Page 42 of Christmas Ever After
‘There’s a few over, er, here somewhere…’ I’ve definitely seen some animal snow globes since I got here, but the whole place is so full of snow globes that it’s impossible to find anything specific when you’re unfamiliar with it. ‘Look, there are some dogs there.’ I spot the spots of a ceramic Dalmatian and direct the woman to a shelf where Raff has got a few snow globesfeaturing different breeds of dog, and a few cats too, along with a sign saying that they can be custom-made to match photos of customers’ own pets.
She shakes her head and I look around. ‘Look, there’s a “Twelve Days of Christmas” one there.’ I point out a large, expensive musical snow globe, which features the avian battalion of the song – multiple swans, geese, three hens wearing French flag scarves, two turtle doves, all gathering around a partridge in a pear tree.
I love Raff’s imagination, but she peers at it and shakes her head. ‘Bit pricey.’
It’s one of the larger globes that’s got a £60 price tag on it, but as I understand all too well with nutcrackers, it’s not always easy to strike a balance between charging enough to allay the amount of time and work that’s gone into it and a price that customers won’t baulk at.
She continues walking around the shop, running her fingers over globe after globe, leaving prints on the glass, but I’m not convinced that she really wants to buy anything.
‘Ooh, are those reindeer up there?’ She eventually points out a snow globe on a high shelf that Raff or Quentin could probably reach but I haven’t got a hope in hell.
I scout around for something to stand on and find a step-stool tucked under the counter. I pull it over and clamber up on it, struggling to get my balance and gripping the shelf with my good hand to steady myself.
The globe in question is at the back, behind another row of snow globes. It features two reindeer standing amongst snow-covered trees, and I reach over and pick it up by the glass dome and lift it out, but Raff’s snow globes are good quality, heavy ones, and it needs two hands to hold.
I try to steady it with the wrist of my broken hand, but it’s no good. As I go to pass it down to the customer, the smoothglass slips out of my grip and it crashes to the floor, shattering into smithereens and spraying the stool, my feet and trouser legs, and her shoes with glycerin liquid and an avalanche of wet glitter.
The woman shrieks and jumps backwards in shock, and then peers at it. ‘Oh dear, you wouldn’t think they’d make such a nasty mess, would you?’
She suddenly looks up at me in horror and quickly starts backing away. ‘That wasn’t my fault, was it? I only asked if they were reindeer, I didn’t mean for that to happen. I never touched it. You can’t blame me!’
‘I wouldn’t,’ I call after her as she runs out of the shop like she was expecting me to start squawking, ‘You break it, you buy it.’ It was my fault entirely. Of course it was. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to blame her.
I sigh and look down at the chaos around me. The water is slowly running across the laminate flooring, taking rivulets of glitter and iridescent snowflakes with it, the glass has shattered into splinters, and the base has split into pieces and scattered across the shop.
That went exceedingly well, didn’t it? Trying to get a non-romantic sale has ended in a broken snow globe and a customer unlikely to ever return. Brilliant.
I keep hold of the shelf while I step down from the stool, trying to avoid the broken glass. What a nightmare. Broken glass is bad enough to handle with two functional hands, never mind one. There’s a hazard sign folded up behind the counter so I put that out in case anyone comes in, and run to the back room to find a dustpan and brush, and then I get down on my knees and use my thighs to brace the pan as I one-handedly sweep broken glass into it. Who knew one snow globe could gosofar?
I’m panting and sweat is beading on my forehead by the time I’ve got all the glass swept up and as much liquid mopped up aspossible. I’ve got glitter in places I didn’t know I had, and the joins between the floorboards are sparkling with the stuff.
The base has cracked into several pieces and skittered across the shop and I crawl around to gather up all the nearby pieces, intending to pull them all into a pile and sweep them up too, but there are so manybitsscattered around that it couldn’t possibly all have come out of that one base… could it?
At first I think it must have been a light-up snow globe or a musical one, but it was on the shelf full of ordinary ones, small ones with a £25 price tag… I pull a piece of cracked resin base over, one that’s got wires and a circuit board attached to it. Electrical components? Why are there electrical components in the base of a snow globe? What are all these wires with little thingamabobs on the ends?
And that’s a…
I scramble over and pull out a tiny buttoncell battery from where it’s rolled underneath a table. Why would there be a battery inside the base of an ordinary snow globe?
Unless…
The floor is damp underneath me as I sit down and scrabble all the parts of the broken base in front of me and try to piece together what I’m seeing. One of the wires with a… whatever the small thingamabob is… on the end of it is clipped onto the inside of the base, and there’s a tiny pinprick hole going through from the outside to the thingamabob. That wire is connected to a small circuit board, along with three other wires with thingamabobs on the ends of them too, and a lot of other electrical components, all painstakingly soldered onto the board, and a round metal holder where the battery has popped out.
Is thisit? Isthisthe secret? It’s got to be, hasn’t it? I might not know much about electrical bits and pieces, but I know thisstuff doesn’t belong in the base of an ordinary snow globe. I put the battery back in and wait for it to do something, but it doesn’t.
Maybe the fall has damaged it somehow.
I try to piece it back together, which seems like something you’d need an engineering degree to be able to do with both hands, never mind one. I’m bracing the broken parts against my thigh and trying to trace the wires back to where they came from. The broken clips holding them in place are still on the different shards of the base, each one next to a similarly small pinprick of a hole, so tiny I’d never have noticed it if I hadn’t smashed the base into pieces and could see light coming through.
My breathing speeds up. I’m uncovering what I’ve been desperate to uncover about Dardenne Snow Globes for years. This is their secret. This small, perfectly soldered, battery-powered circuit board hidden in the basehasto be how the snow globes move.
Why did I never think of doing this before? Buying a Dardenne snow globe and dismantling it, and now I’ve done it inadvertently and…
I stop. I’m not sure if I want to know. All I can think of is Raff. His deep eyes, his smile, his kindness. Iknowhis snow globes don’t magically move of their own accord, but if I figure out the perfectly sensible and ordinary reason that they do move, will it change everything? Our new-found truce and the undeniable friendship we’ve struck up over the past couple of weeks? The tingles I get when he looks at me?
I could gather this up and throw it away, and I wouldn’t be any the wiser. You can know something withouttrulyknowing it.
And yet, I can’t stop myself. I have a one-time opportunity to find out the secret behind the snow globe that matched my mum and dad all those years ago. Ihaveto know. My younger self, the girl huddled on the stairs listening to raging parents screamingat each other would never forgive me for turning away…Shewould want to find out, regardless of the charming smile of the man running this show; she would need to know the truth.
