Christmas on Primrose Hill (2 page)

‘Time to head into the fray, is it?’ Daisy asked wearily, pocketing her phone inside her dress. ‘About time. I’ve got plans after this. My second ever boyfriend’s best friend lives here now and we’re meant to be meeting up after.’

‘Yeah, well, there’s been a technical hitch, so we’re helping out,’ Jules said as the engineer told them all to follow him.

‘Uh, sorry, what’s going on?’ Caro asked as they lined up at the side, along the top of the track.

‘Pick your rider, girls. We’re gonna get to hold their hands,’ Jules winked. ‘But I’m taking number three. Cam Stan is gonna be
my
man,’ she laughed, trotting off friskily towards the snowy ledge.

‘What’s she talking about?’ Daisy demanded, squinting to see past the bunny’s eyes and decipher who was inside. ‘Nettie?’

‘Yeah, it’s me,’ Nettie sighed. ‘And we’ve got to stand in front of the gates so the riders can hold on to us. The gates are jammed.’

‘Oh great!’ Caro tutted, chewing exaggeratedly on her gum so that her jaw looked like it was on springs.

The crowd erupted as the girls filed out – their tanned legs, plattered bosoms and kinky plaits highlighted in the spotlights, buckets still over their arms as they waved to the crowds below them. Gingerly, being the most cumbersome of them all with an eighty-inch waist, Nettie followed slowly along the ledge that topped the ice ramp and a ripple of laughter accompanied her entrance, as though she was deliberately intended as a joke. The riders – having been told of the solution – were already clambering over the gates, seemingly unencumbered by their bulky padding and very obviously anxious to get going.

‘Hi,’ Nettie smiled at her rider in lane four, an Austrian called Juls Frinkenberg, who had once been in the world top three.

‘Oh really? I get the bunny?’ he said irritably, stepping out of the way while she wedged herself past him to squeeze into the space in front of the gate.

‘That’s exactly what I said,’ she replied, grabbing hold of the gate with one paw and holding out her other arm for him. She swallowed at the sight of the near-vertical ice drop, just a metre in front of them. How could this guy be so desperate to go down it? Every instinct in her body was telling her to get the hell back.

‘Link arms!’ the engineer shouted across to them all. Nettie saw Jules giggling as she proffered her arm to Cameron Stanley like it was the prelude to a seduction. Cameron seemed more than happy to link up with her, and nowhere near as keen as Juls to hurl himself down the slope, not when he had his very own milkmaid standing at the top.

Juls linked his arm round hers just as Nettie noticed that the bucket was still swinging from it.

‘Oh—’ she said, going to remove her arm, but the first of the three race bells sounded suddenly and everyone went still, the riders crouched low in their starting positions like wolves ready to hunt. Nettie bit her lip – sod the bucket – and tried to tighten her hold on the gate, but it was hard to get a good grip with her padded paws and she could feel Juls straining away from her, pulling her outwards too.

The second bell blared and she felt herself begin to tremble from the strain of trying to counterbalance against Juls’s weight as her paws failed to grip.

‘Oh . . . oh . . .’ she wailed, panicking as the seconds dragged like weeks. She couldn’t hold on; she was going to drop him . . . Oh God, she was going to drop this rider down the ramp . . .

The third bell sounded and like a rope snapping he was gone. Just like that, to a whip-crack of cheers, the tension was released and she staggered backwards into the gate, her ear falling in front of her eyes again so that she couldn’t see, only hear the riders race away, the crowd’s accompanying roar following them like a Mexican wave, down and away from her.

Relief arrowed through her – she had felt fear, real fear, in those few moments when she’d thought he might pull her over with him. ‘Close one!’ she muttered as she straightened herself up, the long, wide, padded paws of her feet slippy on the ice. Wasn’t there a scene in
Bambi
in which Thumper went flying along a frozen pond? she wondered as she turned to get the hell off this ledge and back to the safety of the race meet area.

But the bucket . . . she’d forgotten about it as she scrabbled against Juls’s weight, and only as it slid off her thick, furred arm and rolled onto the ice with a thud did she remember it again.

‘Oh! Shit!’ she said, scrambling down to pick it up before it too headed down the ramp. If that hit a corner and went flying into the crowd, there could be an injuries lawsuit before she got this costume off. She didn’t think, though, to calculate for the greater weight of the rabbit’s head, and as she leaned forward, her paw just grasping the bucket’s handle, she felt herself begin to tip. The ice drop stretched out in front of her, vertigo-style, and she over-corrected, lurching up to standing again, but her paws slipped, and as she moved her front foot wider, trying to plant herself solid, she stepped over the lip of the ledge and immediately began to slide down the ice sheet.

‘
Nets?
’

Jules’s voice was immediately far away and becoming smaller, the crowd speeding towards her as she rushed down the first drop, too shocked, too terrified even to breathe, much less to scream. The crowd were doing it for her anyway – screaming and laughing and cheering as she sped past them, arms outstretched, ears flying behind, her wide, flat paws steady but speedy on the ice. What . . . ? No . . . No . . . No . . . She’d never experienced speed like this before, never anticipated what it does to your body when fear activates the survival instinct. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t draw in a breath to let out a scream. Instead, her body froze as she sped down the ice – immobile and yet more mobile than she’d ever been.

She was going to die.

She was definitely going to die.

The first bend came at her before she could even process it. Her body was rigid inside the giant suit and she couldn’t steer, stop, see . . . She hit the first corner, then the second almost immediately, but rather than fall, she ricocheted off the walls, the bunny’s moulded round tummy seemingly rebounding her like a pinball. Left, right, left, right . . . She felt the hits, but it was like taking body blows in a sumo suit at a school fete – faint and distant.

OK, not dead yet, then.

But . . . suddenly the course was running straight again. There was no relief in that, quite the opposite, in fact, and Nettie felt her heart almost leap clean out of her body as she knew what that meant – after the chicanes came the bumps, the ramps . . . and that meant she was going to . . . going to catch some . . .

She flew through the air like a cannonball, her arms still outstretched and flailing like cartoon wings. Something – muscle memory, perhaps, from a childhood ski-school lesson – made her bend her knees, ready for the impact, and amazingly, somehow, she got over the first and the second; she was barely aware of the crowd or their roars of delight as she sped past; but the third . . . She knew the riders called it ‘the Giant Killer’. It was what made this event such a big ticket, built especially for this competition, and as she soared higher than any bunny should ever soar, she knew she wouldn’t land this one.

She wasn’t sure at which point up became down – while in the air or when she hit the ice again? – but the world tumbled, and for a course that was all white, she could see only black as her head was knocked about in the giant rabbit’s head as she rolled and bumped and skidded and collided until . . .

It was a moment before she realized she had stopped moving. It was a moment before the clamour of the crowd came to her ears. It was a moment before someone carefully pulled off the rabbit’s head and the world rushed at her in a warp weave of colour and sound, brightness and cheer. It was a moment before she found she was standing again, two padded men – the visors of their helmets pushed back – draped beneath her arms as they slid her from one corner of the finishing square to the other, hailed as a legend. And it was a good few moments before she saw that the yellow bucket was being passed round the crowd and was rapidly filling up.

Chapter Two

Nettie eyed the custard creams. They were the safest place for her to rest her eyes while Mike prowled in front of the whiteboard with an excitement that was all the more alarming because it had been aroused by her.

‘Well, I think we can say that was a successful event, don’t you?’ he asked, nodding his own agreement with himself. ‘Certainly, the costumes worked.’

‘Totes,’ Jules grinned, nodding back, one of the custard creams halved in her hands, and Nettie knew her friend was just waiting for Mike to turn his back momentarily before she licked the filling. ‘They lapped it up, especially the bunny – it was hard-core
and
cute.’

‘It was not cute,’ Daisy said, looking up from filing her nails. ‘That thing freaks me out. I mean, who’s ever seen a blue bunny?’

‘Who’s ever seen a
seven-foot
blue bunny, you mean,’ Jules chuckled.

‘Exactly. It’s like a mutant.’

‘Tell you what, then – next time you can wear it. That way, you don’t have to look at it,’ Jules said helpfully, earning herself an arched, beautifully threaded eyebrow from Daisy.

‘There won’t be a next time,’ Nettie said curtly. It was two days later and she still had the bruises on her arms and torso to show for her misadventure; plus her neck felt like she’d slept with her head on a brick.

‘Well, that combination is clearly what we need to tap into again,’ Mike said, beginning to prowl once more, clicking his fingers rhythmically. Nettie stared at the patch of thinning hair on the back of his head as he stopped and surveyed the up-down zigzags on the chart. ‘Donations were up seventy-six per cent after Nettie’s stunt. It really engaged the audience and caught their imagination.’ He spun on his heel and pointed at Jules intently. Nettie could imagine him practising the move in his bedroom mirror, perhaps imagining he was Clint Eastwood and with a pistol in his hand rather than a remote control. ‘Hard-core and cute, you say?’

‘Yep.’ Jules looked back at Nettie, who was sitting beside her. ‘You did look adorable whizzing down the ice like that, your little arms flailing about, ears flying.’

‘Yeah, it was the ears I loved. They were hilarious,’ Caro snorted from across the table. ‘Honestly, you couldn’t have planned the whole thing better.’

‘Ha! No chance Nettie would have signed up for that in advance. You’ve got a thing about heights, haven’t you?’

‘
And
speed,’ Nettie mumbled, quite sure she had a borderline case of PTSD.

‘Well, the good news is, you survived,’ Jules said, patting her on the hand. ‘Another bicky?’

‘Thanks.’ Nettie nibbled at the edges of the custard cream. She needed the sugar. She wasn’t sleeping well at the moment.

‘Ladies, if we could focus on the matter in hand,
please
.’ Mike had put on his sarcastic voice, but it only served to make him sound needy and Daisy resumed filing her nails. ‘I’m sorry I missed the stunt. It would have been good to see. We need to come up with more ideas like this.’

‘I can show you,’ Caro said, tapping quickly on her iPad and then picking up the Apple TV remote on the table. As their IT and data analyst, she was the go-to person for anything technical (and spare charging cables). ‘I already asked White Tiger for the footage . . . There. I’ve sent it to your inboxes,’ Caro said with customary boredom. Her higher intellect meant she rarely engaged below a certain interest level.

‘Oh, right . . .’ Mike said, his face brightening as the screen on the wall was switched on. ‘Righty-ho, well, let’s see what we’ve got here, then.’

He straightened up and Nettie swivelled her chair a little, to get a better view of the white screen as ‘Titanium’ began pumping through the speakers, Mike nodding his head in time to the beat. The camera angle was wide, panning over the crowds, their heads flashing red, pink, white and blue in the strobe lights. Nettie felt sick, actually sick, as the lens picked out the menacing white ice wall that meandered between them all, the riders already shooting down it in a clash of flashing skates and jutting elbows.

Then she saw it. The blue blob that looked like a glob of Blu-tack from the wide-angle camera, tipping over, heavy-headed, at the top of the ramp, its padded paws as frictionless and unsteerable as if a pillow had been thrown down. Nettie felt her heart catch as she watched the blue bunny rapidly pick up speed; within three seconds she must surely have been doing sixty miles per hour, her arms flailing – the bucket dangling uselessly at her elbow – and ears flying, just as the girls had said. Her hand clapped over her mouth in aghast horror as she watched the bunny ricochet off the chicanes like a cartoon character – up one moment, doubled over the next. It was so hard to believe it was her in there, even though her body still all too clearly remembered the sensations, and adrenalin fizzed in her hands and feet and stomach.

Vaguely she was aware of the girls laughing – it seemed, from the corner of her eye, that Caro had her head on the desk – but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen. The ramps were coming up, and in the next instant she watched open-mouthed as she flew through the air, belly up, the huge paws at least creating some drag, before she landed with a teeth-clattering thud and slid in spinning revolutions all the rest of the way down the slope.

The crowd were going wild for it, almost falling over the barricades to applaud her, as the riders – who’d seemingly been watching with the same horror she’d felt, for no one unwittingly went down that course – rushed over, pulling her to her feet and taking off the rabbit’s head.

Instantly the cartoon-like illusion was broken. Her head seemed dwarfishly small in the outsized suit, and her long dark hair, matted from the heat in there, stuck to her pale cheeks in limp strands; even her full lips – usually rosy – were blanched. A shriek of laughter pealed through the conference room as her head actually reeled a little, her stunned, slightly cross-eyed expression seemingly as funny as the rest of it. Nettie watched her own legs buckle, her paws sliding everywhere on the ice as the two riders – one of whom was Jules’s latest conquest, Cameron Stanley – grabbed her under the arms and jubilantly presented her to her adoring public.