by Isabella May
Table of Contents
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
Section 6
Section 7
Section 8
Section 9
Section 10
Section 11
Section 12
Section 13
Section 14
Section 15
Section 16
Section 17
Section 18
Section 19
Section 20
Section 21
Section 22
The Cocktail Bar
Isabella May
"A dash of glam-rock, a drizzle of humour, a pinch of spice, and of course,
a drop of magic. Voila, the perfect Cocktail.”
The Book Fairies
“Isabella May takes readers of her brand new novel on a cocktail coaster ride of emotions infused with tangy drama, a savoury blend of love and magic, and a zest of mysticism with a soulful taste of surprise, bursting like firecrackers—breathtaking and sensational.”
Heartale Fix
“A ‘berry nice’ cocktail of love, the ‘fizz’ of lust, and the ‘sour’ taste
of revenge – to top it off a ‘cheeky’ drop of magic!”
Wendy Clarke – Co-founder of The Fiction Café Book Club
Copyright © 2018 by Isabella May
Cover Image: Adobe Stock @fortyforks
Design: soqoqo
Editor: Maureen Vincent-Northam
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.
First Crooked Love Cats Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2018
Discover us online:
www.crookedcatbooks.com
Join us on facebook:
www.facebook.com/crookedcat
Tweet a photo of yourself holding
this book to @crookedcatbooks
and something nice will happen.
This novel is dedicated to all of those in need of magic.
Open your eyes; it was there all along…
Acknowledgements
Sophie Partridge comes in at top of this list. Little did she know how her Florida Cocktail Trip of 2016 would plant the champagne bubble that became this book, but those pictures she shared on Facebook were something else and inspired me to get scribbling immediately. So thank you, Soph. I owe you one mahoosive Key West Cooler next time we meet!
Alas, there are so many cocktail companions to list. Old and new, remembered and (eek) forgotten. So here is my attempt at doing just a little bit of that:
Sarah Hill and Laura Moore: I pray to God we never experiment with a drinks cabinet containing Jack Daniels ever again. Caroline Stacey: here’s hoping neither of us will ever be led once more into Mad Dog 20/20, or Diamond White, or neat Cinzano, or Pernod and Black temptation…
Tracy Hails, Jon Davies, Collis Boucher, Peter Mitchelmore, Rich Ellis and Alan Patmore: If my memory serves me correctly, we partook in many a jug of whatever-Happy-Hour-wanted-to-dispense-of at one Las Iguanas in Bristol… overlooking the night that I mistook the kitchen for the Ladies’ room. My curiosity as to the magical notes of mixology could only have grown from there.
Collis: on the Key West Cooler front, maybe eight in a row should be the limit though… especially when one is gracing Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon!
Book Fair Buddies: Vicky Bostock, Louise Viveiros, Cristina Galimberti, Selena Johnstone, Ruth Owen. Thank you for not raising either eyebrow as I uncouthly supped cocktails with my meal (whilst everybody else politely glugged down their wine). You have all helped to shape my kooky drinking habits.
And Cristina, I shall be ever grateful to you for introducing me to a proper Campari and Orange – with blood orange. If a mixer is to be mixed, it’s to be mixed meticulously.
My husband really cannot be overlooked in all of this either. How patiently he sits and awaits my cocktail verdict (especially if it’s a brand new one I’m trying) wherever we go. He also knocks up the meanest of White Russians.
Mum: I have you to thank for treating me to my first proper Piña Colada – Waldorf Astoria style.
Emma Wilson and Natali Drake: You both added fuel to the cocktail fire that burned within when we collectively began to write about our favourite tipples for a certain magazine.
Ailsa Abraham and Vanessa Couchman, I am indebted to you for the fabulous creations you have kindly donated to The Cocktail Bar, courtesy of the online launch party competition for my first novel. The recipes for both of these magical glasses of elixir can be found at the end of the book. Make sure you patent them: you’re going to sell millions!
Huge gratitude, as ever, to Crooked Cat Books for confirming I am not a One Trick Pony (or kitten). It means the world to me to get another story out there.
And thank you billions to all who have so passionately supported my first novel, only adding to the momentum that is this one:
My family - particularly my dad who tore a knee ligament in the process of carrying out Book Fairy drops! - my mum and my sister, my cousin and my aunt for their constant and fabulous promotion of ‘Pavlova’ all over Somerset – there’s no way I’d have generated such a pre-sales buzz without you. And I cannot forget my niece, who even hiked up Glastonbury Tor for her auntie. Thanks also goes out to my friends (especially Natali Drake for her unparalleled support and beautiful photography, and my old school friends: wow, just wow!), my former colleagues, my current colleagues: the amazing CATS whose knowledge, advice, tips and excitement has been monumental. Then there is my lovely Editor Maureen Vincent-Northam, my Spanish friends, all the fabulous book bloggers… especially the one and only Karlita from Heartale Fix, all the fantastic Facebook book groups… especially the wonderful Wendy Clarke’s (where I ‘just happened’ to meet Jennifer Gilmour), and Helen Boyce’s TBC Reviewer Request Group (well… perhaps with the exception of THAT 2 star review!). The Book Fairies in London and Bristol have also been amazingly helpful with all of the exciting and inspired book drops they voluntarily carried out.
An extra special thank you to Emma Mitchell for everything she has done to help both books shine extra brightly, too.
And an extra, extra special thank you to the Lovely Loomies and Emma Gibbard who kindly let me promote the book for the day, leading to one Jeremy Clarkson being knocked off the top spot in Hot New Releases for Food and Travel Writing on Amazon. Magic!
Last but definitely not least: Bryony Curtis, THANK YOU for introducing me to the marmalade magic of Aperol Spritz at the time of writing these acknowledgements. Where had it been hiding all my life?
About the Author
Isabella May lives in (mostly) sunny Andalucia, Spain with her husband, daughter and son, creatively inspired by the sea and the mountains. When she isn’t having her cake and eating it, sampling a new cocktail on the beach, or ferrying her children to after school activities, she is usually writing.
As a Co-founder and a former contributing writer for the popular online women’s magazine, The Glass House Girls - www.theglasshousegirls.com - she has also been lucky enough to subject the digital world to her other favourite pastimes, travel and the Law of Attraction.
The Cocktail Bar is her second novel. Oh! What a Pavlova is her first.
The Cocktail Bar
“Cocktails: Because no great story ever started with someone eating a salad.”
Source Unknown
Chapter One
RIVER
River Jackson
didn’t care that the words Glastonbury and Piña Colada hardly belonged in the same paragraph. He had to go back. Instinct told him he had unfinished business. Besides which, he had a duty to a certain Mexican bottle, one which thankfully wasn’t yet adorning the bar. Since the day he realised he’d stopped raising either eyebrow at his mother for “becoming a goddess,” logic was an alien notion anyway.
It was something he was at least half questioning now though. His matted pony tail reeked of sticky Kahlua. Blake could have elected to slam dunk his head into a puddle of something cheaper. But River’s balaclava-attired attacker had reached for the three closest bottles to hand, sliding them along the length of the fully stocked shelf as if it were his xylophone finale in a requiem. Splinters of glass flew across River’s business opportunity, until they became a broken mirror, glistening their danger warning to a thirty-four-year-old who’d gotten way too ahead of himself. The Cointreau doused the freshly laid wooden floor, the Peach Schnapps’ heady scent coated the tables and chairs, and the Kahlua re-painted the bar’s counter creamy beige – alongside River’s twisted head, right shoulder and part of his torso.
He knew it was Blake as soon as the daylight dissolved the silhouette that had entered the bar. It was all in the eyes; the left green, the right hazel. Too tempestuously thick for his own good, nothing much had changed there. Neither had Lee’s role as passive observer; River detected that teenage nervousness was still part of his physique, emanating like a leaky tap he’d never got round to fixing. Lee shuffled from foot to foot in front of the bay window’s enormous blind – which he’d made a cack-handed attempt to pull over their intrusion; a stray tuft of flame red peeped from beneath the seam of his head gear.
“You’re lucky you picked on me,” said River, swallowing hard to stifle a fit of ill-timed giggles, despite the fact nothing about this was the modern definition of hilarious. “Don’t give up the day jobs just yet though. Probably best you don’t start raiding the bank—”
“Zip it, fucker,” said Blake. He yanked off his head gear and stooped to look River in the eye, excited spittle flying in all directions, “who the frick do you think you are waltzing back into town as if you own the joint?”
River felt his old school friend’s wrath anew through the thin black gloves, whose role of safeguarding identity revealing fingerprints, was equally laughable. Blake pressed River’s face harder onto the counter; further acknowledgement of his fresh burst of fury. Then all remained hauntingly calm, until he decided to spit his disdain at River’s forehead, before pulling himself away as if he’d come to his senses.
“You’re not wanted here. Isn’t that right, mate?” he said across the hazy bar to Lee’s ghostly shape.
The outline nodded in agreement and continued to transfer its weight from foot to foot.
River hoped the height of the action was over but didn’t dare move a fraction. His teenage years with Blake were reminder enough of his tendency to come back with a sudden and unexpected vengeance.
“Hey, beanpole,” said Blake, seemingly forgetful of their attempt at anonymity, and reminding River why his former friend was so shit at Cluedo as a kid. “Well? Don’t just stand there like a lanky moron, help me get rid of the evidence.” He beckoned Lee’s willowy figure over from the doorway.
Poor Lee, as much as he’d grown up, he’d obviously never managed to outgrow his moniker.
“Look, there’s no need, guys,” said River, somehow barely moving his lips for fear of reprisal. “Just leave it to me, yeah? It’s not like I’d totally finished decorating anyway. It’s cool, really. Least I can do—”
“And did I ask for your opinion?” Blake stood with authority, turning a triangular piece of glass over and over between comic book villain fingers as if contemplating its edges’ many uses. “It’s just that last time I made that mistake; last time I called you because I thought you were a mate… someone who gave a crap about my life when it was dangling by a thread… you were thousands of miles away on a stage in California.” He sniffed hard and tossed the glass behind him. A tinkle of destruction pierced the air.
“I know. I’ve been rubbish. Going to make up for lost time now though. It’s one of the reasons I’m back.”
“Did you hear that?” said Blake to his sidekick who was busying himself kicking shards of glass into a pile. “He thinks he can swan off with his F list entourage, jet around the world making millions with his two-a-penny voice, drummer and guitarist, forget about us until the novelty wears off, and then we’ll be waiting here with open arms.”
“Don’t work like that,” Lee finally found his voice although his gaze remained fixed to the drama decorating the floor.
“The kid’s right for once in his life; it doesn’t work like that,” said Blake with a menacing smile as he rubbed his hands together. “’Cos not only have you flounced back to Glastonbury, but you’ve also been dense enough to buy the pub where my old man, my very own flesh and blood, used to enjoy his one and only pleasure in life after my bitch of a mother did the dirty on him.”
Shit, how could River have forgotten the importance of the skittles? It was the life force of men of a certain era and ilk. Not just here but in towns dotted all over Somerset. No, he genuinely hadn't thought any of this through.
River’s heart pounded like it was backstage at his last gig in Guadalajara all over again. He knew Blake’s body language intimately. Too many high school science lessons exchanging secret looks before one or the other of them unleashed the stink bomb behind a gaggle of girls, ‘accidentally’ dropped the box of iron filings, or pestered Miss Willoughby with questions of ‘genuine concern’ about the correct application of condoms and all things reproductive.
“Remember that game we used to play at Tor Fair every September?”
“Um,” River began and then cleared his throat to buy some guessing time. “Hook the duck, the darts?”
Damn, why did he have to go and mention yet another pub game whose tradition was about as far removed from a cocktail bar as it got?
“River,” said Blake with the addition of several tuts and an unexpected kick to his private parts. “How could you forget?”
River yelped. It had been at least a decade since anybody had attacked him there (notwithstanding the ending of last year’s fling with the Parisian model). He breathed in deeply, whistling through clenched teeth, hoping to avoid a delayed reaction of effeminate cries.
“I’m uh, I’m sure it’ll come back to me… if you uh… if you jog my memory.”
“Is there anything you remember about your roots, Jackson? Or were there too many drugs on the road?” Blake sniffed at his empty palm in a pitiful attempt to imitate a coke head. “You’re just a traitor through and through. Back here to bleed the place dry selling Sex on the Beach to eighteen-year-olds now forty is on your horizon and the paparazzi are making a beeline for the younger models. Unless of course, you’d been smart enough to do the indie band shebang like HRH Chris Martin, which you most definitely haven’t.” He shook his greying head with more than a striking resemblance of Miss Willoughby on detention duty.
“No, man, no, it’s nothing like that. I promise.” He hissed inwardly at the mere mention of the paps, the local rag was already on his case, and he was praying he’d got away without attracting the lens of the tabloids. “It’s me, the real me. The River you know and love. And I’m back for good this time. I’ve turned my back on all that fame and fake crap. It’s meaningless, especially the money.”
“See, that, my man, is where you are very much mistaken.” Blake lowered his posture again so River was in no doubt he had something very serious to say – and that he really was sporting an interesting cluster of badger streaks. “You are not back for good.” He grabbed roughly at the day-old stubble on River’s chin, “neither are you wanted here,” and then released it.
He spat again at the floor, an impediment which appeared to be carrying him from the football field as a teenager and on into adult life. Rive
r held his breath wondering what was coming next as Blake began to pace around the bar, stopping here and there to mimic somebody admiring the portraits in an art gallery. One glove was removed now and he dipped his index finger into the Schnapps’ sticky river, swirling it thoughtfully as if it were the blood of his prey. He lifted it to his lips, the alcohol re-painting an evil grin.
“Peachy… but then you’d know all about that… because you weren’t just satisfied with obliterating a skittles team—”
“But I couldn’t stop The Ring O’Bells being sold, that wasn’t my fault. If I hadn’t bought it, somebody else would—”
“Shut it,” Blake yelled. “I’m doing the talking,” he continued softly.
“Now where was I? Oh yes, peaches… ripe juicy peaches, none more so than Alice’s rump.” He paused to laugh. Lee’s echo joined in a few seconds later, the double entendre catching on.
River’s pulse quickened as he too connected the dots.
“A derriere so pert and delicious, that not only did you steal an old man’s pastime, but you swiped my woman while you were at it too—”
“But that was years ago, man… a… a… one night stand,” River gulped. “It meant nothing… to either of us.”
“Nothing?” Blake cackled. “The love of my life meant nothing?”
He was a tornado of rage again. His face contorted with revenge as he reached for the chair behind him, slamming it into the wall. The legs buckled, debris scattered. Even Lee looked terrified this time.
