My heart is starting to hammer like one of the little toy soldiers in a Christmas cartoon, and my mouth has gone suddenly fuzzy. I lick my lips and try to focus. This is what I wanted. This was my choice. This is what I’m lying for. And what’s the point if I’m so scared I can’t enjoy my own transformation?
I look out of the window while I try to calm my breathing down. It is really beautiful. The buildings are massive and majestic, everyone is wrapped up in furry hats and scarves and there are Christmas lights twinkling between the snowflakes. And every so often, if you look really hard, it’s possible to see a man in uniform, standing on a corner with a massive gun in his hands.
Which distracts a little bit from the Christmas ambience, but still.
And then there’s the river: huge and shining with the lights stretching out in reflections across the water. Exactly like the books I have at home and much, much better than La Seine in Paris.
Which is not being racist towards rivers. I’m just saying.
“We’re nearly here, my little Chocolate-drops,” Wilbur says as the taxi turns a corner. “Baby-baby Unicorn, how are you feeling? Calm? Cool? Deeply and irretrievably fashionable?”
I give the least convincing nod of my life. “I feel fine,” I lie as the taxi stops. My hands suddenly feel like live fish in my lap: all slippery and incapable of staying still. “I feel great,” I continue, looking out of the window. “I feel—”
Then I stop. Because in front of us is a huge square, filled with snow. On one side is an elaborate red wall and on the other side is a large white palace, delicately carved. I know that if I was to turn round, there would be a red castle behind us, but directly in front of us is the most beautiful building I have ever seen. Red, and blue, and green, and yellow, and striped and starred and carved like the most expensive cake you could possibly imagine.
And in front of that are about thirty-five people, sixty lights, trailers, chairs, hangers full of clothes, clusters of passers-by and – inexplicably – a small white kitten on a pillow, wearing a lead.
And it looks like every single one of them is waiting for us.
ion Boy lied.
There’s no other way of putting it: he totally and utterly lied. This is a biggy, in every possible sense of the word. As soon as we get out of the taxi in Red Square – which is where I’ve already worked out we are – we’re surrounded. It’s like being in some kind of zombie movie, except that instead of the undead wearing ripped clothes and trying to eat us, it’s fashionable people wearing black and fur and trying to talk to us about our journey.
“At last!” somebody shouts at the back. “They’re finally here!”
“Sweetums,” Wilbur announces as he gets majestically out of the car. The snow has slowed down, but Wilbur still opens a huge umbrella in case his hair gets “damp”. “I’d like to say it was the traffic, but it really wasn’t. It’s just so much easier making an entrance when everybody’s waiting already, isn’t it?”
I’m glaring at Nick so hard that my eyebrows are starting to hurt. “No biggy?” I hiss as we’re helped out into the snow. “No biggy?”
Nick grins at me and shrugs. “Oh, come on,” he says in a low voice. “If I’d told you the truth, you’d have just tried to climb out of the taxi window.”
He’s right. “I would not,” I snap back because climbing out of windows isn’t a very elegant image for him to have of me, and then – to regain a little bit of dignity – I toss my head as angrily as I can. Although it’s pretty hard staying mad when you’re standing in the middle of a fairytale in front of a castle with somebody who looks just like a prince.
Not that I think of Nick like that. We’re just colleagues.
Dad, in the meantime, is sucking the attention up as fast as physically possible. “My daughter,” he’s saying to anyone who will listen. “The strawberry-blonde one. Can you see?” He keeps pointing to his own hair. “Genetically mine. It’s actually a recessive gene so she was very lucky because her mother was a brunette.”
“Dad,” I whisper again and roughly four more ways to kill him race through my head. “Please.”
“Harriet, this is all so… so…”Dad sighs happily while he looks for the right word, dusting off his nineties vocab. “Rad,” he finishes and I have to put my hand over my face to hide my embarrassment.
It’s not enough to ruin this moment, though. I’m in Red Square. To my left is the Kremlin, which houses Lenin’s Mausoleum, and in front of me is St Basil’s Cathedral, one of the most amazing and famous pieces of architecture in the entire world. There’s the GUM department store, and the State Historical Museum, and the Kazan Cathedral. There’s even a bronze statue of Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky, although it’s so covered in snow I can’t see who is who.
It’s stunning, which shouldn’t really be a surprise. It’s not called Red Square because it’s red. It’s because the Russian word for red – KpacHaЯ– also means beautiful. This is their beautiful square.