dinner.’
‘Help me up, Bridge.’ Luke held his hand out and Bridge pulled back, her hand slipped and she ended up splatting backwards in the snow herself. She was laughing too much to get up and for a while she and Luke lay there like a pair of overturned turtles.
Jack and Mary were already well advanced, rolling up a snowman head and body when they did eventually manage to achieve a standing position. Luke sprang into action, scraped together a ball and began to push it forwards.
‘Stop copying our technique,’ called Jack.
‘Sue me for copyright, you posh arse,’ Luke called back.
‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if we went home and forgot to sign the divorce papers,’ said Luke to Bridge, as she began to shape some shoulders into the white mass of snow.
‘It would. We should do it tonight and get it over with. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘I’m just glad we got there in the end,’ said Luke, hefting the snowman’s too-large round head onto his body.
‘Football head,’ mused Bridge, standing back to admire it. ‘Remind you of anyone?’ Then she punched it straight in the middle where the nose should be and made a fist-shaped hollow.
‘I didn’t, you know,’ said Luke, suddenly serious. ‘Tina lied. I didn’t even touch her.’
‘It doesn’t matter any more.’
‘Yes it does. I need you to believe me because it’s the truth.’
‘If I do that, it makes what I did to get back at you totally unforgivable.’
‘Forget it, Bridge. You were right about her, she was poisonous. We were both played like cheap guitars.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Okay, I believe you.’ It was hard for her to say and he knew that, because it meant her shoulders were weighted with more blame.
‘Good. Thank you.’
Bridge fashioned ‘Football Head’ the snowman a very fat nose.
‘They stuck together you know, Tina and James,’ said Luke.
‘No fucking way.’ Bridge’s jaw dropped to her knees.
‘I don’t keep in touch with them, in case you’re wondering. I heard from a mutual friend. They renewed their vows to wipe the slate clean and ended up having a full-on fight in the church. The police had to be called.’
Bridge tried to close up her gloaty smile, but didn’t put that much effort into it. ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer couple. I hope they stay together forever. I can’t think of a worse punishment.’
‘Me neither.’
Bridge fashioned a pair of inflated snow lips for Football Head.
‘Some things you can’t stick back together again,’ she said. ‘So why bother trying?’
She said it but she doubted her own words. If this Bridge were single and this Luke were single, maybe, just maybe, the glue that once held them might have been reactivated.
* * *
‘Does our snowman remind you of anyone?’ asked Jack.
Thin flat line of a mouth, piggy little eyes, nose like a blob of Play-Doh, pair of pneumatic boobs. ‘Nope,’ Mary replied. Subconsciously she’d been sculpting a snow Kimberley, but she would deny it if asked.
Jack coughed, prepared to say something that the cider had loosened from its holdings.
‘Mary, I would just like to say that I truly appreciate all you’ve done for the company. I know that the vegan scones were your idea and I never gave you credit for them.’
Mary paused from smoothing down the snowwoman’s neck, then carried on. It was only the cider talking, she decided.
‘Thank you,’ she said eventually.
‘And for so many other suggestions you’ve made that have helped the business. Helped me.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘I was thinking that er… when we get back, maybe… you might er… consider…’
Mary’s breath went into suspension. Her heart literally stopped beating.
The length of the pause was ridiculous, tantamount to the length of pause when the host of Love Island was about to announce who was getting chucked off.
‘…a pay rise.’
Mary’s heart started up again, a heavy compacted thump, like a racehorse landing on the turf after flying over Becher’s Brook. Disappointment rumbled through every cell and sinew in her body, before quickly segueing into annoyance, then it gathered speed and galloped on into full-blown anger.
‘Jack, there’s something I have to tell you,’ she said. ‘I’m not coming back. I’ve been offered another job and I’m going to take it.’
The cider had loosened her tongue too.
* * *
‘Talk about the abominable snowman,’ said Robin, stepping back to admire their handiwork. Their snowman was hideous, with a shrunken head and a scrawny neck, but at least classily dressed with Charlie’s Chanel scarf knotted loosely at his throat. ‘Who does he remind me of, I wonder?’
‘He looks not