the weighted Santa hat doorstop I made out of the way and slamming the door behind me, even though we’ve decided to keep it open to make the shop more inviting.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Stacey looks up from replacing one of her necklaces that’s been bought from the mannequin in the window.
‘I knocked over a giant nutcracker and broke it and now I’m going to owe that shop nine hundred quid,’ I say in such a rush that even a professional translator wouldn’t be able to decipher it.
‘Can you split that sentence into more than one word?’
I lean against the wall and knock a bauble skew-whiff and don’t even bother to straighten it as I take deep breaths and try to calm my heart rate while I repeat myself.
‘You have to go back,’ Stacey says when I’ve finished. ‘Explain that it was an accident and ask if they’ll let you start paying it off in January. They run a Christmas shop; they must understand how tight things can be at this time of year.’
‘Or I could hide in the back room and never come out. I’ll go home after dark and stay in my shed making decorations and you can sell them, and between us, I’ll never have to show my face here again and no one will ever know it was me. How’s that for a plan?’
We both know I’m not serious, but I start pacing the floor anyway. ‘What am I going to say? And I’ve run away and made it all worse. Now I’ve made myself look like a criminal. I’m a fugitive. A life on the run beckons. Oh my God, I’m going to get involved in organised crime and be indoctrinated into a gang, and all sorts.’
‘Your only crime is murdering a nutcracker. I don’t think the punishment is twenty-five years behind bars, but maybe they’ve changed the charge of second-degree murder to include wooden dolls now.’
I narrow my eyes at her sarcasm and she laughs. ‘I need a cup of tea, so go on, go back over there and confess so you can watch the shop while I go and get one, or there might end up being a real murder committed due to tea desperation.’
I try to delay the inevitable for a few moments longer, but I know she’s right. I’m not a good enough liar to pretend it wasn’t me, and my conscience is already getting the better of me. Stacey and I have done craft fairs where people pick things up and pull them around and break them and then hastily put them down and hurry guiltily away, or even better are the ones who draw your attention to it and say, ‘This is broken, love. It was like that when I picked it up. I wonder how that happened …’ I would much rather someone outright apologise and offer to pay for it, even though it doesn’t matter as much with a £2.50 pair of earrings as it does with a £926 nutcracker. ‘And what is with that weird pricing?’ I say to Stacey.
‘Nia!’ she snaps. ‘You’re delaying. Get on with it.’
I’ve known Stace since the first day of secondary school, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t because she can see right through me. I grumble as I set the door open again and force one foot in front of the other to traipse back across to the open door with the Santa still Macarena-ing outside, feeling like some sort of hefty cyclops rather than an elegant ballerina this time.
Inside, the shop is still empty. Where on earth is this person? The nutcracker made such a crash when it fell that I’m surprised someone from the UK’s seismology team hasn’t turned up to investigate the unexplained earthquake that just registered on their scales, and yet there’s still no one in sight. This is getting weird now. I suppose I should pick the nutcracker up and wait with it until someone gets back …
I round the corner of the aisle where the nutcracker was, but the giant wooden soldier has gone, along with the broken bit of his arm, his sceptre and every splinter of wood, and lying on the floor in his place is a man. I scream.
The man is lying on his back and his head and right arm are under a shelf, looking like he’s trying to reach for something. His left arm is in a plaster cast and held across his chest by a sling.
He yelps in surprise at my noise and jumps so much that he clonks his forehead on the shelf hard enough to make the whole thing shake, causing such a reverberation that the rows of fifteen-centimetre-tall nutcrackers wobble and fall off, pelting down at him as he tries to curl in on himself and makes a noise of pain.
‘What are you doing there?’ I snap, the shock of seeing him making all logical thought fly out the window.
‘I work here. You?’ he snaps back as he wriggles himself out from under the shelf, every movement slow and stilted and followed by a noise of pain that he’s probably not aware he’s making out loud. He crunches the nutcrackers under his legs as he moves, until eventually he’s fully free of the shelf and is lying on the aisle floor, surrounded by a sea of little wooden nutcrackers, and squinting up at me in the brightness of the shop.
My heart is still pounding from the shock of his unexpected appearance and I’m sure he must be able to see it bouncing in and out of my chest like a cartoon character’s.
He’s got something clutched in the hand of his unbroken arm and he rubs his forehead with his free fingers. ‘Is your jumper flashing or is this the festive equivalent of seeing stars?’
It makes me snort with laughter. ‘It’s flashing.’
‘I thought you worked in the decoration shop opposite?’
‘I do.’ I can’t hide my surprise that he knows that.
‘Not the jumper shop?’
‘No.’
‘So you’re wearing that without contractual obligation?’
‘It’s Christmas,’ I say when I finally fall in to where his line of questioning was going.
‘And that makes it socially acceptable to wear a set of traffic lights?’
‘Ah, traffic lights only have three colours. This jumper has many more.’
‘Believe me, I can see that.’ He groans and clonks his head back onto the floor. ‘So, my arm breaker. You came back.’
‘I had to. I’m so sor— Wait, your arm breaker?’ The music playing in the background of the shop is now “The Waltz of the Snowflakes” from The Nutcracker and the ballet pops into my head. The nutcracker soldier given as a gift on Christmas Eve, who gets broken and then turns into a prince at the stroke of midnight and takes the young ballerina on a magical journey through a land of sweets and snowflakes.
He mutters something about the nutcracker, but all I can think about is the ballet and the nineteenth-century story behind it. About the nutcracker who turns into a real-life prince after being broken …
He’s just lying there, trying to catch his breath, pain obvious in every line that flashes across his face when he winces.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I did not think this through at all. Getting down here was hard enough, but I have absolutely no idea how to get up. I regret this decision.’ His face is still pinched but there’s a jokey tone in his voice that makes me smile.
‘Do you need a hand?’
‘No, I need a crane. Or a forklift truck.’
His tone makes me giggle again and when I look back at him, he’s smiling for the first time and his smile is so much like Flynn Rider’s that it stops me in my tracks. In that moment, he looks so much like the Disney prince that it’s almost like the animated version has stepped out of the screen and into real life. Wait … A Disney prince. A nutcracker prince. A prince … I wished for last night?
No, it couldn’t be. Like I’ve somehow developed the ability to see through walls, I look in the direction of the magical nutcracker. I wished for a prince. A prince like the nutcracker himself. And they say nutcrackers grant wishes if the wish is made at the moment a nut is being cracked, and the stars were twinkling just right and the wind did whisper in his beard. This man is even wearing