The hostility was what intrigued me - when Nicola gets chosen for the shepherd boy Tim behaves as if she had asked for it - but maybe it is about Nicola's basic world view which is pretty Nicola-centric (maybe in its own way as much as Lawrie's is Lawrie-centric). Certainly it surprised me that Nicola was so pleased when she was first told she would play the Shepherd Boy as that implies she had completely forgotten about Lawrie's obsession with it.