Page 37 of The Cocktail Bar

“Thank you so much, for everything,” Alice shouted to her as she dramatically scooted out of the caravan and closed the door on the two of them, as well as River’s proposition.

“I had to try.” He shrugged.

“This is just incredible. I don’t know how to repay you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I owe you so much. You haven’t let me open my purse since I’ve been back.”

“Do you, really? I tempted you… away to a land that was meaningless, at a time in your life when you had the world at your feet, the love of two parents – that’s something I’ll never know, not to mention a place in the Olympics. And now look at you… holed up in a peasant’s holiday camp.”

“River, no.” She put her arms around him, giving his back a long languorous rub; which he sensed that she sensed was all of a sudden the height of inappropriate, and so began the descent to a pat on the back. “This is hardlyButlins… which I hear is actually very upmarket these days… I made my choice back then, and I made it by myself. I had a tongue and a voice besides, and you know what? I will never regret Avalonia, the places it took me, the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Don’t you ever let me hear you say that again, okay?”

He didn’t answer and so she withdrew from her embrace, looked him in the eye. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he said the word.

But it wasn’t okay. Not until he’d made it up to her. Set her back on her path. All he could do right now was trust that Mercedes actually did somehow know more about his life. The idea that anybody else could have better tabs on his destiny than him; that was something that used to frighten him, the reason he had never been into the notion of a ‘God’. And yet, perhaps this very hut without wheels – albeit a brand spanking new one with every home comfort required – was another small puzzle piece slotting into a bigger picture, the one that wise old Mexican woman had hinted at?

Much later at supper, as Alice insisted on trying for the second time to cook them scrambled egg and beans on toast without burning anything, a skill she’d clearly never had thrust upon her as a basic mode of survival in her teens unlike the majority of those who grew up in the early 90s, he started to get a glimpse of what that completed puzzle might look like.