‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Leo calls over as he and my dad navigate a six-foot-tall nutcracker out of Hawthorne’s tiny basement door, Leo walking backwards with the feet while my dad wraps his hands around the neck like he wants to throttle it. If someone doesn’t start saying ‘to me, to you’ in a minute, it’ll be a sign of an impending apocalypse. Quoting the Chuckle Brothers is the law when moving furniture, like shouting ‘pivot!’ when manoeuvring large items up a staircase. ‘I’ve never been in trouble with the police, ever. I didn’t intend to start at this point in my life.’
‘You worry too much,’ I tell him.
‘We’re stealing!’
‘We’re reclaiming. Borrowing, if it makes you feel better.’
‘Your daughter has some kind of influence over me,’ Leo turns to my dad. ‘She makes me tell her all sorts of private things, she hypnotizes me into breaking and entering, and now she’s bullied me into becoming a thief.’
My dad laughs. ‘There’s this little word called “no” …’
Leo looks over at me and grins, nearly losing his footing on a broken bit of concrete. ‘Where would be the fun in that?’
‘This is a good idea,’ I protest, shivering at the sudden warmth that floods me at the affectionate look in his eyes. ‘It’s all just sitting there. It was for the street once, why shouldn’t it be used for the street again?’
‘Because the street itself hasn’t broken into a building to nick it. No one’s going to prise up its paving slabs and chuck them in prison. Us, on the other hand …’
‘You have customers now. We should give them a nice street to be on. Give them a reason to stay and shop at the other shops here. Do you know the old greengrocer? He popped in today to tell Mary he was thinking of coming back now the supermarket has gone. She hadn’t seen him for a few years. Apparently he’s got even more gorgeous in his retirement.’
‘Mary?’ Leo’s ears visibly prick up. ‘Doesn’t Mary work at the –’
Bollocks. ‘Mary. One of my colleagues at the bank. Very common name. That’s right, isn’t it, Case?’ I raise my voice so she can hear me from the kitchen. ‘The greengrocer popped into the bank to tell our colleague Mary that he was thinking of reopening with a skeleton stock next week to see how it goes, didn’t he?’
‘Sure.’ Casey appears in the kitchen doorway, pushing thick blonde hair back. She points at the giant nutcracker. ‘That was on the corner before Hawthorne’s with a sign round its neck directing people in.’
‘Anything else?’ I ask.
‘It’s bloody difficult on this crappy old newspaper.’ She waves around the frame of aged print that Leo and I rescued from the floor behind the counter of the toy shop where it had fallen down. ‘It’s too yellowed to make out anything except the big things.’
‘I might be able to help seeing as I was the one who decorated most of it in the first place, even though it was a fair few decades ago now,’ Dad says.
‘It doesn’t have to be exactly the same,’ I say. ‘I just thought it would be nice to make it as nostalgic as possible. From the very beginning of this, we’ve wanted to remind people of what these boarded-up old shops used to be. What better way than to decorate it as close as possible to how people remember it? We’ve got this amazing old picture of a prize-winning high street that Mr Hawthorne preserved all these years, we may as well try to follow it as closely as possible.’
‘With the exact same crappy old decorations that look like they belong exactly where they came from – the Eighties. Except we get them with thirty years’ worth of extra mould. Yay.’ Casey pokes her tongue out at me. ‘I don’t know how you talked me into this.’
‘Free coffee.’ I stick my tongue out back at her. ‘And because if we don’t do something, this is probably going to be the last Christmas that any of us spend on this high street.’
‘Yeah, because we’ll all be in bloody prison.’ Leo relieves my dad of the nutcracker and stands it up on the pavement, walking it one side at a time to where the alleyway joins the street.
‘Still all clear,’ Bernard calls from his position as lookout at the corner by the bank, a good spot because it gives a view right down to the churchyard and right the way up past Hawthorne’s towards the old Woolworths and the start of the high street, just to be extra careful that we don’t get caught.
Maybe Leo’s got a point about prison after all.
‘A nicely decorated street boosts morale,’ I say when he comes back, panting from the effort, the slight sheen of sweat making him look even sexier than usual. ‘It makes customers happy and it makes shop owners feel like the council cares about them.’
‘They don’t,’ he interjects helpfully.
‘No, but we do.’ I sigh because Leo’s being so negative about this since we discovered the old decorations. Even Casey is more positive than him and she’s about as positive as Victor Meldrew having a bad day. ‘You can’t look out at Oakbarrow High Street now and pretend that anyone cares about it, can you? The closest thing we get to renovation is an estate agent popping out to replace a “for sale” sign that’s aged so much it’s now illegible. We need to remind people that there’s still a high street here, because quite honestly, it’s easy to miss, and since the windows thing took off, more and more people are walking down the street. We have to do something to make them want to stay. The windows have given us momentum, but it’s up to us to keep pushing forward. No one else is going to help us.’
Leo sighs and inclines his head towards Hawthorne’s door. ‘Come and help me test some of these lights then. I bet all the bulbs are dead by now.’
* * *
‘See?’ I say, standing on a ladder outside the old chemist, Leo the same on the other side as we stretch a rope light banner of snowflakes across the road between us. ‘What was it you said the other day? About a sentence in the English language that goes, “You were right, I was wrong”? You can give it a try if you like.’
He tries to frown at me but he’s laughing too much and I smile at the sight of him looking so happy and getting involved in the decorating. All the fixtures and fittings for the decorations are still in place, albeit with a tad more rust than they had last time these lights went up, but they’re all still strong and sturdy.
Leo gets off his ladder quicker than I get off mine, and as I climb down carefully, he’s waiting at the bottom and holding his hand out to help me down. His hand stays on the small of my back as we stand on the pavement and look around, admiring everyone’s handiwork. Each defunct streetlight has a hanging light-up bell attached to it, the posts are wrapped in a spiral of sparkling red and green tinsel and Casey is down by Aubergine, finishing each one off with a huge velour bow. Bernard is attaching a wreath of holly and mistletoe to every door, and my dad is using his old council privileges to wire our Christmas lights into the lampposts to power them.
‘It looks amazing,’ Leo says quietly. ‘I can’t believe they all came to help us. Even your dad. I bet he’s not usually outside putting up Christmas decorations at eleven o’clock on a December night.’
‘In all fairness, he’s not usually putting them up on a July night either, that’d be far too early.’
‘Ha ha,’ he says. ‘You know what I mean. It’s late and it’s cold and all three of them have come out to help anyway. Even your friend who hates Christmas.’
I laugh because Casey must have told us her feelings towards Christmas approximately 45,879 times tonight and I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed. ‘She might hate Christmas but she doesn’t hate the free drinks you’re making for everyone.’
‘Least I can do.’
‘I know you’re worried,’ I say, squeezing the hand he inexplicably hasn’t let go of yet.
‘Just afraid of getting caught. The last thing I need is to be arrested, and I know we’re doing it for the greater good, but there’s no two ways around it – we’ve stolen these and we’re undoubtedly breaching health and safety laws to put them up, and it’s my key we’ve used. If there’re any repercussions from this, it’ll be on me.’ He glances at me. ‘Maybe I should just man up and stop being frightened of being alive.’
I freeze on the spot. It’s exactly what we said on the phone. Is he testing me? Does he know? Or is he just sharing the same feelings with me as he shared with a stranger in a telephone call? ‘Oh look, we’ve forgotten to put these hanging snowflakes up. I’ll get on that immediately.’
I fold my ladder, hoist it under my arm, and hurry off down the pavement, hoping that’s the end of that conversation. I want to talk to him so badly – when he said that on the phone, it genuinely was like someone had put into words how I’ve been feeling for years, but I can’t have the same conversation as the real me to the real him because then there will be no hiding.
* * *
‘It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ Casey looks up at me from the bottom of the ladder, where I’m trying to wrangle a column of dangling snowflakes onto a bracket on the side of The Bum.
‘You can say that again,’ I mutter. ‘It’s a matter of time before he realizes who I am.’
‘What?’
I glance down at her with a roll of thick red ribbon in her hand and look around to make sure no one’s in earshot. ‘Me. Leo. The bank.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m sure he’ll laugh when he finds out. It’s just a little white lie.’ She looks up the road to where Leo’s untangling a row of reindeer to go up between the old pet shop and the newsagent.
‘You know, I thought he was going to be a right stuck up prat who wouldn’t be seen dead with someone who handles second-hand clothes for a living, but he actually seems very nice. Very you, despite the fact that your love life is so dire that the statue on the war memorial outside the church looks like a reasonable date prospect at the moment.’ She points up the street towards Leo again. ‘He’s the kind of guy you’d date anyway. I can’t for the life of me work out why you started this whole bank nonsense. Not the George Bailey connection, was it?’
I can’t tell her. It’s not the same as discussing it with Mary after Leo had basically told her himself. Casey doesn’t know anything about the phone call and it’s not my place to share more of Leo’s private life than I have already.
‘A moment of madness,’ I say, because really, what else was it? Who tells someone they work somewhere they don’t? Particularly when that person works on the same street and is likely to see them every single day?
She nods like this is a completely reasonable explanation. ‘Well, the guy did name his coffee shop after your favourite film. I get similarly overexcited when I meet a hot guy with a six pack and no wedding ring.’
‘Men can take wedding rings off, you know. Or can have long-term partners and babies without actually being married …’
She shrugs. ‘If a guy wants to sleep with me, that’s up to him. I’d rather shag a married guy than end up actually falling in love with someone and lying about where I work and getting into more of a tangle than you’ve got into with those bloody snowflakes. Come here.’
‘I’m not in love with him.’ I step a few rungs down the ladder and hold the snowflakes out while Casey tries to untangle them from the bottom up.
‘Well, you clearly have feelings for him. Ugly, messy feelings. And he clearly has ugly, messy feelings for you too.’
I go to protest but she interrupts me.
‘He hasn’t taken his eyes off you all night. And no one puts that much effort into a name on a coffee cup unless they want the recipient to notice them. And do you honestly think I didn’t notice how long he kept his hand on your back when he helped you off that ladder earlier? Any man trying the chivalry thing with me would’ve had a boot to the bollocks.’
‘It’s sweet. He’s sweet. I just wish it wasn’t such a mess.’
She nods sagely. ‘When I said it was a mess earlier, I meant the Christmas decorations, but it’s nice to see what your mind is fixated on.’
‘The Christmas decorations aren’t a mess,’ I say, choosing to ignore the last part of that sentence. Of course I’m fixated on it. I’ve thought of nothing but Leo since the moment I put that phone down.
Leo calls down the street before she has a chance to respond. ‘Your dad’s ready to switch on!’
Casey and I dump the snowflakes in a pile and make our way up towards the bank where Leo and Bernard are waiting at a spot that gives us a good view in either direction. We’ve tested the lights to make sure they all work, but this is the moment we find out if my dad has managed to get the wires for the biggest lights connected to the council’s outdoor generator like he used to.
‘Three … two … one …’ My dad shouts from somewhere behind Hawthorne’s and Bernard starts doing a drumroll.
Lights all along the street ping into life, flickering a bit at first and settling down after a few seconds, filling the darkness with the multicoloured twinkling of Christmas cheer.
‘Wow,’ Leo utters from behind me, stepping a bit closer so his coat brushes against my back.
‘It looks just like I remember it,’ my dad says as he comes to join us, looking surprised when he sees that it actually worked.
‘Me too,’ Bernard says, sounding a bit emotional, and Leo reaches out to give his shoulder a squeeze.
It’s not perfect, I know that. It doesn’t exactly match the old picture because some of the decorations hadn’t survived their decades of storage and rodent attackers, but it’s the best Oakbarrow High Street has looked in a long time.
‘It’s just like I remember it when I was young,’ Leo says.
‘I reiterate, it’s a mess,’ Casey says, making us all groan.
‘It’s not a mess, it’s festive. I don’t think Christmas should be about designer colour schemes and what’s on trend this year. It’s meant to be a multicoloured, chaotic accumulation of all the decorations that mean something to a family, even if they clash. We all have little family traditions because Christmas is about remembering the Christmases that came before it. It doesn’t matter if the retail park has got twenty-thousand twinkling lights in blue and gold. Our strength is in people’s memories. We need to appeal to people like us who remember it when it was thriving.’
‘She’s right.’ Leo is still standing behind me and he steps almost imperceptibly closer. ‘I’ve been talking to a lot of customers who’ve come back lately and you’d be surprised by the number who’ve said how sad they’ve been to see it fall into disrepair and how nice it is to see someone doing something about it.’
I feel his warmth behind me, standing so close now that my shoulder is pressing into his chest, his breath stirring my hair as he speaks.
‘Every family has daft little things they do every Christmas because it reminds them of years gone by. My family always used to walk down Oakbarrow High Street on Christmas Eve and say Merry Christmas to all the shops. It’s been a long time since we did it, and not all members of the family are still with us, but my stomach is full of butterflies at the thought that I can walk my mum home this year under these lights that we remember so well.’
His voice is shakier than usual and without thinking, I reach back until my fingers find his hand and give it a quick touch, but as I go to let go, he holds on, sliding his fingers between mine and squeezing.
‘Even if this is the last year that Oakbarrow High Street exists as we know it, even if all the chatter and social media coverage disappears after there are no more Christmas windows, at least we’ve done something to make this year special.’
Bernard pats him on the shoulder in return, raising an unkempt grey eyebrow when he spots our joined hands. Thankfully, he keeps quiet about it but I quickly disentangle my fingers from Leo’s. Casey would have kittens if she caught me holding hands with a guy. Not even kittens. She’d be so surprised that she’d spontaneously give birth to a litter of alpacas or something.
‘Are you positive all this stuff is safe?’ Leo asks my dad. ‘It’s all well and good making the street look pretty but it’s not so great if we’re going to electrocute the shoppers.’
Dad smiles at him. ‘Like I said, I used to be an electrician. I can make sure it’s safe but now I’m retired, I no longer have the accreditation to give out any official certificates. Safe and officially certified safe are two different things.’
I had no idea my dad was such a rule breaker. I thought he’d go mad when I told him about breaking into Hawthorne’s and finding the old decs, but he offered to help wire them up before I’d had a chance to ask him.
‘No one will know it was us who found them and put them up anyway. As far as anyone’s concerned, it’s a Christmas elf who comes in the night, just like the windows,’ I say. ‘We know they’re safe, that’s what matters.’
Leo’s gaze levels with mine. ‘It’s a good job I trust you as much as I do.’
I gulp.
The church bell starts chiming for midnight and I turn to look down the high street towards the only working streetlamp near the churchyard.
‘Every time a bell rings …’ Dad says. No matter where we are, he still says it whenever we hear a bell chime to remind us of Mum and her favourite film.
Leo’s eyes meet mine again. ‘Bells have been doing that a lot lately …’
‘Well, it is bloody Christmas,’ Casey mutters, completely missing the softness in his voice and the shy smile as he ducks his head and looks at the pavement.
‘What about a tree?’ Dad asks. ‘It’s not Christmas in Oakbarrow without a tree, decorated by yours truly, of course.’
‘Considering how many years it’s been since yours truly retired and was fit enough to hop up and down ladders, decorated with help,’ I say.
‘We’ve got this far, we may as well do it properly,’ Bernard adds. ‘We haven’t had a tree for a couple of years now, and do you remember the last time we did? It wasn’t even a pine tree, it was a dead birch that had fallen down in the November storms, and they strung it with one string of battery-operated fairy lights and when the batteries went after three days, no one replaced them.’
‘The old tree stand is still in Hawthorne’s basement,’ Dad says, and I’m still surprised by how much he’s getting involved in this. ‘We should get a tree and have a proper switch on, like we used to. Do you remember how all the shops stayed open, The Bum served hot mulled wine, and the café had all sorts of mince pies and stollen bites and mini puds laid out on tables for everyone to share? There were party poppers and crackers for the children, Santa did meet-and-greets, Hawthorne’s speakers pumped Christmas carols out of their windows until the Salvation Army band arrived to play for us. It was the best night of the year.’
‘We should do that again,’ Bernard says. ‘Get a tree and throw a big party on the day we light it up. You want to remind people of how our street used to be? There’s no better way than that. We go all out. Invite everyone. You’ve made this much effort. If it’s worth doing then it’s worth doing.’
‘It’s only just over a week ‘til Christmas,’ I say, even though the idea has got my heart racing. I’ve often heard about the light switch-ons in Oakbarrow. They were almost a thing of the past when I was young, but they were even bigger in Mum and Dad’s day. Every time we walked by the Christmas tree outside the church, Mum would mention them fondly.
‘If we invite people, everyone will know it’s us,’ Leo says.
‘Anonymous invites,’ Dad says. ‘Stack of them on your counter, stack of them in the shop, stack of them in the bank.’ He points to Leo, then me, then Casey in turn.
‘I’ll take them around to the other shops,’ Bernard says. ‘If anyone does ask questions, I’ll just say a stranger asked me to do it. I haven’t got anything to lose.’
‘Where are we going to get a tree of that size this close to Christmas?’ Leo asks, surprising me again with his eagerness.
My dad thinks for a minute. ‘You busy on Sunday?’
Leo shakes his head.
‘There you go then. Georgia’s not either. The pair of you can take my car because it’s got a sturdy roof rack. There’s a tree farm on the other side of Gloucester where the council always used to get their trees. They grow them onsite so they’re unlikely to be out of stock, and it’s only about an hour’s drive each way.’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I mutter. Is Casey right about my love life being so dire that even my pensioner dad is now playing matchmaker? You know things are bad when your father is setting up dates for you.
Casey gives him an approving look.
Not that going to get a tree with Leo is a date, of course.
Leo looks at me with both eyebrows raised and his eyes glinting with mischief and I can’t help smiling again.
There are probably worse people to be stuck in a car for a couple of hours with.