Christmas on Primrose Hill (12 page)

‘OK, we’re good to go. Now just remember, stepping over is the hardest part. What did I tell you to do?’

‘Lean back, feet flat, trust in the equipment,’ she replied in a monotone.

‘Exactly. Trust in me. Trust in yourself, Nessie. This is going to be fine. You’re going to want to do it all again as soon as it’s over.’

‘I’m really not,’ she said quickly, her voice thin with fear that she was placing her life in the hands of a man who couldn’t even get her name right.

‘That’s what they all say. Just trust in me.’ His brown eyes were steady upon her and she nodded out of politeness, trying to remind herself this guy was a professional. The White Tiger insurance team had been all over this like a haemorrhagic fever and she must have filled out thirty forms. They wouldn’t be letting her do this if it wasn’t safe – not because they cared about her, but because her omeletting the pavement in their name really would be bad publicity.

She stepped back so that her heels overlapped the edge of the roof. Half of her was now officially hanging over London, and adrenalin was rushing in torrents through her system, making her limbs tingle, her stomach flip. Everything was suddenly clearer – the white clouds in the grey sky (God, it was such a dreary day; please don’t let her die on a dreary day), the still-bright green ‘Fire exit’ notice by the door, the puffs of smoke coming from some far-off chimney stacks in the Hampstead Heath direction and suggesting a retired gentleman reading his papers in the library of his Victorian house, while she . . .

She tried to focus. Trust in the equipment. Trust in Jonno.

She looked across. He was already dangling back in the harness, his feet propped against the glass wall like he was lying in bed, watching her.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

Of course she wasn’t. It was a ridiculous question. Who was ever ready to step backwards off the Shard, one of the highest tower blocks in London, and pretend to be a
whale
for Chrissakes? And yet her body was disobeying both logic and instinct as her hands – visibly shaking – closed round the rope.

‘That’s it,’ Jonno murmured. ‘Now just lean back. That’s all it is. Just a lean. The equipment will do the rest for you.’

She couldn’t move.

‘I know it’s hard. This is the ultimate test of mind over matter. Just take your time.’

Take her time? How did eighty years sound?

And yet slowly, in degrees, she realized she was beginning to lean back, her legs bending as she took one foot off the roof and placed it lower, on the wall instead. The paws of the bunny suit weren’t grippy, but they were long enough to create some sort of base to push on and she held the pose for a few long seconds, her eyes scrunched shut, her lips unwittingly moving as she willed herself to move the other leg too, her hands registering that the rope was tight, her harness already pulling round her as she leaned into it. Instinct told her everything would free-fall – that the ground would rush up – and she felt her arms and legs go liquid with fear. But everything held. She wasn’t falling
yet
.

With her eyes still closed, she moved the other foot in a rush of courage. Perhaps she moved it too quickly, eager to be done with it, for the movement threw her off balance and the other leg slipped off the glass so that she was suddenly dangling above the far-distant street.

She screamed. Jules screamed. Nettie screamed again.

Jonno grinned, reaching over and steadying her as she twirled and spun on the rope, clutching it desperately, her eyes wide open now behind the mask. Oh God, she was going to die. She was going to die on a dreary day dressed as a mutant rabbit. ‘No worries, Nessie. That happens to most people. Me too, first time I tried it.’

His voice was so quiet, so calm, that Nettie had to stop screaming to hear him. She had also realized that although she was still dangling, she wasn’t actually falling.
Trust in the equipment
. She was shaking from head to toe.

‘Ready to put your feet up now? You’ve done the hardest bit.’ Jonno was still holding her rope and she had stopped pivoting.

She nodded frantically. Anything – anything – that meant she was touching the lovely solid glass-and-concrete structure, and not space, was a welcome prospect, even if it was just the soles of her feet.

Sucking in her tummy – thank God for those circuits classes – and bringing up her legs, she planted them one, two hard on the glass. The building didn’t move. It would take her weight, it seemed.

‘Good girl. Now the rest is easy.’

She watched as he demonstrated the next step, trying very, very hard not to notice how far below him the horizon was.

‘Now your turn,’ Jonno said, bringing his hands back onto the rope like it was nothing to have only a karabiner stand between your life and your death.

Nettie bit her lip and looked up apprehensively. Jules was standing between the health-and-safety woman and the White Tiger CSR man, her hands raised in a prayer position to her nose and looking even more scared than Nettie. Catching Nettie watching her, she immediately straightened up and gave Nettie a jaunty wink.

For some reason, Jules’s nerves made Nettie feel reassured and a sudden rush of whisky-fuelled adrenalin shot through her. Fuck it!

‘There you go, Nettie!’ Mike said, zooming in on her with his camera as she took her hands off the rope and threw her arms back over into an arch, like a whale breaching the water. Her legs left the smooth safety of the Shard’s glass walls and she tipped so far back she could see the pavements, behind and beneath her.

‘That’s it, Nettie!’ Jules hollered.

‘And again, please,’ she heard Mike call. ‘I think I might have missed that go.’

Above her, Nettie could hear Jules letting rip at him, and as she dangled from the rope, upside down, London now her sky and adrenalin and whisky mixing in her bloodstream, there was nothing else for it – she began to laugh.

Their breath hung in the air like steam-train puffs, a white trail that lingered behind them like a floating breadcrumb trail as their feet pounded the frozen ground in unison, hands pulled into loose fists. Em had set a firm pace today, her red ponytail like a warning flag in Nettie’s peripheral vision to keep up, and they had done their circuit of Regent’s Park in almost record time.

They reached the top of the steps and Nettie jogged on the spot as she ‘allowed’ Em to go down first (i.e. tried to catch her breath) before following after, her eyes on the black slick of the canal, a murky spine of ice in the water reaching towards the banks.

It was dark on the towpath, even though the street lamps shone, and Nettie felt the familiar frisson of nervousness she always felt when coming to Dan’s in the winter months. He was a gentleman, of course, always insisting on walking her all the way home after their many suppers, but she did sometimes wish he would live in a normal house like most normal people. His mother, in Nettie’s opinion, had a lot to answer for.

The houseboat – half the length of anything else on the canal and more like a tug than a barge – was called
Puffin
. The crooked stove pipe was already puffing more than they were, the lights glowing orange behind the thin green curtains at the windows. Music – Primal Scream, Nettie guessed – was playing through the speakers loudly enough to make the water round the hull vibrate, and they could tell from the way the dried-up flowerpots had been stacked neatly by the back door that Jules had already arrived.

‘Hey!’ Em panted, opening the door and peering into the small cabin. Four faces grinned back – Dan, Stevie, Jules and Paddy. The homely aroma of chicken korma from a sachet wafted over them, poppadoms burning in the small oven like black toast. Dan was looking hassled, waving a tea towel round to disperse the smoke, as Stevie and Paddy sat at the table, setting up the cards.

‘Oh
grim
,’ Jules grimaced as Nettie followed in after her with a stagger, grateful to have stopped running at last, her cheeks pink and large patches of sweat darkening her clothes.

‘Oh, you don’t mean that!’ she retorted, arms outstretched and pretending to give her friend a bear hug.

‘Keep away!’ Jules laughed, holding up her cigarette as a defensive weapon. ‘You could have done us all the courtesy of having a shower before you rocked up here, you know.’

‘With what time?’ Em asked, immediately beginning her gentle-stretching cool-down routine. She looked annoyingly fresh from the forty-five-minute run, while Nettie, limbs trembling with fatigue, had to sink onto the bench to recover. ‘Dan was adamant we had to be here for seven p.m.,’ she said from a deep runner’s stretch.

‘I hardly think twenty minutes would have mattered, here or there,’ Jules said. ‘Look at you both. You’re going to stink.’

‘They can have a shower here if they want,’ Dan said. ‘I’ve got some clean towels.’

‘Clean?’ Em scoffed. ‘Yeah, right. I’ve seen your towels, Dan, and I know perfectly well you use them as bedding for the dog.’

As if on cue, Scout jumped onto the bench, standing on Nettie’s lap and her tender muscles. ‘Ooow!’ she winced, trying to manoeuvre the dog into a better position. ‘Don’t you ever cut his nails, Dan?’

Dan shrugged, handing her a hydrating beer with a wink and a smile, and inadvertently knocking a pile of Doritos to the floor. Scout jumped off Nettie’s lap – leaving her wincing all over again – and hoovered them up within seconds.

‘Well, so long as I don’t have to sit next to you,’ Jules said, taking another drag of her cigarette and blowing out the smoke through the corner of her mouth.

‘I’ve got a solution to Jules’s problem,’ Stevie said with a sly voice. ‘We could always make this a game of
strip
poker.’

‘Ha! Categorically no!’ Jules scoffed.

‘Why not, Jules?’ Paddy said teasingly. ‘You’re always cleaning up. What’s wrong? Feeling off your game? Not so sure you’re going to win tonight?’

Jules stuck her tongue out at him and looked for something to throw, but Nettie knew – as any girl did – that the issue wasn’t so much one of skill and bluff as whether or not her friend had shaved/put on decent underwear/juiced this week (delete as appropriate).

‘Well, I’m up for it,’ Em shrugged, jumping up from a hamstring stretch in which she had almost bent double, and grabbing her beer off the tiny Formica worktop. ‘I’ve had a crap day. I need to blow off some steam.’

‘You’re telling me,’ Nettie grumbled from her now-prone position on the bench, knowing this was Em’s cue for everyone to ask after her job and trying to divert attention away from the subject. Out of the lot of them, Em’s was the one that carried true weight and significance. She parried with death every day, after all, and was never shy about recounting stories from her many, many years of further education. Stevie, on the other hand, had only two GCSEs, and Dan was more interested in the latest Arsenal result than his career.

‘Bet it doesn’t beat my day,’ Paddy said, idly shuffling a deck of cards. ‘I lost seventy-eight grand in three minutes this afternoon.’

‘How many times have I got to tell you, mate? You can’t be a broker without knowing how to count,’ Stevie quipped. Paddy kicked him in the shin under the table.

‘Yeah? Well, I had a water pipe blow in my face earlier,’ Dan said, bringing over some more Doritos. ‘Freezing, it was. Reckon I’ll get hypothermia.’

‘Tch. D’you feel another sickie coming on, then, Dan?’ Jules teased.

‘How about you, Nets?’ Stevie asked. ‘Any horror stories for you today?’

Nettie pushed herself up to sitting and glanced at Stevie. He grinned as she met his eye, and she knew he knew exactly what she’d been up to today – having raised £17,600 by lunchtime, the clip had been filed and she was trending again – and there was no doubt dangling from the Shard, anything but graceful as she arched back in the bunny suit, was her definition of a horror story.

‘Me? No, it was quiet,’ she mumbled with a warning look in her eyes, feeling guilty that she still hadn’t let Em and Paddy – good friends though they were – into the secret. It wasn’t a copyright issue anymore and she knew she could trust them to keep quiet about it if she asked. But something still held her back.

‘Well, my day trumps all of yours,’ Em said determinedly, going to stand near the pot-bellied stove. If no one would ask, she would just jolly well tell. ‘I saved a pregnant woman’s life after she’d officially died three times on the table, and then spent the afternoon being hauled in and out of the HR offices because the husband is upset I couldn’t slash
didn’t
save the baby too, so now he wants to make an official complaint.’ Her face was white as she spoke, and for the first time Nettie saw the true cost of her friend’s perfectionism. Life and death, every day, every hour, every patient.

Everyone fell silent, the gentle teasing buzz in the overcrowded cabin morphing into subdued sympathy for the unknown woman.

‘I mean, the mother was my patient. In a scenario like that, you always prioritize the mother. Always.’ She shook her head and took several deep swigs of her beer. Her hand was visibly shaking.

Nettie felt bad that she’d bitterly anticipated Em’s news as just showing off. No wonder she had run tonight like she was chasing the wind, no wonder she needed to talk, drink, relax, play.

‘Yeah, OK then, you win,’ Stevie said finally, breaking the mood. ‘Your day officially sucked most. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to win this game. I hope you’re wearing lots of layers.’

Em just shrugged.

‘We are
not
playing strip poker,’ Nettie said firmly, picking up where Jules had left off.

‘Em says we are. She won the Sucky Day Competition and she wants to play,’ Stevie countered.

‘What’s wrong, Nets?’ Dan grinned, his feet up on the table as he swigged his beer. ‘Can’t handle the heat?’

‘No! I mean, yes! I mean . . .’ she spluttered. ‘You know what I mean!’

‘You don’t have anything we haven’t seen before, do you?’ He paused, a mock-shock look crossing his face. ‘Oh no, wait, I always forget about your third nipple.’

The boat rocked with laughter.

‘You are a pig!’ Nettie giggled, grabbing a tea towel and throwing it at him, but it unfurled in flight and lilted to the ground like a feather.