Nettie eyed the custard creams. They were the safest place for her to rest her eyes while Mike prowled in front of the whiteboard with an excitement that was all the more alarming because it had been aroused by her.
‘Well, I think we can say that was a successful event, don’t you?’ he asked, nodding his own agreement with himself. ‘Certainly, the costumes worked.’
‘Totes,’ Jules grinned, nodding back, one of the custard creams halved in her hands, and Nettie knew her friend was just waiting for Mike to turn his back momentarily before she licked the filling. ‘They lapped it up, especially the bunny – it was hard-core and cute.’
‘It was not cute,’ Daisy said, looking up from filing her nails. ‘That thing freaks me out. I mean, who’s ever seen a blue bunny?’
‘Who’s ever seen a seven-foot blue bunny, you mean,’ Jules chuckled.
‘Exactly. It’s like a mutant.’
‘Tell you what, then – next time you can wear it. That way, you don’t have to look at it,’ Jules said helpfully, earning herself an arched, beautifully threaded eyebrow from Daisy.
‘There won’t be a next time,’ Nettie said curtly. It was two days later and she still had the bruises on her arms and torso to show for her misadventure; plus her neck felt like she’d slept with her head on a brick.
‘Well, that combination is clearly what we need to tap into again,’ Mike said, beginning to prowl once more, clicking his fingers rhythmically. Nettie stared at the patch of thinning hair on the back of his head as he stopped and surveyed the up-down zigzags on the chart. ‘Donations were up seventy-six per cent after Nettie’s stunt. It really engaged the audience and caught their imagination.’ He spun on his heel and pointed at Jules intently. Nettie could imagine him practising the move in his bedroom mirror, perhaps imagining he was Clint Eastwood and with a pistol in his hand rather than a remote control. ‘Hard-core and cute, you say?’
‘Yep.’ Jules looked back at Nettie, who was sitting beside her. ‘You did look adorable whizzing down the ice like that, your little arms flailing about, ears flying.’
‘Yeah, it was the ears I loved. They were hilarious,’ Caro snorted from across the table. ‘Honestly, you couldn’t have planned the whole thing better.’
‘Ha! No chance Nettie would have signed up for that in advance. You’ve got a thing about heights, haven’t you?’
‘And speed,’ Nettie mumbled, quite sure she had a borderline case of PTSD.
‘Well, the good news is, you survived,’ Jules said, patting her on the hand. ‘Another bicky?’
‘Thanks.’ Nettie nibbled at the edges of the custard cream. She needed the sugar. She wasn’t sleeping well at the moment.
‘Ladies, if we could focus on the matter in hand, please.’ Mike had put on his sarcastic voice, but it only served to make him sound needy and Daisy resumed filing her nails. ‘I’m sorry I missed the stunt. It would have been good to see. We need to come up with more ideas like this.’
‘I can show you,’ Caro said, tapping quickly on her iPad and then picking up the Apple TV remote on the table. As their IT and data analyst, she was the go-to person for anything technical (and spare charging cables). ‘I already asked White Tiger for the footage . . . There. I’ve sent it to your inboxes,’ Caro said with customary boredom. Her higher intellect meant she rarely engaged below a certain interest level.
‘Oh, right . . .’ Mike said, his face brightening as the screen on the wall was switched on. ‘Righty-ho, well, let’s see what we’ve got here, then.’
He straightened up and Nettie swivelled her chair a little, to get a better view of the white screen as ‘Titanium’ began pumping through the speakers, Mike nodding his head in time to the beat. The camera angle was wide, panning over the crowds, their heads flashing red, pink, white and blue in the strobe lights. Nettie felt sick, actually sick, as the lens picked out the menacing white ice wall that meandered between them all, the riders already shooting down it in a clash of flashing skates and jutting elbows.
Then she saw it. The blue blob that looked like a glob of Blu-tack from the wide-angle camera, tipping over, heavy-headed, at the top of the ramp, its padded paws as frictionless and unsteerable as if a pillow had been thrown down. Nettie felt her heart catch as she watched the blue bunny rapidly pick up speed; within three seconds she must surely have been doing sixty miles per hour, her arms flailing – the bucket dangling uselessly at her elbow – and ears flying, just as the girls had said. Her hand clapped over her mouth in aghast horror as she watched the bunny ricochet off the chicanes like a cartoon character – up one moment, doubled over the next. It was so hard to believe it was her in there, even though her body still all too clearly remembered the sensations, and adrenalin fizzed in her hands and feet and stomach.
Vaguely she was aware of the girls laughing – it seemed, from the corner of her eye, that Caro had her head on the desk – but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen. The ramps were coming up, and in the next instant she watched open-mouthed as she flew through the air, belly up, the huge paws at least creating some drag, before she landed with a teeth-clattering thud and slid in spinning revolutions all the rest of the way down the slope.
The crowd were going wild for it, almost falling over the barricades to applaud her, as the riders – who’d seemingly been watching with the same horror she’d felt, for no one unwittingly went down that course – rushed over, pulling her to her feet and taking off the rabbit’s head.
Instantly the cartoon-like illusion was broken. Her head seemed dwarfishly small in the outsized suit, and her long dark hair, matted from the heat in there, stuck to her pale cheeks in limp strands; even her full lips – usually rosy – were blanched. A shriek of laughter pealed through the conference room as her head actually reeled a little, her stunned, slightly cross-eyed expression seemingly as funny as the rest of it. Nettie watched her own legs buckle, her paws sliding everywhere on the ice as the two riders – one of whom was Jules’s latest conquest, Cameron Stanley – grabbed her under the arms and jubilantly presented her to her adoring public.
The cheers grew yet louder still.
‘Hear that? They reckoned it was a bloke in that suit,’ Jules said. ‘What a surprise for them seeing a pretty little thing like you in there.’
‘They probably assumed it was another of the riders,’ Daisy added. ‘Who else would be able to go down there like that?’
‘I can’t believe I’m alive,’ Nettie muttered, her eyes wide as she watched her wan self, trying to smile, to stand. ‘Honestly I can’t. It’s a miracle. My dad must never see this.’
Mike pressed ‘pause’ – freeze-framing the short on an image of Nettie being held up, her head lolling to the side – and perched himself on the corner of the conference table, his arms crossed loosely over his thigh as he leaned in slightly towards her.
‘Well, Nettie, I think we can all see for ourselves there the incredible response to your . . . uh, slide.’ He smiled. ‘How would you feel about repeating the success?’
‘Terrible.’ She shook her head firmly, reaching for another biscuit.
‘No, no, don’t make a rush decision. One thing you must bear in mind is that it would never be as bad as the first time. You’ve done it already, remember, mastered the course.’
Mastered the course? Mastered the course? She had slipped and crashed and bounced her way down a sheet of ice! How did that constitute mastering the course? There had been no technique, no free will involved at all. ‘I could have died, Mike.’
He gave an earnest shake of his head. ‘I think the bunny saved you, Nettie.’ His forefinger stabbed onto his own leg. ‘You were as safe in that costume as a kitten in a drum.’
There was a pause. ‘That’s not very safe,’ she said, flummoxed.
He looked at her for a long moment, before inhaling sharply and pulling back. ‘Well, far be it from me to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. I’m merely looking for ways to help you.’
She frowned. ‘Help me?’
‘Well, yes. You’re in charge of charitable donations. It’s no secret that when Jules was doing the job two years ago, she exceeded her targets by forty-six per cent, whereas you are down fifty-one per cent. The clients keep asking me if there’s a problem.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘And what am I supposed to say, huh? That my head of CD has personal problems? Is that their problem?’
‘Of course not, but . . .’
He nodded repeatedly, and the ‘but’ rippled into the room like a big, fat excuse. ‘You see what I’m saying here?’
‘Um . . .’ Nettie hesitated, keeping the biscuit to her mouth, as though for protection rather than ingestion.
‘I can’t carry dead weight. Everyone has to earn their place on the team.’ He pointed towards the window. ‘I’ve got people queuing up to sit in that chair you’re sitting in right now. Young graduates, hungry for the exposure, the experience . . .’
Nettie wasn’t sure that was true. She opened the post every morning. He got five CVs a week at most.
‘I know your personal circumstances have been difficult, Nettie, but I think you need to take some time to think, really think, about whether or not this is the industry for you.’ He slammed his fist into his palm. ‘It takes drive, commitment, hunger, passion. You used to be so . . . so . . . hungry, Nettie.’
To her surprise, no one cut in that she still was. Nettie eyed the girls on the team. There wasn’t much evidence of drive or passion in any of them, and the only hunger in the room had been just about sated thanks to the plate of biscuits. Daisy was checking her hair for split ends. Caro had the iPad secretively tipped towards her, which meant she was playing solitaire. Only Jules was paying full attention, resentment burning her eyes black.
‘What happened to you? Where did you go?’
Nettie wanted to slap him. He knew exactly what had happened.
‘From what I was told by my predecessor, you used to be first in, last out every day. You knew if we were low on tea or needed to order more print cartridges. You answered every phone on the first ring. But now?’ He frowned. ‘Now . . . ? I know things have been difficult for you, but I want you to take a long, hard look, Nettie, at where you’re going with your career. Is this still right for you? Because if so, we need to start getting some results, and fast. The bunny worked. Don’t dismiss it out of hand. You should be thinking how to make it work for you again. Make it your USP.’
‘What, Giant Flying Bunny?’ Jules grinned, leaning forward and squeezing Nettie consolingly on the shoulder.
Mike shrugged. ‘Why not? Think big. You could become White Tiger’s mascot.’
Caro frowned, momentarily ceasing chewing her gum. ‘Well, if they were to have a mascot, wouldn’t that be a . . . white tiger, then, Mike?’
Mike straightened up irritably. ‘You know what I mean.’ He clapped his hands together, looking round at the lethargic, now completely demotivated team. ‘Right, well, on the plus side, the Ice Crush event brought in more than two thousand pounds in total. I don’t have the exact figure here, but let’s take heart from that.’ He punched the air feebly and everyone sighed collectively as he tried to rally them, as though his comments to Nettie had been a mere pep talk and not thinly veiled threats about losing her job.
‘Next week the Christmas countdown begins in earnest, so I want you all in on Monday and working at high revs. You don’t need me to tell you it’s our biggest week next week, so rest, take it easy and come in refreshed and good to go. Have a good weekend, everybody.’
Mike had barely got the words out before the women were scraping back their chairs and showing more energy than they had at any other point in the day. Caro already had her phone to her ear, finalizing the arrangements for her evening plans. Nettie watched as Jules grabbed the last two biscuits and slipped them into her pockets ‘for later’. Everything was always ‘for later’ with Jules – the crumbs on her shirt, the cake in her bag, the cheeky chappy standing by the bar.
‘Ignore him. Tosser,’ Jules said under her breath to Nettie as they walked back into the office.
Nettie hugged her papers closer to her chest. ‘He’s right, though. I’m terrible at this job.’
‘No, you’re not. He’s just a bad leader. He couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery and he expects you to coin it in for the charities?’
‘Well, you managed it.’
‘Only because I was going for his job and trying to impress the bosses,’ Jules groaned.
‘You should have got it. It’s a travesty that they gave it to him. We all know he only got it because his wife’s father knows the Middletons and they’re hoping to wheedle an introduction.’
It wasn’t just Jules who’d been disappointed by the decision. With no obvious career progression at the agency, Nettie had been mentally bracing herself for the news that, any day now, Jules would be leaving. She knew headhunters contacted her on a regular basis but her friend always stopped them in their tracks and Nettie suspected the only reason she was still working there (apart from tormenting Mike whose inept people skills meant he was clearly vastly out of his depth in the job) was to keep an eye on her.
It was a suspicion that she couldn’t articulate, not least because Jules would deny it and Nettie didn’t want to face the guilt, because she didn’t care about the job like Jules did. Sure, she liked the team, the commute was fine and the hours were pretty regular, but this wasn’t where she had thought her career would end up – shaking buckets at sporting events, begging for spare change in the name of big business charity. Not to mention wearing grotesque fancy dress costumes for a living.
No, in her previous life, she had wanted to be in advertising, giving people added narratives in their everyday lives and sprinkling happiness over the prospect of purchasing car insurance or washing powder. She would come to the rescue of ailing giants like Tesco and RBS, and single-handedly rewrite the public’s perception of them before setting up her own company. She’d graft for a few years and then sell at a great profit to Ogilvy & Mather. This was her plan; this had always been her plan, ever since she’d fallen hard for the Diet Coke guy in the Noughties and mended her heart after her first proper breakup. Only, the dream job in advertising hadn’t materialized in time – too many graduates, not enough jobs – and she had settled on this one as a short-term stopgap, justifying it as a lateral move into marketing, which everyone knew was inextricably linked with advertising. One and the same really.
But then she hadn’t ever anticipated the schism that would one day rip through her life like a tear in a sheet of paper, and ever since then, new rules had had to apply: six months had turned into almost six years, life twisting away from her at all the pertinent moments so that this was all she could cope with, anyway – something low-level, doing just enough to get by. Jules’s arrival on the team nearly five years ago had undoubtedly helped make this office and those meetings bearable – the two of them had connected immediately, Jules buying her first flat just around the corner from Nettie, and they worked and played together as a team – but was Mike right? Was it time to move on? Were she and Jules actually holding each other back, clinging to each other like bindweed, their grip too strong for the other to grow?
Jules was quiet for a moment. ‘Yeah well, bygones and all that. No point in dwelling on it. Far more importantly, what are you up to tonight?’
‘I was supposed to be seeing Em, but she’s doing another double shift,’ she groaned. Emma was Nettie’s best friend from university, a Titian-haired, porcelain-skinned willow wand with a brilliant brain, luck on her side and men at her feet, and who was on the fast-track to becoming a consultant obstetrician. Subsequently, she cancelled their plans a lot.
‘Well, I want to check out that new vodka bar on Prince Albert Road. Come with.’ Jules dropped her iPad, jotter and pens on their shared desk. Jules’s side of the desk looked like it had been raided by the police, with skewed sheets of paper scattered everywhere, coffee rings on the only visible bits of grey veneered desktop, the paperclips linked together in an industrial daisy chain – testament to the amount of staring out of the window she did – and sitting in the corner, a bug-eyed lemur toy she’d been given by her ex and couldn’t quite part with yet.
Nettie’s side, by contrast, was neat and tidy, with everything in its place and a motivational placard that read, ‘Your breakthrough is just beyond your breakdown’, which never failed to amuse Jules, who joked that the lot of them were fast heading towards one – now that Mike was running the show.
‘I really shouldn’t. I need an early night,’ she said, filing her paperwork into her top right desk drawer. She didn’t need to look up to know the expression that would be on Jules’s face at her words. ‘And before you say it, Em and I had promised to have a quiet one – she’s strung out, and I’m all bruised from the other day. She says I need a hot soak to bring it out properly. Bath salts. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Pah! What does she know? A night on the tiles is what you need. It would help you unwind properly. You’ve got to relax, Nets. Have some fun and go nuts. It’s much better for you. Blow off the cobwebs.’
Nettie arched an eyebrow but didn’t reply. Ever since Jules and her Big Passion ex had broken up, Jules’s answer to everything was a Big Night – promotion, engagement, winning a tenner on the lottery . . .
‘Would it hurt you to come for one drink? It’s on the way home anyway.’
‘But it’s never just one with you – that’s the problem.’
Jules slapped her hand over her ample chest. ‘I promise, just one. On my life.’
Everything hurt. That was all she knew.
Hitting ice walls at sixty miles per hour had been bad. But this was worse. So much worse. So, so much worse.
Her head was falling off, for one thing. Well, that had to be what it was. It was the only possible explanation for the throbbing above her neck.
And she must have been punched in the stomach for it to feel quite so battered.
And who knew her tongue had a pulse?
Downstairs, she could hear the sounds of Radio Four already blaring in the kitchen. That meant her father was up; it also meant pigs everywhere were running for their lives as the fat hit the pan. Should she go back to sleep? If she could just doze till, say, a week Tuesday, she’d get through the worst of this.
But John Humphrys wouldn’t be denied, his voice carrying through the gaps in the floorboards like water running through the pipes, and she stared at the wall for what seemed like an epoch, but according to her clock was only eleven minutes, before attempting verticality.
She had just managed it – her hands actually holding her head, like it had come loose – when she heard another voice vibrating through the floorboards of the draughty house and knew Saturday was well and truly underway. She sighed.
A few minutes later she was being propped up by the kitchen doorway. She stared at the familiar scene. Both her father and Dan were standing in the middle of the kitchen, working on her father’s bike, which was upside down in the middle of the room, the front wheel spinning.
‘Ah! It awakens!’ her father boomed – or so it seemed to her, anyway.
‘Dad, please?’ Nettie winced, simultaneously holding her hands up as though trying to push back the sound waves while marvelling at her own voice: seemingly it had grown hairs overnight.
‘Sorry, love,’ he chuckled, his eyes twinkling at the sight of her, bedraggled and broken. His Saturday mornings were never like this. He didn’t drink, never sat still; the man radiated busy-busy-busyness, always doing something, and everything about him suggested bonhomie: the bosky beard, sparkling hazel eyes, the rounded tummy that paid testament to his great love of French cooking and none whatsoever to his second great love, cycling.
Dan turned round to face her, just as bad as her father, a laugh already on his lips. ‘Oh, it is you. I thought Barry White had come back from the dead.’
He laughed freely at his own joke. Nettie had always thought it would be a lot easier to hate him if he didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Damon Albarn – both of them tall, cheeky-chappy types with round blue eyes and mousy hair, scruffy (perpetually wearing jeans, Pumas and hoodies), heads always hung low, usually from avoiding ex-girlfriends or irate customers. Currently, Dan was without a girlfriend, but she expected that to have changed by Friday night.
‘Not funny,’ she said testily, massaging her temples again as she grudgingly staggered into the kitchen, her white towelling robe tightly belted round her waist, her long dark hair hanging in a tangle down her back. Her foot caught in the handle of her mother’s handbag, kept in its usual place between the wall and the table, and she stumbled, falling awkwardly onto the back of the kitchen chairs.
‘Oh, for Chrissakes!’ she cried, her temper flaring from the fright. ‘That thing is a bloody liability there! Why can’t we move it?’
‘Love,’ her dad said sympathetically, pushing the bag against the wall and tucking in the handles, ‘you know your mother likes it there. Look, just sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea. You know she always says there’s nothing a good cup of tea can’t remedy,’ he said, pulling out the orange Arne chair – each one round the unpainted table was a different colour of the rainbow – and gently pushing her into it. She gave him a sullen look, which he either ignored or, more likely, genuinely didn’t notice. ‘So, out with Jules again, were you?’
‘I hate her,’ Nettie muttered, just as Scout, Dan’s beloved Norfolk Jack Russell, trotted over to her for a cuddle. She looked down at him sadly, not sure she could bend that far right now.
‘And yet every week . . .’ Dan went back to spinning the wheel again, pressing the brakes on the handlebars and testing the ceramic discs, her father stopping to tweak something on his way back from switching the kettle on. Nettie watched with slack-jawed apathy as the two men began consulting each other again, heads together, the tea forgotten.
It had once been her Dan would come to see. They had first met when he’d been thirteen and she was eleven; she’d been coming out of the house as he walked up the path on his newspaper round, delivering their daily copy of the Guardian. He was two years above her at school, but it was the first time they’d spoken, and the following week she saw him from the upstairs window lingering in the corner of the square until their front door opened, whereupon he’d leaped to his feet and raced over, falling into a casual stroll just as he got to their path – and promptly ran into her mother.
After that, Nettie had made a point of opening the door at the same time every Saturday, and their chats on the doorstep were soon held over mugs of hot chocolate in the kitchen as her mother fretted over his cold hands in the wintry temperatures and deplored that his own mother had never thought to give him some gloves. So she had knitted him some for Christmas, which Nettie had found mortifying; but shortly after, when Dan had been fired from the paper round (on account of his persistent lateness for all the deliveries after number 91 Chalcot Square), he would still be found in their kitchen at the same time every Saturday. Her mother was convinced he felt more at home in their house than in his own, and as Nettie had advanced into the long, bleary sleeps of teenagedom – sometimes not waking before lunch – her father had spent more and more time with him, so that Nettie was now quite convinced he considered Dan a surrogate son, irrespective of the fact that the boy already had four stepfathers and counting.
Nettie slumped face first on the table as the two of them continued to spin and test and frown and tweak, used to being ignored on a Saturday morning. The kettle had boiled, but no one else appeared to have noticed. She rose, gingerly, and made the tea herself.
‘Oh, sorry, love!’ her father said distractedly, realizing his oversight as she noisily plonked herself back down at the table and reached for the half-closed laptop at the other end. ‘So . . . I take it you girls had fun last night, then?’
‘Yep,’ Nettie mumbled, wishing he’d stop pretending to be interested in her night out. He was too absorbed in his own special projects – cycling round Regent’s Park every day, gardening at the community orchard in St George’s Terrace, gathering a ‘Town Team’ to petition for a farmers’ market, model building – to pay too much attention to hers.
In truth, she remembered precious little about last night anyway. What was the point in having such a great time that you wiped all memory of it from your consciousness and had only pain as a memento in the morning?
She retrieved the laptop, which was, as ever, completely hidden beneath her father’s papers on the table – a children’s author and illustrator who had enjoyed some early success in the 1980s, he was currently working on a modern-day reimagining of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and there were at least forty drafts of the Piper scattered across the tabletop, some of them scrunched from when he’d thrown them against the wall in frustration. His most recent publisher had politely declined to renew his contract when it had expired a year last spring and he was writing this on spec, which was why – he kept saying – ‘It had to be perfect.’ Nettie privately suspected it was taking so long to complete because he spent most of his working days staring, lost, at the walls. The mortgage on the house had been paid off long ago, but she knew he was troubled by his diminishing royalty cheques, and the peppercorn rent she gave him, which he wouldn’t hear of increasing, didn’t cover their outgoings.
She tapped the keyboard with one lethargic finger and opened up her emails, sipping her tea and vowing some sort of revenge on her friend who thought that toffee vodka on a Friday night after a bad day at work was a good idea.
‘So where did you go?’ her father asked.
She didn’t want to think about it; a wince skittered across her features at the very thought. ‘Just some new vodka place opened on Prince Albert Road,’ she grumbled, closing down the line of conversation.
She frowned as the ‘loading’ icon circled continuously on her screen and drank some more tea. She looked out of the window towards the grey sky. It was the colour of an old bra, bedraggled and overused.
She looked back at the screen. Come on. Come on. Why was it taking so long?
She slid out her arm along the table, her head resting heavily on her hand. ‘Dad, is the Wi-Fi down?’
‘Don’t think so, pet. I was on an hour ago and it was working then. Why?’
‘It won’t load. The little blue circle thingy’s just going round and round.’
‘Sounds like there’s a big file coming through,’ her father said helpfully. ‘Just give it a minute.’
‘I’ve already given it three.’
Dan chuckled. ‘Nothing if not patient, you.’
She pitched a glare in his direction.
‘Are you expecting any photographs? They usually jam the feed,’ her father offered again, trying to temper her black mood.
‘Oh no. Don’t say you’ve sent yourself a load of selfies again?’ Dan teased, and she groaned, hiding her face in her dressing gown. Would she ever live that down?
Dan, recognizing that she had no reserves this morning and knowing she would be soon descending into an Official Grump, got up from his position on the floor. ‘Oh, come on, then, let me have a look at it.’
‘Oh. It’s working!’ she said brightly just as Dan was halfway across the floor to her, and shooting him a sarcastic grin before taking a noisy slurp of her tea. It was his turn to groan as he turned back to the bike again, used to her taking out her hangovers on him.
The screen – after its unusual dormancy – had sprung into life, the emails ticking down through the inbox like pages being flicked in a book. They loaded more quickly than her eyes could scan, but there was one word she did pick up on, one that was repeated over and over again so that it read almost fluidly off the rapidly uploading screen: Twitter.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ she whispered as the screen continued to scroll down. ‘You have a new follower . . .’ was repeated over and over and over and over.
She stared open-mouthed. This had to be some sort of technical glitch, or a computer malfunction. She checked the keyboard for a sticky key, but everything appeared normal, and after a few more minutes it finally and suddenly stopped.
Hesitantly – wondering if she was, in fact, still drunk – she began tabbing down individually with the arrow keys, but after several pages, she switched to the ‘pg dn’ button – and still they came, supposedly all these new followers and not a single name she recognized.
‘What is it?’ Dan asked, intrigued by her unusual silence.
But Nettie didn’t reply. She didn’t hear. She still couldn’t process what her eyes were showing her. This couldn’t be right. She was drunk. Hallucinating. She had to be.
She leaned in closer to the screen.
‘Nets?’
Still nothing.
‘I just don’t . . . I don’t believe this,’ Nettie murmured, frowning at the unintelligible cluster of letters and numbers of a shortcut link some – many, in fact – were re-tweeting.
The doorbell rang and her father straightened up. ‘Ah! Now, that should be my new carbon wheel,’ he said, pleased, as he trotted down the hall to the front door.
Dan sauntered back over to Nettie, curiosity getting the better of him and even surmounting the mystery of why the new brakes didn’t work. ‘Fine, then the mountain shall come to— Holy crap!’ He leaned a hand on her shoulder.
‘I know!’
They were quiet for a long while, both trying to make sense of it. ‘Well, how many are there?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t counted yet. There’s too many.’
‘Duh! Just go into your home page,’ Dan said, tutting again as Nettie’s hung-over fingers failed to synchronize and she dropped her head, already defeated.
Dan reached for the laptop and turned it to face him, his fingers flying easily over the keyboard as he logged in to Twitter. ‘How many followers did you have before?’
There was a pause. ‘Thirty-seven? I think?’
Dan stopped typing. ‘Seriously? I mean, I know I’m pretty much your only mate, but—’
‘Shuddup. It’s not my thing.’
Dan chuckled but didn’t argue back. His eyes were fixed on the screen, his fingers moving swiftly and making little tap-taps. She slid her arm further along the tabletop so that she was lying fully flat and rested her head on top of it. Her eyes closed.
‘It’s just gonna be some weird mix-up,’ she mumbled. ‘You know, like when a bank accidentally wires a million pounds into your account because they got one digit wrong.’
‘Yeah, because that happens all the time,’ Dan replied, his eyes widening as the Twitter page came up. He laughed out loud suddenly. ‘Jesus, Nets! Take a guess how many you got now?’
‘I can’t,’ she protested, her voice still thick and bleary.
‘Twenty-two.’
Nettie’s eyes opened again and she raised her head an inch. ‘You mean I lost some? Oh, come on!’
‘Thousand, you numpty. Twenty-two thousand!’
Nettie sat upright. ‘What?’ Was she hearing things? ‘Did you just say . . . ?’
Dan nodded, his eyes bright.
‘But why?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ he laughed, sitting down on the table, arms folded over his chest. ‘Come on, Nets, out with it. You don’t get twenty-two thousand followers overnight and not know why.’
‘But I don’t!’ she cried, her hands to her mouth. ‘Why are all these strangers following me? What do they want? Oh my God, Dan, what have I done?’
Dan watched her, his smile fading as he saw the truth on her face. ‘You honestly don’t remember?’
She shook her head.
‘Would Jules?’
‘Jules?’ she repeated, a glimmer of fear creeping into her eyes like a stealthy cat.
‘Well, it’s got to be something that happened yesterday, and given the sorry state you’re in, I think we can probably narrow it down to something that happened last night. Let’s face it, where Jules goes trouble usually follows.’
Memories of toffee vodka swam behind her eyes again and she pulled her hands down over her face, only the vaguest impressions of light and dark, and much laughter, flashing through her mind in distorted images, like the world seen through a teardrop.
Oh no. Oh no.
Dan handed her the phone. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’