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 me. ‘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 …’
‘Do you think this is the first year we’ve noticed things are going downhill?’ he barks. ‘Do you think we don’t do our best every year to attract more customers? You swan in like some sort of saviour come to pull us back from the brink of despair. If Nutcracker Lane was saveable, don’t you think we’d have done it years ago? And we certainly wouldn’t have resorted to
