Read Christmas on Primrose Hill Online
Authors: Karen Swan
Christmas on Primrose Hill
For Vic and Lynne,
who also understand the joy
of a good cup of tea
Contents
Prologue
November, three years earlier
The note lay on the table in a sunspot, dust motes spinning in the air above like dancing sprites. All around it was silence. A coffee cup to the side was half full, but a skin had formed across the top and it sat, now, below the tideline inside. The chair stood at an odd angle, the newspaper smooth and unread, fruit quietly over-ripening in the fruit bowl.
She had stood in the doorway, staring at it like a set piece in a Dutch painting – that was what she would always remember of that moment as her instincts absorbed the narrative laid out before her.
It had taken several moments to move from the spot and intrude into the scene, to become a player on the stage. But her feet had done their job, and her eyes, on the note, did theirs.
And that was how it had begun.
Chapter One
December, present day
‘I am a giant blue bunny. A blue freaking bunny. Of course I am. Of
course
I am,’ Nettie muttered, her voice muffled beneath the outsized plush-furred rabbit’s head, one long ear dangling down and obscuring her already compromised vision.
‘On the plus side, your bum looks cute,’ Jules grinned, flicking at her white pom-pom tail.
‘Yeah?’ Nettie twisted, trying to catch a glimpse of her large moulded rear end in the mirror, but her ear kept getting in the way.
‘Yeah.’ Jules grinned devilishly. ‘All the better for Alex to grab next time you get back to—’
‘There won’t
be
a next time,’ Nettie said furiously, turning on the spot and stamping her foot – well, paw – on the ground. ‘Not this time. We are over. Completely over . . . What?’
Jules had collapsed against the wall like she’d been thrown against it. ‘Do that again.’
‘Do what?’
‘Stamp your foot.’
‘You mean like this?’ Nettie stomped her foot on the ground again.
Jules cackled with laughter. ‘My childhood just flashed before my eyes! You know you’re just like Thumper when you do that?’
‘Oh, well, as long as you’re amused by all this . . .’ She tried swatting the ear back with her paw. ‘You get to look gorgeous, while I have to endure the ritual humiliation of wearing this thing.’
‘Aw, it doesn’t matter – no one will know it’s you in there,’ Jules said, trying to stifle her giggles as she too tried to manipulate the ear into staying back. ‘Besides, it’s all for a good cause.’
‘But I still don’t get why I have to be a giant blue bunny! It’s not like it’s a toddlers’ tea party out there. Who’s going to want to give money to me? Look at you. You look cool dressed like that. They’ll all wait for
you
to go round with the bucket.’ Nettie looked on enviously at Jules’s sexified, micro Swiss traditional dress costume, her breasts in the scooped blouse offered up like peaches on a plate. She’d look good in it too, she knew, given half the chance. OK, maybe not as good as her glamorous colleagues – she didn’t have legs up to the ceiling or a washboard tummy, for starters – but her gentle curves and almond eyes (both in shape and colour), and crowning glory, a sleek hazelnut mane that was both swishy and shiny, deserved better than to be mummified in this monstrous get-up.
‘Yeah, maybe, but it was a closing-down sale and there were only three of these costumes left.’ Jules nodded in agreement, tugging her top down a little lower. ‘The only other thing they had was a giant banana, apparently. I think Mike figured he’d done you a favour.’
‘He’d be doing me a favour if he could point out to me where exactly in my job description it says anything about dressing up in costumes? We are professionals, for heaven’s sake.’
Jules shrugged helplessly. ‘Well, look on the bright side – at least you get to be warm in that thing. It’s flipping freezing out here.’
‘I’ll happily swap,’ Nettie said quickly.
‘Nah, you’re all right.’ Jules winked, her light brown eyes dancing with mischief. ‘I rather like the look of that Canadian racer – what’s his name?’
‘Cameron Stanley?’
‘Yeah, him. I reckon this might help my cause.’ She fiddled some more with her neckline and tucked stray wisps of her hair back into her short, stubby plaits; her dark, curly hair fell to just below her jawline and they had had a devil of a job weaving it back. ‘Do you reckon he’s got a girlfriend?’
‘No idea,’ Nettie muttered, glowering that she’d have no chance of pulling in this outfit. Not that she’d want to go out with any of the guys here. They were mad, the lot of them. Certifiable, in fact. Why else would anyone willingly throw themselves down a steep and winding ice track on skates?
On the other side of the screens where they were standing, the lights strobed red, pink, blue and green, the roars of the crowd getting louder as the DJ whipped them into a frenzy. It was more like a rock concert than a sporting event, although the sponsors (and her marketing agency’s star clients), White Tiger, had carved a niche for themselves supporting the hard-core, extreme sports that were practically uninsurable, attracting a radical, die-hard crowd, and this annual event had become the fans’ favourite fixture.
And here she was, in the thick of it, dressed as a giant blue bunny. Nettie picked up her collection bucket. The first heats were completed and they would be ready at any moment for the second round to begin; then they could go round collecting money for Tested, the testicular cancer charity currently benefiting from White Tiger’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) beneficence.
‘Honestly, why are they taking so long?’ Jules tutted, peering round the White Tiger sponsor’s board to the racetrack, warming her bare arms with her hands. ‘I’ll die of exposure if they carry on like this.’
Nettie came up behind her and wrapped her furry arms around her friend – at five foot three, she was usually three inches shorter than Jules, but was currently two feet taller thanks to her giant head. ‘Don’t say I never do anything for you.’
‘Ah, that’s so nice,’ Jules sighed as she watched a couple of the engineers talking in a huddle at the top of the ramp. They were wearing pensive expressions and talking intermittently into their headsets, occasionally rattling at the starting gates beside them. ‘Hmm, that doesn’t look good.’
But Nettie’s attention was elsewhere. She wasn’t great with heights, and the ice-skinned course, built upon specially adapted scaffold towers, rose sixty metres above ground level. Narrow spectator aisles flanked the run on either side, and Nettie could see the long-haired, goateed supporters beginning to get restless, their gloved hands starting to pound the boards. Most of them looked just like the gnarly guys all padded up behind the gates, helmets and skates on and ready to go, punching their hands into their fists as they kept their adrenalin and aggression levels up. Ice cross downhill racing wasn’t a sport for the faint-hearted – in fact, it made ice hockey, famous for its punch-ups, look positively limp by comparison – and the title given to this event was apt: Ice Crush. So far there had already been one broken wrist and a dislocated shoulder, and there were still six rounds to go.
One of the engineers walked in their direction; from the expression on his face, he was being bollocked in his earpiece.
‘Hey,’ Jules said to him as he walked past. ‘What’s going on?’
The guy, clocking Jules in her provocative costume, seemed happy to stop, pushing the microphone of his headset away from his mouth. ‘Technical difficulties. The gate mechanism’s jammed.’
Jules pulled a cross-eyes face. ‘Urgh, but I’m
frozen.
The sooner I can get out there with this bucket, the sooner I can get back into some proper clothes.’
The engineer didn’t look particularly incentivized to make that happen.
Nettie looked across at the competitors trying to keep warm and psyched behind the gates. ‘How long till you fix it? They look more like they’re going to pick a fight than have a race.’
‘Could be hours. We need to get to the circuit board underneath, but some daft idiot’s built the ramps over the access hatch. If we can’t find another access point, we’ll have to cancel.’
‘Oh great,’ Nettie groaned. ‘We came all the way to Lausanne for nothing.’
‘Not nothing. Wait till we hit the bars later.’ Jules grinned, burrowing back into the rabbit fur to keep warm.
‘Mike’s going to be on the warpath if we go back with just this for the pot.’ Nettie shook the yellow bucket despondently and a few coins rattled.
‘Well, it was a rubbish idea anyway,’ Jules said. ‘I keep telling him nobody collects donations by shaking a bucket anymore – well, except the Foreign Legion and the Salvation Army. If he wanted us to do this, we might just as well have gone and stood outside Tesco.’
Nettie looked back at the engineer. ‘Is there really nothing you can do? Because if not, I’m taking this stupid costume off. It stinks and it weighs a ton.’
The guy shrugged. ‘Well, there’s no race if the riders can’t even get out of the gates.’
‘Why can’t they just stand in front of the gates?’ Jules asked.
‘The gates are too low when they’re behind them, meaning they’d be on the back foot. The riders need to start with their weight low but forward, on the front foot, to get the explosive power they need to blitz the course.’
‘Oh.’
Nettie would have thought a seventy-degree slope and blade-encased feet were more than enough to get blitzing. ‘So then why don’t you get people to stand in front of each gate and the riders can hold on to them? That way, they’ll be able to put their weight forward.’
‘It’s a bit . . . crap.’ He frowned.
Nettie shrugged. ‘Well, they did it for the snowboarders at the Winter Olympics.’
‘Yeah, I guess . . . I guess that’s a thought.’ The engineer frowned, holding up a finger to listen to his boss on the one hand, while considering Nettie’s proposal on the other. He spoke quickly into his headset.
‘We should go out there and do it,’ Jules hissed.
‘What?’
‘Yeah. It’d be great exposure. Everyone would see us up there before we go into the crowds.’
‘It’d be great exposure all right – everyone would be looking straight up your skirt!’ Nettie laughed.
The engineer overheard and looked back at Jules again. ‘How many others are there like you?’ he asked her, a quick – appreciative – flick of his eyes indicating her costume.
‘Two more dressed like me,’ Jules said. ‘And then our big bunny here.’
‘Yeah, four . . .’ the engineer said into the headset again. ‘It’s about the only option we’ve got . . . I know,’ he murmured. He looked back at the girls and a few moments later gave them a thumbs-up. ‘OK, then. Get the others over here.’
‘Yo! Daisy! Caro! We’re up!’ Jules yelled.
Daisy – six feet tall with legs that came up to Nettie’s armpits and blonde hair as soft as swansdown – sauntered round the corner looking like Heidi Klum playing Heidi. Caro, a skinny strawberry blonde with freckles and a serious gum addiction, followed after her.
