With the final dregs, Olive lifted her thermos lid to the clouds. ‘To John and Jane, wherever you are.’ It was the toast she always whispered.
‘And to family and friends,’ Richard said.
‘And to the Gin Shack,’ Tony added.
They all three chinked vessels and it always made Olive happy. This new weekly ritual. This nod to how all things change, but how that was sometimes for the better. It didn’t stop her wishing John was there with them. That she could be gifted the knowledge of how he would have aged or what profession their daughter would have taken up. But those thoughts no longer stopped her from appreciating the here and now. The fact she got to sit with her son and her closest friend every week, continuing the legacy she’d started with her husband, was a blessing. One she hoped always to continue. Family. Friends. Gin. They were the most important things in Olive’s life. She felt unbelievably lucky to have a life filled with all three.
Olive loved Christmas. There was no element of it that she didn’t like: the gift-giving, the chance to wear Christmas bling, the time spent with others. This year she was looking forward to it more than usual. Living at Oakley West Retirement Quarters meant it would be more of a celebration, with lots of people about (with no need to be the one cleaning up afterwards), and there were plans afoot at the Gin Shack they were due to discuss this morning. Tony was being very secretive about them and at long last she was going to find out.
It was the reason she was hotfooting it from her beloved beach hut earlier than she would normally choose to. She wanted to get to the Gin Shack on time, ready for them to discuss ways to keep trade up during the quieter winter months, especially as she had some ideas of her own. The opening of the new bar during the summer had been more of a triumph than they could have hoped for, but there was every chance the early success might fade with the tourists not about.
It was a crisp October day as Olive attempted to rush along the promenade. There was an early chill, proving that the best way to dress would be with many layers. She pulled her pink fleece tighter around her as she ambled along. Not for the first time, she considered whether she should invest in a skateboard to get her eighty-four-year-old backside along the concrete walkway quicker.
When Olive finished working her way up the slope towards the Royal Esplanade, she glanced across to the Gin Shack, the sun glaring off the silver signage. It would look pretty when it was decorated; all tinselled up and shimmering like a star on top of the Christmas tree. Maybe she should mention a few decor ideas at the meeting. If there was one thing Olive believed in, it was totally overdoing it at Christmas. It was perhaps an overcompensation that had developed over the years, but when Richard had been young and they’d been alone in those first few years, throwing herself into the season had been what got her through.
It wasn’t tinsel reflecting from the windows today. It was the sunshine creating quite the dazzling effect. There was something different about the frontage of the building, but she wasn’t quite able to see what.
Moving across the green to get a better view, Olive noticed the streamers hanging in front of the door from the sign. She knew something was different. Maybe Tony had decorated after all. But streamers weren’t very Christmassy and they’d not hosted many private functions yet, apart from a birthday party a fortnight ago, and they’d only had balloons for that occasion. There’d been no streamers, at least not that she’d noticed, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t senile enough to have missed them entirely, especially as they obscured the doorway. And she’d been through the door several times since without noticing them.
Olive shielded her eyes from the reflecting light and went to take a closer look.
It wasn’t just streamers that had been attached. Someone had gone to the trouble of decorating the entire sign. There was now a 3D pink mould attached to it, which looked odd. Unless someone was planning on converting it into a snowman, she didn’t know what was going on. Maybe Tony’s sons, who’d made the sign in the first place, had redesigned it for the winter season. It was probably part of the agenda for this morning’s meeting.
Olive couldn’t read it from the angle she was at, so she ventured towards it, and because of the glaring light, opted to cross the road to get a better look.
When she was finally able to focus on the new adjustments to the sign, she had to read it five times to make sure she was seeing right.
The added details of the sign meant it no longer said The Gin Shack. Instead the additions meant it read: The Gin’s Shite.
‘The gin bloody well isn’t,’ Olive said to no one in her astonishment. ‘We serve the best varieties in the world,’ she continued, wanting to put this invisible force to rights.
And what was worse, if the slur wasn’t enough, there was a rotund pink decoupage bum with brown streamers waving out of it. Never had diarrhoea been depicted so creatively.
If the Gin Shack was having any rebranding for the winter season, Olive was pretty certain this wasn’t it. Even Tony’s sons wouldn’t horseplay about like this. Olive thought they’d left all the antics of getting the Gin Shack running behind them. The additions to the sign told her otherwise. As things went, it was a pretty grotesque way of pointing out someone’s dislike of the place. One that made her feel uncomfortable when she considered the deliberate nature of the sign.
This really wasn’t how Olive had been expecting the day to go. She was early to the meeting because of her uncontained excitement for all things Christmas. Not because she wanted to be the one to discover they’d fallen victim to some kind of prank. Now she had to be the one to go and tell Tony he had an arse, complete with diarrhoea-brown streamers, attached to his building.
One thing was for certain: being involved with the Gin Shack would never let her become a boring old fart.
It was hard to stick to any kind of agenda when there was a papier-mâché decoupage bum sculpture resting on the table.
‘I mean, why? Why would anyone go to all that effort? It seems so… pointless,’ Esme said.
Everyone had arrived for the meeting, but they were all too busy gawping at the butt for them to have gained any ground on the matters they were supposed to be discussing. Veronica and Randy had joined them, completing the Oakley West trio, and all of Olive’s beach-hut neighbours were there for the meeting: Tony, Esme and their three boys, along with Mark and Lily, Paul and Skylar.
Tony and Randy had been able to remove all signs of the vandalism with relative ease, but did it still qualify as an act of defilement if it was so easy to take off and hadn’t left any permanent damage to the actual sign? It was still plain rude, whether it was against the law or not.
‘And so deliberate,’ Paul said. It had even riled the quiet person among them. ‘That would have taken some effort. You’re talking weeks. And for the level of accuracy with how it covered certain letters and not others, that would have taken some research.’
Perhaps Paul knew more about paper crafting than Olive ever would have thought. But he was right. To have aligned it up correctly with the sign currently in place would have taken some measurements or knowledge of what they were adding onto.
‘Should we contact the police?’ Skylar asked.
Olive had really had her fill of police over the summer. The comings and goings at Oakley West Retirement Quarters had been shocking to say the least. She really thought they’d seen the back of anyone trying to put a stop to the Gin Shack. Why would anyone want to stand in the way of a place that she and many others considered to be a source of pure happiness? And this deliberate act appeared to be a clear signal that someone wasn’t in favour of the establishment.