The Great Christmas Breakup (7 page)

‘That’s would be lovely, dear.
How’s work?’

‘Dan Phillit, the new manager, is vile. Other than that, it’s still the same.’

‘Oh, what a shame.’

I shrugged as I grabbed the heavy
, odd-shaped item. ‘What are you doing with this
, anyway?’

‘
Oh,
I offered to try and sell these for my husband – they’
ve been up in the loft for ages and we could do with a cruise.
’

‘What it is
?’

She pulled the brown paper aside to reveal some glass eyes and a lot of fluffy white fur. ‘Sheep.
Fiber
glass.
We have ten of them.’

‘Why?’

‘My Samuel can’t help himself when it comes to a bargain.
Bought
them at auction a few years ago, hoping
he might offload them to a
n antipodean
jumper joint on 6th across town, but after they said no,
he dumped them up in my loft
instead and that was that.
I though
t
I might get a few dollars for them.’

‘Christmas is coming,’ I said. ‘Not much demand for sheep.’

‘I thought the church might want a couple, for a manger. But t
hey’ve got their old wooden animals
, haven’t they?’

Helping her
into her apartment on the first
floor, I snuck back down, walking quickly past my own apartment
windows
in case Carson saw me and tried a getaway of his own.

As I neared the subway
, I wondered what to do.

It was a holiday.

I had no money.

I might as well go to L
olly’s. She might have time for a cuppa and a chat.

Or she might need some help if the place was busy.

As I walked away, I spied Carson looking forlornly out of the
living room
window.

Serves him right.

*

The
LollyBliss
store was packed
with the liberal elite of NYC, i
ndulging in childhood fantasies of hand knitted
jumpers and floral prints.
It took me a moment to narrow in on
Lolly
. Finally
I spotted
her, surrounded
by
great lengths of semi-opaque
tu
lle near the
store
windows.

‘Lolly, there you are.’

‘Scarlet, what are you doing here?’

‘Escaping.’

‘From what?’

‘A carpenter
called Uncle Rabbit
and my prat of a husband.’

The girl w
ho was helping Lolly fix the tu
lle to the window display stared as if I had just teleported in from the
unexplored
depths of
the galaxy.

By the looks of her, she was one hundred percent Upper East Side, so perhaps Brooklyn
was
like coming from outer space?
The hair was brown, glossy and dead straight. As she moved, it swung from side to side in a thick s
heet. She was dressed as if aping
one of the Brady Bunch g
irls – a tiny woolen
LollyBliss
dress
showed off her
reed thin figure to perfection; and she was tall enough
to get away with flat, red, pate
nt Mary Janes.

‘Lucinda, this is Scarlet,’ Lolly said, handing me a length of the
paper-thin
fabric.
‘Here, you two put this up while I go and sor
t out that crowd at the till
.’

I suppose i
t wasn’t surprising that Lolly was busy –
Christmas was coming and the store had
been featured in one of the inserts of a national newspaper as a ‘cool plac
e to source nouveau-retro gifts
in NYC
’
.

‘I don’t even know what nouveau-retro means,’ Lolly had said, ‘but I don’t care.’

Looking about now, as Lucinda struggled with a staple gun, I figured it meant money.

‘Can you hold it up a l
ittle higher?’ Lucinda accent was more British than mine
. ‘Are you from the old Country?’ I asked.

‘New Hampshire, you mean?’

‘No,
old Hampshire, or elsewhere in the United Kingdom?
’

Lucinda appeared baffled. ‘No, of course not. Horrible weather.
People with grim teeth.
’
She gave a little shake of her head at the horror of it.

I looked pointedly at the rain bucketing down. ‘Good reason,’ I said, s
arc
astically.

‘Obviously,’ Lucinda replied, reaching for the furthest corner of the windo
w with the staple gun. The micro-
mini was raised to such an extent that it was clear she spent a fortune on salon treatments for hair removal.
A group of lads outside began whistling.

‘Cretins
,’ Lucinda mumbled, oblivious of
her own contribution to the event.

Lolly reappeared.
‘Not sure about that
tulle
now. What do you think?’ she asked me.

I stood back.
The tulle was see-through and revealed far too much of the wooden backdrop Lolly had recently installed.
I could see she was going to put up some sort of clothesline and simply hang clothes onto it.

The effect would be, fo
r wan
t of a kinder description, amateur
ish
at best
.

Despite her skill in amassing trendy retro clothing,
my dear friend
clearly hadn’t grasped window displays.

And everyone knew that in New York City, window displays
mattered.

I didn’t realize how much they mattered until Lolly began weeping quietly.

‘What on earth is
wrong? The tulle isn’t that bad, is it?
’

It was
that bad
, but still.

‘Don’t cry, Lol.’ I put an arm around her. ‘It’s not the end of the world.
’

‘
It is.
NYC
Shopping Weekly
is coming to do a feature,’ Lucinda revealed.

Lolly confirmed it. ‘How on earth can I impress them with this?’ She punched at the tulle.

Honestly, the world was full of problems lately.

‘When are they coming?’ I asked.

‘Tonight. Just before we close.’

I checked my wa
tch. That was in six hours
.

‘Lolly, didn’t you think of this before?’

‘I did a drawing with the tulle – see.’ There was a tiny sketch of a pink fairy wonderland tacked to the side of the window.

‘Can you get more tulle?’ I asked, seeing the problem at once. It was clear that she’d need about forty miles of tulle to achieve the effect she’d drawn.

‘No,’ Lucinda said. ‘No without waiting weeks.’

‘So, you need a new idea.’

‘It took me a month to come up with the tulle. We’ve been so busy and . . .’

Suddenly, I remembered Mrs Carlisle and her sheep.

It might just work,
LollyBliss
was quirky, wasn’t it?
If those sheep weren’t nouveau-retro, nothing was.

‘How about you do
Christmas jumpers on
suspended
sheep?
We could bunch the tulle up and make it look thicker by putting white  paper balls behind it.
I reckon I co
uld help you make that window look funky in six hours.
’

‘Is funky good?’ Lucinda scrunched up her perfect nose.

‘W
hat sort of sheep?’ Lolly was
puzzled.
‘I can’t really picture it.’

Strangely, I could. I imagined them flying
about
the
small
space,
spotlights trained on them,
squeezed into Lolly’s amazing
knitwear.

‘Static, fluffy ones. Cute, and odd.’

‘Cute and odd, that’s you,’ Lucinda said to Lolly.

That’s no way to speak to your boss.

I waited for Loll
y to tell Lucinda to shut up.

‘How much will it cost?’ Lolly asked me, instead.

‘What’s your window dressing budget?’

Lolly shrugged. ‘Well
, I spent fifty
dollars on that tulle, and it looks usel
ess. I suppose I could go to two hundred
, maybe a bit more.
’

Asking if I could make a phone call, I found
out
Mrs Carlisle’s number
from directory enquiries and called her. The elderly woman
was thrilled at the opportunity to make a su
bstantial amount selling all the
sheep
at once
.

‘I can ask Hammertro to bring them, he is such a nice boy.’

‘Hammertro doesn’t have a car.’

‘Doesn’t he? I always see him in one.’

‘Are you sure that’s not a police car?’

She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, yes,
possibly
.’

I said to call a cab and put the sheep inside, and send it to
LollyBliss
. ‘We’ll pay
the driver
this end.’

‘Very good dear. And Scarlet?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you.’

*

Lucinda and I put up a sheet so that the window display under construction was hidden from shoppers, and
once the sheep arrived, we
began our work.

It was pre
tty hilarious watching the
girl
from the Upper East
tr
ying to jam a jumper on a stout fiberglass sheep, and I had to admit that my mood improved
immeasurably
as the minutes raced away. 

By the time we
had
sourced jumpers that would work together
in the display
, and
then got them
to
fit th
e sheep without looking completely ridiculous
, it was five fifteen. I
hadn’t checked my mobile for hours, but intuition told me Carson was trying to call and force me to come home.

Why? So he could go out and enjoy his freedom?

Sod him.

‘Right,’ I said,
my butt in the air as I pushed
the last sheep into place, ‘what do we think?’

Lucinda frowned. ‘That you could stand to lose a few kilos?’

‘Not about me, Lucinda, about the window display?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. What do sheep have to do with Santa?’

‘It’s ironic.’

Lucinda’s
dazzling
eyes flickered, trying to compute the meaning of the word ironic.

Before she could offer a retort,
Lolly appeared inside the curtained-off window. ‘Oh Scarlet, this is amazing.’

As we looked around, I had to admit it
was
pretty amazing.

We’d taken the tulle and sprayed it with opaque white from a nearby hardware store. Next, we’d arranged it in bun
ches in the window, pushing butcher’s
paper behind the big tulle balls to bulge them out and give the impression of snowy fields. Then, after the sheep were dressed in the colorful jumpers – magenta, bright green, red, blue, orange and yellow – we suspended them at different levels as if frolicking in the window. We’d discovered that the sheep weren’t identical, which meant their legs all moved in different directions. The overall effect was slick, bright and humorous.
The lads from Monty Python would be proud.

‘You like
it?’ Lucinda asked, confusion evident on
her beautiful face.

‘Lucinda, can’t you see that it’s just what I was trying to
achieve?
’ Lolly turned to me. ‘I know you wanted to design clothes, but this is much more your thing. I am paying you for this.’

‘Lolly, no, I didn’t do it for that. Plus you had to pay for the sheep and the cab.’

‘But
Scar, you saved me. W
e’ll use the sheep ag
ain too.
Maybe they can be our festive theme?’