One Day in December: The Christmas read you won't want to put down

by Shari Low

  ‘Erm, I’m not sure. I don’t usually wear make-up, so something really natural would be great,’ Caro suggested.

  The teenager’s nod and look of determination told her she was up for the challenge. Rod returned and picked up a dryer and a huge brush.

  Slotting in on the opposite side of Daisy, Kylie got to work, and suddenly a whole host of images popped up in Caro’s mind – photographs that Lila had posted of very similar situations. In this salon, hair being done, make-up, nails too, surrounded by stylists and technicians. So this was what it felt like to be Lila. This was part of her life. Part of what made her who she was. Caro took a moment to think about how it felt and came up with… nice. That was it. Not amazing, or wonderful or special. Not boring or annoying. She appreciated their work but this wasn’t her. If anything, all the attention was a bit embarrassing. Give her Todd and his hairdressing scissors in her kitchen any day of the week.

  Another ding as the door opened again. Anxiety. Apprehension. Then… Disappointment – and a touch of admiration - as an elderly lady with a bright purple bouffant bustled in..

  If the bell went again over the next half hour or so, Caro didn’t hear it over the noise of Rod’s hairdryer.

  Daisy finished first, and Caro thanked her for her flawless pink nails. Kylie finished at exactly the same time as Rod switched off the drier and reached for a tube that looked like a large mascara.

  ‘What do you think?’ Kylie asked. ‘And please don’t worry about saying if you don’t like it. Suze won’t really fire us.’

  Caro looked in the mirror and for the first time saw herself… and someone else. Kylie had done exactly as she’d been asked. The make-up was barely noticeable. The perfect shade of foundation. Subtle blusher. A nude lip. Beautifully blended contouring. Two coats of black mascara that widened her eyes in a natural way. She looked like herself, but she also, more than ever before, looked like her mum. The shock and sadness must have fleetingly registered on her face.

  ‘Oh God, you hate it. I’m so sorry. Is it too much? Not enough? Wet wipes coming right up!’

  ‘No, no!’ Caro blurted. ‘I love it! I really do. Sorry, I just don’t wear a lot of make-up so it took me a moment. But I honestly love it. Thank you so much. I’ll tell Suze you’re wonderful.’

  ‘Yes!’ Kylie fist-pumped the air, then did a dance that involved intensive shaking of her arse. The two mothers and daughter in the adjacent seats gave her a round of applause and she bowed her way back to reception to a high five from an amused Suze.

  Rod unscrewed the tube, releasing a gold-tinged brush about an inch long. He lifted a few thin sections around her face, and slid the brush along them, instantly lightening the colour several shades. Then he picked up some contraption from the counter, and started to roll tendrils of her hair around it, working his way around her head until it was a mass of loose, wavy tendrils.

  The door went again. Her heart thudded. She looked. No Lila.

  Rod wafted hairspray over her new style to hold the waves and then stood back.

  ‘I can tell by your smile that you love it,’ he said, clearly one for appreciating his own brilliance. He was right, though. If she’d known this was possible she’d have done it years ago. She looked younger, brighter, more polished. On any other day, she’d be thrilled by the result, even if she’d downplay it to anyone who complimented her, because she hadn’t actually done it herself.

  ‘I do,’ Caro agreed, thinking that, much as this was the most unexpected turn of events, she was glad she’d come in.

  It was only when she stood and Rod took her robe off and insisted she check out the side view that she saw yet another image in her mind. Not her. Not her mother. But a Facebook photo of Lila, a few weeks ago, after a ten-mile jog on a Sunday morning, no make-up – or at least, not as much as she wore in every other photo – her hair loose and wavy instead of her normal sleek shine.

  Perhaps it was the fumes from the hairspray, or just the emotion of the day, but Caro was just a little bit sure she saw a resemblance.

  Very faint. Nothing obvious. But maybe it was there. She shook the thought off and headed to the front of the salon, where Suze greeted her at the desk. ‘Well, you look great,’ she said, chuckling. ‘I’m so glad. I hate firing anyone on a Friday.’

  She put the bill on the top of the reception counter.

  A hundred quid. Holy crap. Who spent a hundred quid on a Friday afternoon just to look good? Caro got her credit card out. Apparently she did, and she didn’t regret a single minute of it, or of the twenty quid she added on as a tip. If today wasn’t one of the most terrifying of her life she’d actually have been enjoying it. A nice lunch. An out-of-the-ordinary trip to a salon. Meeting some people that made her laugh. At least if she headed back on the train tonight completely empty-handed, she had some positive experiences to show for it, and she could retreat, undamaged, while she came up with another plan.

  But she wasn’t finished trying yet.

  She tried to sound as nonchalant as possible as she spoke to Suze. ‘While I’m here, can I ask… a friend of mine comes in here all the time and I was wondering if she was due in today’ She could have led with this at the start, but then if Lila had come in, Suze would have pointed her in Caro’s direction, giving no way out for Caro. Now, she was leaving anyway so there was nothing to lose.

  ‘Really? Who’s that and I’ll check the book.’

  ‘Lila. Lila Anderson.’

  There was something in Suze’s reaction that piqued Caro’s interest. A flicker of something. She saw it in her kids when one of their classmates irritated them, but they didn’t want to show it. If she had to guess, she’d say Lila wasn’t Suze’s favourite person. Suze covered it well though. With a few clicks of a mouse, she checked the screen in front of her.

  ‘Ah, no, Lila isn’t due in today.’

  Caro’s spirits crashed. She really felt she’d got close and now she was back at square one.

  ‘But you should pop in next door,’ Suze said, while organising the receipt.

  ‘Why?’ Caro asked, then realised that next door must have some significance and if her story that she was Lila’s friend had any truth, she should probably know what it was. She decided to bluster her way through it. ‘I haven’t seen Lila for a while so I’m a bit out of touch with things.’

  Please don’t call the police. Please don’t. How did undercover investigators pull this sort of stuff off? One small lie and she was already in danger of sweating off Kylie’s finest work.

  Thankfully, Suze didn’t seem suspicious. Or if she was, she didn’t care. ‘Well, the menswear shop next door – CAMDEN – is owned by Lila’s boyfriend Cammy.’

  Caro felt her knees weaken as she took in this information. Next door. Right next door. Lila could be there right now and if she wasn’t, then there was a man who could tell her where she was.

  Oh crap, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just walk in there and ask for her.

  Could she?

  Chapter 14

  Cammy

  The potato tortillas, chicken croquettes, albondigas, pintxos and large carafe of sangria had barely hit the table when Josie morphed into Agatha Christie on an inquisitive day.

  ‘So what do we really know about her though?’ she pondered, doing her best Poirot.

  Val laughed and Cammy tried not to. ‘Christ Almighty, Josie, you need to give it a rest.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she wittered, digging a fork into one of the meatballs. ‘Since they banned smoking in public places, and I cut down to three a day, I need to keep my mind distracted and my mouth busy. Anyway, Cameron…’ she sometimes liked to use his full name when she was attempting to take the moral high ground, ‘all this comes from a place of love. And a burning desire to keep you out of the divorce courts in a year’s time.’

  ‘Josie, she’s great. Her mum and dad are nice.’

  ‘What about her friends? Who are they? Do we know any of them?’

  It wasn’t such an
outlandish question. Josie had worked in La Femme L’Homme for over a decade and built up relationships with just about everyone who shopped there and in the beauty salon next door. Val worked part time in Sun Sea Ski, the shop on the other side of CAMDEN, and struck up friendships with loads of the regulars. In the grand scheme of city centre life, it wouldn’t have been particularly unusual for them to know someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Lila. In fact, given their interrogation skills and a gossip database that rivalled the amount of information held by Interpol, it was pretty surprising that they didn’t.

  Cammy shrugged. ‘She doesn’t actually have a lot of mates…’

  Josie’s head flew up like a meerkat in heat. ‘What? Why? What’s wrong with her?’

  Cammy had refused the sangria – determined to keep a clear mind for the day ahead, but he lifted Val’s glass and took one sip, for medicinal purposes. As much as he adored her, Josie was giving him a headache and a growing pain in the arse.

  ‘Nothing. You know what it’s like. Her mum says girls have always been jealous of her, so she’s never really built up a big circle of pals.’

  He saw Josie and Val ponder that one for a minute, but he refused to admit that it was strange. No girlfriends popping in for a cuppa, no late night calls to a pal to chat about her day, no group outings or weekend trips. Okay maybe it was a tad… unusual, and even before she spoke, he knew Val, a woman who constantly surrounded herself with friends and family, would pick up on it.

  ‘That might be the case, my love,’ Val said, always a bit more reasonable than Special Agent Josie, ‘but to be honest, it’s a bit strange. No pals at all?’

  He went for a white lie to divert her concern. ‘I’m sure she has, but we’ve been a bit wrapped up in each other since we met.’ There was some truth in that. In the six months they’d been together, they spent most nights going out for dinner, or chilling at home with a movie – at least, that was on the nights that Lila didn’t have spin, or boxercise, or personal training sessions. She’d had loads of those lately – said it was because she wanted to look great in a bikini if they went off somewhere tropical in the post-Christmas lull in January.

  That’s why the friends thing had never really fazed him. He just thought they were doing that thing a couple does when they first fall in love, where they want to spend all their time together. Usually naked. Nothing wrong with that. Understandable, actually.

  Before he’d gone over to LA, he’d been a die-hard founding member of the party scene in the city – out every night with an ever-evolving group of party people. He’d gone back to that for a few weeks when he first got home and he just felt… past it. Out of place. He’d soon realised he was getting too old for all that carry-on, so after twelve hours a day in the shop, six days a week, chilling out with Lila suited him just fine. In fact, he felt really lucky to have found someone who felt the same way he did.

  ‘She’s just so busy being madly in love with me that she’s let her friends slip a little over the last few months,’ he added for good measure.

  Josie snorted. ‘She’s not too busy to post twenty photographs a day on that Facegram.’

  ‘Instagram. Or Facebook. I’ll explain it to you again later,’ Val said, sagely, sounding like she was so up on these things she had Zuckerberg on her friends and family list.

  ‘Well, whatever. I’ve never known a grown woman who needs that many photos of herself.’

  Okay, so she had a point. And yes, he’d thought it strange at first that she detailed every aspect of her life online, but so what? She enjoyed it. It was a hobby, and she got a buzz from the interaction. He had zero interest in Facebook or Instagram or any of the social media sites, but if Lila enjoyed them, where was the harm?

  Cammy was about to issue an irritated rebuttal when Josie followed the criticism up with… ‘Although… wouldn’t have minded that in my day. It would be good to have photographic evidence of how I looked before I went grey, developed wrinkles and my baps headed south.’

  A woman at the next table froze, unsure if she really had just overheard that correctly. Couldn’t have. Not from that elderly lady.

  ‘Val, please change the subject and get her off my case,’ Cammy pleaded, still laughing. ‘World politics. Religion. Brexit. Wrestling. Anything at all. I beg you.’

  Val knocked back the last of her vino before she spoke. ‘I’d love to help, but you know it would take a bigger force than me to make it stop.’

  Josie ignored them, filling up her glass, then Val’s. Cammy stuck to water, fearful that they would deploy a back-up plan to get him so pissed he’d crash out before he could propose.

  ‘Previous boyfriends, then?’ Josie continued the interrogation.

  ‘Erm…. Well… ah… No one serious.’ He immediately realised he should have known better than to try to bluff that one out in front of women with lie detection sensors that went off like car alarms at the first hint of a fib. He immediately cracked and surrendered the truth. ‘Right, so you’re not going to like it and don’t judge her…’

  ‘Of course we won’t, love’ said Val, as she and Josie pursed their lips, judgemental heads on, ready and waiting.

  ‘She had a long-term relationship before she met me. Over six years .’

  He tried to leave it at that. Stop there. He even picked up his fork and dug it into the last chunk of tortilla, before the heat of their steely stares forced him to abandon the idea.

  ‘Okay, so he was married.’

  Josie practically started a Mexican wave. ‘I knew it. I knew there was something. Sometimes you just need to dig deep, don’t you Val?’

  Val, in fairness, was looking more concerned than outraged.

  ‘But I’m not judging, son,’ Josie added, serious again.

  ‘And neither am I,’ Cammy said pointedly. ‘Would be a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t it?’

  They all knew what he was referring to. Years ago, when Mel’s first marriage broke up and he told her he was in love with her, they both acknowledged that there was a connection between them that went further than friendship. But then, before they could take it much further than a kiss, she’d found out he’d been having an affair with a married woman all along and backed off.

  That kind of stuff didn’t fly with Mel. After everything she’d been through with her husband, she hated cheats. And she hated liars. Especially when she discovered that he was the liar who’d been sleeping with Suze, the woman who’d been Mel’s sister in law and best friend for years, and they’d both been covering it up. Yep, he’d been having a long term, meaningless fling with a member of Mel’s family. There was no coming back from that. Instead, devastated that he’d blown it, he’d taken off to LA and put it all behind him. Some might find it weird that he now owned a shop next door to Suze’s salon, and they were still good friends, neither of them ever mentioning their misguided affair, but that was just life. They were all adults and it was a long time ago. Although… the tortilla got stuck somewhere above his stomach as he acknowledged that, even now, Mel was nothing more than a memory, he still missed everything about her. Most of all he missed her friendship.

  A thought struck him – did he have that kind of friendship with Lila?

  He immediately realised the comparison was unfair. He’d known Lila for six months. She was beautiful, they’d fallen madly in love, had a great time together, and she’d made coming back to Scotland and starting all over again so much better than he’d ever thought it could be. Okay, so they didn’t have that deep friendship bond, but they had so much more.

  Jesus, why was he even thinking this stuff? Bloody Josie! She was getting into his head and it was driving him nuts.

  He dived back into the conversation. ‘So… Lila had an affair, I had an affair, now we’ve both learned from our mistakes. Maybe we are pretty well suited after all, eh Josie?’

  Josie didn’t answer, just topped up her sangria glass again.

  He’d been looking forward to tonight so much, bu
t the sheen was definitely starting to wear off. Lila had sounded a bit subdued on the phone too. She was usually well up for a night out and a nice dinner somewhere flash, but she’d been more than a bit reluctant, even now that her mum and dad were coming. Or maybe he was just reading too much into it because Josie was deploying her mind-warping tactics on him.

  He checked his watch. After three p.m.

  ‘Right ladies, let’s head to the restaurant and make sure everything is set up there, and then we just need to nip over to the shop and pick up my suit.’

  Val nodded. ‘That would be great – I’ll pop in and see Jen while we’re there.’ Jen was Val’s adopted daughter, who owned Sun Sea Ski.

  Cammy paid the bill and they headed off to tonight’s venue, Cammy modifying his stride so that the click of Josie and Val’s high heels could keep up with him. Josie and Val were unusually quiet as they walked – no doubt hatching a new derailment strategy. He was relieved when they finally got there, with no mention of abduction or protest marches.

  The restaurant, Grilled, was one of the most beautiful in the city, a throwback to a more glamorous era, with chandeliers and intimate booths. Dinner for two costs about as much as a flight to Majorca, dinner for four would cover the return journey, but hey, it was going to be worth it for the romance, the tranquillity, the perfect ambience of it all. Besides, it was Lila’s favourite restaurant, mainly because it was frequented by celebrities and she could take surreptitious selfies and post them on social media.

  Hang on, that made her sound really shallow. Although, he supposed, sometimes she could be. But then, so could he. There was a reason that he never left the house without stopping at a mirror to check he looked good. There was a reason that he enjoyed the finer things in life. There was a reason that Fake Bake profits in Glasgow had increased since he’d moved back to the city. And there was a reason that he was planning to propose to his beautiful girlfriend in the flashiest restaurant in town. Did it make him a bad person? No. Did it make him perfectly suited to Lila? Hell yes.