He rocks me a little from side to side. I let him.This is easy, I hear myself think.
‘This is nice,’ he says, and I know we’re still as in tune as we were last night when we kissed for hours like teenagers, getting hotter and wilder until I guess we passed out, only meaning to rest for minutes. I remember thinking how I was going to follow him back to his place up School Lane and over the recreation ground. I remember thinking how nice it would be to take him to bed. And then, we were asleep.
‘Oh God, imagine if the kids had caught us sleeping in Santa’s grotto!’ I say, hiding my face in his neck.
‘I know.’ His body rocks with a silent laugh. Nothing is loud or forced or exaggerated this morning. We’re past all of the hard work of liking each other, and now we just get to do this. We get to be together, comfortable, quiet, relaxed.
Now it’s my turn to say, ‘This is nice.’ And what I’m really thinking is,This is how it’s going to be from now on, and I sigh into his shoulder, hold on to his waist and thank my lucky stars I wasn’t too afraid to let Patrick in.
After the quickest cup of coffee, drank from one shared mug, he insists he’s going to walk me home, which is totally unnecessary but extremely lovely, and it’s not until we sneak through the side gate and onto the high street that I realise Wheaton is under some kind of invasion.
It’s nine fifteen. The school-run traffic should have cleared by now but there are cars and vans on the double yellows all along the road and the traffic warden is on the march, writing tickets, knocking at drivers through their windows, saying, ‘You can’t park here.’
I can see Izz still in her long crossing coat holding her lollipop stick at the bottom of the village hall steps. She should be finished for the morning and getting the cafe open. What’s she doing up at the hall? There are a few council vehicles along there with their orange flashy roof lights spinning, and there are people queueing all over the place.
A crowd with big cardboard boxes are waiting at the main school gates to be let in.
‘Gingerbread builds?’ Patrick says to me, still holding my hand as we call off our walk to my place and make our way along the street to investigate the hubbub.
I turn up my jacket collar, not that it’ll do much good hiding my unbrushed hair and yesterday’s face. I must look a fright. Patrick hasn’t said a thing about it, but my eyes hurt from lack of sleep and my skin feels dry. I need a shower, a ten-hour nap and a whole bottle of moisturiser to set me right again.
‘Excuse me,’ Patrick says, getting the attention of one of the people in the school queue. ‘I’m the school caretaker. Do you mind telling me what’s in the box?’
‘Oh,’ says the young man, and the teenage girl he’s with turns too. ‘It’s a gingerbread greenhouse and allotment.’
Of course it is.
‘But why are you here?’ I ask.
‘We set off at four, from Carlisle. Wanted to make sure it arrived in time.’
‘Right,’ I say, astonished, and others in the crowd start sharing what’s in their boxes. Some of these people, I recognise – they’re locals, parents and grandparents of schoolkids. Others have come a long way to drop off their handiwork.
I spot Mrs Slaughter making her way from the school office across the schoolyard with the key to the gate to take delivery of their builds. I suppose there’s plenty of room for them if we shove some of the others together a bit or add some extra tables. Think of the Pepperkakebyen, I tell myself, and all those gorgeous builds packed in side by side, a gingerbread city, not just a village. Ours will look the same. How wonderful!
‘Let’s go.’ I pull Patrick away, not wanting the school secretary to see me and Patrick all unkempt and loitering about this early. She’d definitely put two and two together.
We make our way towards the village hall as car doors swing open across the pavement in front of us and, mostly, young people step out, telling drivers – their parents, I suspect – that they won’t be long. Some are holding their phones up, already recording, narrating their arrival in Wheaton. There’s a queue of them outside the village hall, presumably wanting to get a video ‘for their socials’, to quote Lucy.
I don’t, however, notice the outside broadcast van parked right in front of the hall until we get closer.
‘He’s going to get a ticket,’ says Patrick as we approach.
There’s a camera operator and a presenter I recognise from the local news.
‘First timethey’veever set foot in Wheaton. I thought we were too local for the local news?’ I say, but my wisecrack falls flat when I notice there’s someone mic-ing up Izz as she stands on the steps of the hall. They’re running a wire up inside herChildren Crossingcoat.
‘Izz! You OK?’ I shout over the heads of the people gathered there, snapping photos of her and of the council workers as they traipse in and out of the building. It sounds like some repairs are underway already, or is it the start of the demolition?
‘They want me to do an interview,’ Izz shouts back, her eyes wide.
Someone with headphones and a radio mic at their lips starts clearing the way through the spectators so the interviewer can ascend the steps to Izz.
‘Is she all right?’ Patrick asks me, looking concerned for our friend.
‘She looks like a rabbit in the headlights. Should we intervene?’
‘Sign here,’ the headphone person’s saying to Izz, showing her papers on a clipboard. ‘And here.’
