The Wish List: Escape with the most hilarious and feel-good read of 2020!

by Sophia Money-Coutts

  I slid lunch into my rucksack, a waterproof navy job bought several years ago from Millets for its many compartments. It fitted my purse, my lip balm, my house keys, a spare hair tie, a packet of paracetamol, my phone, my sandwich, my flapjack and whatever book I was reading. I didn’t understand women who left the house with a handbag the size of a matchbox. How could they go about their day looking so self-assured when all they had on them was a debit card and a lipstick? What if they got a headache?

  I reached under the hall table for my hideous work shoes, fastened them and set off on foot for the shop. A distance of exactly 2.6 miles, much of it along the Thames.

  I walked to most places playing Consequences, another form of control. It had started when I was four, the year after Mum died. That was when I started totting up the number of classmates every morning to make sure they were all there. Only when I reached fourteen could I relax. Everyone present. Some days, it was only thirteen, which would make me anxious until Mrs Garber said it was all right, the absentee’s mother had called to say they had a stomach bug and they’d be back in tomorrow.

  After my classmates, I counted the chairs in our classroom to make sure there were enough. Then the pencils in my pencil case to check I hadn’t lost any; the paintings on the walls; the carrot batons on my plate at lunchtime; the books in my rucksack on the way home again. I counted the stairs when I got back and tried not to let the flight between the bathroom and Mia’s room bother me – Mia was just a baby then – because it was an odd number. Only nine stairs on that flight and I preferred even numbers. They felt more secure, more stable. No number was left out because they all had partners. To my 4-year-old brain, not being left out was important.

  My obsessive counting slackened its grip as I grew older but it still remained a habit. Dad and Patricia had despatched me to various specialists over the years, but a succession of armchair experts, asking how angry I felt on a scale of 1 to 10, had done little to cure me. I knew the number of keys on the grubby work keyboard (104) and the number of biscuits in the various packets we ate at work for tea (Jaffa Cakes: 10; chocolate Hobnobs: 14; orange Clubs: 8). I knew the number of steps downstairs to the shop basement (13), the number upstairs to the travel section (12) and the number of caffeine-stained mugs that hung from the wooden tree in the office kitchen (7).

  Time had been the only real help. That, and the fact that I’d become better at hiding my habit. I wore an old-school watch with little hands so I never had to see an unsettling digital time like 11:11. If I was watching television at home, the volume had to be set at an even number by the remote control. Every other week, I went to an anxiety support group called NOMAD (No More Anxiety Disorders. Blame the founder, Stephen, for its unfortunate name, although luckily most members saw the funny side). But these days, the meetings were more to catch up with my friend Jaz than to actively participate.

  This morning, I played Consequences by counting the number of cars I passed. Often, while doing this, a little voice whispered that if a blue car followed a bus then it would be a bad day, but if it was a white car, something good would happen. Logically, I knew this was rubbish and that I was making up rules for myself. But I couldn’t help it. If a blue car, or a green car, or a yellow car, or whatever colour car my brain decided was bad that day did follow the bus, I’d feel panicked, alarmed at what might happen. It was relentless, my brain’s constant paranoia, but counting gave me a sense of order. I felt guilty if I didn’t count things in the same way that others did if they didn’t go to the gym.

  At first glance, Frisbee Books wouldn’t strike anyone as a suitable office for a maniac obsessed with neatness and numbers. Tucked away off a busy Chelsea shopping street, it looked like it belonged on the set of a Dickens film. Its wooden front was painted dark green, with ‘Frisbee Books Ltd’ in white lettering. Underneath that was a big window with two rows of books on display, lined up for passing shoppers.

  Stepping inside was like falling into the library of an extremely untidy recluse. The walls were covered in shelves that supported thousands of books pressing up against one another. Just over 43,000 books. The shop floor was strewn with tables of different sizes loaded with books in bar-graph piles. Military hardbacks on one table (we sold a lot of those in Chelsea); memoirs stacked high on another; cookery books on a table beside that. Fiction and non-fiction was separated in two halves of the shop – non-fiction as you walked in through the door, fiction off to the right.

  Norris, my boss, had inherited the shop from his uncle. It had opened in 1967 when London was swinging, but Uncle Dale thought his bookshop should stand as a cultural sandbag against the likes of Jimi Hendrix and the miniskirt. Norris took over the shop in the early Nineties when Uncle Dale had a hip replacement and could no longer stand all day. Two years on, he died in his sleep leaving Norris the bookshop in his will.

  Frisbee Books hadn’t changed much since. There was a 12-year-old computer in the basement that Norris used for accounting and ordering. Otherwise the shop ran as it always had done. Loyal customers dropped in to order a new biography of Churchill that they’d read about in The Spectator. Middle-aged women browsed for birthday presents. American tourists stood outside in shorts and wraparound sunglasses, taking pictures of the ‘cute bookstore’ they’d found for friends back in Arkansas.

  I’d asked nine independent bookshops across London for a job when I graduated from uni. In my letter, I explained that I fell in love with A Little Princess when I was eight, had barely looked up from a book since, and all I wanted to do now was help other people find stories they could lose themselves in. In my last week at Edinburgh, fellow English Literature graduates boasted of internships at publishing houses or acceptance into law school, but I suspected that working in a corporate office would mean making presentations in boardrooms and bitching about your colleagues. Not for me.

  I got four replies to my letter; five were ignored. Two replies asked me to get in touch via the official application form on their website, and one said they only accepted employees with retail experience. Norris was my life raft, sending me a postcard suggesting I come along to the shop for a cup of tea.

  He was a human bear with tufts of grey hair protruding from both his head and his ears, as if he’d recently stuck his fingers into a plug socket. He didn’t ask anything about my retail experience. While giving me a tour of the shop, he simply wanted to know what I was reading (I’d pulled an old Agatha Christie from my bag) and demanded to know whether I owned a Kindle. Norris growled the word ‘Kindle’ with suspicion and I’d admitted that I used to have one until I dropped it in the bath.

  I instantly regretted the bath comment because Norris paused by the ‘F’ shelf and his eyebrows leapt several inches in surprise. But then he moved on to the authors beginning with ‘G’ and asked whether I was a morning person because he wasn’t much good before he’d finished his thermos of coffee and would I be all right to open the shop. Our chat took fifteen minutes, after which Norris said he’d see me the following Monday.

  I’d arrived nervously that first morning, stammering when customers asked where they might find the latest Ian McEwan or if we had an obscure political book by a Scandinavian writer in stock. The first time I ran a transaction through the till I was so afraid of fluffing it that I spoke robotically, like a Dalek: ‘That. Will. Be. £12.99. Please,’ and had to be prompted for one of our paper bags. But I soon settled into the routine.

  Today, it was my turn to unlock, so I arrived just after nine, turned on the computer behind the till and ran a Stanley knife across the boxes from the distributors. New stock to be put out. Although it might not have looked like it, there was an order to the shop that I understood. If a customer came in and asked for a Virginia Woolf or a travel guide to the Galapagos, I could point them to exactly the right spot. I knew the shop as well as I knew my home. Or better, perhaps, since I rarely went into Ruby and Mia’s bedrooms (too messy, used cotton pads everywhere).

  I knew the custo
mers who came in every day to browse but actually lived on their own and just wanted some company. I recognized the punters who were time-wasters, loitering between appointments, who would finger multiple books before sliding them back into the wrong shelf. And in quiet moments, it also allowed me time to work on my own book, a children’s book about a counting-obsessed caterpillar called Curtis who had fifty feet and was late for school every day because it took so long to put on all his shoes. I’d also come to see Norris as a sort of mad uncle and could tolerate his daily habits – sitting on the downstairs loo for twenty minutes after his coffee, ignoring the phone so I always had to pick it up, leaving indecipherable Post-it notes on the counter about customer orders that were often lost.

  Then there was my colleague Eugene. He was a middle-aged actor who’d worked at the shop for the past decade to pay his rent since he was rarely cast in anything. He had a bald head that shone like a bed knob, wore a bow tie every day and made me rehearse lines with him behind the counter, which often startled customers. Recently, there’d been a dramatic death scene when Eugene, rehearsing for a minor role in King Lear, had ended up lying across the shop floor.

  Either he or I opened up before Norris arrived late every morning, his shirt fastened by the wrong buttons, thermos in hand; this was special coffee he ground at home and made in a cafetière before decanting it and solemnly carrying it into work in his satchel. I’d made the mistake of asking what was so wrong with Nescafé not long after I started work there and the cloud that passed his face was so dark I’d wondered if I’d be fired.

  Anyway, he’d arrive and there was always grumbling about the traffic or the weather before he went downstairs into his office to drink this coffee from his favourite mug – ‘To drink or not to drink?’ it said on the outside. Half an hour later, he would reappear on the shop floor in cheerier humour and ask whether any customers had been in yet.

  But that morning, I was still standing behind boxes of new stock when Norris arrived early and rapped on the glass.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked, unlocking the door to let him in. He looked more dishevelled than usual, shirt and trousers both crumpled, and he was panting, as if 73-year-old Norris had decided to run into work that morning from his house in Wimbledon.

  ‘Let me go downstairs for my mug and I’ll be up to explain.’ He strode towards the stairs and disappeared. I returned to the boxes and wondered if he’d tried to get on the Tube using his Tesco Clubcard again.

  He thumped back up the wooden stairs not long afterwards and put his coffee on the counter with a sigh.

  ‘What?’ I asked, frowning. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Rent hike.’

  ‘Another one?’

  Norris nodded and wiped his fingers across his forehead. There’d been a rent rise last year but we’d expected that. Uncle Dale had had a long lease on generous terms and it had been up for renewal. Also, Chelsea had changed since he died. What was always a wealthy area of the city had become even more saturated with money: oligarchs from the East, American banking dollars from the West, along with the odd African despot who wanted his children to go to British boarding school. This meant the shops changed. Gone were the boutiques and coffee shops. In came curious replacements selling £150 gym leggings and cellulite cures made from gold leaf – shops for oligarchs’ wives. But although Norris had grumbled about the new lease for several weeks, he’d said it was fine and I’d believed him. It remained business as usual.

  But this was different. Norris was panicked.

  ‘Is it manageable?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a lot,’ he replied, his voice uneven. ‘I’m going to ring the accountant later to discuss it but I wanted to let you know now. Just in case… Well, we’ll see. I’ll let you know.’ Then, as if he couldn’t bear to discuss it any longer, he changed topic. ‘Any post this morning?’

  ‘Not really. A few orders overnight but I’ll deal with those.’

  ‘All right, I’m going back downstairs. Shout if you need me.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, before looking around the shop, trying to imagine it as luxury flats with underfloor heating, marble floors and those hi-tech loos with nozzles that wash and dry your bottom. It was an absurd idea. It couldn’t happen. Not on my watch.

  When I got home that night, I found Hugo and Mia bickering at the kitchen table. He’d moved in about six months before, a temporary measure while they did up a house in Herne Hill (‘the new Brixton’, Hugo pompously told anyone who asked).

  I had mixed feelings about their house being finished. On the one hand, this meant Mia would move out and, for the first time in a decade, she, Ruby and I would be separated. And although my sisters were closer to one another than they were to me, Mia’s departure would mean change and I’d miss her. On the other hand, it would also mean that Hugo stopped creeping upstairs to my bathroom to do a poo when I wasn’t there. He denied this but I knew he was lying; he left traces on the porcelain and I’d once found a copy of Golfing Monthly lying on the floor.

  That evening, they were squabbling over their wedding list and Hugo, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, was stabbing at the list with one of his weird fingers.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ I said, making my way to the fridge.

  ‘I’m sorry you don’t like him,’ went on Hugo, in a high-pitched voice, ‘but he’s my boss and it’s imperative that he’s invited. I’m sure he didn’t mean to graze your bottom. It was probably an accident.’

  Mia sighed and leant back from the table. ‘Well he did and we’ve already got half your office. Anyone else you need? The receptionist? The window cleaner? Someone from your IT department?’

  ‘Actually, Kevin has always been very helpful with my computer.’

  I opened the fridge and stared into it as I wondered, for the ninety billionth time, why Mia had said yes to him. Was a house in Herne Hill with an island in the kitchen, underfloor heating in the bathrooms and Farrow & Ball-coloured walls worth it?

  She sighed again behind me. ‘Fine. Your boss can come. But that means we still need to lose…’ she went quiet for a few seconds, tapping her pen down the list, ‘about twenty people.’

  I closed the fridge. It would have to be eggs on toast. I didn’t have the energy for anything complicated. After Norris’s announcement that morning, he’d stayed downstairs for most of the afternoon, leaving Eugene and me on the shop floor.

  I’d leant on the counter, writing a list of ways I could try and help. A petition was my first thought. People always seemed to be launching petitions online. Sign this petition if you think our prime minister should be in prison! Sign this petition to make sugar illegal! Sign this petition to make the earthworm a protected species! I could set up a Facebook page for the shop and launch the petition on there, with a hard copy of it by the till for our less computer-friendly customers. I liked the idea of a cause, imagining myself as a modern-day Emmeline Pankhurst. Perhaps I could wear a sash? Or that might be taking it too far. But a petition, anyway. That was the first thing to organize.

  The shop needed an Instagram account, too. Norris still refused to have a mobile phone and insisted that Frisbee could do without social media. I’d long protested, saying that it wasn’t the 1990s, but it had fallen on Norris’s deaf, hairy ears. So, a petition and an Instagram account. Plus, a new website. That was a start.

  ‘How was your day, Flo?’ asked Mia.

  ‘Fine. I’m making scrambled eggs. Anyone want some?’

  ‘No thanks. Wed-shred starts now.’

  ‘Eggs do terrible things to my stomach,’ added Hugo, but luckily none of us could dwell on this because Mia’s phone rang.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ she said, picking it up.

  I cracked two eggs into a mug and reached for a fork.

  ‘Yep, yep, no, I know, yep, we’re doing it now, yep, no, yep…’ she went on while I whisked.

  ‘Yep, she’s here, hang on,’ said Mia, holding her phone in the air without standing up so I had to cross the kitchen
.

  I put the mobile to my ear with a sense of dread. ‘Hi, Patricia.’

  My stepmother went straight in. ‘I’ve spoken to this woman’s office and she can see you on Tuesday afternoon at five.’

  ‘Which woman?’

  ‘The love coach. She’s called Gwendolyn Glossop. Does five on Tuesday work for you?’

  ‘The shop doesn’t close until six, so—’

  ‘Florence, darling, you’re selling books, not giving blood transfusions. I’m sure they can spare you for an hour. I’ve told your father and—’

  ‘All right all right all right. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Right, have you got a pen? Here’s her address, it’s—’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, hunting for a pen on the sideboard. No pens. Why were there never any pens?

  ‘Floor 4, 117 Harley Street,’ carried on Patricia.

  ‘OK, I’ll just remember it.’

  ‘I’m so glad, darling, I do hope she helps. Now can I have Mia back again, I need to talk to her about vicars.’

  I handed Mia her phone just as the toast popped up. Black on both sides, a bit like my mood, I thought, sliding them both into the bin.

  While Eugene dusted shelves the following morning, I told him about this appointment. He was more enthusiastic than me.

  ‘Darling, how thrilling,’ he said, his back to me as he swished the pink feathers back and forth like a windscreen wiper. ‘Do you think she’ll have a crystal ball? I saw a palm reader after Angus left and she told me that I’d soon meet the third great love of my life.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No.’ He lowered the duster and held his palm close to his nose, inspecting it. ‘It’s this line that runs from your little finger.’ He looked up. ‘But perhaps I just haven’t met him yet? I expect he’ll be along any second, waiting for me on the 345 bus.’

  I wasn’t sure about that. I’d never seen anyone who looked like a great love on the 345, so I merely nodded and Eugene returned to his dusting.