Anita's Bar

By Peter McDonald

Nick Bolton returns to Hobart from London after his mother’s death. Feeling his life to be without direction, he meets the enigmatic Anita and starts working at Anita’s Bar. A tragedy occurs, and Nick finds himself at the centre of a tale of revenge and retribution where old friendships are tested and it becomes impossible not to take a stand. Must good people suffer in order to right a wrong? This is the question Nick is forced to grapple with as the mystery unfolds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982294076

Peter McDonald

Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962, and educated at Methodist College, Belfast and University College, Oxford. He has published four books of literary criticism, and six volumes of poetry, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016). His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He has lectured in English at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol, and since 1999 has been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he is also Professor of British and Irish Poetry. He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, 2007), and is currently editing a multi-volume edition of the Complete Poems of W. B. Yeats for Longman.

Book preview

ONE

I’m feeling disoriented, at an unfamiliar angle to my life, careened. Look at me: the blue velvet jacket I picked up in Barcelona – double-breasted, reaching almost to the knee – worn for years without a second thought, suddenly here an affectation. At the bakery I can’t decide between Danish pastries, croissants, or anaemic baguettes. Last week, a world away, I would have ordered without thinking; now, uncertain of choice, I lamely say, ‘Give me one of each, please.’

Across the road at the newsagency I buy all the daily papers.

The streetscape is familiar, but the shops have changed. The menswear store is a juice bar; the bank sells takeaway chicken, the butcher and greengrocer both restaurants now. The footpath has been dug up and replaced with concrete pavers and spindly olive trees wrapped in metal straightjackets. Pink banners promoting breast cancer awareness dangle from tall poles. Still too fragile to cope with recognition, I slide my gaze around passing, off-to-work-in-the-city faces. The morning is cold, near enough a frost. Wan sunlight trickles from an ice blue sky. At the fishmongers I put my nose to the window before turning right and taking the shortcut through the skate park. There’s no need to rush things, I should still be in bed. I only arrived last night.

I’m on holiday.

I’m taking some belated bereavement leave.

I’ve travelled on a one-way ticket, after disposing of a third of my life in a garage sale, not knowing which way this turning point of my life is turning.

Deep inside me a small voice counts – 166, 165, 164 – and my stride adjusts on cue, stretching and shrinking to a pattern welling up from childhood. By the time I reach Patrick Street I’m shuffling – my legs must have grown – and recalibrate the home stretch. Another thirty-five paces to the rosemary bush poking through a green picket fence, where as a teenager I’d pause and rub the spikes across my face and hands to conceal the tobacco smell, before counting down the final forty to where a neglected apricot tree once dropped spotted fruit on the concrete steps of number eighty-seven. What is the lifespan of a rosemary bush, or the paint on a fence? The apricot has gone. I doubt my parents noticed they had a garden.

My mother died. My mother is dead. I’m still adjusting to the taste of the words. Three months ago, on her way to meet with the staff of a feeder primary school to the high school where she was Principal, her car missed a bend and rolled twice before hitting a tree. It was the day before my birthday, and I’d been on a bit of a bender and mislaid my phone; by the time I responded to my father’s calls I’d missed the funeral. The first time we spoke was surreal – me struggling to absorb the simple fact of her death while simultaneously fighting an overwhelming urge to console my father; him going on about the funeral and how it was all for show, with the Education Minister turning up just to get her photo in the newspaper. ‘The fucking right-wing bitch tried to shake my hand,’ he swore – he never swears – while I was still trying to form an image of my mother in my mind. I’d only seen her once in all the years I’d been away, and that had been in London and so out of context that the woman I remembered from that visit was hardly my mother at all.

I told my father I’d fly straight back to Hobart. ‘Not yet, don’t rush, come when you’re ready, I’ll let you know when is a good time,’ his voice so abrupt he might have been warning me away. Perhaps he was still in shock. My hurt at being rebuffed was tempered by relief, so perhaps neither of us was ready to face the other.

The one time my parents visited I was still living with Ange. They met Sandra and Tommy and made a brave stab at being step-grandparents for a day before our planned week of touring the north of England in a hire car. With all the sights and catching up we were never short of talk, but I got tangled up in trying and failing to come to terms with them as individuals in their own right, as Ruth and Gordon instead of Mum and Dad. In the rare moments of being alone with either of them I made a start, then we’d regroup and I was back to being a child again. Mum criticised Dad’s driving, he her sense of direction. They mocked each other’s choices at dinner, argued over the significance of this or that miners’ or factory strike, disputed the awfulness of slum clearance projects and model towns, split over the sight of nuclear power stations rising from fields of wheat.

Forget the ancient monuments and crumbling castles: for my parents history began with the industrial revolution, yet despite this bond they bickered incessantly. The back and forth of tiny insults, provocations and fake apologies was like static breaking up a radio signal I craved to hear. All I could do was remain alert – a thirty-four-year-old going on ten – and try to anticipate their moves and weigh in on behalf of whichever I perceived to be at a disadvantage. It was an experience I found both disturbing and oddly soothing, as though I’d caught myself cuddling a long-forgotten teddy bear.

The last touch I received from my mother was a rushed kiss on the cheek at Heathrow airport.

Now there’s just Gordon and me. When he picked me up last night I was taken aback by how youthful he looked. After a stiff hug we shook hands energetically, eyes smiling, trying hard to forge a connection. In the car I talked about my flight, and Gordon pointed out the sights as though I was a first-time visitor. Entering the house in which I’d grown up provoked an eerie sense of my mother’s absence. The door still scraped the frame as it closed. I beat Gordon to the light switch. Fifteen years away, and nothing and everything had changed.

Gordon was confusing me. He’d prepared a lavish welcoming meal: squids stuffed with rice, a rack of lamb carved at the table, sautéed potatoes and a green salad. Beer to start, followed by a bottle of good red wine. All this from a father I can’t remember seeing cook anything more complex than a sausage, who never drank with dinner, whose idea of a special meal was takeaway Chinese. And the fuss he made, warming the plates and tossing the salad and springing up from the table to fetch this or that while all the time keeping up a monologue on the aftermath of Mum’s death: how she’d always insisted on being cremated and he’d kept the ashes so we could one day – ‘not yet, no hurry’ – dispose of them together; the coroner’s report that established no clear cause for the accident; the Education Minister announcing a Ruth Bolton scholarship for research into secondary education. The way he moved and spoke jarred – he was too domestic, too eager and too light on his feet to be my father. Of course, we all change over time but nevertheless I was shaken. Perhaps because he’s my only link to my mother I want my father to remain immutable. Those last months in London her death seemed unreal, a mirage that faded whenever I drew close enough to grapple with it. She wasn’t part of my London, so how could I miss her? Last night, in the house we once shared, her absence was tangible.

All evening I couldn’t shake the feeling that the changes in my father had occurred since Mum’s death: that he had deliberately set about reinventing his life. Even the house felt different. My parents were notorious amongst their friends for their lack of interest in their surroundings. They’d bought the house they were renting when I was born, added bookshelves over the years, painted it once – grumbling all the while – when I was in high school. Shabby chaos defined our family. My parents lived for their causes and their jobs, with everything else – except perhaps for me, it was hard to tell – an unwanted distraction. One or the other absent at meetings nearly every night, weekends spent campaigning and arguing politics at seminars and barbeques, washing clothes and vacuuming happening sporadically in furious, let’s-get-this-over-with bursts. The changes that struck me last night were not dramatic, yet were in mood and detail. The kitchen and living areas were rigorously clean and tidy; the furniture – although still the same mismatched couches and armchairs, old standard lamps and bookshelves of every shape and size – felt arranged.

The dining table shifted, to make the most of the view across city rooftops to the bare hills of the Eastern Shore; the vintage Soviet propaganda posters gone from the walls, replaced by framed photos of Tasmanian wilderness. I was being confronted with a new sensibility.

How much of this change has been since Mum died?

When my father opened a second bottle of wine for my benefit, I felt obliged to explain my splitting up with Ange. They’d met and hit it off together – riffing on a shared disdain for Tony Blair – and despite Ange and I being in trouble by then we’d contrived a display of domestic harmony for my parents’ sake. We’d been together since the week I started work on the housing estate, my first stab at living an adult life after eight years in London. Until then I’d worked on and off in bars and clubs, drifting from sharehouse to sharehouse and travelling Europe whenever I had the cash. They were, in the main, good years. I made friends. Seldom was I lonely or anxious about the future. Hobart remained reassuringly part of me, the home I might return to if I didn’t settle somewhere else and could pick up where I left off. And I had some choice jobs. For two summers I lived on Hydra and supervised the bar at Caesar Laskaris’s London Alehouse – a dose of British grunge for homesick tourists – and returned in winter to wait tables at his Greek Taverna in Kensington.

Caesar put me on to Freddy Berkoff – a small-time larger than life concert promoter, mysteriously always flush with cash – who hired me to set up and run the bars at his gigs in parks and empty warehouses. Freddy sent me to Portugal for three months to caretake his holiday house, where my duties consisted of turning the lights on at night and resetting the security system whenever the alarms went off, pretty much every time I tried to sleep. In Freddy’s house I read a book a day for 100 days. And then on my thirtieth birthday the future tapped me on the shoulder. Intent on changing my life, I landed a job as a community worker on the strength of the year I’d spent as a project officer in a centre for unemployed kids after I dropped out of uni. I doubt there was much competition for the job. Lousy wages and an induction consisting of being handed the keys to a beat-up van, a basement with some broken furniture and a table tennis table and told to do the best I could.

Ange was the local community nurse. Tiny, built like a small boy, with a shaved head, studded nose, and a ferocity that turned the legs of any local authority bureaucrat or social worker standing between her patients and the rough justice dispensed by ‘new fookin’ Labour’ to jelly. Sizing me up on my first day she introduced me to the powerbrokers on the estate, told me who I’d be driving where in the van, then took me for a drink.

Two weeks later I moved into her flat. Sandra was four and Tommy two. I never met their father; Ange referred to him only as her ‘Mr Fookin’ Mistake!’ The kids were a novelty at first, a badge of my newfound maturity, but how can you not love children when you get to watch them grow? I saw the world through their eyes, wiped away their tears, felt consoled by their hugs and held their tiny hands in the street. On Friday afternoons Ange dropped the kids at her Mum’s (‘I come from a proud line of single parents’), and we had the weekends to ourselves: propping in pubs, pilling at concerts and parties, lining up in demonstrations, reading the same books and newspapers. or simply wandering the city.

I was happy. It was a good life. There was no reason we couldn’t still be living it now, except we were both wary of commitment. Perhaps it was my fault. Ange was always careful to not let the kids get too close to me, drawing the line when they started calling me Dad in a mucking about, teasing manner, saying I’d be gone one day and she’d be the one left to patch up their little hearts. To a realist like Ange what were the odds of a layabout Australian on a working holiday wanting to settle down in a council flat with a woman with two kids and no money? She refused to consider moving to Australia. A Fool’s Paradise, she called it. Maybe she was serious – but when I look back I suspect all she wanted was for me to more convincingly declare my intentions.

I couldn’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I blame my parents for that. Not blame in the sense of holding them responsible, but blame as in explanation. Like my parents, we both defined ourselves by our politics. At least Ange told me we did, told me that’s why we were so good together, although given the chance I might have risked a more complex explanation. Like my mother, Ange was the tough one in the relationship. The flat was always a mess; we loved the kids but cheerfully forgot about them on the weekends. The longer we went on the more I felt I was being sucked back into what I’d left behind. If I’d talked through my fears we might have survived. But I couldn’t. I’m not even sure I knew what they were at the time.

I picked up some pub work one or two nights a week, with the excuse we could do with the extra money, and that’s how I reunited with Will and started hanging with men in posh suits and matching accents. It was all downhill from there. I moved out of the flat the day I quit my job on the estate.

How can I explain all this to my father?

‘We’re still friends,’ I said last night, and even that’s not quite the truth. Every few weeks Ange would drop into the pub where I worked, and we’d chat about the kids and what was going on in our lives. But there wasn’t much warmth. I think she only came because she was looking good, and she knew it and wanted to remind me of what I’d lost.

‘She’s an anarchist now, mixed up with a group that patrols the streets taking photos of cops harassing kids and immigrants. When they get 10,000 images they’re going to string them all together – a mile of official violence running through the heart of Shepherd’s Bush!’

‘Good on her. She was good for you: she had spirit. I liked her for that spirit, I liked her instinctively. If it wasn’t for the children...’

Go on then, blame the kids. If that’s what my father chooses to believe, then at least I’m spared a better explanation. But there was a wistful tone to his voice, as if ‘what might have been’ was conceivably a better option than ‘what is’.

‘I’m glad you met her. She’s been a big part of my life,’ I replied.

I dried the dishes while my father washed, as I’d done as a child. He’d prepared my old bedroom downstairs. The room looked freshly painted and had been fitted out as a study, with a bed doubling as a couch beneath the window. The old bathroom next to the laundry still functioned.

‘You’re welcome to stay as long as you like ... it’s your home as much as mine...’ Hovering, opening and closing cupboards, showing me where the sheets and towels were stored; pausing in the doorway as he was about to leave, turning to face me. ‘To be honest, I’ve hardly been down here since your mother died’.

‘It’s still hard to believe, isn’t it,’ I said in a voice so strained he reached out and patted me gently on the shoulder. That unsettled me: my father doesn’t do touching. Then, to his credit, he brushed aside the barrier I’ve been bumping against for weeks.

‘Why don’t you call me Gordon? It will be easier for both of us.’

I hadn’t been able to address him as Dad. I’m too old, and somehow the word felt inappropriate, even disrespectful, without a Mum to pair it with. In all the phone calls since her death – and face to face, all through dinner – he’d stay nameless. I’d thought of it as my problem, but it must have been just as uncomfortable for him.

‘Thanks ... Gordon...’. I felt light with relief. ‘Now I’d better let you go to bed. You have to be at work in the morning.’

‘Didn’t I tell you? I’ve retired.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘I took leave after the accident and then decided not to go back. I’m over all that.’

Gordon retired? That knocked me. My parents married way too young, fresh out of teacher training, to avoid being posted to different areas of the state. I’m thirty-seven, which makes him fifty-nine or sixty. I know plenty of men retire well before that age, but not my father. My father was his job, his job was him.

‘Morning, Gordon.’

‘Morning, Nick.’

There’s ham, cheese and sliced melon to go with the bread and pastries. No teabags. Gordon makes coffee in an Italian espresso machine, carefully measuring and tamping the ground beans he keeps in the freezer, wiping the milk spout between cups with a cloth (he is careful to point out) reserved specifically for that purpose. He’s wearing jeans and a tee shirt so neatly pressed he might be a bank manager on holiday. I remember him in crumpled slacks and business shirts that were always missing a button.

‘You used to have the radio on at breakfast,’ I say.

‘I don’t even buy the papers anymore.’

‘What do you do all day?’

‘Catch up on all the reading I never had time for. I walk most mornings. There are tracks starting not far from here that reach all the way to the base of the mountain. And I collect recipes – my cooking has improved, as I hope you’ve noticed.’

Every note is discordant. Walking. Cooking. Frivolous pastimes, barely worth mentioning and absolutely not the summation of a life – not to my father, they’re not. Gordon’s not talking or acting like my father. He doesn’t even look like my father. And if he’s not my father, then who is he? I can’t keep from staring at him, searching for a key that might unlock the changes in a man I’ve spent too much of my life deriding. Is there something I’m missing here? Old dogs have never learnt new tricks, so why would this one?

‘If you don’t read the papers or listen to the radio, and you don’t go to work, how do you keep tabs on who’s knifing who, who’s selling out, who’s telling lies? Don’t tell me you’ve lost interest in the struggle?’

He ignores my cynicism.

‘I’ve stopped listening to the noise, if that’s what you mean. When I first stopped work I fell in a hole. For weeks I couldn’t be bothered with much at all. Afterwards, what I remembered of that time was the quiet: no clatter of information, no detail to process, no pretending that without my input nothing will change.

‘I don’t want to lose the quiet. I can think now. I do a lot of thinking.’

‘That must be easier with Mum gone. What I remember most about the pair of you was the noise. All that discussion, all those arguments – I grew up assuming life was one long political campaign.’

‘Is that why you ran away?’

Hold it right there, Gordon. It’s too soon for this conversation. ‘I didn’t run away.’

‘That reminds me: I bumped into Will last week. Did I tell you he came to the funeral? It seems he’s been forgiven his little setback in London. The firm is making him a partner, although I’d say his father’s the one making him a partner.’

‘That’s unfair. You know Will is bright, even if he can be a bit reckless at times. And he certainly knows how to turn on the charm. Isn’t that the most that partners need to do?’

Now that we’re on safer ground we can relax. Gordon’s griping about Geoffrey Richardson goes way back. Senior partner in the city’s oldest, most respected law firm, patron of the arts, confidant to the senior apparatchiks of all political parties, raconteur and party animal, Geoffrey’s a self-professed renaissance man – although, as Gordon so often pointed out, there’s no renaissance going on. His son Will is my oldest friend. We hooked up in high school after Will was expelled from his private school for distributing a sheet of acid at a Year Nine dance, then shared a house at uni while he drifted through his law degree and I dropped slowly out of Arts. My parents accused me of consorting with the enemy. They couldn’t see that this was a big part of the attraction. Will and I were like a pair of searchlights raking the night sky, on the lookout for different futures, but where our beams crossed the light was bright. We talked for days and nights at a time, spinning philosophies out of straw before demolishing them with the strike of a match. What I loved about Will was his lack of any sense of entitlement. He’d simply been born lucky – no skill in that – and meant to make the most of it. We lost contact when I moved to London, and I wasn’t aware he’d followed until my relationship with Ange was souring and his job drawing up commercial property contracts had morphed into flicking bundles of them, already sliced and diced, back and forth through cyberspace. By the night he discovered me mixing cocktails in a Tapas bar in West London he’d bought a flat in Camden Town, and an expensive girlfriend, at the peak of the market. A year later, as he was set to hand over the deposit on the bar that was going to make me rich and him larger than life, the markets went belly up. Jobless, and with a string of debts, Will did a runner.

I’ve never flown that close to the sun. One of Will’s endearing characteristics is that he knows he’s too well born to lead an honourable life so doesn’t pretend to try.

‘It took a crisis of capitalism to bring him down. You’d know better than me how it happened. All I saw were the photos of For Sale signs outside mansions on the front page of the newspapers.’

‘How about you?’ Gordon asks. ‘Are you okay for money?’

How should I respond? I’m a man now, Dad – I mean Gordon – you needn’t be asking me such questions. But it’s considerate of him to enquire. The truth is I can get by for a few months, even with the pound having gone through the floor, as long as I can stay here in the house until ... until when? Until I find a job? My real problem is I’ve lost the sense of my life having a trajectory. The scheming with Will about opening our own bar sustained me after the split with Ange but since that dream foundered, alongside Will’s career in high finance, I’ve been stuck in the bearpit, jostling with Poles and South Americans a decade younger than me for the dwindling handful of jobs paying seven quid an hour plus tips, if only anyone was tipping.

So, am I okay? ‘I’m fine, for the time being.’

‘Have you thought of going back to uni? It’s been a long time, I know, but you may still have some credits.’

At last, I catch a glimpse of the old Gordon. He might have retired bruised from the struggle, but his faith in the value of an education remains unshaken.

I did run away; I’d outgrown the miniature city of my birth. The fit became tighter as I exited my teens, until my breathing felt constricted and I couldn’t take in enough air to power a decent laugh. My earliest memories of Hobart as a place are stained with gothic horror. When I was little I slept upstairs in the room next to my parents’ bedroom; my window overlooked St. Mary’s Cathedral, a buttressed, sandstone monolith dating back to the 1860s, an era when architecture could still inspire awe amongst the faithful. My parents, both atheists locked in an interminable struggle with the breakaway Catholic wing of the Labor Party, delighted in concocting stories filled with nightmare images. Black clad nuns and priests were the undead; bishops rococo demons from Hell. Shiny, sinister crows carked dolefully by day from the pine trees and descended at night to peck the livers from boxed corpses delivered in long black station wagons.

Behind our back fence loomed a decaying high-rise block of Housing Department flats, an earthly vision of Hell. Many nights I heard screams, a cacophony of smashing glass and police and ambulance sirens; often the next morning I could track meandering splashes of dried blood along the footpath. From the dining room I looked east across a valley of iron rooftops sheltering old warehouses, workers’ cottages and machinery workshops to where another gothic church dominated the skyline. My mother walked me to the park beside the church and encouraged me to play; I remember being