Christmas on Primrose Hill (26 page)

He glanced at her and she sensed rebuke in the movement, as though she’d gone too far, crossed a line. What was it he had said about them trusting each other? ‘No. Milly’s teaching in Tokyo for a year, and Kate’s spending it with her new in-laws – she got married in the spring. And my folks are on a cruise. I had thought I was going to be abroad anyway, and by the time my schedule became clearer, they’d already booked this trip. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Christmas is for kids. It isn’t the same when you’re grown up, is it? You don’t care about stuff in the same way. I’m more excited about the prospect of just having some time off.’

‘So who are you going to be with, then? You’re not going to be on your own, surely?’

‘Not the whole time. Some friends will be joining me later.’ He caught sight of her expression. ‘What? Trust me, solitude is a luxury for me. No one telling me where to be or what to do.’

‘Right,’ she said sadly. She couldn’t imagine not spending Christmas with her family.

They had been wandering aimlessly through the rails for a few minutes now, too much chatting, not enough T-shirt-hunting.

‘Oh wait, I’ve got it – this is the one,’ he said, his signature laid-back smile on his face once more as he held up a T-shirt with a grizzly bear snarling on the front. ‘Think the crowd will go wild for it?’

‘I think they’ll go wild regardless of what you wear,’ she replied.

He glanced at her again, his khaki eyes flipping her stomach over like it was a pancake. ‘Well, then, this one maybe?’ He stepped closer and held up a black T-shirt that had ‘Now or never’ emblazoned across the front. He dropped his voice. ‘It’s a pretty damn good motto to live by, in my opinion.’

She looked up at him, her heart rate accelerating. ‘But will you cope with the fit and feel?’ she asked teasingly, just as a distinctive sound made them both startle. A teenage girl in high-waisted jeans and a parka was standing ten feet away, her phone up to her face as she clicked and clicked again, the shutter opening and closing with the speed of a professional paparazzo’s.

‘Jamie! Can I have a selfie?’ the girl asked confidently and with absolutely no sense of intruding.

Jamie instinctively turned away, dropping his head down, getting his glasses out of his back pocket.

‘Sorry, do you mind?’ Nettie said tartly, the words out before she could stop them. ‘This is a private trip.’

‘Yeah, but a selfie’s only gonna take, like, a second.’

‘Yeah,’ someone else said too, and Nettie turned to find another couple of girls also standing there, phones at the ready.

Nettie twisted to find Jamie, his back to them all, head down as low as he could get. Nettie felt her anger flare.

‘Sorry, but like I said, this is private. Jamie’s not working right now.’

‘Yeah, but Jamie’s never off duty for his fans, are you, Jay?’ one of the girls called, pushing past the rails to get closer.

Nettie stood in her way.

‘What are you, his assistant or something?’

‘Something,’ Nettie replied crisply, rising herself to her full height, but although she was ten years older than this girl, she was several inches shorter, and the girl was already trying to get past her.

‘Oh, go on. Just one, Jamie.’

‘We need to go,’ Jamie said to her quietly, his hand on her wrist suddenly as she felt him begin to tug her away. But in coming over to her, he was within touching distance of the girls and their camera phones were up suddenly, documenting every microsecond, their excitement and agitation growing by the moment to have him so close.

Nettie saw people beginning to turn and point – ‘Hey, isn’t that . . . ?’ – the clamour growing as Jamie’s name rippled over the clothes and down the escalators, the number of onlookers beginning to swell as word spread like wildfire.

Jamie pulled her along behind him, but it was difficult to navigate with no clear routes past the clothes, and people were coming and standing at almost every point, blocking the way past. There was growing commotion now, voices rising, girls beginning to rush and push, as she and Jamie turned back, again and again, running out of directions to turn to. They were fast becoming hemmed in.

Suddenly, now, Nettie understood the look Pho had given her.

‘The escalators are this way,’ she said, pointing to the opposite direction to the one he was heading towards.

‘No, too dangerous,’ he said firmly, the tension she had glimpsed earlier setting his entire face now in a concrete mask – all life and colour gone. Nettie immediately saw his point. There could be a serious accident if overexcited teenage girls on their way up passed him going down.

‘This way, the changing rooms,’ he said quickly, turning on his heel just as a horde of girls spilled from the lifts on the far side, screaming his name. Nettie froze. She’d never seen anything like it. She couldn’t believe how quickly everything had deteriorated. One minute they’d been joking about, the next they were looking for cover from two hundred hysterical strangers all wanting to touch him, be with him, have their photo taken with him.

What had she done? Goading him about having security, teasing him about being too precious to come out and buy a simple T-shirt. But it hadn’t been a pose; this was his reality. He wasn’t free to move about like a normal person. This was the price he paid for the jet-set lifestyle she had only ever read about in magazines, and it wasn’t a joke. This wasn’t funny.

‘Nettie!’

She turned back at his shout, but he was across the shop floor now – unaware that she hadn’t been behind him – an advancing crowd flooding between them and cutting them off from one another like an incoming tide. She couldn’t barge past these people, who were already shoving each other, and there was no question of him walking into the middle of them. A few more minutes of this and there was going to be a riot.

‘Just go! Get out of here!’ she shouted over, waving her arms in the air to force him back.

‘No!’

‘Yes, I’m fine!’ she shouted. ‘Just go!’

For a moment he stared at her across the crowd, desperation in his eyes that this had happened – that they’d been separated, that he’d been noticed, that he’d so hopelessly failed at being normal – but then a security guard appeared and dragged him away and he was gone, blocked from her sight, and she stood alone and still in the store, just another girl, just another fan.

Chapter Fifteen

‘Hey.’

Nettie looked up from her cross-legged position on the floor to find Dan leaning on his elbows across the counter and grinning down at her. ‘Hey.’

‘I thought you might be here.’

‘And here I am . . .’ she smiled, watching as several snowflakes fell from his hair towards her. ‘Oh! It’s started snowing, then?’ The weather had been forecast to close in this afternoon, but she hadn’t really believed it would after seeing the clear skies at sunrise.

‘No. I just need to wash my hair,’ he said, keeping a straight face until she’d grimaced. She shook her head despairingly and carried on unpacking the books from the box and scanning the ISBN codes.

He watched her for a moment. ‘So what you doing?’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Registering the new titles.’

‘Need a hand?’

She groaned as she glanced back up at him. ‘Just tell me what it is, Dan. What do you want?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you changed your mind on the poncho?’

‘No.’

‘So then, what? You can’t expect me to believe that you’ve just wandered into the library and offered to help out of the goodness of your heart? I don’t think so.’

‘No, I was just wondering what you were up to, is all. You’d already gone out by the time I moseyed over this morning, which is
not
like you, as we well know.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Your dad said you must have had plans; I didn’t like to point out to him the possibility that you might have got lucky and not come home last night.’

‘It wouldn’t matter if you did. I’m twenty-six,’ she replied tartly.

‘I know, but we all know you pulling an all-nighter is up there with solar eclipses.’ He registered her expression. ‘Sorry.’

She sighed but offered no explanation, instead continuing to scan the books, the pile beside her growing taller and taller.

Dan watched for a moment, before curiosity got the better of his pride. ‘So which was it, then? Out early, or out all night?’

‘Oh, Dan! You are so nosy!’ she said exasperatedly, unwrapping her legs and standing up.

He shrugged, but his big blue eyes wouldn’t shift off her, trying to read her.

‘Look, I was
working
, all right?’ she said, rolling her eyes.

‘By seven o’clock on a Saturday morning?’ He made a buzzer sound, the kind they used on game shows when a contestant’s answer was wrong. ‘Nope, not buying it. Try again.’

Nettie sighed, knowing exactly what he was thinking – that she’d spent the night with Jamie. She felt her heart constrict again at the memory of last night’s mistake, this morning’s disaster. She glanced at Dan – what he suspected was so far from the truth, and she wasn’t sure she had the energy to explain to him that while he’d been eating his cornflakes, she had been owling as a mutant bunny on top of the O2; that while he and her father had been discussing bikes over their customary Saturday-morning elevenses, she had been in the middle of a stampede on Oxford Street.

‘Believe what you like. That’s the truth.’

Dan cocked an eyebrow and she looked left and right to make sure nobody was standing in earshot. ‘You can see for yourself – Caro should have uploaded it by now . . . Besides, I’m surprised you’re not working today. You said you were flat out.’

‘Boy’s gotta rest,’ he shrugged, flashing her one of his best lazy-boy smiles.

‘Hmm. Excuse me,’ she said primly, raising the hatch and pushing past him with the armful of new books. They had often argued over his lackadaisical work ethic and she knew she wasn’t the only one in the wrong job. Born to a single, working mother, his early years had been spare and hard, a ragamuffin childhood spent in holed jeans and too-small shoes. But his mother was a beautiful woman who knew how to work her wiles, and as she exchanged husbands for alimonies, their circumstances had changed quite drastically. She had even sent him to a private school for a while – two terms, apparently – but Dan had had none of it, being disruptive in class, teaching all the kids swear words and bunking off lessons until eventually he achieved his objective and was ‘asked to leave’. Nettie often joked that he was the only plumber in London who knew Latin accusatives, but there was nothing funny about it; turning his back on his mother’s lavishness and embracing the life he felt he was ‘born to’ was the only way he knew to reject her and the choices she’d made. It was no coincidence that while his mother lived in a £2-million villa in Highgate, he chose to live in a pint-sized houseboat, and he no sooner wanted to be a plumber than Nettie did, but it disappointed his mother’s social ambitions, which was precisely the point.

Dan walked after her, ignoring her disapproval. ‘So when are you finishing here, then?’

‘Why?’ she asked, stacking them on the ‘new releases’ shelf.

‘I just thought we could go for a walk or something. I feel like I’ve hardly seen you this week.’

‘You saw me last night, you fool,’ she scoffed, before her eyes widened with sudden realization. He took a step back as she whirled round.

‘What?’ He held his hands up like she was pointing a gun at him.

‘Has Dad sent you over here?’

‘No!’

‘He has. He has, hasn’t he?’

‘No, I’m telling you.’

She hugged the books to her chest. ‘It’s because of the tree, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘I know it is. Just say it.’

Dan exhaled, knowing his cover was blown. ‘Fine. He just wants to be sure you’re all right. When he found you were gone so early this morning . . .’ He shrugged.

She resumed stacking the shelf. ‘I am fine, I promise. I really was working.’

He watched as she walked back to the front desk, ducking under the hatch.

‘Is that all it is? I mean, I know your job’s off-the-scale mental at the moment but you seem . . . distracted. Stevie thinks so too. Everyone’s worried this is too much on top of—’

‘Dan, please,’ she pleaded. ‘Let it go. I’ve told you I’m fine.’

He held his hands up. ‘All right, all right. You can’t say I didn’t try.’ He kicked the base of the desk lightly with his feet. ‘So when are you knocking off here? I can meet you for a pint if you like?’

‘Not for another hour or so.’

He gurned, before dropping his forehead on the counter. ‘Can’t you skive off a bit earlier?’

She looked up at him from beneath raised eyebrows. ‘You know I can’t. It’s four-hour shifts, and the next volunteer is . . .’ Nettie scanned the rota. ‘Oh, it’s Mary. She definitely won’t get here early.’

‘Fine,’ Dan said, smacking the desk lightly with his palm. ‘Well, then I shall wait for you.’

‘You really don’t have to.’

‘I know.’ He winked as she pulled a sheaf of papers out of a drawer and, ducking back under the hatch, walked over to the community noticeboard by the front doors. Unlocking the glass cover with a key in her pocket, she began taking down the old, expired notices and replacing them with the new ones – mother and baby groups, Pilates classes, guided walks, missing persons flyers, film night, book clubs . . .

‘We could make an evening of it if you want?’ he asked, watching the way she fastidiously checked the leaflets were level and smoothed them of wrinkles before placing a drawing pin in each corner. ‘Got any plans?’

She stalled, thinking of the vast arena that was already gearing up for tonight’s performance – last-minute touches being finalized as the light and sound systems were rigged up, the carpets vacuumed, the bins emptied, the staff clocking on and manning the exits, girls up and down the country already on trains, tickets clutched in their hands, make-up freshly applied . . . She thought of Jamie running through the set on that big stage, or maybe sitting on the so-called ‘rank’ sofa with his tube of Pringles and car magazine. Had she intruded on his thoughts all afternoon, the way he’d intruded on hers? Blink too long and she saw the image of him now scorched on her retina. She’d had to turn the radio off to silence the DJ talking up tonight, playing his songs . . .