I also realise that even though it’s warmer today with the low-lying fog and threatening rain clouds, it’s still a December morning and he’s standing in the car park with half his torso exposed and the cold air is undoubtedly not doing the bruising any good. I quickly tug the T-shirt and jumper back into place and step away, but all my good intentions fly away as he straightens up and turns around, pain visible in every taut line of his face.
Without thinking, I throw my arms around his neck. Well, with enough thinking to be careful of not hurting him. I reach up and pull his head down to my shoulder, my hand sliding around the back of his neck and my fingers carding through the thick hair there. My other arm wraps around his good shoulder and tightens as much as it can without being painful. I half-expect him to shove me away, but his right arm curls around my back, his hand tangling in the hair hanging over my shoulders and sort of gathering it up and pulling it aside, and even his broken arm slides behind me, the elbow above the cast pressing into my back.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I don’t know.’ All I know is that I’m nearly in tears at the sight of his bruised body and the thought of seeing that and not hugging him was unthinkable.
‘I don’t either, but feel free to keep doing it.’
My arm gets impossibly tighter around his shoulders and my fingers curl into the thick strands of hair at the back of his neck, so dark it’s almost the same colour as the black lamppost beside us, and uneven enough to feel like it’s growing out of the neat cut it was once in. All I can think about is what he said in the storage room the other night about being alone and in shock, and I want to hug him hard enough to retroactively erase those memories.
‘Call them knots in my woodgrain,’ he murmurs into my ear.
He’s still talking about the bruises, I know that, but it’s another reminder of the nutcracker and I stiffen in his embrace, even though thinking of bruises as temporary knots in woodgrain is a nice sentiment. ‘Is this hurting you?’
‘Absolute agony but worth every second.’ I can hear the smile in his voice and the way his arms tighten makes me smile too.
I could happily stay here and hug him for a good few hours yet, but I force myself to let go and take a step back, wondering if the half-dazed half-confused look on his face matches the one on mine.
‘Just so you know, I’ve never started my workday with a cuddle in the car park before.’
‘That’s the power of Christmas jumpers.’ I reach out and touch the furry green face of the giant Grinch head on the front of his jumper, being careful to stick to the right side of his chest.
Why can’t I take my hands off him? What is it about him that makes me want to be close? I’ve just inappropriately hugged him and now I’m rubbing his chest, and I still can’t make myself step away.
The jumper is knitted in black and has a huge face of the Grinch in the centre, made from green fur and wearing a Santa hat with a 3D bobble. ‘See? There’s a Christmas jumper out there for everyone – even you, Grinch.’
He grins at the nickname. What started off as an insult has become a term of endearment.
‘What’s with the trolley?’ He nods towards the blue metal contraption forgotten on the pavement.
‘I’m getting my tree tonight. My grandparents always used to get their tree from here. The seller collects them from a little Christmas tree farm in Scotland and drives down twice a week with a new batch straight from the farm. They have a small selection but they’re always personally chosen from the absolute top-quality stock.’ I nod towards the tiny tree lot at the end of Nutcracker Lane where a truck is backed in and the tree seller and driver are unloading netted trees.
‘Can I borrow that? I’ve got some stuff for you and that will really help with carrying it in.’
‘What stuff?’
He beckons me to follow him to the boot of his car and opens it. ‘Shelving for the shop.’
His boot is completely stacked with narrow wooden boards, and I can see a toolkit on the back seat.
‘I haven’t fulfilled my end of the bargain yet to help you improve your shop. I was thinking about it last night. Can I be brutally honest?’ He continues when I nod. ‘In the nicest way possible, it looks like a jumble sale. All the tables and rifling through baskets makes it feel like a craft fair, not the professional retail shop that customers are expecting. You don’t have enough shelf space. I was at my parents’ last night and I remembered that their garage was full of all this old pallet shelving I made when I was younger. I thought you might want it in the shop to get rid of some of those tables and display things properly … if you’ll help me put it together. My mum had to help me dismantle it to get it in the car. Furniture doesn’t exactly mix with one functioning arm.’
I reach out and run my fingers over one of the smooth wooden boards. ‘This is beautiful. These are all old delivery pallets?’
He nods.
‘And you made these into shelving?’
‘Many years ago,’ he says before I can look too impressed. ‘Three units here, more in my mum and dad’s garage. I couldn’t carry any more last night.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘You’re not supposed to be lifting anything heavy.’
His eyebrows furrow in confusion.
‘I googled broken ribs,’ I explain. ‘You’re supposed to be taking it easy. I wanted to make sure you’re looking after yourself.’
‘I can’t believe you googled broken ribs for me.’ He ducks his head and his cheeks redden, and then he looks up and mouths ‘thank you’ so quietly that no words come out. He reaches out and takes my hand and just holds it for a long minute, his thumb brushing back and forth softly across my fingers, so gentle that my breath catches in my throat and my knees start shaking. I can’t help wondering what it would be like if we didn’t let go. If we crossed this car park and walked into Nutcracker Lane hand-in-hand.
‘I’m sorry.’ James jumps and drops my hand abruptly. ‘I’m losing track of time here. What do you think?’
It takes me an embarrassingly long time to realise he’s talking about the shelving. ‘Oh! Yeah, these are amazing. I’d love them. Thanks. And you’re right, I know you are.’ I once again appreciate his honesty. Stacey and I know the shop isn’t brilliant, but neither of us have known how to fix it.
He turns around and ducks into the car to retrieve his sling from the seat and slams the door shut behind him, and I go over to pick up the folded transporter trolley. ‘I’m glad I caught you actually. I have a favour to ask. You know those nutcrackers you said the owner had a shipping container to get rid of? Could I have some more of them?’
‘Sure. As many as you want.’
‘How many does a shipping container contain?’
‘I don’t know. I’d have to check the stock records for an exact amount, but I’d guess around ten thousand.’
‘That’s brilliant!’
He laughs and quickly stops himself when he sees I’m serious. ‘You want ten thousand nutcrackers?’
‘Well, no, we should probably pace ourselves with a thousand or so to start with. Here, look.’ I stop walking and prop the trolley against my hip and start digging in my shoulder bag until I find the examples of flags and banners I made last night. I pull them out and hand them to him.
‘Save Nutcracker Lane,’ he reads aloud. ‘This Christmas, I wish … One for all and all for one … Christmas magic is in the air …’ He shuffles through the flags and banners in his hand and looks between them and me, confusion on his face. ‘Are you going to enlighten me?’
‘We’re going to fight Scrooge with an army – a nutcracker army.’
‘We are?’ I don’t need to look at him to see the raised eyebrow as we start walking across the car park again.
‘You inspired me the other day, talking about the community banding together to save the nutcracker. If they’ve done it once, they could do it again.’
He does a half-snort half-laugh. ‘I’ve never inspired anyone
in my life, so thank you.’
I want to say I’m sure that’s not true, but we step down from the pavement onto the tarmac and the trolley clatters down the step behind me, making me jump because I’d forgotten I was pulling it. I seem to forget a lot when James is in the vicinity, including my own name and how to breathe.
I give myself a shake. ‘The point is that no one knows how much trouble Nutcracker Lane is in because no one comes here anymore. If people in the local community knew, people like me who loved this place in years gone by, people like that woman with the snowglobe-collecting grandson who wanted to bring his own children here one day, people who had wishes granted by the wish-granters or still have photographs up on their mantelpieces of their children with Santa here, or fond memories of the sleigh rides, or who were helped out by the gift donations Nutcracker Lane used to collect for local charities … If people know that this time next year, whatever part of this place that survives is going to be very different … maybe they wouldn’t let it go. So we’re going to take your little nutcrackers, attach these flags to their hands and send them out into the community.’
‘Under their own power? Do you have a magic spell to make nutcrackers sentient?’
Maybe. ‘We’re going to put them out there. Everywhere. We’re going to hide those little nutcrackers in every conceivable place. We’re going to line them up along the lane, create a chain carrying the banners running through every shop window, and outside too. I’ll get in touch with the local paper and ask them to run a story on the nutcrackers that are appearing everywhere. I was thinking on the way up this morning – garden walls, garden gates, trees, bushes, and hedges. On lampposts and flower pots and gathering around the recycling bins and waiting at bus stops and sitting on park benches.
‘I’ll print out a thousand more flags, and we’ll give each shopkeeper a box of the nutcrackers to distribute. Everyone comes from different areas, so we’ll cover more ground if the others get involved too. If people find these nutcrackers and start talking about them, they might come back to visit this place. At least people will know that Nutcracker Lane won’t always be here. Magically appearing nutcrackers will get people talking. Parents will tell children about the good old days here and maybe children will want to come and see for themselves. You can’t ignore a fifteen-centimetre nutcracker if it appears at your garden gate.’
He shakes his head, a huge smile on his face. ‘You’re incredible. You’re the brightest spark I’ve ever met.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, but nothing seems impossible with you around. Even a nutcracker army.’
I blush. ‘I’m going to call a staff meeting at five tonight. Will you come?’
‘You don’t honestly think I’d miss it, do you? I’ll bring a box of the nutcrackers I’ve got here and collect the rest from the warehouse tomorrow.’
‘Thank you. Seriously, James, thank you so much. I couldn’t do this without—’ I let out a shout of joy as we approach the entrance and grab his arm excitedly. ‘The nutcrackers are back!’
He smiles as I lift up my trolley and rush over to the floor-to-ceiling glass windows surrounding the entranceway. Inside, in exactly the same position as they used to be, is the family of nutcrackers in size order, lined up from the biggest at five-foot to the smallest at a few centimetres, including the one James and I fought over in the storage room the other night.
When I look up, James has let himself in the door and wound the key in the one that plays “Little Drummer Boy” and the tune filters out to me as the nutcracker’s drumsticks start moving mechanically up and down to his drum. It’s a sight I haven’t seen for years and never thought I’d see again. The tune was my father’s favourite Christmas song, and there used to be something comforting about hearing it played as you walked in or out of Nutcracker Lane.
And there’s only one person who could’ve done this.
‘You found them,’ I say as he stands in the doorway, holding it open so we can hear the music.
‘You don’t know that I had anything to do with this,’ he says, but his smile says otherwise. ‘I’m a Grinch, remember?’
‘I know.’ It’s all I can do not to throw my arms around his neck again, but how many times can you inappropriately hug someone in one morning? I reach out and stroke the green fur of the Grinch’s face on his jumper again, trying to make him realise I’m rubbing his chest, not the jumper. ‘But you’re the best Grinch I’ve ever met. I thought you were going to sell them.’
‘I couldn’t. Not with knowing how much you liked them. I figured they deserved to be back in their rightful position for their …’
He trails off but I can finish the sentence for him: ‘… final year.’
He nods, and I stop rubbing his chest to press one finger against it like I’m poking him in the gentlest way possible. ‘Not if we and our ten thousand nutcrackers have anything to do with it.’
He reaches up and wraps his hand around mine, our fingers entwine and he tugs me through the door, and this time, we don’t drop hands as we walk down the lane.
Chapter 8
‘We can fight this,’ I say, hoping I sound more confident than I feel. ‘But we have to work together, not against each other. We shouldn’t be trying to save our individual shops; we should be trying to save Nutcracker Lane – the whole of it!’ I’m standing in the gap of the fence surrounding the wish-granting nutcracker. It’s quarter past five, and I’ve somehow managed to gather every shopkeeper and member of staff, all the carol singers, and even the Santa and his elf are sitting at the back on the floor against the log cabin wall of a shop while Santa picks his nose, peers at what he exhumes like he’s choosing his next delicacy, and promptly eats it. Everyone is looking very deliberately away from Santa, which means I have at least thirty pairs of eyes on me and I’ve never been good at public speaking. James is somewhere behind me on a bench, and the strains of “Little Drummer Boy” are still filtering through from the drum-playing musical nutcracker inside the entrance.
‘We have to show Scrooge that he can’t do this to us,’ I try again. ‘E.B. Neaser, who doesn’t even have the decency to use his real name, is trying to divide us, and so far he’s succeeding. We’re all old friends. That’s more important than anything else.’
‘He damaged my stock!’ Carmen points an accusatory finger at Hubert.
‘She’s been stealing my customers!’ Mrs Brissett from the jumper shop shouts at Rhonda from the hat shop.
‘She’s been telling everyone that my hats are rubbish and fall apart in minutes!’ Rhonda fires back.
‘My poinsettias died because I asked him to close up for me and he left a window open so it got too cold for them,’ the florist accuses the bloke from the coffee shop.
‘That was an accident!’ the guy from the coffee shop yells back.
The bickering continues and I ask myself why I ever thought this was a good idea. How can former friends turn into enemies so quickly? A week ago, these people were making lunch plans together; now they can’t even be under the same spacious roof without a fight breaking out.
‘This is just the first year,’ I try again. ‘What happens next year? Scrooge is culling so many of us now, but do you really think that’ll be the end of it? Whoever “wins” this time around and comes back to their shops next year – won’t he just do the same thing again? None of us are going to be winners in the end. The only chance we’ve got is if we all stick together and fight back as a whole.’
‘Nee, how can we fight it?’ Stacey says quietly from her spot next to me, her arms around Lily’s shoulders, looking like she regrets bringing her seven-year-old daughter to what has turned out to be a festive re-enactment of Fight Club. ‘No matter what we do, at the end of the year, Scrooge is going to calculate our earnings and keep the shops with the most profit. No amount of nutcrackers is going to change that.’
‘We could combine our earnings and report equal amounts!’ I shout as the idea suddenly hits m
e. ‘What if we all make a pact to pool our earnings and when we send our accounting books in after Christmas, we split the total and each report an exactly equal amount? He wouldn’t be able to argue with that. Following his own rules, we’d beat him at his own game. What do you think?’
Silence. I think they must be so stunned by my moment of genius that they can’t quite find the words to capture what a fantastic idea it is.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s tax dodging and comes with a prison sentence,’ the snowglobe seller eventually pipes up.
Murmurs of “account fiddling” and “fraud” go through the crowd and I gulp. ‘We’d show the taxman our actual sales, obviously. I only mean the ones we send to Scrooge. We have to show him that he can’t just pick and choose and sell the rest off to the factory.’
‘How could we trust anyone though?’ Carmen asks. ‘How do we know everyone else would stick to the plan and not add a few thousand onto their totals to ensure their own safety and shaft the rest of us?’
‘We’d have to trust each other. Like we used to.’ To be honest, I’m half-thinking I’ve imagined how much everyone on Nutcracker Lane liked each other. How can so many friendships be so quickly decimated over this?
‘Pfft.’
‘Pah!’
‘As if!’
And that’s just a selection of the responses to how well that suggestion goes down.
‘And you.’ The man from the craft shop points a finger directly at me. ‘Young whippersnapper who’s only been here for seven days. I’ve been here for twenty years, and you come barging in, thinking you can tell us all to break the law. You can’t tell me what to do. What do you know about Nutcracker Lane that makes you able to change things?’
‘But … but I’ve known you all for years,’ I say to the man who my grandma used to buy festive embellishments to make her own cards from every year. ‘I’ve been a visitor for decades …’
The Little Christmas Shop on Nutcracker Lane: The perfect cosy and uplifting Christmas romance to curl up with! Page 15