ve always been there, always supported me, no matter what I’ve done. It’s like when I look at you and compare you to Alice’s parents… and I know, I know, ‘we don’t do judgmental in this household’,” he did his habitual fingers around his head thing, to highlight the importance of Heather’s wisdom, “but just for today, let’s… for sixty seconds anyway. What I’m trying to say is: you’re poles apart. Alice may have had both of them around as she grew up, and bags of money to boot. But all of that is worthless when it isn’t coming from here.”
He put his hand over the left side of his chest and wondered if in another life he ought perhaps to have been a vicar.
Heather sniffed and then smiled. “You know my theory on these things from the stories I’ve told you about my own upbringing.”
He knew what was coming next and bit his tongue.
“We choose our parents, River. We don’t always take the easiest path because where’s the spiritual lesson in that, how would our souls grow otherwise? But we do choose them.”
“Yeah, I know.” He felt a smattering of guilt then at the tales Heather had passed on to him about the way her father – his grandfather, who he’d fortunately never met – had beaten her as a child, his grandmother besides. When he looked at it like that, he supposed he could have chosen more extreme parents. Although, try as he might, the idea of him floating about on a cloud looking at a giant TV screen with potential mums and dads lined up on it – as Heather had so often tried to put the idea into context when he was a young child and he’d frequently questioned her as to the whereabouts of his daddy – seemed ludicrous. Surely, if he had spotted Lennie – a younger, trimmer version, or not, he’d still have wanted to avoid the creep at all costs.
“I think we could both do with a nice pot of catnip. What do you say?”
