‘I can’t believe we got in the paper,’ Leo says when I go in through the side door that night. ‘Mum’s bought six copies, she’s getting at least four of them framed as Christmas gifts.’
‘I took a copy home for my dad and he wants your autograph. I think he was relieved to find out that when I go out in the nights to paint pictures on shop windows that I am actually painting pictures on shop windows. God knows what he thought it was a cover for.’
He laughs. ‘I was stalking the newspaper website earlier and the article has been shared a few hundred times. And our post of last night’s picture that I showed you this morning has got over a thousand likes now.’ His smile is so wide that it makes the room seem lighter than it is.
‘Thanks for the hot chocolates you dropped off at the bank earlier,’ I say. ‘Sorry I managed to miss you again. I particularly liked the “Christmas Banksy of Oakbarrow” you’d written on my cup.’
He grins. ‘Well, I was hoping to hand it to you in person, but you were on a break again. At least I know why you’re okay with late nights now – it’s clearly because you do absolutely no work during the day.’
‘I do! You just have terrible timing. You must wait for me to disappear and then come in. I’m starting to think you’re actively trying to avoid me.’ Deflection. That’ll throw him off the scent.
He’s grinning as he answers. ‘Actually, I was really hoping to catch you just so I could squeal about the article some more, but I couldn’t stay because we were so busy. Mum had a queue to the door by the time I got back.’
‘That’s fantastic. I thought it looked busier outside today.’
‘Yeah. It’s brilliant that the newsagent has reopened, and the light was on in the florist’s shop today and someone was inside cleaning. I reckon they’re thinking about coming back too. It’s been there since 1902, it can’t have been an easy decision to close up.’
‘This is exactly what we need. More shops so people have got a reason to come here. If enough shops reopened and customers came with them, we could get enough people together to fight the hike in business rates. The council aren’t going to listen if there are only four businesses on the street, but if there are twenty-four who are making a profit and bringing people to the area then they can’t ignore us.’
‘In that case, we’d better go and do another picture for our adoring fans.’ He winks at me. ‘You fill the bucket, I’ll make the tea.’
Leo disappears upstairs and I run hot water into my empty bucket in the kitchen sink to wash off last night’s picture of Santa getting a spray tan on the tanning shop, complete with orange skin and tiny white boxer shorts. I wander over to the kitchen table where the newspaper is open on the page of our article and read through it again, even though I’ve already read it approximately forty times today. People are raving about my artwork, something I never thought would ever happen, and it’s all because of Leo and his belief in me. It all feels a bit unreal, and for the first time, like we’re actually making a difference here. We really have a chance of making Oakbarrow High Street better.
When Leo comes back, he’s got the usual two teas in biodegradable takeaway cups which he somehow manages to carry in one hand. I go to lift the bucket out of the sink but his fingers close around the handle, the side of his hand pressing against mine, and I feel that familiar spark, the one that makes me want to keep touching him, no matter how miniscule the touch is.
‘I’ll carry this. You lock up.’ He tosses me his keys and I catch the huge, jangly bundle. ‘It’s the one with the blue cap.’
‘Do you have enough?’ I shake the heavy mangle of metal, trying to locate one blue-capped key in the muddle of keys. ‘You own one coffee shop. Starbucks’ bosses wouldn’t have this many keys if they had one for all their branches.’
‘They were Dad’s. He always had them on him. I don’t know what they’re all for, I just always remember him with this clink-clank of keys in his pocket so I like to keep them on me.’ I feel his eyes on me as he speaks. ‘Sorry, I know it’s stupid, it’s just something of his that I like to feel in my pocket. Kind of a reminder that I’m doing the right thing.’
‘It’s not stupid.’ I part the keys in my hand, trying to work out which shade of blue, in the many shades of blue key caps, painted tops, and keyrings, actually locks the coffee shop side door.
‘What’s Santa’s secret entrance?’ I ask as my fingers fall on a smooth metal key with a handwritten tag attached and a red and green enamel ‘H’ dangling from it.
‘Dunno.’ He shrugs. ‘Something to do with Hawthorne’s?’
‘Your dad had a key to Hawthorne’s?’
‘Makes sense. Like I said, his mate used to let him change into his Santa gear and leave his stuff here, then he’d go out through this alley and into Hawthorne’s basement door round the back there.’ He points to the end of the alleyway past the bins. ‘They always called it Santa’s secret entrance. I assume it’s the key to that.’
‘Do you think it still works?’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Are you saying you want to give it a try?’
I look up at the side of the building towering above us. It’s always been a pinnacle of this street. Two storeys taller than any other building and with roof tiles patterned to spell out ‘H Toys’ at the back, meaning you could always see it from the motorway whenever you drove towards Oakbarrow. When I was little, Mum and Dad would always tell me to look out for Hawthorne’s so we’d know we were almost home. It was such an impressive building back then and people used to travel for miles to visit it, and even now, after a decade of disrepair, it’s still instantly recognizable.
‘You haven’t answered but I feel we might need a quick revision on what constitutes breaking and entering,’ Leo says.
‘But we’ve got a key,’ I say. ‘Do you think they’d still have a burglar alarm?’
‘Well, the security company they used went out of business years ago, the original owner is dead, and the shop’s been abandoned for at least a decade, so I doubt it.’ He looks at me with one eyebrow quirked up and one lowered. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Wouldn’t you love to see what it looks like now?’ I say excitedly. ‘You’re always talking about how much you loved Hawthorne’s. It’s like the wreck of the Titanic on the ocean floor but with hopefully less barnacles. I can’t believe you’ve had a key all this time and you’ve never broken in!’
‘Some of us like to obey the law. Besides, I didn’t know I had a key. I’ve never paid much attention to what’s on there other than the ones I use.’ He looks between my face and the keyring in my hands. ‘And now you’ve said it, I’ve suddenly never wanted anything more in my life.’ His face breaks into a huge grin. ‘Quick, dump everything in the kitchen and I’ll grab a torch.’
* * *
‘And I thought you were such a good, law-abiding girl, George,’ Leo says as he brushes cobwebs away from Hawthorne’s basement door and inserts the key into the rusty lock. ‘You’re a bad influence on me. My mum’ll never make you mince pies again if we get arrested for this.’
‘Almost persuasive enough to turn back but not quite.’
He glances up and smiles and for one weird moment, his eyes linger on my lips and I think he’s going to kiss me, but he quickly looks back down at what he’s doing. I must’ve been imagining it. Those overexcited neck kisses this morning did something to me and now I’m just fantasizing about Leo’s mouth at odd times. That must be it.
The door creaks in the silence of the night as he pushes it open inch by inch, like he expects an alarm to start shrieking and laser beams shining across the room. All that happens is we obviously disturb a moth’s nest because a series of irate moths come flapping out into the night.
‘Not quite the large, angry guard dog you were expecting?’
‘Ha ha,’ he mutters, pushing the door open fully and peering in.
‘Go on.’ I give him a gentle shove. ‘Stop being frightened of living.’
‘What?’ He turns to face me and my cheeks heat up instantly. It’s too close to what we said on the phone and I should’ve realized it before the words were out of my mouth.
‘I mean, stop being frightened of anything living, they’re just moths,’ I amend, quite pleased with my quick thinking. It’s a shame it’s not quick enough to make me shut up before I get into these messes in the first place.
He narrows his eyes at me and I’m just about to create a diversion when he speaks. ‘Says the girl whose biggest concern about me sleeping on the floor is that spiders could come and get me in the middle of the night.’
‘It’s not my main concern.’
He makes a noncommittal noise as he leans past me to shut the door behind us, leaving us in complete darkness on a small landing area with far too many cobwebs. He flips the torch on and shines it around to get our bearings. We’re in a stairwell at the back of the shop, with steps below us heading down to the basement area, and steps above leading up to what I guess is the shop floor.
Leo shines the torch upwards, revealing cobweb bunting strewn between every stair rail and crisscrossing to the wall, and I’m not sure if the cobwebs have collected dust or if we’ve found several really worrying new species of spider.
‘Sorry, I’ve only got one torch.’ Leo offers me his arm and I slip my hand through it automatically. ‘Stay close so you don’t trip over anything.’
I could easily use the torch on my phone, but the heat from his body and the softness of his jumper under my fingertips make me realize that it’ll be more enjoyable if I ‘forget’ my phone light.
‘You’ve been here before,’ I say, holding his arm close as he navigates expertly up the stairs.
‘Not since my dad was working here. Didn’t think I’d ever be here again either. Thanks, law-breaking friend.’
‘Oh, come on. It’s not exactly the start of an illegal drug smuggling and money laundering ring, is it? It’s testing a key we found to see if it works. I’m not about to open my jacket and offer you six kilos of cocaine and a few bottles of poison.’
The smell in the stairwell is cloying with musty dampness and dust that hasn’t been disturbed for years, and we leave footprints behind us in whatever the muck on the steps is. The stairs keep going, and I realize this is a secret stairwell hidden away from customers’ eyes. It was probably a fire escape once, but stairs zigzag above our heads, joining each floor of the shop to a multitude of storage rooms. No wonder I used to watch staff disappearing out the back to collect orders and think they’d gone to Narnia.
The first sets of wooden and glass double doors that we come to are instantly recognizable as the ones that stretched out behind the checkouts on the first floor. Leo puts his hand on one and pushes, a cloud of dust flying around us as the door creaks, the hinges groaning after so many years of rusty stillness. He steps through and holds it open for me.
‘Wow,’ he says under his breath, shining the torch around.
We’ve come out behind the checkout area, one long counter built from brightly-painted giant Tetris blocks with four separate tills stood along it, frozen in time. I can’t imagine anywhere in Oakbarrow needing four tills running now, and it’s hard to believe that anywhere ever did, and yet I can remember how long the queues here would get, especially at this time of year.
Leo uses his hand to cover the torch beam as we venture further into the shop because we’re near the ground floor window and could be seen if anyone happened to walk past.
‘It’s like a time capsule spanning seven decades,’ I say, as I look around at the shelves of forgotten toys. The only thing that hasn’t forgotten them is the spiders, who are clearly quite happy in their undisturbed home. ‘Also, if they ever make a sequel to Arachnophobia, I think we’ve found the set.’
Leo laughs as he picks up one of the soft toys lining the floor, a floppy-eared stuffed rabbit the size of a 5-year-old, and runs his hand over the handlebar of a child’s bike, one of many lined up in a rack, still waiting for an owner. ‘Dad bought me my first bike here.’
I step a bit closer to him because there’s a wobble in his voice and I have a feeling this shop means more to him than he’s letting on. ‘Sorry, dark,’ I mumble when my shoulder bumps into his back, not because it’s dark, but because I get the feeling he needs a bit of human comfort.
He reaches down and takes my hand, locking his fingers between mine and squeezing.
I feel the sense of melancholy too as I look around. Toy shops are meant to be happy, enchanting places, but now, this magical place gives the same dismal feeling inside as you get from standing outside and peering in the window, taking in the lone cobweb-covered teddy sitting in the once-great display among a load of dead flies. This shop is the embodiment of what has happened to every other shop in Oakbarrow. The epitome of what was once loved and popular, something that drew crowds to the area, now left abandoned in time, exactly as it was on the day it shut down, ten years ago.
Near the entrance is a rack of ‘try me’ vehicles for children to ride around the shiny tiled floor on – scooters for older kids and ride-along ladybirds and ducks for littler ones, their only riders currently of the eight-legged variety. There’s a hexagon-shaped cardboard arena for duels between remote controlled cars, the two battlers, now with broken plastic and missing wheels, lying in pools of battery acid leaked from their remotes. There are rows and rows of toys that I remember from my childhood – Tamagotchis, Furbies, action figures of Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spirograph boxes, Sylvanian Families, and more Barbie dolls than you can shake a stick at.
‘Wow, is that an original Game Boy?’ Leo picks up a box and blows dust from it. ‘That was one of the best presents I ever got back in the Nineties.’
‘Me too.’ I peer over his shoulder at the retro box. ‘The year Mum and Dad got that for me, I accidentally saw it in a cupboard before Christmas and had to pretend I didn’t know what I was getting on Christmas morning.’
‘Accidentally, huh?’
‘Yes!’ I say indignantly.
He grins. ‘Oh good, because I always used to go looking. I knew all the hiding places.’
‘Your dad was Santa, Leo! That’s against the rules for everyone but especially for you.’
‘You know what I’m like when it comes to behaving. You honestly think I was a perfect model child who brought good Christmas mojo on myself?’ He waggles his eyebrows. ‘Obviously that only started when I was 30. I’m all about good Christmas mojo now.’
We both dissolve into giggles and we’re still laughing as we take in more shelves stacked with jigsaws, dolls from every generation dating back to the post-war years, train sets and toy car racing tracks, Scalextric sets, chemistry kits, skipping ropes and frisbees, and there are stands of choose-your-own marbles and rainbow spinning windmills, and the floor is packed with hula hoops leaning against the walls, kites, and gigantic dolls’ houses.
Leo is still holding my hand as we go up the open-tread staircase to the second floor, even less modern than downstairs. Up here are the most popular toys of years gone by, from Rubik’s Cubes, slinkys, and Space Hoppers to Hornby trains, Matchbox cars, Care Bears, and My Little Ponies.
The main part of the second floor is where Santa’s grotto stood. I give Leo’s hand a squeeze as we stand and look at the empty space in silence, and he lifts our joined hands and presses them against his chest, curling his fingers tight around mine.
I remember so clearly visiting Santa in his red-painted wooden shed with sheets of cotton-wool snow nailed to the roof. Beside it there was a lifesize empty sleigh pulled by plastic reindeer and a snowy path leading up to the door, lined by giant candy canes and populated by staff dressed as elves who used to manage the queues and take your picture when you sat on Santa’s lap.
‘Did you spend much time here as a kid?’ I ask, my voice sounding like a shout in the silence of the shop.
‘Yeah, loads when my dad was working as Santa.’ His voice sounds hoarse from the dust and decay in the air. ‘Mr Hawthorne, the man who owned it originally was an absolute legend. He was the heart and soul of the place. He opened in 1950 and worked here until he was 93. He’s what you and I remember from when we were young. He was the kind of guy who went above and beyond for his customers. He’d often see children crying because they wanted something so badly but their parents couldn’t afford it, and he’d slip a little note to the mum or dad saying to come back on Christmas Eve, and there it would be, waiting for them, free of charge just because he wanted to make children happy.’
‘He sounds wonderful.’
‘He was. He truly loved his job and did it solely because he loved it so much. It’s probably a good thing that he died when he did because seeing it like this would’ve killed him. In those days, it seemed like it would be here forever.’
‘So what happened? Someone else took over?’
‘A son, I think. Someone who didn’t understand that what kept it going for so many years was the personal touch and the absolute love that Hawthorne poured into it. It became all about stacking the shelves with cheap toys for expensive prices, and when the boom of the internet started, they didn’t have a hope in hell of competing. They were out of business within a couple of years.’
‘You know a lot about this place.’
‘This is my childhood,’ he says. ‘This and the café that was next door. My sister and I used to hang out here after school and in the holidays when Mum got fed up of us under her feet and sent us to see Dad at work for a few hours. Mr Hawthorne gave us free run of the place. He let us play with anything we wanted. He never worried about us damaging anything, he just wanted us to enjoy ourselves,’ he continues as we wander further around the floor. ‘You only have to look at it now to see how much anyone cared after Mr Hawthorne died. No one’s even bothered to clear it out or try selling it for retail value. Some of these things are probably valuable to collectors by now but they’re just left here to rot.’ He seems genuinely frustrated by it.
‘This place was really important to you, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, in a weird way. My sister’s older than me so she grew out of toys and wouldn’t be seen dead here while I was still playing with Action Man and building every Lego kit I could get my hands on. I felt special here. Mr Hawthorne always asked my opinions on new things he was thinking of stocking. I think when you’re a kid, no one really listens to your opinion because you’re just a kid, and when someone does make you feel valued, it really sticks with you.’
‘I think this place has probably stuck with a lot of people round here. It was a real treat when we got to come in here.’
‘Exactly. That’s the saddest thing. I genuinely think this place could’ve lived on. It might not have been able to compete with the internet giants, but I thought there would always be a place for it in Oakbarrow. You see people going retro more and more nowadays. I overhear a lot of talk in the coffee shop because people come here thinking it will still be open and stop in for a cuppa when they discover they’ve come all this way for nothing. Grandparents bring their screen-raised grandkids to get something they enjoyed when they were little. Parents desperate to break a kid of their iPad addiction. Anyone sick of toy cars that snap in half after three minutes.’
‘I see it a lot too,’ I say without thinking. ‘People are always coming in looking for old toys of their generation. People’s faces light up when they see something that reminds them of their childhood.’
His eyebrows knit together as his forehead furrows. ‘In the bank?’
Bollocks. ‘Where they come to get their money out so they can go to the places that sell these retro toys. Obviously.’
He shakes his head. ‘Anyone would think debit cards had never been invented.’
‘Oh, well, you know older people are a bit scared of technology, aren’t they?’ I say, sending up a silent apology for stereotyping an entire generation.
He knows I’m lying. Even in the darkness of the shop, I can almost hear the cogs turning in his mind, trying to work out how someone who works in a bank would see people’s faces light up at the sight of retro toys.
‘What was that?’ I grab his arm like something has scared me. Now is the time to create a diversion. The less he thinks about me and my place of work, the better.
He shines the torch upwards. ‘Probably just bats in the roof. Bat poo was definitely one of the many things we’ve waded through tonight.’
‘How comforting,’ I mutter.
‘Don’t worry, scaredy cat, I’ll protect you.’ The diversion works as he seems to forget all about my job. He slings an arm around my shoulder and squeezes me into his side and I snuggle as close as I can without it getting weird as we take the next set of stairs up to the third floor and come face to face with a wall full of board games. Classic red and white Monopoly boxes, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Operation, Guess Who, Twister, Connect Four, Hungry Hippos, Cluedo, Snakes and Ladders, Buckaroo, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and those frustrating Magic Eye pictures that I could never see no matter how hard I tried.
Leo pulls out a Mouse Trap box and wipes dust off it. ‘Wow. This was my favourite game when I was little. My friend had it and I never did, and every time I went over to his house, I wanted to play it, but he’d be bored because he’d played it loads.’
‘Shall we have a game?’
He looks at me like a red frog has just appeared on my head.
‘You know we’re both in our thirties, right?’
‘Oh, come on. We’re in an abandoned toy shop. It would be wrong if we didn’t play with something. Besides, you’re never too old for a game of Mouse Trap.’
‘The box says “six and up”.’
‘There you go then, we qualify.’ I take his arm and pull him across to a soft-carpeted reading area stuffed with bean bags and little chairs, surrounded by shelves of books. I remember many a happy hour reading here, it was the perfect place for parents to leave their kids with the staff while they popped downstairs to buy surprise Christmas presents. The plush deep-red carpet is faded and threadbare now, worn away by customers and, more recently, probably something fun like cockroaches, and the array of books that used to delight are falling from the shelves, damp and stuck together.
Leo brushes off a space on the carpet big enough for both of us and sits on his knees, and I sit down next to him as we open the box and peer at the plastic pieces inside.
‘Wow. I remember this like it was yesterday.’ He reaches in and pulls out the red basket trap and turns it over in his hand, and a smile immediately breaks across his face. ‘You always have such great ideas, George.’
He spreads the board in front of us and gleefully tips the plastic bits out. Neither of us can remember the rules or be bothered to read through the instruction leaflet, and even though you’re meant to build the game up as you play, we just set the trap up and start.
We’re basically just throwing the dice and moving the number of spaces, chasing each other around the board, shouting ‘cheese!’ a lot but never remembering to take any of cheese wedges you’re supposed to collect, and setting the trap off for the sake of it even though none of our mice are in the cheese wheel space.
The trap was always the best bit anyway. The swinging foot that misses the bucket at least twice and finally connects, sending the little metal ball down the blue path and through the guttering to the pole that drops the other ball into the red bathtub, catapults the green diver upside down into the bowl, and finally brings down the trap. I remember the jerky movement of that basket coming down as one of the most satisfying moments a child ever experiences. As an adult, it’s a bit bonkers, but I was never happier than the last day of each term at primary school when everyone would get to bring a board game in and Mouse Trap was always the firm favourite of everyone in the classroom, including the teacher.
Leo’s laughing so much he’s breathless, and there are tears of joy running down his face. I’m leaning against him, and we’ve regressed to throwing plastic mice and cardboard cheese at each other, and giggling so much that we’re holding each other upright to save overbalancing and rolling around on this ancient carpet.
‘Why didn’t we realize how mad this game is when we were young?’ he says in my ear. ‘You basically spend the whole time resetting the trap. My mum always said it was a waste of time and now I’m the same age, I understand why.’
We give up on playing it pretty quickly. We’ve still got tonight’s window to do and we’ve only made it up to the third floor of Hawthorne’s four storeys, and we’re not leaving without exploring properly. It’s a responsibility of adulthood to explore every nook and cranny of an abandoned toy shop.
‘Thanks, George,’ he says as we poke all the plastic bits back into the box, set the folded board on top and put it back on the shelf.
‘What for?’
‘Another wonderful night.’ He wipes tears of laughter from his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I’ve spent so much time in this shop but that was the most fun I’ve ever had here.’
I grin at him and he grins back and he looks so happy and buoyant and carefree that it’s definitely been worth a little breaking and entering, and when I glance in one of the distorted funfair mirrors on the wall as we pass, I look as happy as him. Even with the warped glass making my head look all squiggly, my smile matches his, and I realize that I haven’t felt this happy in forever either.
The toys on the fourth floor get even more vintage. It’s stacked with old-fashioned boxes from Muffin the Mule marionettes and what must be the very first of the Easy-Bake ovens to James Bond Aston Martin cars and Troll dolls that date all the way back to the Sixties. We poke our heads into one of the rather unimpressive store rooms, so different from the Narnia-esque land of neverending toys that I’d always pictured. Once, they must’ve been meticulously organized and stacked floor to ceiling, but the shelving has collapsed over the years, and now there’s just higgledy-piggledy mountains of unwanted toys that have stayed where they’ve fallen, buried in dust, their boxes nibbled by mice.
‘Toy shops are meant to be magical places,’ Leo says. ‘They make adults feel like kids again and give kids a chance to enjoy being kids. Seeing it like this is just wrong.’
‘I’d love to rescue this place,’ I say. ‘It’d be a hell of a project, but can you imagine seeing Hawthorne’s open again? It would be incredible.’
‘Me too.’ He suddenly lights up. ‘I’d love that. Wow.’
The idea of how amazing it would be to see Hawthorne’s restored to its former glory floats into my mind. ‘It would be impossible though, right? I mean, we both have jobs, and we have no idea who owns it now, and whoever they are, they clearly don’t care about it very much …’
‘Christmas is the one time of year to believe in impossible things,’ he says, then takes a step back and looks at me in pretend shock. ‘All right, what’s gone wrong here? We’ve switched roles. You’re meant to be the positive one. Either you’ve slipped me some of that potion or you’re rubbing off on me. And whichever it is,’ he takes my hand again, ‘I’m enjoying it and I wouldn’t mind it continuing.’
Oh, me too, Leo. I squeeze his hand with both of mine. ‘I put extra wart of toad into the potion last night.’
He bursts out laughing and his laugh echoes around the shop, making the building seem more alive than it has in many, many years.
* * *
‘Thanks for the push into criminality,’ Leo says as we get back to the little landing we arrived on. ‘It was awesome to see this place again. So much nostalgia.’
‘A real blast from the past.’ I look around, reluctant to end this yet.
‘Look.’ I nudge him with my elbow and point towards a red door down the next set of steps. It’s got a metal label that says ‘storage’ on it, and underneath someone has stuck a white sticker with ‘Christmas’ scrawled across it in faded marker pen.
Leo does a sharp intake of breath. ‘My father’s grotto will be in there.’
I bite my lip and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Do you want to have a look?’
‘No,’ he snaps instantly. Then he swallows and turns away and I give his shoulder a squeeze. I hadn’t realized how difficult coming in here might be for him.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbles under his breath. ‘Yes. More than anything.’
Even after all these years, the first smell that hits me when we open the door is the metallic scent of tinsel. Christmas decorations always have the same scent to them. No matter how long they’ve been in a box in the attic, they always smell the same as they did when you put them away.
We’re below the ground level of the building now and there’s no chance of being seen from the outside so Leo pulls the cord hanging by the door, looking surprised when we hear the generator outside stir and the lightbulb flickers into life, still lighting up the room after all these years.
You could say that Christmas has thrown up in here, but that would be an understatement. It looks like someone’s scooped the remains of a tinsel factory and a fairy light manufacturing plant into a room and thrown a few plastic reindeer in for good measure. If the North Pole existed, it would have less Christmas stuff than this room.
‘Wow,’ I say, not knowing where to start. I have no excuse to stay glued to Leo’s side now we’ve got some light so I reluctantly pick my way across the room, sidestepping boxes of plastic snowman parts, jumping over great arches of lights, and waltzing around seven-foot-tall candy canes.
I stop and stare at a sign leaning against one wall. It’s bigger than I am, and it reads ‘Merry Christmas from Oakbarrow’ in between two bells. I recognize it. ‘Didn’t this used to be up at the end of the high street as you walked out of town, past the church?’
‘Yeah,’ he replies without looking over.
I pull the sign forward and look at the one behind it. This one says ‘Merry Christmas’ with Santa in his sleigh being pulled by two reindeer. ‘And this one used to be up near Woolworths as you get onto the high street.’
I delve further into the pile and pull out a stack of jingle bell shapes made of rope lights. ‘And these are what used to hang from the lampposts. What on earth are they doing here?’
‘Mr Hawthorne was responsible for the street decoration.’ Leo sounds distracted.
‘I thought it was the local council.’
‘It was. They maintained it, but he bought the lights and paid for the running of it and stored them for the rest of the year.’
‘We’re always told that a festive-looking street is good for business. Head Office are always saying that decorating the outside helps business on the inside. Mr Hawthorne must’ve thought the same,’ I say, instantly realizing it was a careless sentence and waiting for the inevitable, ‘In a bank?’ comment that will surely follow.
Leo’s silent.
I’ve got so excited by the Christmas decorations that I remember from when I was little that I’ve temporarily forgotten how hard this must be for him, and I look back to see him trailing his fingers through the dust covering a candy-striped arrow sign reading ‘North Pole’.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask softly.
‘Mm,’ he mumbles, and I get the feeling I could’ve asked him if he’d seen a giraffe waving from Saturn’s rings and his response would’ve been the same.
I make another path through boxes of baubles as I go back over to see what he’s looking at when he drags a dustsheet off a pile of props: a gigantic sleigh turned upside down, an oversized display book for the naughty and nice list, a postbox for letters to Santa, and neatly wrapped giant presents.
‘This was my father’s chair,’ he says, dropping down into a wooden seat he’s just uncovered with a thunk so heavy that it reverberates through the room and reminds me how much weight he’s carrying on his shoulders.
‘You never told me what happened to your father,’ I say, perching carefully on a knee-high resin reindeer next to him.
‘Apart from my mum and sister, I’ve never told anyone what happened to my father.’ His fingers rub over the arm of the bright red throne, cherry-coloured wood with curved arms and carved details painted in what was once white but has now faded to a dull magnolia. I remember the chair with Leo’s father sitting in it. It was glittered back then and always had tinsel wrapped around the legs, with a dark burgundy velvet seat, shiny gold cushions, and sparkly holly leaves along the back.
I cock my head to the side, wondering what he means. ‘What happened to your father?’
‘I knew you were going to ask me that.’
‘So tell me.’ I lean down and try to catch his eyes but he refuses to look at me. ‘It might help to talk about it.’
‘Don’t, Georgia, please.’ His voice is low and shaking and he hasn’t called me Georgia once since he found out who I was named after. ‘I’m hanging on by a thread here and if I talk about it, I’m going to cry …’ His voice cracks and he cuts himself off.
The plastic reindeer doesn’t move easily so I squeeze it with my legs and try to jump it a bit nearer, in probably the most undignified move I’ve ever done in front of a man. Or any human in general. ‘It’s okay to cry, Leo.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he snaps, sounding like he already is.
‘Yes, it is. I know you’re trying to be strong for your mum and sister but you don’t have to do that with me.’ I reach over and squeeze his knee. ‘Talk to me, please. It’s got to be better than bottling everything up inside and pretending you’re okay when you’re not.’
He finally looks up at me, his normally bright eyes red-rimmed and damp. It feels like he’s searching my face for ridicule, like he’s expecting me to make fun of him, and I hold his gaze until he sighs and drops his head, his curls flopping forward in defeat.
‘We were fishing down by the river. You know, the Barrow that runs along the outer edge of town?’ He says it so quietly that I have to lean in to hear him. I remember him saying something about his father dying on the river during the phone call.
‘It was late autumn when the salmon are swimming upstream but we were both terrible fishermen and on the rare occasions we caught anything then neither of us would have the heart to kill it so we’d just put it back in the water and let it carry on with its day. We did it quite often but I think it was more an excuse to spend time together, just the two of us, than through any real love of fishing. Anyway, this one day everything was completely normal; we were sharing our flask of tea and eating the cake Mum always packed for us. We were laughing and joking as usual, and suddenly he went completely white, his face contorted in pain, he clutched his chest and fell out of his chair. He was dead before he hit the ground.’
Tears are rolling down his face and my chest is aching with how much I want to hug him but I also know that if I wrap my arms around him, he’ll break down and stop talking, and above all else, I want him to keep talking. I settle for squeezing his knee a bit harder.
‘I did everything I could. There was no phone signal so I had to leave him and run up the bank to call 999, then run back down. I did CPR, I did all the rescue breaths, everything I could think of, everything the operator was telling me down the phone, the paramedics had to drag me away when they got there, but it was too late.’
So that’s what he meant when he said he couldn’t save him the other day. ‘Do they know what it was?’
‘A massive heart attack. So severe that he was gone in seconds. It was just so quick, you know? One minute he was there, and literally thirty seconds later, he was never coming back.’
‘God, I’m so sorry,’ I say, blinking back tears of my own. ‘I can’t imagine how terrible that was.’
He shakes his head, his curls quivering with the movement, and I want to reach out and brush them back, stop him hiding his face behind his mass of hair.
‘I’ve never told anyone that before,’ he says, his voice sounding wrecked and broken. ‘What is it about you? Why is talking to you so easy? You make me feel like I can say anything and it’s somehow okay because I’m saying it to you.’
‘You can say anything,’ I say gently, at odds with how hard I’m squeezing his knee. He’s going to be lucky if he doesn’t need a replacement kneecap by the end of this. ‘It’s okay not to be okay, Leo. Bloody hell, you watched your father die in front of you. You can’t just brush that under the carpet and pretend it didn’t happen. You’re allowed to have feelings too.’
‘You don’t understand. My mum and dad spent every day together for fifty years. My mum’s life revolved around him and suddenly he was gone. Her life was empty. She stopped cooking because she didn’t have anyone to cook for, she stopped cleaning because there was no one to appreciate it. For a long while, she stopped getting out of bed. The only thing that gave her life any meaning again was the idea of buying the coffee shop.’ He lets out a sigh so deep that it sounds like he’s been holding it in for a very long time. ‘And my sister … he was her hero. She didn’t cope with it at all. She lashed out, she blamed the doctors, the ambulance crew, the NHS, and mainly, she blamed me.’
‘People do that in grief. That doesn’t mean it was anyone’s fault. It just means that life is unfair and desperately searching for someone to blame is part of coping with the unfairness of it.’
‘Yeah, well, neither of them can deal with me falling apart too.’
‘I’m sure they’d rather you fall apart than end up doing something stupid because you’re trying to ignore your own grief and pretend everything’s all right when it isn’t.’
‘It’s better since you came along.’ He glances up at me and presses his lips together, his mouth curving up into a sad smile. ‘Everything’s better since you came along.’
I blush at that, wanting to look away to hide my embarrassment, but determined not to turn away when he’s so raw and laid bare, vulnerable in this moment. What I want to do more than anything is tell him how amazing he is, how inspiring it is that someone can go through that and still get up each morning with a smile and a joke for every customer.
All I’ve wanted to do since the moment I picked up that phone is make his life better – no, not even that. I wanted him to realize that life is wonderful, even when it doesn’t seem like it. Above all things, it’s always, always worth continuing to live.
And then there’s the guilt. How much better would he think I made his life if he knew I’ve been lying to him since the day after the phone call? He’s just shared something with me that he’s never told anyone before, and I can see from the slump of his shoulders and the tremors going through his hands that it took a lot. How is he going to feel if he ever finds out that I’m not who he thinks I am?
He sniffs and rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, George. I didn’t mean to say any of that –’
He goes to get up but I launch myself at him. Of course, I catch my foot on the leg of the reindeer and tumble into his arms rather than wrap him up in a protective hug, but you can’t win ‘em all.
‘You okay, my lovely?’ he murmurs as I struggle to get myself back into an upright position and slip my arms around his waist. A little thrill goes through me when he squishes me against his chest, his whole body closing around me as he hugs me back.
‘It’s been a while since you called me that,’ I say, my red cheeks hidden against his soft jumper.
‘Ah, it’s just a generic pet name. I call all customers who look like they won’t punch me that. There’s only one I call George Bailey though, and she’s a bit more special than anyone else.’
I giggle nervously and he holds his arm out. ‘Here. You should hit me. I deserve to be slapped for how sickeningly sappy that was.’
I reach out and wrap my hand around his wrist instead, pulling it back to where it was resting on my hip so he’s cuddling me again.
The movement of my fall has obviously jogged one of the Christmas decorations because a Santa on a shelf suddenly starts dancing and playing a tinny version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and it makes us both jump.
‘And it just happens to be the song at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life,’ he whispers against my hair. ‘Do you think the universe is trying to tell us something?’
‘Mm,’ I mumble, snuggling a bit further into his chest.
His breathing has that shuddery hitch you get after a long cry. It takes me right back to the phone call and hearing it down the line then too. If it’s humanly possible to want to hug him tighter than I wanted to then, it’s now.
He seems happier though. Lighter, somehow. Like sharing that has lifted a weight that even he didn’t know he was carrying. And I feel privileged that he’s opened up to me. The real me, not a random stranger on the phone, an actual friend. And he doesn’t make any attempt to pull away, and it should probably be weirder than it is to just stand here hugging him, but it feels so natural with Leo.
‘At least he was with you when he died,’ I say after a few long minutes.
‘Only you could try to make death into something positive.’
I pull my head back and look up at him with a sad smile. ‘Even I can’t put a positive spin on that. I just mean that at least he was with you at the end. He was happy, doing something he enjoyed with someone he loved. He could’ve been on his own doing his tax return or something like that. I know nothing ever makes it better, but …’
‘In some ways it could’ve been worse?’ he finishes for me and I nod.
‘I’m trying so hard to be him, to run It’s A Wonderful Latte as he would’ve run it, and I’m just … not. I never wanted this for my life and now it is, I feel like I’m failing at every turn.’
‘You’re not.’ I squeeze his side and let my fingers rub his jumper for a minute. ‘I promise you, Leo. Speaking as a customer, it makes such a difference to go there every morning and see a lovely face and a friendly smile, to have a two-minute chat with someone who makes the effort to know my name and remember how I like my coffee. That’s you being you. It’s nothing to do with what your father would’ve done. That’s what’s so great about high streets. The personal touch. The chat. The knowledge of your customers. I hate going into these huge busy shops where the cashiers don’t even look up as they grunt the total in your general direction. You make people feel valued. Sometimes I go to order something in a coffee shop and I feel like an inconvenience for interrupting the staff chatting with their mates, which they carry on doing instead of answering something I’ve asked them.’
‘So what you’re telling me is that you cheat on me with other coffee shops?’
I burst out laughing and give his arm a light slap. ‘Ah, it’s not two-timing if I only go there to see how crap they are compared to you.’
‘So we’re a dysfunctional marriage where you have sex with other men to prove to me how good I am at sex?’
Leo and sex and having sex with Leo shouldn’t be in the same sentence and my face heats up at the thought, but I can’t help the grin spreading across my face when our eyes meet, his dancing with mischief that it’s been a while since I’ve seen.
‘And I call you my favourite customer.’ He winks at me and pokes at a box of tangled fairy lights with his toe. ‘Bit different to the fancy designer decorations at the soulless retail park, huh?’
I look around the basement at the decorations that once graced our high street, their boxes now discoloured beyond recognition and sporting some impressive damp stains, and the unboxed decorations half-covered by threadbare tarpaulin with corners chewed by God only knows what.
‘Did you know that Oakbarrow won a best-decorated high street competition in the Eighties?’ he says. ‘Mr Hawthorne had an old newspaper clipping in a frame behind the counter.’
‘Leo, that’s it!’ I grab his arm excitedly as an idea hits me.
‘Do you know how nervous I get every time you say that?’
‘Ha ha,’ I mutter. ‘Do you think it’s still there?’
‘What, the newspaper clipping?’ He shrugs when I nod. ‘I don’t know. Why? What are you suggesting?’
I grin at him. ‘I’m suggesting we break the law again, but properly this time.’